“I don’t know what I think,” says Michael.
“No,” says Wendy.
It looks like her bites have finally faded, but it might just be too dark to see. Michael rests his head on Wendy’s shoulder.
“No more news,” he says. “Let’s watch something else.”
She clicks into the program guide. Reruns and reality bullshit, four channels showing college hockey. 8 Mile’s on HBO. Wendy says fine, they can watch.
Michael took her to see it in college, during that stage when couples share the cultural artifacts that molded and shaped them, a shortcut to surface intimacy while the deeper kind develops. The film wasn’t bad. More so, she liked Michael’s passion. Everyone else in New York was too hip to fullheartedly gush over anything, afraid to take the wrong view and lose tastemaker cred.
Within minutes, Michael’s asleep in fetal position and facing the wall. Only his pate can be seen, a sparse lawn that Wendy wets and finger-combs while watching, mesmerized by the actress Brittany Murphy, whose death seven years later, from pills and pneumonia on a bathroom floor, imbues this past performance with retrospective weight. Gone is the apple-cheeked Murphy of Clueless. Here she’s gaunt and thigh-gapped, all pupil and jawbone, a body offering itself in lieu of other things to offer. When Eminem asks her on a date, she responds, “Why don’t you take me somewhere now.” This character doesn’t believe in the future, thinks Wendy, she fears its conditional tense.
The film cuts to the two of them inside the auto plant where he works. Murphy unbuttons her blouse and Eminem hoists her onto a clunking apparatus. Her legs come up and her panties come off. For reasons obscure, at first, to Wendy, Brittany Murphy licks her hand. It is an oddly human moment, the last before their bodies take a mechanistic turn, thrusting to the factory’s din and clang.
11.
The closet is empty except for the prototype. His clothes closet’s elsewhere. The prototype has its own closet, the closet a romantic partner would use if he had one. He does not. The prototype is the closest thing he has to a romantic partner.
Lucas pulls the item over his naked body in a series of slow, graceful movements. No one is watching. The item could be and will be described as a second skin. He thought about calling it Skin or Skein or Skinn. These names tested poorly. Too crass and direct, like those off-brand condoms sold in coin-op machines. The name he’s chosen—The Suit™—is clear and unpretentious. Everybody owns one. A suit is something a person wears to work.
Imagine a speed skater’s full-body spandex. Now imagine that outfit so well-matched to your skin tone that it looks like you’re not wearing clothes. Now imagine a fabric so breathably aerated that it feels like you’re not wearing clothes. Your clothes go on top. In this case, a pair of 1966 Levi’s XX 501s in Cone Mills selvedge denim. Custom motorcycle boots made from distressed seal leather and flown in from Japan. Matching jacket. White T-shirt by Hanes.
Before dressing, Lucas performs a series of sun salutations to the closet mirror, allowing his spine to elongate, his calves to tense and relax. He does five burpees, ten stationary lunges, fifty jumping jacks. He does ten more burpees, twenty split jacks, fifteen single-leg bridges, and a four-minute plank. He does a circuit of back-step lunges, body-weight squats, clapping push-ups, and bicycle crunches.
The previous prototype ripped in the crotch during this routine. Even Lucas’s crack team of apparel scientists had trouble synthesizing a fabric that could properly house the prototype’s twelve hundred micro-sensors while maintaining target weight and durability specs. The new prototype has a reinforced crotch that does well under athletic duress and provides storage for extra sensors.
After fifteen years of daily practice, Lucas still can’t do the splits. Some positions aren’t meant for adult male bodies. This doesn’t stop him from trying. He comes to a controlled halt three inches short of his goal, maintaining balance by engaging his glutes and staring at a fixed point on the floor. He feels stabbing pain in both hips, and a satisfying burn in his hamstrings. Keeping his lower body stable, he bends at the torso and touches the floor, maneuvers into a spread-legged pushup, then bounces back to standing. He says, “Namaste, motherfucker,” and pretends to shoot the wall. He puts his clothes on over The Suit™, checks himself in the mirror, adjusts his collar, his hair. The prototype remains intact.
On his tablet, Lucas looks at the data. His heart rate peaked at 180 during this little routine. He watches the live feed as it drops to 150, 140, 115, 65. His blood pressure’s 135/90, on the high end of normal. Blood sugar: 120. He needs to cut down on soda. Blood alcohol: under .01 percent. Water loss: three ounces over the last twenty minutes, an impressively high retention rate.
When the product comes to market, this data will be sold to advertisers. It will be used as the basis for a new kind of target marketing. When Lucas’s blood sugar drops below a certain level, Bobby Wasabi’s Sushi Palace will auto-text asking if he wants to one-click order the same sashimi combo that he got last week. When his blood alcohol indicates a data-determined peak susceptibility to impulse shopping, Orbitz will email, offering a negligible discount on the ticket to Aruba that’s been sitting in his cart. The Suit™ can track the frequency and weight of bowel movements through its advanced Sensi-Shape™ technology. After twenty-four hours without defecation, ads for laxatives will permeate his streams.
The data will be sold to insurance companies as well. The Suit™ is a marvel of actuarial science. It knows how many hours you sleep and exercise, or spend seated in an office chair. It can model your posture, detect irregular heartbeats and
