Touch

by Courtney Maum

  Sloane grabbed her cell phone, dashed off an e-mail that she would accept Daxter’s proposal to do a double-headed consultancy for the ReProduction summit.

  Then she turned to Jin. “You tell me if this windbag says another thing about my womb,” she insisted, furious.

  “I will. I’m on it.” Jin hadn’t been exposed yet to the fire she had in her, but he was smiling, nevertheless, to see it back. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “I’m gonna go back to my office and do my fucking job.”

  26

  Sloane zoomed across the various floors back to her office, determined to stay in forward motion. She drafted an e-mail to Deidre requesting that she tell all the reporters who had requested comments and interviews that she was available for neither at this time. Then she called Mina and asked her to come up.

  “Sit down,” Sloane said, when Mina came in, looking both flattered and surprised. “I’m sure you have places to go. I just wanted to tell you—the idea you brought up the first day? Of a second-skin wearable that tracks how little we’re touched? I wanted to tell you that I’m going to be championing ideas like this. In case you have some more.”

  “You are?” Mina said, a sudden loosening in her face.

  “Yes,” she said, affirmative. “Dax has got a new figurehead for his tech agenda, so I can take another tack. My view of the future is that people are going to want to be people again, don’t you think?”

  After Mina left, promising to report back to Sloane about whatever was trending or unusual in Frederica, Delaware, where she’d be spending her Thanksgiving (which sounded more to Sloane like a sassy seven-year-old than an actual place), Sloane called up Allison in electronics and got her voicemail.

  “Allison,” Sloane started, “I wanted to get back to you about expanding the Denizen line of electronics to the bedroom. I don’t know whether you were at Mr. Bellard’s discussion this afternoon, but he is, in fact, being brought on as a consultant to the ReProduction project, and given his enthusiasm for augmented reality, he’s probably a better candidate to answer your questions about virtual sex tools in the homescape. As for me, I’m actually envisioning a return to physical intimacy, so I don’t feel comfortable giving you advice about a trend that doesn’t have sustainability in the marketplace.”

  She hung up, noisily. Then she tried Andrew Willett, from furniture.

  “Oh, Sloane,” he said, stumbling into surprise once he realized who was calling him. “Hello!”

  “Hi there,” she said, brightly. “I didn’t want you to take off for vacation before I addressed the question you sent through. I think if you really want to make a splash with your bed catalogue, feature a family: two parent figures, a child, all of them reading books in bed. Or one could be reading a newspaper. But no screens anywhere.”

  “No . . . no screens?”

  “No, none.” She turned her hand over and investigated her nail polish, a vivid turmeric.

  “Um, I can try it, but . . . it can’t be like a man and woman parent. We’ll get sued.”

  “Caretakers, Andrew. It doesn’t matter if they’re two women, two men, two black bears. In fact, you might have great success if they are wild animals. The idea is to create a vision of warmth and love. People will resonate with it. Trust me. Try a comp. Focus-group it. I bet you’d be surprised by the kind of reaction you get. Who the hell wants to see people electronically paying their bills in bed? Independent bookstores are thriving. Reading is making a comeback. Print will make a comeback, too.”

  “Oh, um, well, okay?” he said to her deluge of words. “I don’t know whether I can convince the team, though.”

  “You don’t have to. That’s my job. Just come up with some comps and I’ll take care of the rest after the break.”

  “Okay,” said Andrew, and then, brightening, “Okay!”

  She wished him a good vacation, he said he was off to Kansas City. It was inspiring, all of the places that real people were from.

  Sloane’s phone kept vibrating with text messages, so when she got off the line with Andrew, she finally checked her phone. Her sister had sent her a half-dozen all-caps outrages: she’d read Roman’s piece.

  “Masturbation, of both the cerebral and the physical sort, is the preferred release of the digitally experienced”?! I WISH I’D NEVER ‘DIGITALLY EXPERIENCED’ HIS PIECE!

