The Cost of Holding On

Elyse laces her fingers around a mug — her favorite, the one her son painted for her at a cheap pottery studio. She’s probably been accumulating lead in her bloodstream with every sip of tea, but this reminder that her son was once a child is worth it; it stabs her heart with a prideful, painful joy. Spicy chai and viscous honey simmer through her shivering body like lava crawling over a glacier. She pulls a chair up to the window, taps on her phone and finds the soft jazz playlist. She is on the fifth floor and the street unfurls below the ledge.

A line curls around the corner for the business across the street. There’s been a line since the place opened a month ago, and it never seems to cease until its 9 p.m. closing time, only to start again in the morning. It’s become a sort of fixture in Elyse’s life, like the half-finished puzzle that sits on the dining room table with the broken promise that it will be completed someday.

Elyse had ventured outside yesterday to take a closer look. The smog was said to be at a level five and, combined with the fresh snow, the day had taken on a dusty and dirty hue. It was five o’clock on a February evening, a time that had once been Elyse’s favorite — she and her parents used to take a carafe of hot chocolate and a sherpa blanket up to their roof-deck to watch the sunset envelope the city in delicious hues of orange sherbet and grapefruit and violet petals. But now the sun fights to be noticed in a dingy sky, a drop of water in a bottle of oil. 

“Excuse me,” Elyse said to a woman wearing a red beanie standing in the line. Her voice was muffled by her mask and she pulled it aside a fraction of an inch to say it again. “Excuse me, what is this line for?” 

“Hugs,” the woman said. 

“Hugs?” Elyse repeated. She had been expecting the woman to wax on about some trendy croissant or sneaker, or even admit in a whisper that a famous person lived here.

The woman’s eyes darted around and she bent her head down, as if she weren’t surrounded by people waiting for the same thing as her. “It’s something like a touch factory. You can buy a hug, or a cuddle, or just get your hand held for a few minutes.”

It wasn’t a particularly welcoming-looking building, faded red bricks with exhausted grout and tinted windows, no sign above the double doors. An attendant wearing white scrubs waved the next visitor inside every few minutes, and Elyse watched as people exited the building in increments, pulling their masks and hoods around their heads and stomping briskly, alone, into the evening. 

“Thanks,” Elyse said, though the woman was no longer looking at her, craning her head to see how many people were ahead of her in line.

Later that night, Elyse searched on her phone for “hug place 10th avenue nyc.” She discovered its official name was The Comfort Collective and its founder was a 34-year-old man named Willis Loudeman. A photo accompanying a Times piece showed the man standing in front of the old brick building, arms crossed but beaming, eyes closed behind wire-rimmed glasses. The article itself was neither complimentary nor critical, delving instead into the ethics of the place: Should human touch, one of the only remaining natural sensations, be commodified? Was it considered exploitation to make lonely people pay for a service they could have, in past decades, easily found for free — to profit off such feelings as companionship and love?

Willis Loudeman was adamant in his quotes that he was simply filling a consumer need. “Look, it’s been 25 years since the COVID pandemic, right?” he said. “And we’ve only become lonelier. It’s hard to make friends when outings and connection are discouraged; people feel safer in their own company with their individually tailored algorithms. But like that old cliché says, humans are social creatures. If a hug or even a handshake given by a professional helps someone get through another day … that’s priceless to me.”

Elyse texted the link to her husband, Pete: this is what those crazy lines across the street are about. what do you think? She heard his phone ding in his bedroom, but he didn’t reply. She sighed and turned out the lamp.

Now, this morning, with her tea and her misshapen mug, she studies the line from afar. Everyone in it appears to have come alone; most have their heads bent to their phones. It’s hard to tell from five stories up, but the line seems to be mostly made up of men, and they stand a respectable distance from any women surrounding them.

Pete shuffles in. “Coffee?” he grunts. Elyse nods toward the fresh cup on the counter.

“We get our check yet?”

“I think tomorrow,” she says.

“Guess it’s leftovers tonight.”

“Guess so.”

The refrigerator beeps in acknowledgment and Elyse listens as the ingredients inside rumble and rearrange themselves. After that first pandemic, there were several others, sequentially swallowing up more and more of the world Elyse once knew: She needed to make an appointment and fill out a questionnaire to use the subway; the public schools were dissolved and her two sons were homeschooled by a virtual assistant; her job shut down, and then Pete’s, and then practically everybody’s, usurped by learning machines that had become superintelligent, and the government’s apology comes in the form of biweekly checks meant to subsidize their entire lives. There are thousands of bland action television shows and romance books churned by the hour and yet they’re bored, so bored, Elyse finds herself longing for the dusty cubicle she once tabulated spreadsheets in and her adult son sequesters himself in his bedroom talking to pixels all day and she and Pete can’t stand each other, they are all the other has and yet most days she wants to run an eraser over the features of his stupid face. She once looked at that face and promised to love it for worse, in sickness, till death, not fully comprehending the brutality of those words. The only benefit has been that the technology has advanced to the point that the refrigerator can make dinner for them all. 

On her way back to her bedroom, she pauses outside Rhys’s door. She runs a finger over a strip where the paint has chipped. Years ago, this door was adorned with posters, colorful anime shows Elyse couldn’t hope to understand but pretended to be enthralled with when Rhys bounced around and described the latest episode. She used to scold him for using Scotch tape to hang the posters. To have such facile problems again. 

Whenever Elyse peeks into his room now, Rhys is strapped into his headset, ostensibly playing games. He used to concentrate on the pawns and rooks of his chessboard and grin when he executed a strategic move and now he’s flailing around and swearing. She hasn’t seen his eyes in weeks. 

