Sensation Machines Read online

  “The future,” said Ricky.

  “South Dakota?”

  “Cold.”

  “San Diego?”

  “Sykodollars, Michael.”

  “Right,” I said, and remembered where I’d seen one before: on my dad. The Sykodollar was the currency of Shamerican Sykosis, an Augmented Reality game that I’d played on occasion, and that my dad had been playing obsessively for years. Like a cross between Monopoly, SimEarth, and Pokémon Go, SS was an open-source world where players won and lost money on in-game bond markets, then used that money to augment public space. Walking through through Manhattan in AR helmets, players were privy to a massive panorama of user-generated content, from jewel-encrusted halal carts, to buildings overlaid with fractals, to giant stainless steel tendrils raised above the East River, braided through the inter-borough bridges. Last week’s New York Times Magazine even featured a cover story on Shamerican protest art, including a downloadable plug-in for replacing signage lettering—such as on NBC’s Rainbow Room marquee—with an all-caps #METOO, and an AR-enhanced Prospect Park memorial honoring the victims of recent mass shootings.

  Bracelets like Ricky’s, I remembered, held thumb drives containing the algorithmic passkeys for users’ accounts. Despite originating as an in-game tender for players of SS, Sykodollars had become a universally traded cryptocurrency. The only way to access your SD was with these mathematically complex and non-replicable passkeys, and if they got stolen there was no way to get them back. Most SS players kept these passkeys on their phones and computers, but players with big bankrolls were targets for hacking, so it was safer to keep the keys in safes or deposit boxes or even, for the paranoid and fashion forward, on their persons.

  A while back I’d read a piece about the SS creator’s initial vision of the game as a commentary on the gamification of capitalism, its users vicariously participating in otherwise inaccessible markets by trading stocks and renovating buildings in the same way sports fans could throw down virtual dunks in games like Parquet Gawds. But this ironic economy had taken on a life of its own, growing beyond the game’s boundaries and leaking back into the real world where users exchanged its untraceable currency for contraband. For a while, Sykodollars were a rising commodity, but the market shifted, and their value dropped. My dad mentioned it every time he called to borrow money, promising the SD would recover and he’d pay me back. This had been going on for years.

  “I thought those things were worthless?” I said.

  “You’re thinking in linear time,” said Ricky, a reminder that he was high on crack. Sammy laughed. An erection stretched his sweatpants to their tensile limit. Ricky noticed as well.

  “What on earth did people do before Viagra and Cialis and Levitra and Stendra?”

  “I think they slept,” I said. “Slept and worked and only had sex when they were actually aroused.”

  Sammy said, “Sounds boring.”

  We were on the white leather couch, feet on the white leather ottoman or buried in the white fur rug. White was a statement. The statement: sleazy. Ricky’s motto: style over substance. The style: Las Vegas. The substance: anything ingestible.

  I leaned over the mirror-table. My eyes were yellow. Smears of dried blood spread across my neck and cheeks. I dumped the contents of the Duane Reade bag, my pathetic contribution to the pharmaceutical pot. At the store, it had felt ripe with promise, but now my cache seemed insubstantial. Sammy snagged the Sudafed, crushed one with a credit card, snorted.

  “Well that won’t do anything,” Ricky said.

  “I’m bored,” Sammy said.

  “Youth,” Ricky said.

  Sammy stuck a nicotine patch to his forehead. It reminded me of nicotine and that I needed some. I lit a cigarette. Ricky made me put it out. He had an aunt who’d died of emphysema after suffering an oxygen tank for years, dragging it up and down the stairs. She would house-sit when Ricky’s parents were away. He would torture her by taking bong rips at the kitchen table, talking loudly about analingus, threatening to remove her nose tube if she told anyone. Ricky had always been an asshole, and I liked that about him. He believed in the glamour of himself. In our blue-collar town, where boys beat up other boys for being much less gay than he was, Ricky’s ownership of his outsiderness struck me as representative of a better world. That world, it turned out, was two worlds. One was New York. The other was money.

  “So what you think?” Ricky asked me.

  “Of what?”

