Look Alive Out There

by Sloane Crosley

  “You’re welcome to make contact yourself but—”

  “But you wouldn’t advise it,” I finish his sentence.

  Understanding the severity of my problem for the first time, I go into string-pulling mode. This is known as grasping at straws when you have no strings to pull. But surely something can be done.

  When it comes to customer service, I have a trick I am simultaneously proud and ashamed to share here. Proud because it works, ashamed because it is the behavior of a raving lunatic. If the usual means of contacting a company are not working, if you feel helpless and frustrated and like you would be very rich if only you were paid to repeat your issue to a panoply of departments, this is what you are to do: Go to the company’s homepage. Scroll down. See the “newsroom” button? Click on it. Here you will find the contact information of public-relations employees. PR is the one department within any corporation that wants to be contacted—or at least needs to be in case, say, two hundred million gallons of oil oopsie into the Gulf of Mexico. Now send a polite-to-the-point-of-obsequious note, explaining your tale of woe. Really get in there. These people don’t know you or how far you’ll go. They have no measure of your crazy. No one needs to know you have a full life with almost no cats.

  Hear that sound? That’s the sound of your name being omitted from a group e-mail that reads “You want to take this one, Nancy?”

  Randy, the executive assistant to the CEO, calls me immediately. He explains what I already know to be true, that GoDaddy had been trying to reach me via Hotmail before they gave up. I, in turn, explain that rattling off dates is like listing all the times you rang the doorbell of an abandoned house. For me, this just happened. I’m not saying it did. I messed up. But if Randy can’t help me legally, logistically, or financially, he can at least do me the courtesy of acknowledging my reality.

  “I don’t check Hotmail,” I say for the umpteenth time. “I use it as a graveyard.”

  For some reason, this metaphor strikes at the core of Randy.

  “You know,” he says, “I think we’re similar people. Same approach to life, same habits.”

  Under normal circumstances, I’d be inclined to think this was some kind of customer service gambit, but Randy does not work in customer service. Pop psychology is above his pay grade. A self-described “glass half full” kind of person, he’s just a nice guy with “CEO” at the ass end of his title and the burden of talking to me.

  “Our guys are really good,” he assures me. “I’m sure you’ll get your site back.”

  That I would not be afforded the opportunity to get my domain back had not occurred to me. I am sliding down the ladder of hope at an alarming speed. This morning, anything less than the reinstatement of my account and an apology for the inconvenience would have been unthinkable. Now I am praying for the privilege to send a stranger a piñata full of money. Never outside the realm of fiction have I so deeply fantasized about someone I didn’t know and had not seen. Never have I so desperately wanted to breach the barrier of unknowability to understand why a person was not responding to his or her e-mail. Never has my brain been host to the thought: It’s just the one planet. How hard could this be?

  At 10:30 p.m., like a flashlight dying in a cave, my e-mail goes down for good, refusing to accept my password, which is an elaborate version of a password I’ve used since college. This feels a little like one’s in-box getting sudden-onset dementia. Don’t take it personally, you think. This isn’t you. This isn’t us.

  I check the domain registration again. I am now property of a man named Al Perkins.

  *

  British Man Defends Buying B.C. Town Name and Turning It into Porn Site.

  According to an article in the Canadian National Post, Al Perkins of the British dependency of Jersey recently nabbed the town of Barriere’s website and attempted to milk them for $9,700. This will turn out to be only partially true. Perkins does not actually reside on the island of Jersey, only registers his domains there, and Al is not his real name. But the unfortunate part—the milking part—checks out. When the town refused to pay, Perkins raised the stakes and flooded its site with pornography. Which is how visitors to barrierechamber.com wound up “greeted by a wall of explicit images in categories such as ‘college,’ ‘fantasy,’ and ‘gagging.’”

  Well, that does not sound promising.

  Technically, what Perkins is doing is legal. He owns the site, he can do what he likes with it, including redirect it. Though this is a seriously disproportionate response to a clerical error. Perkins’s defense is that if a domain means that much to someone, why wouldn’t he or she renew it? At first, I am struck by how nicely this argument dovetails with my own guilt. How could I have been so negligent? On the other hand, this is the philosophical equivalent of asking, “Why are you hitting yourself?” while slapping someone in the face with their own hand. I maintain my site. And I do so knowing absolutely no one is on the hunt for a 2006 rant about frozen yogurt. Unless I’ve committed a minor felony, traffic hovers at around eighty visitors per day, two of whom are most definitely my parents. But at least it’s mine. Was mine.

  I assume barrierechamber.com will be dead—the town has moved on to the more literal pastures of barrierechamberofcommerce.com. Instead, it leads me to the Facebook page of one Wesley Perkins. This is surprising, as I gather most people in his line of work do not want to be found. And yet there he is, in his mid-forties with squinty blue eyes and sandy hair. There is something of the elfin Conan O’Brien about him. He is in a relationship with a pretty raven-haired woman named Lesley. There are pictures of their faces pressed close together. Wesley and Lesley. I wonder what Perkins would look like to the unbiased eye. He looks nice. Normal even. Under different circumstances, would I register his smile as an expression of joy and not the cackling of someone who probably cut his teeth stealing wallets from old ladies?

  Reasonably, I know the profile of my buyer is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how many puppies this man has skinned. But perhaps this information can be used to manipulate him in some abstract fashion. So I decide to update Adam. He, too, has seen the identity of my domain’s new owner. I ask if he’s dealt with “them” before. (Perkins is always “they” or “them.” This is domain grammar, shorthand for “I don’t know how many of who are doing what where.”) And yes, Adam has dealt with they. And no, he doesn’t sound pleased about having to do so again. I ask him if he’s aware that they has a sideline as an amateur pornography peddler who terrorizes Canadians.

