The Boy Kings

put him to bed on the living-room couch, leaving Thrax and me to sit cross-legged on my bed, talking. The Internet was missing, shut out of the action on my closed laptop that lay unused on the floor of my bedroom. “Welp. Miss u,” I imagined the Internet saying to us from deep within some data center somewhere, perplexed as to why it had not been made master of ceremonies, router of all human affection and friendship. Thrax was there, and we were moving perilously close, almost to the point of kissing. Something had gotten into us tobring us to the brink of a physical consummation of our long affection. Perhaps it was the Fleetwood Mac, whispering to us from the free-and-easy seventies, fueled by real drugs instead of digital ones. “Players only love you when they’re playing,” Stevie sings in “Dreams,” and I think that the song could be updated for the Internet age to read “Players only love you when you’re playing.”
    “We should sleep in tomorrow,” Thrax said. It was Tuesday, but neither of us had to be at work until we felt like it, which in his case could be as late as seven at night or never. Maybe it was the Fernet or the fact that in San Francisco we were far away from Facebook, but I felt bolder than usual, like I might finally be able to break the fourth wall, that barrier of virtual reality that we had built. Social media instead of television was our new fourth wall, and any true connection in the world we built required you to shatter the screen once and for all. “Okay,” I said, snuggling out of my jeans.
    Thrax leaned in to kiss me, and I almost laughed that this was actually happening, but it was. We were indeed breaking the fourth wall, as if the iPhone’s tempered Corning glass was shattering everywhere, all over my bed, against Steve Jobs’s and all the other tech titans’ wishes that it stay unbreakable. Then, the siren of the virtual began to sing me back to its safe, contained shores. “I don’t want to have sex,” I declared.
    “We don’t have to have sex,” he said, sounding mostly relieved. We were agreed, as always, that we didn’t want to have sex. Sex with each other was too real. Horribly, chillingly real. Because from sex—the true, physical, total interlacing of bodies—you cannot go back to the virtual. The virtual was what our fortunesdepended on. And, as figureheads of Facebook, we had to preserve the distance that the company depended on. For, if everyone were connected with the ones they loved, they—we—wouldn’t need Facebook and its distant promise of love always somewhere around the corner. Real intimacy is the third rail of a publicity-driven, virtual society. We must avoid it at all costs. Thrax and I had always known this instinctively. Our unerring sense of control was what helped us win the game and take our seats next to Mark.
    Something had to be done, though. Our odd, enduring affection was still there, always available to be picked up and left when it was convenient, like secondhand news. But I wanted—I needed—to try to kill it. I felt a sudden urge to destroy this—the tension, the war, the endless battle to be loved and liked—once and for all. If I could kill it, maybe I could check out and leave it all behind. And, so, I took charge.
    The perpetual competition in our working and social lives reminded me of a line from a James Baldwin novel that seemed to illuminate all of this, this war for status, “Love is a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up,” he wrote. Maybe for the boys, being loved was a war, a battle we wage on social media now, instead of in real life. And, maybe, whenever they tire of this game, love will have to be a growing up, something they’ll have to find somewhere else, offline, away from the screen. So, in the unmonitored darkness of that night I decided it was okay, at least momentarily, to submit, and Thrax did too.
    “Just don’t update your status about this,” I warned, eventually falling back onto my pillow.
    “Hold on, I was just getting out my phone,” he said, trolling.
    “Not funny,” I retorted, but we both laughed. It was funny.Everything was. We were making a fortune out of broadcasting our own selves and interests to the world, and we didn’t even have to go to work if we didn’t want to. To punctuate this, my alarm clock began to chime errantly and we burst into more laughter. Who needs an alarm when you don’t have to go to the office and when all this is over, you