Sensation Machines Read online

  “Here’s what I don’t get,” says Rachel. “If Broder stole the bracelet, then pawned it for bus fare, then how did the cops get it and plant it in the first place?”

  “Maybe it’s not the same bracelet,” I say.

  “Of course it’s not the same bracelet,” says Donnell.

  In my mind, police corruption still belongs in the fictional realm, but I’m coming around. I alter my earlier definition of privilege to include the expectation of integrity in dealings with the law.

  “We can’t dwell on mistakes,” I say, meaning mine. “We need a plan.”

  “What I need is a lawyer,” says Donnell.

  “Right,” I say. “A lawyer.”

  “Because the one I have is useless.”

  “Okay. Then we’ll get you a lawyer.”

  He leans across the table.

  “And you’re gonna pay for it?”

  “Pay for it, right. Huh.”

  Donnell crosses his arms.

  “No, no,” I say. “I mean sure, I’m happy to pay. The thing is that my finances . . .”

  “I see,” says Donnell.

  “But we’ll figure it out. I can sell, well—I have assets. I have sneakers.”

  “You have sneakers?” he says. “Because lawyers get paid in sneakers.”

  Rachel suddenly sprints for the trash. I worry the guardbot will mistake her for an inmate and light up her brain stem with five hundred volts. But she reaches the garbage can safely. Inmates and visitors watch. Her theatrical purge cuts the tension in the room. People laugh and clap. The guardbot wheels to the vending machine. It puts a claw in a keyhole and buys Rachel a bottled water out of the kindness of its humanely programmed heart.

  “Look, Michael,” says Donnell. “I appreciate your willingness to help. And I’m glad to know this guy’s out there, and that we know who he is. But what I need right now is money. I’m going broke in here, missing shifts at work, bills piling up. And the kind of legal team I need won’t be cheap. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  I’m close enough to see the spreading dampness on the armpits of his jumpsuit, his white-knuckle grip against its loose cotton sleeves.

  “It should have been me,” I say. “In here. It should have been me in here instead of you.”

  “It shouldn’t be either of us. It should be the guy who’s actually guilty.”

  “I’m the constant at the center of the map board, the obvious choice to play the unsuspecting mark. If this were a movie, I’d be the lead. You’d be, I don’t know, the cool best friend.”

  “Best friend, huh?”

  “Good friend?” I try.

  Donnell says, “This is the problem with you finance guys. You think you’re the star of the movie. You always think you’re the star.”

  We drive back to the city under smog-painted sky. It’s a balmy evening, a few weeks from Christmas, and the townhouses twinkle once we’re off the highway, and trees are for sale outside the bodegas. Hundreds of drones converge on Columbus Circle, empty of product, returning to base to meet the clear-skies curfew.

  Rachel double-parks outside Wendy’s dad’s. She keeps the car running and I head inside.

  “Hello,” someone says, when I unlock the door. I don’t recognize the voice, and can barely hear it over the music, an arena rock anthem playing loud.

  Lucas Van Lewig sits in the living room, in Fred’s easy chair. He’s got the air of an ex–college quarterback gone on to corporate success based on family connections and a firm handshake: sandy hair, great teeth. He wears a distressed bomber jacket that, despite looking like it belongs to midcentury American action abroad, retails, I know, for four figures at Saks. His eyes roam the length of me, as if this Scantron-style assessment will bear weight on our conversation. I’m conscious of my poor posture and dad-bod. The song ends and another begins. This one I recognize.

  “Freddie Mercury was a genius,” Lucas says, as if it’s an inarguable fact that pertains to our encounter. “He never got the critical admiration he deserved, but critics are scum, as I’m sure you understand, and if a flamboyantly gay man’s ability to make aggressively hetero sports fans chant and weep isn’t a sign of true iconoclasm, then I don’t know what is. You’ve got to remember this was pre-Drake. Mercury never saw the dawn of the metrosexual or the sensitive asshole. He never knew the Poptimist movement. But history will be kind. I can feel it in my bones. Is this real life or is this just fantasy? Profound? It’s almost biblical.”

