“That I did not know,” he says.
What Adam does know is that we can expect an initial offer in the thousands. Oh, how high will we go, how far will we fall? And at what point am I no longer in the business of subsidizing a stranger? I don’t bother asking “now what?” because I know “now what.” Now we wait.
At 1:02 p.m. the next day, my phone rings. It’s my mother. I curse her name and send her to voice mail. At 1:04, the phone rings again. It’s Adam. They wants $8,700.
“Fuck they!” I scream into his ear. “Sorry, not you.”
“You can cuss all you want,” he says. “I’m just not allowed to.”
“But you kind of want to, don’t you?”
“He’s asking for a lot,” Adam concedes.
The pronoun is as much of a meltdown as I’m going to get. Over the next few hours, we start trading numbers with Perkins. Us: $1,000. Him: $5,000. Us: $3,200. Him: $4,800. I get the Potemkin-style impression of math being done.
“These numbers are so arbitrary,” I whisper.
I have come to the gym to blow off steam. I nearly slid off the treadmill when Adam called. Now I am speaking to him in the open stairwell, agitated but trying to keep my voice down. Between lulls of acceptance I have bouts of revolt. We’re talking about four years’ worth of electric bills. A trip to Borneo. Thirteen good cashmere sweaters. Twelve hundred cups of coffee.
A woman in a unitard dismounts an elliptical machine and asks me to be quiet.
“I’m sorry,” I say, covering the speaker, “it’s an emergency.”
“I’m trying to work out,” she says, pointing at the elliptical machine so I know where it is.
I came here to sweat out my anger. I don’t see why she can’t do the same. Also, who doesn’t bring headphones to the gym? I am about to respond to her—my usual reserves of annoyance are being employed elsewhere but I’m sure I can muster up something for the occasion—when she points at the ground.
“You dropped something,” she says.
I look down to see the credit card I had lost. I must have left it in my gym shorts the last time I wore them. I canceled the credit card in December. It’s now February. So not only am I at fault for letting my digital self go, but I am at fault for letting my actual self go. I wince, tell Adam to offer $3,500, and hang up the phone.
Meanwhile, my existence has been completely colonized by Perkins. Competing distractions and obligations have been minimized as if on a screen. The only icon left is Perkins’s face. The face of a man who, in a sane world, should give no thought to my existence beyond the occasional humbling sense we all get when looking up at the stars or learning about major cities in China. But he has forcibly bound us together. So I find out everything I can. Which, as it turns out, is a lot.
A night of reconnaissance reveals multiple complaints leveled against Perkins via the World Intellectual Property Organization. WIPO is appointed by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. As fabricated and intergalactic as these organizations sound, they’re the only recourse for people in my situation. The Internet doesn’t have borders. If your identity gets usurped by someone in a foreign country, there’s not a ton you can do about it. In an effort to address this issue while simultaneously creating more acronyms, WIPO uses a Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) for issues “arising from alleged abusive registrations of domain names.” Yet even this is not ideal. It takes eight months to resolve a case, for a minimum fee of $1,500. But apparently Perkins is worth it.
One complaint is of particular interest to me. It was filed by a woman named A. D. Justice, who writes novels about men who work for a security company. The covers feature bare-chested hunks with mystifying muscle groups. She doesn’t have a trademark but she might as well. Her domain is “the identifier of her work.” After redirecting it to a porn site, Perkins offered to sell it back to her for the bargain price of $6,700. But her mama didn’t name her “Justice” for nothing. An ICANN panel transferred her domain back to her after finding Perkins’s actions to be “indicative of bad faith,” a phrase I hope to incorporate more in my daily life. I notice you’ve asked me to accompany you to a wedding on the day of the wedding and I find your actions indicative of bad faith. Good day to you, sir!
If it were just my website at stake, I would follow her lead. I have a middle initial and I am prepared to deploy it. I also work freelance, which means I have no problem squeezing in a vengeance project. But Perkins is also in possession of my primary e-mail address. On the surface, this is no great prize—GoDaddy’s e-mail interface is a notch under medieval—but it happens to be host to the majority of my life’s correspondence. I don’t have time for the law.
At long last, Perkins appears again, demanding $4,200. I pay it. Amex texts me a fraud alert. Because even the robots know something is wrong. But as my confirmation whooshes through the phone, I feel relief. Granted, it’s the relief of a man trapped between a boulder and a canyon
