“No, that’s okay, thank you. I guess we should just go home.”
“Very good,” said Anastasia. “No stops on the way there? If you’re ill, we could perhaps—”
“No, that’s fine, thank you. I just need some rest.”
Anastasia pulled promptly into traffic, incurring the pitched wrath of several different horns. There was a bit of the Floridian senior to her driving style.
“So, if I may ask, how are you finding the job?” Anastasia asked.
“Well!” Sloane responded, punchy with too many thoughts. “The least that I can tell you is that it’s a very exciting time.” She stuck her face inside the paper bag. There weren’t that many notes, maybe five? “Sorry, just a second, A., I need to read something for work.”
She felt guilty for excluding Anastasia, but she was excited, and you couldn’t read and talk. She pulled out a yellow note first, two Post-its that had been attached and then folded in over themselves.
I sleep with a hot water bottle every night. So I can pretend someone’s beside me.
Sloane swallowed, audibly, the note like a wounded insect in her hands. She thought again about the outsourcing of affection: professional masseuses, vocal coaches. Hot water bottles, sure.
She reached in and pulled out another note. This one was longer, the ink smudged.
Someone stole my bag from the gym last year. At first I was so angry about all the shit I was going to have to deal with, but the day after the theft was one of the best days I’ve had in a long time. I didn’t have my phone. I just went from place to place again. Not checking in on things. Not feeling so urgent. The Monday after that weekend, work replaced my phone.
“Anastasia?” Sloane asked.
“Yes, Sloane?” she replied. “My eye detection trackers said you were still reading.”
“I am,” she said. She didn’t have a thing to add. She just wanted to make sure that someone was still there.
She took out another note, the squirming handwriting on this one like a squeal of worms:
I am seriously worried about the condition of my brain. I can’t spell anymore. I can’t remember things. I keep checking my phone.
Sloane knew this feeling, of course she did. The almost biological certainty that the more often you checked your cell phone, the more likely you were to find that one message or notification that would improve your entire life.
Oh, but it didn’t happen. Like it didn’t for those men in ragged T-shirts, scudding metal detectors along the gray beach sand. Astonishing. The world was filled with so many modest hopes.
Two more:
I joined a hip hop class but I’m too scared to go.
I play Words with Friends on the computer, but when I was little, I played hockey. I don’t like Words with Friends. I hate my computer. I would give just about anything to be on a real team again.
Sloane thought about the augmented tactility of athletes, how they needed to stay aware of their own bodies, and other bodies, all the time. In Paris several years ago, there had been a wellness campaign that now seemed strangely prescient: Move your body. Get outside.
She settled her head against the seatback, glowing from within. She had finally unleashed something they could all work with. Maybe she hadn’t done it in the right way, but she had said something honest, and the relief was huge. She thought back to what Jin had said before his unexpected confession.
I think you’re right about the return of physical contact as a trend.
“Sloane?” interrupted Anastasia. “I feel obligated to tell you that your blood pressure has increased at a rate that is incommensurate with your average resting heart rate. Would you like me to activate the massaging seatbacks? Or perhaps call for a tea?”
It was true, her heart was beating fast inside of her hard bones. Is that what she was saying? That technology was going to be less important than human touch? That people were ready to put down the chains of smart devices and be physical again?
“Sloane?”
Even as her heart pumped, she felt the blood draining from her expression. No, this couldn’t be a presentiment. She couldn’t make a proclamation like this to a tech company, not in this convenience-obsessed, ping-centered world. She was simply wrong. She was unusually emotional. Maybe she was getting sick.
“No,” Sloane said to Anastasia, stuffing all the notes back into the bag. “I just need to go home.”
• • •
Because Sloane wanted the apartment to herself, she knew Roman would be there. Music softly playing, light under the door. Key in the lock, her heart clenched at his perennial there-ness. He was like a housefly. Inscrutable, the buzz.
She stood in the entranceway until he called out to her. “Sloane? Is that you?”
Eventually, when she didn’t answer, he came out to check who or what had entered the apartment.
“Oh, hi!” he said, Zentai suit rolled down to his waistline, an undershirt on top. The Zentai sleeves were hanging off either side of his hips like dead petals off a tulip. “They really do have to do something about the eyes. One can’t work under these conditions. Anyway! You’re home early, no?”
“I’m sick,” Sloane said. “Apparently.”
“Sick?” He peered at her. “How?”
“My art director thinks I’m attractive,” she said, dropping her bag.
Roman nodded, thoroughly impassive. “Well, that’s always a nice compliment. Art directors have good taste. Did you want a tea, darling? I’m working on my op-ed!” He clapped his hands together. “An article, then the book deal, that’s America, right?”
“My art director thinks I’m attractive,” Sloane said again.
“But my darling!” He gave her wrist a victorious tap. “Of course he does! And you don’t look sick to me!” he added, with a wink.
He bounded past her to the bedroom where the printer was set up. “I’m so excited for you to read this,” he called back. “I think I’m on to something. But you’ll tell me. You’ll tell me!”
