The wind’s too strong to ride roofless, but we brave it, gun in the glovebox. My Porsche clanks along in the right-hand lane. It’s been due for a tune-up for years. The car crosses the Taconic, paced by Vermont-plated Subarus and shit box hatchbacks bearing Red Sox insignia. White-bearded riders on Harleys from New Hampshire zip past like they’re late to audition for the ZZ Top reunion tour. New York plates are bolted to an absurdly high number of vans and SUVs, which gives me pause to wonder where they find city parking. Maybe in the badlands out beyond the limits, like Westchester. Rachel’s on my right, wind in her hair, sun on her scorpion. She speaks, but I can’t make her out over the noise.
“What did you say?”
“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.
“Here’s what I don’t get,” says Rachel. “If Broder stole the bracelet, then pawned it for bus fare, then how did the cops get it and plant it in the first place?”
“Maybe it’s not the same bracelet,” I say.
“Of course it’s not the same bracelet,” says Donnell.
In my mind, police corruption still belongs in the fictional realm, but I’m coming around. I alter my earlier definition of privilege to include the expectation of integrity in dealings with the law.
“We can’t dwell on mistakes,” I say, meaning mine. “We need a plan.”
“What I need is a lawyer,” says Donnell.
“Right,” I say. “A lawyer.”
“Because the one I have is useless.”
“Okay. Then we’ll get you a lawyer.”
He leans across the table.
“And you’re gonna pay for it?”
“Pay for it, right. Huh.”
Donnell crosses his arms.
“No, no,” I say. “I mean sure, I’m happy to pay. The thing is that my finances . . .”
“I see,” says Donnell.
“But we’ll figure it out. I can sell, well—I have assets. I have sneakers.”
“You have sneakers?” he says. “Because lawyers get paid in sneakers.”
Rachel suddenly sprints for the trash. I worry the guardbot will mistake her for an inmate and light up her brain stem with five hundred volts. But she reaches the garbage can safely. Inmates and visitors watch. Her theatrical purge cuts the tension in the room. People laugh and clap. The guardbot wheels to the vending machine. It puts a claw in a keyhole and buys Rachel a bottled water out of the kindness of its humanely programmed heart.
“Look, Michael,” says Donnell. “I appreciate your willingness to help. And I’m glad to know this guy’s out there, and that we know who he is. But what I need right now is money. I’m going broke in here, missing shifts at work, bills piling up. And the kind of legal team I need won’t be cheap. Do you see what I’m saying?”
I’m close enough to see the spreading dampness on the armpits of his jumpsuit, his white-knuckle grip against its loose cotton sleeves.
“It should have been me,” I say. “In here. It should have been me in here instead of you.”
“It shouldn’t be either of us. It should be the guy who’s actually guilty.”
“I’m the constant at the center of the map board, the obvious choice to play the unsuspecting mark. If this were a movie, I’d be the lead. You’d be, I don’t know, the cool best friend.”
“Best friend, huh?”
“Good friend?” I try.
Donnell says, “This is the problem with you finance guys. You think you’re the star of the movie. You always think you’re the star.”
We drive back to the city under smog-painted sky. It’s a balmy evening, a few weeks from Christmas, and the townhouses twinkle once we’re off the highway, and trees are for sale outside the bodegas. Hundreds of drones converge on Columbus Circle, empty of product, returning to base to meet the clear-skies curfew.
Rachel double-parks outside Wendy’s dad’s. She keeps the car running and I head inside.
“Hello,” someone says, when I unlock the door. I don’t recognize the voice, and can barely hear it over the music, an arena rock anthem playing loud.
Lucas Van Lewig sits in the living room, in Fred’s easy chair. He’s got the air of an ex–college quarterback gone on to corporate success based on family connections and a firm handshake: sandy hair, great teeth. He wears a distressed bomber jacket that, despite looking like it belongs to midcentury American action abroad, retails, I know, for four figures at Saks. His eyes roam the length of me, as if this Scantron-style assessment will bear weight on our conversation. I’m conscious of my poor posture and dad-bod. The song ends and another begins. This one I recognize.
