Sensation Machines

by Adam Wilson

  Penny’s drunk too—she’s been drinking since six with the guys watching the game—and because of this, and because Wendy looks so sad, Penny leans in and says something deeply sentimental, a line she’s heard in movies a million times but never once had occasion to use, though now it seems fitting, so right for the moment, she says, “He always loved you, you know.”

  Wendy bursts into tears. Normally she can’t cry in front of other people—she’s too stiffly self-conscious—but the last few days have found her freely sobbing. Wendy wonders if, maybe, a barrier’s been broken, allowing access to a long-stored well of sadness, so that she’s not just crying for what’s happened this week, but for all the old things she would have cried for as well had the floodgates been open. Penny pours them each another round.

  17.

  Broder has emptied the wallet, traded its tender for powder. He closes his eyes. Blurry Broder with his slideshow brain. Everything’s bright: white walls coated in eggshell varnish, lemon-scented kitchen shine. The toaster was a silver mirror, floor a skating rink for socks. He remembers playing hockey with a duct-tape puck. Each year for his birthday, he asked for a brother.

  Broder got a silver Torah pointer for his bar mitzvah, wore a silver silk shirt. They did the hora in the stammering strobe and they lifted his chair toward the crystal chandelier. His cousin’s gift was weed stems in an Altoids tin. They smoked from a pipe made from a dry-erase marker and the smoke smelled like marker. Broder’s magic mushroom poster glowed pink under black light. His bedroom ceiling was stickered with stars.

  Girls were easy if you styled correctly: Abercrombie cargos, diamond stud, frosted tips. Broder’s mom mixed the bleach in a plastic beach pail. It was an intimate thing, her hands in his hair, the way she so delicately crimped the foil. Mom wore sweatpants but only ever vacuumed. She wore makeup but never left the house. He never knew how to answer when she asked about his day.

  His grandma had what the home’s brochure called a junior suite: bathroom, sofa, sad twin bed. Broder brought Munchkins from Dunkin’. His grandma crushed the crumbs into the carpet with her stockinged heels, and he painted her nails: fuchsia or magenta or the kind called Party Shimmer. He loved the birdlike bones in her elegant hands. He brought flowers and he opened the windows, but it still smelled like urine. Broder only ever took a couple of her Oxys. Sometimes she called him by her dead husband’s name.

  There was a greening in spring, honeyed summers. The glittered tar of his parents’ paved drive. Broder spun circles, whippit-high, a human helicopter crossing the lawn. Fall was burnt and russet brown. Winter was ice white with open heat grates. It was ice on the windshield, the sound of the scraper. Broder always had a bad winter cough. His phlegm was Adderall blue, Ritalin orange. School came easily to Broder; he got As.

  College was cocaine and Napster. You just needed money and an Ethernet cable. You needed Winamp. Broder wore hoodies low over his eyes, stumbled down Broadway back to the dorms. There were hand jobs, blow jobs, the rare case of intercourse. He kissed a guy just to see if he liked it. Consensus: neutral. He let a guy jerk off on his leg.

  There was no time for class. During daylight, he slept, or smoked on the steps of Dodge Hall in a trench coat and shades, or hunted for vinyl in mildewed storefronts on East Village side streets. Broder loved those rooms, their rising dust. Nothing in his parents’ house was old.

  Broder had turntables and he had taste. He had very little talent. Michael didn’t mind. Michael had very little money; Broder bought. They ate chicken parm from Milano’s, or Amir’s falafel, or eggs Florentine from West End or Deluxe. They didn’t have girlfriends.

  Broder wanted a girlfriend. He wasn’t sure how it worked. Girls were always gone by the time Broder woke. He’d sometimes catch one in the doorway, in the phantom disco shimmer of last night’s sequins, holding her heels. He wrote their numbers on loose scraps of paper or the back of his hand, but by the time he thought to call, he’d lost the scrap, or the marker had smudged, or he was scared of rejection and put down the phone. He envied those couples conjoined in the quad, sharing salads, passing the fork back and forth. To bring a girl home for Thanksgiving break, that was the dream. To show her off at the neighborhood bar, or cruise the midnight-still suburb in his hot-boxed Audi, pointing out the lower schools and Little League fields, the mall, the ice-cream parlor, all the sites of his corny nostalgia. He wanted what they always had in movies: a witness to his family’s weirdness, a hand to hold at the Thanksgiving game. He had Michael instead, at least until Wendy.