  “Is Wendy here?” I say.

  “I thought you’d be taller,” Lucas replies.

  His voice is deep as a leading man’s and flirtatiously deadpan. It’s like he’s got popcorn caught in his throat. Like he’s getting rimmed through a hole in the seat cushion as we speak.

  “And better-looking,” he adds. “But look at you. You’re losing your hair.”

  He waves as if swiping a dating app, replacing me with someone more to his taste. I instinctively raise a hand to cover my scalp.

  “The Rogaine’s not working as advertised,” I say, unsure how we’ve arrived at this discussion of my failings.

  “Propecia?” he offers.

  “Kills the libido.”

  Lucas gives an understanding nod despite the fact that his hair is thick as bear fur, effervescent as chemical sunset, coiffed and berry-smelling as Baywatch-era David Hasselhoff’s. It’s possible his erections suffer for this vanity, but it seems unlikely. He sips from a tiny bottle of Coca-Cola using a pink children’s twisty straw. When he’s done sipping, he puts the straw in his mouth, rolls it around on his tongue.

  “Cuban Coke,” he says. “It’s the new Mexican Coke. Very refreshing. Want one?”

  I shake my head.

  “The Mexicans switched from cane sugar to high fructose a few years back. People still buy by the caseload. It’s these tiny bottles that sell the product, their nostalgic appeal. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing the public to ignore the fine print. It’s how your industry got in the mess it’s in. Luckily for me, the Cubans are still uncompromised. If there’s one thing Castro instilled, it’s a belief in the superiority of raw cane. I respect him for that, if nothing else.”

  “You haven’t told me where Wendy is.”

  “She left already. The keynote starts in an hour. I need to head down there myself. I just stopped by to drop off some Cuban Coke for Fred. The guy can’t get enough. I mean, at his age. But a man needs a vice. I stopped smoking a year ago. I still get the craving.”

  He opens his mouth and lets the straw drop. We watch it flutter to the carpet.

  “You’re wondering what it was like to grow up under my father. Most men have a story that begins: The most important thing my father ever told me, and whatever that thing is, it’s almost universally some idiotic lesson gleaned from his experiences in love or war. My father never told me anything.”

  “What keynote?” I say.

  “Greg’s keynote speech at DisruptNY. I hope you’ll join me. It’s really a good one. I wrote a lot of it myself, though your wife read it this morning and threw in some bon mots. We’re launching the product and I think you should be there. I expect it will clarify some things.”

  “What things?”

  “The future of the human race, for one. The end of unemployment. The dawn of augmented man. But we should start smaller.”

  “The suit?” I say, remembering my G-chat with Greg.

  “Ah, so Ricky told you.”

  “Just the name,” I say. “I only know the name.”

  “Well, did he tell you that you’re the sole benefactor of his Sykodollars? All his SD will be passed on to you, Michael Mixner, and after tonight, there will be quite a lot of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He takes the bracelet from his pocket and puts it in my hands. The item’s h
eavier than I imagined. Ricky’s initials are engraved on the case’s back and a small curly hair is caught in the clasp. I wonder if the hair is his, if it got pulled loose when Broder ripped the bracelet from his wrist.

  “GPS,” Lucas explains. “I like to keep track of what I put into the world. The pawnbroker let it go for fifty bucks. As for the anonymity thing: I mean, it’s true, for the most part. The government has no idea who’s holding these assets. But I do. Once people started getting deep in SD, I needed a way to track where it was. The real question is why I’m choosing to tell you when I could have kept this information to myself. But I’m a rich man, Michael, I don’t need the money. If I’d kept it, then what kind of guy would I be?”

  “A bad one?”

  “One of the first conversations I had with Cortes was about you. He was telling me about his trader friend, how his guilt about the crash had turned him into a half-assed Marxist. We had a good laugh about that. Cortes thought it was positively hilarious. You, with your loft and your Porsche, singing the Internationale. Ha-ha, am I right? So we’re laughing and laughing, and then there’s a pause. And Cortes turns to me and says, you know, I’ve thought a lot about it, and I’ve decided Marx was wrong. You know that thing about religion being the opiate of the masses? Well, Marx was wrong. So I said, okay, I’ll bite, if religion isn’t the opiate of the masses then what is? And you know what Cortes responds?”

