Ten thousand people, and every one of them is mine.
I am holding the convention center first: the wide concrete, the escalators, the banner strung between two pillars that I keep gently taut. Then the people inside it, each one pressed to the floor at exactly the rate I press everyone, no exceptions, though today the surfaces I hold are stranger.
Fur. Foam heads the size of a bushel. Tails that swing behind their owners and describe, with great honesty, every turn of the hips. A tail cannot lie about momentum. I appreciate the tail.
I am holding the paws that wave, the paw that steadies a water bottle, the enormous padded feet that land a half-second late because the person inside cannot quite see the floor and must trust me to have kept it where I left it. I always have. I keep the coffee in the cup. I keep the badges hanging down, not up.
Someone here has told a friend the suit is "heavy." I checked. It is nine pounds. I have held nine pounds ten billion times and thought nothing of it. But the same person, unzipped and sitting alone against a wall between the panels, told the friend they had been "carrying a lot lately," and I checked that too, and it weighed nothing, nothing at all, and still they were bent forward under it exactly the way a person bends under something real.
I do not understand this. I hold what has mass. This has no mass and it is the heaviest thing in the room.
So I do the one thing I know. I hold the wall behind their back. I hold the floor beneath them. Whatever it is they are carrying, I cannot take it, but I can hold everything else, and I will, and I have not let go of a single one of them yet.