In a few minutes, he returned with several pages printed out.
“Okay, I admit I’m nervous,” he said, nodding jerkily. He’d put a sweater on over his torso, so he was standing there in a manly gray cowl-neck with Lycra legs.
“Roman, I actually don’t feel well. I’m not sure this is the time.”
“It isn’t?” Roman repeated, his face falling like a child’s. He thumbed the pieces of paper. “I really wanted your opinion before . . . do you want me to get you soup? I actually ended up finding a very nice place this morning. Café Mogador? Maybe they have soup?”
Exasperated, she reached out for the papers. “Okay, fine, just give it to me,” she said. “And I will take tea.”
“Tea! Of course! Though I’m not sure if we have any.”
“Vodka, then. With lemon. That will be good for my throat.”
“And for mine, as well!” He ran excitedly toward the kitchen. “We will cheers!”
Sloane fell to the couch with the clutch of pages. She was too exhausted to fight. She’d been goading him for information on his book project and here it finally was. She kicked both of her shoes off, saw the op-ed’s title, decided she’d best wait for that drink.
“Can I watch you read it?” Roman asked, returning with two glasses. “I feel like that’ll help me know where I need to tweak it, yes?”
“Whatever,” Sloane responded, the paper neon white beneath the black type.
“Okay,” said Roman, holding his glass up to be clinked. “Go!”
Sloane started to read:
(For . . . The New York Times? Op-Ed section? Health?)
“After God Goes Sex”
by Roman Bellard
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche famously announced that not only was God dead, but that we—we!—had killed him. And so it is that we have
also killed sex.
Understandably, it took a much longer time to bring down God than fornication. Both are at the origin of creation. Both have been eradicated—(murdered! claimed Nietzsche) by our human hands. But only one of these eradications can actually be tracked.
Monsieur Bellard! you will say, finding my byline. I don’t know what you’re talking about—I still have lots of sex!
It is the elephant in the courtyard—Europe’s birth rates have been declining vertiginously for decades. In some European towns, the population decrease is such that the sewage systems are too empty to work properly. Let’s consider that.
Social demographers and economists tell us that the economy is to blame: the increasing unemployment rates discourage people from having children. Climate change has aimed a spotlight on overpopulation, an epidemic that is remedied by a halt in reproduction. Other experts studying the world’s fertile generations have put the blame on Generation Me. Young people today don’t want to be burdened by dependents. They want fame, they want freedom, they want fortune and mobility. They want the freedom to be whatever trends dictate that they be.
Informative as they are, none of these articles or findings are talking honestly about what isn’t happening in bed. People aren’t just having less reproductive sex these days, they’re having less sex, period. Why? Well . . . We just don’t need it anymore.
With the initial tsunami of the Internet and the second wave of social media, the peer reward system of social sharing has conditioned us to privilege auto-satisfaction over coupled sex. Masturbation, of both the cerebral and the physical sort, is the preferred release of the digitally experienced. (It’s no surprise that “selfie” was named word of the year in 2013.) With online dating and geosocial networking applications, casual sex is easier than ever to come by, but the laws of supply and demand are kicking in: because of sex’s ready availability, we don’t want it anymore.
Nor are we very good at it, it would seem. The Internet’s negative effect on concentration levels has spilled over into the bedroom. People want what they want, and they want it, fast. And what is faster than masturbation? Who knows more about our own likes and turn-ons than ourselves? Unless we are copulating for procreative purposes, there are so many ways to derive pleasure through activities other than sex. There just isn’t much of a point anymore. The thrill factor has worn off.
The preference for virtual sexuality over physical touch is spreading even into the necessarily tactile realms of sadomasochism and porn. For this article, I interviewed Mistress Imperia, a notorious dominatrix in the online virtual world Second Life. Before becoming an eminent participant in the BDSM scene there, Mistress Imperia worked as a real-life dominatrix. “I serviced wealthy clients mostly, CEOs, people in positions of control,” Imperia explains. “But in real life, you can only go so far with the dom-sub relationship. There are limits—physical limits, financial limits sometimes, limits on your time. These people had families, secrets. When you think about it, it was in their real lives that they were actually playing a role. The kinds of physical taboos I’m pushing people through feel groundbreaking. I can honestly say that I’ve never had more interesting, arousing or satisfying sex than I’m engaging in online.”
In a polemic article for New York magazine called “He’s Just Not That into Anyone,” the American writer Davy Rothbart said that a dependence on porn is leading people to detach from their actual partners. And not just emotionally, chemically, too. Because of the release of the dopamine-oxytocin combination fired during climax, porn watchers can actually bond with their computers. “They can, in essence,” writes Rothbart, “date porn.”
What should we do about all the sex that we aren’t having? Meh, your correspondent says. Nothing! Like Mistress Imperia, I am of the persuasion that there is a brave new world to be explored in terms of tactility. As long as human beings are on the planet with their reproductive organs intact, sex will still be available and around, but I for one am taking a sabbatical from penetrative sex.
