Sensation Machines Read online

  “Of course there are holes in the story. But the holes don’t matter. The holes can be filled. Let’s say he had been carrying a gun as part of his doorman duty, or because he’d recently been mugged, or he has a micro-penis and can’t afford a Ferrari, or he watched westerns as a kid, or any of a million other reasons someone might carry a gun. The point is not to make him lovable, but relatable. There’s a difference. But the holes don’t matter anyway. What matters is the larger effect of this kind of narrative, which draws attention away from some kind of #Occupy-based conspiracy and toward a lone gunman with a personal issue.”

  Wendy can already feel herself disconnecting Ricky’s death from the game they’re playing. It’s easier to intellectualize than to face the gutshot of a human vanished. It was easier, after her mother died, to write an op-ed for her high school paper criticizing what she called the Cancer Industrial Complex, which prioritized research for high-visibility cancers like breast and prostate, while killers like pancreatic stood in the underfunded shadows. It was easier, when Nina died, to organize a neonatal mortality support group, using Communitiv.ly’s conference room as an after-hours event space, stocking the meeting with Nespresso pods and nut milks, zero-calorie sodas and artisanal cupcakes, purchasing leather-bound notebooks in which the attendees could write down feelings, though Wendy left hers blank. It is easier, now, to focus on work.

  “Look,” says Wendy. “It’s not as bad as you think. Let’s say the doorman did do it. It may seem improbable, but let’s pretend it’s the truth. Donnell the doorman committed the murder in the manner you’ve just described, dragging Ricky into a conveniently empty room and shooting him with a handgun. Here’s the question we need to ask: Would this murder have occurred if it weren’t for the Funeral for Capitalism and the planned march to the Zone Hotel where protesters were provided with an opportunity to exercise their anger? As far as I understand it, the answer to that question is no. Donnell Sanders is not a murderer by nature. I’d guess that he’s never previously been convicted of a crime. He did not premeditate, and never would have killed Ricky if he hadn’t been given this opportunity. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  “Go on,” says Lucas.

  “Now what does this mean for us?” Wendy continues, feeling herself, as she speaks, take on Lucas’s speech patterns, his syntactical style, which is half TV DA, half radio DJ, words relayed so rapidly that it’s impossible to stop and consider any single piece of information without missing whatever comes next. “What it means is that, regardless of who literally pulled the trigger, the blood is on #Occupy’s hands. It’s on Nøøse’s hands and it’s on Jay Devor’s hands.”

  “Keep talking,” says Lucas. She’s never seen him show deference before. The power in the room seems to shift in her direction as she stands above Lucas at full height, feet shoulder-width apart, arms at her sides. Lucas is listening.

  “Now I know there are some who say that Jay Devor did not play any role in the riot, that he had nothing to do with its organization. There are some who even think that it was the banks that organized the riot to discredit #Occupy. In that scenario, the banks also ordered the hit. However, if Donnell the doorman committed the murder, then the conspiracy is no longer a viable theory. Why would the banks want to frame the doorman? No, if Donnell the doorman committed the murder, it means the riot must have been organized by #Occupy, and that the murder was an unplanned byproduct. The murder was the result of the riot gone wrong. The riot is responsible for the death of Ricky Cortes. And in much the same way that our previous president’s racist tirades inspired neo-Nazis to march on Charlottesville, and a gunman to open fire in El Paso, Jay Devor is complicit in Ricky’s murder.”

  Lucas grins. He bats his lashes again, and she thinks he might be in love, not with her, or even with what she’s saying, but with Wendy’s conversion to their cause.

  “The only place we need to convict Devor,” she says, “is in the court of public opinion.”

  “Yes,” says Lucas. “I see your point. I see your point indeed.”

  26.

  From his parents’ back porch the sky is purple, though it’s lighter where the horizon meets the tree line, the last broken sun rays hot-glued like sequins between branches and leaves. A lone swimmer inches toward shore.