“Freddie Mercury was a genius,” Lucas says, as if it’s an inarguable fact that pertains to our encounter. “He never got the critical admiration he deserved, but critics are scum, as I’m sure you understand, and if a flamboyantly gay man’s ability to make aggressively hetero sports fans chant and weep isn’t a sign of true iconoclasm, then I don’t know what is. You’ve got to remember this was pre-Drake. Mercury never saw the dawn of the metrosexual or the sensitive asshole. He never knew the Poptimist movement. But history will be kind. I can feel it in my bones. Is this real life or is this just fantasy? Profound? It’s almost biblical.”
“Is Wendy here?” I say.
“I thought you’d be taller,” Lucas replies.
His voice is deep as a leading man’s and flirtatiously deadpan. It’s like he’s got popcorn caught in his throat. Like he’s getting rimmed through a hole in the seat cushion as we speak.
“And better-looking,” he adds. “But look at you. You’re losing your hair.”
He waves as if swiping a dating app, replacing me with someone more to his taste. I instinctively raise a hand to cover my scalp.
“The Rogaine’s not working as advertised,” I say, unsure how we’ve arrived at this discussion of my failings.
“Propecia?” he offers.
“Kills the libido.”
Lucas gives an understanding nod despite the fact that his hair is thick as bear fur, effervescent as chemical sunset, coiffed and berry-smelling as Baywatch-era David Hasselhoff’s. It’s possible his erections suffer for this vanity, but it seems unlikely. He sips from a tiny bottle of Coca-Cola using a pink children’s twisty straw. When he’s done sipping, he puts the straw in his mouth, rolls it around on his tongue.
“Cuban Coke,” he says. “It’s the new Mexican Coke. Very refreshing. Want one?”
I shake my head.
“The Mexicans switched from cane sugar to high fructose a few years back. People still buy by the caseload. It’s these tiny bottles that sell the product, their nostalgic appeal. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing the public to ignore the fine print. It’s how your industry got in the mess it’s in. Luckily for me, the Cubans are still uncompromised. If there’s one thing Castro instilled, it’s a belief in the superiority of raw cane. I respect him for that, if nothing else.”
“You haven’t told me where Wendy is.”
“She left already. The keynote starts in an hour. I need to head down there myself. I just stopped by to drop off some Cuban Coke for Fred. The guy can’t get enough. I mean, at his age. But a man needs a vice. I stopped smoking a year ago. I still get the craving.”
He opens his mouth and lets the straw drop. We watch it flutter to the carpet.
“You’re wondering what it was like to grow up under my father. Most men have a story that begins: The most important thing my father ever told me, and whatever that thing is, it’s almost universally some idiotic lesson gleaned from his experiences in love or war. My father never told me anything.”
“What keynote?” I say.
“Greg’s keynote speech at DisruptNY. I hope you’ll join me. It’s really a good one. I wrote a lot of it myself, though your wife read it this morning and threw in some bon mots. We’re launching the product and I think you should be there. I expect it will clarify some things.”
“What things?”
“The future of the human race, for one. The end of unemployment. The dawn of augmented man. But we should start smaller.”
“The suit?” I say, remembering my G-chat with Greg.
“Ah, so Ricky told you.”
“Just the name,” I say. “I only know the name.”
“Well, did he tell you that you’re the sole benefactor of his Sykodollars? All his SD will be passed on to you, Michael Mixner, and after tonight, there will be quite a lot of it.”
“What do you mean?”
He takes the bracelet from his pocket and puts it in my hands. The item’s heavier than I imagined. Ricky’s initials are engraved on the case’s back and a small curly hair is caught in the clasp. I wonder if the hair is his, if it got pulled loose when Broder ripped the bracelet from his wrist.
“GPS,” Lucas explains. “I like to keep track of what I put into the world. The pawnbroker let it go for fifty bucks. As for the anonymity thing: I mean, it’s true, for the most part. The government has no idea who’s holding these assets. But I do. Once people started getting deep in SD, I needed a way to track where it was. The real question is why I’m choosing to tell you when I could have kept this information to myself. But I’m a rich man, Michael, I don’t need the money. If I’d kept it, then what kind of guy would I be?”
“A bad one?”
