Sensation Machines Read online

  “Did I tell you I got bedbugs?”

  This got his attention. Becker surveyed the way I was positioned on his Eames chair, assessing the possibility of something crawling from my pocket and burying itself in the leather.

  “Okay,” said Dr. Becker, who now walked toward the door.

  “Wendy’s going to leave me,” I added, though it wasn’t something I’d allowed until that moment. But it seemed suddenly obvious. I’d woken that morning with a plan to mend my marriage—or, at least, with a plan to make a plan—but as I sat in the now-infested Eames chair and watched the sky darken through the window, I realized that I’d failed.

  “I see,” said Dr. Becker again.

  There was something infuriating in the calm way he said it while pulling open his office door to expedite my exit. He took a step into the hallway. I’d been coming here for decades. All he could say was I see.

  Wendy

  I returned to an empty apartment. I felt very itchy. I ran a steaming bath. We lived in a large refurbished loft on the top floor of an old canning factory. Shortly after moving in, I replaced the apartment’s original bathtub with an oversized claw-foot I found online.

  When Michael first saw the tub, he said something that upset me. The deliverymen had just left after finishing the installation. I’d cleared the packaging and trash. I’d tested the faucets by running hot water over my fingers. I was taking in the tub for the first time.

  The tub was beautiful: white with the mildest varnish finish, giving it the shine of a freshly dish-washed dinner plate. The claws were hand-molded by a sculptor in Dutchess County. They were lion’s claws with long toes arched to show off individual tendons. The tub was held on tiptoes, supported by the lion’s toenails, which started thick at their crescents, then thinned to slim points like sharpened pencils. I had decorated the bathroom in Matisse prints, an array of pastels. The windows were open and a breeze blew in. The sunset shone through the window.

  I was pregnant then, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that, in that tub in that room at that moment, I saw the future flash before me. I imagined the drum of my belly covered in bubbles. I saw myself washing my daughter, running shampoo across her tiny skull.

  Michael said that it, the tub, would be a good setting for wrist-slitting or death by overdose. He was standing in the doorway when he said it.

  I said, “Go on.”

  Michael entered the bathroom. He tried to touch my waist but I pulled away. He climbed into the empty tub and lay down, fully clothed. He closed his eyes.

  Michael went on to describe our bathroom by candlelight on a cold winter night. He watches snow fall outside the window while the water runs at full heat, pinkening his skin. I am out of town for work and he has the loft to himself. Pain has overtaken him. Not sadness, he said. Not loneliness. But real pain, the kind he experienced before being medicated. The kind that only death’s stillness might relieve.

  Michael said he would put on the kind of maudlin music that plays in movies when characters kill themselves: a softly fingerpicked arpeggio, a woman’s breathy voice, the buzz of a simple bass line.

  He smiled. He thought this was funny. Or maybe he smiled because he’d meant it to be funny but had begun to scare himself, and was trying to salvage the situation by highlighting its comic familiarity. These were clichés after all. Michael said he would surround the tub with candles. Wax would drip into the water. He would reach from tub to medicine cabinet and gather a collection of plastic pillboxes. He would down a deathly combination of pills with a bottle of Pinot Noir. A bitter wine, he said, no citric aftertaste to his short life. He would say salut and blow a kiss out the window. The kiss would drift on the wind and reach me where I was. Michael would await eternity.

  I said I found this upsetting.

  Michael said he was only joking. He tried to take my arm and pull me with him into the empty tub. I exited. We did not speak of it for some time.

  Over the following months, while Michael bathed, I would watch the clock. Often, I became impatient. I would enter the bathroom and check on him under the guise of keeping him company. I would sit on the toilet seat and watch Michael bathe.

  We would talk. I was pregnant. These were pleasant times. We discussed baby names—Michael liked Emma, I preferred Eva—and imagined our lives as parents. Michael would work less, coming home early to cook elaborate meals. We’d walk Nina (my mother’s name, which we’d eventually agreed on) to school, wave goodbye from the doorway. We’d buy appallingly hip children’s clothing. We’d place her on the bed between us and sandwich her with warmth. In a few years, Michael would coach her basketball team. He’d teach her to make omelets, to ride a bike.

