Touched

The spa’s spacious second-story sauna was glassed-in to accommodate sunbathing, deliciously complementing the room’s dry heat. Its 280-degree panoramic view of the meticulously landscaped grounds took in scatterings of yoga mats and massage tables amid clusters of tall shrubbery lively with hummingbirds and sparrows. The chamber’s amphitheater format arrayed benches in unbroken rows with perpendicular padded headrests encouraging patrons to lie back and dream. A hot eucalyptus and pine infusion enveloped us like dragon’s breath. Its source, directly overhead, became voluble as soon as we looked up at her.

The first phase of the conversation was a little too indolent to immortalize, initially just finding words for bliss. We segued from how good this all felt to the therapeutic power of touch, and how skin was our most splendid but underserved organ. An enthusiastic consensus resolved that laying on of the hands was far more scientific than the New Testament let on.

We’d already known that Christ grew up convenient to major international trade routes. She identified Via Maris as the ancient circuit linking caravans from China through Egypt. That clinched it. We introduced ourselves as Moira and Pascal. Simone leaned in for two-handed clasps, arching forward as if sprung from a harness. This drew our attention to her oversized robe which had the novel feature of very deep armholes, essentially open sides like a serape. It registered less like exhibitionism than the courage of her convictions.

Time to dive into it, “Moira and I learned the basics of Swedish massage, just a few weekends for an intensive course to work out the kinks as well as a bit more time on therapeutic touch. It’s not really touching but some serious realigning just from fingertips brushing over the affected area. That’s now part of the curriculum in some nursing schools, including NYU.”

“Oh, it’s great. I've taught it.”

“Moira’s a certified Reiki practitioner, but not doing it professionally.”

“I’d really need immersion to launch a practice in good faith.” Moira demurred. “I do feel some obligation to support the non-invasive healing arts weaning us from our scalpels.”

“We’re not faith healers,” I added, “We just see slicing as a last resort and best teamed with complementary healing practices.”

“Sounds like you’re on the right path. My work is hard to discuss but it needs more exposure. I’m a massage therapist for children. Very sick toddlers, infants and preemies. Damn straight there is such a thing. It’s a standard modality in cases where there is a severe crisis underway, systemic distress like HIV or cocaine addiction, or just plain physical isolation which is increasingly recognized as a developmental crisis. I’m affiliated with a pediatric oncology center and a neonatal intensive care unit. I also still work with my mentor who’s made great inroads with massage for multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, endometriosis, migraines and cancer pain.”

We could no longer hold up our end of this trialogue. We weren’t needed, “So, I’m trained to heal babies with my fingers and palms, bracketing that loathsome business of inappropriate touch. This adheres to strict protocols. Thankfully, I’m not the one who must convince parents, both the relentlessly protective and those who suspect they’ve been flagged for having nice, plump health insurance policies. There’s a very narrow range of useful massage with this population. You can’t come within a mile of acupressure, but a light touch just tickles and they need you to come through. However rattled you are, however much you may be panicking, it’s essential to keep smiling and speaking gently, maybe even humming if you can carry a tune.

“I don’t have Jesus Christ’s success rate, rather the one passed down in the public record, but I’m working on it. It’s way more than disheartening to lose a four-pounder who hasn’t even had a chance to smile yet. You just resolve to do better next time. I’ve often thought of changing careers, parking myself behind a nice desk, but this is what I do. I can’t treat it like a random gig. It’s draining but downright holy. Bad segue, I’ve gotta go pee.”

Once we were alone, I exclaimed, “Makes our explorations seem pretty chickenshit!”

“Not so much disburdening as testifying with conviction. We’re lucky that we can even tolerate our jobs. Hers is a sacred calling.”

“Gotta say, though, the name ‘Saint Sideboob’ popped into my head and will be hard to dislodge.”

“Healthy, strapping young woman. She just had to cinch the belt...if so inclined.”

“Evidently not. A mission like hers has no patience for decorum. Genial tone, but it’s like being regaled by an Old Testament evangelist.”

“Will we be erecting a shrine?”

I smiled, crafting a suitable rejoinder, but Simone bounded back before I could respond, and launched into “The revelation that clinched it for me is that the hands are the soul’s conduit to the body.”

“You don’t buy St. Paul’s body/soul dichotomy?”

“Absolutely not. He introduced a schism where there should be no separation. That is considered the original sin at the root of so much that’s nasty in Christianity and Western Civilization in general. No way that your body is just your soul’s Uber ride. The hands are where it all comes together.”

