Touch

by Courtney Maum

“I actually like that,” Sloane said with a smile.

  “How ’bout ‘Blue Lagoon’?” suggested Allison.

  “Blue Lagoon totally sounds like an app,” said Jarod, tapping his pen against his tablet.

  “But what if we pushed this further?” Sloane asked, truly excited now. “What if it wasn’t an app? What else could it be?”

  Sloane watched eleven faces fall. People looked at one another uncomfortably, waiting for someone else to speak.

  After a disheartening lag, Jarod spoke up again. “Well then,” he said, shrugging. “That would just be life.”

  Everyone remained quiet, so Jarod shrugged again.

  “And no one would buy that.”

  • • •

  Even if it ended on a minor chord, Sloane still felt that the electronics meeting showed enormous progress. It was taking some time, of course, but in public, and secretly, through the notes that she was getting, people were pushing beyond their comfort zones intellectually. They were thinking less about what “versioning” model Mammoth could easily make to see version 2.0 better, faster, smarter than version 1.0, and further ahead to what humans would need once they had everything they wanted. In short, they were learning to trend forecast. Were learning to care. And isn’t this why Dax had hired her in the first place?

  Sloane was so fixated on finding a corresponding product idea for the kernel Allison had planted in the electronics meeting (she once knew a man who wrote travel guides that contained only places, names, and numbers in no particular order across the world: Copenhagen, call Sophie for ceramics; London, Brian gives great haircuts; New Delhi, Dimple, if you like mulligatawny stew. How would old Jim Haynes have made a restaurant recommendation app feel more random, more friendly, more lifelike? she kept asking herself) that she didn’t realize she’d headed into the copy room instead of the supply closet until she was there. A bigger surprise was that the man standing patiently in line behind a frantic, coiled fellow was Jin. She was rocketed back into her present tense.

  “Oh!” Sloane cried, instantly blushing. “Oh!” she repeated, making her initial reaction worse.

  The fellow making the copies looked up, clearly alarmed by the color of her face.

  “Hi!” Sloane said to the copier, overcompensating out of embarrassment.

  “Hi?” the fellow replied, confusedly, as the machine rolled its green scanner over his paper, ejecting copies, sheath by sheath.

  “Did you want to cut in?” Jin asked, indicating the space in front of him with a gentle wave, along with (she wasn’t imagining this?) a loaded smirk.

  Sloane tried to react to this question on a semantic level, with grammatically correct words. She tried not to recognize the warmth spreading throughout her body because, really. What the hell. Maybe she and Jin should have come up with a kind of protocol, a way to act around each other. But that would have necessitated recognizing what they had done.

  “I’m not in any rush,” Sloane said, which came out sounding like an overture.

  Jin laughed. The mystery boy at the photocopier looked totally bewildered: what joke had been made? Suddenly efficient, he gathered up his materials and left. In Sloane’s mind, Jin leaned against the counter and held her at arm’s length—taking space to contemplate the body he’d been with the night before.

  In reality, he opened up the giant Xerox and put his A6 paper on the glass.

  “Our color propositions,” he said, his eyes smiling. “For the YA tablet.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s great.”

  “Isn’t it?” he teased. Leaning against the machine, seeming to take pride in the fact that she was more nervous than he was.

  “I got your text,” he said, checking the first copy for bleeds, before looking her in the eyes.

  “And I got yours,” she answered, laughing, because her system didn’t know what else to do with the bigness in her heart.

  Jin pressed Start on another round of copies, then relaxed against the machine and regarded her, just as she’d hoped he would, but with his arms folded. The impossibility of what had passed between them just a cluster of hours earlier seemed both delicious and absurd. The whirring of the ink-jet cartridges and the sharp scent of the ink was piercing through her consciousness. It wouldn’t be outlandish, would it? A very quick embrace?

  “Oh! Sloane,” said a familiar voice behind her. Deidre in the doorway, the clipboard to her chest. She looked from Sloane to Jin, and back to Sloane again, and tried, gallantly, to curb a burgeoning smile. “Mr. Stevens would like to see you,” she said, her face sternish again. “If you don’t mind.”

