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11.

I’ve learned, over the years, that it’s impossible to explain the beauty of coding to someone who is not, themselves, a coder. Looking at the source of a website or a game or a piece of software is a lot like turning over an elaborate piece of embroidery and seeing the complicated tangle of the threads beneath: Only a certain kind of mind is interested in the complex logic of that mess, rather than the tidy end result. The cause, rather than the effect.

Learning to code HTML that week made me understand something vital about myself: I may have spent most of my life thus far observing and consuming and regurgitating (my father’s thoughts, mostly), but what truly brought me joy was making something happen . Learning the secret language that allowed me to speak to the computer, and then using it to create something from nothing. All I had to do was string together a cryptic arrangement of letters and symbols, and there my private world would be on the screen, my vision magically made manifest. For the first time in my life, I felt like a god.

My father, unwittingly, had given me a hobby.

Scratch that—a vocation.

Of course, it wasn’t so hard to code a website back then. In 1996, Web design was as simple as deciding whether you wanted your background to be black or white or Netscape gray, and whether you wanted your text to blink. You could center your photos, or not; maybe you’d use a “fun” font, like Comic Sans. If you really knew what you were doing, you’d throw in an animated GIF of a silly cat or a dancing baby.

It was, in retrospect, a beautifully egalitarian time to be building websites: The field was wide open to entry because everyone was equally new to the game. We were all still just stabbing in the dark, figuring out this new medium. And you didn’t need to be an expert programmer to plant your flag on the internet. All you needed was an HTML for Dummies book and a dial-up connection; at the very least, a GeoCities home page.

Elsewhere, more experienced developers were already playing with the tools that would transform the look and feel of the internet as we now know it—Flash and JavaScript and cascading style sheets—but for the rest of us novices, building websites in 1996 was like being handed a Lego set and directed to build a castle. No matter how creative you got, there was only so much you could do with the tools you had.

And that was the beauty of it all: Your Web page was valued less by how it looked than what it contained within. Content truly was king, as the saying went.

I may have been living off the grid for my entire life, but for once I wasn’t actually that far behind.

—

With the arrival of the internet, the pattern of our days shifted.

Each day, after breakfast, my father would vanish into his study and start banging away at his Smith Corona. He was writing his manifesto, and nothing else existed. Our morning study sessions had been forgotten completely; all pretense of home school had gone out the window. The logs in the pile went unsplit. The vegetable garden needed to be tilled before it started to snow, but that seemed increasingly unlikely to happen. Meals, always a haphazard affair in our house, were downgraded to canned chili and our ubiquitous oatmeal.

There was a new manic intensity to my father, one that wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. His moods had always swung with the seasons, the arrival of the mail, the results of an election, or an epiphany about a new invention. He was happiest when he had a new project to fixate on, something that he believed had the potential to change everything. The last time I had seen him like this was when he first noticed the zine rack at the Country Bookshelf and came up with the idea for Libertaire .

While he wrote, I worked my way through Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week. It took me five days. As soon as the door to my father’s study closed, I would sit down at the laptop and stay there—tinkering with source code, test-driving the results, my fingers fumbling across the unfamiliar keyboard—until the cabin grew dark. My father would emerge around dinnertime. We would eat our chili in near silence, my father too wrapped up in his own thoughts to bother being interested in mine; me too absorbed in my own new discoveries to care. After dinner, he’d disappear back into the study again and stay there until long after I’d fallen asleep myself.

“Keep focused, don’t surf the internet, it’ll rot your brain,” my father had warned me, but it was a futile instruction, and surely he knew it. I spent every free moment tumbling down the rabbit holes of this fascinating new wonderland.

Keep in mind that there was hardly anything to do online in late 1996—not in comparison to today’s internet. You could read The New York Times . Get the weather. Poke around the websites of assorted universities and research institutions. You could shake a virtual Magic 8 Ball or zoom in on maps of the world or visit the home page of some kid in Wisconsin who was really, really into the Grateful Dead. You could hang out in chat rooms or watch a live webcam of coffee dripping into a pot in San Francisco or look at photos of dogs with funny haircuts. Wherever you went, it would be as slow as syrup.

There was a reason that the average time that someone spent on the Web in 1996 was thirty minutes a month .

But me? I felt like a dehydrated camel who had just stumbled onto a desert oasis. I drank that shit up, puppy Mohawks and all.

And when I was one hundred percent sure that my father was preoccupied, I would plug terms into search engines, troubling ones that had been nagging at me. Silicon Valley. Paranoid delusions. Federal agents.

The most important, of course, were Esme Williams and Theresa Williams . I had thrown these names at AltaVista at my first opportunity, then watched with a sinking stomach as the search engine spat back an anemic selection of results. A Black pediatrician in Los Angeles, a teenage track star in Iowa, the geriatric winner of a pie-baking contest in Texas. Nothing that pointed to a dead kindergarten teacher from (I had to assume) Silicon Valley or her bereaved toddler daughter. I tried again, this time with different combinations— Theresa Williams car accident and Esme Williams obituary and Esme and Saul Williams wedding. Then, just to be sure, Saul Williams wanted by federal authorities and (guiltily) Saul Williams criminal. Nothing.

I realized, then, that it was entirely possible that I was still searching for the wrong name. Who was to say that I was even a Williams ? If my father lied to me about my first name, it was possible he’d also lied to me about my last.

So much for the internet having all the answers.

It had grown clear to me that I needed to somehow get back inside my father’s desk drawer. Surely there was something else buried in that pile of papers that would shed light on the mystery of my name. More photos, perhaps. Medical records with my name on them. An obituary for my mother. A wedding certificate. But with my father practically living in his study, frantically typing away at his manifesto at all hours of the day, there was to be no opportunity. Not until he left town again.

And so, as I bided my time, I surfed the Web until my eyes glazed over, filling my brain with all the pop ephemera I could cram inside: cat memes and Justin’s Links from the Underground and Dilbert cartoons. I pretended that this was almost as good as being in the real world. I pretended that each passing day didn’t bring further evidence that I was, as Heidi had warned, living in a prison of my father’s making.