Sensation Machines

by Adam Wilson

  “It’s fucking freezing.”

  “You want me to pull over and put the roof up?”

  “Fuck no, you pussy.”

  Rachel twists the volume knob. The tick of an E-MU snare comes clean through my system. I once read an essay that claimed Eminem’s popularity wasn’t due to his whiteness, but to the clarity of his diction. It seemed racist to me, giving points to a white guy for elocution. I thought the writer was wrong, that the real reason for Em’s intelligibility is the sparse perfection of Dre’s beats, so much cleaner than the racket turned out by his successors. Then again, I’m always playing the apologist’s role, even in my own head, whitesplaining my white taste by way of Dre’s endorsement.

  We’re going through Em’s catalogue in chronological order. We skipped Infinite, though, the twenty-four-year-old’s passable Nas impression that purists consider his official debut. Nothing against the record, but it lacks the nuance of the later oeuvre. Besides, it isn’t on Spotify. Rachel slept through most of The Slim Shady LP, the true debut, a product of industry rejection, relationship angst, and raising a daughter in Dante’s Detroit. Now she’s awake and I’ve dialed in that album’s follow-up, The Marshall Mathers LP. Rachel yawns.

  I want so badly for this music to communicate something to my sister about who I am that runs deeper than taste. I want my favorite rapper’s nasal whine to be a musical madeleine that transports Rachel to my headspace during seminal moments. I want her squeezed beside me in Dave Goode’s Honda Civic, limbs silky from ecstasy, nodding to “Drug Ballad.” I want her at prom when the DJ plays “The Real Slim Shady” and my legs begin moving of their own volition, a foxtrot meets Riverdance that doesn’t sync with the beat, but feels too good to stop. I want us to weep during “Stan,” and I want her to know how I feel in this moment, now that Lucas is no longer the villain whose exposure would restore moral balance, and Ricky’s not the innocent victim I need and believed him to be. This is too much to ask. The car swerves and Rachel tells me to watch the road.

  We aren’t sure when Broder left the house, but my gut says this morning, after four or five hours of restorative sleep on my parents’ guest bed. He must have woken at sunrise into the awful awareness of the well-rested man. I imagine he panicked, ditched the gun, and walked five miles to the interstate, where he hitched a ride to Montreal.

  I found the gun when I went to wake him. There was no one in the guest room, just that old children’s blanket in a heap on the floor. I thought he may have gone out for air, but then I found the gun. Rachel helped me fish it out with barbecue tongs and seal it in a Ziploc gallon bag.

  It was easy to piece things together after that, to look back on what Broder said last night—words that seemed, in the moment, like a madman’s rant—and figure out what he meant: that Ricky brought cocaine to Broder’s wedding and offered it to the sober bride; that Broder blamed Ricky for Aliana’s death; that he’d fantasized for years about exacting revenge.

  We took separate cars and searched the streets. When Broder didn’t turn up, Rachel, Donny, and I reconvened at the house—our parents still asleep—and I tried calling the detectives. Neither answered; I’d left a dozen crazed messages last night. Rachel discouraged me from calling the local cops for the convincing reasons that (1) the force was comprised of idiots we went to school with, and (2) it didn’t seem worth wasting time attempting to convince these idiots that a urine-smelling gun, somehow in our possession, was the weapon in a major murder case. More imperative than finding Broder was getting the gun to the detectives and Donnell out of jail.

  I know that identifying the culprit should give me some sense of closure, that the lack of a political motive should mute the inner voice that says all could have been avoided if we hadn’t screwed the country with our greed and hubris, then celebrated that screw-up by drinking aged bourbon in the ironic glow of Fitzgerald’s green light. But I do not feel exonerated. Because Broder came to me the night of the party. He came and he wanted to talk. He needed to talk. In my stoned and selfish state, I refused.

  I remember Ricky on Halloween, dressed as a pirate in my grandmother’s silks. I remember his hippie phase, the self-sewn patchwork stripes on his cords. His hairy back at the beach. The way he wore tiny watches to emphasize his giant hands. How he rolled such beautiful joints. I remember him in fourth grade, after knocking Steve Wyck to the ground in my defense. He hooked my arm in his and we walked like that—together—back to class.

