Touch

by Courtney Maum

  Best-laid plans, indeed. She’d checked countless websites, made phone calls, had even tried Mammoth’s travel division—there hadn’t been a single plane to take. Nature, in its infinite superiority, had shown all of the East Coast the folly that was waiting until the fourth Thursday in November to show your family that you cared about them by dumping a historical amount of snow across the eastern seaboard.

  All across the country, planes were grounded, indefinitely delayed. Turkeys overcooked while mothers checked and rechecked the flight status of children’s airplanes. Beds that had been turned down for grandchildren went unslept in, guest towels unused. Overtime was accumulated by the harried airline staff, insults were vaulted, pleas proffered, egos checked. The would-be passengers’ reasons for flying were many and persuasive: but Mother Nature, the great leveler, was hearing none of it. Anything that went up into the sky would not come down that day.

  Once it really sunk in that she wasn’t going to be able to get to Florida, her body felt heavy with both the relief and disappointment of not being able to make the surprise trip. Sloane lay in bed and considered how the stages of grief also applied to air travel: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. In a way, she was jealous that she wasn’t stuck in an airport to watch beleaguered humans reach the fifth stage.

  It would start with meal coupons being distributed. Lines, impossibly long ones, forming in front of Sbarro and Chick-fil-A. The rage and the indignation of the experience that would tighten people’s bodies into clenched fists and tight jaws. Someone with a toddler—two toddlers, exhausted—would finally dare to ask if she couldn’t cut ahead in the line, and the man she would have asked would be the wrong one: a businessman who had about three hours of vacation in his annual contract, an only son who hadn’t seen his parents in Cincinnati since spring of the previous year, who had left the charger to his laptop in his checked suitcase—idiot!—who had only checked his luggage in the first place because he’d bought a lot of dress shirts for his father so that he’d look crisper, hale; his father who had called him Steven the other day (which wasn’t his name, but his uncle’s, who was three years dead), and with the delays, if he even made it to Cincinnati, he’d be there for such a piddling amount of time it would be more damaging to his parents than if he hadn’t come at all. And now, when all he wanted was something greasy and off-diet, here was this woman with her oversized carry-ons and her troop of runny kids and their dirty T-shirt blankies, asking to cut in front of him.

  This man was going to say no because of low blood sugar and exhaustion, and also frustration for the life he’d meant to make for himself (wife, children) but hadn’t, and the one he wasn’t going to reach by air (his father still had dimples when he smiled), when he was usurped by a woman who said, Yes, come in front of me, I have little children, too.

  And she did have children, this woman who had let the line be cut, one of whom was an infant for whom she had a foldable cooler of frozen breastmilk in her checked bag which was, at that minute, probably thawing, which meant that all of the half hours she’d spent pumping in her sordid hotel guest room were for naught. Now the baby would have to have formula for the first time in its life because the breasts he needed were stuck in a fast-food line in Newark. Her husband would either weather the presentation of that formula with grace or it would be a hell-raising disaster. So many tiny big disasters, and nothing they could do but be nice to people, be patient with people, let them cut in line.

  Yes, come in front of me started up a conversation about frustration that turned into one of thanks. The businessman, shamed by his neighbor’s generosity, offered to hold one of the mother’s bags while they all waited in line together, and what were they waiting for? Fried chicken wasn’t good for you, they admitted, and yes it got you messy, but wasn’t fried chicken—inherently—the best?

  And elsewhere in the massive terminal, thronged with people using carry-ons as computer tables because all the chairs were full, a woman who had been on her way to Jamaica for a much-needed “girl’s trip” with women who, like she was, were all three years into their divorces, a woman who was trying not to think about the cost (financially and emotionally) of every single hour that she wasn’t getting sun, passed the spa booth that she’d remembered from the last warm-weather vacation she’d taken when her ex was still her husband, when they, too, had had a flight delayed and she’d suggested they both get massages to kick off their vacation, and he’d said they’d already paid enough for the vacation as it was.