  Ricky nodded at his guest. “Of Sam my new boy-man.”

  Sammy smiled. He had a gap between his teeth. A few hairs sprung from his pimply chin. Haircut definitely self-inflicted; there was no apparent rhyme or reason to which areas were shaven and which were left long. The resulting look was something between skate kid and surgical patient, mid-prep.

  “Sammy, why don’t you tell Uncle Mike how old you are?”

  “Eleven,” Sammy said. “I’m about to turn twelve.”

  “C’mon,” Ricky said. “Your real age. Humor Michael.”

  “I’ll be nineteen in October.”

  “Sammy may be young in years,” Ricky said. “But his cock is as old as this dying empire.”

  I scoped the young man’s bulge. “Doesn’t look dead to me.”

  “What I mean is, it’s a cock from another time, from another era. From back when men were men.”

  “Another era?”

  “Michael, dear Michael, you don’t understand. It’s not your fault, you’re from a different world. Where you’re from, women are afraid of penises. Penises have been pushed at them their whole lives. Penises have been shoved in their faces, forced into their ears and down their throats.”

  “Into their ears?”

  “Into their ears, Mike. And who wants that, a dick in the ear? Not women, that’s for sure. Certainly no woman I’ve ever met.”

  “I’m not sure I . . .”

  “Let me tell you about Boys Town, where I’m from. In Boys Town, there are two types: you’re either carrying a nine-inch hammer like Sammy is, or you’ve got nothing. There’s no in-between. And now, with all this estrogen and soymilk, in this city of soft rodgerings, a nine-inch hammer is hard to come by. You should see him come, Mike, you really should. I could arrange it. Sammy, up for a quick spurt?”

  Sammy touched himself through his sweats, literally weighing the option.

  “Like a semen bullet,” Ricky continued. “Ten thousand tiny Samuels sprung into winter air. It’s a Nutcracker of semen, the way he can make it fly. His balls do ballet, Mike. A cock from another time.”

  “A Cro-Magnon cock,” I said. “A pre-industrial dong.”

  Sammy raised an eyebrow, lowered it, leaned back into the couch.

  “By the way,” Ricky said. “You look terrible. Really terrible. I’m sorry to have to bring it up, but you’re like a pink elephant in the room with your pink face and fat pink stomach.”

  “Thanks.”

  Sammy’s penis had subsided, and so had Sammy. Within seconds he was snoring. Ricky laid a blanket over his young friend’s body.

  “You ever worry?” I asked. “About corrupting these kids.”

  “You know what I worry about, Mike? I worry about you. What are you gonna do with yourself?”

  We might lose our jobs, but Ricky, I assumed, would be all right. Ricky was liquid. Ricky owned land in Laos, Tanzania, all the emerging markets. He had a safe in this apartment that contained a hundred thousand in American dollars plus a hedge stash of euros and yen. He even had Chinese yuan, currently worthless, pegged to nothing but its culture’s Darwinian superiority. Yuan was the cockroach of currency, the Keith Richards of capital assets—against all odds it would survive. Ricky had told me he was planning retirement. This was it for him. The economy crashes and he jets on out. He had Cuba in mind, a cheap hideout filled with tan boys thrumming for a true taste of
capitalism.

  “I’m writing my book,” I said. “I’m finally writing my book.”

  “Your book? Oh, of course, your book! What’s the book about? White guys who want to be black, Hispanic guys who want to be gay? Something like that? Am I getting close? Can you write a book on Basic Income—what is it, thirty grand a year?”

  “Twenty-three,” I said.

  Ricky shook his head.

  “It’s about our generation,” I said. “The book is. You know, the generation that came to capitalism too late. Remember?”

  “Oh, you’re listening to me now. That’s a bad sign. Our generation? Mikey, we don’t have a generation. We’re post-generational. Rated PG if you catch my meaning.”

  “Maybe that’s what the book’s about.”

  “The book’s not about anything, Mike, because there is no book.”

  “It’s about Eminem,” I said. “The book is about Eminem, and how his oeuvre, including the first three LPs plus 8 Mile and its soundtrack, define our generation.”