  SO PEOPLE CAN DATE PORN NOW? OMG WHY DID I HAVE CHILDREN IF THEY’RE GOING 2 GROW UP 2 THINK LIKE THIS

  Sloane warmed, picturing her sister fending off her children’s pleas for more peanuts or pretzels in order to send these texts. This was the Leilee she’d grown up with: someone who would literally run off of a soccer field in the middle of a game if her sister needed help.

  On her way out, she stopped by Deidre’s office to wish her a happy Thanksgiving (Deidre was headed home to Ann Arbor, “tree town,” was what she called it), then continued downstairs, where she ran into Jin in the copy room, again.

  She’d come to fetch an article about the rebirth of an ancient Mayan trend that saw people wearing live insects as brooches; she felt it played into the back-to-the-body movement she was seeing, although she didn’t know how yet. Something about the dirt of insects, where they came from, loam. Ashes to ashes. Beautiful death.

  “So this is kinda our place, huh?” Jin said when she came in.

  “Well, it has such pleasant lighting,” Sloane quipped, amidst the electric zaps and zooms.

  Jin didn’t say anything further about Roman’s lecture, nor his sellout comment about Sloane wanting kids. There were other people in the copy room with them, although her attention on Jin was so complete, she hadn’t noticed who.

  They agreed to talk over the holiday without saying this out loud. They shook hands, as colleagues, over a deal that no one else in the copy room had heard them make, and for the rest of the weekend Sloane would be agitated by the unfinishedness of that contact.

  • • •

  Sloane was operating at a significant deficit during the Thanksgiving weekend—she was without her car. Whether it was happenstance or further proof that Dax had turned against her, Anastasia had been pulled out of service to get a holiday decal applied on her hood. Sloane assumed that a lot of corporate energy had gone into deciding what decal would say “Christmas” without saying “Christ.” Accordingly, from the drawings that had been presented to her from HR, it looked like she’d get Anastasia back with a cluster of bright jelly beans topped with pure white snow.

  Once home, Sloane admired the architecture of her life without Roman: the apartment was clean and hopeful, bright. A rite of purification, Sloane doused the kitchen with Clorox—the industrial kind that would kill both the good and bad bacteria, not the brand she usually used, formulated with geraniums and hope. She scoured the floors, she changed the sheets on the bed, she did a load of laundry. And while she was engaged in this liturgy of housework, she thought about her snouts.

  Her consulting firm back in Paris had taken its cue from the other trend forecasting agencies she’d worked for in the past: low overhead, wide reach. Aside from a Parisian personal assistant (who had taken advantage of Sloane’s New York interlude to “re-center” at an agrotourism retreat in Spain), Sloane worked alone, but she did have a coterie of experts that she called on when she needed insight, or skills she didn’t have: such as a working knowledge of Excel.

  Her snouts (Sloane had an allergic reaction to the term “cool hunters”) were located all over the world: Melbourne, Shanghai, Des Moines. Sometimes, Sloane found her human catalysts through references, but most often, she knighted them during her own travels. Kai, for example, was a sneaker designer in Leeds whom she’d met at a tiny store he owned while she was in the city for a typography conference (“Is Helvetica the Next Helvetica?” was the panel she was on). Nelly, a pink-haired, femme lesbian, was a bartender in Kansas City and a relentless optimist. Some
times Sloane collaborated with people because of their dispositions, not because of anything they had achieved. Sometimes she clicked with people because they were kind, or simply sensitive, or possessed the exceedingly rare ability to keep their eyes up when they walked around.

  The best thing about her snouts was that they lived across a myriad of cultures and time zones, so there was always someone to call upon when she needed inspiration. Sure, she now had a firm handle on her premonitions, but she knew it couldn’t hurt to test other people’s waters.

  The first call she made was to Kai; he’d always been her favorite. He possessed that seductive emotional amalgam of the young and brilliant: he was both composed and wired. If Sloane had a knack for predicting trends, Kai was someone who set them. He’d single-handedly ignited the black velvet sneaker fervor that had swept across Europe several years ago.