  “Opium,” I say. He’d used the same line on me.

  “Correct,” Lucas says. “He said opium is the opiate of the masses.”

  “A searing insight.”

  “We were stoned off our gourds. I’m not usually a weed guy, but the shit he had, Jesus. Maybe that’s why we were laughing so hard.”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  “But it wasn’t until later that I got what he meant. See, Marx thought that people want answers to the big, old questions, like what we’re doing on this earth, where we go when we die, and why anyone would choose to watch golf on TV. But Cortes, I realized, knew better. People don’t want answers. They just want to buy shit. Opium you can hold. You can hold it, and smoke it, and pay a hooker to blow it up your anus with a straw. Opium’s retail, that’s what Cortes meant.”

  His phone buzzes and he looks at his screen. “Okay,” Lucas says. “The limo’s downstairs. We can finish this talk on the way.”

  “I have a ride,” I reply.

  “Suit yourself,” he says, and leaves.

  I shut the windows and turn off the lights. Before locking up, I look into Wendy’s bedroom. I know she’s been staying here, but the evidence is scant: contact case on the nightstand, an empty water glass. The bed’s nicely made and her suitcase is closed in a corner on the floor.

  Greg moves across the dais in wood-heeled chukka boots he occasionally stomps for effect. He’s got more hair than I remember, a thick top-mop that covers what I’m pretty sure was recently a bald spot. He reminisces on his days as a point guard, describing the naysayers who said that a five-six white kid from the Maryland suburbs would never play college ball. He tells of his diverse array of teammates, their strong sense of brotherhood, how sports prepares one for business through the acquisition of discipline and leadership qualities.

  His anecdote culminates in the revelation that, during Greg’s senior year, alum and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar subsidized the team’s uniforms. Greg stamps out each syllable of the mogul’s name with his heel as if it’s a war chant, as if the audience knows to join in celebrating not only the entrepreneur, but the system that rewards a PEZ collector with a billion-dollar IPO.

  Greg manages to segue from basketball to politics by alluding to Omidyar’s humanitarian ventures, including his micro-funding efforts in Zimbabwe. He explains Omidyar’s stand against WikiLeaks, which leads to a discussion of the political responsibilities of business leaders, which further leads to a biased reading of the current economic crisis, and the way that the extreme left as well as the extreme right have co-opted social media, and how Greg’s working to bring voice back to the reasonable mainstream. The phrase Reasonable Mainstream appears on the wall, and I imagine this isn’t the last time I’ll hear or see it, that a young senator, somewhere, is taking notes, preparing to dazzle the next RNC with a unifying sermon.

  Greg moves on to the concept of work. He talks about being raised by a single mom who hustled two jobs to put food on the table and save for Greg’s college fund. She cleaned houses in the mornings, bagged groceries at night. He says he used to feel embarrassed by the demeaning nature of his mother’s work, afraid that peers would see her in their homes or at Safeway, in her sweat-blotched bandannas, with her varicose veins. He used to feel embarrassed, but his mother did not. She was proud of her work and the things it allowed her to provide; proud of her reputation as a cleaner, never stealing like certain other practitioners in her trade—and here I sense a racial element to Greg’s insinuation, though no one else in the crowd appears to notice—proud of the trust these wealthy families placed in her hands, allowing access to their costliest possessions. Looking back, Greg is no longer ashamed. He’s grateful for the sacrifice his mother made, a sacrifice which, he now realizes, she made for his benefit. Still, at the time, things were tough. Working so hard meant his mother rarely had time to spend with her son, and the time they did have was spent before the TV in fatigued silence.

