And even from Andrew, in the furniture design department, someone who had also come around to humanity and warmth: Hey Sloane, reaching out regarding our bed catalogue. Most of our images have couples in them reading on their tablets, but with Roman’s article, do you think featuring single sleepers (with virtual reality gear on or something?) would be more on trend? Online catalogue needs to be shot soon, let me know?
Let me know. Just checking. Can we talk? Certainly, Sloane wanted to reply. Let’s talk about the fact that Roman Bellard is not my husband, not my collaborator, not even my roommate anymore. But it didn’t matter what people thought she and Roman were. Such labels would be lost in the retreating flow of semantics—what mattered now was the revelation that cool kids were done with intercourse. How could Mammoth make money off of people shunning sex?
With more sex! Sloane wanted to shout. The end of sex means the return of sex, how could people not see this? If hemlines are long one season, in two years they’ll be long again. People were going to tap and swipe their way through at least three more years of self-obsession before waking up to the debilitated state of their relationships in the real world. And then?
Sloane took a break from the pinging and the typing to check on Roman’s article again. Three hundred and seven comments, number-two trending topic on Twitter. Her stomach sank.
“Sloane?”
Deidre entered her office looking like she was bearing bad news after a urine sample. She had a sheet of paper floating on top of her ever-present clipboard.
“I thought it might be easier to just give you these messages than filter the calls,” she said.
While she was reading through them, Deidre scratched her wrist. Sloane could feel her discomfort to the Fahrenheit degree.
Thomas at The Guardian. Marvin at The Atlantic. Susan again from The New York Times. She looked up at Deidre, her eyes imploring.
“You know, we’re not even together anymore?” Her voice sounded far away, even to herself.
Deidre nodded carefully. “I do.”
“But everyone thinks we are.” She looked down at the papers. “Everyone’s so excited. What am I supposed to say?”
“Um, well, I imagine that that would take some thought,” Deidre said, clearing her throat. “And, um, I didn’t know if you’d heard, or rather, I’m pretty sure you hadn’t, so I wanted to be the one to—” Deidre scratched her wrist again. “It’s Roman. As I understand it, he was supposed to come in on Monday to do a presentation, which you were apprised of, but, um, now he’s coming in today, actually, of which you were not.”
Sloane widened her eyes further. When the hell had that been decided? She’d seen Dax two hours ago. Either he’d already called in Roman by then, or he’d decided to strike while the iron was hot.
“Today? With everybody leaving?” she asked, shocked.
“Um, it will be streamed live, I’m pretty sure?” Deidre said, sounding uncertain only for Sloane’s benefit. “Because of the attention the article’s getting, I believe Mr. Stevens felt that it was best to do it right away.”
“No,” Sloane said, her head shaking. “I get it. Of course. No, he didn’t say a thing to me, but fine. Was I meant to prepare anything?”
“No,” said Deidre, her eyes jumpy. “It’s—it’s just him.”
Sloane absorbed this, and Deidre watched it happen. She couldn’t think of a single expected thing to say.
“For what it’s worth,” Deidre accorded, her color rising, “I want you to know that a lot of people believe in the things you’re saying.”
“Well, apparently I haven’t been saying them loudly enough,” Sloane said, looking dejectedly at the piece of paper with all the journalists’ names on it.
“But with the suggestion boxes, and the time-outs with the phones?” Deidre attempted. “I hear things. A lot of people are really grateful that you’re here.”
“Really?”
She watched Deidre parse out her next words. “The thing that you said at Sparkhouse about people . . . paying to be hugged?” She put her arms around herself, seemingly to stop herself from talking. “I don’t think that’s crazy. Sometimes I go to the hairdresser’s when I don’t even need to. After a bad day.”
Sloane looked at Deidre wholly, looked at her entirely, seeing not an exhausted executive assistant but a hopeful woman in a hairdresser’s chair, her eyes closing against the comfort of someone else’s hands upon her, memories of dish soap bubbles and shared baths, the irreplaceable intimacy of someone bathing you.
That had been Deidre’s note then; her confession. Sometimes I go to the hair salon just to get my head touched. There were other people holding private hurts across this office, and some of them, also, had dared to speak up.
I wish I had better handwriting. But it hurts my hand.
I want to call my friends more. But I never call.
I like wearing long johns because it feels like someone loves me.
“I think . . . I guess what I’m saying is that there are a lot of people on your side.”
Sloane stared at her, incredulous, until she started to believe it.
“In that case,” Sloane said, standing, “let’s check out the competition.” She extended her arm to be linked through with the messenger’s.
There was no more nervousness, this time, when Deidre smiled.
25
On Sloane’s way down to the cafeteria where Roman’s presentation was being held, she was congratulated by people she didn’t remember meeting on the success of her article—they used the plural form of “you”: “Such an interesting article,” “Your article was so great.” Pop culture had roped her into a twosome with Roman, and because she hadn’t gone public with their separation, she was in that twosome, still. The anti-mom and anti-dad had a viral contagion on their hands, one that would bring Mammoth tons of press.
