Sensation Machines Read online

  The personification of money has always made sense to me: money does this, money does that. It’s as if it has legs. It might, at any moment, leave. This is one reason I didn’t pursue writing. In my Advanced Nonfiction workshop, our professor warned against nurturing a fallback plan. He said the problem with a fallback plan is that you’ll fall back. My classmates nodded and wrote this down. Personally, I liked the idea of falling back. I pictured myself in one of those summer camp trust exercises, plummet disrupted by a bed of hands.

  “I get it,” said Lillian. “Puma was boring, and you’re sick of explaining Pim-Pam to geriatric CEOs. I am too, Wen. But this client is different. They’re interesting. I don’t know what they are. But as I said, the money’s real. This works out and from now on everything’s pickles and cream if you catch my meaning.”

  “I don’t.”

  “It’s a saying.”

  “It is?”

  “It must be.”

  “Okay.”

  Lillian kicked back her chair. She laid a leg upon my leg. I brushed the dirt from her shoe from my pants. She hit the roach and coughed hard. Her cheeks looked purple in the porch light.

  “The account is ours,” she said. “God help me, I have a feeling. A rumble in my gut like the dam’s about to burst.”

  “That may have been the shrimp. It felt a little slimy.”

  “I didn’t eat the shrimp. I’m off shellfish. The smell makes me want to vom.”

  I looked down at my plate. There were twelve shrimp tails on it. There were none on Lillian’s.

  “Why’d you serve it?”

  “It’s what you serve.”

  She flicked a shrimp tail off the balcony.

  Michael

  Back outside, I was almost run over by a convoy of Citi Bike tourists speeding through a red light. With the introduction of Citi Bike, the increase in bridge tolls, the reliably annual announcement of long-term service stoppage on one or another subway line, and the continuing trendiness of those dumb caps with the flipped-up brims, New York had become a cyclist’s city, a war zone in which cars were the enemy, and pedestrians were bystanders in the line of fire. But while I appreciate the cyclist’s experience of the city—the way she hears words drift, car horns begetting car horns, and conversations cut up so that single syllables call out across avenues, each respondent ignorant of the next block’s aria—walking’s better for thinking, and I had a lot on my mind as I wound north through the Financial District.

  Our office was uptown, but Ricky and I had a Monday tradition of coffee and omelets before riding the A/C to Forty-Seventh Street. He’d been my closest friend since fourth grade, when Steve Wyck called me a white-trash kike with a deadbeat dad who should’ve been killed in the Holocaust. I’d been about to point out that my dad wasn’t born until after the Allied victory when Ricky intervened with a judo chop to Wyck’s solar plexus, knocking the bully to the ground and earning my protector a three-day suspension.

  I’d followed Ricky since: to Columbia, to Wall Street, to his gay bar du jour. I was not close with my parents, and had left home by the time my sister, Rachel, was old enough for joint commiseration. Until Wendy came along, Ricky was it, peer and mentor, bad influence, eccentric solver of problems. Even after, he was the only person who knew both versions of me: pre- and post-Wendy; the white-trash kike and the hipster millionaire. My fall was my own, but my previous prosperity had heavily hinged on his tips. And while his provocative nature didn’t always recommend him as a source of prudent guidance, Ricky’s role in my life was still that of advisor, and I currently, desperately, needed his counsel. He could be trusted in matters of finance.

  Besides, I was interested in #Occupy. Protests now flared in previously #unOccupied Republican strongholds from Arizona to West Virginia; pro-#Occupy op-eds appeared daily on national news sites; and #Occupy leaders were finally getting face time on network news shows where they voiced increasingly popular support of the UBI. This windfall, they promised, would encourage participation in consumer markets and help the unemployed pay for privatized insurance. Recipients could quit degrading jobs and go back to school to earn higher degrees. They could contribute to the sharing economy. They could open small businesses knowing they’d have cash to fall back on if things went belly-up. As an added bonus, a financially contented populace might feel less imperative to freely spray bullets in public space. The logic went that if the ride or die Second Amendment crusaders could afford more powerful and expensive assault rifles then, paradoxically, they’d be less inclined to shoot the scary pacifists rallying to take those rifles away. But there was doubt on the right—from the very circles that fought so hard to abolish a public health-care option—that, left to their own devices, people could be trusted to correctly spend.