  She reached him in what sounded like a pounding restaurant. “Kai,” she said, used to delivering her needs in sound bites. He was always on the move somewhere, in a taxi, in a pub. “Give me your weirdest. I’ve got a crisis over here.”

  “Okay,” Kai said, the clamor dimming as he moved to a quieter spot. Most likely, a restroom. Sloane heard somebody flush.

  “So people are really into bells,” he said.

  “Bells?”

  “Yeah, like on clothing. Like, literally: silver bells.”

  Sloane pulled her knees up on the couch. “Ugh,” she said, coming up empty. Unconnected dots.

  “I guess they’re kinda talismanic? Inspired by Tibetan percussion sticks. People are wrapping them around their sneakers, they’re hanging from backpacks. Appearing on necklaces.”

  “Okay,” Sloane stalled. “But what about people-to-people stuff? Are you seeing anything in terms of . . . like, physicality?”

  “Oh, gah, no,” he answered, with a laugh. “Unless you count hoverboards as physical. Better to show off your trainers with, yeah?”

  Sloane hung up, disgruntled. Her information hunger was related to a very specific need. It was nutritional, and urgent. Like a system low on iron, she’d know the right information when she hit it, and bells weren’t it.

  Next up, she called her friend Lance who worked in real estate in Malmö, Sweden. “Outdoor pizza ovens,” he answered unequivocally, when she inquired about the latest craze, “and sunken fire pits.”

  “Sunken fire pits?” she repeated. Was this what the financially independent equated with adventure? Having heat outside?

  After her relative flare-out with Kai, Sloane didn’t want to ask the others whether they were specifically seeing anything intimacy-related—she didn’t want their answers to be biased. But she didn’t have to worry. The information she was getting back was resolutely anti-touch.

  Ethan, in Dallas, told her about the popularity of an app named “RunPee” that let you know the stretches of time during a movie that had been crowdsourced as “nonessential” so you could run and pee. Apparently, the app was so successful, bathroom lines had started accumulating during the same moments in newly released films, leading to the app’s purchase by the talent behemoth William Morris, who wanted access to the pee-break data so that they could track where interest waxed and waned in their clients’ films.

  Lulu in Los Angeles told Sloane about sensory deprivation data sharing—the broadcasting of blood pressure levels and heart rate information while stressed-out Angelenos were submerged in the lightless, soundproof isolation tanks that had become a popular way to digitally cleanse.

  “But you’re not digitally cleansing if you’re sharing biometrics with your social media base,” Sloane interjected.

  “I guess so,” said Lulu, who sounded like she was chewing hair, “but at the same time, you get props for going from the most stressed out to the calmest. It’s kinda a thing.”

  Sloane made a mental note to kick Lulu out of her stable. She’d been a reliable (and sane) source of wellness information until she’d gone in for hot yoga.

  Sloane’s motley team talked to her of fish species that communicated by electrical impulses and a clamoring for egg cozies; the ubiquitousness of Jerusalem artichokes and adult coloring books.

  But it was only Rufus in New Delhi who gave Sloane something she could work with.

  “Okay, so it’s a Pointless button. It started as an app, and the app failed, but a guy here resurrected it. You just poke and poke and poke at your phone, and eventually, after an unpredictable number of attempts, something completely random will emerge. An image. A sound. A photo of a camel.”

  “Discovery,” Sloane said. “Hope.”

  “Well, yeah, exactly,” said Rufus, who sounded like he was drinking something. It was the middle of the night in New Delhi, the doughy part of the evening where your actual thoughts were weirder than your dreams. Rufus was a programmer who slept during the day.

  “I mean, it replicates what we’re all hoping, which is that something great and beautiful is going to come out of our phones.”