It would be easy to let people continue making these assumptions. Not to mention lucrative. And Sloane was private about her personal life—she’d never used a publicist, she never granted the kinds of profiles magazines were always calling her for. But at that moment, joining the swarms of people clasping mugs of coffee, heading for the cafeteria where the presentation would take place, she envied the clean mechanics of a public relations firm. All she would have to do was put out a statement and step back to watch it spread. After ten years of collaboration and domestic partnership, Sloane Jacobsen and Roman Bellard have amicably parted ways. And then the firm would put out another carefully worded press release explaining why Roman had joined Sloane at Mammoth, and Sloane could forever rely on others to explain her messy life. But no: maybe she wasn’t as quick to respond as she could be, but she wasn’t about to start paying someone to speak up for her.
Upon a makeshift platform that looked more like a pulpit, Dax was saying how grateful he was that Roman could make it in on such short notice; grateful, too, that everyone was able to gather right before vacation. He winked, he smiled, he had a lot to be thankful for.
Roman was wearing his purple Zentai suit, the one he saved for lectures. Sloane wondered if he’d worn it over to the office, or changed in one of the company restrooms. Looking at him up on stage, flawless and feline in his Zentai silhouette, Sloane felt strangely calm. Come what may, she wasn’t living with him anymore and she never would again. He seemed less now like someone who had hurt and disappointed her than a whacky upstart.
“So without further ado,” Dax was concluding, having cinched his introduction, “I’ll let our neo-sensualist take it away. Everyone, the author of today’s trending ‘Sex Is Dead’ piece, Roman Bellard!”
Sloane noted real enthusiasm in the crowd’s yelps. Yes, well, people initially tripped over themselves for optical head-mounted displays also, and look how that turned out. These guys would probably stay onboard for augmented virtual sexuality experiences until they were caught jacking
off to a fairy hologram by their landlord mom.
Roman raised his hand in the direction of the applause to both acknowledge and abate it. With his compromised vision, Roman probably couldn’t see her. This both pleased and worried her. She knew he valued her opinion, and that his ego would be crushed if she hadn’t stood in to listen, but she also knew he might get more carried away than usual if he thought she wasn’t there.
“Thank you, Daxter, for having me!” Roman yelled to his brand-new devotees. “This is such a welcome. Such a day. Such a day to be much more than our bodies!”
People cheered again, but Sloane just rolled her eyes. God, people were so willing to eat up anything French.
“Many people ask me, ‘Roman, what is neo-sensualist,’” he continued, “so I think we start with that? The new sensuality, it is wonderful. It is a pursuit of sexuality that goes beyond being touched. We’re in the digital age here, but our sexuality is still analog. But this is not how it should be. The new sensuality—the new sexuality—is post-touch.”
Sloane steeled her stomach against the rising temperature in the room. Eyes were open, mouths wide in pretty o’s—the Mammothers were all ears. Sloane had hoped to see more skepticism, more indigestion, frankly, at the idea of no more sex, but this was a generation tuned to fasts. They had been raised on a diet of withholding—free from additives, free from BPA, free from communal love.
“We have only to look around us to see that the post-sex revolution is already under way. Whoever has that clicky thingy, could you do the slide?” Roman paused as the task was executed, the screen behind him coming to life. “An undesired side effect, the not seeing,” he said, touching his sightless face to a chorus of laughs.
Once the slide was up, he turned referentially to a massive, blown-up image of two people kissing with tongue.
“Penetration as parable. Penetration as farce. The polemic French director Gaspar Noé’s latest movie, Love, debuted in 3-D,” he said, holding the mike up to the place his mouth would be if it wasn’t spandexed. “3-D is for action movies. And thrillers. And now it is for porn. And if it is for porn”—he made a motion for the next slide and another still appeared, this one, the head of a penis positioned in front of a bright nipple—“that means that we are making fetish of the normal because it isn’t normal anymore.”
Sloane felt a roiling in her belly. On this, he was right. This was one of Roman’s academic comments that used to thrill her—thrilled her still. The canonization of the normal, it was something they would have talked about all night, before, cycling through the examples that were, in fact, around them, thinking up places where they could give joint lectures. And now what? Was Sloane normal? Or was normal the new weird?
With Roman’s presentation fully under way, people started to look around, as surreptitiously as possible, for Sloane. She could almost read the thoughts going through the heads of people with their embarrassed smiles; the assumptions that Roman and Sloane’s sex life involved the kinds of kinks they couldn’t fathom: inversion tables, drilldos, dental forceps, VR porn with pumped-in, feral scents. So this is what it means to be an anti-mom, they must be thinking. Bondage gear and intellectual conversation and interactive VR sex.
She counteracted the attention by keeping hers on the stage, purposely not looking for the people she still considered sympathetic to her cause: Mina, Deidre, Andrew, and Jin, of course, whom she had to work so hard not to look for she was burning calories.
But Jin—persistent carer—was looking for her. While Roman documented the other ways in which the normal had become fetishized—regular human activity tracked through wearables, the iconization of selfies—she sensed Jin claiming a place beside her. Her body divined sideways, like a fork tuning toward water.
