10

An invader arrives in your computer and begins to glean the little diatoms of your identity.

Your name, your address, and so on; the various websites you visit as you wander through the Internet, your user names and passwords, your birth date, your mother’s maiden name, favorite color, the blogs and news sites you read, the items you shop for, the credit card numbers you enter into the databases—

Which isn’t necessarily you, of course. You are still an individual human being with a soul and a history, friends and relatives and coworkers who care about you, who can vouch for you: they recognize your face and your voice and your personality, and you are aware of your life as a continuous thread, a dependable unfolding story of yourself that you are telling to yourself, you wake up and feel fairly happy—happy in that bland, daily way that doesn’t even recognize itself as happiness, moving into the empty hours that probably won’t be anything more than a series of rote actions: showering and pouring coffee into a cup and dressing and turning a key in the ignition and driving down streets that are so familiar you don’t even recall making certain turns and stops—though, yes, you are still present, your mind must have consciously carried out the procedure of braking at the corner and rolling the steering wheel beneath your palms and making a left onto the highway even though there is no memory at all of these actions. Perhaps if you were hypnotized such mundane moments could be retrieved, they are written on some file and stored, unused and useless in some neurological clerk’s back room. Does it matter? You are still you, after all, through all of these hours and days; you are still whole—

But imagine yourself in pieces.

Imagine all the people who have known you for only a year or a month or a single encounter, imagine those people in a room together trying to assemble a portrait of you, the way an archaeologist puts together the fragments of a ruined façade, or the bones of a caveman. Do you remember the fable of the seven blind men and the elephant?

It’s not that easy, after all, to know what you’re made up of.

Imagine the parts of yourself disassembled; imagine, for example, that nothing is left of you but a severed hand in an ice cooler. Perhaps there is one of your loved ones who could identify even this small piece. Here: the lines on your palm. The texture of your knuckles and wrinkled skin at the joints in the middle of your fingers. Calluses, scars. The shape of your nails.

Meanwhile, the invaders are busily carrying away small pieces of you, tidbits of information you hardly think about, any more than you think about the flakes of skin that are drifting off of you constantly, any more than you think of the millions of microscopic demodex mites that are crawling over you and feeding off your oil and skin cells.

You don’t feel particularly vulnerable, with your firewall and constantly updating virus protection, and most of the predators are almost laughably clumsy. At work you receive an email that is so patently ridiculous that you forward it to a few of your friends. Miss Emmanuela Kunta, Await Your Reply, it says in the subject line, and there is something almost adorable about its awkwardness. “Dear One,” says Miss Emmanuela Kunta,

And it’s pretty funny. Miss Emmanuela Kunta is probably some fat thirty-year-old white guy sitting in his mother’s basement surrounded by grimy computer equipment, phishing for a sucker. “Who falls for this?” you would like to know, and your coworkers all have anecdotes about the scams they have heard of, and the conversation meanders along for a while—it is almost five o’clock—

But for some reason, driving home, you find yourself thinking of her. Miss Emmanuela Kunta in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, the orphan daughter of a wealthy gold agent, and she walks along a market street, the crowds of people and beautiful displays of fruit, a large blue bowl stacked with papayas and a man in a pink shirt calls after her—and she turns and her brown eyes are heavy with sorrow. Await your reply.

Here in upstate New York, it is beginning to snow. You pull off the interstate and into the forecourt of a gas station and at the pump you insert your credit card and there is a pause (One moment please) while your card is authorized and then you are approved and you may begin to dispense fuel. A thick flurry of snowflakes blows across you as you insert the nozzle into your gas tank, and it is pleasant to think of the glittering lights of the hotels and the cars passing on the highway that runs along the edge of the Ébrié Lagoon, which Abidjan encircles, the palm trees against the indigo sky, etc. Await your reply.

And meanwhile in another state perhaps a new version of you has already begun to be assembled, someone is using your name and your numbers, a piece of yourself dispersed and dispersing—

And you wipe the snow out of your hair and get back into your car and drive off toward an accumulation of the usual daily stuff—there is dinner to be made and laundry to be done and helping the kids with their homework and watching television on the couch with the dog resting her muzzle in your lap and a phone call you owe to your sister in Wisconsin and getting ready for bed, brushing and flossing and a few different pills that help to regulate your blood pressure and thyroid and a facial scrub that you apply and all the rituals that are—you are increasingly aware—units of measurement by which you are parceling out your life.