Touch

by Courtney Maum

  “Honey, you’re upset.”

  “I’m not upset,” Sloane lied. “I was just confused, but now it’s fine. But I’m running late.”

  “Okay, well, we’ll see a lot of each other when we get back.”

  “Okay,” said Sloane, swallowing the pit in her esophagus. “Let’s.”

  14

  Back in Paris, Sloane always rode the subway when she was feeling blue. The shared solitude of the experience never failed to cheer her: simply watching the faces people assembled as they sat alone in public filled her with compassion. Someone with a forgotten nametag still pinned on their blouse, a lanky boy just broken up with, a giddy gang of tourists en route to the Louvre, wondering if they’d luck out and find a speedy ticket line. All the common hopes and heartbreaks of a short commute.

  And so it was toward Union Square that Sloane headed after her mother’s phone call. No destination in mind, just a need for the crush of nameless bodies and those bodies’ warmth. When Sloane felt poorly about herself and the life that she’d created, she tended toward benevolence—drew her strength from strangers. Their shapes, their small deliverances. The heat of all these lives.

  The train was crowded for this odd hour in the morning: but in a world of freelancers and eternal students and the chronically underemployed, there was no longer a traditional starting time for work. Rubber boots and leggings, leather clutches, woven scarves and vivid plastic, the humid tube of metal was filled with so many things. She imagined what it would look like, a subway devoid of people who had left their stuff behind. Wilted petals of textiles, ownerless totes.

  There had been an effort a few years back by an artist no one had then heard of—a British New Yorker named Craig Ward, who had been inspired by a friend’s photograph of the bacteria in her son’s handprint to take to the New York subways to cull bacteria for himself. He’d brought back the microorganism samples in petri dishes that he filled with a jellylike substance that would continue to feed the bacteria, and let the human stories ripen in the heat throughout the summer. The resulting photographs were bright universes unto themselves: little planets of E. coli, bright comets of salmonella, orbited by Staphylococcus aureus and common mold. The printed images caused immediate urban panic, but Sloane had found them gorgeous: a still-life cartography of a single time and place. The hands that had brought and shared that bacteria were presumably still alive, as were the cultures themselves. One of the images taken from the Times Square shuttle had nearly brought her to tears. So many people, so many opportunities to share something important, and yet, sales for hand sanitizer had never been so high.

  Sloane had spent enough time in the beauty industry to know that the goal, in terms of contemporary personal care products, wasn’t so much celebrating one’s humanity as effacing it. Breath strips and deodorants and sanitizing gels. Of course, Sloane wasn’t an ogre of hygiene, she bathed and perfumed as regularly as anyone, but still, even thinking of those photographs as the L train rattled into action made her want to seek eye contact with somebody, lean against a shoulder, ask, Isn’t it something? The wonder of ourselves?

  But face-to-faceness wasn’t trending. Quite the opposite, in fact. As part of what Sloane had once dubbed the “UpPaying” culture, people were more than willing to pay a premium to be—and stay—alone. You’d seen this in real estate for decades, but it was hitting travel, too: airline upgrades that allowed you to have more leg room for a higher price; pieces of gym equipment that could be privatized during a certain hour just like a table in a restaurant. Even the rise of ridesharing companies like Vroomy reflected a trend in egocentrism. As friendly and approachable as the company seemed, much of what made Vroomy successful was that it allowed its users to avoid the shame and inconvenience of putting money into a stranger’s hand for a useful service. Car drivers were just push notifications, timely service bots: something to rate five stars or three depending on how quickly you got where you were going. Sloane, herself, was loyal to taxis. She liked the incertitude that you would find one when you needed it (oh! but when you did!). She liked the way their on-duty signs glowed as they came toward you in the rain.

  At Sixth Avenue, the train filled with the hard press of more bodies, the sharpness of old coins mixed with melony shampoo. She opened herself to the visceral intrusions: an elbow to her upper arm, a backpack nudging her right hip, a toe depressed by accident as the shuttle jolted.

