Sensation Machines

Copyright © 2020 by Adam Wilson
All rights reserved.
Published by
Soho Press, Inc.
227 W 17th Street
New York, NY 10011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilson, Adam (Adam Zachary), 1982- author.
Sensation machines / Adam Wilson.
New York, NY : Soho, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019059162
ISBN 978-1-64129-165-1
eISBN 978-1-64129-166-8
Subjects: 1. Political fiction. 2. Black humor (Literature)
3. Satire.
Classification: LCC PS3623.I57779 S46 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


 
For Sarah


Selfies


 
Once again at the beginning I am down on Front Street,
by the old drugstore, the pharmacy where all healing starts.
—Alice Notley


Michael
On Monday, the third of December, roughly twenty-four hours before my oldest and closest friend would be murdered, I woke with sinus pain, an itchy scalp, and the accumulated clog of postnasal drip. At 2 a.m. I’d taken a Trazodone—a mild antidepressant prescribed as a sleep aid—and in the cocoon of the drug’s afterglow, as dawn shot itself through our casement windows and a bacon scent blew in from downstairs, I watched my wife sleep: pillowless, chin tilted to ceiling like a dental patient’s.
Wendy’s nostrils flared on each exhale and she issued grunts in a lower register than she used in waking life. Her speaking voice is affectedly high-pitched, the product of being five foot ten and embarrassed about it, but these grunts came from her gut, from the bile-scorched basement of her intestines. Most of the bedbug bites had scabbed off her forehead and cheeks, but some leaked pus and blood from where she’d scratched. Still, she was stunning, like an actress made up for a zombie flick, who, despite the artist’s best efforts with latex and greasepaint, remains implausibly lovely. No scabs could distract from the neat plane of her nose, or the buoyant, red curls spread across our new SureGuard anti-allergen sheets.
We’d discovered the bedbugs the previous week, and our apartment had since been emptied of clothing and other possibly contaminated items. In the absence of curtains, the sun now striped the wall where our dresser once sat, a Civil War–era showpiece bought above market value in a heated eBay auction. The image brought to mind the afternoon, three years before, when Wendy and I stood in the empty loft and surveyed the space, bright with promise, soon to be filled with everything we owned.
Most of that stuff was still here—Wendy’s Miró and Kandinsky prints, my books on hip-hop, Apple products and other electronics, cookware and baby gear, plus our collections: nineties cassingles, ceramic hands, antique hat mannequins, deadstock Air Jordans, inherited Judaica—but the room felt bare, more warehouse than home, though here we were, inhabiting, and here was the cat, leaping onto the air bed where she perched atop Wendy’s head. It looked like Wendy was wearing one of those sable hats that protect the bald domes of oligarchs from frosty Moscow winters. She threw the crying cat across the loft.
The cat landed on four feet and scurried toward the bathroom. A gaunt, acrobatic animal with silver fur and green eyes the color of a faded military rucksack, she was a stray I’d found picking at garbage outside our building a few weeks prior. The cat’s aggression toward Wendy spoke to an interspecies female territoriality, and my wife, defensive, had later accused the cat of being bedbug patient zero. Wendy still appeared to be asleep.
I leaned in and kissed her. Our accounts were overdrawn, creditors called me by the hour, my job was in limbo, and Wendy knew none of this, but at least we appeared to be bedbug free.
It was early winter, and would reach eighty by noon, but at 6:30 a.m. bodega owners braced themselves in jackets and hats as they rolled up their chains to signal the commencement of commerce, diurnal music as yet undisturbed by the market crash that had put the dollar in freefall and Clayton & Sons, the bank where I worked, on the verge of insolvency. There would be no bailout this time, and in this panicked climate, a proposal for Universal Basic Income had passed through Congress and was headed to the Senate for final approval.
TV news flashed shuttered windows and boarded doorways, but here, in my corner of upmarket Brooklyn, things appeared status quo. The day’s first delivery drones descended from tree height to eye level before lowering landing gear and making soft contact outside the remaining brownstones and the high-rise condos that had mostly replaced them. Pigeons scattered, wary of the claws that carried shrink-wrapped Gap sweaters, flatbread sandwiches, and other objects impossible to print at home. Earlier drones were sci-fi chic—floating orbs and baby Death Stars—but people found them sinister. The solution was to design the objects after actual birds, and now it was Hitchcock twenty-four seven. I turned up Court Street toward the Brooklyn Bridge.
I should mention that I’m not from around here. I was raised off an exit ramp in East Coast exurbia, where every gas station sells Red Sox crapaphernalia and the strip malls aren’t yet full franchise; they’re still half occupied by local bars and burger joints, blue-lit, filled with Carhartted Brosephs and their female companions—Tara, Britney, Aurora, etc.—sassed in green eyeshadow, in beerlight shadow, in Bud Light soft-stupor, whittling away their middle twenties with wet eyes and dry skin, wet bars and dry heaves, and Japanese trucks that somehow still run after all those miles spewing dust and American fumes.
Of course, that’s a romantic half-truth because (1) I’m from the Berkshires, twenty minutes from the quaint town of Lenox, which is home to both Tanglewood and a community of retired Bostonians who antique on Saturdays, then head to Williamstown Sundays for a taste of the theatre. Their cottages are dotted with Rockwellian Americana (purchased from the nearby Rockwell museum), scented by potpourri and sawdust, cinders in fireplace, local kale simmering on stovetop, steeping itself in red wine reduction as grandma dusts off the viola, prepped to serenade grandkids with riffage from the Charles Ives songbook; and (2) my