  She arrived sophomore year, a phoenix rising from the ashes of the Towers—or, that’s how it must have looked in Michael’s mind. Michael’s high school friend Ricky was bitchy about it, and Broder was lonely, and the city was apocalyptically drinking, awash in song: hipsters arm in arm, earnestly belting Sinatra over the jukebox.

  So while Michael chased romance in the cheaper bistros of Upper Manhattan, the unlikely alliance of Ricky and Broder hit the West Village dives, and the Chelsea meat markets, and the Meatpacking clubs. They spotted celebs at downtown hotspots—Christina Ricci at B Bar dousing her french fries in ketchup, Parker Posey smoking weed outside Bungalow 8—and made a point to ignore them. They drank happy-hour margs in Murray Hill with young Jewish Republicans, drank Bloody Mary oyster shooters in Tribeca with WASPs. They came armed with gram bags of weak cocaine that they bumped in bathrooms off dirty dorm keys, or laid out in lines on toilet lids for small groups of friends or attractive strangers. At Pravda, they pretended to be Russian, and drank quail egg martinis, and Broder hit on models who could somehow tell that, despite his cokey confidence and vintage track suit, he was not a talent scout. They hit the midtown sports bars, and the Hell’s Kitchen gay bars, and the Bushwick roof parties, and the Lower East Side gallery openings, and, once, a Williamsburg loft, where they snorted Molly off a frisbee that was being passed around while a keytar player and an electric violinist performed covers to an indifferent crowd. They drank Jack and gingers at Ricky’s apartment, swallowed Klonopin and rolled around on the floor. They waited for the coke guy to call back. Sometimes they waited for hours, watching Simpsons reruns and Seinfeld reruns, filling Ricky’s ashtray, blowing up the coke guy’s pager 911. And they talked about the Towers—who they knew in the Towers: a dude from Ricky’s stats class, interning somewhere; a friend of a friend of Broder’s dad’s—but mostly they didn’t talk about the Towers, and the empty space in the conversation was as gaping as the space where the Towers had stood. They smoked a joint laced with PCP and went to see the first Harry Potter film at Loews Lincoln Square, and Broder had to hold a hand over one eye in order to see, and that night he lay in bed and pictured marrying Hermione Granger, his proud mom walking him down the aisle.

  And sometimes he went back to women’s apartments, though it rarely went farther than muddled fumbling. Other people talked about the Towers, didn’t talk about the Towers. And Broder threw up in toilets, and he threw up in bathtubs, and he threw up off a friend’s third-story balcony and watched the vomit splatter in the street below. One night he threw up in a cab driver’s hair and was left on the West Side Highway to walk. He peed in his closet, and in his laundry basket, and in his bed. Outside Scratcher, he peed on the side of the building rather than waiting in the bathroom line, and he was fined $50 by the City of New York.

  Self-reflection wasn’t Broder’s forte, but even he could see that he was seeking something—oblivion, euphoria, an antidote to loneliness. Though maybe these were aspects of the same elusive need: to feel himself akin to other sympathetic humans, their separate solitary daydreams fleetingly joined in a vague and all-encompassing warmth. And one 5 a.m., he found himself in a Chinatown apartment above a fish market, watching a hipster with a braided rattail hold a Bic to the bottom of a spoon. Broder thought it would be brown, but it was more like the color of sand. He watched through slatted blinds as the rising sun lit the East River in a million silvers, and
in the beauty and fish stink, he opened a vein.

  Here’s where Broder loses time. Here’s where time loses Broder. The clock still ticks and the heart still beats, but they move at different tempos, make different music. He’s at school and he’s high and he’s home. He’s high and he’s home. He’s at school. He’s high. His grandma is sick and she’s dead. He’s home.

  Broder’s dad has moved into the local Marriott with a woman who works at the bank. Broder has emptied his bar mitzvah savings. He’s sold his Minimoog and drum machine. He’s run out of veins in his feet, so he shoots into his arms, and now everyone knows, he thinks they know. He’s long-sleeved at the shiva, reciting the Kaddish. He’s on the lawn in a snowstorm making an angel. Michael never seems to return Broder’s calls.