  We discussed our fears as well. Mine was that motherhood wouldn’t change me as much as I hoped it would. That instead of turning me blissed-out and easy, my new role would make me more tightly wound. I worried that I’d be too stiff to form a comforting cradle. I worried that my performance of motherhood would be unnatural, that my love would not be correctly expressed.

  Michael was reassuring. He told me I was being ridiculous. He told me he couldn’t think of another person more suited to motherhood. He said that I had a big heart, that my heart was so big that it didn’t fit on my sleeve like his did, and so I had to hide and protect it deep inside of myself. But he knew it was there, and that when Nina was born all that stockpiled love would come gushing out. I told him it was the cheesiest, stupidest, and kindest thing anyone had ever said. I rubbed soap on his shoulders and shampooed his hair.

  These baths continued until Nina’s death. After, I persisted in sitting on the toilet and keeping Michael company, but I began to worry about the possibility of his bathing while I was out of the house.

  Michael’s pain came as a comfort in some ways, to know that grief was something we shared. At the same time, I couldn’t help feeling like we were in competition. I was the mother. Instead of trying to outdo me, he should have been consoling me. Not that I wanted consolation. In fact, I became angry when he tried. What nerve he had to think that anything would help. He was constantly encouraging me to let out my feelings, to talk and to cry. He wanted us to see a counselor together. I felt judged.

  Eventually, the thought of returning home to a blood-covered bathroom floor and a bathtub filled with Michael’s corpse became overwhelming. When I mentioned it, Michael shrugged and said, “I’m sorry I said that before. Try not to think about it.” His lack of irritation with my pestering made me even more nervous. I got rid of the tub. I replaced it with something simpler and smaller, a less romantic spot for suicide.

  The replacement bathtub was fine. It had Jacuzzi jets and a comfortable headrest attachment. I took an Ativan. I lay in the bath and flipped through an old issue of Vogue. I laid my phone in sight.

  Michael

  The bar was my undergrad haunt, 420, named for its address on Amsterdam Avenue. The bartender was my undergrad bartender, Penny Watt. The Penny I remembered had a thing for zebra-print patterns. Now the animal’s stripes were tattooed from wrist to shoulder. It was, as they say, a look.

  “You planning to order anything, or are you just going to stand there staring at me?”

  “Penny,” I said, “do you not recall your old pal Michael Mixner?”

  She looked skeptical.

  “You seriously don’t remember all those times you threw me out after I stood on that table busting freestyle rhymes?”

  I pointed at the offending area. We’d been friends, or so I’d imagined. She was a grad student doing a PhD in gender studies. I was an undergrad who gave two-dollar tips and thought it entitled me to hours of banter.

  When I first fell for Wendy, I told Penny immediately. She matched me shot for shot as we hatched a plan to win Wendy’s heart. The plan involved arriving at her dorm with a red bow around my forehead and reciting “Bump n’ Grind” with Shakespearean
affect. It was scrapped in the sober light of morning. When Wendy and I got engaged, we came to this bar and made Miller High Life toasts, the champagne of beers being the closest thing to bubbly in 420’s fridge.

  The bar was different now. Stoners had always been drawn by its fortuitous address, but only after legalization had its owners cashed in. These days it was a full-on vape bar, decorated in a mishmash of Stanley Mouse reproductions and posters for eighties-era gaming systems. A chalkboard menu offered a long list of local and imported strains—one, an indica/sativa blend, was described as ideal for the Columbia film student forced to sit through a screening of Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó—and most of the tables had been retrofitted with perma-vapes.

  The room was filled with skunky mist and stumbling students, a number of whom wore AR helmets, which was all but unthinkable a few years before. The problem with the old devices wasn’t gaudiness or bulkiness, but something like its opposite: misguided subtlety. Take Google Glass, a product that failed because it looked like an ugly pair of glasses. The current helmets were gladiator gold with reflective visors and tricked-out lights, designed with readers of DC and Marvel in mind. The helmets weren’t exactly cool, but like band T-shirts and sports jerseys, they were statements of pride, declarations of allegiance to particular tribes.