  Jin’s composure didn’t waver. Perhaps he was too young to know the sound of a death knell.

  21

  Sloane,” Dax gushed, arms open from his chair. His office again, eponymously mammoth.

  “I’m so glad to see you feeling better,” he said, without any apparent irony. “It’s the season, don’t you think? Warm to cool . . . do you know there are people who eschew the eating of tropical fruits in the winter because our North American systems aren’t used to digesting elements exposed to so much natural sun?”

  “I did, actually,” she said, touching the top of the chair in front of her, wondering if she should sit.

  “So let’s just get right down to it, yeah? Can you close the door?”

  On her way to do this, Sloane drew in a breath. Although a girlish part of her ran to the possibility that he knew about her and Jin, this wasn’t really possible. What she felt in her stomach was that Dax had concerns.

  “Sit, sit, sit.” Dax flapped at her, once she was facing him again. “So this professional affection thing. Piqued my interest. Where we going with that?”

  Sloane took a seat, moving slowly, trying to emanate the qualities of caution and patience that were missing from Dax’s voice.

  “Well, I’m still thinking through all this,” she started. “But obvious applications would be real-life friend-finders, social networking.”

  “Right, but I need things,” Dax said, drumming his fingers out in a quick gallop. “That I can pack, box, ship.”

  Sloane closed her eyes briefly. It was hard for her to trend forecast if she didn’t feel alone. She could feel alone in public—had felt secluded and protected yesterday on the subway train, in fact—but with Dax there, blinking petulantly at her like a hungry restaurant goer, it was hard to access the darker, stranger recesses of her inner mind.

  She pushed herself. There were always flashes and small red darts of heat, neurological connections she could actually ride.

  “Well, empathy robots, for one.”

  Dax thrust his chin onto his fist, alert now. “Go on.”

  “Versions of this exist, of course,” she said, nervous—nervous! The idea had just popped—“mostly in Japan. They’ve had some success in nursing homes especially—they’re these seal-like robotic creatures with oversized eyes that make cooing sounds, and flap their ears to listen. Now, they’re not really listening at all, but the point is to make the old people feel comfortable talking to someone who isn’t judging them. Someone who isn’t going to tell them that they’re not making sense, or they’re just being paranoid. I don’t know that they’ve done much to extend life expectancy, but as for quality of life . . .”

  “So this would go along with your idea of renting friends?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Sloane replied, unequivocally. “Although I truly believe that people will want to rent actual, human friends soon. People they can be seen out and about with. Have conversations with. Empathy bots, if you imagined the applications . . . well, I guess, since we’re on the topic of ReProduction, empathy tots could be a great solution for people who want . . . part-time kids—”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said, his body thrumming. “Kids you can turn on and off.”

  What was she doing? This idea wa
sn’t something that she actually felt. It wasn’t coming from that place of gravity that felt steadying and important. It would give further permission for people to be shortsighted and selfish, and it would be a huge success.

  “This I fucking love.” Dax shook his finger maniacally. “You had me pretty worried when you started confiscating phones, but this is fucking genius. It’ll be so big! Like those computer games, right? Where people used to carry around digital goldfish to learn responsibility? My kid had one. He killed it after two days, forgot to feed it. The differentiator here, though, is that you can activate it or deactivate it. Turn parenthood off or on.”

  “There would be a myriad of uses,” Sloane said, slowly, carefully. “And sure, parenting as a hobby could be one, but really, I would caution you . . .” She tried to find the right way to pace her words. “My gut instinct is still that people are going to want to interact with actual people again.”

  “Sure, but I can’t sell that. And also, no. I pick my kids up, they don’t talk to anyone at school all day and then they spend the entire evening texting. So I think empathy bots, yeah.”

  “Right, but I was thinking for the next generation . . .”

  “Yeah, no,” Dax said quickly, “I don’t have time for that. I want the stuff at ReProduction to be preorderable. Can you think more through these robots? I want to present this to electronics.”

