by Kelly Harms
“At least you’re popular?” I say.
She shakes her head. “I’m not popular. I’m newsworthy.”
“Well, I like you,” I tell her. I’m pleased to find that like her much-younger self, adult Jessica is bright and sharp and quick minded, very easy to be around.
“You’re weird.”
A voice comes over the intercom announcing the hour and telling me to be on my way. “Visiting hours are almost over,” I repeat needlessly. “I’m coming back again soon.”
“I may be in the loony bin by then.”
“Really?” I ask.
“Probably not. I think it takes a while. But I’m not sure.”
“Well, if you aren’t here, I’ll look there.”
“Why?” she asks. “Don’t you have to get back to your work? Which is highly competitive?”
“No. I don’t. I’m only very lightly occupied at the moment.”
“So you’ve got nothing better to do than hang out with a head case?”
“Yes. That’s about it. Also, I am staying at a very nice inn.”
“Well,” says Jessica, and I’m happy to see the glint in her eye is as bright as it’s ever been, “in that case, next time you come visit, bring a cake with a file baked into it. I want you to break me out of here.”
MIA
My first instinct after the big phone toss is to go straight home, get my laptop, and drive to a coffee shop with good Wi-Fi. My second is to look up the address of such a coffee shop on my phone. My third is that holy shit, I just threw my phone over a mountain, and now I do not have a cell connection or a way to post on Pictey or Facebook or Instagram or even freaking Yelp. Yelp, for the love of all that is good in this world and the next.
And I did it on purpose.
I must be out of my mind.
Right now, right this second, anyone in the world, truly anyone, could be trying to reach me. Oprah Winfrey might be calling me right now to invite me to do yoga together. An editor from New York might be calling to offer me a book deal. A producer might want to make a movie of my life.
Which would show exactly what, I wonder. An actress sitting in her apartment scrolling and tapping and then staging photos? My life is not exactly the makings of the next Free Solo. And that, I remind myself, is the entire point. I’m going to go live a life worth making into a movie, now that I’m unyoked and free from the chains of technology. I’m going to celebrate the freedom and live, truly live.
To be clear: I have no idea what this involves, exactly.
I go find my mom out in her garden. She’s putting in vegetable starts. “Mom.”
“Oh! There you are. Hand me that thing with the leaves.”
“The plant?”
“Yes. That. And before you ask, yes, I’m taking my ginkgo. I was already forgetting words when I was forty, and now whole days go by when I don’t speak to anyone. Don’t start calling around for memory care.”
“I wasn’t going to ask about that. I was going to ask you what people did before phones.”
“What do you mean?” Mom replies. I note she is using her bare hands instead of a shovel to scoop a hole in the soft, freshly hoed ground.
“I mean, like, describe a day in the life of a normal adult—so not you, I should stress—living in a time before the internet.”
My mom frowns at me. “Aside from not being zombies, people were exactly the same, as far as I remember. They got up, put on their pants one leg at a time, and went to work all day. Then they came home and had dinner with their families and went to bed. I suppose there was prime-time TV in there, over the air, with commercials that allowed you to get up and pee. Books, with paper pages that you manually turned. Is that what you’re asking?”
I furrow my brow. “Kind of. But not exactly. Imagine my normal weekday. I wake up in the morning, grab my phone, and look at my notifications until my alarm, on my phone, goes off. Then I get up, take a shower while listening to a podcast on my phone, get dressed, and do my emails on my phone. I make the breakfast that comes up on my meal-planner app, and then I put my macronutrients into my diet app on my phone while I’m eating. I ask my smart speaker to play the entertainment news while I scroll what’s trending on Facebook and Twitter. If I’m using the last of something, I order it on my grocery-delivery app.
“Then, after I eat, I get out my laptop. I post about my morning and the daily intention. I do ten minutes on my meditation app. I put on music via Bluetooth and spend most of the morning online responding to followers and keeping up with my social media. Maybe a break for online window-shopping. Lunch from my meal-planning app, another post, more social media, sponsor emails and Slack meetings, content generation, podcast interviews, the gym with my wearable or yoga on my fitness app, a Pictey Live, dinner with Tucker provided by a food-delivery app, a streaming show or three, one last update of my story with the day’s mentions, and then bed.”
My mother looks at me, appalled. “Do you need your phone to have sex too?” she asks.
“Mom. Ew. And no.” I think for a moment. “But I do use it to listen to white noise when I sleep. Tucker snores.”
“Another plus to being single again,” says Mom. I’m glad she’s over Tucker. Never mind how I feel. I mean, I feel ok. But I wouldn’t mind the tiniest bit of fawning.
“His snoring wasn’t that big a deal,” I reply. I found it comfortable. I knew he was still breathing.
“So you’re asking how to live a life without every move dictated by notifications and applications?”
“Well . . .” It sounds stupid when she says it. Much like everything I do.
She sets down her tray of seedlings. “You start by facing the fact that for the last however many years—I’m just going to guess six—you’ve been distracted and distant to the things actually going on around you in the present. You may feel euphoric at the moment, like you’re free, and you are. But what comes next will be a hard transition. Now that you don’t have a screen between you and the world, you stand to be very overwhelmed. Things you’ve buried may come up.”
