And if you swipe right, you can see the jungle room to the right.” If you read your texts while working, you lose that time, but also the time it takes to refocus afterwards, which is a lot “If you swipe left, you can see the jungle room to the left. Look.” He waved the iPad in her direction, and began to move his finger across it. In front of us, I could see the large fake plants that Elvis had bought to turn this room into his own artificial jungle. When we got to the jungle room – Elvis’s favourite place in the mansion – the iPad was chattering away when a middle-aged man standing next to me turned to say something to his wife. As we walked, I felt more and more tense. So as we walked around we were surrounded by blank-faced people, looking almost all the time at their screens. In each room, a photograph of where you are appears on the screen, while a narrator describes it. You are handed an iPad, you put in little earbuds, and the iPad tells you what to do – turn left turn right walk forward. When you arrive at the gates of Graceland, there is no longer a human being whose job is to show you around. He had to switch his phone off during the day. I could see that the idea of breaking this numbing routine ignited something in him, but I told him there was one condition he had to stick to if we went.
“Adam,” I said softly, “let’s go to Graceland.” I reminded him of the promise I had made. Then one evening, as we lay on my sofa, each staring at our own ceaselessly shrieking screens, I looked at him and felt a low dread. I still read a lot of books, but with each year that passed, it felt more and more like running up a down escalator. I had just turned 40, and wherever my generation gathered, we would lament our lost capacity for concentration. Our ability to pay attention was cracking and breaking. During the decade in which Adam had become a man, this fracturing seemed to be happening to many of us. (I’ve changed his name and some minor details to preserve his privacy.) He seemed to be whirring at the speed of Snapchat, and nothing still or serious could gain any traction in his mind. He had dropped out of school when he was 15, and he spent almost all his waking hours alternating blankly between screens – a blur of YouTube, WhatsApp and porn.
I never gave it another thought, until everything had gone wrong. One day, as I tucked him in, he looked at me very earnestly and asked: “Johann, will you take me to Graceland one day?” Without really thinking, I agreed. He took to singing Jailhouse Rock at the top of his voice with all the low crooning and pelvis-jiggling of the King himself. W hen he was nine years old, my godson Adam developed a brief but freakishly intense obsession with Elvis Presley.
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