  Well, fuck Dale and his fall-over-if-you-blow-on-it spec house with the siding that he told everyone was wood when it was clear as day that it was vinyl, she was getting a mani-pedi.

  And when the pedicurist touched Teresa’s legs: one tap on her bared calf to say, put your foot into the water, when she cupped her hands around the woman’s degraded plantar nerves and applied a thumb tip to a pressure point, Teresa’s entire being filled with the bounty of this touch. The orchestrations it had necessitated for her to take five days off—Stella to her friend’s house, Harry to his dad’s—they all washed away from her with this warm support. So much so that when Teresa was coasting on the frequency of the relaxed and the manicurist asked if she’d like an extra ten-minute shoulder massage for fifteen dollars, Teresa felt the sun upon her and the coming warmth of her companions, the laughs, the confidences they’d share, the fact that it didn’t matter that she was jiggly in her one-piece because she wasn’t twenty, damn it, and also, deeper, truer: that she deserved to feel like she was special, deserved a little love, so she reached into her wallet for more cash.

  Sloane could see all this, could feel the reluctant budding of humanity’s best side, just as clearly as she could see the Toyota Camry far below her, skidding up 9th Street toward the dog park, past the Puerto Rican flags that were just tips now, prodding through the snow-capped azaleas of the community garden that the residents had to fight to protect from developers every year. She could feel the expelled breaths of people all across America realizing that that day, they weren’t going to actualize their plans, the almost blissful absurdity that comes once you accept the fact that even with your phone and your tablet and your Wi-Fi–enabled thermostats, you don’t have control, and that your mind—so tired, always on—is interpreting that sudden helplessness as the exact thing that you wanted.

  28

  The weekend was a long one. Sloane missed Jin. She missed her car. Plus, certain people weren’t calling her back. She’d left “Happy Thanksgiving” messages for her mother and her sister, and after two days passed without any answer, her ego had been sore. I actually tried to make it there, she’d written in a group text to both of them. Just so you know. I tried.

  Even Roman (who had continued with his frantic I’m not sure why you’re so upset / I thought you’d be excited for us messages) had gone radio silent, too. If his onslaught of sudden television and radio appearances were anything to judge by (that long holiday weekend alone, he’d been on The Today Show, The Tonight Show, and had been booked for that week’s Give Me One More Second!), he’d probably decided that he didn’t need her—or her opinion of him—anymore.

  In order to inoculate herself from the mushroom cloud of his relevance, Sloane had gone out to the movies—a luxury activity she rarely had time for. It had been rainy and cold, the city emptied of people who had other homes to go to, and—with her car still out of commission—she’d decided to catch a cab.

  Regardless of the city you were in, taxis used to be safe places to turn inward and reflect, but now they were like being inside of a stimulation blender. Sloane spent the twenty-minute ride being jabbered at by the different images playing on the TV screen. One clip had even been of Roman on some show yip-yapping about the end of sensuality.

  “I knew sensuality, American sensuality was over,” Roman was saying, teeth gleaming over the mug bearing the show’s logo, “when I was looking over materials for a potential teachin
g job. Here”—he pointed downward, as if he had planned on teaching from that very stage—“in America, they were sending me, I don’t know how you call them. Manuals, yes? On sexual etiquette?” He opened his hands to explain the situation further.

  “If I am having a one-on-one meeting with a student, the door must be open. And between the two of us, there must be three feet on the floor. If the student has his or her legs crossed, well!” he cried with emphasis. “Then I must be like this!” Here, he made a dramatic gesture of someone who was straitjacketed, to the studio audience’s delight.

  Sloane had started punching the digital Off button to wipe him from the screen, but every effort she made to turn the television off just seemed to make Roman louder.

  “And so, really, Dina, you must admit that sexuality cannot live here,” Roman was saying to the show’s host, with a languid hand-twirl that encompassed the whole stage. “It doesn’t have to! There is a lusher world, a wilder world, a more rewarding one online!”

