Sensation Machines Page 26

  And Michael isn’t listening. He’s doing something on his phone. Then he’s showing that something to Broder. Another image. A man. Blond hair.

  “How about him?” says Michael. “You ever seen him before?”

  Broder shakes his head.

  “She was fifteen months sober,” Broder says.

  The man with the magnets wakes himself with a snore, says sorry, and falls back to sleep. Michael stands and takes his phone into the corner, sticks a finger in his ear. He doesn’t speak into it.

  Broder says, “Fifteen months is nothing.”

  Michael, phone still to his ear, says, “No one answers their phones.”

  “Leave a message,” says the woman. “I’m sure she’ll call back.”

  “You’re still fragile after fifteen months,” Broder says. “After fifteen years even. You can’t offer drugs to someone fifteen months sober and expect them to say no.”

  “No you can’t,” says Michael. He sits.

  The man with the magnets holds a beer in his drooping hand. The man’s arm lowers, and it looks like the beer might tip over, but he rights it and brings the can to his mouth. Liquid passes his lips, then comes spraying out. Beer goes everywhere. The man is still asleep.

  “I’ll get paper towels,” says the woman. She leaves.

  “It got her started again,” says Broder. “Three months later she was dead.”

  Broder holds up three fingers to illustrate. He lowers them, finger by finger. Michael looks very carefully at Broder. Like he used to look in the old days when Broder played Michael a new beat. Broder never knew what Michael was thinking, if he liked the beat or not.

  “I’m sorry,” says Michael. “That must have been hard.”

  Broder shakes his head. Michael looks back at the TV. Young Ricky’s on-screen again. Michael begins to cry. He says, “I know it’s not the same. Not the same as losing a wife.”

  “No,” says Broder.

  “I loved him,” says Michael.

  “Not the same,” Broder says.

  The woman returns with paper towels. Together she and Michael wipe the spill from the floor. Michael wipes the tears from his face. The woman says, “Maybe we should all try to get some sleep.”

  “I’ll never sleep,” says Michael.

  She says, “You should try.”

  The woman wakes the man with the magnets and they leave. Michael says he’ll go to bed too, but doesn’t move. He looks at Broder again. He holds the look for a long time. Broder thinks he’s about to say something about time and how it passes. Michael says, “Goodnight.”

  The wallpaper in the bathroom features illustrations of birds and ducks. It’s peeling in places. Broder touches a decorative soap and licks his finger. It doesn’t taste how he thought it would—too soapy, and not particularly sweet. Avoiding the mirror, he takes the gun from his pocket and places it, nose down, in the toilet bowl. He leaves the lid up. He leaves the house.

  42.

  Kate’s in the precinct waiting room, a cluttered hallway that feels like the set of a period drama about police corruption in nineteen-seventies New York. There’s an excess of furniture: couches stained at head height from decades of hairspray seepage, a dozen folding chairs marked D.O.C. No one sits. People pace and stretch. They gulp soda and blow noses into sand-colored napkins. Kids lie sprawled on the tile. Women rock strollers. Garbage rises from the bin. Devor’s attorney steps out to make a call, and only now, left alone, does Kate note the lack of other white people in the room.

  Her first reaction is pride in herself for having taken three hours to notice her minority status.

  Her second is shame in having noticed at all.

  Her third is outrage at the system for being so predictably racist, when this place should be filled with Wall Street spouses.

  Her fourth is shame that her third wasn’t her first.

  Her fifth is to picture Devor in a bright orange jumpsuit, addressing a quorum of inmates. His lecture begins with the Old Testament—Exodus, Kate thinks, Moses and Aaron standing before Pharaoh, a brief exegesis on unity and brotherhood—and makes stops at the Russian Revolution, Malcolm X, and Black Lives Matter, before Devor executes a daring twist and returns to Marx, because all injustice stems from the skewed relationship between capital and labor.