  Michael remembers how the lake used to look in December, frozen and cratered in spots where snow weighed down and cracked the ice. When it stayed cold for long enough, neighbors would ice fish for the scant remains of summer’s man-dumped stock of trout and catfish, and Michael would skate with a hockey stick, practicing wrist shots and backward figure eights. Lydia always watched from this porch, a model of Jewish motherhood, worried the ice would crack and he’d fall through. What was she planning, to dive in and save him? Detective Ryan isn’t answering, so Michael calls Quinn instead.

  “Go for Quinn,” says Quinn.

  “It’s Michael Mixner,” Michael says. “Something occurred to me—was Ricky wearing a bracelet when they found him?”

  “A bracelet?”

  “An SD bracelet. Sykodollars. From Shamerican Sykosis. Looks like a watch without hands.”

  “I know what you’re talking about. My kid plays SS. I shouldn’t say plays. More like a job, really. He’s nine. Wears his helmet to school. His mother put him in one of those hippie schools where they let the kids piss and shit on the walls.”

  “They shit on the walls?”

  “He won’t even take the helmet off for meals. You ever seen someone eat in one of those things? No? It’s because you can’t. I have to make his meals in liquid form. You ever tried to turn a cheeseburger into a smoothie? It’s actually better than you might expect.”

  Michael pictures Quinn feeding ropes of pink beef into a juicer along with lettuce, tomato, and shredded cheddar; Quinn and Junior drinking their concoctions from oversized beer steins while watching YouTube clips of farting dogs; Quinn sitting by his son on the bathroom floor as Junior—helmet lifted like a hockey goalie’s between whistles—spews bile-stewed cheese-beef into the toilet.

  “Apparently some of these bracelets might be worth a lot of money,” Michael says. “Like millions of dollars. And it might be nothing, but the last time I saw Ricky he made a weird comment about the value of his bracelet, something to do with linear time. And then he was telling me that he’d invested all his money in some sure thing, and I’m wondering if that thing was SD.”

  “You’re kidding me,” says Quinn. “You mean my kid could be rich?”

  “I guess it’s possible.”

  “Huh,” says Quinn.

  Michael pictures him nodding, Adam’s apple riding his throat like a tiny elevator. Quinn says he has to go and ends the call.

  Rachel steps through the sliding doors and hands Michael a cigarette. It’s dark now, the sky a sheeny black. The moon is higher and the sun is gone. The swimmer wades toward the small patch of beach maintained by the town. Michael and Ricky had to rake it one summer for community service after getting caught with a joint in Ricky’s car. It was the best job Michael’s ever had, meditatively dragging his rake across the sand, catching twigs and bottle caps in its bristles, his skin turning tan. Ricky would chat up the old ladies from the nursing home who were brought in by van every Friday and propped in plastic chairs along the shore. The ladies wore sun hats and sunblock dripped in blobs down their arms. Michael thought it wouldn’t be the worst way to end a life.

  When the swimmer reaches shore, he suddenly can be seen in the glow of motion-detecting security lights. It’s their neighbor, Mr. Harkness, esteemed cardiologist and cycling fanatic: nude. Mr. Harkness stands perfectly still, arms spread like Jesus, and begins to urinate. Rachel flicks her butt. It falls in an arc near the naked man’s feet. Their neighbor, startled, does a small fearful dance and yells, “Watch where you throw those things.”

  “Watch where you swing that dick,” replies Rachel.


  27.

  Greg asks if she’s got music. Lillian taps at her phone and some kind of nü-metal erupts from her speakers. He tries to find a way to dance to this noise, circling his hips, flailing his arms, attempting a knee bend. Lillian watches, the blue glow of her Juul a weak spotlight. Greg teases his nipples, over the shirt at first, before undoing its top button, then the next one down, hips still circling, mouth pursed in duckface. It’s not until his bellybutton’s exposed that Lillian says, “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “I thought . . .” says Greg.

  He rushed over here after receiving an SOS text featuring three eggplant emojis, a peach, and fireworks.

  “You thought what?”

  She holds up her phone. Greg wonders if she’s documenting this humiliation. For all he knows, Lillian has already Insta’d his stripping image across the interwebs. He pictures Wendy ROFL.

  “But your text,” Greg says. “I thought you wanted . . .”