“So, wow,” he whispered, their elbows almost touching.
“Yeah,” she answered. “I’ve got a lot on my plate.”
“I had no idea,” he said, quietly. “Until I read it. I had no idea.”
She’d managed so far to avoid Jin’s eyes, talking to him while staring straight ahead, but she could feel him looking at her, insisting that she fall to him as Roman clicked through another slide. The current one showed a generic image of average-looking people eyeing each other in a bar with an almost palpable lack of hope.
“This is a portrait of our sexual culture now,” Roman was saying, his voice insinuating a pout. “It is my belief that, with Mammoth at the helm, you can take people to the place where they are surpassing their sexual potential, instead of doing . . . this.” He pointed in the vague direction of the slide, leading to more laughs.
“And then there is the Zentai,” Roman continued, snapping a stretch of clingy fabric away from his arm. “I have long dreamt of putting artificial intelligence into second skins, until, of course, we can actually encode it in ourselves! In the meantime, you can imagine the potential, erogenous and otherwise, of second-skin applications that allow us to become the device.”
“Sloane?” Jin insisted. She finally turned to face him.
“You all right?” he asked.
Douceur, douceur—it was such a tender word in French. Sweetness. Mild gentleness, flowers and perfume. In English, the way Jin’s eyes were looking at her would be described as “concerned,” but in French, this was attentiveness, this was empathy. To Sloane, his compassion fueled the magnetism between them, leaving her wanting to touch his arm, his shoulder, touch any part of him.
“I don’t know,” she whispered honestly. “I might be.” She tried to laugh, but finally shrugged with something nearing lassitude. “I’ve got some work to do,”
Meanwhile, Roman moved to another slide. Up came the image of a lone man staring through a narrow viewfinder with a cord running along his head. Sloane recognized the logo of one of the sex toys Roman had had delivered to their apartment on their first day in New York. He started going on about the VR Tenga, how freedom from sex was The Next Big Thing.
“In cyberspace we can even become immortalized!” Roman was going on. “With responsive virtual technology, no one can put a limit on us except our imaginations. We can live out fetishes that society has punished. The sexual revolution—and I am proof of it—is happening online.”
Somewhere in the front, somebody started clapping. Someone behind them started clapping, too. Sloane found herself nodding to an inaudible beat, incredibly relieved. If this was all he had, she could beat it. She knew Roman—knew him—and he didn’t have anything but charisma to back any of this up.
But then Daxter took the stage, beaming at his sudden prodigy, and Sloane remembered that Roman didn’t need data, that Mammoth would find some for him, and if it didn’t exist, they would create some by producing virtual reality products that people had to have. It had been posited to her before that trends no longer existed, but were only manufactured, and although Sloane had long held that this wasn’t true, she had to cede that in some cases—in this case—it very well could be.
“I love this,” Dax proclaimed onstage, too enthused to keep himself from slapping Roman’s back. “So many products are coming to mind I’m about to take him hostage. You’ll hear more about this next week, but I didn’t want you all to leave for the holiday without hearing this from me: we’re super lucky to have Roman joining the team to get us ready for ReProduction.” He threw his arm around the Roman silhouette. “Alongside Sloane,” he added.
That smarted. She had not said yes to her and Roman leading separate teams. But Roman had said yes, and—apparently—that was enough.
“Errrgh, yes,” Daxter was going, peering out at a hand waving from the audience. “I wasn’t really opening this to questions, but, um, sure.”
Sloane stood on tiptoe to see a T-shirted man near the front. Dax handed him the mike.
“Yeah, I, um, I don’t know if Sloane is here or not?” the guy said, addressing his question to Roman. “But my understanding is t
hat . . . is that you’re a couple?”
Sloane’s blood stopped moving through her body the way it should. A new flock of people craned to find her in the back. Up on stage, Dax’s expression tightened. Who knew what was going on underneath Roman’s suit.
“And I guess my question is, well, how to reconcile what Sloane has been telling us, which is that people are going to want, well, like real people stuff again, against what you’re saying, which is that our lives, like, even our sex lives, are going to be fully lived online?”
Sloane’s lungs felt like they were holding too much air. Jin shifted at her side.
Dax hurriedly retrieved the microphone.
“Yes, well,” Roman started, curving to the mike that Dax hadn’t actually offered, “in market research, we always found that it was difficult for women to talk about sexuality without the great emotion.”
“You fucking fuck,” Sloane said, on held breath.
“—there is always that, how would you put it, that certain tenderness? They get attached. And of course, they can be mothers! Which makes objectivity so hard—”
Dax grabbed back the mike. Meanwhile, caterpillars of lights had started dancing before Sloane’s eyes; she felt like she might faint. Had Roman just announced that she was craving motherhood to the entire crowd?
“It is probably a gender thing, but yes,” Roman continued, even though Dax was clearly trying to stop him. “I think this is probably the only time that we have not agreed on trends!”
This freaking show pony, Sloane thought, growing livid. If this misogynistic ding-dong thinks he’s going to posit himself as the big fucking kahuna of trend forecasting, he’s got another thing coming to him. And so, she raged, did Dax.
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