  This was not the #Occupy I remembered from 2011, that Bonnaroo facsimile with its compost bins and People’s Library, its greased teens locking tongues beneath the honey locusts. There were still students, crust punks, and derelicts, but added to these ranks were laid-off workers from all manner of industries. These people’s tax dollars had gone toward the previous bailout, and they’d been repaid with foreclosures and overdraft fees. And now their jobs had been replaced by bots or shipped abroad. Unemployment was the highest in our nation’s history. The repeal of Dodd-Frank had led to another credit bubble, and speculators like me had sunk billions into industries bound to topple under the weight of an increasingly nonexistent consumer base.

  The Senate was split on the UBI, though not entirely along party lines. Factories that our previous president had “saved” from offshore deportation had since laid off almost all their human labor, and thousands more were left jobless when funding ran dry for the half-built border wall. Senators in the affected states were more afraid of their constituents’ diminished spending power than they were of scary old words like socialism. At the same time, plenty of coastal Democrats kowtowed to their Wall Street backers who opposed the proposal. And initially supportive libertarians balked when it became clear that the UBI would not be funded, as they’d envisioned, by bulldozing federal benefits programs. In all likelihood, the decision would come down to the votes of a few undecided, including New York senator Tom Breem, a centrist Democrat campaign-financed by the very banks hit hardest by the bill.

  Breem’s office was in Albany, but the chants and stomps coming from Zuccotti Park were intended to reach him. A FOX News anchor had deemed the scene an “unsightly display of Marxist manpower,” and I’d wanted to see it for myself. “Whose streets? Our streets!” sang the protesters, reminding the swarms of surveillance drones that these roads had been built with human hands. The Freedom Tower stood gaunt in the distance, a fragile monument to the dying era of the American construction worker.

  If #Occupy’s previous incarnation fizzled under its supporters’ inability to agree on a set of demands, the new regime was unified by consensus on this single urgent issue. These weren’t pod people, but podcast people, the restless jobless who filled long afternoons listening to pundits preach the gospel of #Occupy. Groups as disparate as BDS, Black Lives Matter, and The Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association joined arms beneath the #Occupy banner. The previous administration had segmented the country into factions narrowly focused on their own safety and survival, but that administration’s end, combined with the employment crisis and subsequent crash, had heralded the integration of these financially progressive factions, now bonded in harmony against the fiscally conservative Republican moderates and Democratic centrists eager to reinstate the neoliberal status quo.

  Once again, there was a 99%. I saw cabbies of every ethnically stereotypical stripe, from old neighborhood wise guys to club-ready Russians with slicked hair and Bluetooth attachments. I saw adjunct professors with bulging triceps because their only job perk was gym access; MTA maintenance workers wearing tool belts filled with possible weaponry; mail carriers raring to go postal. T
here were even people in Augmented Reality helmets, who saw, I assumed, a terrifically enhanced version of the protest. I pictured the US Steel building in laser-beam crisscross and lit from within, a radium hearthstone transmitting light waves the color of electrified money.

  It was amazing how many industries automation had so quickly thrown into disrepair. Service, retail, and factory jobs were hit hardest, but white-collar industries were also affected, from IT to sales to customer service. Even former blue-shirts were out in force, ex-cops who’d cuffed dozens in 2011, now linked in solidarity against the tear gas–equipped drones that had stolen their street beats. A workers’ strike meant nothing in this automated city, or if not nothing then the opposite of its intent: it reminded the masters what little need they had for a human workforce. For now, the tear gas stayed unsprayed, but as the sound of the human mic increased in volume, and drumbeats quickened to amphetamine tempo, and protesters pounded fists against palms, one couldn’t help but wonder if, this time, true violence might ensue.

