Sensation Machines Read online

  When I uploaded photos of Michael’s bites to MeMD.com, the range of responses was broad. There were fifty-four comments. One user suggested that Michael had a rare form of leprosy, previously contained to the sub-Saharan desert. Another suggested that Michael was a self-denying victim of spousal abuse. Six were spam posts offering sets of Don’t Tread On Me windshield decals at a competitive price. Eleven members of the forum suspected bedbugs.

  I blamed the cat and demanded her eviction. Michael defended the cat. The cat cowered. She looked guilty, but that’s how cats look. We agreed to disagree. The cat was granted probation. An exterminator laid pesticide throughout our apartment. We took our vacuum-packed clothing to my father’s storage space where it would sit for the recommended eighteen months. Our spoiled furniture littered the sidewalk. I left a note warning rummagers to steer clear. It was not an ideal moment for this drama.

  We were courting an enigmatic client at work, referred to on the books as Project Pinky. In lieu of an RFP, the client had provided a study syllabus of theoretically comparable marketing campaigns. The syllabus included familiar campaigns like Joe Camel and Just Do It, but also campaigns selling abstract commodities: Ronald Reagan’s appropriation of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”; the public relations circus surrounding the O. J. Simpson trial. The final item was Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, the Greek comedy about women who withhold sex from their husbands in an effort to end the Peloponnesian War.

  The plan was to pitch our ingenuity by presenting updates on these historical campaigns. The client had offered an unprecedented $10,000 materials fee to cover preparation costs. It was unclear what materials we were meant to acquire—O. J.’s glove?—but the message came across: despite the absurdity of our assignment, Project Pinky was serious business. We had a week to prepare. The client would not be approaching other agencies. The account was ours to lose.

  Communitiv.ly, where I worked, is a Think Tank for Creative Synergy and Digital Solutions. More simply, the company helps heritage brands engage with consumers on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Ru.ffy, Pim-Pam, Twitch, and Instagram, and provides access to in-house strategists, as well as to a network of freelance designers, community managers, editors, journalists, programmers, videographers, and copywriters.

  It is the network of freelancers that sets Communitiv.ly apart. Say, for instance, that your cosmetics company wants to set up an aspirational webzine that promotes a branded lifestyle and provides entry points for single-click purchase. Communitiv.ly will find a freelancer in its network to curate editorial content. Communitiv.ly will provide that editor with a database of underemployed fashion writers. Then Communitiv.ly will design, build, and optimize your site, create promotional communities on social media, launch traditional print, TV, and radio campaigns, and provide event planners and viral marketing experts to make sure the site’s launch gets enough old-media coverage to incite traffic-fueling buzz. It’s a one-stop shop, and it works because brands like Marc Jacobs and Revlon have more to spend on editorial projects, and can milk more revenue from them, than struggling old-media entities like Condé Hearst.

  I’d heard people say that this was the future of journalism. What they meant was the end of journalism. Despite my active role in the razing, I was among its mourners. In ninth grade, while classmates tested their developing wiles in Spice Girls costumes and witchy lingerie, I went as Bob Woodward for Halloween. I must have been a sight: five-nine with a tangerine Jew-fro and pimples, wearing my dad’s corduroy suit. I dressed my Welsh Springer Spaniel as Carl Bernstein.

  In college, I covered student activism for the Columbia Spectator. I was both too cowardly and too skeptical to participate in the demonstrations that were a fixture of campus life. The protested causes weren’t always commensurate with the protesters’ zeal, and I sometimes wondered if the real cause wasn’t the self-validation of those involved. I’m thinking, particularly, of a weeklong hunger strike devoted to curtailing fraternities from referring to beer pong by its insensitive alias, Beirut. I found the reporter’s role empowering, a way to participate while maintaining a balance between distrust and support. I harbored hopes of putting truth to paper.