“One of the first conversations I had with Cortes was about you. He was telling me about his trader friend, how his guilt about the crash had turned him into a half-assed Marxist. We had a good laugh about that. Cortes thought it was positively hilarious. You, with your loft and your Porsche, singing the Internationale. Ha-ha, am I right? So we’re laughing and laughing, and then there’s a pause. And Cortes turns to me and says, you know, I’ve thought a lot about it, and I’ve decided Marx was wrong. You know that thing about religion being the opiate of the masses? Well, Marx was wrong. So I said, okay, I’ll bite, if religion isn’t the opiate of the masses then what is? And you know what Cortes responds?”
“Opium,” I say. He’d used the same line on me.
“Correct,” Lucas says. “He said opium is the opiate of the masses.”
“A searing insight.”
“We were stoned off our gourds. I’m not usually a weed guy, but the shit he had, Jesus. Maybe that’s why we were laughing so hard.”
“Maybe,” I say.
“But it wasn’t until later that I got what he meant. See, Marx thought that people want answers to the big, old questions, like what we’re doing on this earth, where we go when we die, and why anyone would choose to watch golf on TV. But Cortes, I realized, knew better. People don’t want answers. They just want to buy shit. Opium you can hold. You can hold it, and smoke it, and pay a hooker to blow it up your anus with a straw. Opium’s retail, that’s what Cortes meant.”
His phone buzzes and he looks at his screen. “Okay,” Lucas says. “The limo’s downstairs. We can finish this talk on the way.”
“I have a ride,” I reply.
“Suit yourself,” he says, and leaves.
I shut the windows and turn off the lights. Before locking up, I look into Wendy’s bedroom. I know she’s been staying here, but the evidence is scant: contact case on the nightstand, an empty water glass. The bed’s nicely made and her suitcase is closed in a corner on the floor.
Greg moves across the dais in wood-heeled chukka boots he occasionally stomps for effect. He’s got more hair than I remember, a thick top-mop that covers what I’m pretty sure was recently a bald spot. He reminisces on his days as a point guard, describing the naysayers who said that a five-six white kid from the Maryland suburbs would never play college ball. He tells of his diverse array of teammates, their strong sense of brotherhood, how sports prepares one for business through the acquisition of discipline and leadership qualities.
His anecdote culminates in the revelation that, during Greg’s senior year, alum and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar subsidized the team’s uniforms. Greg stamps out each syllable of the mogul’s name with his heel as if it’s a war chant, as if the audience knows to join in celebrating not only the entrepreneur, but the system that rewards a PEZ collector with a billion-dollar IPO.
Greg manages to segue from basketball to politics by alluding to Omidyar’s humanitarian ventures, including his micro-funding efforts in Zimbabwe. He explains Omidyar’s stand against WikiLeaks, which leads to a discussion of the political responsibilities of business leaders, which further leads to a biased reading of the current economic crisis, and the way that the extreme left as well as the extreme right have co-opted social media, and how Greg’s working to bring voice back to the reasonable mainstream. The phrase Reasonable Mainstream appears on the wall, and I imagine this isn’t the last time I’ll hear or see it, that a young senator, somewhere, is taking notes, preparing to dazzle the next RNC with a unifying sermon.
Greg moves on to the concept of work. He talks about being raised by a single mom who hustled two jobs to put food on the table and save for Greg’s college fund. She cleaned houses in the mornings, bagged groceries at night. He says he used to feel embarrassed by the demeaning nature of his mother’s work, afraid that peers would see her in their homes or at Safeway, in her sweat-blotched bandannas, with her varicose veins. He used to feel embarrassed, but his mother did not. She was proud of her work and the things it allowed her to provide; proud of her reputation as a cleaner, never stealing like certain other practitioners in her trade—and here I sense a racial element to Greg’s insinuation, though no one else in the crowd appears to notice—proud of the trust these wealthy families placed in her hands, allowing access to their costliest possessions. Looking back, Greg is no longer ashamed. He’s grateful for the sacrifice his mother made, a sacrifice which, he now realizes, she made for his benefit. Still, at the time, things were tough. Working so hard meant his mother rarely had time to spend with her son, and the time they did have was spent before the TV in fatigued silence.
