highlighted the key passages for you, but for present purposes it might be better if I just read them out loud. I still haven’t decided if I’m going to hand this laptop over to you.”
I shrugged. “You could just give us a copy on a thumb drive. I have one right here.”
“Look, you’ll probably understand what I mean when I start reading, all right? And perhaps it would be best if you saved any questions until I’ve finished.”
I nodded. “Sure. Whatever makes you feel more comfortable, ma’am.”
She shook her head bitterly. “Oh, believe me, Agent Martins, there’s really nothing I find at all comfortable about any of this. And would you say Cynthia or Mrs. Ekman instead of ma’am? It feels condescending. Like you’re trying awfully hard to be patient with me. I’d appreciate that, thank you.”
As Mrs. Ekman glanced down at the screen, I caught Helen’s eye and tried to contain the desire I had to pull a face in her direction. My leash had been snapped hard, and I was still gagging a little and flexing my neck like a corrected mutt.
“There is so much e-mail I get now,”
read Mrs. Ekman,
“that, at times, it feels like a modern variant of the proverbial Chinese curse—may all your messages find you. It’s like the opposite of a diaspora. If a thousand roads lead forever to Rome, then I’m equally sure that a thousand e-mails a week seem to lead to me. These days I am resigned to receiving UBE (unsolicited bulk e-mail), UCE (unsolicited commercial e-mail), or just plain spam from so-called zombie networks that are located all over the world. Routinely, I am promised millions of dollars if only I will send my bank details to some illiterate Nigerian ‘phisherman’ (for so these spammers are sometimes called); or I am offered some equally improbable means of making my male parts much larger than they are at present. I have grown used to this kind of junk mail much as I have grown used to having gray pubic hair or supplements in the sections of the Sunday
New York Times
.
“Sadly, I am even used to threatening e-mails. In my line of work, they are an occupational hazard and nearly always these are the usual nocent missives about how I have mightily offended the GOP or Islam or God and how he will soon punish me with death. But lately I have been receiving e-mail threats that are very different from the ones I normally receive. Not in their content—no, the content stays the same: God just hates my guts—but rather in the way they seem to behave when they arrive in the in-box of my computer.
“Now, I am not a technical person. One of the smaller paradoxes of my life is that I spend so much time using a computer and yet understand nothing at all of how one works. Of course, I have become used to this level of quotidian ignorance. And, like most people who own a laptop computer, I can live with it. Or at least I thought I could.”
Cynthia Ekman read aloud from the on-screen journal with an obvious pride in her late husband’s slightly pompous prose. I hadn’t the least fucking clue what “nocent” meant and I was someone who’d been to law school.
“No, what I find perplexing,”
she said, continuing to read,
“is that I am quite unable to find any one of these e-mails on my computer. Let’s call them the Mr. Phelps e-mails, for they seem programmed to self-destruct just as soon as they have been read, almost in the manner of the taped message that used to precede the titles in the sixties television show
Mission: Impossible
. Jim Phelps, the stone-faced leader of the MI force of con men and safecrackers, would play a cassette tape that would then dissolve in a cloud of smoke, as if a hidden vial of acid had erased the secret message forever. It was always the best moment in the entire show, if only because it was always the easiest part to understand.
“These e-mails are not viruses, for they seem to have the very opposite effect to the idea of computer malware, which is to run
I shrugged. “You could just give us a copy on a thumb drive. I have one right here.”
“Look, you’ll probably understand what I mean when I start reading, all right? And perhaps it would be best if you saved any questions until I’ve finished.”
I nodded. “Sure. Whatever makes you feel more comfortable, ma’am.”
She shook her head bitterly. “Oh, believe me, Agent Martins, there’s really nothing I find at all comfortable about any of this. And would you say Cynthia or Mrs. Ekman instead of ma’am? It feels condescending. Like you’re trying awfully hard to be patient with me. I’d appreciate that, thank you.”
As Mrs. Ekman glanced down at the screen, I caught Helen’s eye and tried to contain the desire I had to pull a face in her direction. My leash had been snapped hard, and I was still gagging a little and flexing my neck like a corrected mutt.
“There is so much e-mail I get now,”
read Mrs. Ekman,
“that, at times, it feels like a modern variant of the proverbial Chinese curse—may all your messages find you. It’s like the opposite of a diaspora. If a thousand roads lead forever to Rome, then I’m equally sure that a thousand e-mails a week seem to lead to me. These days I am resigned to receiving UBE (unsolicited bulk e-mail), UCE (unsolicited commercial e-mail), or just plain spam from so-called zombie networks that are located all over the world. Routinely, I am promised millions of dollars if only I will send my bank details to some illiterate Nigerian ‘phisherman’ (for so these spammers are sometimes called); or I am offered some equally improbable means of making my male parts much larger than they are at present. I have grown used to this kind of junk mail much as I have grown used to having gray pubic hair or supplements in the sections of the Sunday
New York Times
.
“Sadly, I am even used to threatening e-mails. In my line of work, they are an occupational hazard and nearly always these are the usual nocent missives about how I have mightily offended the GOP or Islam or God and how he will soon punish me with death. But lately I have been receiving e-mail threats that are very different from the ones I normally receive. Not in their content—no, the content stays the same: God just hates my guts—but rather in the way they seem to behave when they arrive in the in-box of my computer.
“Now, I am not a technical person. One of the smaller paradoxes of my life is that I spend so much time using a computer and yet understand nothing at all of how one works. Of course, I have become used to this level of quotidian ignorance. And, like most people who own a laptop computer, I can live with it. Or at least I thought I could.”
Cynthia Ekman read aloud from the on-screen journal with an obvious pride in her late husband’s slightly pompous prose. I hadn’t the least fucking clue what “nocent” meant and I was someone who’d been to law school.
“No, what I find perplexing,”
she said, continuing to read,
“is that I am quite unable to find any one of these e-mails on my computer. Let’s call them the Mr. Phelps e-mails, for they seem programmed to self-destruct just as soon as they have been read, almost in the manner of the taped message that used to precede the titles in the sixties television show
Mission: Impossible
. Jim Phelps, the stone-faced leader of the MI force of con men and safecrackers, would play a cassette tape that would then dissolve in a cloud of smoke, as if a hidden vial of acid had erased the secret message forever. It was always the best moment in the entire show, if only because it was always the easiest part to understand.
“These e-mails are not viruses, for they seem to have the very opposite effect to the idea of computer malware, which is to run
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