  A few blocks away, outside Goldman Sachs, a smaller demonstration was at hand. A group of young people gathered around a card table, holding signs with anti-Goldman slogans. Seated at its center, I was surprised to see, was Jay Devor, founder of a social network and new-media empire called Nøøse. Begun as an app for finding protest events in the tristate area, Nøøse had grown into a large-scale nonprofit with offices on both coasts, two hundred full-time employees, print and online publishing arms, and a user base nearing the two million mark.

  Nøøse had been instrumental in spearheading #Occupy’s organizational upgrade, in part by creating a manageable infrastructure for earmarking donations, and by implementing an online voting system that pushed the movement closer to its vision of a true direct democracy. Devor—a baby-faced elder statesman among his Gen Z cohorts—had become the de facto face of the movement after his public arrest during a reading of Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener. The reading stopped traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, and Devor appeared handcuffed on Page Six, smiling for the cameras: part Robin Hood, part Zuckerberg, part Jewish JFK.

  Devor and I were classmates at Columbia, and had crossed paths at Brooklyn bars and mutual friends’ birthday parties in the years since. Beyond his disgust at what I did for a living, I sensed a begrudging respect. I’d recently emailed Devor with an article pitch for Nøøse’s eponymous webzine of culture and politics. The piece was an unwritten excerpt from the book I was writing—or planning on writing—called Eminem: American American in America. I had yet to receive a reply.

  “Devor,” I said, and he looked up with the same soft eyes that had conjured the removal of so much women’s wear, the sparkling tube tops and chic retro Umbros of fangirls from Greenpoint to Red Hook and as far north as Washington Heights. There were probably even coeds who commuted from Bronxville, Young Trotskyites of Sarah Lawrence. He looked me over before responding, unsure about fraternizing with the enemy, or else gauging the health risks of shaking my hand.

  “Mixner,” he said with a nod. We’d never made the transition to first names, which spoke to either a lack of intimacy, or a deeper intimacy built of nostalgia.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I come in peace.”

  “If that’s the case,” Devor said, and handed me a flyer. I had to remove the reading glasses from my bag to read it, and in doing so grabbed a tube of moisturizer and passed it to Devor. The sun had emerged from behind the clouds, and I figured Devor, a pale guy like myself, might benefit from the product’s SPF-15 infusion. “For your face,” I said.

  Devor rubbed the ointment into his cheeks in mechanical circles like he’d practiced in a mirror after watching a YouTube seminar on the subject. In another life, he might have been me, and I him. We were like the dual Lindsay Lohans in the remake of The Parent Trap, identical in nature, but nurtured to form separate systems of belief. I, with my working-class upbringing, had come to value personal prosperity over fiscal equality, while Devor, descendent of Day-Glo kibbutzniks, had learned that sharing led to caring led to casual threesomes.

  My phone buzzed, but I ignored it and looked at what I’d been handed, an invitation to a Funeral for Capitalism at 8 p.m. in Union Square. Letterpress printed on crème card stock, it was the second printed invite I’d received for an event that night. The other had come from a junior colleague, a cocky young trader raised in the crotch of Greenwich luxury, complete with a home bowling alley and servants cruelly uniformed in oversized bow ties. This colleague’s life had been a procession of silver-spoon achievement—prep school grade inflation, Harvard gut curriculum and golf team heroics, genetically blessed Anglo-aquiline bone structure—and now, at the first blush of failure, he was throwing a, no-joke, Great Gatsby theme party in the penthouse suite of SoHo’s Zone Hotel. The invitation, which sat in my briefcase, was similar to Devor’s, except it was printed on cheaper card stock, and in pedestrian Geneva font.

  Ricky had convinced me to make an appearance at the Gatsby party, promising top-shelf bourbon and behavior that might provide anecdotal evidence for my theoretical excerpt, a think piece on the way white investment bankers misappropriated rap lyrics as justification for fiscal Darwinism. I no longer wasted brain space wondering if I attended these events sincerely or ironically, the line between the two having been irreparably blurred sometime in the early aughts.

