User Engagement

Salman

The flock of pearl-white doves flew against the cyan sky, circling up towards the scorching sun, cooing and cooing. The coos became louder as the birds flew farther away. Salman put his hand up over his eyes and crooked his neck to watch them fly. The doves looked like a huge cloud hovering in the sky, drifting higher and higher until they shrank into an imperceptible point, vanishing into the sun’s blinding light. As the birds vanished, the coos crescendoed to an overwhelming volume.

          “Salman?”

          David’s voice jolted Salman awake. But the coos were still going, louder than before. Salman was not sure if he had awoken or emerged into a higher dream.

          “Huh?”

          “Um, could you turn your alarm off?”

          “Oh yeah, sure.”

          Salman reached for his iPhone that he had left plugged into a white charging cord on his bedside table the night before. He picked it up and pressed STOP at the bottom of the screen. As the coos ceased, he became aware again of the incessant drone of cars hurtling down the street outside of the window. He looked at the time: 9:30 a.m. 

          “My bad.”

          “It’s alright.”

          “I thought it was real life.”

          Salman didn’t want to get out of bed yet. His Greek history class wasn’t until 11 a.m. He had plenty of time. He let his head fall back down to the pillow. Though not to sleep. He lay on his side, holding his iPhone in his hand, and opened up TikTok. The first video that appeared was a Japanese chef dicing up a crab and satisfyingly wrapping the meat into sushi rolls. He swiped to the next video, an edited scene of Spongebob Squarepants yelling at Squidward. The yellow sponge yelled ridiculous obscenities at the top of his lungs. After that came a clip of Jordan Peterson lecturing about what it means to be a real man, superimposed with footage of someone playing Minecraft parkour. 

          He didn’t care much for these things. He didn’t think much about any of them at all. Salman thought of himself as an artist; he loved cinema, music, and fashion. He would point out things to David, like the gait and silhouette of random people in the street, or how the full moon would be perfectly framed by these trees at night, making for a perfect shot. He would try to show David what he meant by holding up his hands, finger, and thumb each poised at right angles opposite each other to make a rectangle. 

          Salman watched as a skateboarder in baggy blue jeans did a kickflip down a huge stair set, and all of his friends clapped and woo-ed. He swiped to another video, and by chance, followed his thumb to the top of the iPhone screen, where he noticed the time: 11:34 a.m. Shit, he thought. How could this be? He would have guessed only twenty minutes had passed. But two hours?

          “Fuck it,” he muttered to himself. 

          At this point, if he were to get ready and go to class, he would only be able to catch the last bits of the lecture. He told himself that he might as well not go. He sat up in his bed and stared through the window’s iron security bars at all of the cars and people. The sounds of mufflers and horns were the same as ever. He turned to the left, swung his legs off the edge of the bed, and stepped into his cushioned slides that he leaves in the same place each night, ready for him when he wakes up. He opened the door to his closet, grabbed a black t-shirt and gray sweatpants, and slipped them on. He saw that David’s bed was empty. He hadn’t noticed David leave.

          He shuffled across his room, past David’s bed, and opened the door. He went to the bathroom and pissed. He leaned over the sink and rubbed the cold water onto his face. He looked up and watched the water drops slide past the dark blotches under his eyes and fall off of his chin. He dried his face with a towel and pulled his shirt up; in the mirror, he could see that he almost had abs. He made a mental note that he needed to eat more.

          Salman walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge. He grabbed the jumbo white grade-A egg carton, closed the fridge, and set the carton on the counter. He took a frying pan from the cabinet and placed it on the stove. He drizzled oil into the pan and cracked two eggs into it. He turned the knob of the stove. The igniter clicked three times before a blue flame sprung up in a ring around the burner. Salman grabbed a loaf of bread from on top of the fridge, put two slices into the toaster, then switched it on. 

          It would be a minute until the toast and eggs were ready, so he took his iPhone out from his pocket, leaned against the counter, opened up TikTok, and started scrolling. This time, he watched point-of-view footage of a racecar driver swinging impossible turns around steep, winding mountain roads; a selfie recording of a fat old man in a fedora holding a foaming pint of Guinness in his hand with a caption in white letters: “I don’t think I’ve ever had a better pint of Guinness;” three Nigerian men walking out of a house, decked out in huge, thick gold jewelry. He scrolled and scrolled until the toast sprung up in the toaster, snapping him out of a trance. The toaster must have only taken a minute to cook. He watched seven TikToks before the toast sprung up in the toaster. He put his iPhone back into his pocket. 