  Kate knows this fantasy is racist, Devor as white savior bringing light to the wildlings, like those two famous Johns, Smith and Snow. She tries hard to avoid the white man’s burden in her classroom, reprimanding herself for any slight neglect to check her privilege. Yet she’s been known to excuse the same behavior in Devor. Maybe because she holds men to lower standards. Maybe because her boyfriend’s earnest elation at his own sense of wokeness provides refreshing contrast to the canned ardor of politician-speak. Devor doesn’t dumb down or slow down or condescend, and it’s this quality—a rare, informed optimism—that keeps her hanging on despite his mounting tally of relationship fails. So she’s surprised by the spirit-dampened Devor who emerges from lockup with more gray in his beard than she remembers it having before. Kate reminds herself that he’s only been in jail since lunchtime. She stands and opens her arms. He falls into the hug, forehead to shoulder, like a marathon runner, too blistered and chafed to realize he’s won.

  Back home, after talking to the lawyer over sake and gyoza, they sit in bed. Devor has his laptop and she has her iPad. The only parts of their bodies that touch are their feet. Kate scratches the dead skin on his heel with the nail of her big toe.

  “A year,” she says. “Nothing.”

  “Twelve months,” he says, clicking through Facebook, liking statuses he’s tagged in that link to outraged pleas for his release. Longer posts are awarded with thumbs-up emojis. Sometimes hearts. “Fifty-two weeks. Three hundred and sixty-five days.”

  “Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes,” sings Kate.

  Devor doesn’t react. He may not get the reference. She once suggested they watch Rent and he said maybe on her birthday.

  “Do you know what happens to guys like me in jail?”

  “Sure,” Kate says. “They unionize the inmates. Protest the lack of organic produce. Reform the prison healthcare system from within.”

  This list of possible deeds seems to tire Devor. He slides farther down the headboard. The lawyer was adamant about their options. Devor can testify against the doorman and go free. Or he can suck it up, plead out, and hope for a lenient DA. Best case, he gets three to five, and is home in a year with an ankle monitor. Maintaining his innocence is not on the table. The evidence against him is strong. Sophia agreed to testify, under threat of her professor ex-boyfriend’s deportation. Devor seems more crestfallen by this fact than the prospect of prison. Kate kisses his cheek. Touches a finger to his lips, then runs it down across his sternum. She puts down her iPad, shuts Devor’s laptop, takes his hand.

  “You’ll survive,” she says. “I promise.”

  She traces his lifelines, keeps scratching his foot. She was hoping for the kind of sex that couples have in movies when bombs fall on cities or aliens invade. She tries a less subtle tack and undoes his belt. Pulls down his jeans and runs her tongue up his inner thigh. Devor neither consents nor complains. It only takes a minute. She swallows. He pats her head.

  “Think you can go a year without one of those?” Kate asks.

  “No,” Devor says. “I don’t think I can.”

  “Hm,” Kate says. “We can always petition for a conjugal visit. I’m sure they’ll make an exception for a nice boy like you.”

  Devor nods. He picks up his phone and starts playing Candy Crush. His underwear is bunched around his ankles. Kate takes off her nightgown. She retrieves the vibrator from her nightstand drawer and offers him the item.

  “Do I get a turn?”

  “I’m tired,” says Devor. “Maybe in the morning instead
just this once? I know it’s not fair but I’m tired.”

  She accepts this excuse and goes into the bathroom. Devor says something, but she can’t hear over the running water.

  “Did you say something?” she asks when she gets back in bed. She lifts his arm and fits her head on the pillow of his chest.

  “These power structures,” Devor says. “They’re deeply embedded. I could see that, when I was locked up. Things became clear. I was naïve to think I could change them.”

  “Locked up for four hours,” says Kate.

  “I’m tired of fighting.”

  “You’re just tired.”

  “I guess,” says Devor.

  He rolls onto his side and falls asleep. She reads Twitter for a while, then gets bored and turns the vibrator on. Devor stirs and she turns it back off. She doesn’t want to disturb him. He needs his rest.

  43.

  Wendy wakes to her cellphone’s symphonic ring, Beethoven’s fifth, a five-second snippet: Michael. She reaches for the device in slow motion, afraid to wake her companion. He’s all but dead, knees to chest and lead-heavy in his spot on the far side of the California king. She mutes the phone. There are twenty missed calls from Michael. There are voicemails but she doesn’t have the energy to listen.