  “I never knew what you saw in rap music,” Ricky said. “All that crotch-grabbing and queer-bashing—they’re all closet cases, if I say so myself, but that’s irrelevant. I want to ask you a serious question: Does the world need another book? Forget the book. Get a manicure for God’s sake. Get a back wax.”

  I lifted a glass stem from the table and tapped it against my palm.

  “I was thinking,” I said.

  “Uh-oh. That’s never a good sign.”

  “I was thinking you might be able to help me.”

  “I’m not much of a writer, Mike, hard as that may be to believe. Never had time for all that i before e shit.”

  “Except after c,” I said.

  “See, I wouldn’t have known that. Proves my point.”

  “With money, I mean. I could use some help.”

  Ricky responded to this request with an expression of such unadulterated joy, that I’d continue to recall it through the mournful week that followed. I’d recall it as I drove north on the Taconic, and as I drank myself blind at our old hometown bar. And after the open-casket wake, lying sleepless in my childhood bedroom, I would try my best to swap the image of Ricky’s embalmed face with this smiling one instead. I took some comfort in the knowledge that, on his last day of life, my despair had filled Ricky with delight.

  “Help you how?” he asked.

  He wanted me to beg.

  “Well, what would you do if you were in my situation?”

  “And what exactly is your situation?

  I said, “Chapter Thirteen has crossed my mind.”

  This was bait. I knew that, as my best friend, he’d never let me file.

  “Terrible idea, Mikey. I can see why you’re so broke, with ideas like that. Never, ever file for Chapter Thirteen. Once you’ve filed Thirteen, there’s no coming back. Did you learn nothing from Behind the Music?”

  “I guess not,” I said, though the chained gates of MC Hammer’s foreclosed mansion were seared in my retinas.

  “Look, it’s not so bad. You’re cash poor, but you’ve got assets. There’s your apartment, for one. And what about all that C&S stock you stupidly bought? Toxic assets to be sure, but you’re not without options.”

  “I thought the boom would last,” I said.

  “It was a bubble, Mike. It’s always a bubble.”

  “So what would you do, then, if you were me?”

  “I’ll tell you what I wouldn’t do: I wouldn’t go around pretending I was writing a book.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “I can’t see you doing that.”

  Ricky leaned over and brushed a fallen strand of Sammy’s hair behind his ear. Sammy continued to snore.

  “What I’d probably do, instead, is get on my hands and knees and beg my friend Ricky for a handout. That’s what I’d probably do. If it were me.”

  “Right,” I said. “I was considering that option.”

  It was the only option I’d considered. The plan that I’d been banking on all morning—the plan I hoped would save me from ruin and resuscitate my marriage—consisted, entirely, of asking for this loan.

  “So how much we talking here?”

  I coughed out a figure.

  “I’m sorry,” said Ricky. “Could you speak up a bit? I didn’t quite catch that.”

  He was loving this hard.

  “Three million,” I said, a little louder. “Can I borrow three million dollars?”

  Ricky shook his head. “Michael, you beautiful fool.”

  “It wouldn’t have to be all at once. Maybe a million now to start paying off some things, another in six months’ time, something like that?”

  I trailed off. Ricky looked down at the table like he was taking inventory of the Duane Reade stuff I’d dumped, calculating how much we could sell it for on eBay.

  “Look, Mike, I’d help if I could, I really would, you know that. But that’s a lot of change we’re talking about, and I’m not so liquid at the moment.”

  “I’d take euros,” I said. “Yen even.”

  He removed a painting from the wall.

  “You have a safe hidden behind a frame? I thought they only did that in movies.”

  “Duh. That’s where I got the idea.”

  He held his palm to a sensor and the safe opened. It was empty.

  “Not even yuan?” I asked.

  “Invested,” Ricky said. “I’m all in.”

  “What about Cuba?”

