act i 

status quo: dorian, unburdened by prospects, wishes to be insta-famous. he opens a tiktok handle and begins posting muscle pics and thirst traps online. he likes the way his hair absorbs the southern light flooding in from his kitchen's winter windows which are cold to the touch. he enjoys the way his eyes shimmer and reflect the circle light. he craves the attention of strangers whose names he never knows. at twenty-eight and six foot seven, dorian is all but a god, and at tender moments alone, he imagines him meeting himself at the club. imagines how his own hand might tremble when touching his doppelganger's shoulder. can't help but then imagine an army of self-copies, an orgiastic self-replification. but then (inciting incident) the first morning of spring comes, and dorian wakes to find new content in his profile--stuff he never took. and yet all the selfies are perfectly saturated, all the video perfectly on brand. he doesn't remember taking any of it, but there it is. dorian assumes what is obvious to us all: that his tiktok avatar has come to life and is self-producing its own content.

act ii

at first it's a boon. the avatar perfects the category of elevated t. traps: soft glow lighting, none-engagement with the camera, the audience witnesses the avatar wholly absorbed in something benign, innocent event, barely aware that he's tufting at 3am in a pair of raincloud gray sweatpants. sure enough, followers go up. comments role in. dorian joins the creator fund. affiliate brands reach out. he creates in-feed ads. he creates merch. life is good. because the avatar keeps creating content, dorian devotes himself full-time to cashing it in. dorian, of course, tells no one. then seven years goes by. twenty-eight blinks seven times and suddenly he's thirty-five. the hairs on dorian's head drift into the wind. the skins on his face turn slightly translucent, like rice paper wrapped around a log of black pudding. but the avatar never gets any older. dorian catfishes men with the avatar's pics. or does he? he asks himself alone in the mirror. if it's not me, who is it then? it's just the best possible version of me, he whispers to himself in answer before falling asleep. the men who fall for it though are polite. even at his advanced age, dorian is still beautiful. fuckable, but can't help but set himself up to disappoint.

act iii

though soon dorian came to understand: the spoils were his, but the glory was the avatar's. by halloween, dorian decides: he will transform himself back into the avatar--and then magically they will become one or something--loaded and pumped and disgustingly rich. the process is grueling though. botox injections. steroid abuse. an adderall script from his GP. fillers to salvage his falling face. silicon to round out the thinning upper lip. knee replacements. hair plugs. pec implants. throws in an ass lift, while he's at it. but soon no one recognizes him. and those that do are frightened. friends avoid eye contact when seeing him eating alone at restaurants. family members gather for the holidays without telling him ("your mother just doesn't understand why you did all that. she says she loved the way your face looked"). all the while the avatar is trending, the comments gag: ageless beauty! forever young! we have arrived together in zion! we have overcome the inevitable decline! thirty-five shits itself into forty-two, and dorian finally understands: he cannot be the avatar. he will never be the avatar again. their pathways in life were always destined to fork. he could not follow the avatar into the stars or ride its tail into the heavens. dorian wakes one crisp october morning and creates a second tiktok handle. he posts unflattering photos of his face, his body, so people can see what he's done to himself and understand the true nature of the avatar. he confessed his heart to the camera, told them how he was afraid to die, to get old, to grow ugly, to not know the heat of desire & the flame of hate alike. but the content was ugly, so no one saw it. and no one followed back.

act iv

dorian buys a condo in hell's kitchen and basically never leaves. he listens to joni mitchell albums and applies cold compresses to his face. he drank gin gimlets with mint for breakfast. the avatar's content, in time, matured. no one much noticed the decades-long march into immortality taking place in front of them. desire is fleeting. lives are short. but the avatar's photos were inspired scenes of deistic meditation: imitations of saint sebastian, of the god apollo, the buddha and even jesus christ. all stood in witness to his second coming. finally, all thought: beauty returned to virtue. and in dorian's tiny hell's kitchen apartment, the walls are stacked with merch, which dorian spends his days mailing out to folks: a one man fedex operation. forty-two pustules into forty-nine. the avatar's followers now include major hollywood producers, political leaders, billionaires. a cult begins to form around him. it's only a matter of time before someone traces down the IP address and sure enough, dorian wakes one cold winter morning to find that he's been doxed and a group break into his home, chanting madness. finding dorian there alone in his own bed, they are furious, deceived, cosmically catfished. they try to rip him apart like latter day bacchae, digging there nails into his arms, his legs, his side. someone in the back says to crucify him out on the lanai. dorian, in a final gesture, tries to shut the avatar's accounts down. it's not clear why he did it. perhaps he thought it was a vampire-like situation, and that if the avatar disappeared there would be a jump cut in the reel, and everything would go back to the way it was and dorian would wake all over again at the beginning, and marvel at the realness of this nightmare. but (da da dum!) the avatar creates its own accounts. and everyone refollows. i mean, EVERYONE. plus dorian, forced at last to become his own follower and take his place among the rabel.

act v

all of dorian's revenue streams dry up. dorian loses his condo. he gets a job as a receptionist at a modeling agency. he says he'd like to do casting calls someday, that he's a real eye for beauty. but his face now looks like a frozen mask, one of those old greek ones with the smily and sad faces: dorian's is definitely sad. and so his bosses do not like to put him out in front of people all that much. it makes the board members uncomfortable, they say. so dorian shares a three-bedroom with four twenty-somethings. they are loud and very beautiful, but he is very tired. nowadays he is frightened by pleasure and will cross the street to avoid pain. but he does not know how to mold ambivalence into equanimity, indifference to love. forty-nine withers into fifty-six. dorian develops an inoperative brain tumor. he is given a prognosis of nine months and told to make his final preparations. he cannot stay at his place any longer, so he moves into a facility. there is no one he knows around. no one he can call. the faces of the nurses and the staff and the other patients are strange to him. they come to him in dreams at night, like a ryan murphy anthology show, the faces all the same, but the roles shifting like a kaleidoscope, slamming together and ripping apart, over and over and over again. soon the morphine drip takes him away. those are long empty days of dying. silence. finally: at 1:29 AM on what will be a warm spring day, the avatar posts one last shot: a shriveled up old corpse laying in a hospital bed, a drained IV on the rack, shit and piss still emptying into bags. there are no more posts after that. the avatar disappears. the world passes away. all forget.