  Privacy. Lack of privacy. Proximity to others. When Sloane had been little, she’d shared a room with Leila—had continued to share it until she’d turned twelve and been gifted with her own room. She’d remembered it as a privilege, of course, being able to create and dream and dwell in her own space, but it also made it easier to drift away from her little sister. Maybe this was the key to happiness, a trend she could bring back to the flailing furniture department: shared spaces, smaller rooms. Bunk beds for adults. Who knows—maybe if they’d all been crammed into a smaller house, her family wouldn’t have let her leave for France. Maybe she would have grown so accustomed to their proximity, she would have been there the night of her father’s accident, would have come home from college more. She would have been there and she would have felt something, the unraveling presentiments that had darkened her before. She’d always thought that her father would still be alive if she’d been home that winter evening, had convinced him not to go out for the completely superfluous thing her mother had wanted in order to make the perfect family meal. This belief was something that she should have kept to herself. She hadn’t. No wonder her family didn’t want her at their Thanksgiving dinner.

  Sloane caught a glimpse of the watch wrapped around the wrist sharing the grip pole beside her. Quarter to ten—she’d have to head back. She was excited about Sparkhouse, she could talk honestly there—wouldn’t have to adapt her ideas to fit into the parameters of the ReProduction summit. They could discuss people who had children, and if they could talk about kids, they could talk about messiness and grubbiness and dirt and germs and fingers. Hands learning how to handle other bodies, tinny voices clanging, little people coming into the power of their limbs. The hugeness of the thing that made children long so much for a certain person that it made them cry.

  Sloane had felt this for her father and she’d felt it for her mother when she’d been very young, and standing there in the subway, she thought it would complete her in some way if she could feel that need again. Which made Sloane think, quite suddenly, that she might not be the only one who had gone underground for human contact. Perhaps she was an unknowing member of a weird new club. That could be a thing, couldn’t it—the old thrill rising within her—people seeking proximity to make up for some lack? Not stolen touches or perversions, just temporary companionship, shoulders rubbing against shoulders as a train filled with commuters, seeing a movie in a theater to be in the presence of others instead of staying home to peer at a laptop from the couch.

  It hit Sloane then—furniture, it wasn’t going to get larger, it was going to be smaller. The return of love seats manufactured not for their original purpose (which was to accommodate the gargantuan dresses that society women wore), but to facilitate courtship. Three-person love seats, four-person love seats, design moving backward to reflect the Italian aesthetic of the seventies where spontaneity and play and sociability were leading values. She thought suddenly of a series of outdoor seating solutions she’d seen in the Yucatan, where the benches curved in tight horseshoes so that visitors were facing one another. These seats had proved so adept at starting conversations that a group of people had actually started a language swap in the public park, with strangers gathering on Tuesday evenings to converse in languages they hadn’t mastered yet.

  Sloane’s head was suddenly filled with images and colors. Something frozen inside of her had cleaved. People were going to pay to get close to other people. She could envision the opposite of the UpPaying trend making its way toward all of them: a movement in wh
ich people paid a premium for more contact, not less.

  These images and epiphanies were still shooting around inside of her as she made her way back to the office, her body warmed as if by fire from the return of her instincts.

  15

  Sparkhouse was already under way by the time Sloane made it back. There were so many people crowded into the conference area, she had to wedge her way in toward the back wall, where she found herself standing next to Mina.

  “Hey,” Mina whispered, eyes bright. “I loved the missive about the phones!”

  “And recently?” upspoke a fellow with an actual feather in his hat, who appeared to have been talking for some time. “The kombucha’s been, like, really, really flat. I just have some concerns about the integrity of the scoby y’all are using.”

  “Does anyone have anything that’s not a petty gripe?” interrupted Dax, standing at the side of the whiteboard, drinking from a travel mug with “U MAD BRO?” printed on it.