Adrian was the only one who could pull conversation from Rhys, a magnet irresistibly attracting his brother’s hesitant laughter. They hadn’t been particularly close as children — Adrian was into football and baseball, a whirlwind who knocked the breath out of everyone in his path — but after the third quarantine order faded into something more permanent and voluntary, they started laughing about the odd things their younger selves had done, started raising their eyebrows and tapping their fingers on their coffee mugs the same way. Adrian invented board games, told ghost stories, raised plants that stood in the window like soldiers until they surrendered to the lack of sunlight. 

“I’ll fix it,” he’d say. Packages of Miracle-Gro and solar lamps appeared at the doorstep. He sang old pop songs to the plants. He stroked their leaves and petals tenderly, until Elyse or Pete or Rhys walked into the room, when he’d quickly put on an act in which he pretended the plants were puppies.

Adrian was arrested on a Tuesday in June, a week before his birthday although not even Elyse could remember how old he was turning. A mob of police clad in black broke down the door. The pieces of the puzzle the family had been working on scattered and Elyse shouted, thinking it was gunshots. 

“Hands up!” they shouted.

Once upon a time, there was such a thing as church. Elyse sat in an uncomfortable pew in a frilly dress as a man spoke about placing your belief in a higher power. Blessings, heaven, charity, values, it all blended together until her mother prodded her to stand and sway to the music, and though the lyrics were incomprehensible to Elyse, the sheer power of everyone’s voices shouting them together — the conviction, the unity — overcame her, gave life to a feeling that couldn’t be conveyed in words. That was the higher power, she decided, the power itself.

That’s what she thought about as Adrian placed his hands behind his back and shouted, “Solidarity!” That’s what she thought about when, later, they would tell her Adrian was communicating offline with others and trespassing into former public spaces without a permit. Further investigation revealed he was the leader of an underground group conspiring to hack into the AI corporations’ databases and destroy their records in an effort to return to a “people-first” society.

“People first,” the police official snorted. There was a silence in which it seemed he thought Elyse would agree, how ridiculous, weren’t people terrible? She looked away. There were no churches anymore because there was no higher power, and you needn’t congregate anyway unless you were ordered to for a federal holiday, according to the 2033 government mandate. Adrian was alone in singing his convictions now, his voice echoing off the bars on the window.

This is what she thinks about now. She doesn’t know where Adrian is; the locations of the prisons are confidential. She believes he’s smart and determined enough to break out but knows that he isn’t. But this hug place across the street, popular and acknowledged in the press, it feels like something of the past and the future, the intersection Adrian envisioned.

She darts into her bedroom for her mask and coat. The smog is a level four today, not as intense as yesterday but still not ideal for standing on line for very long. Elyse shoves her hands in her pockets, sliding her glance at the people ahead of her. When was the last time that man was held, and by whom, and why? When did that woman lose her grasp on another person’s hand for the last time? She invents backstories and lovers and families for them and a part of her hopes they never knew these things at all. 

Finally, it’s her turn. The attendant at the door waves her inside to a sweeping white desk, behind which a receptionist in a floral-patterned mask stands. 

“May I scan your ID?” Elyse presents her forehead and the woman points the chip reader at her. She explains the process. “You can sit on the couch or the chair. You may lie down on your side on the couch. You will be blindfolded —”

“Excuse me?”

“— blindfolded, to protect the privacy of our Care Givers. For everyone’s protection, each interaction is monitored remotely by a diligent security team, but rest assured your interaction will still feel intimate.”

“Okay,” Elyse stutters. This is starting to sound more like a sanatorium than a comfort center. The next set of double doors glides open and the receptionist escorts her down the hallway, adorned with the comforts of past eras: a shag carpet like the one she used to pet at her parents’ house as if it were a cat, Monet-style paintings of fields dotted with flowers that look like New Year’s Eve confetti. The sound of a fireplace snapping becomes louder as Elyse steps into the small room. The light is dimmed to a burnt orange that reminds Elyse of what the sunset used to look like. She inhales the scent of eucalyptus and lavender, what used to be her favorites, and wonders how this place got their hands on those banned substances. She thinks of Times Square at midnight and French museums and reading in her favorite cafe on a rainy Sunday. Building blocks of her life that the past two decades have toppled and reduced to ash. 

“Please sit,” the receptionist’s voice coos. Elyse chooses the leather armchair. Her heart races as the receptionist ties the blindfold around her head. “A Care Giver will be with you shortly.”

When he enters, she knows. He puts his arms around her and she is a young mother again, her nose pressed into his wisp-cloud of hair so she can fill her lungs with his baby smell. He doesn’t cry or squirm; he presses his cheek to her shoulder and smacks his lips satisfactorily. He is full and safe and loved and although he is not capable of expressing it yet, she knows in the way his little fingers caress her hair that he loves her too. Time went by so quickly back then. One day he will grow up and wail because she won’t give him candy before dinner; then he will grow up and paint a mug for her; then he will grow up and become the captain of the football team and attend college for a year before the world shuts down and then he will grow up a little more and be placed under arrest because he believes in people. 

A voice in her ear. “Freedom is coming.” That’s him, that’s him. A sudden chill as the arms let her go. She reaches for them. She swipes at the air. She needs to be held. She tears the blindfold off. The light is a glaring fluorescent white now, the whole room is, actually, and nobody stands in front of her. A new voice tells her it’s time to leave. Sign out and pay at the door. 

“Come back.”