“I’m not overwhelmed,” I tell her, bemused. “Have a little faith, Mom. I’m just at loose ends. I tried exercise and reading one of your books, but it’s not what I would have picked, and my e-reader won’t update without Wi-Fi. I did some yoga, but I’m used to using an app to move me through my yoga routine. I flossed, unpacked, started a load of wash, and parboiled some veggies. Now what do I do?”
Mom looks up at me and then at her (yep, analog) watch. “It’s been thirty-five minutes since we got down the mountain.”
“The longest thirty-five minutes of my life. Oh, stop rolling your eyes. I mean, for one thing, I’m effectively off of work as a direct result. Lots of people struggle with keeping busy when they take time off of work.”
“Lots of ding-dongs. What’s to struggle about? You can do whatever you want with your days now.” She pauses. “Do you need to borrow some money? Is money the problem?”
“It’s not the money, though that’s awfully nice of you,” I say, knowing I make double in sponsorships what Mom earns in a year of birth coaching. “Though . . .” I think of something I haven’t done in a while. “Do you know of any local studios who might need a substitute teacher this week?”
Mom looks at me in surprise. “You can still teach yoga?”
“Of course I can. I mean, I haven’t taught in person for a while. Not since Mike. But a couple times a month I upload online classes for YogaStar.com.”
She frowns. “I thought maybe you’d quit.” She wraps her hand around my biceps. “There used to be muscle here.”
For the first time since I was a kid, I consider my biceps in terms other than svelteness. “There’s a lot of pressure to be thin in LA,” I admit. “When I’m at home, I keep to a pretty intense diet.”
She says nothing, which is so unusual it makes me nervous. Silence falls over us. I get more nervous still.
“Hey,” I ask. “Why aren’t you using that tr
owel? It’s sitting six inches from you.”
“I just tilled, and the earthworms are on the move. I don’t want to accidentally bisect one,” she tells me.
I look at her flatly. “But you know that it won’t kill the worm, right? If you hit one. It actually doubles the worm population.”
“Even so, it would be sad for the worm. Plus, this way I get to feel the dirt. It feels very nice. Try it.”
I kneel down to where my mom is digging and sit on my heels. “Mom, tool use is one of the few things that differentiates humans from animals.”
“Actually, apes use tools too. You’re not so special. Get your fingers in there. Start experiencing the world without a filter.”
I grimace, but after all, I am trying things her way, aren’t I? Obediently I put my hands in the slightly moist, fluffy dirt. It’s dark brown, the color of fresh-ground coffee, with some sparkles in it. It feels cool and soft and sort of nice, I admit. But when I take my hands out, the undersides of my french tips are filthy. I hold them up to her, as if to say, See?
“Now, isn’t that nice?” she says, missing the point entirely. “Don’t wash too carefully before you eat next, and you’ll add all those new lovely microbes into your gut.”
“That’s literally eating dirt, Mom. Can’t I just take my probiotic?”
“This is better,” she says. “The real version is always better. If you really want to quit your phone addiction and not just go rushing back to the Apple store at the first opportunity, I recommend you OD on the real-life versions of everything you previously did online.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Go to the market instead of buying supplements online. Shop around. Talk to people there. Get your nutrition through actual food.”
I shrug. This sounds less than thrilling, to be honest.
She goes on. “Do yoga on the mountainside and then fall asleep in the meadow. Read a newspaper on the porch, and feel the cold pump water wash away the ink on your grubby hands afterward. Listen to one of Andy’s old records while you eat lunch and notice how you start chewing in rhythm. Go to town and ask for a map of the local stores and restaurants. Read a book even if it’s not what you would prefer, just to see what another genre is like. Take off your shoes and get your feet muddy down by where the frogs live. Wander around the neighborhood looking for someone to talk to. Write things down, with a nice pen, on scrap paper, and stuff the bits of ideas in your pockets so you’ll meet them again at the end of the day.”
I look at her in wonder. She pauses. “Everything you can do on a phone you can do better without a phone. Except the self-numbing and avoidance. Just skip those.”
“Maybe I should just scoop up a handful of compost and send it right down the hatch,” I say.
“I’ve heard worse ideas,” Mom replies. She breaks up the small root ball of the new plant, something puny with broad true-green leaves, and throws a sprinkling of gray stuff into the hole she made before nesting the roots into the earth and smoothing dirt around the plant in a heap. “Ta-da!” she announces. “That will be lovely come fall.”
“What is it?” I ask.
“A parsnip,” she tells me, grabbing her watering can. “I only plant one each year. To me, they taste like old, stringy carrots. But they must be eaten, for character building, and besides, the greens are nice.”
I think about my “must be eaten” foods, and none of them are for character; all of them are for minimal total body fat percentages. Pea protein powder, arugula-and-cacao smoothies, and gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free iced “dessert substitute.” I might actually prefer the parsnip, but it has twenty-eight net carbs.