  The notches of Lucas’s spine are perfectly proportioned, a bone xylophone. She imagines playing the instrument with a padded mallet. His back features a fading tan. She fingers the line where his butt goes white. He doesn’t stir. Wendy’s the big spoon, breasts to shoulder blades, nose in his neck hair. Wendy holds her hand in front of his mouth until her palm is wet from condensation.

  Wendy saw Lucas’s bathroom last night, but she was drunk. Only now can she truly admire the spotless space, tile so shiny and disinfected. He has one of those showerheads that looks like a large, circular lamp. No products but a bar of soap and a bottle of generic shampoo. A neatly organized shaving kit rests on top of the toilet. She does her legs and armpits. The water pressure is strong. Dead skin down the drain.

  (The Parentheses)

  (Sunset over D’Agostino’s. Crosstown wind off the Hudson. Michael thinks he can still smell ash. Exiting shoppers cut like tailbacks toward the end zone of the subway entrance. Celery stalks blossom from the tops of brown bags. Soup season is here. Michael stares at what may or may not be Wendy’s window. The way the sun hits the window makes it difficult to tell if lights are on in the apartment. Michael gives the horn another honk.

  Wendy strides from the building in burgundy heels that match her hair. She says sorry she’s late, though she’s not. Her mother always insisted on making men wait. It’s one of the few shards of wisdom that Wendy remembers. This is why Wendy, a naturally punctual person, still follows it.

  Michael’s truck smells like Slim Jims. His breath smells like cigarettes. He sweats and taps the wheel, accelerating rapidly out of green lights and braking hard into red ones. Wendy fastens and refastens her seatbelt. Their first date was nearly two months ago, and this thing that happened since makes it feel like even more time has passed. Michael turns onto Ninety-Sixth Street. The radio is off. He debates playing his demo. On the one hand, it’s tacky. On the other, Wendy, who majors in English, might pick up on his allusions and use of enjambment.

  “You have any music?” Wendy asks, and before he can stop himself he’s inserted the tape. Web MD comes in over the car’s tinny speakers:

  I got love for the doctors

  And medicine men

  Who pen scrips and pen rhymes

  From the tips of blunt pens

  Who roll blunts out of dimes

  Like Proust’s madeleines

  “Check it,” says Michael. “That’s me.”

  The restaurant is a small Portuguese place that will soon be out of business. Rents rise in the wake of the attacks despite predictions of mass exodus. On date number one, Wendy had mentioned a summer she spent in Lisbon with her father.

  The restaurant’s walls are covered in woven tapestries depicting battles and sex acts. Stringed instruments that look like mandolins but aren’t, exactly, hang between the tapestries. The waitresses wear bandannas and gauzy print skirts and black boots and dangling earrings and beaded necklaces. Entrees are in the twelve-to-fourteen-dollar range, which is all Michael can afford, but he’s hoping the warmth of the waitstaff, and the authenticity of the decor, and the deep pork odor coming from the kitchen, and the fact that he remembered about Lisbon, will give Wendy the impression that he chose this restaurant for its Old World ambience and not because he’s on a budget.

  “Nice place,” says Wendy.

  He reads her flat affect as that too-cool-for-anything attitude prevalent among upperclassman whose initial enthusiasms for the city have hardened into stone-faced opacity. Wendy, however, was being sincere, though the restaurant doesn’t remind her of Lisbon so much as a childhood summer—one of the last with her mother—spent at a seaside rental in Little Compton, Rhode Island. She recalls the rocky coastline and the vein-green shade of her mother’s forearms; lunches at the local pub, eating steamers and burnt linguiça. At night Wendy would write in her journal, attempting to re-create, in prose, the town’s clammy odor and sea-salt air. To get the experience on paper was a way of freezing time. It was also the beginning of a new identity: Wendy, aspiring author. Only recently, under the tutelage of an eager nonfiction writing prof, has she come to understand that recapturing the past means reliving its traumas. She interviewed for an internship at an ad agency last week.