  My father once told me that everyone who lived through the sixties had his own personal Altamont—the day the idealism died—and I think one could claim an analogous moment for nineties kids, when each of us realized that Kurt Cobain was gone, complaints about selling out were nostalgic, and those adorable indie shops from Seattle were now the giants come to destroy. For many, this moment arrived with the posthaste corporatization of Cobain himself, his face become logo on T-shirts sold at Target so teens who’d never heard him could flash the style markers of disaffected rebellion while listening to the disco-soul cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” from last week’s The Voice.

  I liked hip-hop, a genre stridently open about its impure relationship with commerce, and thought I was exempt from this kind of disillusion. I was wrong. I distinctly remember the first time I saw a photo of Vampire Weekend—Columbia kids who dressed in Brooks Brothers beach duds and played a preppified genus of Paul Simon worldbeat—and feeling surprised and disappointed that the boat-shoe class had developed a claim on youth culture. It felt like a rigged game to bring more power to the powerful, to deprive the less privileged of their monopoly on cool.

  Still, I looked forward to the party. Maybe I could pre-game at Devor’s protest and pitch my book. There were sure to be plenty of editorial types on hand. My being a banker was of fetishistic interest, the protectors of the literary realm turning polite and deferential to anyone wearing a suit in a performance of open-mindedness that masked a deeper lust for proximity to dollars.

  What I couldn’t do was go home. I’d been ignoring calls from Wendy since leaving the house, and it was only 9 a.m. I worried that she’d tried to use our Visa and it had been declined. A single login to E*Trade and she could suss out the breadth of our financial situation. I didn’t want to imagine her reaction. We were in bad shape already: scratching bug bites, staring at cellphones instead of each other. A heartfelt apology wouldn’t cut it. I needed to offer, alongside my confession, a recovery plan.

  Not that I was so deluded as to think that a book deal might save me. AR gaming, VR porn, and the era of addictive, B/B+ quality TV had all but abolished the market for the kind of intellectually rigorous project I had in mind; there would be no angel at the Funeral for Capitalism handing out six-figure advances for hybrid works of cultural criticism and memoir. Still, if I could find a publisher, Wendy would understand how serious I was about this new vocation. And sure, we’d have to deal with our debt—I was working on that—but the important thing, I would stress to Wendy, was that I’d found a passion, a calling, and that this new pursuit would sustain
my soul, and would maybe, eventually, lead to my procuring a tenure-track gig at Pratt or The New School.

  “Sounds like a good funeral,” I said. “Open bar?”

  “BYO,” said Devor. “We may have power in numbers, but we’re not particularly flush.”

  He pointed at the donations bucket, which contained some coins, a two-dollar bill, and the butt of a sesame bagel. I wanted to prove my traitorous disregard for my industry, but not so badly that I was willing to part with the little cash I had. As a show of my sorry financial state, I flipped open my flap pockets. Out came a fistful of burrito scraps: pork nibs, green peppers, a wadded ball of aluminum foil.

  “Calexico?”

  “La Esquina.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Delicious.”

  “I’m glad we’re agreed. It’s like that joke about Israelis and Palestinians, and how they only agree on hummus. Maybe bankers and #Occupiers can be unified over burritos.”

  Devor produced a heartier laugh than my remark warranted.

  “Did you get my email?” I asked.

  “I get a lot of emails.”

  “Did you get mine?”

  “Write the article,” he said. “We’ll see if it’s any good.”

  Wendy

  Michael and I deal with anxiety differently. Michael is an extrovert. He had a hip-hop group at Columbia; he was MC WebMD and he rapped about his neuroses, rhyming thyroid, typhoid, and infinite void, and occasionally spasming into a performative coughing fit.

  I remember my first attack in his presence. We had just returned from dinner, Indian, our third date. We were in my dorm room illegally downloading MP3s and drinking wine from coffee mugs I’d stolen from the dining hall. This was as close as I’d come to nurturing a rebellious streak. I was nervous. Dinner had upset my stomach, and Michael’s eyes on my objects and meager hangings made me feel exposed.