Sensation Machines Read online

  Behind them plays a montage of half a century’s progress. Depression-era amputees in wood and wicker wheelchairs are replaced by laughing kids who pop and lock on titanium prosthetics in a dance class being taught by Rihanna. We see various firsts: first mobile phone, first home computer, first AR helmet. The camera pans a grove of stem-cell steak trees where slabs of meat hang like heavy fruit.

  “But not everything’s perfect,” Greg says. “We, in this room, are better off, but not everyone is. The jobs that people like my mom needed in order to make ends meet, well, a lot of those jobs no longer exist.”

  A new montage plays. We watch bots build bots; we watch bots wait tables, run tills in bodegas and clothing stores. We see a room full of bots wearing headsets, taking customer service calls. And where this leads: faces of the homeless, tents in Tompkins Square Park, scenes from an #Occupy rally.

  Greg explains that one solution to this problem is to pass this bill, the UBI. But when he considers this solution, he thinks of his mother and her pride. He wonders whether she would have wanted a handout, whether that would have made her feel good about her position in life, about her larger contributions to the world. He says that when he thinks long and hard, he knows that this solution is highly problematic. That when people get free money, they don’t value it in the same way that they would if the money was earned. That their shame in receiving these handouts makes them spend money in inappropriate ways. They don’t save. They buy drugs. Instead of solving our problems, these handouts create a need for further handouts, for more expensive programs subsidized by the government. He cites a study of dubious origin. He tells the crowd that this country was founded on the idea of work, that it’s a place where every woman deserves the chance to feel pride in her labor. Where every man deserves the opportunity not to take, but to earn. He says that, when it comes down to it, the problem is not about resources, but about their distribution model. And that’s what he’s proposing to fix with this suit.

  The phrase distribution model brings visible relief, as Greg returns to a vernacular familiar to this crowd. I can see, on their faces, that these people beside me want so badly to believe that Greg is correct, that there might be a solution to this problem—which, ultimately for them, is the problem of their guilt—that doesn’t involve an increase in their taxes, a blow to their business and savings accounts.

  Greg tells us we can take off our helmets. We do, and his model/mom disappears. Once again, he’s alone onstage. He still wears the bodysuit, that was real. A blueprint of it appears behind him, complete with dozens of complicated inserts. The words The Suit™ appear on the wall.

  Greg explains about the sensors and the unprecedented data they’ll be used to create. He explains how the data will be used for scientific research and medical advancement. The diagnostic possibilities are limitless. The Suit™’s capacity for early detection could increase average life expectancy by years. He explains the buy-in options, that workers will be paid more for wearing The Suit™ in conjunction with helmets. He explains that The Suit™ can be worn by anyone, anywhere, and for any length of time. That the sky is the limit on how much money a person might make. He explains that a person can even wear The Suit™ while working another job, if so inclined. That a person can wear it to sleep.

  The awed silence in the room has come to an end. People snap photos and some record video. They type into tablets, laptops, and phones. I imagine the tweetstorm beginning to rage.

  Greg says, “Now I want you to reach out and grab your neighbors’ hands.”

  The audience responds in all seriousness, turning themselves into a set of paper dolls. They grew up with shit like this and aren’t embarrassed. My sweaty palms meet other sweaty palms.

  “Feel the connectivity,” says Greg. “Feel that deep human frequency. Listen to it hum.”

  I try to move quickly, but I’m caught in the flow of human traffic, people beelining for the bathroom, or better cell service in the lobby, or a cocktail bar on Carmine Street that was reviewed in last week’s “Tables for Two.” Wendy catches my eye and steps in my direction before being intercepted by a cheek-kissing acquaintance. Even from five yards away, I can see her cringe at the transfer of microbes to face. It takes all her strength not to wipe the mauve imprint with the sleeve of her sweater. I know because I know my wife.

  When I reach the front row, she’s able to escape the attempts of another aggressive schmoozer and pull me backstage. We land in a green room where bottles are popped, Greg’s being toasted, and the Rocky theme plays from someone’s phone, which has been placed in an ice bucket to amplify its sound. Lillian pours champagne into plastic flutes, spilling most on the floor. She winks as she hands me mine in lieu of a hello. I put the flute down and push past the handful of Communitiv.ly employees who mill about Greg. “It’s like I’m a tiger,” he says, “and the stage is my cage.”