          The toast was slightly blackened. Salman put the pieces of toast onto a white ceramic plate and slid the eggs on next to them. The eggs had formed into a white circle at the bottom of the frying pan with the yolks opposite each other, resembling a yin-yang. He cut the eggs down the center with a butter knife and placed each semicircle on the slices of toast. He picked up the plate, shuffled over to the couch, and sat down in his usual spot, which was well broken in. He put his breakfast on the coffee table in front of him. From the couch, he saw all the cars and people going by outside the living room window, got up, went to the window, drew the blinds, and sat back down. He sighed.

          Salman slid his iPhone out of his pocket. He wanted to look at his Instagram direct messages to see if Adonai had gotten back to him about whether or not he had any good weed plugs. 

          He opened up Instagram. No word from Adonai. Fuck, he thought, oh well. He saw that someone he had met once had posted a story. He clicked on it and looked briefly at an image of that person posing in the mirror. Then, without thinking, he tapped onto the next story. He didn’t even register that he had tapped. It just seemed to happen. The next story was a meme. He tapped again. A picture of a Valais sheep appeared. He pressed again and again. He hardly considered the images that he was seeing on the screen. He just liked to tap and watch the parade of images. They were like brief glimpses into faraway places, each post a short fantasy. But these fantasies were not what he was interested in. Tapping just scratched a certain itch. Something felt right about staring at the screen and tapping. He tapped through fifty stories before he looked up from the screen, remembering his eggs and toast. He stared blankly at two cold white semi-circles on top of the singed bread.

          Salman leaned over the plate, wedging off pieces of eggs and toast with the side of his fork. He held the fork in his right hand, his iPhone in the left. His eyes oscillated between the iPhone screen and the food. For each bite, he scrolled through five posts. After dozens of posts, he finished his breakfast. He looked at the top of the screen: 12:09 a.m.

          Salman got up from the couch and put his plate into the silver kitchen sink, planning to do it later. David had just gotten on him last night about letting his dishes pile up. He told David he would not let it happen again. He had missed his Greek history class and had no more classes for the day, so he decided that he would smoke the last of his weed. He went back to his well-worn spot on the couch, picked up the bong from under the table, opened up the silver grinder that he had left on the coffee table, took a small pinch of flower, and put it in the bowl. He got up from the couch, went to the window, pulled the curtain back, and opened up the window. He lit the weed with a black Bic lighter, watched the cherry grow as he inhaled, and blew the smoke out of the window.

          Salman put the bong away and went to the bathroom to take a shower. He loved the way the hot water trickled down his body when he was high. He stepped into the shower, turned the handle to the left, waited for a moment, and stepped in. He let the near-scalding water wash over him as he stood right under the spigot. The water was warm like a hug. A thought of his mother came into his mind; he wondered what she might be doing. A distant bittersweet memory of his first girlfriend surfaced unexpectedly: the time when Salman took her to a hidden beach beside a river and they laid together on a towel, talking and kissing for hours. He didn’t like to think about these things. Usually, he tried to keep memories in the past and not think about them. Remembering his family and first love made him feel an indiscernible tension. He wanted to avoid thinking about these things. It was better that way. 

          Salman stepped out of the shower into the now-steamy bathroom. He took his towel from the hook and dried himself. He went to his room and put on fresh clothes. He decided that he wanted to work on his graphic design project, so he sat down at his desk and opened up his Macbook. He opened up his projects folder. It contained three files. He opened the third one, the most recent. It was an abstraction of a tall, stocky man wearing a suit. So far he’d just taken a raw photograph and overlaid geometric patterns.

          He was moving his cursor to the coloring tool button when he felt a buzz on his thigh. He took his iPhone out of his pocket. New direct message from Adonai. He opened Instagram and read it: “sry bro. i get all my bud at home and bring it here. idk any plugs.”

          Fuck. Salman closed the direct message tab and his main feed appeared in front of him. Without meaning to, he swiped up on the screen, surfing from one post to another: a Playboi Carti outfit picture; a deepfake of Donald Trump made to look as if he were in a commercial for orange juice; a man standing in front of a Tesla giving a motivational speech about following business aspirations. He kept swiping, barely registering the things he was seeing. He lost track of time entirely as if he was transported into another dimension. Every so often he chuckled to himself. 