“There were no homemade dinners, only instant noodles and frozen pizza,” Greg explains to knowing nods from the crowd, a multi-ethnic survey of techies, ad guys, and Ivy League MBAs, some of whom, I imagine, come from similar backgrounds, watched their parents do slave work at menial jobs so their children could eat açai bowls in the Stanford dining halls, and spend semesters in Goa studying contact improv, and settle down, after college, to six-figure salaries at places like Google and American Express. People, in other words, not so different from me.
“My mother rarely made it to any of my games,” Greg adds, presumably for the parents in the room, Park Slope freelancers who set their own hours around their kids’ schedules, and who wouldn’t dream of missing the lute and drum performance that concludes little Madison’s Ancient Instruments class. Greg looks wistful as he stares past the crowd to the room’s back wall and wipes what may well be a tear from his cheek, though the lighting and distance make it difficult to tell.
The phrase #WorkWillSetYouFree replaces Reasonable Mainstream on the wall. A photo appears beneath the hashtag: young Greg, maybe ten years old. A mesh jersey drapes like a gown on his undeveloped frame. His mother stands behind him, smiling with pride, the implication being that this rare opportunity to see her son play has imbued this worn-out woman with uncommon joie de vivre.
“But what if,” Greg says. “What if there were a way for my mom to be at my games while she was at work?”
After asking this question, he steps to the side. The image of Greg and his mom at the basketball court is replaced by another, the same one I saw on a billboard in midtown on the car ride here: a photograph of a construction site populated by male models, while a blond woman wearing a white negligee and an expression of cartoonish lust looks on from the side.
“Now, as you can see, this man is at work. And this woman, well, for all we know she may be at work too,” Greg says, having fluidly dropped the tearful tone and returned to his previous swagger. His comment is followed by sparse chuckles from male members of the crowd, which are instantly silenced by reproachful stares from their female companions, who suspect any joke at a sex worker’s expense, and any image that so closely adheres to the clichés of male fantasy, even coming from a speaker who, like his mother with the wealthy families whose houses she cleaned, has done so much, already, to earn their trust.
“I’m going to ask you to do something,” says Greg. “I want you to reach down under your seat and find the AR helmet that was placed there before you arrived. I want you all to put your helmets on. I promise they don’t bite.”
More chuckles and murmurs, but people put on the helmets, eager for the part of this talk that they came to hear, the part where the promised product will be unveiled. I’m eager too, and a little bit scared, so I put on the helmet and watch the work site come to life before my eyes in a seamless 3-D that surrounds me on all sides. Worker-models spread mortar and lay bricks, and the negligeed woman bends to lift a wrench that has fallen to the ground. This causes some groans from the women in the crowd, though most remain silent, awaiting Greg’s explanation, still anticipating whatever comes next.
We watch this play out for a moment, and then there’s a rupture, and the room goes dark. When things come back into focus, us helmeted onlookers have been transported to an entirely different scene. The same cast of model-workers is here, but instead of laying bricks, they—and we—watch kids play basketball. Our formerly negligeed woman is wearing a sundress, and her face, we now see, resembles Greg’s mom’s, though in her current incarnation she looks fit and robust. Through the magic of augmented reality, one of the kids playing ball is Young Greg, and his model/mom cheers as her son sinks a jumper.
“These people,” Greg says, through a speaker in my ear. “These people are also at work.”
At his words, Greg’s model/mom stands. She steps out of the bleachers, and steps out of the image, and steps down onto the dais where she poses beside her now-grown son. It’s unclear if this woman is here in the flesh, or if the optics on my helmet have created this illusion. Either way, she looks real. In unison, Adult Greg and his model/mom begin to undress. There’s a gasp from the audience, and another, smaller gasp, when it becomes clear that beneath their clothes they are not nude, but are, instead, wearing skin-tight nude bodysuits, conspicuous only for their few tiny zippers and the absence of genitals, nipples, and hair.
“We’re living in something very close to a utopia,” Greg says. “Food is in abundance. So is medical care. Cars run on sunlight. Meat grows on trees. If you cut off your finger you can print a new one at home and fly in Drone MD to inject you with anesthetic and sew it back on. All of us in this room are better off than we’d have been even fifty years ago.”
Behind them plays a montage of half a century’s progress. Depression-era amputees in wood and wicker wheelchairs are replaced by laughing kids who pop and lock on titanium prosthetics in a dance class being taught by Rihanna. We see various firsts: first mobile phone, first home computer, first AR helmet. The camera pans a grove of stem-cell steak trees where slabs of meat hang like heavy fruit.
