Sensation Machines Read online

  I admit that I was jealous of Donnell’s aptitude. His blog’s modulation between high and low registers was exactly what I was trying, and failing, to achieve with Eminem. For months, I’d been too embarrassed to bring up my own project during our weekly discussions. In part, the reason was obvious; Donnell was a writer, and I was a wannabe. But there was also a racial element to my reticence. I didn’t want to come across as a try-hard white guy whose scholarly knowledge of hip-hop betrayed a fetishistic aspect to his interest.

  I was a Jewish teen in the nineteen-nineties, meaning hip-hop soundtracked my seminal years. It was pumped into malls, played at school dances, taped off the radio, and traded on mixtapes at camp. I got a shortwave radio for my bar mitzvah, and the first thing I did was search the airwaves for Hot 97, the mythological station of Summer Jam fame.

  If hip-hop gave me an identity during those years, it also provided repeated reminders that it wasn’t intended for people like me. People, that is, with no experiential knowledge of the crack epidemic, or Section 8 housing, or mistreatment at the hands of trigger-happy police. People, that is, with no experiential knowledge of the racial injustice that, I gathered, was a defining component of many American lives. Even before being schooled at college in the language of political correctness, I understood my status as a cultural voyeur.

  But while friends like Ricky found themselves reflected in, say, Phish’s maple syrup funk, part of hip-hop’s appeal was that it wasn’t a mirror, but a window into a foreign world. Which is to say: I loved hip-hop both in spite of and because of the fact that it wasn’t mine to love.

  And then there he was, with his bleached hair and Kmart wardrobe, his pill-popping mom and lower-middle-class angst. I identified with Eminem so strongly it scared me, given his homophobia, misogyny, and nihilistic rage. I told myself that this was only a persona used for pushing boundaries, and that all that really mattered was Em’s level of skill. But even the latter was a controversial topic. To proselytize too hard for a white rapper’s talent was to risk promoting Caucasian exceptionalism. I worried that I’d have to face these questions if I ever wrote my book.

  “So how does Carrie Bradshaw fit into your theory?” I asked Donnell.

  “How doesn’t she fit, is what you should be asking.”

  “Okay, how doesn’t she?”

  “In no way doesn’t she.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “You’ll get it when you read the piece. That is, if I ever find time to write again. Jackie’s home on winter break, the other doorman’s on two-week vacation, and Verizon has a sick day policy to rival the Führer’s.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That sounds hard.”

  Donnell released a puff of air in a manner that told me I couldn’t understand. It said that I, with my food grubbing and demand for banter, only added to his woes. I knew about Donnell’s money troubles from his blog: bank-breaking debt, a shitty mortgage on a money pit apartment. Our situations, I understood, were fundamentally different. For a moment, I wondered if he actually liked me, or whether I was just another asshole with whom he was forced to interact. Perhaps it’s testament to the triumph of self-deception, but I refused to accept that the latter was the case.

  Wendy

  Lillian’s email wasn’t urgent: a reminder to arrive promptly for the 10 a.m. pitch. I had a mostly sleepless night spent scratching my scabs and fighting the cat.

  Monday morning—on what would be the day of Ricky’s murder—I missed both my alarm and my train. Michael was already gone. I hurried out the door, hoping I’d have time to stop by a boutique near my office that opened at nine. I’d practically run out of the few clothes I’d saved from quarantine, and my online purchases had yet to arrive. I was wearing a shirt of Michael’s that I’d found in his closet protected by a plastic membrane. In our old Manhattan apartment, I used to admonish him for refusing, out of laziness, to remove the plastic from his shirts when he brought them home from the dry cleaner’s. We shared a small closet. It rankled me to open it and see stray plastic sticking out. The plastic created static and took up space. We had our own closets in Brooklyn, and he did as he pleased.