I’m in a long-term relationship. I’m happy. I’m monogamous, but neither of these conditions means that I’ve ever lost my desire to sexually explore. Recently, I’ve become involved with a fetish community of Zentai wearers in my native Paris. An abbreviation of zenshin taitsu (Japanese for “full body suit”), Zentai is an integral, second-skin-type Lycra bodysuit that covers the wearer from head to toe, even the eyes and mouth. Many of its proponents, who gather in online communities and in weekly meet-ups at bars, believe that Zentai suits are liberating because they efface the wearer’s physical self. I, personally, feel liberated in my suits because, in them, I’m freed from my ingrained notions about touch. Touch, I had long thought, is about skin-to-skin contact. Eyes meet eyes, if things progress sexually, lips meet lips. Within a Zentai suit, such physical commingling can’t occur. What you are presented with is the outline of another body, a simulacrum, a trace. You have to learn to touch differently. You have to take the taboos away from acts like “fondling” and “rub.”
We are entering the second half of the second decade of the twenty-first millennium, and with it, the death of sexual touch. We’ve been in bed too long together, the proverbial cigarette long since extinguished. We don’t know how to climax anymore.
Now, of course, there will be readers of this article who are going to run home to meet up with their bedfellows to prove that their sex lives are just fine. These aren’t the people who are going to abstain from traditional sex. The people I am pandering to, the people I expect will join me in the pursuit of a new sexuality, are the ones whose potential sex partners only exist online. The ones who find the possibility of human contact more exciting than contact itself.
The article went on, but she’d read just enough.
“Roman,” Sloane said, her voice tight as a screw, “are you proclaiming an end to penetrative sex?”
“Yes!” he said, ecstatic. “Yes, that’s exactly it. The world is ready to explore other sensuality paradigms. Virtual sexuality is the new Internet. The research agrees with me. But you, what do you think?”
Sloane stared at him, incredulous. The papers in her hand felt like they were on fire. She didn’t have the wherewithal to even reach for her drink.
“I’m sorry, but for everyone? For us?”
“For the wired rich, as you have always called them,” he said, lifting his drink. “And for us, yes, obviously, too. But I think it will be freeing! It’s become too rigid, don’t you think? You put x into y, this into that.”
Sloane watched his hands in horror as they replicated the technicalities of the sexual act.
“Roman, this is a big problem,” she said, putting down the pages. “For me. For us.”
“Ah, ah! A little competition!” he exclaimed. “But don’t worry. I was even thinking you could write the intro to the book. When you think of the applications—for example, dating sites. You bring cyber penetration into it, can you just imagine?!”
Sloane wasn’t listening to his talking mouth. In her mind’s eye, she saw her father sweep stray hair off of her mother’s forehead as she came in from the garden, her face freckled with dark soil and late summer sweat. Their relationship hadn’t been perfect, but it was kind and good. And Sloane and her sister were proof that they had sex. Leila was about to have three children, herself. Harvey was an ever-present redwood of a committed partner. Sex was bonding, sex was biological, and Roman didn’t want to have it. Not with her. Not with anyone. Only with himself.
“Roman,” she said, her voice cracking. She was thinking of her role in the ReProduction trends conference, all those single, fertile people who were going to be further inoculated to social interactions by whatever antibreeder products Mammoth pushed on them. “I don’t think we love each other anymore.”
“Love?” Roman asked, reaching for the papers. “This is about self-actualization. About realizing your dreams.”
&
nbsp; She looked at him. Really looked at him. And felt completely stonewalled. She’d felt safer alongside perfect strangers on the subway than she did to this coldhearted mass of synapses and cells. In a flash she realized she’d been using Roman as an emotional buffer for the last decade, and in the same second she realized she was tired of being numb.
“Roman,” she repeated, her voice low and strong. “I want you out of the house.”
“What?” he asked, his mania suddenly curbed.
“I don’t want to live with you. I don’t want to be around you. I don’t like you anymore.”
“But Sloane,” he said, outraged. “This has nothing to do with you!” He flapped the papers at her. “It is for my book!”
“Nothing to do with me? Nothing to do with me!? What kind of alternate reality are you living in right now? We haven’t had sex in almost two years but this isn’t about us?! What is wrong with you? Seriously! Seriously! Turn around. I’m sure there’s something I can reactivate, a kind of microchip . . .”
He pulled away from her reaching hands. Jumped up.
“This came from your ideas,” he yelled. “Yours. The possibility of sex is better than actually having it, it was you that brought me this. You have all the data. No more reproduction rates, a soaring interest in the porns . . .”
“These are data, Roman. You don’t go from there and decide to be personally done with sex! Normal people don’t. Normal people want other people in their lives!”
“And since when are you and I that?”
Sloane’s response caught wetly in her throat. Yes, since when had she been normal? Since when had she wanted to have someone say something nice to her in the morning, be comforted, be spooned? Since when had she needed, absolutely viscerally, to feel that she was loved?
“Roman, this makes me sad for you,” she said. “It makes me totally sick. I don’t want this. I don’t want it anymore.”
“But Sloane!” he gasped. “You know that I am right!”
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