  “Cuba can wait. I’ve got a thing going on, a great opportunity. I’ve been looking for the right time to tell you about it. Actually, I was hoping we could talk at the party tonight. I’m in on the ground floor of something. Low risk, and a bigger upside than Sammy’s Neanderthal wang. If you can scrounge together just a teensy bit of capital, I think we can make your debt disappear. Can’t promise anything, of course, but I feel good about this one, and you know I’ve never steered you wrong.”

  That teensy bit of capital posed a problem. I couldn’t imagine explaining to Wendy that I was selling our loft in order to invest in one of Ricky’s sure things, no matter his previous rate of success. Still, it was a thought. I didn’t have any others. There was always my book.

  “In the meantime,” Ricky said, and snatched the stem from my hand. He replaced it with a fifty-dollar bill. “Buy yourself something nice. You deserve it.”

  He lit the crack rock. This was my cue to leave.

  Wendy

  When I arrived at the restaurant, a Greenwich Village sports bar, of all places, the client was already there, in a corner booth, drinking Coca-Cola spiked with rum. I know because I ordered “same as he’s having,” and was surprised to find alcohol in my beverage, and more surprised to find it sweetened by high-fructose corn syrup. I didn’t think that people still drank non-diet soda. At least not in New York.

  The client was dressed casually now, in jeans and a bomber jacket. Blond bangs were curtains over his eyes, protecting them from UV rays and admiring glances. His nose and cheekbones were miracles of architecture. Thick, moist lips. Shaven chin–shine. He wore a sober expression one might not expect from someone so boyishly handsome. The effect was jarring; his eyes were oversized, as if they’d outgrown their sockets. I was the subject of his scrutiny.

  I’ve always fetishized WASPs. True WASPs, I mean, born in Connecticut and bred on Nantucket schooners eating lobster rolls and deconstructing golf swings. They’ve never shown much interest in me. Rachel Kirshenbaum and I used to drive out to Darien to look in their windows. We loved their orderly homes. The neatly stacked copies of Elle Decor. The calming peach walls.

  “I never got your name,” I said.

  He nodded. I wasn’t sure he understood I’d meant it as a question.

  “So what is it?” I said. “Your name?”

&nb
sp; The client sighed as if the answer were obvious. “Lucas,” he said.

  Lucas did not read the menu. I wondered if he’d memorized it before my arrival as a power move. If he could reel off the list off the top of his head, wines and specials included. Or perhaps he was the kind of guy who ordered a cheeseburger wherever he went, or else asked the waitress what she recommended and then ordered that. He slurped his drink loudly. The waitress came and we ordered our food.

  “Do you have any idea what you’re doing here?” Lucas asked.

  “Eating lunch.”

  “Good,” he said. “Sharp.”

  Lucas reached into his bag and removed a piece of paper. He sketched a female stick figure. He made a click sound with his teeth. The figure had conical breasts, linguini hair. Her eyes were dots. Her mouth was the letter o.

  Next, Lucas drew a male stick figure doubled over at the waist. He drew a large phallus protruding from the female figure’s pelvis and extending into the male figure’s rear end.

  Lucas wrote Wall Street next to the female figure. He wrote Joe Schmo next to the male. I noticed he wore no wedding ring. I wondered if it was in his pocket, reduced to mere metal among coins and keys. I had no sense of his age.

  “Simple story, right?”

  “I like that you represented Wall Street with a trans person. That’s very open-minded, if slightly wishful thinking.”

  “Artistic license. The point is that what I’ve just drawn is popular opinion, correct? The general consensus, agreed on by communists, and European socialists, and liberals who are afraid to describe themselves as such, and liberals who take pride in the term, and people who call themselves moderates, and people who call themselves apolitical, and Southern rednecks, and gun-toting libertarians, and God-fearing devotees of the Limbaugh radio hour, and the Gen Z mega-demo that’s coming to voting age as the boomers burn and fade. Anyone who’s not a billionaire knows that Wall Street’s the nemesis of our friend Joe Schmo, or Joe Hill, or Joe the Plumber, or Joe Mama, or whatever you want to call someone with a floating-rate mortgage on a depreciating property, and a job that, if it hasn’t already been made redundant, will be sometime in the next ten years. Even you believe in this reductive narrative.”