Sensation Machines

by Adam Wilson

  I wanted to be one of those girls with a record player and a stack of LPs. One of those girls with a vintage fur displayed on a sewing form. I was not that girl, too timid and self-conscious, too conflicted between my fear of and desire for attention.

  In high school, the lacrosse team made a website where they ranked and analyzed the females in our class. I was given points for my looks, but demerits for my supposed inability to smile. Verdict: frigid bitch. People mistook my shyness for coldness, my stilted manner for arrogance. And though I’d tried to make myself over in college by wearing costumes to theme parties and laughing at unfunny jokes, I knew that these adjustments were cosmetic.

  I sensed Michael was about to make his move. He’d been giving his take on “The Real Slim Shady,” misquoting Frederic Jameson and explaining the song’s postmodern assault on the illusion of objectivity. My stomach rumbled. What Michael was saying was pretentious and half-baked, but I appreciated his spirit. Here was the college experience I’d imagined before the disillusion of matriculation: discourse with flirtation. It was surprisingly hard to come by. The gender theorists had rejected me for precociously shopping at Ann Taylor Loft. Besides, they were averse to hegemonic concepts of courtship even when the courtship rituals included avowals to lay waste to the hegemony. Everyone else was only interested in real estate. Even the other writing students discussed it ad nauseam, debating which neighborhoods still inspired enough dread to keep gentrifiers from spoiling their storefronts with juice bars and yoga studios.

  I’ve heard people say that during sexual encounters they’ve felt outside of their bodies, distant observers. My experience has been the opposite. I am only a body, a sensation machine. Michael kissed me and I kissed back. His tongue felt mealy in my mouth, like a chunk of soggy apple. He scooched closer on the bed. He wrapped an arm around my waist and placed his palm beneath my sweater, just above my beltline. He traced a path from my navel to my hip.

  I pulled away. I thought I might vomit. I had trouble breathing. I hyperventilated. I thought I might have spontaneous diarrhea. I assumed that Michael would flee. I felt like the night’s failure was indicative of all my future failings, indicative of the hopelessness of any such endeavor.

  Music continued to play. I imagined Michael staring at my body and assessing what I considered its flaws. We’d fooled around on our first date, but we were in a dark car, and I’d kept my clothes on. Now, in the privacy of my bedroom, further exploration was expected.

  I was, and still am, by most accounts, attractive: tall and relatively thin with red hair that falls in tight spirals below my shoulders. I have expressive lips and turquoise eyes. I have my maternal grandmother’s upturned, Irish nose, which nicely offsets my other, Ashkenazic features. I’m not a size zero, but I dress to accentuate my strengths.

  Still, during all of my pre-Michael sexual experiences, I’d arrived against disappointment. I’ll never forget Gabriel Simm’s face upon the unveiling of my breasts, my flat and ovular nipples reflected in his lenses. Gabriel did a double take. He could only blame his vision. Then: a cringe of acceptance, a closing of eyes, tongue diving toward areola as if, with enough torque, he might bypass reality and land on fantasy’s shore.

  The first thing Michael did was turn off the music. He knew not to touch me. He pulled over my desk chair and sat facing me. He spoke very slowly. He said my name. He told me to take deep breaths. He said everything would be okay. He said he understood, that he had felt like this before. His voice was steady. He said there was no rush, that he liked me, and that he could wait. He told me there was time. He asked if there was anything I took to calm down when I felt this way. I told him where I kept the Ativan. He took one too, “to be on the same wavelength.” I thought this was funny. We watched a video on the computer. My breathing regulated. The video was a clip of a monkey fainting from sniffing its own feces. Michael said he’d watched it hundreds of times. He made me laugh.

  We fell asleep fully clothed. I woke with Michael in my arms. He lay drooling in the fetal position. He looked vulnerable, sweetly sleepy.

  When I got home from Lillian’s on Sunday night, I was surprised to find Michael in the apartment. It was ten o’clock. He had been going out after work. He usually arrived home past midnight. I’d be in bed, alert, awaiting the sound of his keys. Eventually he’d stumble in and clomp across the loft. I’d pretend to be asleep.