  “Excuse me?” Sloane had said, tapping against the Plexiglas that separated her from the cab driver. “I will pay you if you can find a way to keep this off.”

  “Huh?” he’d said, turning, pulling an earbud out of one ear. “Only card.”

  “You don’t take cash?” Sloane asked.

  “Just card.” He put his earbud in again.

  • • •

  Monday couldn’t arrive soon enough. Sloane rose early that morning, knowing that two things that recently solidified her had returned. The previous night, Jin had flown home from Seattle, richer in the knowledge that he did not like canoeing in November and that his divorced father was officially a catch.

  “Not one but two women dropped him off sandwiches this morning,” Jin said on one of the phone calls they’d enjoyed while apart. “They’ve got his fishing trips clocked.”

  In addition to having her love interest back on the same coast, she also had Anastasia by her side again, freshly decorated with her holiday decal.

  “The perception I have of jelly beans is that they communicate ‘Easter,’” Anastasia commented, when Sloane asked her what she thought of her new hood. “But mine is not to reason why.”

  “Lord Tennyson,” Sloane had replied, continually impressed by the spectrum of her driver’s cultural references.

  While they headed across town, Sloane reacquainted herself with the stockpile of Dax missives in her phone. He’d been thrilled to hear that Sloane was game to do a double consultancy with Roman, and had been e-mailing her ideas over the weekend in stream-of-consciousness format:

  I’m going to make a video for Monday morning to announce that Roman’s coming on. (still in Aspen, gotta love the spring skiing in November, thank you climate change!) And to explain the direction forward: PRO-TECH and PRO-TOUCH.

  As for the way we organize the ReProduction summit, maybe it’s an actual debate? Or maybe we present the products for each side, and then we have a debate? I really like the idea of audience members being able to choose sides: we’ll crowdsource the whole thing with social media metrics so we can see who’s winning in real time. Oh, and I’m looking into legal with this, but I’m thinking we offer the whole thing on streaming . . . for $$.

  Reading through Daxter’s ideas again, Sloane’s confidence had wavered: could she really stay involved in such a charade for the long haul? But then she thought back to all the notes that she’d been getting and the anecdotes she’d heard that weekend from her snouts, and she reminded herself that she’d built her reputation on identifying trends that she believed in before anyone else. Far-off ones. Far-fetched ones, but true, sustainable trends. To bow out now would not only thwart the people longing to return to a more personable way of life, but it would also be a disservice to herself. Did she really want her name attached to a batch of robotic “empathy toddlers” that would enable people to remote-control parenthood? Or did she want to talk about what she really saw coming, what she really thought would trend?

  She ran her hands along Anastasia’s leather seats and took in the “This Christmas, think about YOU” signs shining out of shops.

  Pro-touch. Pro-technology. The only reason Daxter would even fathom giving people a chance to choose between the two camps is because he was certain she would lose. He would make her look ridiculous so that Mammoth’s products and mission statement (Delivering the World®) felt more appealing and urgent than ever. Games and electronics, music, food and fashion, all of it delivered not to your door, but to the bowels of your smartphone. Your sex and love life, too. No. Sloane was going to stand up and announce that people were ready to separate their souls from their SIM cards.

  What she wanted on the way to work was drumbeats. Tom-toms. A percussion-heavy fighting song. And then she remembered that she had a virtual wealth of knowledge on the driver’s side.

  “Anastasia?” Sloane ventured. “Do you know any songs?”

  “Like a lullaby?” Anastasia asked.

  “Well, I don’t know, really,” Sloane said, embarrassed to ask for a Russian song per her secret fantasy of Anastasia’s roots. She wanted to believe in an Anastasia who knew songs that had been passed down in a rich oral tradition. Something that convinced a weary soldier to march on.

  “I was thinking more . . . battle songs? In fact?”

  “Oh, certainly,” said Anastasia brightly. “I have quite a few.” And then she started to sing:

  One, two, three, four, five,

  A hare went out for a walk.