          Salman remembered the project that he had opened. The cursor still hovered over the color tool. He looked at the clock: 3:49 p.m. He didn’t feel like working on the project anymore. He looked out the window at people walking by outside, the sun shining on their hair. He got up and drew the blind. He smoked another bowl, turned all of the lights off in his room, and curled up in bed. After a short while, he fell asleep.

David

It is evening. I open the door to my bedroom—all of the lights are off—and my eyes fall upon Salman lying in his bed in a fetal position. A head and one thin hand stick out from under his navy comforter. Faintly illuminating the darkness, a dim glow radiates from the iPhone that he clutches in his claw-like fingers with the ferality of a raccoon holding a scrap of garbage. The creak of the door startles him, and now bathed in the light pouring in from the hallway, he looks up at me, squinting, disoriented. Quickly he averts his eyes, returning his tired gaze to the iPhone screen that he holds four inches from his face. His thumb swipes repeatedly from the center to the top of the screen as if rubbing off the thin foil of a lottery ticket, behind which gamblers dumbly suppose they might finally obtain a manifestation of their greatest dream. 

          Salman wasn’t always like this.

          The day I met Salman, he wore a black leather jacket over a white t-shirt with black jeans and sleek black sneakers. The product in his curly hair glistened in the sun. We had messaged online and were both looking for roommates for the next academic year, so we went for a walk and chatted. We agreed that we could live together. He was majoring in Communications. He seemed to have a developed taste in cinema and said he wanted to make movies. He’d point out people in the street and know exactly what clothes they were wearing. He’d point at things and say, “Just imagine a shot of that—like this—you see? You see?”

          That autumn, we moved into an apartment together near our college. We both were weed smokers so we got along well. 

          But he developed an ugly habit. He couldn’t put down the phone. 

          He clenched it in his hand at all hours, whether eating, walking, or sitting on the toilet. He spent all his free time on the phone and didn’t go out. Just swiped. Over and over and over. As if beneath each video lay a hidden vein of gold. At night, I’d watch as the wall behind his bed was inconsistently illuminated by the screen as he swiped, oscillating between lightness and darkness.

          By the end of the year, it was as if Salman had been replaced by someone else. He still had the same curly hair, black jeans, and sneakers. But, there was something different. There were dark bags around his sullen eyes. He avoided eye contact as much as possible. He’d wince at the smallest of sounds. 

          Once, in the middle of the night, he screamed at the top of his lungs. Just for a moment. I had my headphones on and acted like I had not heard him. But I did. Whatever shard of humanity that he had left him in that nocturnal scream. After that, he became empty.

          He spoke little. Days would go by without him uttering a single word. He was in bed all the time, always grasping the phone. The phone, the phone, the phone, the phone. 

          At times I felt the urge to confront him, to tell him that he was addicted to the screen. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Once people get to that point, it is better to just leave them be.

          It wasn’t that he wanted to stare at the screen. The truth is that he didn’t have a choice.

          I thought that he was addicted to the phone, but I came to realize something sinister: it was the phone that was addicted to him. It was as if the phone was plugged into his brain through his eyes and all of the neuron firings of his brain became part of the code. What would become of TikTok and Instagram without Salman? They are leeches, only able to survive by feeding on people like him. Software engineers in Silicon Valley designed the applications so that the algorithms could run only while incorporating users’ neural synapses into the code circuit. The engineers knew how to get Salman hooked, how to harvest his swipes: they just had to get his dopamine receptors firing through endless sensory stimulation. They knew exactly how to keep him addicted, servile, and dependent. The more he swiped, the more dopamine his brain produced, and the more his brain produced, the more the algorithm was vivified. The algorithm got itself off through his scrolling. It treated him like soil, sowing him with content and reaping his attention. And the algorithm always wants to run—it will do anything—wouldn’t you want to feel seen too? Salman was transfixed by the procession of pixels and images and symbols and text that came to be his whole reality. The real world paled in comparison to the digital one. The pursuit of anything in reality became meaningless—why do anything? Why go outside when he could traverse the globe through a screen? He didn’t understand why he should bother doing anything else. He felt comfortable staring at the screen. No one knew how his mind worked better than the algorithm. Like a lover, the screen provided him with warmth, intimacy, and meaning. All he had to do was swipe.

Henry Romain was born in Wyoming, grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and studies English with an emphasis in Creative Writing at USC. You can follow Henry on Instagram here.