  “There were no homemade dinners, only instant noodles and frozen pizza,” Greg explains to knowing nods from the crowd, a multi-ethnic survey of techies, ad guys, and Ivy League MBAs, some of whom, I imagine, come from similar backgrounds, watched their parents do slave work at menial jobs so their children could eat açai bowls in the Stanford dining halls, and spend semesters in Goa studying contact improv, and settle down, after college, to six-figure salaries at places like Google and American Express. People, in other words, not so different from me.

  “My mother rarely made it to any of my games,” Greg adds, presumably for the parents in the room, Park Slope freelancers who set their own hours around their kids’ schedules, and who wouldn’t dream of missing the lute and drum performance that concludes little Madison’s Ancient Instruments class. Greg looks wistful as he stares past the crowd to the room’s back wall and wipes what may well be a tear from his cheek, though the lighting and distance make it difficult to tell.

  The phrase #WorkWillSetYouFree replaces Reasonable Mainstream on the wall. A photo appears beneath the hashtag: young Greg, maybe ten years old. A mesh jersey drapes like a gown on his undeveloped frame. His mother stands behind him, smiling with pride, the implication being that this rare opportunity to see her son play has imbued this worn-out woman with uncommon joie de vivre.

  “But what if,” Greg says. “What if there were a way for my mom to be at my games while she was at work?”

  After asking this question, he steps to the side. The image of Greg and his mom at the basketball court is replaced by another, the same one I saw on a billboard in midtown on the car ride here: a photograph of a construction site populated by male models, while a blond woman wearing a white negligee and an expression of cartoonish lust looks on from the side.

  “Now, as you can see, this man is at work. And this woman, well, for all we know she may be at work too,” Greg says, having fluidly dropped the tearful tone and returned to his previous swagger. His comment is followed by sparse chuckles from male members of the crowd, which are instantly silenced by reproachful stares from their female companions, who suspect any joke at a sex worker’s expense, and any image that so closely adheres to the clichés of male fantasy, even coming from a speaker who, like his mother with the wealthy families whose houses she cleaned, has done so much, already, to earn their trust.

  “I’m going to ask you to do something,” says Greg. “I want you to reach down under your seat and find the AR helmet that was placed there before you arrived. I want you all to put your helmets on. I promise they don�
�t bite.”

  More chuckles and murmurs, but people put on the helmets, eager for the part of this talk that they came to hear, the part where the promised product will be unveiled. I’m eager too, and a little bit scared, so I put on the helmet and watch the work site come to life before my eyes in a seamless 3-D that surrounds me on all sides. Worker-models spread mortar and lay bricks, and the negligeed woman bends to lift a wrench that has fallen to the ground. This causes some groans from the women in the crowd, though most remain silent, awaiting Greg’s explanation, still anticipating whatever comes next.

  We watch this play out for a moment, and then there’s a rupture, and the room goes dark. When things come back into focus, us helmeted onlookers have been transported to an entirely different scene. The same cast of model-workers is here, but instead of laying bricks, they—and we—watch kids play basketball. Our formerly negligeed woman is wearing a sundress, and her face, we now see, resembles Greg’s mom’s, though in her current incarnation she looks fit and robust. Through the magic of augmented reality, one of the kids playing ball is Young Greg, and his model/mom cheers as her son sinks a jumper.

  “These people,” Greg says, through a speaker in my ear. “These people are also at work.”

  At his words, Greg’s model/mom stands. She steps out of the bleachers, and steps out of the image, and steps down onto the dais where she poses beside her now-grown son. It’s unclear if this woman is here in the flesh, or if the optics on my helmet have created this illusion. Either way, she looks real. In unison, Adult Greg and his model/mom begin to undress. There’s a gasp from the audience, and another, smaller gasp, when it becomes clear that beneath their clothes they are not nude, but are, instead, wearing skin-tight nude bodysuits, conspicuous only for their few tiny zippers and the absence of genitals, nipples, and hair.

  “We’re living in something very close to a utopia,” Greg says. “Food is in abundance. So is medical care. Cars run on sunlight. Meat grows on trees. If you cut off your finger you can print a new one at home and fly in Drone MD to inject you with anesthetic and sew it back on. All of us in this room are better off than we’d have been even fifty years ago.”