  Wendy follows me into a de facto dressing area, floor messy with what must be Greg’s rejected performance-wear: leather pants, fur blazer, knee-high biker boots. She gestures to the discards. “I had to convince him the Keith Richards look doesn’t work when you’re five-six and don’t play guitar.”

  I think she expects me to laugh, that her coworker’s clownish lack of self-awareness can unite us in snark as it has in the past. She looks nervous, like she sometimes gets with strangers: back stiff, chin to chest, voice trailing at sentence’s end.

  “The speech was something, though,” she continues. “You must admit he’s got presence. The audience ate from his hands.”

  She forms her palms into a bowl to illustrate what she’s described.

  “Reasonable mainstream,” I say. “It’s good. And that suit.”

  “You mean The Suit,” says Wendy. “The Suit TM.”

  “Right. TM.”

  “It’s brilliant, don’t you think?”

  I’m not sure what I think. It’s been a long day. I know that The Suit™ may kill the UBI. It may end unemployment and eradicate the concept of personal space. It may be the decisive tool that turns millions of humans into consumerist cyborgs. It may cure cancers, diabetes, and ALS. It may take capitalism to its logical conclusion, the last stop on a journey that began when the first Egyptian sent silk up the Nile, and ends here, in this green room, as the weight of Greg’s most recent bowel movement is AirDropped to the cloud. The reach of this product seems to be without limit, and whether this is a good thing—an even tradeoff for the complete annihilation of the ad-blocking software that protects our fragile, American souls—is better left for the artists of the future to decide.

  All I know for certain is that, right now, I don’t care. Maybe tomorrow, in the elucidating light of another sun-bleached morning, I will wake to the throb of my conscience. I will remember Ricky’s body in the open casket, and I’ll remember the fear on Donnell’s face. I will recall Donnell’s need for funds, and his even greater need for Ricky’s SD bracelet. But here, in this moment, I’m looking at Wendy, and all I selfishly see is what the object on my wrist means for us: debts erased from the ledger, amends made to her dad, a chance to let the guilt and resentment rise like steam, leaving us stripped and clean; the way it opens our future like a long-clenched fist that has, without warning, softened its grip.

  I say her name and touch her chin. I try to gently nudge it upward so her eyes meet mine. She shakes me off and steps back. I fall forward and try again to stroke her face, but she pushes me away. A hiss whistles through Wendy’s teeth.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  She lets out a breath, acknowledges her overreaction. She removes a mirror from her purse and checks her reflection, moves a strand of hair behind her ear. She says, “I look like hell.”

  “You don’t,” I say.

  In fact, she looks gorgeous, a subtle blush job hiding any remnants of bedbug warfare. Wendy’s made-up face offers comforting wisdom: the past can’t be erased, but it can be
hidden until it’s forgotten, buried beneath layers of powder and pigment.

  “I’m sorry too,” Wendy says. She means for overreacting, but also for more, it seems, from her refusal to meet my eyes or accept an embrace.

  “I’m sorrier,” I say back, and spread my arms to show the breadth of my remorse. “I fucked up. I know I fucked up. But I can fix it now.”

  I hold out my hand and show her the bracelet. She doesn’t ask questions, but I sense she understands what it means. Maybe Lucas already explained. Wendy raises her chin so that our eyes align. She puts a fingernail at the nexus of her brows, drags it down across her nose and over her mouth.

  “I fucked up,” I say.

  “I fucked Lucas,” she says.

  The kind of drinking we’re doing doesn’t warrant toasts or salutations or even the comforting clap of a sisterly hand across one’s spine. Only the liquor will get rid of this feeling, and only after Rachel and I finish this bottle and I stumble to bed and go black.

  Tom Breem’s press conference plays on TV. He explains why he voted against the UBI. The Suit™, Breem thinks, provides a better solution to the unemployment problem. “An American solution,” he says.