  Their waitress arrives, a voluptuous woman of indeterminate age in a low-cut blouse and candy-apple lipstick. Her name is Bernice, and there’s something overtly sexual in her demeanor: the way she poses with hands on hips, elbows cocked, bracelets piled at her wrist. Bernice asks if they’d like anything to start, bread and olives, perhaps, or the house special jamón croquettes?

  Michael hesitates. He was hoping to be quick with dinner so they can get to part two, a quiet cruise around the neighborhood, listening to slow jams and not spending money. He brought his dad’s truck down from the Berkshires to help Ricky move, and he figures he might as well milk the novelty.

  Wendy senses her date’s discomfort. She knows he’s on financial aid and that he’s embarrassed about it. She tells the waitress they’re ready to order their entrees.

  Wendy will have a salad. She actually wants shell steak with herb-roasted potatoes, but she won’t order it in front of a guy. This is not something learned from her mother, but from Rachel Kirshenbaum, her semi-anorexic roommate and so-called best friend. Wendy’s not meant to finish her entree either, but rather to take five or six rabbit bites, then cover her salad with a napkin.

  Rachel and Wendy are an unlikely duo. They were paired freshman year, and have stuck together because neither is good at making friends. Wendy because she’s shy, and Rachel because her Long Island accent is grating. Rachel wears her eating disorder like a Tiffany’s tiara, bragging about skipping dinner, and constantly quoting the Kate Moss maxim that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. It makes Wendy sick on the inside, and not particularly hopeful for the feminist cause. Still, Wendy guiltily envies both Rachel’s self-discipline and sculpted abs. Wendy is not a size zero, but she knows how to dress for her body. Men find her attractive, but often look disappointed when she disrobes by the light of her desk lamp. She’s learned to turn it off. Fuck these men and their porno fantasies. Michael orders the shell steak.

  “You smell ash?” he asks.

  “I smell seared flesh,” Wendy says. The words come out snarkier than intended. Her defensive stance is so deeply ingrained that it’s hard to turn it off. “It smells good, though,” she adds, to clarify.

  “I keep smelling ash,” Michael says. “They say the smell should be gone by now but I can’t get it out of my nostrils.”

  “The royal They,” says Wendy, holding up air quotes.

/>   “Maybe it’s a phantom smell at this point,” says Michael, ignoring what she thought was her scalpel-sharp insight into the media’s post-9/11 paternalism. Wendy’s been watching the news for weeks, though by this point it’s all recycled material, the same slideshow of the rubble and the chisel-jawed firefighter and Bruce Springsteen sweat-soaked at the benefit concert; the same news anchors, and human interest stories, and teary interviews. And yet, despite her awareness that this barrage of imagery has been consciously arranged for maximum emotional manipulation, at certain moments Wendy is able to suspend her cynicism and find comfort in imagining this messy tragedy as a well-plotted serial drama populated by heroes and villains, and moving toward some kind of narrative resolution.

  It might be the survivor interviews that make her feel this way, interviews with those who escaped from the burning buildings or lost loved ones, yet still manage to face the camera and answer questions designed to make them cry. Because even if these people are faking optimism and faking patriotism and faking the can-do resilience that comes from living under God’s real or imagined grace, the fakery itself is an act of courage.

  Michael continues: “Maybe I’m imagining it. Normally I can’t smell anything because of my sinuses. Did you know that phantom smells are a symptom of strokes? People smell burning right before they stroke out. Or maybe it’s heart attacks, not strokes. I can’t remember. Either way, I wonder if people thought they were having heart attacks when the towers came down. If they smelled the burning buildings and thought they were stroking out.”

  “It’s strokes,” says Wendy. “My grandfather had one.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Michael.

  Wendy says, “I was two at the time.”

  She sips her water. Michael drums with his spoon, then becomes aware that he’s doing so and stops. He tries to change the subject but they can’t land on anything. Instead, he focuses on the swinging kitchen door, willing Bernice to emerge with a bread basket. His leg has returned to its prior state of restlessness and Wendy finds herself clutching the edge of their table to hold it in place.