  “I miss Ricky,” I say.

  Rachel asks if I’m hungry.

  We stop at McDonald’s. Outside the vehicle, a grade-school field trip briefly enfolds us like a flock of flamingos, kids wobbly on stick legs, all wearing the same knee-length pink T-shirt. Rachel says, “Dude, have you ever, like, listened to the lyrics on that album? That guy is super rapey, huh?”

  “It’s a persona,” I say, though my heart isn’t in it. I’ve mounted this argument a million times to friends, relatives, and baristas, waving my arms as I exposit on concepts of postmodern posturing, questions of identity and assumption: Em as irony, Em as sincerity in transparency, Em as Internet troll, Em as the freed id of American masculinity, Em as commentary on it all. But, in this moment, I can’t bring myself to go there. Because maybe Rachel’s right. What is persona but an excuse for one’s worst self? Ricky was right too. Eminem isn’t the most important artist of our nonexistent generation, but only the most important artist of my own life. And if he’d never been born, then maybe some white kid in Des Moines would never have locked his girlfriend in the trunk of his car, and another white kid in Tacoma would never have opened fire at that mall, and Ricky would be alive. It occurs to me that I know nothing about anything, and that all of my problems come from my always having pretended otherwise. Maybe this is what’s meant by privilege.

  We smoke against the hood of the Porsche. Rachel slaps her belly like a bongo drum. We must be a sight, the derivatives trader and his face-tattooed sister wearing a T-shirt that says FUCK COPS.

  Inside, the rest area smells of urine despite its glut of competing odors. The school kids have sugared up and now roam the crowded space, sliding across mopped floors and throwing burgers at each other.

  Back in the car, I cover the roof. Rachel finishes her fries and falls asleep. Em surveys the anxieties of fatherhood, the dueling strands of love and rage that wind around one another like lengths of barbed wire. I’m reminded of a story by the writer Andre Dubus, who lived in Haverhill, Mass., and wrote with a Masshole sensibility that assuaged my homesickness when I moved to New York. In the story, a good Catholic guy helps his daughter dispose of a corpse after she kills someone drunk driving. It ends with the man gone crazy, yelling at God from his lawn. If it had been one of his sons, the man explains to the Lord, he would have let him rot in jail. But a daughter is different; God can’t understand; God only ever had a son.

  I imagine Nina in the passenger seat instead of my sister. In this fantasy, Nina’s a redhead like Wendy, downy chinned and puffy cheeked. A sun rash blooms on her pale skin. We’re coming home from a day at the beach. Her forehead leaves marks on the window. A towel draped over the seat to stop sand from dirtying the Porsche comes loose in her twisting and falls to the floor. I can’t picture her face.

  Detective Ryan looks tired, back curved in T. rex scoliosis, tie already loose, a strip of lettuce crusted to his collar. He’s grown a salt-and-pepper beard that adds five years to his appearance, but helps to hide his second chin. An unplucked bridge connects his eyebrows’ distant boroughs. The gun sits on a steel tray that belongs in a dentist’s office, a resting spot for the dentist’s torture tools. It glimmers beneath Detective Quinn’s desk lamp, still slightly wet from its bath in the toilet.

  “To summarize,” says Quinn. “A heroin addict, who you hadn’t seen in twenty years until he turned up on the night of the murder, disappeared for a week, then took a four-and-a-half-hour bus ride . . .”


  “Sometimes more with traffic,” I add.

  Rachel gives me a look, but I know from TV that timelines are important.

  “Why don’t we round up and say an even five hours?”

  “I think that’s unnecessary,” I say. “Maybe just note that it sometimes takes longer. It also might have taken less time if he took an express bus.”

  Quinn taps his skull to indicate he’s stored the information.

  “I’ll start again: a heroin addict, who you hadn’t seen in twenty years until he conveniently”—I don’t like his conveniently—“showed up on the night of the murder, disappeared for a week, took a four-and-a-half-hour bus ride—give or take, considering traffic and whether the bus he took was express—to the Berkshires, where he walked five miles from the bus station to your parents’ doorstep, the location of which he remembered from a visit he made twenty years ago. Upon arrival, you invited this alleged killer inside, where he confessed to the murder, to which you responded by doing nothing. Correct?”