  Project Pinky was something else. Lillian arrived in the mornings on three hours’ sleep. Greg fine-tuned our General Deck, a PowerPoint presentation explaining our business model through buzzwords and animation. I mocked up a “Free O. J.” fan page, complete with links to articles on police corruption and racial profiling, as well as a message board where people who’d been harassed by the LAPD could share their stories. Greg’s shirts grew progressively more unbuttoned until, by week’s end, a briar patch of black hair threatened to garrote anyone who stood too close. I combed interviews with Springsteen for quotes that might reiterate right-wing talking points if taken out of context. Lillian lost her voice screaming supposedly inspirational marketing clichés about team building that she’d found on a Tumblr dedicated to cherry-picking from a handful of marketing blogs that, in their turn, had cherry-picked from books by blog-anointed marketing gurus. The gurus were paraphrasing the founding fathers.

  The night before the pitch—this would be Sunday, the second of December, two days before Ricky’s murder—Lillian invited me to her West Village townhouse for a once-more-unto-the-breach sort of sendoff. We sat on her balcony and watched the darkening sky. There was a bottle of Riesling uncorked on the table, half-eaten canapés, the roach of a joint from which I’d abstained. I’d spent ten minutes explaining Lysistrata to my stoned boss. Lillian lit a cigarette. Like many New Yorkers, she’d started smoking again when the embargo on Cuba’s lung cancer vaccine was lifted. After reading the fine print regarding emphysema, throat cancer, and low rates of preventative efficacy, she was now, unsuccessfully, attempting to quit.

  “So, they stop fucking their husbands,” said Lillian. “And then expect them to end the war? These women clearly knew zilch about men.”

  Lillian had been married twice and this made her an expert. She had one child to show for it, Damien Earl, a living embodiment of every cliché about privileged urban youth. At eighteen, he’d participated in a reality TV program about privileged urban youth. He was currently finishing a semester in Milan.

  After Damien’s father ran off with the younger wife of a deceased Kuwaiti oil baron, Lillian swore off men, only to return amid this golden era of online dating. My boss was a fit and elegant fifty, subtly Botoxed, with sharp brown eyes and long natural lashes. She wore her hair in a chic, angular bob that flattered her narrow face and gave off a shimmering aura of money. In the current dating climate, these attributes weren’t enough. We often spent lunch breaks swiping profiles on Kügr, but she rarely matched with anyone of interest. I used to wonder how I’d do, what currency my looks still carried. Since the death of our daughter, Nina, I’d noted a down-tilt in male attention. Men used to stare while I swam laps at the Red Hook pool. Now stretch marks scored my stomach. Wrinkles spidered from my eyes. Michael told me I looked beautiful. He was not an objective audience.

  “It does seem shortsighted,” I agreed.

  “I mean, for one,” Lillian continued, “they’re acting without regard for their own interests. Everyone knows a soldier in the heat of battle is a maniac in the sack. And, for two, they’re absolutely fucking deluded. Denying a man sex is the most surefire way to incite mass violence. History has proven it: the Christian Crusades, 9/11. Both could have been prevented by blowjobs. Why do you think Clinton was the only president in recent history who didn’t nuke the shit out of some sleepy Islamic hamlet?”

  I started to say something, but it wasn’t worth it. Provocation was her mode, and I’d learned, over the years, to avoid being baited. In my loftier moments, I projected onto Lillian a feminist objective: to co-opt locker-room talk, reclaim vulgarity from its province on the right.

  It may have simply been her style. My boss’s disposition toward crass innuendo surely had Darwinian value in her
deft infiltration of our industry’s boys’ club. I was the closest thing she had to a protégé, and I sensed her desire to instill in me something of this bro-ish bearing. I knew that my refusal—was it refusal or failure?—had affected my career. Male clients tended to request Greg as their account liaison.

  “The way to manipulate men is not by denying them sex,” Lillian explained, “but by forcing them to make promises while their dicks are in your mouth. You ever been with a soldier?”

  One thing she respects is a lengthy sexual CV. My own was not. Lillian knew this but pretended to forget. I shook my head.

  “You really should try it sometime. Their penises are tiny and they compensate by going down on you for hours. They love to take directions.”

  She knew I was married too.