  I told myself that Michael’s behavior was an appropriate response to the stress of the crash. The truth is that it had been a problem for some time. After our daughter’s death, I found myself reticent around Michael.

  He’d suggested we begin to try again. I wasn’t ready. I was still in mourning. I think that Michael saw, in Nina’s death, the loss of a future, whereas I felt the loss of a person I’d known. For nine months she’d been my roommate, a tiny human sharing my body’s resources. Michael only knew her as a nebulous mass. A mass that occasionally kicked.

  I worked long hours, and when I got home I took long baths. I didn’t want to talk or to be physically intimate. I told myself I was protecting Michael. Nina had come from my body, been destroyed by my body. Who could caress this killing thing? I felt I didn’t deserve to be loved.

  A part of me was relieved when Michael began to go out after work. The other part was lonely.

  That night, he seemed happy to see me. He may have been buzzed, but I couldn’t smell anything on him. I was tipsy myself. He asked about my evening. I recounted Lillian’s position that oral sex might have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

  It was warm in our apartment. Michael took off his clothes and got on the air mattress in his underwear. His bites had faded more than mine because he was better at leaving them alone. I changed into a nightgown and got in beside him. He’d stopped at Bed Bath & Beyond and bought a new set of sheets. They were stiff but clean.

  Michael had his laptop open and I watched as his cursor hovered, for an instant, over the shortcut to our E*Trade account. I didn’t think anything of it. He clicked on the CNN shortcut instead. The Florida neo-Nazis had occupied a Hillel at FSU, and were holding a rabbi and four students hostage. Michael scrolled down past articles on Hurricane Marie, sexual assault on an HBO set, and Shamerican protest art. He clicked into a piece on the proposed sale of C&S to Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group. We silently read. The gist was that the deal was stalled but not dead. Michael hovered over E*Trade again. He didn’t click. He closed his laptop.

  “This world,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Our world,” he said.

  He pressed into his temples with his index fingers. He stared at the wall.

  I was feeling fondly toward Michael. I was thinking of the previous week, when he’d cleaned and cooked, and rubbed my feet. The wine had made me tired and I’d fallen asleep. Now I was awake. I slipped a hand inside his boxer briefs and rested it there.

  When he was ready, I rolled onto my stomach and raised the hem of my nightgown. Michael preferred being face to face. He liked to look into my eyes. I liked this too, but not always. Sometimes it felt like too much pressure, like being under observation. Michael leaned over and kissed the nape of my neck. He nibbled my shoulders. He ran his hands along my spine and held my hips. He asked if it felt good. I said that it did.

  The sex was accompanied by word-like noises coming from Michael’s mouth. I’d never heard him make these noises before. It sounded like an infant’s strangled attempts to articulate beyond her linguistic capacity. I didn’t like the way my face felt against the pillow. The sheets were rough. They needed three or four wash cycles to be softened to my satisfaction. I imagined other couples testing the sheets in the store, tainting the fabric. I knew this was not possible. The sheets had come sealed in plastic casing. I tried to feel pleasure. I tried to will the convergence of our bodies into something ecstatic. I could feel the shrimp suspended in the aspic of my intestines.

 
Michael asked if I wanted to vibrate. This is something we did. He’d thrust from the rear while I ran a vibrator over my hood. Michael had said that my contractions, when I was on the cusp of orgasm, set off his own climb. I said I didn’t want to vibrate. It seemed unlikely I’d be able to climax.

  When I began to get dry, Michael added lube to the outside of his condom. He wore condoms because I react adversely to birth control pills. The condoms, coupled with the side effects of his antidepressants, prolonged the plateau phase of intercourse. I often spent long minutes lying in wait.

  Michael thrusted and made his noises. He kissed my hair. My phone buzzed. My phone had a special buzz for emails from Lillian. The buzz was accompanied by a bird’s chirp.

  Michael said, “Leave it.”

  I said, “Mike.”