  This, Sloane could move forward with. A Pointless button was a digital cry for help. People were turning to technology to lead them to salvation, but it wasn’t working. Sloane didn’t often take photos with her cell phone, but the last one she had came to her in a mental flash. It was a picture of some street art she’d seen in the Belleville district of Paris a couple of days before she’d left. A single question, scrawled: Can our humanity save our inhumanity?

  Resoundingly, Sloane felt: yes.

  • • •

  That night, Sloane burrowed into her own version of a sensory deprivation chamber, a sort of bedded deep think she resorted to when there was too much in her head.

  Free of clothes, shades drawn, the refrigerator unplugged (it made these gurgling sounds that drove her bonkers), with a lavender sleep mask wrapped around her eyes, she got under the covers and smushed her face between four pillows. From there, with her body anchored under heavy blankets, she floated between her experts’ input and the thought waves that had been currenting through her before Roman’s article emerged.

  Visions came and went like shooting stars across her mind space. As did memories, unanswered work e-mails. False urgencies. Regrets.

  She saw hand sanitizer bottles dangling from purses.

  People liking the profiles of people they were never going to date.

  A renaissance in small talk; how-to books and conversation tutorials that taught you how to chat.

  A market rise in flashlights. Flashlights. Why?

  Reading under covers. Reading in a tent.

  Camping.

  Areas without cell phone service. De-connectivity. De-activation of accounts.

  Unbuying. Unfindability. An increase in runaways.

  The opposite of bullying. An emphasis on friend-making. An emphasis on slow friendship.

  Agendas without dates inside. A trend in “underplanning.”

  A relaunch of the “reach out and touch someone” slogan from AT&T.

  The tunic she’d left at the dry cleaners and forgotten to pick up.

  Images bumped up against images, slid past each other like fish. The sifting was occurring, pictures that held no resonance were dissipating into the blue. It took effort to keep the superficial things from surfacing, remnants of to-do lists, anxieties and gripes, but if she floated there long enough, the hierarchy of her mind would find its natural form. The small comets continued. Squiggly dancing seahorses and sudden yellow sparks.

  Dancing lessons. Self-smelling as an indicator of health. Renewed faith in pheromones instead of dating sites to indicate sexual compatibility.

  A coming craze for scuba diving.

  Domestic birds and ant farms. A clamor for new pets.

  A baby born with webbed fingers, an evolutionary edge. Proof that humans didn’t need separated digits any longer, just a nub to scroll.

  Horseba
ck riding. Dog sledding. A marked interest in sports that melded man and beast.

  A celebration of humility. Undersharing. A need for privacy, again.

  Sloane’s head filled with the feather music of a mind falling asleep. There would be a quest for unheard notes and syncopations that made the mind work, the soul travel. There would be music labs where people would listen to dissonant chords and complex tonalities to reawaken neural pathways that had been overly conditioned to the melodically predictable pop music of the modern age. There would be handwriting classes and manners clubs where people practiced etiquette norms to keep decorum alive. She had forgotten to find a dentist in the United States. Or a gynecologist, for that matter. It had been good talking to her sister. She needed to call her sister, and her mother, more.

  • • •

  When Sloane awoke the next morning, the city was blanketed in white. It was early, not yet dawn: there would be flights delayed and sedans whose tires spun brown tracks into the snow. There would be the potential of snowmen and snow balls—crystalline ice water sculpted between gloves.

  There would be preheated ovens and there would be small mouths. There would be the inedibility of root vegetables turned to lush and sweetness through the application of heat. There would be entranceways overfilled with clothes, and boots with snow melting down into the cracks of floorboards. There would be music. There wouldn’t be music. There would be pop-up screens and adverts, political agendas, there would be things sold.

  There would be more snow, and there would be more silence.

  There would be calm, again.

  27

  The next morning, feeling clearer, cleaner, after her mindsink, Sloane had felt the urgency to execute the time-honored, last-ditch effort known as the Dramatic Gesture, and board a plane for Florida. She’d do what she’d been avoiding for so many years now: physically—and emotionally—show up.