GONE FISHING

Emma Dermansky

Two strong guys on a small boat were hauling up a net full of fish, and right in the middle of it was my phone. As the net went up my phone went down, hitting a fish in the eye. Things were finally getting exciting. I wondered if it would sink back into the ocean or end up in a bucket, one fisherman pointing it out to the other. I hoped they would identify it as a tossed burner phone, left by one of the members of the college mafia, skipping town, and coming back right in time for finals with a new one. 

I wasn’t in the college town mafia (student government), the vampire killer association (bible study), or one of those people who ran around calling themselves a philosophy major. I didn’t have any good reason to go throwing my phone into the harbor and yet here I was. 

I knew people who had solved their problems with technology without throwing their phones to the bottom of the harbor. When my roommate thought her screen time was too high, she broke the campus wifi router and blackmailed Verison into shutting down cellular service. This worked for her, and it gave the computer science department a chance to show up to the physics majors or when they designed a proto-type wifi for the whole campus. It took five minutes for anything other than League of Legends to boot up. After the whole thing ended and IT got the wifi back on, the admissions department counted it as a win. They put up banners saying that students at this liberal arts college were sexually active, and psychologically sound self-directed learners. U.S. News called us the 99th-best liberal arts college in the northeast, and we were running out of ways to distinguish ourselves. That’s why the deans gave my roommate, Clara a prize for creatively bringing the digital detox to Campus. She didn’t even show up. Contrary to what the minimalists prescribed, she didn’t spend her detox meditating. She spent her emancipated time reading Ulysses on the floor, cutting out pages from the annotated copy, and linking them together with red string like a conspiracy theorist. She was relentless, just like Joyce and the computer science majors. It was all great for the student newspaper (THE SUSPICIOUS WATCHERS!) 

Jay, the president of the Campus Luddites, got sick of their phone one day and traded it out for a flip phone with an honest-to-good antenna. It’s five feet long.  She had made a deal with the local Verizon,  who were terrified after their run-in with Clara. They set her phone up with three calls a month for 75 cents a year. Jay was in my freshman-year English class, and they generously let me call them every 3 months. We usually talk about books. 

The point is, my friends, as eclectic as they were, had yet to send their phones to swim with the fish. Even the Luddites had phones. 

I had committed extreme action. It wasn’t because I’d seen some poor dog get shot on Instagram, or been stalked by the student newspaper. That morning the years of nothingness finally hit me. What was I doing? I spent the morning on my phone, almost two hours. Doing what? For what purpose? Why? Did I even like any of it? But at that point, I wasn’t at the crime scene yet. I was still in my room. 

After my morning scrolling, I got another mediocre iced latte from the campus cafe (it was called SAD MUSIC) and I planned to study at the library. I had packed my backpack. Somehow the day had drifted away from me, and somewhere between my dorm and the harbor, I had decided to throw my phone over the fence. Now it was 3 pm and I was leaning on the rusty fence that overlooked the harbor, my pockets that much lighter. Everyone hated their phones, but they hated them in the way people hate Mondays. I needed a motive for digital murder, so I traced my morning back. My mother texted me about my train ticket home. I ignored her, then felt bad about ignoring her, and realized if I had no phone she would have to send mail or come out here, to America’s 99th greatest institution of liberal arts. Alternative theories include a quarter-life crisis, my first psychotic break, and the rare possibility that I had been cursed. 

Or maybe it was something stupider than a curse. One Tiktok in the blur of Tiktoks made me feel annoyed, rather than pleasant nothingness. Here’s the trend:  The influencer, pretty, blonde, and sprawled out on her queen-sized bed is scrolling on her phone. An ominous, off-screen voice commands the influencer to TURN IT OFF. The influencer throws her phone out of the frame, probably into the cushioned hands of her suspiciously heterosexual boyfriend. Then the inspirational montage starts, and we see the influencer hiking, laughing, and swinging her arms around her boyfriend. All of it is recorded. When the influencer is not on her phone, she’s in a sterile wilderness. 

In the comments her followers talk about how they're going to do it; they’re going to pull the plug and delete Instagram. I imagine them talking about digital detox for years, right until the last glacier melts and kills us all.

Leaning over the railing of the harbor was nothing like those videos. There was no voice telling me what to do. It was silent. I couldn’t tell if my phone was still in the net, and I wouldn’t have to know ever again. There was no music to tell me something special was happening, and no people to check in with.  I imagined reenacting the moment as a performative art piece at the open mic, breaking people’s phones, and lying down on the ground in silence. It would go on for five hours, and anyone who tried to leave would be shot.   

The harbor expanded out in front of me. The fog went on for miles. The motive was unknown, and I could feel my life expanding.