  “I just saw them today.”

  “Perfect, then for next time. Let’s roll this shit out after Thanksgiving. Sloane, this is perfect. It’s fucking huge. God, I’m so excited, and this isn’t even why I called you in!”

  Sloane was staring past him, half at, half through the window, thinking back to her first decade in trend forecasting when the clients she’d worked for wanted forecasts ten or twenty years out. Today, companies wanted to know what would happen in three weeks so that their social media intern could be ready with a hashtag. In twenty years, it was unclear whether the human race would still be on the planet. It was too depressing; it was too vague! It was much more fun to debate the shelf life of platform Birkenstocks.

  “Sloane?” Dax repeated. He was thrusting his phone at her, screen out. “This?”

  Sloane curdled at the image; blood rushed to her head. His screen was cued to an Instagram snapshot of Roman in his green Zentai suit waiting in line at Whole Foods. It had been liked seven hundred thousand times.

  “This is your husband?” he asked, pulling the phone back. “Roman Bellard?”

  “We’re not actually married,” Sloane answered, still trying to sound calm.

  “And this?” He showed her another photo, Roman in the gold suit, at an outdoor Paris market, posing with a striped bass he’d just been handed by a fishmonger. “How you’ve never mentioned this before . . .”

  “Yeah,” Sloane said. “Zentai. He’s very big online.”

  “A neo-sensualist? A neo-sensualist? Where have you been hiding him?!”

  “In France,” Sloane said, attempting a lame smile.

  Dax waved his hand dismissively. “I’d love to meet him. Must. Dinner? I know that it’s, like, basically Thanksgiving, but that takes, what, three hours? You staying in town?”

  Sloane’s mouth opened, but no words came out. This was an impossible situation. If she told Dax that she’d broken up with Roman because he was about to publish a fatwa on penetrative sex, he’d be even more desperate to meet him. And she didn’t like the possibilities of what could happen if they met without her there.

  “We’re, um, probably going to Florida?” she said.

  “Oh yeah?” Dax said, his eyes raised. “When’s that?” He was tapping at his phone.

  “What about tonight?” he asked, not waiting for her answer. “Can you do tonight?”

  “I’d really rather not, Dax,” she said. “Roman and I . . . things have been a little tricky, I don’t know if it’s the move over here, or what . . .” Her sigh was exaggerated enough that she hoped he’d drop the subject.

  “It’s just dinner”—he shrugged—“not a visit to the marriage counselor. Which—” He held up the hand that wasn’t pawing his phone. “Jesus, been there! I’m only curious. I mean—” He tap, tap, tapped. “How can I not be?” He thrust his screen at her again. Another image, this time of the both of them, a night when she’d been happy: Sloane in an embroidered silk crepe gown on a red carpet in Paris, Roman in the gold Zentai suit, his Lycra feet nestled in tuxedo slippers. They’d been at the launch for the reissue of a Helmut Newton photo book of a naked Charlotte Rampling. Two years later, Rampling would make an Oscars comment that would unclothe her even further.

  “How’s Oak and Fell? At eight?”

  • • •

  When she called him that afternoon, Roman didn’t even hear that the dinner invitation was a caveat, an accordance, a favor she was doing for herself. That it didn’t mean that they weren’t separating, that she hadn’t kicked him out. All he heard was that he’d piqued the interest of a major CEO.

  “Should I wear the suit?” Roman asked her over the telephone. “Is that what he’s expecting?”

  “No, don’t wear the fucking suit, Roman. We’re going to a restaurant, you need to be able to eat.”

  To Sloane’s consternation, Dax had chosen one of those exhausting, ampersanded places with deeply subservient waiters who kneel to whisper about the extra-specials. All of the entrées were thirty-six dollars and all vegetables had to be ordered on the side for nine more. Sloane was deeply tired of farm-to-table restaurants. She would have preferred to eat the farm.