  I sometimes wonder about the relationship between violence and space. There is a reason that urban areas have high murder rates. People are packed too tightly; boundaries blur. The closest I ever came to homicide was as an undergraduate. I did not like having a roommate. My roommate did not like wearing headphones while she listened to music. She did not like taking the phone into the hallway to talk to her boyfriend. She did not like staying on her side of the room. She did not like waiting until I was out of the room or asleep to engage in sexual activity. Instead of peace and quiet I got pillow-muted panting. Bedsprings scolded like aggravated ghosts. I pictured her body as a punctured balloon, air slowly escaping until she was small enough to be flushed down the toilet without clogging the pipes.

  I was running low on time, so I asked the clerk to bag various items. I would try on the outfits later and return what didn’t work. I picked out underwear, socks, a bra, a knee-length charcoal skirt, three T-shirts, tights, a pair of flats, and a lightweight cardigan to keep me warm in the air-conditioned office. I chose a black pencil skirt for that morning’s pitch and paired it with a simple Oxford shirt. I did not select any of the parkas and scarves displayed on the mannequins. Designers had taken a stand against climate change. They would not bend. They would not break. They would not relinquish their seasonal collections. Fashionistas nobly suffered, sweating through wool sweaters on eighty-degree days. It was a sign of commitment, and stupid.

  I gave the clerk my American Express card. After a brief interlude, she handed it back. She whispered the word declined the way my uncle Alan whispered words like gay or black. I regretted not choosing a chain store manned by telepresence bots. The boutiques still hired humans. Only a particular breed of female can produce the specific sneers essential to these boutiques’ elitist mystiques. These women had made themselves indispensable by force of attitude.

  I said, “There must be some mistake. Could you please run it again?”

  The clerk did as she was told. The card was declined again. It’s an awful feeling to have a card declined. You want some other proof to present, evidence that you’re still entrenched among the world’s earners and savers.

  I gave the clerk my ATM card, which was also declined. I had a feeling it would be. Our balance had been dangerously low. Michael had said he was waiting for something to come in. He’d said liquidity in a tone that meant I shouldn’t ask. When my most recent paycheck disappeared from our statement, he’d said he was moving things around. I knew something was wrong, but not the extent. I didn’t want to know.

  The machine declined my Visa as well. The clerk looked so smug as she told me, forearms crossed in an X over her torso, the outline of her rib cage showing through her T-shirt. I was wasting her time. The store was otherwise empty. I had no cash on me. I had no other cards. I tried Michael’s cellphone again. It rang.

  By the time I arrived at my office—an open-plan studio that makes it impossible to go unnoticed in absentia—it was after ten o’clock. Our staff and a lone member of the client’s team were seated around a projector screen. Greg was up front with a laser pointer tracing the outline of a Venn diagram. Greg has broad shoulders. His cheeks are covered in cultivated stubble. He wears a college ring from a second-tier East Coast university (Tufts), jeans and sport coats (both stylish), no tie, and shoes that aren’t quite sneakers or boots, but give an extra lift to his five-six frame. Favorite adjective: kick-ass. Once, in a pitch meeting, he’d suggested the tagline Hennessy: Latinos welcome, after the company’s head of marketing had expressed a desire to expand their demographic.

  It was the broad-spectrum spiel we fed all our clients. Lillian oversaw the proceedings from the perch of a barstool. She gave me a look that said: we’ll talk about this later. I found a seat u
p front.

  Our team—Greg, Lillian, and myself aside—consisted of developers with poor fashion sense. Felt, red trim, fedoras, bandanas. The occasional splash of platinum lamé. They could have passed as bar mitzvah DJs or landlocked pirates headed out on the town in 1980s Las Vegas. Communitiv.ly is a casual company. The tech world takes cues from San Jose. Across one wall, graffito-style spray paint declared creation isn’t an ism. Greg was on the part about the speed of culture.

  “The United States,” he said, “is not just one country.”

  The client looked unconvinced. He was handsome, almost boringly so. His shoes must have been the ones Lillian had described. She was right about the leather.

  “The United States of America is many tiny countries,” Greg continued. “And each contains multitudes.”

