But even though Michael isn’t up for conversation, the helmet’s appeal goes beyond its function as a mask; it offers an escape from the visual triggers of grief. So Michael rolls up his Missing Cat sign, turns on the device, and fits it over his head.
The helmet’s heavy and Michael’s still unsteady. He holds the bannister as he inches down the stairs, seeing no difference yet between the cobwebbed real world and its augmented counterpart, though the helmet’s tinted visor darkens everything slightly, an equivalent sensation to wearing sunglasses inside. It’s only when he exits the building and steps onto the street that Shamerica bursts forth, a tumult of chrome spires and silver balustrades, set against the latex-black sidewalk that glints like a river of sunlit tar.
Regions of Shamerica aesthetically vary, consistent only in their miscellany, but Michael’s block feints at loose coherence, collectively informed by Frank Miller comics, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the chemical-plant zone from Sonic 2, and Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. In other words, the neighborhood bears the high-middlebrow imprint—rare for game worlds—of arty Brooklynites Michael’s own age. Across Hoyt Street stands what might resemble a Gothic cathedral if it weren’t tricked out with jet engine propellers, and lining the block are holographic sports cars, octo-motorcycles modeled after in-line skates, and what appears to be a hand-blown glass glacier on the corner of Pacific whose security system is a ring of flames.
Michael sees all this, but he’s not really seeing, still checking for the cat behind trashcans, mailboxes, and the glacier that he knows, in real life, is a Chevy Impala piled with parking tickets; still picturing Ricky, whose body, he guesses, is done being examined, and now lies solitary in a freezer tube.
It’s hot in the helmet, and sweat pools in Michael’s eyebrows as he weaves down the sidewalk, subject to pauses and lurches, less walk than stagger, arms spread for balance like he’s riding a skateboard. He keeps checking to see if Wendy’s texted, or if Broder’s called back, or if, by the grace of a benevolent god, there’s a voicemail from Detective Ryan explaining that there’s been a mistake, the body wasn’t Ricky’s after all.
staples is crowded even though it’s mid-Tuesday. There’s no AC, just a rickety fan spraying dust and room-temperature air. Michael takes off his helmet and tucks it under his arm. He unrolls his sign as he waits in line, and looks at what he’s scrawled. Wendy was right, he should have included a photo.
“How old are your kids?” asks the woman beside him, whose own, a boy, looks about six. The boy hides in the folds of the woman’s skirt. Michael’s sister, Rachel, used to do the same thing when she was that age.
“My kids?”
The woman points at the paper in Michael’s hand, and only now does he get it: his sign’s been mistaken for the work of a child.
Michael puts the helmet back on.
7.
The poster featuring the photo of the entrance at Auschwitz was just an example. An extreme image designed to get Wendy’s attention and stress the paradoxical nature of their campaign. She’s not actually meant to use the image. Lucas gave her the poster, she thinks, as a test. Wendy’s meant to prove that women can be calculating monsters.
And while the #workwillsetyoufree hashtag may draw complaints from Holocaust remembrance groups, Wendy doesn’t think it’s a PR concern. Severed from the image, the hashtagged phrase will only have Holocaust connotations to a minority of people—she saw a recent poll showing that one-third of Gen Zers couldn’t identify Hitler in a photo—and the slogan is banal and uncreative enough that Communitiv.ly can plead plausible deniability regarding its source. A twenty-two-year-old copywriter could have easily, unwittingly, come up with the slogan on his own.
The bigger problem, for Wendy, is strategic. The campaign’s not as straightforward as Lucas’s example would have her believe. In an analogue of the example, she’d be selling the protestant work ethic to Middle America. Convincing flag-waving xenophobes that accepting free money is unpatriotic. That Basic Income is a sneaky liberal trap that would reverse our Cold War triumph and retroactively cause the Russian, Ivan Drago, to pummel Stallone at the end of Rocky IV (a favorite movie of Michael’s). That as people quit their low-wage jobs to live out their days drinking Budweiser on inflatable rafts, a flood of illegals would arrive to replace them, increasing drug smuggling, sex crimes, and the prevalence of Spanish words in colloquial English. That, on the glorious future day when white Jesus has graced them with lottery winnings or a million-dollar inheritance from a long-lost aunt, the government will be there to take 60 percent of that million away. Easier said than done, but at least there’s a precedent; it’s what the Republicans have been selling for decades.
But this is not Wendy’s demo. Her demo is Yelena the Trust-Funded Yoga Instructor, a Jersey-born Bikram maven whose given name is Helen, but who changed it at Oberlin to sound less basic, and whose parents subsidize her juice bar/studio. Wendy must convince Yelena that handouts are disrespectful. That handouts strip the poor of dignity. That there is something noble about being self-sufficient. That 6 percent property tax might cause her father to finally make good
