Touch

by Courtney Maum

  Thinking of her mother made her think more about her mother. At Tuesday, ten a.m., Leila’s eldest in school, Everett at home with Leila—what was Margaret doing? Slow-cooking something, brining, giving herself chores. Or maybe she was with Leila. Or out to breakfast with a friend. Some dark place in Sloane wanted her mother to be lonely, but it was possible—probable, even—that she wasn’t. Sloane tried to shake herself off this mental track. It was a bad season for melancholia. Thanksgiving, that harbinger of familial closeness, was just around the bend.

  She picked up her phone, dying battery in the red. Thank you for dinner, Mom, she started texting, it was really good. Looking forward to catching up more over Thanksgiving. She read it over. Unimpressed, but also not sure how to improve upon it, she pressed Send. Then she sent another message: Let me know what we can bring?

  Sloane was listening to the descending C-chord of her phone dying when a knock announced Deidre ready to escort her to the art meeting. Except when Sloane looked up, it wasn’t her.

  In France, there was an automatic response that came up on ATM screens when you tried to take out cash. The semantic translation was Enter your passcode away from prying eyes, but literally, the message read Compose your secret code while sheltered from indiscreet regards. Accordingly, whenever Sloane took out money in Paris, she always fantasized about a debonair man smoking a cigarillo at her back, clothed in a cape, maybe, a sort of unmasked Zorro. It was the kind of fantasy that involved words like “loins” and “ravaged.” A fantasy rekindled by the person in her doorway, standing there, unmasked.

  “Hi there,” she said, rising halfway up.

  Sensing her confusion, he introduced himself: “I’m Jin. The art director?”

  “Oh, Jin,” she said, shaking his outstretched hand. “Of course. It’s so nice to finally meet you.” She looked around them. “Did you want to chat before we head downstairs?”

  “Oh, there’s no downstairs today,” he said, pulling his gigantic cardigan around him as he sat. “The team is swamped. Black Friday stuff, sorry, you mind?” He nodded to his seat.

  She fluttered her hand at him, no. “So it’s just . . . us?” she asked.

  “Well, Daxter wants us to tag team the young tablet project anyway, so . . .” Jin started extracting things from a large tote he’d brought in. “To me, it seems to make the most sense to just get started. I’ll bring you up to speed.” He had three different computer tablets on his legs, thin as dinner menus, in shades of jelly beans.

  The mention of the tablet project made it easier to focus. Dax had of course briefed her on the YA project—it was one of the rare non-ReProduction enterprises she’d be involved in while at Mammoth. In the fall, they were releasing an entire line of young adult–themed tablets, with keypads, accessories and color schemes designed to appeal to teens. The tablets were actually double-screened, with a reinforced exterior LCD screen that could either broadcast what the user was doing on the internal screen, or be set to a personalized profile: a picture of the user, a collage of friends. Whether they were hanging out in a café, reading on a subway or watching a movie at home, passersby would be given a glimpse into their world.

  “So,” said Jin, hands on top of his work pile. “Should we get to know each other, or just jump in?”

  Sloane laughed, uncomfortable. She’d been staring at his fingers.

  “I jest,” he said, folding one leg while managing not to disturb the products resting on his thighs. “But I was in Chicago your first day. I’m a fan of your work, of course. You can help us shake things up.”

  Sloane smiled, wishing she deserved the compliment. She hadn’t done a lot of shaking up yet.

  “So,” Jin said, his smile suddenly mischievous. “What’s your opinion so far?”

  “Well, everyone’s been really welcoming,” she said, her guard sky-high.

  “Hmm,” he answered, recrossing his legs. “Not so impressed.”

  “No, no, of course I am,” she countered. “I’m just . . . still feeling things out.”

  “It’s a specific culture,” Jin said, pulling back a bit. “But just know that everyone is really happy that you’re here.”

  “Thank you,” she said, flattered. “Really. So show me what you got?”

  “Maybe we can start with colorways?” He held up the three tablets. One was rose-petal pink, one grass green, and the last one, an orange so bright it made her squint.

  “So I don’t know if this will surprise you,” she said, “but I like the pink one. The other two are kind of painful, they’re so bold.”

  “That’s what I said!” He laughed. “Consumer research pulled these from active wear. Headbands and sports bras, I guess there’s overlap.”

  “It’s not earth-shattering, I know,” Sloane continued, “but I’d been picturing something more along the lines of metallic pastels.”

  “You don’t say!” He beamed, pulling a color board out. “Something with grit and life. And really textured. Unisex.”

  He held up a swath of what looked like magma mixed with charcoal and moonstone. Sloane’s heart leapt at this. The bolt.

  “I love that,” she said, honestly. “Volcanic.”

  “That’s the working name, actually,” he said. “It’s fiery, apocalyptic. I get that these are young adults, but they’re worried about things, too.”

  Oh, the jolted thrust of something finally right! The outer body flash of it, the hot thrush of quickened heart. Textured images started to burn up at her: tarnished metal, corroded copper. Mica. Moss.

  “What about . . . flesh?” she heard herself suggest. Immediately, she went hot.

