I
Spam, Therefore I Am
David Hagerty
Not long ago, I thought of
myself as an anonymous hero.
I was the most famous person you
could not name. My messages reached millions a day, but no one knew me. I
helped thousands, yet few gave me credit. I reconnected people to each other
and themselves without ever meeting them. I was a secret shaman for all that
ailed society.
You’ve probably read my ads:
“Feel disconnected, isolated, alone? I have a lifeline. For only $19.95 per
month, I’ll end your banishment, your imprisonment.”
How, you ask? I marketed an
herbal remedy based on ancestral wisdom, passed down through the generations,
yet never recorded, one unavailable from doctors, unacknowledged by pharmacists
or the FDA, but more effective than any of their potions.
Why did I believe this? Because
I was a patient of my own cure. I discovered it on an overseas adventure and
quickly realized its power from its effects on me. Before taking it, I felt
alone and insignificant. I had no family, no friends, no connections. I
wandered. Then I found the formula in an ancient, aboriginal text.
I wanted to share my discovery,
so I started a business. My messages reached people through their emails, their
text messages, their social media. Any means not regulated and controlled by
the authorities who want to keep us all segregated, isolated, powerless. When
one of these outcasts reached out to me, I replied.
As happened with Mykel. I don’t
know his full name, otherwise I would report it. That is the one he gave me. I
know him only as a cypher.
Mykel responded to one of my
queries that indeed he did feel misunderstood,
unfulfilled, alone. He saw people but could not interact with them. Instead, he
dreamed, vividly, of people chained and tormented. Of people jailed and
forgotten. Of people broken in body and soul. He longed to connect with
someone, anyone. I assured him I would help. Although I was not qualified to
diagnose his condition, he had diagnosed himself. Besides, my treatments are
natural, organic, elemental, and therefore safe for all. After the anonymous
transfer of funds online, I sent him a month’s supply of my supplement and told
him to take one dose per day.
Within a week, he reported that
he felt remade, reborn, reconnected. He had identified someone with whom he
longed to bond. “She alone can fulfill me,” he wrote.
Thus, I too felt redeemed. Every
time I heard from a satisfied client, I knew that my efforts were not in vain.
If I kept a wall of gold stars, each representing some new connection, it would
exceed a galaxy. For him, I would have added a bright one.
Usually, my encounters with
clients are short, succinct, mutually fulfilling. They unburden themselves
once, twice at most, and thereafter only ask for refills. However, occasionally
one of these lost ones craves more than a singular contact. I become a
surrogate, a sage to lead them back from their banishment.
So it was with Mykel, who wrote
to me daily about his progress. He’d met the target of his affections. He’d
spoken to her. He’d invited her out. He’d invited her home. She’d spent the
night. They’d become inseparable.
Wonderful, I thought, except why
keep writing to me if he’d found fulfillment with her?
Nonetheless, he wanted to share
everything with me. She was his prisoner, his love slave, his subject. I
assumed he was speaking metaphorically, as we often do when we first connect
with another being. Except his comparisons became ever more vivid, tormented,
violent. He had mastered her, had branded her as his own, had ravished her
until she begged him to relent. Phrases from an S&M story.
I stopped replying. Our
relationship had reached its outer limit, a boundary I would not exceed even
with clients. Although happy to resupply them, I kept a professional distance.
I did not want them to rely on me, only on my medicines. Don’t all healers need
some remove from their patients?
Yet Mykel persisted. He had
bound and gagged her, he wrote, pierced her with fishhooks, starved and beaten
her till she fainted.
This was not connection. It was
not love. It was criminal.
Or so it sounded. I could not
know whether these confessions were true or some dark fantasy.
I checked the news for stories
of people vanished, abducted, lost. But in such a large, disconnected society,
the disappearance of any one being is rarely noticed or reported.
Then I called the police, asked
if they had any recent cases of missing persons.
“Every day,” said the patrolman
who answered.
“Of a woman,” I asked, “who
may
have fallen victim to her boyfriend.”
“You’ve gotta be more specific,”
said the cop. “We’ve got dozens like that.”
What did I know of Mykel? Only
his first name, his email. Or an email, which I assumed was his. When I
shared it with the cop, he said he’d try to trace it.
So I waited—days, then weeks.
I never heard back from the
police, but I heard from Mykel. That his relationship had reached its
“unnatural end.” That he’d “terminated the connection.” That he’d “killed it
off.”