  Suddenly a hunter appeared

  And shot the hare.

  Bang, bang, oh oh oh,

  My hare is going to die.

  He was brought home

  And he turned out to be alive.

  “Hmmm,” Sloane went, when the song was over. “Strangely prescient.” Her eyes settled on an elderly woman in the crosswalk who had a leash attached to her own shoe. What to make of it? What to make of anything? As the old woman made it safely to the sidewalk and Anastasia pushed into gear, Sloane suggested that in addition to autonomous driving, her car might want to consider trend forecasting, too.

  29

  Sloane arrived at the office early enough to guarantee that she’d have some alone time before the day kicked in, and thus thought nothing of pressing the elevator’s “close door” button until she heard a girlish “Oh, can you hold that?!” coming from the lobby.

  Two girls she didn’t recognize arrived running to the elevator, grateful at first, then discomfited when they saw the person holding the door for them was Sloane. They all exchanged weak smiles. As the elevator started its surprisingly slow ascent, one of the girls held her phone’s screen up in the other’s direction. Sloane caught the image of an emaciated polar bear that had gone viral the night before.

  “Oh my God, it is so sad. Like, I almost cried,” said girl two.

  “I did cry. I’m, like, basically still crying,” said girl one, putting her phone away. “I shared it everywhere. I mean, can you even? They’re dying out there!”

  A man in a business suit got in at the second floor. He had very strong cologne. He got off on the third floor. Took his cologne with him.

  “Oh, I tried that new arepa place?” girl one continued, the air cleared.

  “Oh yeah? How was it?” Girl two.

  “It was amazing. They have amazing flan.”

  “I am so into Panama,” said girl one. “I have been, like, seriously considering doing New Year’s there.”

  Sloane walked out of the elevator, head shaking. Rather than take offense at the girls’ vapidness, she told herself she should instead look for proof of things to come. Lots of people did love Latin America. Tacos, tamales, arepas, watermelon juice, hibiscus tea and Cuban sandwiches—in the last six years there’d been an explosion of interest in everything Latino in drinkable and solid form. And these were the cuisines of people deeply attache
d to friends and family, a physical culture with grounding social bonds. And so much of this food was eaten with one’s fingers. It certainly wasn’t what the girls had intended, but Sloane filed their conversation away under the pro-touch camp.

  The open work space area was still vacant—it appeared that Sloane was, indeed, the first one there. She stood there for a moment, waiting to see if any screen savers rose from their slumber with the #sexisdead hashtags she’d been seeing, but all the computers were dark. Whether on an order from Dax or moved by the cleaning staff, the cell phone box wasn’t outside the fifth floor conference room any longer, and Sloane felt certain this would be the case with the other floors.

  On her way to her own office, Sloane stopped by Deidre’s, after seeing the light was on. With her plants and her aquarium, her crochet carpets on top of the already carpeted floor, Deidre’s office had the hominess of a high school guidance counselor who liked candle crafts.

  “Did you have a good holiday?” Sloane asked kindly, after knocking on the opened door.

  “Oh, Sloane! Hi there, hi! I did,” said Deidre, pulling a paper napkin over the muffin she’d been eating. “Did you?”

  “Sure!” Sloane shrugged. “Some plane trouble. How was ‘tree town’?” she asked.

  “Oh!” flushed Deidre, happy she’d remembered. “It was great. It was just the nicest. Have you ever been?”

  “I have,” Sloane said, leaning her head against the door frame. “It’s a great place.”

  Okay, so Sloane hadn’t actually “been” been to Ann Arbor but she’d had a driver who had stopped for gas on their way to Wayne County airport and it (the general area, not so much the gas station) had had a pleasant vibe. Plus, she felt like making Deidre feel good. Sloane wanted Deidre to feel good and to be happy with herself. Sloane wanted to take back all of the cut-flower food packets she’d thrown away in her lifetime and feed them to Deidre’s plants.