Sensation Machines Read online

  The Suit™ notates the time and length of this feeding. When I zip back up, sensors in my built-in bra cup will measure the difference in the weight of my breast and use that data to assess the volume of milk I’ve dispensed, accurate to within an eighth of an ounce. What is done with this data, I can’t be sure. Yesterday, I saw a piece online by someone whose Suit™ had detected a tumor. He’d had it removed before the cancer could spread.

  The men to my left do their best to ignore me, but I catch them sneaking looks. My milk-filled breast is obscenely oversized. Olivia tooths down to make her claim. As if threatened, the female of the group stands from her towel and removes her jeans. She wears a bikini bottom beneath, the kind that ties on the sides, exposing her hips. She folds the jeans and lays them carefully in a tote bag, bending away from the men. She leaves her sweatshirt on. There is something of a tease in this ensemble, top half covered while her legs stand bare. Her legs are long and muscled. I imagine she’s a runner, a former college athlete who does charity 10Ks twice a year. Or maybe a pole vaulter. I can picture her mid-vault, arcing over the bar. She walks toward the water. Her friends no longer look my way.

  Ciaran in the bodega is a bald, old Irishman with nose hairs long enough to be mistaken for a mustache. His grown children work the night shift. One, Timothy, goes to City College. A Type Two employee, he’s saving to buy his girlfriend an engagement ring. The other, Ciaran Jr., is always in trouble: drugs, fights. He mocks his brother’s helmet. Ciaran thinks he steals from the register. I don’t doubt it; I’ve seen this son, a freckled lump of muscle. With me, Ciaran’s style is somewhere between flirtation and paternal worry. The balance is right. I like listening to his stories, the local gossip. He knows everyone in the neighborhood, who they’re screwing, what they owe the bank. I can’t put faces to names but it doesn’t matter. I find the smallness of life here refreshing, though maybe that’s condescending. The store smells like cat litter.

  “Wendy,” Ciaran says. He was born in Galway, and still has the trace of an accent despite forty years in New York. This neighborhood used to be Irish, but Brooklyn’s a free-for-all these days, a mad rush to beat the market.

  “Large coffee, two cream,” says Ciaran. I love the pride he takes in knowing my order. He often gives me small gifts: chocolates, hard candy, lollipops. I leave the gifts in a pile on my kitchen table. I kept the furniture that came with the apartment. Eventually I’ll decorate. I don’t plan to leave. I never eat the chocolates, but I like having them there.

  I sit down on a high stool and hold Olivia in my lap. I drink the coffee as slowly as I can. I make a game of it, seeing how long I can pause between sips. I’ve traded my smartphone for an old-fashioned flip that doesn’t have Wi-Fi. I feel more present this way, and the hours feel longer, which I like. Even at home on the laptop, I don’t check my statistics. The knowledge that this freedom is a willful delusion doesn’t make me feel any less free.

  I eat a vegetable sandwich that includes the avocados Ciaran’s begun to buy at my request. He sits next to me and makes faces at Olivia, who laughs. She’s an easy audience. The skin on Ciaran’s face is loose, as if he bought the wrong size shirt for his skull. He smells of cat shit. He tells me his wife always wanted a daughter. The ginger cat struts along the counter, one foot crossing over the other. It’s unsanitary. I don’t say anything. The cat likes Olivia and I sense the affection is mutual. I’m afraid of the cat, as I am of all animals. Olivia shows none of my fear.

  “Look at her,” says Ciaran. He points at the cat. “I took her to the vet for her yearly checkup, and the vet says that if Ginger were a human she might be a gymnast. Isn’t that funny, a cat being a gymnast?”

  I smile. Ginger sniffs around Olivia. Olivia laughs. Ciaran lets the cat lick an empty tin of tuna. He’s gentle with the animal, stroking its fur in a way that reminds me of my mother brushing my hair before bed. Maybe the cat and I have ginger affinity. Sometimes I say Nina when I mean Olivia. She’ll never know. I’m not sure to which she I refer.

  There are plenty of seats on the subway. That’s one nice aspect of living this far out. I like to watch Olivia, imagine things from her perspective. I examine her features for signs of my own. People say she looks like me but I don’t see it. I don’t see Lucas either, though I’m always searching. Nina was my mother’s name. Olivia’s name belongs to no one. I imagine she’s free of the burden of history, but each time we leave the insular paradise of our apartment I know this is not the case.

  We switch at Fourteenth Street. The busker who’s been here for decades is still singing the same Beatles songs over the same wrong chords and grinning. I find his smile upsetting: its width and consistency. I used to hate his voice, the way he reached for inaccessible notes. Now I think I’d miss him if he disappeared.

  We wait a long time for a train. Someone’s selling churros caked in powdered sugar. Olivia’s face looks blotchy. I worry she’s developing a rash. Two teenagers remind me of Ricky and Michael. They sit across from me on the train and I can’t help staring. They’re wearing shorts and their legs are hairless. They seem almost afraid of Olivia, as if looking might turn them back into babies themselves.

  I don’t get off at Fifty-Ninth. Something about the crowds outside Columbus Circle, the heat of exhaust pipes, manure from Central Park, people smoking outside the mall. Instead we ride up to Seventy-Second and walk south. There’s a new storefront on West End, a bookstore. This is an interesting development. There hasn’t been a nearby bookstore in years.

  The new store was formerly a flower shop. I once went with my father to pick up roses for my mother. He bought her flowers every Friday. Only now I can’t remember if the flowers we bought that day were for my mother or her grave.