  “Drink or die, perv,” said Penny. She poured a bourbon, slid the drink in my direction.

  “So you do remember.”

  “Dude, I’m sorry to say it, but you look really terrible, like a tumorous dog.”

  “Hazard of the profession.”

  “Oh yeah, I was gonna ask. I take it all this stuff in the news has not been the best for you.”

  “That would be an understatement.”

  “Well, just be thankful, you still look in better shape than Broder.”

  “Broder?”

  “He was in here the other day,” said Penny. “Back in town.”

  “And he was bad?”

  “Drinking,” said Penny. “So yeah.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Shit is right.” She poured me another.

  Broder was my undergrad accomplice and partner in hip-hop. I was WebMD and he was Mix Master Mucinex. We were roommates and inseparable until early sophomore year when he dropped out after developing a heroin habit.

  We lost touch. I worried, sure, but I was a naïve college kid with other things on his mind. I never thought Broder would die, and he didn’t, though he came close one night in a Dunkin’ Donuts bathroom on a bag cut with bleach. Next I knew, he was in a California rehab clinic.

  Broder came to my wedding, but left after the ceremony. I think he felt awkward around other friends, and particularly Ricky, who wasn’t shy about voicing his abhorrence of Recovery Kultür. After that, I’d been busy with work, and he’d been busy getting married, himself, to another former addict who didn’t stay that way for long. Her body was discovered in Joshua Tree, in the motel where Gram Parsons had also OD’d. I should have called him then.

  “What was he doing here?” I asked Penny, but she’d left with a vape-load for some guys in the corner. Besides, I knew what he was doing: haunting the old rooms, hoping to reclaim lost glory or black out trying. I was doing the same.

  Wendy

  I woke in a cold tub. If a warm bath is the womb, then a cold bath is the coffin. Or maybe a cold bath is the morgue table, and asleep in the cold bath one dreams the doctors above her, poking at her organs with their instruments.

  It was only 8 p.m. but I was anxious. There were no missed calls from Michael. Ricky wasn’t answering his phone, and I’d received another email from Michael’s mother. I did not write back. I didn’t call Lillian either. I called my father, who said Michael was fine, that he was probably out with the boys from the office, that at times like this they had to let off some steam.

  “Yes,” I said, “steam.”

  I didn’t mention the money or my meeting with the client or Michael’s absence from work. My father told me he loved me and that I could come to his apartment if I didn’t want to be alone. I told him that wasn’t necessary. I felt better for a moment, but as soon as I hung up, the fear overtook me again.

  Slowly, forcefully, I used my fingernails to pierce the skin above my anklebone and dug out one of my bites. The picked scab bled. I worked my way up my legs, scratching, picking. This did not decrease the itchiness, but I got satisfaction from the rhythm and pain. Torn skin accumulated under my fingernails. I bit my tongue and turned the TV on.

  I watched the news, waiting for the story to break that Michael had been found dead. Instead I received a litany of louder misfortunes. The National Guard now surrounded the FSU Hillel. A Guardsman spoke over a bullhorn, demanding surrender. The showrunner of a prominent HBO drama denied allegations that he’d failed to provide his actors with plastic genital guards before shooting sex scenes. The Gulf Coast prepared for Hurricane Marie.

  When the news cycle repeated, I turned the TV off and googled for local victims who fit Michael’s description. I knew this search would yield nothing. I knew that he was fine. I told myself not to worry. I told myself that this was the beginning of my being alone. I would pack a bag in the morning and leave.

  Before my bath, I’d logged on to E*Trade. It was worse than I’d imagined. This was a fundamental betrayal of the promise of our union: that we would be the kind of people who had money.

  I turned off the lights and lay down. I did not feel tired. It was still early. The cat swaggered up to my side of the bed. She fit her head into the glass from which I’d been drinking. She stood on her hind legs. Her tongue lapped at the water. I imagined the things that tongue had touched. “No,” I said, and slapped her.

