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It happens from time to time that you forget how to log in to one or another account even though—contrary to prevailing advice—you use the same password for most accounts for a few years. And when it does happen, you undergo the strange test of answering questions about some version of yourself.
What is your favorite cuisine?
Some of these security questions are innocuous. You probably felt few qualms when, as part of setting up the account, you chose them; they’re like having small talk, and they don’t get at your essence. Nothing about the answer is unique to you or even of particular interest to you.
The challenge lies in recalling precisely how you felt about the question at the time and the case-sensitive manner in which you expressed that preference. To keep track of your security question answers, you have to construct an alter-ego, a security question version of yourself. It is this simplified, perhaps falsified, self that the machine recognizes. It is a shadowy, partial self made up of unrelated pieces of information that, isolated and removed from any meaningful context, refer to nothing but the artifice of the security question itself: a hometown but no current town; a mother’s maiden name but no mother; a high school mascot without a high school; a first car with only a color; and a younger sibling’s birth month but no younger sibling. It is a self that exists forever in the present tense, even as first cars, mothers with maiden names, fathers with middle names, and younger siblings change and fall into the past tense.
What is your father’s middle name?
Some decades ago, a baby came into the world. His parents named him and loved him and raised him, never foreseeing that his being would someday be reduced to a case-sensitive string of characters, which itself appears to the machine as a series of electrical pulses and on the screen as a series of dots (lest someone looking on see the answer and compromise the account’s security).
There’s something of appropriation in using your father’s name like this. There’s something unsettling about his being reduced to this role, a shibboleth to regain entry to one of your online shopping account or streaming service. There’s something dehumanizing about his being reduced to this role after giving you life, carrying you in his arms, throwing a baseball with you, taking you and your brother fishing or camping, hiking to the scree-covered summit of a volcano with you and your brother and putting an arm around each of you the last time you were all together.
In what city did your parents first meet?
Your parents met in a less mediated age.They met when computers took punch cards and everyone kept a bottle of white-out for correcting typed pages.
At some point—the point at which there were passwords enough that they were forgotten and needed to be recovered—life became, at some level, a set of circumstances to generate a facsimile self, a digital shadow self—a favorite cuisine, a first car and its color. The most superficial aspects of your life are, strangely, those necessary to prove yourself.
Given everything that came later, it’s hard to imagine your parents meeting, having loved each other. After that summer, it was ten years before they could be civil to one another.
A memory that often comes up is seeing them hug at the funeral. That was almost more astounding than the funeral.
What was the name of your favorite childhood pet?
Any question of favorites feels like a betrayal. Much more honest are the questions of sequence—What was the name of your first childhood pet?—than of evaluation.
There were, setting aside the ranking of favorites, two: a dog and a cat. The dog was at your dad’s house, where you and your brother went on Wednesdays and every other weekend. The cat was at your mom’s house, where you lived the rest of the time. You loved them both, and even now, decades later, you’re still not ready to replace them. To favor one is to diminish the other. When you have—or perhaps had—one brother, he is—or was—your favorite brother, but when there is more than one pet it hurts to pick a favorite, even if only to placate the machine and get to the next screen.
What was your high school mascot?
The past seems more present the more it recedes away from the present. When one, two, five years out of high school, you hardly gave it a thought. Those times were dead to you. You thought that life was over. At twelve, fifteen, eighteen, twenty years out, you feel as if you had only just graduated and you and all your friends and your younger brother were off to better things. In your dreams you often return to high school, and even more often do you return there with your regrets. Often you wonder how it could have been different, thinking now on those who loved you without your realizing it until years later, how you should have paid more attention to those who had little time left, how greatly you misjudged everyone, including yourself. There you were, sitting in the empty stadium during your afternoon release period, reading, as you waited for school to end and your brother to meet you so you could go home together. You weren’t paying much attention to your brother because you thought he would always be there. You thought there would always be more time.
In what city did you meet your spouse?
Some questions remind you of what could have been, make you question the choices—although they did not seem like choices at the time—that have resulted in a semi-settled vagabondage, moving from one timezone to another, never settling down, never quite finding that vaguely defined satisfaction. You made your choices, although you didn’t know at the time they were choices.
In what month is your parents’ wedding anniversary?
There are things you’ve managed never to learn, things that seem inconceivable. In a sense, your parents still have an anniversary, but the union it celebrates has long since been sundered, and other unions, with other people, bound by other vows, have replaced it. It’s an anniversary like a birthday for the dead.
What you recall more clearly is the separation anniversary, that autumn when your parents no longer lived together, when you and your brother began an unsettled existence. You two were too young to understand divorce, but you had each other. You always had each other, until you didn’t.
What was the make and model of your first car?
The air conditioning was broken, and the heater didn’t always work. Wires hung from a hole where a radio had once been. The windows—which rolled down but had to be pulled back up and shoved into place by hand—fogged when the weather got cool and damp, even if it didn’t rain. There was an engine knock and a timing belt misalignment that never could be fixed. You never liked the car, but, in those youthful days of ambition and rage, it represented all that you would someday leave behind. It always seemed that in the future you would be happy, that things would be better in some undefined way. Gradually you learned—partly through the insistence of dreams—that those days of playing video games with your brother, of driving with him to school in tense silence, of labeling your food so he would stop eating it, would be, if not the best days or even happy days, the days you wish you could reclaim. If only you had known then to look to your brother in the passenger seat and remember him because there would always be other cars, but his seat would always be empty.
What is the birth month of your youngest sibling?
When meeting strangers, you always tell the truth about how many siblings you have, but you list them—brother first, then step-brothers, then step-sisters—so that people tend not to ask about your brother, the youngest. Your parents and step-parents have grappled with how to meet the inevitable question: Do you have kids? Your dad mentions only you; your step-mom always mentions your brother; your dad is glad she does, but he is weary to bring it up himself. Your step-dad mentions only your step-siblings, not you or your brother; your mom mentions only you, a painful compromise.
Your brother was born on the last day of October. Halloween, Samhain, Día de Muertos, All Souls’ Day—somehow there arose an agreement across time, of peoples indivers places, that this time, halfway between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, is when the living and the dead are nearest each other. Maybe there is some symbolic resonance for this being a birthday, particularly in retrospect, but when you and your brother were young, you never would have thought that. He always seemed little for his age until the end, when he was just about taller than you. And that, especially that first birthday without him, was how you thought of him, as a little baby, born on the thirty-first of October, a little pumpkin, who couldn’t stay in this world long, of whom little now remains except the occasional question that touches on him, and you try to remember because that’s all that’s left.
Eric Vanderwall is a writer, editor, and musician. After several years of working as a freelance musician, he earned his MA at the University of Chicago. His fiction, scholarship, book reviews, and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, memoryhouse, the Chicago Review of Books, The Hemingway Review, On the Seawall, and elsewhere. Please visit www.ericvanderwall.com to learn more.