  The light inside the store is low. People must come here to hide. The store carries an impressive amount of small press books and poetry. I imagine it’s a Columbia hangout, or maybe it’s where writers come to browse after nearby sessions of psychoanalysis. I wonder if Michael still sees Dr. Becker. If so, he might be just down the block. He might walk into this store and see Olivia and me. This would happen in a movie. He wouldn’t be mad. He’d tell me Olivia was beautiful, that I was beautiful.

  It’s a nice thing that this place exists. Bookstores are disappearing. Ever since they put Wi-Fi on subways, people read even less than they did before. But some people must; this store is testament with its posters advertising author events and its shelves of Staff Picks. The woman at the counter is reading Anne Sexton, studying the old sadness. It must seem ancient, absurdly unmedicated. She underlines in pencil.

  I scan the fiction, not even looking for new novels. Instead I pull down books I own, or have previously owned. I often feel this urge to re-purchase, as if reading a new copy means I’ll experience the book again for the first time.

  The bookstore I’m in has a large children’s section. I guess they must have to. People still buy books for kids as birthday gifts. A picture book on display is called My Daddy Wears The Suit™. Adult nonfiction has a number of titles on the subject as well. For or against, they’re all cashing in.

  A sign advertises weekday story time with a young guy who plays the French horn and has puppets. It would be nice to bring Olivia. She reaches for a stuffed monkey that sits in a basket with books about Curious George. The monkey and my daughter are the same size. I place the monkey in her stroller. Olivia rests her head on its chest.

  I read aloud from a pop-up book about public transportation. So many of the books are New York–based. The store must traffic in tourists. Or maybe it’s that children feel secure seeing familiar locations depicted in print, reassurance that the world is a solid and permanent place. I know Olivia doesn’t understand what I’m saying, but it soothes me to read aloud, to trace my finger along the illustrations, wind the cranks and gears, push her fingers across the plush fabrics. As we’re leaving, I skim the periodicals. I like the images on the covers of
the style magazines, the fierce eyes of the models. These young women seem built for this world.

  Olivia’s hungry again and needs a change. I buy the Curious George book and an Edith Piaf postcard for Penny. Up close, I can see the clerk’s tattoos. On her arm is a list of men’s names. Each name has been crossed out. I relate to the sentiment. The crossing out can’t erase the names, it can only obscure them. The names are still on her arm, reminders of moments in time and their obliteration. I imagine my own arm marked with Michael.

  “What’s her name?” asks the clerk.

  “Olivia.”

  “A little blonde heartbreaker, huh?”

  I say, “The hair is her father’s.”

  My father isn’t at his apartment. He and Ellen drove to a farmer’s market in Tarrytown this morning. They were supposed to be home by now. Maybe there’s traffic. Tonight, I’ll cook for the two of them with whatever they bring back. Lots of nice things are in season.

  I’ve come around on Ellen. They seem happy. They’re planning to buy a place in Brooklyn. I’ll miss this old apartment. It’s my main point of connection to my mother.

  I open the windows and take off The Suit™. I’ve worked enough hours today. At first, I took care to hang the garment in the closet. Now I let it fall. I like to feel the air on my chest as Olivia feeds.

  After, she quickly falls asleep. I cover myself with a light cotton blanket. The overhead fan circulates air. When my father and Ellen get home, we’ll eat bread and olives at the kitchen table. They’ll coo over Olivia and take pictures on their phones. Ellen will try to teach my father to post the pictures to Facebook for the hundredth time until he gets frustrated and she does it herself.

  A soft sound comes from Olivia’s mouth like the lowest setting on an air conditioner. Her ears wiggle. I hold a hand to her forehead. I hold a hand to my own.

  On the floor sit the sealed boxes that contain my clothes and Michael’s. There are ten boxes in all, a life in four square feet. Penny and I picked them up from storage last week. I haven’t opened them yet, though I can’t say why. I should bring this stuff to my own apartment. I should throw it all away.

  There’s a box cutter in my father’s hardware drawer hiding beneath Ziplocs filled with loose batteries and ancient screws and nails. The box cutter’s handle is the orange of warning signs. I cut into the packing tape and brace for bedbug holocaust. I picture dozens of the insects crushed between skirts and T-shirts, more falling loose with each item removed.

  Not so. Only my clothes are in the package, neatly folded. Michael’s must be in another box. He shoved his in. I folded mine. I was preparing for this moment.

  Acknowledgments

  This novel’s vision of the future was influenced by a many texts, most notably: Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford; Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier; Eminem, Rap, Poetry, Race: Essays edited by Scott Parker; Whatever You Say I Am: The Life and Times of Eminem by Anthony Bozza; The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi; Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World by Annie Lowrey; and Basic Income and How We Can Make It Happen by Guy Standing.

  I’m extraordinarily grateful to those whose editorial insights were integral to this book’s completion. My agent, Erin Harris. My editor, Mark Doten. And my readers: Matthew Sharpe, Justin Taylor, and especially Robin Wasserman, who went above and beyond the call of duty.

  “The Parentheses” first appeared, in slightly different form, in issue #1 of Assignment Magazine. Thanks to Benjamin Nugent for his astute suggestions and for coming up with the section’s title.

  Thanks to Aspen Words, the James Merrill Foundation, Arteles Creative Center, and everyone at Soho Press and Folio Literary Management.

  Thanks to the Wilson and Rapp families for their unwavering support.

  Thanks to my son, Julian Douglas Rapp Wilson, for the joy you’ve brought into my life.

  This book is dedicated to my wife, Sarah Rapp, whose strength, patience, intelligence, and boundless love carried me through the long span of its creation.