  The cat retreated. I felt ashamed and hoped I hadn’t caused injury. The cat licked at the area I’d slapped, a patch of sagging belly. She cautiously made her way back to the glass. The cat stared straight at me. I tried to find, in her eyes, some indication that she recognized, in me, another consciousness, a being capable of pain and mercy. She sipped again from my glass. I slapped her, harder this time. A tooth sunk into my wrist. I tried to shake her off. She clawed at my elbow and shoulder. I pulled her tail and she let go.

  I rubbed my wound under cold water. We were out of bacitracin. For weeks, I’d nagged Michael to take the cat to a vet for tests and shots. I tried to watch a reality show called Arm Candy about a group of working-class men vying for the attentions of wealthy older women. I tried to google Lucas but I didn’t know his surname. I googled feline HIV. It was uncommon. I got out of bed and searched the apartment for hidden cash. I checked the cabinets and shelves, Michael’s dresser, and the freezer. I found nothing. I ordered a car on my company account.

  Michael

  Anoush was the last of a dying breed: Pakistani American, heavy on the horn, patriotically heedless of yellow lights. Apps like Lyft and Mhustle had elbowed in on his terrain, offering plush seats and Dasani in exchange for higher fares. And though the driverless revolution hadn’t arrived like we’d been promised, yellow cabs were still few and far between. If you could afford New York, you could afford these apps. I was a holdout. Mhustle was for show-offs, and Lyft’s smooth-sailing hybrids left me anesthetized. I preferred wind through duct-taped windows, guys like Anoush.

  “Asshole,” he said, passing a Tesla with California plates. I wasn’t sure if he meant the car’s driver or its creator, Mr. Musk: husband of models, saver of ozone, emissary to Mars, and an outspoken promoter of the UBI.

  “Nothing against Teslas,” Anoush clarified. “It’s just a shame that the jerkoffs who buy them can’t drive. People say Jersey is the asshole of America, but I’m telling you, it’s California.”

  “Armpit,” I said. “But point taken.”

  I wondered if he’d ever left New York. Travel was expensive, and airports still weren’t pleasant places for men of his skin tone. Jus
t the previous week, Twitter was abuzz with the story of two teenage boys, on a class trip to D.C, forcibly stripped of their turbans by LaGuardia security. Besides, California had lost much of its appeal in the wake of climate change. Who needed Venice when you could surf the Long Island Sound without so much as a wetsuit for warmth? Even In-N-Out was now bicoastal. All Cali had left was smog and drought. Anoush turned up the music. A rapper spit end-rhyming couplets on the subject of #Occupy, threatening to “cream on Senator Breem” and “go to war for Devor.”

  “Fuuuuck,” said Anoush. “I completely forgot about the Funeral. Should have taken Eleventh instead.”

  I’d forgotten as well, distracted by Penny, and news of Broder, and vape-clouded memories of simpler times. I was headed, instead, to the Gatsby party. It seemed right for my mood: stuck in the past, sulky that my wardrobe hadn’t saved me. To get there we had to pass through the Funeral for Capitalism. The event was bigger than I’d envisioned, thousands strong, inflatable caskets crowd-surfing the crowd. I rolled down the window. The amplified voice sounded like Devor’s, but it was hard to tell beneath the cheers and engine noise.

  “Big crowd.”

  “You’re telling me,” said Anoush. “I was down here earlier, before my shift. But I don’t know, man. I mean, what’s gonna come of all this? I don’t trust Breem. I’m telling you now, he’ll never let Basic Income pass. You know he started his career as a lawyer in Chip Van Lewig’s office?”

  “I know,” I said, though in fact I did not, yet another reminder that for all my pretension I was grossly misinformed. I did know of Van Lewig, a Midwestern cosmetics scion with family ties to the Heritage Foundation and John Birch Society, whose lobbying efforts had helped reverse decades of environmental progress. The Van Lewig Building was across the street from C&S.

  “Besides,” Anoush continued, “all those talks he gave at Clayton and Goldman. Those guys are his friends. They paid for his whole campaign. You think he’s gonna turn on them now?”