  In the end, Breem wasn’t the deciding vote. Six other Democrats switched from yea to nay. All cited The Suit™ as a mitigating factor. Beyond these walls, my colleagues surely celebrate; the result of the vote means our industry’s saved. There will be no looting or riots tonight. Even the radicals seem strangely compliant. We’ve reached another inevitable point on the journey from status quo to status quo.

  Soon we’re burping, a chorus of escaped air. Rachel burps the alphabet. She burps the national anthem. We are burping and drinking and all I know is it’s dark: this lightless room, the drone-less sky.

  Wendy

  It’s a bad day for the beach, overcast with intermittent thunder. I like the cool wind off the water, clouds changing shape as they move across the sky. The Coast Guard used to store artillery here. The old fort is covered in graffiti. Condoms and bottles cover its sandy floor. It’s the kind of place where they find bodies on cop shows. A man fumbles with his girlfriend’s zipper and trips. There, in the dark, lies a decomposing corpse.

  Despite the damp, the graffiti looks fresh: uranium greens and popping oranges outlined in silver. None of it is beautiful or artistically rendered, not like the subway trains of my Manhattan childhood. Today’s spray-can artists shoot and run. They leave tags or simple logos, rudimentary marks of existence, poorly rendered self-promotional campaigns. No one takes the time to stencil belabored visions. This is art that captures the ephemeral moment; you can see, in the fluidity of the lines, the speed with which one gets from A to B. One thing I have now is time.

  I spread the blanket and we sit, me on the blanket, Olivia suspended on the band of linen stretched between my knees. I’ve begun to dress like the women in the catalogues that arrive on my doorstep unsolicited. My colors are earth tones and muted blues. My fabrics drape loosely and flow. Beneath them, The Suit™ hugs my skin. Its aerating system lets the breeze inside.

  I rock my daughter in the hammock of my skirt, attempting to match the ocean’s laps, which swing in a kind of ideal cursive, both slack and exact. Olivia smiles. Spit pools at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes follow the path of a drone on the shoreline. Seagulls scatter.

  The Suit™ measures my body’s mechanisms: its waves and punctuations, the regulated movements of water and blood. This information bounces off satellites and towers. It swims invisibly through the air. Once the data leaves my body, then it’s no longer mine, and, in a sense, I find that freeing, like a purge or a cleanse. What, after all, do these numbers mean? They are immaterial representations. I retain the fleshly stuff of life.

  The beach’s only other occupants are a couple of young men who wear bathing suits despite the sky’s sunless state, and a female counterpart, fully clothed. I can’t tell if any of them wear Suits™ beneath. Not everyone does, though it’s much more common among the young.

  The trio look like they’re having fun. They drink canned margaritas and kick a semi-deflated soccer ball. The men bury each other in sand. When the ball becomes too deflated to kick, they take turns wearing it on their heads. Olivia likes their laughter. I like hers.

  The trio reminds me of Michael and Ricky and me. Michael walking on his heels in hot sand to protect the tender balls of his feet. Ricky wearing my sun hat and doing Audrey Hepburn. I wanted to wrap them around each other and fit myself in the alcoves. I wanted to love Ricky because Michael loved him. I was a different person then, laid across those hours, half burnt, half in love.

  The drone circles back and hovers just overhead. I’m used to surveillance. I like to imagine Lucas stationed at a monitor, observing his daughter’s growth. He hasn’t reached out. I’m not certain he knows she exists.

  The last time I saw Michael in person was after Greg’s keynote at DisruptNY. I watched his physical reaction when I told him: body falling under gravity’s pull, a sharp increase in the speed of his breath. Michael fell to his knees and wrapped his arms around my calves. For a moment, he said nothing. Then he stood. He stepped away and paced, building speed as he circled the room, nearly tripping over Greg’s scattered clothes.

  A few seconds later, he came to a halt. He spoke in a modulated voice. He said that it—my betrayal—didn’t matter. He understood why I’d done it. He was upset and he was mad, but he said he understood.

  Michael kept insisting we could make it work. We were both in tears. I told him I was sorry, that I was so sorry. He asked if I still loved him and I said that I did. But, I said, love doesn’t mean wanting to make things work. And I was tired of the effort. I was tired.

