Sensation Machines

the necessary accessories, rubbed her belly and sang to it, my out-of-tune baritone penetrating her epidermal walls, piping Boyz II Men covers into the almost-baby’s watery bedroom. We took birthing classes and researched strollers, bought tiny Air Jordans and spent evenings babyproofing the loft. When Amazon sent someone to assemble the crib, I watched like a hawkeyed foreman. We could not have been more prepared.
Our daughter wasn’t technically stillborn—the monitor showed a heartbeat when she emerged—and the term is a misnomer anyway. So much is moving, like the slithering liquid surrounding the body, or the doctors’ and nurses’ scurrying hands, creating a charade of motion, a defiant charade against the situation’s fixity. And I don’t know if Wendy knew something was wrong when the room fell silent in the absence of our daughter’s cry, but either way I saw her first, this beautiful human, crowning into air she couldn’t find a way to breathe.
Andrea K. continued to scan my selections. She moved with metric precision, never pausing to price-check an item or rotate a package to locate the barcode. In a theater at Vassar, this might have played as modern dance, a misguided commentary on the Tao of retail. Here, in Manhattan, it was no more or less than that endangered species, the low-wage job.
“Morning,” she said in cheery voice. She had a sympathetic countenance, Andrea K., and I liked her tattoos—a kinematic schema of a dragonfly’s wings, slot-machine cherries, the injunction Look Alive—which, with their stylistic mishmash, spoke to the fickle whims of the human heart.
“Taking a trip?” she asked, as I bagged my stash.
It had occurred to me that Wendy and I could use a weekend away. To get out on the road, bunk down at a boutique hotel upstate. We’d drink champagne and order room service sundaes, a last blast on my company card before the company burned or I got canned and they killed my expense account.
“Thinking about it,” I said. “I’ve been wanting to take my wife somewhere nice. Where would you go this time of year?”
The cashier eyed my crumpled outfit, my year’s supply of Rogaine, my bottle of two hundred prostate-health pills.
“Preventative,” I said, in reference to the pills, or perhaps to the lot. But she was admiring my suit, a Crayola-blue, shawl lapel Fashion Week sample. Kanye had worn the same one during the pro-union rant at the Grammys that announced his return to the political left.
“That a Yeezy?” she said.
I tugged my lapel like it might make the jacket magically unwrinkle. I wasn’t sure whether to be proud or embarrassed by the item’s exorbitant price. She handed back my Visa, which her machine had declined.
“It’s telling me to cut this card in half.”
I gave her my Amex instead.
“So where might a frugal guy like me take his wife?”
The answer was obvious to Andrea K.
“Storm King, dude. It’s only, like, twenty bucks to get in, and chicks Instagram the shit out of that place.”
She was referring to an outdoor museum, a couple hours upstate, that was a popular setting for romantic montages in films about the love lives of the Brooklyn precariat. I hadn’t taken Andrea K. for the type. In my own youth, her look would have been labeled alternative, and carried with it a particular set of assumptions, one being that its owner held a healthy disdain for the status markers of bourgeois life. But young people these days didn’t buy into such rigid segmentation; they just wanted to Instagram the shit out of stuff. So did Wendy. Many times she’d suggested that we drive up to Storm King. I’d always deferred, wary of cliché, or maybe only traffic on the Palisades Parkway.
Today would not be an exception. But later, after everything went down, I wondered what might have turned out differently if I’d heeded the cashier’s advice. In this alternate history, I convince Wendy to play hooky from work, and I whisk her upstate. In this alternate history, humbled before nature and modernist sculpture, I find the courage to come clean about the millions of dollars that I lost on the market. In this alternate history, Wendy is angry, but after hours of open and honest discussion, she arrives at forgiveness. And in this alternate history, we hit traffic on our way back to Brooklyn, and Wendy never meets Lucas or lands the Project Pinky account, and my best friend, Ricky, skips the Great Gatsby party because I’m not there to be his wingman, and he avoids the riot, and he doesn’t get murdered.
But I was not ready, just yet, to come clean. There was still time to fix things before Wendy found out. I had a plan, and I was heading to Ricky’s to ask for his help.
Andrea K. ran my Amex, handed back a receipt. Her forearm, I noticed, featured a list of men’s names: Albert, Sadeeq, Tino, Bartholomew. Each tattooed name was struck through with a line.
“Those guys take you to Storm King?”
“Bartholomew did.”
“And?”
“It was nice.”
“So what happened?”
She rolled her eyes. “One good deed,” she explained, “does not a winner make.” She studied my card before handing it back. “Are you a loser, Michael Mixner?”
I told her it remained to be seen.

Wendy
I was already thinking of leaving Michael by the time we found blood on the bedsheets. The amount was minuscule, a few dark dots. I assumed I was spotting.
There was more blood, the next day, on Michael’s side of the bed. Michael said he’d cut himself shaving. We didn’t connect the marks on our skin to these stains. The marks itched, and I’d falsely sourced them to dander allergies. Michael had recently brought home an itinerant tabby. As a child I was afraid of cats, their abject nihilism. I still am. At night, the unnamed cat gnawed my heels and toes. Sometimes she broke skin, another explanation for the blood.
When I uploaded photos of Michael’s bites to MeMD.com, the range of responses was broad. There were fifty-four comments. One user suggested that Michael had