Lucas kneels in front of her so they’re face-to-face. She can smell her own cooking on his breath: chervil and habanero, a sour hint of goat cheese.
“We squared off. This time my father just stood there. He didn’t even have his guard up, like he was egging me on. I reared back and threw a punch.”
He’s leaning close to Wendy now. Their cheeks nearly touch. Lucas raises a fist and slowly hooks it toward Wendy’s ear. He stops three inches short and drops his hand.
“My dad ducked. The punch missed completely. I was caught off-balance. My father returned with a right hook to the eye. I hit the floor. My father was barefoot. He placed his foot on my chest. His feet aren’t large, but they’re wide. Size nine triple E. The smell was overwhelming. I was close enough to see the fungus overtaking his nails. He applied enough pressure to let me know that he could crush my breastbone if he wanted. Then he removed his foot and left the room. We never spoke of it.”
She says, “Okay.”
Lucas stands and Wendy follows down the hall. His bedroom overlooks Central Park. Lucas opens the closet.
“What’s that?” says Wendy.
“The product.”
It reminds her of a bandage, the kind that wraps around a sprained wrist or ankle, but bigger, person-sized, and in the shape of a wetsuit or footed pajamas. She says, “I don’t understand.”
“Go on,” Lucas says. He takes The Suit™ from its hanger and places it in Wendy’s hands. “Touch.”
Wendy holds and pets the item like it’s someone else’s infant and she’s afraid to drop it.
“You can’t feel them, can you?”
“Feel what?”
“Exactly,” says Lucas, a challenge.
She tries different styles of touch: palm, backs of hands, fingertips. She presses The Suit™ to her cheek and sniffs. It smells mildly of sweat.
“I don’t know what I’m looking for.”
“Microsensors. Twelve hundred of them.”
He takes the laptop from his bedside table and shows Wendy the software, explaining how the sensors track speech, movement, and bodily functions, track the heart’s rhythmic flutters. He turns The Suit™ inside out and shows her the sensor-laden condom that measures blood flow, secretion, and fluctuations in length and girth. He shows her the spinal seam that models posture.
Lucas takes The Helmet 2.0 down from the shelf. He explains how it will work in conjunction with The Suit™, synthesizing data and whispering consumer motivation to the user in the user’s own voice. He explains that people who wear these helmets in conjunction with The Suit™ for a long enough time will find it difficult to differentiate between the whispered voice and their own inner one. The voice knows what you want before you do, whether you’re hungry, thirsty, or constipated. Hungry for Famous Ray’s pizza, thirsty for Mike’s Hard Lemonade, in need of fifty milligrams Colace from the Duane Reade three blocks south. It tells you what you want before you know you want it. In conjunction with these helmets, The Suit™ becomes a proxy brain.
Lucas outlines his plan to sell this data to insurance companies, big pharma, and consumer brands. He evangelizes on this landmark innovation in marketing and data science, a natural progression from step-counters, search engines, and recommendation algorithms, crossbred, rolled into a single garment. For effect, he taps his phone and Sam Cooke arrives in the room like a human wind chime, singing an old gospel number about longing to touch the hem of his savior’s garment. Garment, Lucas explains, was a potential name for the product, ruled out for its Mormon connotations.
Lucas doesn’t smile. He doesn’t demonstrate The Suit™ or insist that Wendy take a test run. She thinks she understands why. Something might be lost in the demonstration, a failure, by the item, to tangibly represent its power. This product, she intuits, was designed to underwhelm its wearer, to blend with the body to the point where the wearer forgets its presence. Hence its custom hue, the same pink shade as Lucas’s skin. Hence its lightness.
“This is all quite impressive,” says Wendy.
“But?” says Lucas. “I know there’s a but. I can see in your eyes that there’s a but. Your internal software analyzed the data I’ve presented and something doesn’t add up. The marketing strategist inside you is throwing little red flags.”
“Perceptive.”
“Spend enough time with machines and you start to think like one. I started coding at nine, was fluent in Cobra by twelve. By college I couldn’t have sex without modeling each position beforehand in my visual cortex.”
“And all this while captaining the swim team,” says Wendy.
“So what’s your but? Let me guess. You want to know how I can get anyone to wear this ridiculous thing? You want to know who will sign off on this invasion of most basic human privacies? You want to know what this glorified long underwear has to do with the UBI?”
“Something along those lines.”
“It’s simple,” says Lucas. “We pay them.”
“We pay them,” repeats Wendy, realizing, as she says it, that she’s including herself in the we.
“This country,” he says, and takes a long pause, two or three seconds, to let her reflect and feel the weight of these words. The this implies a certain familiarity, almost familial. This family, she imagines someone saying with the same tone and inflection, the same weariness, after finding out her uncle is sleeping one off in county jail. And country, a space between syllables emphasizing the word cunt, its sharp uppercut into that hard T, the ry trailing off, an afterthought. “This cunt-ry is going through a difficult moment. Maybe difficult is the wrong word. Maybe the right word is pivotal. It’s important to be specific. I’ve always believed that. Otherwise we’re no better than chimps.”
“Because chimps aren’t specific?”
“Forget chimps,” says Lucas, “I want
