Exile

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June 18, 05.18am

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I wake up to a pale, artificial glow resting on my cheek. The darkness of the room swells with the luminosity of a phone screen and I squint to the side. Felicity is lying beside me on her back, arms upright and eyes wide at her phone screen. Her thumbs sway in movements like a synchronized dance; her eyes track the movements like a game of ping-pong. The glare of her phone highlights the sleep deprived lines drawn under her eyes.

'Are you ok, Felicity?'

'I'm ok. We need more subscribers,' she murmurs. 

'It can wait,' I assure her, sliding my hand against her arm.

'Stop it,' she snaps.

I turn to the other side and fall back into a weak rest.

I am awake, again. Grey morning light bleeds into the room and the sweltering humidity breathes down on my chest. I turn to Felicity who is sprawled across the surface of the bed like a dead bird. The curtains hang in the still breeze and I think about our subscribers. We’re struggling to stay afloat and she knows it. I shuffle to one side and try to think about something else: about how 5am can be a lonely place. As I clamber out of bed I reach for my phone, frantically retrieving our subscriber intake. We have not posted since last night but our points have already started to fall and our subscriber intake has slowed down. I analyse the statistics like my eyes are a magnifying glass.

'A stumble can turn into a fall..' I utter to myself softly.

I hold the camera lens of the phone in front of me and position the angle ahead of an unconscious Felicity. The shutter snaps like the sound of a whip. I upload. I wait. I watch. A happy couple picture. This has to be guaranteed success. Our points start to rise and I take a deep, satisfied breath. She will be happy to see that picture when she wakes up. This one wasn't even staged. 

She opens one eye.

'Good one,' she grins.

'You were waiting for me to take the picture,' I say dryly.

Her smile fades and she rolls onto the other side away from me. I can never tell when she's genuinely asleep or just waiting for me to take a picture of her in a restful state. 

I stand around not knowing what to do with myself - so I look back on some of our old videos. There is an old video of us both laughing in a park after a night out. The inky black night falls against the deserted park equipment as we filmed ourselves laughing giddily. I can't remember why we’re enjoying ourselves but Felicity had taken it upon herself to film the moment immediately. I watch the video like a detective. When I listen to it more closely, it sounds like Felicity is crying. 

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June 18, 09:50am

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I scratch my eyes and stand lifelessly staring at my omelet. Felicity is propped on the edge of the kitchen chair, resting her pink bowl and porcelain cup on the window ledge. A bright day beams outside. She's prepared granola and yogurt for breakfast and it sits behind a scenic picture of trees rustling on a warm Spring morning. The camera clicks like an eruption of electric sparks. She stops, squints at her results and then swishes her thumb across the screen to apply an array of colourful filters over the photo. Meanwhile I inspect my sloppy omelet. The stretched shape, raised bumps and shades of sandy colour resemble a foreign desert. Half circle, half rectangle; the solemn face looks back at me with its anemic complexion.

'Shall I take a picture of this one, darling?'

She comes over to have a look. Her face screws up.

'Definitely not,' she says in disgust. 'It's ugly.' 

June 18, 14:30pm

We race through the forest as Felicity holds her selfie stick in the air. She is dressed in dark jogger bottoms and a tight tee. Her face is doused in makeup, embellished in an orange glow.

'This way,' she pants, leading the charge through greenery.

Our lungs swell inside our chests and sweat prickles on my skin. My eyes follow her on my own screen as I act as her cameraman. The sweet morning has turned into a blistering furnace. We run through the heat to look healthy; to look strong.

'How does it look?' she calls out from a distance.

She looks unnatural. Her arm is stuck out in midair like a plank of wood. Her feet move mechanically across the terrain. But on the phone, it is good. The frame rate is a seamless river of pixels swimming together like a smooth current, and there are no signs of motion sickness captured on the footage. We pour through the forest until she is satisfied with what she has. We finally rest on a log while she stares into her phone, swiping filters and tapping digits.

'You look so tired,' she complains, looking at the screen. 'And so exhausted.'