  Jin stared past her through the window, lost in his own thoughts.

  “Tongue,” he finally said. “Weird, right? That it’s a universal shade?”

  But Sloane was taken over by the insistence of a memory, flooding her with the overwhelming tactility of her first kiss. Not the real first time (which had been on the edge of the bed at a high school “make-out party,” lock-kneed next to Adam Saybourne, who’d literally jumped on her from his position on the mattress), but kissing when she got the hang of it, when she was aroused (rather than mortified) by the sound of her own breath.

  She ran her hand through her hair, undid her bun. Something tongue-colored, textured like flesh. It was right, but it was disturbing. But disturbance felt so right.

  “As much as I believe in this,” she said, suddenly conscious of her hair grazing her shoulders. “It might not be mainstream.”

  “So you think like Dax does.” Jin frowned. “That what’s easy, works.”

  “Easy?” she asked, startled. “That’s not why I’m here.”

  Something in the air had rearranged itself, the space felt thick between them.

  “I’m not going to go rogue on the YA tablets,” Sloane continued, defensive. “They’ll sell better if they’re done in metallic pastels and that’s as true today as it’s going to be three years from now. And that’s part of trends, too.”

  “You really think that?” he asked.

  “What I really think is that teenagers should be outside getting air and sunlight and, like, having awkward sexual experiences instead of socializing electronically, but that’s not gonna happen, so yeah, metallic pastels.”

  Jin put his fingers to the skin under his collar. The longest, slowest scratch.

  “Can I ask you a question?” he said, finally, sliding the tablets back into his bag.

  “Of course.”

  “I’m known for being blunt,” he said. “I’m just warning you.”

  “I think I can handle it,” she snorted.

  “Are you afraid to do your job?”

  Sloane’s eyes narrowed; her already dry throat clenched. The very bones in her hand felt like they were drawing inward.

  “I’m not afraid to do my job,” she snapped.r />
  “You can tell me what you really think,” he said. “I promise.”

  “And what I really think,” Sloane said, “is that the YA line should be done in metallic pastels.”

  Jin rubbed two fingers across his lips, contemplating her.

  “Fences,” he said, now aiming those fingers at her.

  “Excuse me?” she said, shrill.

  “You’ve got fences up.” He circled his fingers through the air. “I get it.”

  “I don’t have any fences,” she retorted, “I’m just doing my job.”

  She could almost hear him say Are you? through the expression on his face.

  “I’m gonna choose not to believe you,” he replied instead. He put the color board back into his bag. “Or not believe you, yet.”

  Sloane opened her mouth to berate him, but nothing came out. Every insult she crafted felt empty and old-fashioned, and she was not the type of person who showed her emotions at work.

  But when Jin left, she found herself templed against the window, the gray swell of other buildings looming up before her, so many strangers doing things on their high floors. Who do you think you are? she could have asked him. Who do you think you are? she could have asked herself.

  12

  At the end of the day, Sloane got into Anastasia, furious. Who was this smooth upstart? If his collagen levels and pushy confidence were anything to go by, he was clearly younger. Maybe by a lot. He’d probably been curled up in a dorm room dog-earing fashion ads while Sloane was telling Fortune 500 companies which models to feature in those ads. She was good at her job, damn it. She knew what she was doing at Mammoth, and it wasn’t telling Dax that all his electronics needed to be organ-colored so that people could get back in touch with their inner selves.

  Screw art directors, and screw Jin in particular. Front-loaded with assurance because he looked the way he did: his bone structure alone was like a global positioning chart to something in the stars. Stupid, stupid, stupid, and even stupider still that she’d let a stranger knock her off her fulcrum. She had the sudden impulse to go home and tongue kiss Roman—it was animalistic and murderous, the impetus to reinforce her confidence through her sexuality, but there it was.

  When Anastasia nosed into the lettered corridors of Alphabet City, Sloane’s ears pricked to a frequency only she could hear. Roman was there—not in the apartment, she could feel it, but very, very close.

  She got out of the car and stepped quietly to the curb. Her gaze fell upon the community park where a majestic weeping willow had stood before Hurricane Sandy claimed it. But the park was empty save for a man bent over a plot of land: flannel-panted, weeding. Sloane crossed the street and looked into the glowing bay windows of the café on the corner, and there she saw the him-thing thing that was Roman in his Zentai suit.

  With a deeply felt exhaustion, she saw he was wearing his shiny red one: an attempt to be festive, probably. In any case, he’d managed to attract admirers—three young men around him with their litter of paper cups. Roman had been a cherished curiosity in their Paris neighborhood, and it appeared that the same thing was unfolding here. She picked her way around the gate leashed with Yorkiepoos and puggles and entered the café.

  Taking advantage of Roman’s compromised vision (he really couldn’t see for shit in that freaking suit), Sloane loitered by the condiment station to hear what he was saying. Usually, he was respectful of their private life, but his thirst to be someone in New York made her nervous. She wasn’t sure that he considered their life “private” anymore.