  At the mention of multitudes, a new slide headed demographics appeared on the projector. The slide featured illustrations of men and women done in a variety of gray-spectrum skin hues. At center was a young African American man—you could tell from the hair and dark shading—wearing both a hooded sweatshirt and a necktie. He wore AirPods in his ears. The man was labeled urbanite. A caption described urbanite as someone who makes over $80,000 a year and spends up to three nights per week in bars and nightclubs. It was a slide we’d made for a pitch to Axe Body Spray in July.

  “There are many countries within us,” Greg said. “Within each and every one of us.” He pointed to his heart.

  “But there are also many countries without us. We are part of a global economy now, a global movement. The globe is spinning faster every day. The world makes more revolutions around the sun now than ever.”

  A cartoon of a spinning globe appeared on the projector as techno played from the wall-mounted speakers. In stop-motion photography, the globe’s revolution around a tiny sun increased to hundreds of frames per second.

  “In Kenya,” Greg said, “Pim-Pam is ubiquitous.”

  “But what about—” the client began to ask.

  “Hear me out,” Greg said.

  A cupped ear appeared onscreen. The image had ear hair.

  We were offered the account. Greg’s presentation had gone over okay, and my reimagining of Lysistrata as a wage gap protest, complete with an Instagram hashtag—#RemunerateOrMasterB8—for photos of begging, frustrated husbands, was declared, by the client, a smashing success. He wanted to meet with me privately that afternoon.

  “Just me?” I asked Lillian.

  “If he was into short, dickless men, he would have asked for Greg. As it stands, you’re all we’ve got.”

  “That makes me uncomfortable.”

  “Who said anything about comfort? Throw on some Spanx and contour your cleavage. You might get some onion rings out of the deal.”

  If pressed, she would have said she was joking. I wasn’t certain she was. During the early days of the #MeToo movement, my boss made a public show of support. She retweeted celebrities’ uncontroversial platitudes. Bylined an op-ed in Ad Age, ghostwritten by me. She was shrewd enough to know that, as a female CEO, expressing outrage at our industry’s endemic sexism would benefit her brand.

  Privately, Lillian expressed reservations. She worried that male acquiescence to demands for gender parity—by which she meant the façade of acquiescence—would leave women ill-served. Sex was a weapon, she’d explained to me once. This was at some industry gala. We stood sipping wine, watching the tuxedoed swarm. “They want to network with my cleavage,” Lillian said. “And I want to network with their wallets.” She was worried #MeToo would scare these wallets away. She was afraid she’d be forced to surrender a weapon that she’d spent years learning to wield.

  I told her about one night, at a campaign launch party, when I was cornered by an account exec from a major international brand. The man twirled his martini. He sucked the olives off his toothpick in a single, noisy slurp. From our vantage, at the railing of a downtown hotel roof bar, the city looked glazed after an earlier storm. The man offered his jacket to cover a wet seat. He held my elbow as I lowered myself. His finger poked my lowest spinal notch and traveled down to the point of my tailbone. “Come home with me,” he slurred. “We can discuss the account.”

  “What account?” said Lillian.

  I named the brand.

  “Well that explains why they went with Ogilvy.”

  The office was quiet. The development team was unit testing a cross-promotional app that matched Uniqlo T-shirts to colors of Benjamin Moore paint. The marketing team was gathered around a monitor watching YouTube videos of animals fainting. Others ate at their desks: oatmeal and oversized burritos and leftover kugel from a Shabbat-themed cocktail hour. In their corner, designers tossed Swedish Fish into each other’s mouths. Our CFO could be seen bobbing beneath the weight of puffy headphones, operating an invisible turntable. The intern next to me glued magazine cutouts of Michelle Obama to her mood board. The rest of Communitiv.ly stared into their monitors and sipped coffee from novelty mugs shaped like blocks of Swiss cheese we’d ordered in bulk for an Instagram-cosponsored benefit for a Brooklyn-based artisanal fromagerie. I picked up the phone.

  The representative I reached sounded chipper. He said his name was Orlando and asked how he could be of help.