  Lillian crosses her arms.

  “ . . . me?” Greg says.

  She’s laughing now. Sun comes through the skylight, suspending Greg in a beam of rising dust. Lillian sucks hard on her e-cig as if, with enough force, she might manage to pull in some actual smoke.

  “What I like about you, Greg, is that you don’t overthink things. You’re a man of action and reaction. Take the way you waltzed in here and took off your clothes. Did it cross your mind that I was joking?”

  He shakes his head.

  “If this were Nazi Germany, you’d be first in line to operate the gas chamber.”

  “I’m Jewish.”

  “Self-hating.”

  He shrugs in agreement, mimes turning the crank.

  “You went on a date,” says Lillian. “With a woman named Sophia Dall.”

  “I didn’t get her last name.”

  “It’s Dall.”

  “Okay.”

  “So I need you to rack that brain of yours and try to remember if at any time during your two-hour convergence of shame and small talk, she mentioned her ex-boyfriend Jay Devor.”

  “She did, yeah.”

  Greg gives her the rundown: vape pen, MoMA, a shared order of overpriced tostadas, an au revoir peck on Greg’s cheek. When Greg brought up #Occupy, Sophia had explained that her ex, Devor, had organized the riot, but had left before it started. She’d been with Devor all that night.

  “But you’re saying she told you he organized the riot?”

  “He wasn’t even there, Lil. He didn’t know about the murder until the next day.”

  “Well look at you, Detective Greg. I should get you a badge and a gun. Maybe a cute little sheriff’s hat,” says Lillian.

  Greg, it seems, has done something right.

  She says, “Button your shirt before I go blind.”

  28.

  They eat at the dining table, a third of which is taken up by Stuart’s twenty-seven-inch quote unquote travel laptop. The only stamps on the laptop’s passport: kitchen, dining room, living room, bedroom. Stuart types with one hand while eating with the other. A strand of lo mein dangles from his lips for a second before being sucked in. No one asks him to put the computer away. Those arguments ended ten years ago, during the salad days of Diablo, when it became clear that turning away was not, for Stuart, an option. At least during Michael’s childhood he shut off the computer once in a while. These days, it’s cause for minor celebration when he deigns to come downstairs. No wonder Rachel’s so stunted and armored, so attuned to the dangers of showing you care. Michael would be too had he grown up with the late model version of his parents that she did, all those noodle cup dinners eaten alone, or the belabored science projects so hurtfully ignored.

  If there’s one thing Michael wants on this brief trip, it’s to make clear to his sister that, despite their differing lifestyles and history of emotional distance, and despite Rachel’s understandable reservations, he’d like to try to forge a friendship. Throughout his library research on communism, what Michael kept coming back to was Marx’s directive to raze the family and strip it for parts, each member a worker with no time or room for the hierarchical shackles of eating together at a small round table and asking each other about their days. This seemed like a miscalculation on Marx’s part, a deep failure to understand certain biological imperatives.

  Marx had nine kids, Michael knows, and yet feelings of fatherhood are hardly mentioned in his writings, or, at least, in the small sample of his writings Michael’s read. Marx didn’t understand how lucky he was. Reproduction came easy and perhaps that was it; not until you’ve wanted something so hard for so long, until you’ve lain sleepless in bed on hundreds of nights praying to a God you don’t believe in, or sat in doctors’ waiting rooms squeezing your wife’s hand, or injected her thigh with an IVF needle, can you appreciate what the loss of that family might mean.

  This is why communism would never triumph. People would always care more for their spouses and children than for anonymous strangers. They would not abandon the illusory dream of protecting their families in fenced-off mansions and airbag-equipped SUVs, of fortifying them with stem cell steaks and pricey D vitamins that boost immune defense, of cradling their delicate bodies on Casper mattresses made from high-density memory foam. A man would always want more than factory camaraderie and communal showers, not for himself, but for those that he loves. For all its flaws, capitalism takes this into account. It’s one thing to its credit, an understanding of this deep human need to provide.

  And yet, look at what happens when someone like Michael can no longer provide. The American Dream—that beautiful stage set that looked so real on opening night—is now, with its props sealed in boxes and its actors gone home, revealed as a depthless façade. He finishes his bourbon, pours another.