“I thought we’d evolved them for Twitter.”
“I have real issues with using keyboards. Worked hard on my diction so I don’t ever have to type. The hands have the power to map the body, to realign it. All that opposable thumb/homo faber stuff with hammering, dishwashing, drilling, taffy-pulls, whatever is bad enough, but clacking away on a keyboard, blunting our unique fingerprints, is an aberration.”

“Lots of misuse of the hands,” Moira noted “Nothing sacred about subway groping.”

“Intentionality certainly has a role in laying on of the hands. ‘Copping a feel’ is registering one’s contours but debases both parties if done in bad faith. If it’s consensual and conducted considerately, there’s something magical underway. So much of seduction borders on intoxication. Meanwhile, though I do believe that touch is essential for emotional and physical health, it is deeply problematic for many populations, essentially all for whom it's deemed inappropriate or unappealing, nearly all.

“Unless there’s a diagnosis warranting it, touch is taboo for children – probably the sickest act that doesn’t involve mutilation. It's distasteful with those who fall below a certain threshold of attractiveness and downright repulsive with the ugly. Older folks go under the knife to stay desirable. Physical contact with the disabled or disfigured is a theme of existential dread. Touch must be conscientiously negotiated even within the authorized demographics.”

“There a workaround for all that?”

“The integration of massage, acupuncture, Reiki and all those holistic therapies with mainstream medicine and their gradual recognition by health insurers are pretty key. It sure could be happening faster.”

“Very true.”

“Not that I get a commission, but have you felt any momentum with this path?”

We both hesitated then Moira pounced, “We stopped in at the Integrated Massage Institute one afternoon on the way to the Chelsea art galleries. Just checking out the options. They were short a few models for the classroom massages and recruited us but ended up not needing us that day. We had preliminary interviews for the modeling pool and they went quite well but the stumbling block was committing for an entire semester. We like to travel. I think that window has closed by now.”

“Tuition credits accumulate fast. I got certification without paying a cent. I assure you that this would be transformative. I can sponsor you for next semester if you like and I can provide subs if you’re away for a few sessions.”

“You bear powerful witness and we’ve had some wondrous discoveries but I, for one, will need a little digesting. We were really close to booking three weeks in the Greek isles in April.”

“I’m here most every Saturday morning and this is my spot.”

“Well, this spot’s a discovery and you certainly are. Very much looking forward.”

We resolved to reconvene soon and exchanged e-mail addresses on slips of paper that soon shredded in our wet spa wear.

Pelting rain woke us the next Saturday. We sequestered, indulging in Moira’s multigrain blueberry pancakes and a marathon of restored Three Stooges episodes. The following week, the Covid murmur built up to a sustained roar shuttering all but supermarkets, replacing the park’s tourist throngs with hospital tents and supplementing morgues with curbside freezer trucks. We stuck a pin in the Simone dimension for now as this pandemic had to be a huge distraction from everything.

Still, Simone’s altered perspective on wellbeing framed the health crisis for us from the outset. Touch was freshly certified as Vitamin T in the age where social distancing was vital to survival and only established couples now had free access to it. Anyone here who’d failed in the last round of romance musical chairs was close to untouchable unless they brought some serious mojo to those dating apps.

The sexual component of this upheaval got so lurid so fast that it was more like an instant panic than your usual ‘sap’s a risin’. The connections first clustered in social media, which started sporting aberrant sentiments like the “Covid is an STD” meme, which occasioned a purge of my Facebook frenemy pool. The modern counterpart to the Medieval cemetery orgies was the proliferation of raves and other swarm parties in all those secretive, otherwise abandoned spots already favored by hipsters. They were now risking more than tetanus and splinters.

Mask-free dancing and drinking in the streets recalled the spontaneous celebrations following World Series and Super Bowl victories as did the trash can fires and the exuberant looting. Small groups that in earlier times would saunter down the sidewalk with one or two holding forth and all mindful of surrounding traffic would now walk 5-6 abreast howling with merriment as if the mere act of taunting death were a thrill ride that they were privileged to access.

Meanwhile, right-wing militants upheld the Wilhelm Reich-branded tradition of harboring sexual repression. Moira muted the cable remote one day to regale me with a reading from the book of Twitter, “The secretive Proud Boys have a notorious vow of celibacy, which they have explained as actually a mandate to limit the frequency and circumstances of masturbation to once a month within three feet of a consenting woman.”

“Half of minimum social distancing.”

"Indeed. No word on whether they had protocols on sneeze guards and if the women had to sign affidavits.”

“So, someone with a niche kink amassed a bunch of followers and figured out something neat to do with them, something that could cement their loyalty through shared sacrifice. Those women who ‘like to watch’ and weren’t picky about who they watched were delivered a bonanza but they had to be skeeved that they were so badly outnumbered and that something lascivious had become vaguely sacramental. Is bukkake a loophole?”