  “I used to keep a stash of plastic medals I’d hand out after mission complete.”

  A compulsive liar.

  “After sex they cry. It’s better than most standup routines. Anyway, tell me something about you for a change. How’s Michael?”

  She refilled my wine without my asking. She wanted me to spill marital secrets. A few months prior, I’d mistakenly confessed to a sexual experiment Michael and I had undertaken, a threesome. I thought telling Lillian would get her off my back. It only provoked.

  “Michael’s fine,” I said.

  “Even with this Wall Street bullshit?”

  The truth was I didn’t know. I watched TV and scanned my news feeds. I read the The New York Times. The intricacies of the crisis were buried beneath stories of other catastrophes, the cataclysmic wreckage of the last administration. Headlines warned of coming hurricanes and tsunamis. Warned of rising sea levels and methane emissions. Chronicled the continuing barrage of Weinstein-esque behavior in politics and entertainment. Addressed the uptick in anti-immigration violence in the wake of mass layoffs at fast food chains in Texas and Arizona, the right-wing backlash against the soda ban in public schools. It all just kept coming. That morning’s front page featured a Florida militia with stockpiled Uzis who wore swastika armbands but touted their support for the Jewish State.

  I did know that the hacking group mAchete had leaked internal memos from the C&S brass, suggesting bank employees unload their company shares. I knew the board was trying to push a last-minute sale of the bank and its holdings to a Japanese megabank.

  The Universal Basic Income, or UBI as it was called, was a threat to the entire financial apparatus. If the proposal passed, the government would award every American with $23,000 per year. This $10 trillion dividend would be funded largely by tax hikes for the wealthy, and by increasing taxes on carbon emissions. But it would also be funded, in part, by charging fees to financial institutions on all individual trades and transactions. As far as I understood it, this meant that large investment banks like C&S, which processed nearly three million transactions daily, would be forced to drastically scale down their operations. Right-wing pundits warned of the negative effect this would have on lending. They warned that it would cause steep inflation and disrupt the economy’s flow. They warned that this restriction on capital movement would have widespread repercussions for job creation and trickle-down wealth. They’d used these arguments for decades against other forms of socialization.

  There is no way I could have known then, as I leaned back in my chair and watched the day’s last light impart a Coppertone glow on the old brick church across Lillian’s street, that Project Pinky would be linked to the UBI. That, in fact, the person in charge of Project Pinky hoped to tank the bill and replace it with a system of his own design. I’m not sure what, if anything, this knowledge would have changed.

  Michael and I didn’t talk about the crisis or its possible ramifications for us. We worked late. We left early. At home, we lay in bed staring at separate laptops. We argued about whose turn it was to take out the trash. Michael let the cat sprawl across his ribcage. He stroked her fur and fed her salmon treats that left crumbs on the duvet. I dust-busted around their bodies. We didn’t have sex.

  “So no more threesomes?” said Lillian. “You onto other stuff now? Bondage? Strap-ons? Cosplay?”

  I swirled my wine. One night the previous week, I’d come home to a bleach-clean apartment and Michael in an apron standing over the stove. He’d set the table with our good wedding flatware. Candles were lit. A spray of wildflowers filled a vase.

  I should not have been surprised. Michael gave me gifts all the time and planned date nights: reservations at trendy new restaurants, third-row seats to see Alvin Ailey at BAM. He meant well, I knew, but I often found myself inflamed at his presumptions. For example: that I would ever wear a floral-print, off-the-shoulder romper; that, after a long day at work, I’d be in the mood to leave the house.

  Cooking and cleaning, however, were welcome. He made pan-fried sole in a brown butter sauce. The fish was flaky and moist. We moved to the couch where we drank Côtes du Rhône and listened to records. Michael rubbed my feet. After my second glass of wine, I was convinced to take his arm and practice the waltz we’d learned years ago for our wedding. The waltz seemed like a metaphor. To move as a unit. To create a momentum that would carry us through each other’s mistakes.

  The next day we had bedbugs.

