The other day, I attempted to log into a medical website to retrieve some lab results. I hadn’t been on the site in quite some time, so I found myself cycling through a number of usernames and passwords before I was finally prompted to answer the inevitable series of security questions. One being, “At which of the following addresses have you never lived?” I stared at the list of street names and numbers like a student taking a particularly vexing multiple choice test. Suddenly, my itinerant twenties flashed before my eyes, simultaneously vivid and vague. There were kitchens the size of closets; plaster walls I had illegally painted; the coin-operated washing machine in need of an exorcism; a back door that jammed every time I let my roommate’s dog out (god, how I hated living with that animal); the set of dishes I’d bought with my first live-in boyfriend; musty foyers and musical street sounds–all of these things conjured, in heady detail, by a simple list of names and numbers. And yet… Had I ever lived on Ramsay Ave., I wondered. If so, is it really possible to have forgotten such things already? My grasp of my own history felt suddenly tenuous. Where did LabCorp get this information, all of which pertained to years long before I’d become a patient in its system? More disturbingly, why did it seem to recall what I could not? I sensed a strange transfer of authority at work in all this, from myself as the repository of my own life and history to this other interface–an interface we now associate with untold hoards of data and memory, like some medieval dragon jealously guarding its treasure. I continued to mull over these questions after I’d finally accessed my results (which, thankfully, were normal, but unrelated to my cancer), before arriving at a different one: Is it a gift to have lived long enough to forget these things–namely, where one lived, and when, and with whom? Is it not a sign of life’s marvelous density, and/or of forgetting as a kind of mercy? I’m not sure such questions would have occurred to me before this past year–before cancer.
A few days later, I found myself reading The New Yorker on my phone, and was stopped in my tracks (or, rather, scroll) by an ad that had popped up mid-article. Usually, I find these noisome and utterly off-base (I’ve never been in the market for a neon hunting vest), but this one hit eerily close to home. It was an ad for wigs. I caught my breath. Again, I found myself wondering, what does the The New Yorker’s algorithm know that I don’t? Can my phone sniff out cancer like those specially trained dogs? Is this ad somehow prescient–is chemo in my near future? It took a while to walk myself back from the ledge of panic that this hardly innocuous little plug induced. I reminded myself that I frequently access this blog on my phone–in addition to searching for information about my particular kind of cancer–so it’s not altogether improbable that I would be targeted for such ads by marketers. And, of course, I’ve heard the stories of women who’ve received ads for maternity products before they’d even told family and friends they were pregnant. But that doesn’t change the eeriness of the experience. It dislodges one, somehow, from the locus of the self, and suggests that the self is, perhaps, a scattered collection of loci, to which many lay claim (LabCorp and Best Wig Outlet, apparently, among them). There is the me who has cancer now, just as there is the me who lived on NW 23rd St., years ago, cancer-free. The desire for some kind of cohesiveness, in the face of such fracturing, makes sense and has only grown stronger (in me, anyway).
Well, then 