  The woman named Greta, whom Sloane recognized from her first day, spoke up next. She was in the verbal identity department—Sloane remembered this, because she had said she liked Greta’s name and Greta had replied that she was grateful for her comment, because that’s what they did in verbal identity. They came up with names. “A few of us were thinking we could rename Black Friday,” Greta said. “It’s just, with all the bad stuff happening in the world, aren’t things, like, already really black?”

  “Okay,” said Dax, nodding manically. “Renaming candidates? Go.”

  “Gather Friday,” Greta started, “because it’s right after Thanksgiving and you’re going to gather gifts—”

  “Sounds religious,” Dax said. “What else?”

  “Multicolor Friday? Fuller Friday? Thanksfullish?” Greta said, sounding unconvinced. “Thanksgiver? We really only just started.”

  Dax was unimpressed. “Our Black Friday signage is going into production, like, basically yesterday. But I want this for next year. Give me two hundred candidates by e.o.d., cool?”

  Sloane sunk into her head a little. The room was cold—why were corporate meeting rooms always so damn freezing? She was as close here as she was to other people’s bodies on the subway, but she didn’t have the feeling of immediacy she’d had then. She started to look around the room for Jin and flushed when she found him.

  The conversation had turned to other holidays that could be renamed. Mother’s Day. (What if you didn’t have a mother?) Birthday. (What if you’d had a traumatic birth?) The ideas and the corporate lingo used to receive them (“Let’s table this,” “We’ll circle back”) depressed her, and she let the voices meld into a lulling din, thinking back instead to the subway car she’d just been in, those incandescent images of the floating spores, fingers meeting fingers that had met so many other hands before.

  “Sloane?” Dax spoke up, seemingly out of nowhere.

  She gaped, certain she’d missed a question aimed at her.

  “Sorry?” she said, shaking herself to alertness. “Yes?”

  Dax blinked his eyes expectantly. “Anything to share?”

  Sloane swallowed, thought back to the colorful visions she’d had of smaller furniture. Of taller furniture also, living room solutions built like playhouses instead of the endless iterations of the one-direction-facing couch.

  But she didn’t feel like divulging her furniture premonitions right now. She wanted to talk about the closeness, the closeness that she’d just felt. The proximity of bodies. The open marketplace of touch.

  Oh, fuck it, she thought. She’d already asked for a company-wide ban on cell phones. Why stop now?

  “Actually, I’ve started thinking, just started thinking, about . . . well, I guess I could refer to it as the ‘outsourcing of affection’?” Sloane stood up straighter to reinforce a confidence she didn’t fully feel. “I was on the subway earlier, and was having all these thoughts. And I’ll admit, they’re not . . . cemented yet, but I was watching all these people, people on their cell phones, or reading, or whatever, and I was thinking how we’re all more connected in a certain sense.” She scratched the back of her neck, aware that a lot of people had fallen silent. From across the room, she could feel the expectation coming from Jin’s gaze and it threatened to unspool her.

  “The L train was jam-packed. You couldn’t avoid coming into contact with other people’s bodies.” Beside her, Mina tensed. “And it got me thinking that soon enough, if it isn’t already happening, this is something people will do, like a kind of therapy. Like taking the waters? You know how people used to do that, the old spa tradition?” Some people nodded. She tried not to notice the ones who did not.

  “I think people might start doing the same thing for physical connection. Use crowdedness for health.”

  Sloane put her hand to her temple. She was having one of her headaches. She wasn’t being clear. The things that had made so much sense to her only a half hour ago were slipping from her hands.

  She couldn’t have this kind of muddiness. Not now. What she wanted to express felt so important, but she hadn’t had time to think it through. Charged by a heat coming off of Mina that suggested how hard the girl was listening to her, Sloane decided to continue, focusing on the place from which her epiphany had started, the texture of its roots.