'I can't sleep properly.'

'We can't use your face in these shots. I'm not convinced you look your best,' she frowns.

She uploads a picture of herself and abandons the concept of a couple picture for the run. Our virtual score climbs slowly but the public want more couple happiness. 

We arrive in the center to grab some food from a nearby cafe. Felicity has barely looked at me all day. She is eyeing up an apple pie through the glassy counter.

'Will they think I'm eating poorly? Or will a treat be good for our image?'

I stare meticulously at the pie. The outer pastry looks dry.

'It looks a little flaky,' I say finally. 'It will be hard to take a picture of that.'

I pause and dwell on her former question.

'Although we should still get something sweet. We don't want people to think we're health freaks, or that we’re trying too hard. We need people to know that we can enjoy ourselves.'

She agrees and we both buy a slice of chocolate cake. The dark cocoa sponge is coated in a dreamy, thick fudge. It glimmers under the cafe lights, sat on clean white plates and soaked in a river of sauce. We place them onto the table and position our plates close together above the red and white polka dot cloth. Our phones are out, we spend a few minutes exploring angles and then we finally snap a few shots. We bite into the cake and it tastes bitter; sugarless; hard; burnt; tough like a loaf of stale bread.

Felicity walks up to the desk to complain.

'No one actually buys them to eat,' says the waiter when Felicity bemoans the cake.

When we walk out of the cafe there is a crowd of protesters marching through the streets. The whistles scream like angry birds. The marching of feet thunders on the road.

'Shall we take a picture of this?' Felicity questions.

I am stuck. Politically insensitive. Currently relevant. What would our subscribers think?

I say nothing and watch the angry faces holding up billboard signs. It strikes me as an unusual sight; none of them are holding their phones.

'Ok, let's try it.'

We take some pictures and our score falls. My stomach churns and Felicity looks at me properly for the first time today. Politically sensitive material never works well and I should have known that. She is angry; partly at me and partly at herself. 

-

We do not speak for the first mile on the way home. Felicity has her eyes frantically set on her phone screen; her thumbs a blur across the four corners of the square. I look at the sky and dark clouds swirl above; rain patters on the stony path. I stare into the distance and admire the great beyond.

'Nature.' I say ominously.

Felicity says nothing. She hasn't even heard me.

I crouch to take a long shot of the distance; a musky wash of grey besieges the lens. Snap. Check. Our points fall.

'Are you serious?' says Felicity in disbelief. She looks up at me. 'This is a shared account. Maybe you could let me know before you upload amateur photography? We can't afford to keep losing subscribers.'

She presses her phone into my face.

'No wonder our points fell. That's a terrible picture.'

I look at the swathe of negative comments rushing in about my improvised photography. The people want gloss not nature.

'I was trying to make up for the earlier error,' I confess.

'Run it past me next time you want to take another risk.'

We get home and Felicity lights some candles. Tropical colours are lit up and the walls turn from stony grey to a more exciting, vibrant shade. The room is ambient and the large windows in our room shelter us from the harsh downpour of rain outside. She takes off her clothes and slides into bed; her eyes dare me forward. As I unbutton my shirt and lean onto her white skin, she flashes me a smile and lets her lips gently rest on mine. She then extends her arm and takes a picture. The covers are then pulled up and her naked body disappears. Goodnight.

In my sleep I see my first date with Felicity on repeat. A cozy, candle-lit dinner at an Italian restaurant on a frosty October evening. She wore a teal blue dress. She asked me if she had too much blush on her face before she took a selfie, and then we filmed ourselves clinking glasses.

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June 19 2:42am

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I wake up at 2am and Felicity is staring at herself in the mirror. Her naked figure stands dormantly with her breasts cupped in her hands.

'What are you doing?' I groan.

'All of the celebrities are having breast implants,' she explains. 'I think we need to save up so that I can have the same. Otherwise I'm going to be abnormal. That will be bad for both of us.'

'You think you're abnormal with normal breasts,' I mutter to myself in a daze.

