THE DOWNSIDE OF GOOGLE

Have you ever, seemingly out of nowhere, thought of a person you knew 10, 20, 30, years ago, and Googled their name? And find out they’re dead? Then open the link and see there’s still an open investigation? They’re calling it a possible homicide ~ vehicular manslaughter ~ and the police are looking to question you? You think, “How is this possible? It must be some kind of joke.” Then you scroll down and see an ad for a site called, “This Is No Joke.” You open that link and see it’s an ad for a company called “Got Them”, which is a service that creates elaborate online hoaxes to pull on your friends. So now you’re convinced it’s a joke. Then you realize, “I have Ad Blocker. Plus! I shouldn’t be seeing ads.”

Just then, someone starts knocking on the front door. You peek outside. It’s the police. A LOT of police. Now slowly, like a heavy morning fog lifting from the street, a series of events begins to unfold in your mind. It hasn’t been decades since I last saw him. I ran into him a few weeks ago, didn’t I? Is that possible? Something about all of this doesn’t feel right, but you can’t quite put all the pieces together just yet.

Now the police are pounding on the door, calling your name and shouting that they have your picture. Which sends you in a panic. Why? Who knows? Something about names today has been slightly unnerving. You run out the back door, because for whatever reason, the police in your town never seem to cover the back exits. You hop fences, running frantically between buildings and down alleys, trying not to be seen. Finally, you reach a busy street. There’s a cab sitting right there at the curb. You’ve mostly been using Uber the past year, and have been seriously thinking of switching to Lyft, because you haven’t been pleased with Uber’s business practices lately. Not only that, Douglas in his brown Nissan Sentra is six minutes away, and you don’t have time, so you cave, and jump in the taxi.

“Where to?” the cabbie asks.

“Anywhere,” you answer.

“Anywhere it is… Mister Egan.”

How does he know my name? And that voice. It sounds so familiar. You look in the rear view mirror to have a peek. That’s his face! The person you just Googled! He’s not dead!

“The police think I killed you! We need to tell them you’re alive!”

“Oh, you’d love that, wouldn’t you?” he sneers.

“Yeah,” you tell him. “I kinda would.”

“You don’t remember, do you?”

“What in particular?” you ask. Because you literally have no idea what he’s talking about.

“Three weeks ago. You were out bar hopping with your friends. I picked you up in this very cab and drove you five miles, and you ignored me the entire trip.”

“I probably didn’t recognize you.”

“I introduced myself!”

“I must not have heard you.”

“You laughed! Just like high school. We were in every class together for four years, and you never said hello to me.”

“Come on! I was drunk!”

“In high school?”

“That night!” you exclaim. “And yeah, in high school, too.”

“I’ve been waiting thirty years for this moment,” he mumbles to himself.

“Were we really in every class together?”

He steps on the gas and weaves through traffic, as your limp body bounces like a rag doll in the backseat. You finally manage to take hold of the door handle, but you can’t open it.

“Only I can unlock the doors,” he laughs.

Luckily, there’s no Plexiglas partition separating driver and passenger, so you put your hands on the top of the front seat and vault yourself over. He tries fighting you off, but you manage to reach across him to the door lock switch, and open the passenger door. You know it’s stupid, but you jump out anyway. There’s no oncoming traffic, so you tuck and roll until you slam to a painful stop at the curb. He kicks the brakes and makes a wild U-turn. The thought pops into your head: he’s going to run you over, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You’ve seen this moment countless times in movies and TV shows, and always wondered what would be your final thought when you knew the end was seconds away. Would it be a memory of a woman you loved? Would you think back to a particularly happy time as a child? Or instead, would regrets overwhelm your senses, and run a list of maybes and what-ifs through your mind? In all of those instances, you never once considered those last seconds would be used trying to remember the full roster of every class you had in high school.

The world is moving in slow motion. You can see his maniacal grin as he directs the cab toward you. You won’t even have time to get all the way through the third row of junior Spanish. But before he can reach you, a bus rams into him on the passenger side. He’s ejected from the taxi and thrown to the street.

A witness runs up to you. “I think that guy’s dead.”

“I hope so,” you say.

“I saw the whole thing,” the witness says. “What you did? That’s vehicular homicide.” Then he takes your picture and calls the police.

Just before passing out, you quietly wonder if any of this would be an appropriate story to tell at his wake.