  “Is that your third whiskey?” asks Lydia, an Ashkenazi Jew known to drink vodka until blackout, who thinks brown liquor is devil’s juice for redneck gentiles. “You’re not turning into an alcoholic are you? It’s worrying, Michael. Whiskey’s so strong.”

  “Second,” says Michael, though it’s his fourth. He doesn’t feel drunk, just tired. He hasn’t slept more than a couple hours since arriving in the Berkshires, up all last night picturing Ricky’s future: skin nipped by worms, coffin splintered and piercing the body’s remains. To push this image from his mind, Michael tried and mostly failed to catalog the thirty-plus years of their friendship. He doesn’t know if it’s fatigue or what, but each night since the murder it’s like he remembers less, to the point that he can’t, with certainty, recall even the contours of Ricky’s face, or the texture of his voice; as if Ricky, without his corporeal form, has become liquid and ill-defined, a multiplicity of opposing details that don’t add up to a graspable whole.

  Rachel scoops lo mein onto her plastic plate. Though Lydia hasn’t observed the rules of kashrut since childhood, she still refuses to sully her ceramic dishware with pork and shrimp.

  “Well, I learned something interesting this morning,” Lydia says. “Did you know that the Jews were most likely never even in Egypt?”

  Their mother shares stuff like this all the time. One year, she almost ruined a Seder by making a similarly combative claim that the Egyptians were actually slaves of the Jews. And while it’s true that the Jews almost certainly didn’t build the pyramids, it’s also true that no evidence lent credence to Lydia’s assertion. Either way, there was no reason to bring it up in front of Stuart’s conservative family.

  “So you’re saying Passover is bullshit?” asks Rachel. It’s the only holiday to which she feels a connection, in part because the exodus, with its historical roots and contemporary relevance, has always seemed distinctly non-bullshit, a far cry from cartoonish Queen Esther, or the wonder of Chanukah’s magical flame. Not that Passover’s parted sea or rain of plagues belong to realism, but the slave narrative grounds the supernatural stuff, and the st
ory’s central image—the Israelites marching with bread on their backs—is so sensory and concrete. Rachel has always related to Aaron, the unsung sibling. Michael was Moses: silent in his absence, enveloped in an air of charmed mystique.

  That Michael is not the one she sees tonight. Her brother’s current incarnation looks wounded and tiny, drowning in an oversized T-shirt. He looks nothing like the slick financier who visited in August, Wendy in tow, the pair turning heads at the Grub and Grog with their New York wardrobes that must have looked, to the local crowd, gauchely European, meaning gaudy and threatening and somewhat gay. Rachel wonders where Wendy is now. Michael looks like he could use a nurturing wife. Rachel knows: Wendy isn’t the nurturing type.

  She remembers the dinner after their courthouse wedding. The Mixners were in full force—Rachel’s Long Island cousins, with their polished diamonds and hair-gelled husbands—but there were hardly any guests from Wendy’s side. Aware of this incongruity, Rachel had tried, in her way, to bond with the bride. She’d done this by shit-talking, in perhaps too wine-lit and effusive a manner, the Long Island contingent, telling Wendy she’d rather have no relatives at all than that cunty JAP cousin brigade. Instead of laughing or nodding, Wendy had looked across the table as if seeing the cousins for the first time. She spent a long moment studying Maggie and Hannah, who were in deep debate on the merits and drawbacks of a monthly colonic. “Maggie’s really quite pretty,” was Wendy’s cold reply.

  “Well it’s not bullshit,” says Lydia. “It’s allegory.”

  “Like ‘Fuck the Police,’” says Michael.

  “I mean, it’s the origin story of our culture,” says Rachel. “It’s like if we found out Superman wasn’t from Krypton.”

  “There’s archeological evidence,” says Lydia.

  “How can there be archeological evidence for an absence?” Rachel asks. “There can be a lack of evidence, but there can’t be evidence itself of an absence. And how is it anything like ‘Fuck the Police’?”

  “The violence,” says Michael.