She looks at me, waiting for something.

I explain to her that it's in her mind; that plenty of the women on social media have natural bodies. I know that I am wrong. 

4:30am and my eyes slide across the crack between our curtain again. The rain has stopped but my insomnia is raging. I feel like a lone sock in a washing machine; rinsed and washed out. I get out of bed, look at myself in the mirror and stare at my pale, aged face. The cracks under my eyes. Maybe we could get surgery together.

June 27, 22:49pm

The night is full of euphoric lights and spinning disco balls; a dazzling display of gloss. We are in a nightclub. The dance floor is filled with hands clutching cameras; selfies, group pictures and people spinning their phones around the entire room in a 360 degree motion. The long selfie sticks are standing out like spider legs. Aside from the staged photos, no one is talking to each other in person. The DJ is playing music from a laptop, isolated on a podium but a lot of people have earphones on with their own music anyway. Suddenly, screens mounted on the walls light up and breaking news spreads across the units. Music still thunders. Another round up in our nearby town but everyone here is safe. There are groans from some in the crowd who recognize a brother or sister but drunken cheers from the rest who know no one. I think of an old delusion. One does not die, it is the others who die.

Felicity cups her hands around her mouth and shouts into my ear. 'I went to school with that girl,' pointing at the screen where a figure is being escorted outside of her house. Felicity is happy for the moment, knowing that she is safe, but she cries when we get home. 'What kind of world is this?'

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June 28, 02:09am

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'I feel like we're running out of options,' she says desperately. 'That girl they took away last night - she used to be a fashion designer. She knew lots of celebrities.'

'Those celebrities are gone,' I explain to her. 'I read about the list of exiles this morning. She hadn't designed anything for anyone in months.'

'You don't get it,' she says. 'Her points used to be so much bigger than ours. If she can't stay - what hope do we have?'

I hug her because I have no answers. For a while we say nothing and then finally, she speaks, buried in my chest.

'We need to make a change,' she announces.

I pause. 'What sort of change?'

'We need to join the protest. We can't live like this anymore.'

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June 29, 15:40pm

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We attend a march. We bury our phones into our pockets and walk along the street with wooden sticks and card in the air. It feels alien not holding onto our phones and terrifying that we are not alerting anyone about our business. If we are not interesting on social media anymore then we are on the scrap heap. We'll be outcasts. I can feel our points sinking into an inky black hole and our relevance dissipating as competition hammers at our score. Soon the advertisers will drop from our accounts. Then our own value will drop. And then finally we will be deemed as worthless; no longer worthy of living. Felicity has a stern face now; the departure of her friend has awoken something in her.

'No more exiles, no more exiles.'

I think about what lyes outside of the city. Apparently the heat is scorching and the land is baron. No one lives for long on the outside.

'Get some points you resource-less sponges!' shouts an anti-protester. He films himself throwing a glass bottle into the crowd. It crashes on the road some feet behind us.

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June 30, 05:00am

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5am and my phone flashes with an alert and a thunderous rumble. I shake Felicity's lifeless shoulders with the news I've been dreading.

'It's happened,' I say drearily. 'Our points are too low.'

Felicity cries again and throws her phone across the hall. A few minutes later there is an authoritative knock on the door. Heavily guarded men in uniforms and guns usher us out, lining us up into a van with caged windows. We are driven to the brink of the city, crushed into a compartment with sad, sallow faces. The vans take us out to a vast open space where the ground becomes scaly and orange. The air is thick with heat.

'Please,' cries Felicity, 'throwing herself at one of the guards. Don't leave us out here, not on the outside.'

'The city is overcrowded madam,' says one guard lifelessly. 'Only the interesting can stay.'

I feel the end of a rifle poke into my back and I am pushed out of the van along with others. It's over. We were fools to resist the machine. The world wants gloss not nature I repeat to myself. I hold Felicity's trembling hand as the heat weighs down on us. I turn to her with fear etched on my own weary face. We are here. We are on the outside.