  It is winter it is summer it is spring. Inside the house it’s always sixty-eight degrees. Broder’s mom has adopted a rescue French bulldog. She calls it Gimel, after the first Hebrew letter of his grandma’s name. She’s too distraught to potty-train. Broder scrubs piss out of the carpet with a special shampoo. His mom eats nothing but Taco Bell, refried beans and plump cheesy burritos. She eats chalupas, whatever the fuck those are. She wears men’s undershirts and spandex bike shorts. The shirts are guac-stained. She eats chalupas and cries. Broder stands in the doorway and watches. He pages Michael and Michael doesn’t call back. Broder’s dad keeps inviting him to meet his new girlfriend. Her name’s Patty and she’s a good cook. And she’s black, he always adds, African American, as if that makes leaving Broder’s mother okay. He asks if Broder’s okay. Broder hangs up. He is angry and he’s not. He’s copping outside the dry cleaner, shooting in an alley in a pile of recycling. He’s on the ground in a mess of broken bottles: bleeding, sleeping. He’s on a stretcher. He’s handcuffed to a hospital bed. He’s home. He’s on a plane.

  18.

  Michael’s still at the laptop when Wendy gets home. She stomps through the kitchen, opening fridge and cabinets, nibbling on something, running the tap. She kicks off her heels and makes her way toward the airbed, glass of water in one hand, Bloomingdale’s bag in the other. Half a graham cracker hangs from her mouth. She puts the bag down and chews.

  “Where were you?” says Michael. He’s been online for hours, refreshing Twitter, googling Gatsby Murder. The latest: a witness saw Devor buy a dozen baseball bats at the Modell’s in Times Square two days before the murder, and another claims to have marched behind him to the Zone. Two people claim to have seen Devor during the riot, brandishing a police Taser, but another says she saw him buying beer at a bodega on the Upper West Side around the time that the murder took place.

  Roughly half of Twitter thinks Devor is guilty, but the other half argues in his defense, claiming the banks masterminded the murder and framed Devor to discredit #Occupy. Little hard evidence backs these suppositions, but something rings true. Ricky was disliked by many at C&S, and if Edward Jin and the others sat down in a smoky room and plotted to knock off one of their own, Michael imagines Ricky would make the top of their list.

  The strangest thing he’s found, however, is speculation of a different sort. Among the deluge of shitposts on Reddit, Michael found someone insisting that Communitiv.ly, on behalf of a secret group called Project Pinky, is running a stealth PR campaign to tank the UBI by framing Devor.

  “I got a drink,” says Wendy, done eating, butt on the air mattress, trying and failing to remove her tights.

  “That I can see,” says Michael.

  Wendy manages to free her legs, though she kicks over her water in the process.

  “You went shopping,” says Michael. He takes off his T-shirt and uses it to cover the spill. Wendy faces the wall.

  “I’m confused,” he says.

  She’s focused on her phone.

  “Confused why?” she says after a second. “Confused because we owe hundreds of thousands in credit card debt? Confused because you owned three million dollars’ worth of shares in your own investment bank and now those shares are worthless? I know it’s confusing that something like that could happen. That someone as responsible as you could let that happen.”

  Wendy puts down the phone. She wears an expression Michael has seen once before. It is not the expression Wendy wore when the doctor quietly informed them of her failure to find Nina’s heartbeat, as if the softness of her voice might cushion the blow. No, this is the expression Michael saw shortly after, when the doctor asked if he wanted to hold their dead child. Michael paused for too long before saying yes. He paused, and in that pause he stepped out of the present. He stepped into the future to wonder how he’d look back on the moment, how the experience—her skull in his palm, the caress of his thumb across its ridges—might later haunt and traumatize, degrade any future instance of happy feeling.

  “I’m sorry,” says Michael.

  “What was that? I don’t think I heard you. Did you just apologize? Did you just whisper I’m sorry as if that would make it okay?”

  Michael hits the wall with the rear of his skull. He says, “I’m so sorry.”

  “Fuck your sorry,” says Wendy.

  She pulls the envelope from her purse and fans a stack of hundred-dollar bills. She balls up a bill and flicks it at Michael’s nose. It bounces off. She throws money in the air and they both watch it fall.