  “One of the real problems with the breakdown of interpersonal relations in the digital age,” she continued, her voice steadier now, “is that people don’t know how to be intimate anymore. For example—” She stood up even straighter, projected to the crowd. “If we think about our youngest generation, they’re exposed to screens and swipes and scrolling before sticks and mud and dirt. And a lot of these toddlers—a certain demographic—are so scheduled and chaperoned, they’re not engaging in spontaneous play. They’re doing things of course, they’re learning, but they’re not necessarily engaged physically with their environment; they’re not scraping their knees. And what happens to a kid who’s been too supervised?” Her head was pounding. Across her frontal cortex, a throbbing of white light.

  “It dulls your instincts. And if you lose your instincts, you’re not developing confidence, so as these kids turn into adolescents, sports that require spontaneity and intuition and contact will be terrifying to them. Young people live in a two-dimensional environment,” she continued, despite the fury in her head. “If they make a fool of themselves in the real world, they make a fool of themselves online. Self-conscious adolescents will become self-conscious adults, who are just as worried about faltering in front of their peers as they were when they were teenagers. Eventually, these intimacy-starved humans are going to have to rely on experts to get any sense of comfort. What I’m talking about,” Sloane said, taking air, “is an entire generation of humans who are tactilely bereft.”

  The room was so silent, if the floor hadn’t been carpeted and if people actually walked about with pins, you could have dropped one—and heard it fall. The energy of the crowd had shifted from singular bodies standing around her, restless and gnawing at an invisible bit, to a kind of pulsating togetherness that made Sloane feel as if she was reverberating inside.

  “So what you’re saying,” Dax asked, breaking the room’s fluorescent hush, “is that prostitution will be big?”

  Sloane blinked. She hadn’t expected him to be so literal. Not in front of his employees. Not in a space that was designated for the sharing of ideas.

  “Yes, and no,” she answered, sternly. “Prostitution as we know it will thrive, be legalized. But it’s more than that. And it will be so much softer.” She felt Jin’s eyes on her, the weight of his attention. “What I’m saying, really”—she paused again to swallow—“is that people are going to start paying to be . . . hugged.”

  “Hugged,” Daxter repeated, his hand alighting on a table as if to keep his balance.

  “Hugged, yes, hugged. There will be hugging salons. Hugging parties. People will
rent friends that they can spend the day with. Not prostitutes—just friends. People who will listen and be nice to them. Simple, physical companionship is going to be the catchword. Just like you can get a massage now for ten, for thirty minutes, the same services will be offered where you can pay to be held.”

  Her head seemed to have cleared a little. But in her stomach now was a seasickness, a heaving to and fro.

  “If our capacity for tenderness and interpersonal connection continues to abate,” Sloane said, hoping she could talk through the sickening vertigo, “we’ll have to go outside of our relationships for affection. Intimacy is going to be outsourced. That’s it. That’s what I was thinking. When I was on the train. Sorry, I—” She held her hand up, touched her forehead. “It’s something with this room.”

  Excusing herself with small apologies, moving among feet, Sloane pushed her way through the bodies who scanned as friendly to her, blue and green presences—but these were interspersed with searing spots of red—the energy fields of those who thought she was losing her grip.

  Normally, Sloane was proud of her premonitions. She felt bigger, powerful when she knew that she had left someone inspired. But hurrying through the hall back to her office, she just felt small and vulnerable. And not a little bit ashamed.

  It had been such a long time since she’d been seared with a strong feeling, she couldn’t accept the possibility that she might be wrong. Except she’d seen the data, Dax had seen the data, Mammoth was founded on the data that showed that human interconnectedness wasn’t trending. Disassociation, digital entertainment, wearables and intelligent home security systems, all of this, yes; but hugs? She was letting something get to her, maybe the proximity to her family. Or the stupid slight that they were going to Disney World without her, something she normally wouldn’t give a hoot about. Or the fact that she was sharing her home with a Lycra-suited zombie. All of the above.