  I nod.

  “He then went to sleep, woke sometime around sunrise, conveniently”—that word again—“left the murder weapon in the toilet, before walking another five miles to the highway, where he hitched a ride on a bread truck bound for Canada.”

  “Bread truck was just an example. It could have been any kind of truck. Or not a truck at all. Maybe just a regular car. Maybe somewhere other than Canada.”

  Ryan says, “Noted.”

  Quinn continues: “Then, instead of alerting state and local police of this dangerous fugitive’s possible whereabouts, you decided to take a three-and-a-half-hour drive—making good time due to light traffic, and only stopping once for McDonald’s and a bathroom break—directly to this precinct to present Detective Ryan and myself with the murder weapon, allowing the fugitive ample time to cross the Canadian border.”

  “Yes, exactly,” I say.

  “Okay then,” says Quinn.

  “When you say it, it sounds . . .”

  “Ridiculous?”

  “What about the gun?” I say.

  “What about the gun?”

  “It’s right there.”

  We all look. Ryan scratches his bearded butt chin. Quinn pokes his teeth with the tip of a mechanical pencil. I try to say something, but find myself dry-mouthed. Rachel tags in.

  “Can’t you, like, do ballistics or whatever?”

  “Sure,” says Quinn. “And we will. It takes time.”

  I scan the room for the map board on which newspaper cutouts are connected to mug shots via dry-erase marker. If this were basic cable, then I’d be the suspect, the unsuspecting mark in a vast conspiracy, torn between my distrust of the cops and my fear of retribution from a vaguely ethnic underworld gang. My name would be circled in red, the constant at which all points connect. In real life, the white guy is presumed innocent. Why pursue him when there’s an easier mark with a court-appointed lawyer, like Donnell?

  Besides, these detectives aren’t the savants we know from TV. Quinn resembles a cornstalk with his amber waves of flattop and the willowy body that sways beneath the ceiling fan’s artificial wind. He stares at my sister’s T-shirt. She turned it inside out before we came inside, but the silkscreened letters can still be seen, backward, through the thin poly-blend.

  “Spock cuf?” Quinn says. “What’s that, like, a Star Trek thing?”

  “Sure,” says Rachel.

  He gives her a Vulcan salute. Rachel offers a peace sign in return.

  “The gun,” I manage.

  “Look,” Quinn says. “Even if the bullets match, and even if this alleged guy’s prints are on the weapon, how do we know you didn’t put them there yourself to help your pal Donnell?”

  “You’re saying I . . .”

  “I’m not saying anything. Just that we’ll look into it. But right now we’ve got a guy going to trial, and we have a motive, and multiple witnesses, and an extremely damning piece of evidence. Of course, we’ll continue to investigate if anything comes up, but right now we’re happy with the story we’ve got.”

  I look to Ryan for help, but the other detective has sat down to rest, fingers pressed against his temples like he’s listening hard or not at all. Rachel smacks her gum and blows an oversized bubble. Quinn holds up his pencil, but Rachel pops the bubble on her own.

  “I feel faint,” I say, and grab the doorknob, of all things, to steady myself. The knob turns and the bolt unlatches, and I’m dragged halfway into the hall. I pull myself back in and search for the right thing to say, a password that might unlock these detectives’ vaulted hearts.

  “Everybody grieves differently,” says Quinn. I didn’t take him for a pop psychologist, but perhaps my own response is so prescribed that the detective’s on autopilot, repeating platitudes from a department-issued handbook on grief. “We don’t always get the kind of closure we want. I understand this impulse to keep searching, to find a story that better suits our needs.”

  “This isn’t a story,” I say.

  “Whatever you want to call it.”

  “Broder, he took a real gun—that gun—and shot . . .”

  “Ricky,” Rachel says.

  “That’s possible,” says Ryan.

  “Donnell’s in jail right now. In a cell, a real cell, actual jail. And his daughter—god, Jackie, I don’t . . . Don’t you care?”

  “Of course we do,” says Ryan. “Like I said, we’ll look into it.”

  I let myself slide down to the floor.

  “I want to see him,” I say. “Donnell. I want to see him.”

