Screen Time

The ethernet cable lay coiled like a dead snake across Mark's desk, its plastic shell warm from the router's persistent hum. Three years since he'd last been in the same room as his wife, except for those cursed holiday visits. Now she existed as pixels on a screen, her face compressed into video artifacts, her voice distorted by the very infrastructure that supposedly connected them.

"You're not listening, Mark. I told you, my mother's moving in."

"I heard you," he said, though he'd been watching his iPhone's battery percentage creep toward single digits, calculating how many more minutes of this conversation he could endure before the screen went black—before he could legitimately claim technical difficulties as an excuse to disconnect.

He felt like a zombie, really. Not the pop-culture brain-eating kind, but something worse: the walking dead of modern corporate existence, sustaining himself on caffeine and resentment, trudging through his days in an office cubicle that smelled perpetually of microwaved fish and disappointment. His mother had warned him about this. "Don't become your father," she'd said, right before she died, right before he proceeded to become exactly his father, minus the alcoholism but plus a festering technological addiction.

"Mark? Are you still there?"

"Still here," he lied. "Your mother's moving in. When?"

"Next month. Mark, we need to talk about—the marriage counseling sessions, and—"

"I'll look at my schedule," he said automatically, knowing he wouldn't, knowing he'd spend another evening doomscrolling through news about climate collapse and celebrity breakups, feeling simultaneously overwhelmed and numb, a condition he'd come to recognize as the baseline state of his generation.

The cable company had sent a technician last week, some kid named Ryan who'd looked at the tangle of wires behind Mark's television set and said, "Man, you've got a lot of problems here." And Mark had almost laughed, almost cried, almost said "You don't know the half of it," but instead he'd said, "Yeah, just fix the internet, will you?"

"I love you," his wife said, and the words hung there, three words that once had meant everything, now just data packets traveling through fiber optic cables beneath oceans and continents, arriving delayed and degraded.

"I love you too," he said, and his phone battery died at exactly that moment, the screen going dark like someone blowing out a candle. He sat in the sudden silence of his apartment, surrounded by devices that promised connection but delivered only its simulacrum, and for the first time in years, he didn't reach for the charger.