“But not everything’s perfect,” Greg says. “We, in this room, are better off, but not everyone is. The jobs that people like my mom needed in order to make ends meet, well, a lot of those jobs no longer exist.”
A new montage plays. We watch bots build bots; we watch bots wait tables, run tills in bodegas and clothing stores. We see a room full of bots wearing headsets, taking customer service calls. And where this leads: faces of the homeless, tents in Tompkins Square Park, scenes from an #Occupy rally.
Greg explains that one solution to this problem is to pass this bill, the UBI. But when he considers this solution, he thinks of his mother and her pride. He wonders whether she would have wanted a handout, whether that would have made her feel good about her position in life, about her larger contributions to the world. He says that when he thinks long and hard, he knows that this solution is highly problematic. That when people get free money, they don’t value it in the same way that they would if the money was earned. That their shame in receiving these handouts makes them spend money in inappropriate ways. They don’t save. They buy drugs. Instead of solving our problems, these handouts create a need for further handouts, for more expensive programs subsidized by the government. He cites a study of dubious origin. He tells the crowd that this country was founded on the idea of work, that it’s a place where every woman deserves the chance to feel pride in her labor. Where every man deserves the opportunity not to take, but to earn. He says that, when it comes down to it, the problem is not about resources, but about their distribution model. And that’s what he’s proposing to fix with this suit.
The phrase distribution model brings visible relief, as Greg returns to a vernacular familiar to this crowd. I can see, on their faces, that these people beside me want so badly to believe that Greg is correct, that there might be a solution to this problem—which, ultimately for them, is the problem of their guilt—that doesn’t involve an increase in their taxes, a blow to their business and savings accounts.
Greg tells us we can take off our helmets. We do, and his model/mom disappears. Once again, he’s alone onstage. He still wears the bodysuit, that was real. A blueprint of it appears behind him, complete with dozens of complicated inserts. The words The Suit™ appear on the wall.
Greg explains about the sensors and the unprecedented data they’ll be used to create. He explains how the data will be used for scientific research and medical advancement. The diagnostic possibilities are limitless. The Suit™’s capacity for early detection could increase average life expectancy by years. He explains the buy-in options, that workers will be paid more for wearing The Suit™ in conjunction with helmets. He explains that The Suit™ can be worn by anyone, anywhere, and for any length of time. That the sky is the limit on how much money a person might make. He explains that a person can even wear The Suit™ while working another job, if so inclined. That a person can wear it to sleep.
The awed silence in the room has come to an end. People snap photos and some record video. They type into tablets, laptops, and phones. I imagine the tweetstorm beginning to rage.
Greg says, “Now I want you to reach out and grab your neighbors’ hands.”
The audience responds in all seriousness, turning themselves into a set of paper dolls. They grew up with shit like this and aren’t embarrassed. My sweaty palms meet other sweaty palms.
“Feel the connectivity,” says Greg. “Feel that deep human frequency. Listen to it hum.”
I try to move quickly, but I’m caught in the flow of human traffic, people beelining for the bathroom, or better cell service in the lobby, or a cocktail bar on Carmine Street that was reviewed in last week’s “Tables for Two.” Wendy catches my eye and steps in my direction before being intercepted by a cheek-kissing acquaintance. Even from five yards away, I can see her cringe at the transfer of microbes to face. It takes all her strength not to wipe the mauve imprint with the sleeve of her sweater. I know because I know my wife.
When I reach the front row, she’s able to escape the attempts of another aggressive schmoozer and pull me backstage. We land in a green room where bottles are popped, Greg’s being toasted, and the Rocky theme plays from someone’s phone, which has been placed in an ice bucket to amplify its sound. Lillian pours champagne into plastic flutes, spilling most on the floor. She winks as she hands me mine in lieu of a hello. I put the flute down and push past the handful of Communitiv.ly employees who mill about Greg. “It’s like I’m a tiger,” he says, “and the stage is my cage.”
Wendy follows me into a de facto dressing area, floor messy with what must be Greg’s rejected performance-wear: leather pants, fur blazer, knee-high biker boots. She gestures to the discards. “I had to convince him the Keith Richards look doesn’t work when you’re five-six and don’t play guitar.”