  My closest point of comparison, smell-wise, to this prison, is the Port Authority bus depot basement. But even that cesspool of slop is less nauseating than what permeates this place, an institutional haze comprised of foot fungus, vending-machine ham sandwiches, and human feces that comes up through the grates in a continuous wave.

  “I guess you get used to it,” I say, and look around. Visitors pinch noses while the visited inmates remain calmly anosmic. I want to present a strong front for Donnell, to look right for the part that I’m here to perform, that of gung-ho redeemer on a mission for justice, undaunted by odors that stand in his way. The avocado tint Rachel’s cheeks have taken on does not recommend her for the sidekick role.

  “Used to what?” says Donnell.

  I mime sniffing the air, choking on fumes.

  “Oh that. A sewer backed up this morning. I don’t think it’s usually this bad.”

  The room looks like a cafeteria, but there are bars on the windows and a lineman-esque guardbot blocks the exit. The primary activity appears to be eating, and the prefix I’d use to mark its style is: speed-. Burgers vanish into faces, leaving drippings on tables and grease-spotted paper bags. Chicken bones pile up like Jenga tiles. Fingers are licked. No one is impeded by the smell.

  The inmates are young, baby-faced twentysomethings, maybe even some teens. Their visitors are uniformly female, some with infants or toddlers in tow. Most could be mistaken for students, which would make Donnell their teacher. Except that, today, his air of erudition has been swapped for fatigue. His Afro has lost volume. His lips are dry and chapped. He hasn’t mentioned Carrie Bradshaw even once.

  I offer my ChapStick and Donnell accepts. The guardbot beeps and turns in our direction. A blue light flashes then ceases and the beeping stops. The ChapStick has been deemed non-contraband. Mouth closed, Donnell drags the waxy tip across both lips, then reverses direction and applies a second coat. Normally I’m not a sharer of ChapStick—too fearful of germs—and I hope that this offer represents something larger: my willingness to swap resources and fluids, to make personal concessions for the good of his cause. Donnell returns the item and the guardbot turns away.

  “How is it?” I ask. “In here?”

  He shrugs as if to say: look around and take a wild fucking guess.
I sense an aggression that I don’t hold against him. He doesn’t get why I’m here, or why I’ve brought the face-tattooed delinquent by my side, as if I’m the leader of a Scared Straight program and Donnell’s a human warning to naïve white girls considering careers as black American men.

  “I’m here to help,” I say, and he remains silent, brushes nonexistent lint from the breast of his jumpsuit. I tell him about Broder’s arrival last night, relay the subsequent chain of events: Broder’s confession to deaf ears, finding the gun in the toilet, our frustrating meeting with Ryan and Quinn. I highlight positive aspects, like the promise of the coming ballistics report. I look to Rachel for support but her cheeks have turned an even darker green.

  “Jesus,” Donnell says. “So this guy’s in Canada. And you didn’t think to alert, say, border patrol?”

  “I thought the best thing to do was get here quickly with the gun.”

  “That’s what you thought?” Donnell says.

  It occurs to me that this morning, in my panic and haste, I may have made some wrong decisions in regard to procedure. And by wrong, I mean selfish. I didn’t want the cops taking prints from the toilet lid and turning my parents’ house upside down. I didn’t want to wait hours for the sketch artist to arrive. I wanted the momentum of my Porsche on the highway. I wanted Em in my ears, Wendy in my zip code, Ricky’s headstone in my rearview. Now Broder’s gone, and Donnell may be screwed until he turns up again. Detective Quinn said he found a partial fingerprint on the SD bracelet retrieved from Donnell’s apartment. If Quinn planted the print on the bracelet, then who’s to say he won’t plant one on the gun?

  It all feels surreal: this bizarre causal chain, this week of my life. It’s a nightmare from which I’ve yet to wake, until of course I must accept that I’m already awake. Maybe all causal chains feel surreal to guys like me—derivatives traders, keepers of the status quo—because reality’s a thing we’ve been conditioned to un-see until it’s too late. And then we wake into the ugliness, and we become woke; we wake into our own unbearable wokeness. And we try—half-heartedly and much too late—to fix the messes we’ve made. Only at easing our guilt do we succeed.