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Show "Lorraine Nelson A Biography " 119 After reading about Konishi's death I felt a depression lowering itself over me and found myself repeating her name-over and over again-like a mantra. I couldn't shake the peculiar picture of this anomic Tokyo girl stumbling through the frozen brake in a short skirt and chic black boots. Haifa world from home, in the most remote regions of a country she hardly knew, Konishi futilely spent the last days, then hours of her mysterious life searching for a phony ransom in the frigid dark. In such instances it is often language that soothes me; but it helped me not at all to discover Taka means "lofty" or "honorable" in Japanese; ko means "child." 7A-SV7/- In Japanese, the name Takara means "treasure, the precious and beloved object." Loraine Nelson is a stand in, a proxy for the insignificant, faceless hordes who receive DDS's pamphlets, brochures, and surveys. Where they would eventually appear, she stood, holding their place. But because these people didn't exist, were themselves-as we understood them- only the indistinct data, the digital echoes on which our enterprise fed, and because they were rendered even more unlikely, more ethereal by the impossibly small, rate of their return, Lorraine Nelson became both surrogate, locum tenens for each, and synecdoche for the nebulous mass. She stood in for them, not because they could not stand for themselves, but because they lacked presence. Many of DDS's mailers are returned, the addressees either dead or unreachable or simply non-existent. Others end up in dead-letter offices, undeliverable. Eventually, a mailer may reach an actual human being, who, recognizing the name on the envelope as her own, might open it before throwing it away. But like Schrodinger's cat, until that moment she does not exist. She is neither alive nor dead-we could not even say that she has ever been bom. Rather, she hangs between all possibilities, suspended, the imponderable spirit of an undetermined existence. For reasons which now seem obvious to me, this made my involuntary attachment to Lorraine Nelson all the more frustrating. For all her irreal essence, she had become for me more |