  I hadn’t told Lillian about that either. Displaying uncharacteristic tact, she hadn’t asked about my face. I think she considered the body a safe space. She refused to acknowledge its betrayals.

  “I love making you uncomfortable,” said Lillian. “It’s too easy. I’m sorry. It’s funny to me to watch you squirm. Is that wrong? I should be nicer, right? I’m your boss. I could fire you. Maybe I’ll fire you right now. Ha-ha. Have you noticed that people say ha-ha these days instead of laughing? What’s that about?”

  I changed the subject.

  “Tell me about Project Pinky,” I said. “Fill me in. There must be more to the story.”

  “You ever watch that cartoon show, Pinky and the Brain?”

  I told her I’d seen it. I had a proper childhood, cereal and Saturday morning TV. My mother sat beside me and sketched in a notebook. It’s one of my strongest memories. Not anything we said, but the ease of her pose, the piney bouquet of her men’s deodorant. She found the cartoons amusing. Even as a kid, I was more interested in commercials.

  “What aw we going to do today, Bwain?” said Lillian, imitating the cartoon rat.

  “Today, Pinky,” she continued, now doing Brain’s voice, an operatic tenor, “we are going to take over the world.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “That’s the plan, anyway, world domination. I’m not sure how, or why, or what it means, but the money’s real, and for some reason we’ve been tapped for this project. I’m guessing that reason is discretion. They could have any of the big agencies with the kind of contract they’re promising: Ogilvy, Precocious Baby, whoever.”

  The client had floated a figure, enough to put us in the black for the coming year. We were a boutique service with a solid reputation, but even during our strongest quarters we spent nearly as much as we made. Precocious Baby had copied our business model and amassed a larger network of freelancers.

  “They want to go small. They want someone who knows how to keep their mouth shut. The meeting I had was in a motel on Brighton Beach. At first I thought it was a joke. Then I saw the shoes. I met with a young guy. His shoes, dude. The leather could have been the scrotum on a newborn foal.”

  I did my best not to visibly recoil.

  “The ten grand came in cash in a fucking briefcase. Could be mafia or Russian mafia, but I don’t think so. The guy was too white. Something sketchy is going on and I want us to be part of it. We get this account and we’ll make a killing. They sent me home in a limo. A motel in Brighton Beach and I’m sent home in a limo.”

  “Mysterious.”

  Lillian relit the roach.

  “There’s another t
hing. They asked about you.”

  “Me?”

  The sun was all but gone now, and the air was cooler. I wished I’d thought to bring a sweater.

  “You specifically. They said the contract depended on your full availability. I told them no problemo, of course. I guess your reputation precedes you.”

  “I have a reputation?”

  “You were bang-up on Samsung. Brought them back from the brink. I know you’re being headhunted left and right.”

  There had been offers, none I’d considered. I did think about leaving, but not for another agency. Instead, I imagined launching a startup in the Social Impact space, using my skills to do good. But I was comfortable at Communitiv.ly. For years I’d refused direct deposit because I loved receiving an envelope on my desk every other Friday morning. I loved waiting in line at the bank and holding the envelope. I loved handing the check to the teller.

  Like most beneficiaries of a bat mitzvah savings account, I had a complex relationship with wealth. On one side was guilt, a dumbbell in the pit of my stomach. My paternal grandfather came through Ellis Island with only a toolbox. He quite literally built his modest empire from brick and mortar, erecting low-income housing on the Lower East Side. I built a wall as well, around the dumbbell. If there’s one thing Manhattan private schools are good for, it’s reminding the children of New Money Jews that, in the grand scheme of savings and loans, they’re relatively deprived. I had classmates who owned helicopters, houses on Mustique.

  Then my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Treatment gave her two years. I wouldn’t trade that time, difficult as it was. I spent long hours in her hospital rooms, doing schoolwork and watching trashy TV. My father was there too: pacing, opening and closing the window, staring at his coffee. He took an open-ended leave from work to be at her bedside. Insurance covered certain costs, but treatment was expensive, as was hospice later on. We had no income during that period. When she died, my father was essentially broke.