I questioned: was he leading me
on, yanking my chain, tormenting me for amusement? Was I that anonymous being
he was torturing, not in the flesh but in the mind?
So I replied again. Asked the
name of his friend. “Desolation,” he replied. Where was she now? “Buried
forever.” What did he plan to do next? “Replace her.”
I challenged him, demanded
something identifying, something I could share with her family.
He claimed to have chosen a victim no one would
miss.
I needed to investigate, but
how? Since Mykel’s first name was spelled unconventionally, I searched birth
records, where I found hundreds of such men. I cross referenced those to an
online address directory and narrowed it to a couple dozen. Yet none shared the
same email as my Mykel. From my business, I knew that these identifiers could
be disguised, rerouted. He could have been any of these men, or some other
who’d taken a pen name. I’d reached a dead end.
That’s when he told me he’d
identified a new partner, one even more susceptible to his advances than the
first.
I had to help her. I composed a
new pitch, targeted to every solitary soul on my contact list.
“Looking for someone who’s lost?
Trying to reconnect with a loved one who’s absent from your life? I can help. I
trace the missing . . .”
Dozens of people replied. They’d
lost a brother, husband, son. A wife, sister, daughter.
Mykel always referred to his
victim as a woman, so I eliminated the men. Then I asked my supplicants when
their relative disappeared and winnowed the list to those who’d vanished in the
last year. Still, that left almost fifty.
I probed deeper. Who were they,
what did they do, how did they vanish? I read tales of runaway children,
estranged siblings, lost loves. What type of person might Mykel covet?
He gave me more clues with his
next “partner.”
“She cries for her father even
as I apply the strap of discipline.”
From his description, I surmised
that this woman was young, perhaps a child? I narrowed my search by age,
eliminated the grandmothers and parents. Still, that left too many to pinpoint
just one.
I told their relatives what
little I knew. I urged them to contact the police, to cite an anonymous source,
not some psychic or crackpot but a witness who wished to remain anonymous. I
hoped they could urge investigators on to action in ways I couldn’t. Only the
police didn’t believe them. They called Mykel an urban legend, a bogeyman of
the missing, a hobgoblin of the disturbed.
I knew different. His fantasies
were too particular, too detailed, too vivid to be fictive. He’s as real as I
am—and even more hidden. Despite all of my online connections, I could not pin
him.
For the first time since I
started taking my own medication, my sense of loss and isolation returned.
Despite my best intentions, I had failed. Like Mykel, I had slipped into
megalomania.
Who knew there were so many lost
souls? I should have, given my trade, but in my focus on selling supplements
I’d never thought of the people those people had lost. Companionship takes two,
but my myopia only saw one, a transactional view of relationships. Maybe that’s
the problem, we all see other people as a fulfillment of our own needs.
When I was younger, I read the
classified ads in our local newspaper, particularly those for missed
connections. “Our eyes met on the train, you carried a grocery sack, I hefted a
bag of plant food.” I longed for a person who longed for me. Yet I never found
that ad.
Which is why I started my
business. I knew I couldn’t connect to people personally, no matter how many
ancient potions I consumed, so I lived vicariously through the reunions of
others. And it worked. Many people cured themselves through my ministration.
Only the more people I
contacted, the more isolated I became. I suppressed my own needs through my
business. Why did my medicines work for others but leave me so alone?
The one lasting connection I
made was to Mykel—who still writes me of his exploits. He’s captured dozens
now, he claims, each more satisfying than the last. He has not only connected
with them but subsumed them.
He reminds me of why I retreated
from society. That threat of being misunderstood, exploited, targeted. He is
the monster who drove me into hiding.
Each day I check the news for
reports of a serial killer who stalks people online. I live in fear of being
found out, of being revealed as the matchmaker for a sociopath. It so weighs
upon me, I have suspended my business, stopped all sales and marketing. Even
though my supplements helped thousands, I cannot abide thinking they
contributed to Mykel’s emergence.
Now I rarely leave my apartment.
I exist as a shut-in. I prefer to venture out online, where I remain
protected, disguised, anonymous. I have found a community with others equally
antisocial, whom I console without cures.
Yet I imagine what would happen
if Mykel made me his next victim. Who would notice? Would anyone care that my
postings stopped, my messages discontinued, my counsel desisted? Or would they
go on as I have all these years?
When I die, the only proof of my
existence will be my mass of mailings.
I spam, therefore I am.