  Michael continued to thrust. The bird continued to chirp. I smelled cat pee. Michael grabbed tightly to my hips. His fingernails dug into my skin. I imagined them making small abrasions. I imaged the dirt from under Michael’s nails entering my bloodstream. I imagined the shrimp squirming back to life and swimming up my esophagus.

  I tried to extract myself, but it must have felt, to him, as if I were erotically bucking. He increased the speed of his thrusts. He clutched me closer. I was able to unplug my phone from its charger. I managed to get the phone to my face. Michael whispered what sounded like “I love you.” He bit my ear. He ejaculated as I read Lillian’s email.

  Michael

  The coffee shops by Ricky’s apartment were Starbucks or Starbucksian: corporate, cleanish, out of toilet paper. In the case of the one that I entered, the bathroom was not out of toilet paper, but out of order. At least, this was the explanation offered by the handwritten sign on the door. The sign had been affixed with what looked to be an entire ream of Scotch tape. The tape tried too hard to convince. Here, I speculated, was a pristine bathroom, moated by sign and tape so as to banish the errant pissers who wreaked havoc each morning, forcing the store’s lone human employee to spend his lunch breaks scrubbing. The workforce was fighting back. I opened the door.

  “Shit,” I said, because there was a lot of it on the floor.

  The cafe brimmed with finance guys, men whose hands had palmed footballs in high school and in college had been body inspectors: tweaking nipples, forcing pinkies into tiny anal holes. After college they’d tied ties, tapped out lines, and touched money. Now they pecked touchscreens, checking the Dow, sending vaguely reassuring emails to investors.

  I’d worked in the industry since college, when I interned with Ricky at Merrill Lynch. I was twenty-six when the housing bubble burst, but the nature of derivatives was such that vast degrees of separation existed between the families who’d taken out subprime loans and the guys like me who’d blindly traded CDO packages, each of which contained literally thousands of these mortgages. I’d been trained to imagine my market movements as purely hypothetical, a grand-scale sudoku that would increase my annuals without affecting the mechanics of American life. We weren’t Nazi soldiers following orders, but entrepreneurs following the rooted imperatives of our system, the promise that success comes at the expense of faceless others.

  These others were out of sight, in Middle America, a place that mostly existed, for me, in midcentury novels by the Great White Males who’d been extinct for some time. And though I grew up an heir to financial depression, I still had trouble picturing the boarded-up houses and tent cities, the families ruined by debt. I couldn’t fathom the fallout from our actions, the factory closings and depleted pension funds. I couldn’t see how this recession would shape the next decade’s economy and lead to the current crisis. If I could see those things, I couldn’t connect them to what I was personally enacting.

  There’s a long version and a short version of how I lost all my money. The long version is boring, and involves balance sheets and credit swaps, the broken dream of Detroit’s renaissance. It involves failures of predictive modeling and optimistic long positions. It involves the death of my daughter and a new inclination toward risk. And, if I’m being truly honest, it involves a not-insignificant measure of greed.

  The short version is simple: I bet on America.

  I soon found myself poorly leveraged, my liabilities threatening to outweigh my assets, and my sympathies for left-wing ideology steadily increasing. So while it would be easy to brag of my altruism by asserting that my shifting beliefs were based on a comradely desire for systemic fairness, the real source of my newfound empathy was that the system had failed me as well. I’d done all the right things—gotten the right job, married the right woman, made the right purchases based on Amazon’s recommendation engine—and I’d ended up with a dead child, a slumping marriage, and financial ruin.

  I waited in line, waited for my pills to kick in, watched the coffee junkies queuing for their fixes: eyes glued to shoes, hands darting in and out of pockets, feeling the phantom buzz of their phones. I checked my own, which had been ringing with clients, debt collectors, and this morning’s half dozen missed calls from Wendy. I didn’t call anyone back.

  When I reached the counter, the tele-barista said, “Good morning.”

  It was twelve hours earlier in Manila, and I could see the blinking city through the window behind his head. These cyborgs combined the precision of automation with the frugality of outsourcing to provide a uniquely shitty customer service experience, though it’s worth noting that they rarely messed up an order. Their monitor heads livestreamed humans in the Philippines who remotely operated the robot bodies that brewed the coffee.

