Just One Day

Thirty-one
Willem de Ruiter.
His name is Willem de Ruiter. I rush to an Internet café and start Googling him. But Willem de Ruiter turns out to be a popular name in Holland. There’s a Dutch cinematographer with that name. There’s some famous diplomat with that name. And hundreds of other nonfamous people who nevertheless have some reason to be on the Internet. I go through hundreds of pages, in English, in Dutch, and I find not one link to him, not one piece of evidence that he actually he exists. I Google his parents’ names Bram de Ruiter. Yael de Ruiter. Naturopath. Actor. Anything I can think of. All these combinations. I get vaguely excited when some weird theater thing comes up, but when I click through, the website is down.
How can it be this hard to find someone? It occurs to me that maybe Céline intentionally gave me the wrong name.
But then I Google myself, “Allyson Healey,” and I don’t come up, either. You have to add the name of my college before you get my Facebook page.
I realize then it’s not enough to know what someone is called.
You have to know who they are.