  “—of course, there’s a real winning level, but there’s also a final level for the game within the game.” Sloane leaned closer to their table to hear the rest. “The gamers actually plan trips to the real Chernobyl. They sneak into the contaminated zone. They drink from the water. They post videos of themselves drinking from the water to their gaming friends. They stand on top of the buildings in the Pripyat ghost town. You cannot get a virtual and physical reality more merged than this.”

  Roman was obsessed with the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. In Paris, he gave lectures about the Zone of Alienation that the antihero—an amnesiac artifact collector named The Marked One—navigates amid radioactive buildings and warped fauna. Alone and suicidal, trapped within an alternate reality that has him both inspired and encaged, Sloane considered The Marked One as a worst-case scenario for what disassociated humans could become. The game fascinated her, certainly, and she understood its gruesome appeal, but Roman’s interest in it spooked her. The Marked One didn’t need anybody but himself.

  She decided to make her presence known. “Roman,” she said, putting her hand on his shoulder. “I’m back.”

  “Ah, Sloane! How super!” It came out zupair with his accent. “Everyone, this is, Sloane, my Sloane! This is Juan, and Beau, and Thorne, yes?”

  “Hawthorne,” answered one of the young men, expensively disheveled.

  “Oh my gosh,” said another one, running his fingers through his hair, “Have you two been?!”

  “If Roman had had his way,” she bantered quickly back, “it would have been our honeymoon.” This made the men laugh even though she wasn’t being sarcastic. In the online virtual world called Second Life, Roman actually owned a weekend hunting cabin in the contaminated area. He’d recently bought a fire insert for it using Linden dollars.

  “Sloane—” Roman gestured carefully to the mess of cups around them, trying not to overturn anything he couldn’t see. “A drink?”

  Part of her wanted to sit down with them, get into the differing semantics of the game like she and Roman used to, but if she stayed, there would be perfunctory questions that she didn’t want to answer. Did she also wear The Suit? Roman would wax poetic about their liberated union, and Sloane’s capacity for bullshit was just about maxed out.

  “It’s nice to meet you all, but I have some things to finish up.”

  The lost boys nodded mutely. Of course, they were busy, too. Everyone was busy. Look how busy we all are!

  But they made no motions to leave.

  “I’ll see you a little later, then,” she said, speaking to Roman. He shifted in his seat so that his eyeless face was facing hers.

  “Actually, there’s this Zentai thing I wanted to—”

  “Of course,” she said, forcing a smile. “Enjoy.”

  Sloane left the café imagining the nice things they were saying about Roman’s open-minded wife, and how Roman was probably answering their compliments with an explanation on the limiting semantics of the word “husband.” The word “wife.”

  “And that’s why we won’t marry,” she could almost hear him saying. “Husband and wife confines you to a union, and we’re so much more than that.”

  • • •

  I am so much more than that, Sloane thought back in the apartment, staring at her reflection above the sink. She removed that day’s necklace, a plastic coyote chasing a plastic moon, and put it into the giant Ziploc where she stored her other favorite pieces. I am so much more than the outer cover of my vertebrae which will never again be touched.

  Maybe that was the real appeal of cybersex, she considered, walking into the bedroom. Not having any skin. Online, you really could be so much more than the body you were given. Your reach was limitless.

  Sloane lay down on the bed. Meeting Jin had stirred her. Not just because he’d challenged her, he’d set something off in her as well. Their conversation about how weirdly right a flesh-colored, textured tablet was had her mind darting all around the place thinking of the other ways that touch screens could meet touch. Handheld devices encoded in an actual palm; erogenous enhancers embedded under skin; remote technology that controlled a partner’s libido across space and time, and stranger, smaller thoughts: the simple flesh-touch of another person’s hand.

  Sloane touched the waistline of her leggings. She could ind
ulge this line of thinking in a more productive way. The outlet was there for her: the ready current of porn. She slipped over on her belly to check the hour on the clock. It hadn’t been clear whether Roman was going straight from the café to his Zentai “thing”—he’d probably come back to use the bathroom because it took him a really long and unhygienic time to get out of his Zentai suit in a public restroom. Still, some release would be good for her. She was a working woman in America now, indoctrinated into the varied humiliations of the corporate bagel bar. Really, it would be indecent not to masturbate.

  Sloane was so incapable of conjuring up what an actual lover would look like at this point in her life, she relied on porn to tell her. She rarely agreed. The dopey bulldozers porn pushed on her looked like they were raised on a diet of cattle-farming hormones. Their shaved genitals made them look like Ken dolls, and their mouths hung open stupidly when they were being pleasured. This is why Sloane tended toward Sapphic persuasions in her online taste. The women at least had varied facial expressions, they laughed, they talked, they smiled. They didn’t look like they’d just been told that they had to pay extra for French fries when they climaxed.

  Because it felt too revealing to type a specific category into the search bar, Sloane instead surrendered to the daily menu on RedTube: Mature, Lesbian, MILF . . . she chose a clip from Slow Rebel Productions, the only ones who put their actors in situations where they did normal human things like read, or eat. This particular film was called The Sleepover and it started off with two long-haired girlfriends sitting on a couch in bunny slippers and fuzzy robes.