No family, no partner, no ambition: Charlie is a deletion specialist, responsible for scrubbing the internet of her clients’ shameful moments, and she feels like one of the blank slates she’s paid to craft. But her half-life in a decaying city is put at risk when she becomes patient zero for a phenomenon that results in peoples’ consciousnesses separating from their bodies at unpredictable moments.
She knew she wasn’t amazing at human womanhood, but it’s not reassuring to learn that she’s better as a cactus.
While Charlie tries to figure out how to stay in her body, or if she even wants to, the rest of the world continues its spiral into post-internet, post-climate-change, post-memory strangeness. The major corporation where Charlie works announces that they’ve discovered an immortal animal that threatens life on the planet as they know it; one of her clients, a former childhood vlogger pursuing total deletion, discovers Charlie’s bodily departures and becomes obsessed with replicating them.
As more people leave their bodies, Charlie’s personal secret becomes a global crisis. While corporations spin disembodiment into a net good for society, Charlie must keep a white-knuckle grip on her humanity in a world that can only profit from depriving her of it.
Meanwhile, the memories that Charlie silenced come creeping back into being, and the hurt that she thought was gone for good may just be invisible.
Touch Grass explores the existential despair of Gen Z and the horrors (and very occasional joys) of the digital age. Social media has split us in half: Who we are in real life, and who we are online. In Charlie’s world, between deletion and departures and the breakdown of nature itself, that split has occurred over and over again, leaving only the question of what survives these endless divisions.