I wonder if, while taking some time off from being in front of the camera all the time, I might not have a carbohydrate or two. Nothing crazy. Just let my hair down a little. I can put it back up when the time comes.
Thirty minutes later I am sitting alone in a restaurant looking at a half-empty pizza plate and a totally empty beer glass. Now, this is some delicious character building. This is the first meal I have eaten alone without my phone in . . . ever? It was awkward at first. I went in without reading any reviews, I didn’t have a chance to look at the menu ahead of time, and I couldn’t figure out where to put my eyes for the first twenty minutes of dining alone. But once the pizza came . . . well, did anyone tell me how delicious pizza was? I must have known. I must have had some inkling. After all, I once posted a recipe for almond-flour-and-cauliflower pizza crust that got massive click-through. I posted that it tasted “just like the real thing!” But somewhere around college age I’d stopped eating gluten and then later most alternative breads and finally most carbs, so how the hell would I have known what the real thing tastes like? I must now amend that a cauliflower-and-almond-flour crust tastes absolutely nothing like the real thing, and to anyone who knows better, I sincerely apologize. I actually think I’ll post an apology to carb eaters, even though it’s entirely off brand. I can call it back to the lifestyle by talking about moderation. And then after that I can eat the rest of this pizza all by myself.
I grab around in my handbag for my phone. The inside of this bag is black, but my phone is not black, so why can’t I ever find it? Why am I carrying three lipsticks in one bag? Do I plan on wearing lip stripes? Maybe the phone is in the zipper compartment?
Oh yeah.
I don’t have my phone.
I threw my phone over the mountainside.
I drop my bag heavily onto the floor of the restaurant. No big deal. I’m taking off the filter of my life, like my mom said. I look at the half-eaten pizza. It’s pretty, because the crust is thin and toasty and the cheese is fresh buffalo mozzarella, and I can see the brick oven it was cooked in right behind the table in the background. I could set the focus between the two of them, on the brass bar, which is helpfully empty at this hour. I could get the beer glass out of the photo and maybe order a nice red wine, because there is simply no way to tie beer into my brand, moderation or no.
Except I don’t want a glass of red wine. I want another beer.
And I have no camera anyway, so I might as well have one.
I love going without my phone.
This is not just the first meal I’ve eaten without a phone in years but also the first attractive restaurant I’ve not photographed in some way while eating in it. When we went out, Tucker and I, we only really went to attractive restaurants. So . . . this is kind of a thing. An achievement. An achievement I’m utterly alone in. Every other table of diners in this restaurant either is on their phones or has their phones screen up on the table, except for a mother and her teenage daughter right next to me. The two of them are just talking. My heart pulls. I got my first real phone when I turned sixteen, mostly for calling and a few labored texts. At eighteen, though, I got a phone with a camera. I got an iPhone from Andy for my college graduation.
And after that, I became an inveterate phone diner. Did I ever put my phone away when I ate with my family? Maybe once or twice with Andy. I haven’t gone totally phoneless with my mom since I joined Pictey. After all, someone might have been trying to reach me.
When the server comes to check in, I intend to just order another beer, but instead I say, “Do you have time for me to ask you a question about your job?”
“Sure,” she says. She’s middle aged, with a friendly face and the look of someone who has nowhere to be. “I mean, assuming nobody flags me down, ’course. Fire away.”
“Do you mind when people take pictures of the restaurant or the food with their phones?” I ask.
She doesn’t take a beat. “But you lost your phone,” she says immediately.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you’re eating without it. Alone. Look around. Everyone else is on their phone or with someone, and some people are on their phone and with someone.”
“But what if I told you I didn’t have a phone anymore,” I say.
“I’d say, Congratulations? And that’s really bizarre? I
mean, don’t get me wrong, I love customers without phones.”
I furrow my brow. “Why?” I ask. “Do they tip better?”
“Oh my goodness, no,” she says. “They’re generally cheaper. But people without phones, they come in here, they look at the menu when they sit down. They order drinks when you come over to ask for their drink order. They ask you questions about what’s good. They notice you when you come back to the table and say thank you when you refill their drinks. They’re not, like, too busy leaving the Yelp review for the meal they just ate to pay the tab in some reasonable amount of time.”
“So phone users are slower?”
“Yeah, and when they do look up from their phones, they have no sense of time. So they’ll be like, ‘Where’s my waitress? I haven’t seen her in a half hour,’ and really I was there ten minutes ago and they didn’t even notice me. They’re in that immediate-gratification mode, and it hangs around even when they’re actually interacting with real people. Plus, it’s just depressing when four people come in to eat together and don’t actually talk to each other. I know it’s normal, but it makes me feel like an old crank.”
“Don’t be silly. You just want to be able to do your job,” I say with a smile. But I feel awful. I recognize myself in that description as clearly as if she had done a police sketch. Tucker and I would do this dance: The phones stayed put away for five minutes. But then there’d be some question that came up in conversation that we had to google, and then he’d see he had five texts, and I’d get out my phone while waiting for him and see eight new comments. And then we’d both say, ‘Let’s just get caught up,’ and then the server would come ask us if we were ready to order, and we wouldn’t have opened our menus.