  “I tried to buy some outfits and my card got declined.”

  Orlando explained that Michael and I were in debt to American Express. Our line of credit had been cut off. A trip to Duane Reade had tipped us over our limit.

  I asked how much debt.

  Orlando gave a figure.

  I apologized, though I had done nothing wrong. I hung up and called Michael. He didn’t answer.

  Among the morning’s emails was a message from Michael’s mother. Born in Lodz, Poland, Lydia Mixner née Schulman had been a concert violinist until arthritis wreaked havoc on her fingers. Now she was a late-budding academic, completing her PhD thesis while teaching freshman composition at a local college.

  Lydia’s subject is the evil that men do. Specifically, the evil that men did, during the first half of the twentieth century, to Jews. She has trouble letting go. This explains her relationship with her son.

  Dear Princess Wendy Mixner (wife of Prince M. A. Mixner),

  It has come to my attention that my one and only son, Prince Michael Andrew Mixner of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and the surrounding counties, is currently without access to telephone or Internet. This must be the case. Otherwise, he surely would have returned the many calls, texts, and emails sent to him by his mother over the last few days. Nothing urgent. Tell the Prince his mother longs to hear his voice.

  Yours, Lydia Mixner (Doctoral Candidate)

  The signature linked to MyCrosstoBear.blogspot.com, where my mother-in-law analyzed “evidence” “proving” that the historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth was not, in fact, the Son of God.

  This mission was Lydia’s raison d’être. On various visits, clippings from Biblical Archaeology Review concerning the possible found remains of Jesus’s biological half-brother had been presented to me as if by a district attorney. I couldn’t count on two hands the number of articles I’d been emailed explaining that the term Son of God was, in Jesus’s time, a common way of referring to a righteous person. One year, Lydia gave me a book called The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany for my birthday. As a half gentile on my mother’s side, I bore the brunt of her findings. I typed a reply.

  Dear Lydia,

  Michael is MIA. I guess he hasn’t crawled back up your shriveled cunt after all. Not sure where else to look.

  Kisses, Wendy

  I hit delete and tried Michael’s phone again. I did not leave a message. Lillian called me into her office.

  She said, “You look like shit.”

  So much for denying the body’s betrayals. I picked up a coffee mug and absent-mindedly attempted to sip.
The mug was filled with pennies. I placed it back atop Lillian’s file cabinet and hoped she hadn’t noticed.

  “It’s alright, don’t worry. Just unbutton your shirt to distract from your face and you’ll be fine.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “Am I?”

  I told her I didn’t know, that it was hard to read her tone.

  “Look,” said Lillian. “Just keep the money in mind. If this works you can do all the pro bono your clit-boner desires.”

  She showed me a photo on her phone of a twenty-three-year-old she had a date with later that night. We wished each other luck.

  Michael

  It turned out Ricky was still up, sniffing the remains of last night’s party, sifting and sniffing, licking inner Ziploc to usher him into the workday. On the table were a couple of crack stems.

  “Take a hit,” Ricky said. “It’ll make you sparkle.”

  I waved his offer away. “A little early for me. Or maybe a little late.”

  “The problem of our generation,” he replied. He wore a droopy undershirt, tuxedo pants, and suede loafers. Suspenders hung down around the backs of his knees. The rest of the outfit was scattered in pieces across the room: jacket draped over couch-edge, cuff links collected in ashtray, bow tie on table.

  “Always late,” Ricky continued. “Late Capitalism they call it. Really we’re late for capitalism. But what’s it matter, so long as I’m on the winning end, right sweet Sammy?”

  He blew a kiss at his conquest, a shirtless young guy sprawled out on the couch. Not a bad performance for 8 a.m., post–sleepless night, still glowing from the glory of it all as sun poured in the window, world faded to white.

  “What’s with the bracelet?” I asked, referring to a fiberglass ring around his wrist. The bracelet looked like an avant-garde watch that lacked hands and had the letters SD embossed on its face.