  Roman appeared as she was scrutinizing the menu on the outside of the restaurant’s door. He’d put some effort in his hair. Having not seen him in a full day, it struck her now—again—how handsome he was. Roman was beautiful, classic. He had the polish of a politician you wanted to believe in, wanted to hold a chalice in front of to be filled with golden words.

  “You’re angry,” he said, his eyes temporarily kind. Then his lips curved into a smile. “But you’re here.” His hands fell to his scarf.

  “This is my job, Roman. It isn’t about us. Don’t pull anything. I need you to be civil.”

  Roman put his palms out. “I am civility itself.”

  She almost laughed then; it suddenly seemed like it might be easy to put bygones behind them. So what if Roman wasn’t into penetrative sex? She had recently been penetrated by someone else.

  Dax and his stately wife were already at the table drinking water out of mason jars with about nineteen cucumbers in them when Roman and Sloane arrived. Sloane could tell from the sudden slackness of Roman’s jawline that he was in love with everything about the New York dining scene: the groomed women, the men’s rugged footwear, the soundtrack of New Age folksingers covering Nirvana songs.

  “Roman!” said Dax, standing. “Have we ever been waiting to meet you! But where’s the suit, buddy?” Roman’s breath caught, his stance accusatory. He was about to turn to Sloane with an I told you I should’ve—when Dax continued talking.

  “Sloane, Roman,” said Dax, still standing, “This is Raphael, my wife.”

  In practiced harmony, they greeted the Neapolitan beauty at his side, a woman who somehow managed to look voluptuous and aloof at the same time. A darting look at Raphael’s waistline suggested that there might be a secondary reason for her otherworldly glow.

  Sloane sat down without offering congratulations. You never knew. Even if you knew. She unfolded the thick napkin across her lap to distract herself from the discomfort twisting through her. She had a sinking feeling that she would not be able to rise to the levels of artifice the evening required.

  “Roman’s in this Zentai community, honey,” Dax said, settling back down. “It’s about . . . new forms of sensuality, right? New ways to touch. They all wear these skintight catsuits—”

  “Very tight around the head,” Roman said, passing h
is hand in front of his face. “No holes for the eyes or mouth, so . . . no good for dinner.”

  “Well, that’s . . .” said Raphael, fumbling, “that certainly is something.”

  “It’s like a living avatar,” Roman said, running his right hand along his left arm as if he was presenting a body part he had won. “The suit makes you look extra touchable, your body on display, but your skin can not be accessed.”

  Raphael’s eyes darted toward hers questioningly. Sloane responded by flicking a bread crumb off the table that would soon be covered with high-end, slightly toxic, enamel camping plates.

  “So, I’ve gotta ask you,” Dax said, clamping the wine menu shut with a decisive thud. “Are you into this, too?”

  “I’m not,” Sloane said, her hand raising involuntarily as if to emphasize the extent to which she wasn’t. “It’s definitely Roman’s thing.”

  “But Sloane introduced me to the idea of it,” Roman said, his French charm turned on full force. He was smiling at her, his face unlined, his countenance well rested, no cares in the world. “The freedom, no, the liberty of a second skin.”

  The waitress came, a woman so attractive, Sloane actually laughed. They ordered small plates to share. Sloane prayed that the precious food came quickly. She was worried that if she stayed too long at dinner, Roman would come home with her and they’d start everything again. Not because she wanted him to, or because she’d changed her mind, but because it was so easy. In some ways, their asexual relationship had been safe and comforting. She had stopped worrying if she was desirable, had confirmation that she wasn’t. She didn’t have to try.

  The wine came, presented like a baptized child. Raphael covered her own glass with a manicured hand, and Sloane listened to the guggling of the other glasses filling up. In two days, Thanksgiving. She thought of all the wine that would be served across a table that she wouldn’t be at. Ridiculous, and untimely, but she wanted her sister there with her like she hadn’t wanted anything in a long time. Together they’d ride off in Anastasia, Sloane with a napkin full of pilfered high-grade tater tots and Leila with a screw-cap bottle of white wine. Oh, Leila, Sloane would say, I’ve made so many mistakes.