  Michael’s face resembled our daughter’s in her minute of life, the look of desperation as she tried to clear the fluid from her lungs. They had the same almond eyes.

  I’d later learn that Michael left, the following day, for Montreal. He went looking for Broder. He returned, months later, bearded and alone.

  I know about the beard because I saw him last week on the TV news, seated in a courtroom beside Donnell Sanders. Michael, it seems, has used his new fortune to retain, for Sanders, an elite defense team. To the courts, Michael has offered Ricky’s SD bracelet as evidence of Sanders’s innocence. For these altruistic deeds, the media has deemed him a crusader for justice. I imagine his new beard helps with this image.

  But on the news, Michael looked downcast and bedraggled. His eyes were bloodshot. His suit was unkempt. My guess is that he spends his nights lying sleepless, blaming himself for Broder’s disappearance and his own failure to find him up north. My guess is that, despite the media’s portrayal of Michael as Donnell Sanders’s pasty white savior—a role he always fantasized he’d play—Michael knows that the prosecution will capitalize on Broder’s absence. He knows that, unless the jury returns with a not-guilty verdict, no expensive legal team, or exonerating bracelet, or heartfelt testimony, will make up for Michael’s initial mistake.

  We’re only one week into the trial, but a not-guilty verdict is already looking unlikely. The prosecution managed to pull the jury from Ricky’s Tribeca neighborhood, meaning it’s mostly made up of wealthy Caucasians. Three of the jurors work in finance. Two have personal ties to the police. Jay Devor will testify as a prosecution witness. And the prosecution claims that the gun Michael found contained Sanders’s fingerprints. According to a piece I read in this morning’s Times, accusations of police misconduct are incredibly difficult to prove. It has been reported that Sanders’s attorneys have requested that their client plead out to a lesser charge—murder in the second degree.

  Shortly after The Suit™ launched, a story surfaced, blaming me for fabricating Ricky’s patronage of a nonexistent small-business grant and his support of GLAAD. Lillian wasn’t mentioned in the article, nor was Communitiv.ly’s Project Pinky campaign. In fact, nothing
connecting Communitiv.ly to The Suit™ has surfaced. To distance the company from the scandal, Lillian let me go. My severance was more than fair. I’ve rented a little place here in the Rockaways. It doesn’t feel like New York, so much as a small town filled with transplanted New Yorkers.

  Michael sold our apartment, and has begun to pay off our various debts. He reimbursed my father for the money he lost in the crash, and I’ve been assured that our divorce settlement will leave me in an adequate financial state. I have no doubt that Lucas would provide if I were ever in need, though that’s a position I don’t plan to be in. I’m trying to live simply and to be self-sufficient. I’m a Type One employee; I don’t wear a helmet. I want Olivia to see my eyes.

  I don’t think Michael knows about her yet. We communicate through lawyers. I don’t know where he’s currently living. The only friend I see is Penny from the vape bar. She offers to babysit, but I have nowhere to go that I can’t bring Olivia. Instead, Penny and Sean take the train down and we walk along the water. Sean’s a sweet kid. He’s gentle with the baby. Sean and Penny sometimes dine with my father, Ellen, and me on Friday nights. We light the Shabbos candles, a new ritual that Ellen introduced. Sean knows all the blessings. He’s not Jewish but has been to half a dozen bar mitzvahs.

  I can’t help thinking that Michael would do well as Olivia’s father, that his parenting style would be energized and demonstrative and would complement my own. This is not something I would ever ask of Michael: to wet his head in the stream of my betrayal and suffer for Olivia’s sake.

  Wind sends sand into our eyes. Olivia communicates her discomfort with a cry. I’m in love with her need. I feel useful. I lick my fingers and ever so gently wipe at the corners of her eyes. Her mouth forms an O. She makes a sound that is not prelingual so much as part of a distinct and communicative language. The sound is like, Ga. I unzip and free a breast from my customized breastfeeding model of The Suit™. The product can be customized for any number of conditions. This gives the consumer the illusion of control. I have no illusions.