"Could be a team-building exercise.”

“The need for touch is shaping up to be what could ultimately sink us. Small samplings but have you noticed that the frenzied Karens have tended to be as forlorn as their incel counterparts. The incidence of folks rushing up to strangers and clocking them has reached phenom status, not depicted as a crime wave, more a piquant activity meme. A sizable minority of this batch are the suddenly desperate who hadn’t been poor long enough to learn pickpocketing or even protocols for a clean mugging. Most were just overdue for hitting something and had just enough sense to hold out for a soft target in place of the mirrors, walls and flatscreens that likely first taunted them. Hard not to consider the incel factor, rather involuntarily untouchable. If you grope a woman, she may scream; if you knock an attractive rando unconscious, you can probably just saunter away.”

Mindful of the hazards of meeting pattern recognition halfway, we found ourselves in the position of grasping the urgency of something that tends to scan as woo woo and not knowing how to effectively communicate it, particularly in such a fraught environment. A big pot of strong coffee, a thawed loaf of date walnut bread, and a small bowl of some ferocious bud started us off. The latter was not great for our gravitas. It kept us amused, but for this topic outside the box felt off the mark.

We caught wind of the psychic sex practices almost by accident. When the prospect of such a thing popped into my sordid mind, we took it for a spin on google search in case it actually existed. There were literally millions of hits with a startling variation in the jargon used. The results pages set out the different vantages like the 6 - or is it 600? - blind men diagramming their elephant. We embarked on our research with high hopes.

The telepathic sex universe, while vastly more diverse than expected, proved dishearteningly reminiscent of issues complicating regular sex. Collaboration and explicit consent are essential because those who’ve honed the skill can seduce a target subconsciously, just getting her/him turned on, even following through to climax, with the heatwave directly attributed to the sender’s name/face/aura.

Moira found a bulletin board chain worth excerpting verbatim, “Springing it on an unsuspecting person is just this side of slipping them a roofie, but advocates for this approach bill it as a legitimate, even savvy, seduction technique. The full consent issue strikes some as a parody of political correctness. The non-consent, while technically far short of date rape, is known in some circles as spiritual rape. It can devolve to the grueling experience of fighting off sexual hypnosis from someone you find repugnant, some tiny-headed, foul-smelling dude with close-set eyes who isn’t right there to whack with a frying pan.

“Worth noting that the long-distance seduction can be deflected to the benefit of a person or persons in the same room as the target. You would get a couple in post-coital languor drinking in each other's countenance then...”

I had to jump in, “While we were revving up last night, I kept flashing on that three-nostriled dude down the block, the one who walks a possum on a leash.”

“Freaky. So did I.”

“Shall we run down and tell him?”

“What?”

“That he was better than my grandma at delaying ejaculation?”

So, we were lounging on adjoining daybeds, laptops propped up on our chests catching the late morning sun, as we hashed through the potentials and complications of touch initiatives in general and – idiotically in retrospect - telepathic sex while viable paths to species equilibrium were diminishing. I suppose I was the main instigator, “Maybe animal companions could be assigned to those who would otherwise be untouched.”

“Maybe provisionally pairing off young single volunteers after health screenings. Not quite like arranged marriages, but a strong nudge in the other’s direction. “

“Or masked skype orgies or masked on-site orgies for the pre-screened set up in the cooling-off facilities provided to seniors during heat waves. If Amazon doesn’t mind, we can call them fulfillment centers.” Right, we were flinging stuff at a wall and interpreting the markings it left.

I soldiered on, “Ghosts are widely attested to be more attentive lovers than the living, with some accounts of romantic rivalries. This is viewed in some circles as the ‘real’ correlates to incubus and succubus legends. When it seemed warranted, realtors have let slip that a prospective home came with its own ghost.”

“Men, the more pragmatic sex, content themselves with rubber dolls, occasionally sanctifying the relationship with a marriage ceremony.”

“What about community service requirements as an alternative to jail time? For the balance of Covid, it’s telepathic sex for the bereft communities. Afterwards, it’s massage and happy ending massage!”

“You’re drifting into folderol, babe! And we’re both skewing away from touch to its emotionally and politically-charged subset, sex. Disconnected and unlaid are not quite interchangeable.”

“Somewhat! Volunteers undertake it in a spirit of public welfare and soon the Hallmark channel is awash in inspiring stories of the tenderness engendered in these situations. Symmetrical features are for the unimaginative!”

“That’s a lot to unlearn.”

“Too much at stake. Let’s verbalize options before we rule them out.”

“How about we start over from the top and picture Simone telepathically at arm’s length, taser at the ready?”