I think she expects me to laugh, that her coworker’s clownish lack of self-awareness can unite us in snark as it has in the past. She looks nervous, like she sometimes gets with strangers: back stiff, chin to chest, voice trailing at sentence’s end.
“The speech was something, though,” she continues. “You must admit he’s got presence. The audience ate from his hands.”
She forms her palms into a bowl to illustrate what she’s described.
“Reasonable mainstream,” I say. “It’s good. And that suit.”
“You mean The Suit,” says Wendy. “The Suit TM.”
“Right. TM.”
“It’s brilliant, don’t you think?”
I’m not sure what I think. It’s been a long day. I know that The Suit™ may kill the UBI. It may end unemployment and eradicate the concept of personal space. It may be the decisive tool that turns millions of humans into consumerist cyborgs. It may cure cancers, diabetes, and ALS. It may take capitalism to its logical conclusion, the last stop on a journey that began when the first Egyptian sent silk up the Nile, and ends here, in this green room, as the weight of Greg’s most recent bowel movement is AirDropped to the cloud. The reach of this product seems to be without limit, and whether this is a good thing—an even tradeoff for the complete annihilation of the ad-blocking software that protects our fragile, American souls—is better left for the artists of the future to decide.
All I know for certain is that, right now, I don’t care. Maybe tomorrow, in the elucidating light of another sun-bleached morning, I will wake to the throb of my conscience. I will remember Ricky’s body in the open casket, and I’ll remember the fear on Donnell’s face. I will recall Donnell’s need for funds, and his even greater need for Ricky’s SD bracelet. But here, in this moment, I’m looking at Wendy, and all I selfishly see is what the object on my wrist means for us: debts erased from the ledger, amends made to her dad, a chance to let the guilt and resentment rise like steam, leaving us stripped and clean; the way it opens our future like a long-clenched fist that has, without warning, softened its grip.
I say her name and touch her chin. I try to gently nudge it upward so her eyes meet mine. She shakes me off and steps back. I fall forward and try again to stroke her face, but she pushes me away. A hiss whistles through Wendy’s teeth.
“Sorry,” I say.
She lets out a breath, acknowledges her overreaction. She removes a mirror from her purse and checks her reflection, moves a strand of hair behind her ear. She says, “I look like hell.”
“You don’t,” I say.
In fact, she looks gorgeous, a subtle blush job hiding any remnants of bedbug warfare. Wendy’s made-up face offers comforting wisdom: the past can’t be erased, but it can be hidden until it’s forgotten, buried beneath layers of powder and pigment.
“I’m sorry too,” Wendy says. She means for overreacting, but also for more, it seems, from her refusal to meet my eyes or accept an embrace.
“I’m sorrier,” I say back, and spread my arms to show the breadth of my remorse. “I fucked up. I know I fucked up. But I can fix it now.”
I hold out my hand and show her the bracelet. She doesn’t ask questions, but I sense she understands what it means. Maybe Lucas already explained. Wendy raises her chin so that our eyes align. She puts a fingernail at the nexus of her brows, drags it down across her nose and over her mouth.
“I fucked up,” I say.
“I fucked Lucas,” she says.
The kind of drinking we’re doing doesn’t warrant toasts or salutations or even the comforting clap of a sisterly hand across one’s spine. Only the liquor will get rid of this feeling, and only after Rachel and I finish this bottle and I stumble to bed and go black.
Tom Breem’s press conference plays on TV. He explains why he voted against the UBI. The Suit™, Breem thinks, provides a better solution to the unemployment problem. “An American solution,” he says.
In the end, Breem wasn’t the deciding vote. Six other Democrats switched from yea to nay. All cited The Suit™ as a mitigating factor. Beyond these walls, my colleagues surely celebrate; the result of the vote means our industry’s saved. There will be no looting or riots tonight. Even the radicals seem strangely compliant. We’ve reached another inevitable point on the journey from status quo to status quo.
Soon we’re burping, a chorus of escaped air. Rachel burps the alphabet. She burps the national anthem. We are burping and drinking and all I know is it’s dark: this lightless room, the drone-less sky.