  Wendy’s usually respectful of money above all things, arranging the bills in her wallet by denomination and rolling loose coins while she watches TV. This atypical display lets him know just how angry she is, and how drunk.

  “I got paid,” Wendy says. “Now aren’t you glad I went to work today?”

  “You went to Bloomingdale’s.”

  “Is there a problem? Is there a problem with me spending my money that I earned?”

  Michael collects the bills from the floor. He puts them back in the envelope and places the envelope on the bed.

  “Ricky was my friend too,” says Wendy.

  “I know that.”

  “Abstaining from purchasing clothing is not going to bring him back.”

  “No.”

  Michael goes to the bathroom to give her a moment to calm down. He pees and brushes his teeth. He returns and stands nude before Wendy. It feels like an offer. Here I am to take or leave, is what he’s trying to say. Wendy taps at her phone. She doesn’t look up. Michael gets back in the bed and pulls the blanket to his chin. She tugs it back in her direction, tells him not to be a hog. She watches Instagram stories: a pop singer discussing lactation; Michael’s cousin, Hannah, cooking eggplant parmesan.

  “I read a thing online,” Michael says. “I read a thing online about Communitiv.ly. That you’re trying to frame Jay Devor for the murder. Is that what you’re doing at work?”

  “I’ll tell you what I’m doing,” says Wendy. “I’m making sure the world remembers your friend as a better person than we both know he was. You should be thanking me.”

  “You’re not framing Devor?”

  “To frame someone, he has to be innocent.”

  “There’s no evidence.”

  “Then who did it, huh?”

  Wendy picks up the envelope and counts the cash like she’s suspicious Michael stole some.

  “We should use the money to start paying . . .” he says.

  “My money. It’s not the money. It’s my money.”

  “I just meant . . .”

  “You just meant what? That if we pay off the cards we can go back to normal? Should we move to a studio in the Bronx with a Murphy bed and a hot plate?”

  Michael thinks she’s being bourgeois. These may not be the blissed-out days of frivolous spending, but they still have more earning power than their college friends who’ve eked out the last decade in tiny sublets and shared apartments, working three jobs while pursuing diminishing artistic dreams. Sure, they’re in debt, but Wendy makes six figures, and Michael can find another job. They
are the definition of privileged: the holes they fall into aren’t deep enough to keep them from clawing back up.

  He says, “There’s a difference between being broke and being poor.”

  “Oh don’t pull that shit,” says Wendy. “Don’t pull that I grew up blue collar and love the simple life bullshit.”

  “I can fix this,” says Michael.

  She says, “You can’t.”

  19.

  They meet outside MoMA at noon. Classic Greg. The daytime date means less pressure, and the artwork provides a discussion topic, and the fact that there’s only so long you can stay in a museum without wanting to get off your feet and into some cocktails means that if things go well they’ll be drinking by two while sharing apartment horror stories and humorous anecdotes about their mutual Facebook friend.

  Now here’s the tricky part. Both live far away, she in Williamsburg or Bed-Stuy or Clinton Hill or Bushwick, he in the East Village. His place is closer, but she’ll feel more comfortable at hers, unless she has roommates, which she probably does, in which case, Greg’s studio it is. But how to get there? Three options:

  Cab – Pros: Quickest delivery, with minimal loss of momentum or inebriation. Cons: The question of who pays can be a problem, particularly if Greg’s date wants to discuss it before deciding. Ideally, they’ll split the cab, everyone equal and equally eager, but if she insists on taking the subway to save cash then Greg will look pushy if he offers to pay the full fare. Any way you look at it, a cab is problematic. Which leads to,

  Subway – Pros: Gets rid of the problem of payment. The subway is democracy incarnate, the people’s mode of transport. Greg and date can commiserate over shitty service, and how there’s always construction on weekends, and how Sundays especially suck with tourists clamoring for seats and asking which line goes where and what’s the difference between express and local. Making it from midtown to Greg’s apartment amid this madness is an adventure they can share, then discuss once they’ve arrived. Cons: The subway is not a romantic venue, with its smells and general display of ugliness. Plus it takes a while, trains on or more likely behind schedule, and by the time they get to Astor Place then walk the ten blocks to Greg’s, the mood and booze may have worn off. There’s always