  “And good evening to you,” I said, hoping to get a laugh in response, though, like the baristas of old, my guy was humorless, an underpaid teen with no time for chitchat.

  “My name is Arnel, may I take your order?”

  I told him what I wanted, and Arnel nodded, and a door opened in the robot’s belly. I watched my coffee being poured.

  “I don’t mean to be the bearer of bad news,” I said, “but someone appears to have shat all over the bathroom floor.”

  “Are you reporting an act of vandalism?” said Arnel. “Do you wish to lodge a formal complaint?”

  His face was too close to the camera. I could see my reflection in his eyes. His question seemed like a trick or a threat. I was wary of reporting anything in an official capacity, afraid of paperwork or a delay in service.

  “I’m just saying maybe someone should clean it up.”

  “Copy that,” said Arnel, and he must have clicked his mouse or hit a key, because a siren went off above the bathroom door. The store’s human employee came pushing a mop bucket to meet it. She typed a code into a wall panel that turned the siren off. I didn’t understand why the bots couldn’t clean bathrooms while the humans served guests. I’d been told they didn’t have the dexterity. A metallic arm extended my coffee toward me. I wished Arnel a good day.

  Ricky wasn’t answering his cell, but I was friendly with Donnell, his doorman. When he wasn’t signing for packages, or working evenings hawking iPhones at a Verizon store, Donnell wrote a blog that considered sports and pop culture through the lens of his life as a single dad. He was an excellent writer and, if the universe were remotely fair, he would have been writing for a larger audience than his few hundred daily readers, and for more coin than he got running banner ads. Years ago, I’d endeared myself by donating discards from my sneaker collection as giveaways for the blog’s donation drive, and, ever since, Donnell and I had enjoyed a rapport, longing for the days of pre-replay refereeing and the great elbow throwers of yore.

  When I arrived in the lobby, Donnell did not look up. A book was open in his lap, and the doorman bent over it, presenting his graying Afro to anyone who entered. Donnell, I knew, was roughly my age, but he looked prematurely life-worn with his Don King haircut and plastic rim bifocals, his food-stained doorman’s gold-button blazer. On his desk sat a half-eaten egg sandwich. A peek o
f a circular sausage stuck temptingly from the bread’s square edge.

  “You gonna finish that?” I asked.

  Donnell nudged the sandwich in my direction. He closed his book and placed it face up on his desk; it was a hardcover copy of Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick’s co-authored self-help book, Bueller? Anyone? Sex After Sixty.

  “Don’t even start,” said Donnell. “Not today.”

  He was referring to the Knicks. These were rough times for the team, coming off four seasons in the cellar and Spike Lee’s defection to the Milwaukee Bucks.

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “At least your boys looked cute in those new uniforms. What would you call that color? Rust? Ocher?”

  “Burnt sienna,” he said.

  I considered sports expertise my Massachusetts birthright. In Mass, even dandies and high femmes could hold their own in discussions of the Patriots’ depth chart. I liked New York, where sports knowledge still suggested masculinity, and where I, a white-collar wuss, could penetrate the ranks of quote unquote real men by watching SportsCenter in bed. My discussions with Donnell were self-affirming, our easy banter supporting the delusion that I was not a snob looking down from his tower of privilege, but a streetwise code-shifter with working-class black friends. Or, at least, with one working-class black friend. That this friend had little choice in the matter of our friendship was something I willfully refused to acknowledge.

  “Interesting choice of reading material,” I said, and lifted the book. I skimmed its pages, which were filled with notes and underlines.

  “I have this theory,” he explained, “that one can trace the fall of the Knicks to 9/11.”

  He was a man of theories, a writer who relished the challenge of selling difficult arguments, and who, with humor and insight, often managed to succeed. A recent post defended NBA salaries from a Marxist perspective. In Donnell’s hands, the league’s millionaires became labor incarnate, staffing the only industry that granted its workers just revenue share.