  “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 wall who has decided to chop his own arm off. My options were whittled down but there is control to be had in choosing one. Alas, this feeling is fleeting. Something bad has happened. No one has died. I am not injured or unemployed. I made a mistake and paid for it by wrestling with a pig. Not only did the pig like it, the pig has moved on to other troughs. But I have not.

  I pull up the screenshot I took of Perkins’s contact information. I know I should delete it. I have paid for two services for the price of one—to get my name back and to get him out of my life. But I find the second benefit unsatisfying. It feels as if, on top of everything else, he took the last word.

  Before I can talk myself out of it, I write to him. I explain that I would like to meet him and promise that I am not a nut, come to demand her money back. I just want to ask him a few questions about his business. As he’s perfectly aware, I am a writer. And as I am perfectly aware, he is a walking series of transactions with human skin stretched over them. I reason that I just paid him $4,200 to sit down with me. He writes back a few hours later, his name appearing in my newly recovered in-box. He addresses me by my first name, which makes sense. For a hot minute, he was me. He is amenable to chatting but, before we go any further, I should know it’s “just business” and I shouldn’t “take it personal.” He closes with “kind regards.” No name beneath. The regards are just floating there, a sentiment sent from no one.

  *

  I have two weeks before I fly to London, where Perkins has agreed to meet me. In this time, we speak once. He is monosyllabic at first, emitting the occasional Cockney “yeah,” but once he gets going, he speaks with great enthusiasm about his work. He can’t seem to decide if he should brag about his achievements or treat me as suspect for asking. He wants me to know how lucky I am to be speaking with him. He feels at a disadvantage that I know what he looks like but he doesn’t know what I look like, so he finds images of me online and chastises me for looking different in some photos than I do in others. I have no explanation for this. A few minutes later, he has a revelation that it’s the glasses. Sometimes I’m wearing them and sometimes I’m not.

  After the call, he e-mails regularly, wanting to know how many of me are coming, if I’ll be “chaperoned.” Chances are I’ll be coming by private plane on account of me being a writer. He vacillates between helpful and unresponsive. Most missives are peppered with “lol”s. He becomes fixated on the idea that I follow him on Twitter and insinuates that he won’t meet me unless I do. At one point, he casually refers to himself as the “wolf of the dot-com.” He’s not serious … but he’s a little serious.

  It’s becoming clear I have no idea who I’m dealing with—but I know who does.

  A. D. Justice’s real name is Angel Burrage. Turns out her mama didn’t name her “Justice,” period. She lives in a small town in northwest Georgia and has a voice meant to be threaded into a pillow. And she’s happy to chat with a stranger about what happened to her. Unlike me, she did read GoDaddy’s renewal e-mails. But she was in the midst of switching over from an old Wordpress site and associated the warnings with property she wanted to lose anyway. So she sat back and did nothing.

  “When I realized what happened, I emailed him, thinking any normal human being would say, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize,’ and sell it back to me for whatever he paid for it. But that’s not what he asked for.”

  When Angel didn’t immediately respond to Perkins’s offer, he initiated another conversation, bluntly laying out her choices: not buy the domain, hire a lawyer, or just buy it back from him now. She reasoned she would rather “pay someone to take it away from him than give him a cent.” But before she could state her position, she received another message: “Too late. This is no longer for sale.”

  “He was a real jerk about it,” she says. “In one of his e-mails, he wrote, ‘It’s not like you’re a bestseller or anything.’”

  “Oh no, he didn’t.”

  “He did. He was fishing for me to object so he could ask for more money. The whole thing was devastating. I was angry at myself for not understanding the process and with him for fully understanding it. I really wanted to track him down, you know?”

  I do know. And it’s nice to hear my impulses echoed back to me, as everyone in my life has reacted like I’m running toward a burning building.

  “It’s just hurtful,” she says. “All of a sudden I could see everything I had worked to build being flushed away. I felt so violated.”

  The word sits heavy in my ears. Violated. I had no
t yet identified the feeling myself, but while negotiating with Perkins I was anxious and sleepless and absolutely convinced I was going to get hit by a car. At one point, my neighbor came up behind me as I was putting my key in our door and I spun around, ready to push him off the stoop.

  For some people, specifically creative professionals, an eponymous website is not just another avatar—it’s the real-time representation of their life’s work. Come, feast your eyes on the output that I hath scraped together between the walls of my dwelling! Or, as Angel puts it: “I didn’t so much feel stolen from. I felt as if someone had stolen me.” Unfortunately, these same people are not known for their logistical prowess. A website is often their sole foray into the tech world, the second-most administrative thing they do after refilling a stapler. They build these shrines to self out of necessity so that they can get back to work out of greater necessity.

  Angel thinks I won’t get an iota of remorse out of Perkins. When she says it, I feel so silly for fantasizing that I might get it that I deny I want it and then feel bad all over again for denying it. Maybe I really do need to talk this out. So I ask around, trying to find more people who have had this happen to them, a makeshift support group for the domainishly challenged. A few friends have had to pay a hundred dollars for a lost domain here and there. Speeding ticket money. Nothing to write home about. Except for my friend Kenji Bunch. Kenji is a violist in Portland, Oregon. He is in possession of all his credit cards, but his descent into the underbelly of the Internet began with him switching contact e-mails and forgetting to inform his registrar. Before he knew it, his name was sold at auction to a Chinese domainer named Heng Zhong.

  “I guess I could have just switched to dot-org but dot-org felt a little grandiose. Like I’m on a mission to help all the Kenji Bunches in the world. I felt like my best shot was to try to appeal to this guy’s humanity.”