You were always “the fun one”. On our summer visits to New York, after the long drive south from Ontario, it is you I want to see most of all. When your daughter Sophie was born, I was five. As I grew older, I envied her for having you as a father.

When your mother, my grandmother, died, we stopped visiting New York. I didn’t see or speak to you for 15 years. By the time I went to college, it was apparent that no one knew where you were.

Suddenly in 2007 you call.

I am living in New York now. You tell your brother, my father, that you are living at a shelter on the Bowery. The three of us go out to dinner. We don’t speak much of the past. You say you are doing well, and we agree to meet again soon. Your hair is cropped short and you are thin, very thin.

What surprises me most: you have no teeth.

You are not there when I stop by after work. The man at the desk gives me this news, not for the first time. On my next visit I bring you a prepaid phone so we can make plans in advance. This makes you happy.

We walk to B&H Dairy, where I order cold borscht and you cherry blintzes. I show you how to use the phone.

My father calls, tells me he has urgent news to share. I always thought it was cocaine, he says. But it was heroin. He repeats the last word, drawing out the first two syllables. He is wounded, disbelieving. The way his sibling foundered was worse than he had believed. Cocaine is nefarious, sure, but heroin is depraved. He is waiting for me to interrupt – to affirm that I, too, am appalled.

The first time we meet, just the two of us, you tell me you have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I hardly believe it. You do not conform to any idea I have of a person with bipolar disorder, though the ideas I do have are received, not based on experience. It’s just that you seem to me all right, not terribly different from the way I remember you, though your affect is flatter, hollowed. You wear your defeat.

You complain of ceaseless fatigue, a haze in your head. You list your medications: lithium, Topamax, prazosin, Thorazine, lorazepam, also methadone, more I am forgetting, they are always changing. Frankly I am astonished at, worried by, the number of medications you are taking. The lithium concerns me most. I know that it has dangerous side-effects. I know that it is used in batteries. Never once does it occur to me that you seem all right because of the meds and not despite them. You are impressionable and take what I say seriously. The only people you talk to are social workers, counsellors, medical doctors, psychiatrists, and you do not seek to inform yourself about your own condition. You are not a sceptic. You do not read. You trust what others tell you. The source is of no relevance.

Within weeks – or is it months? – your behaviour seems to me more erratic. You are quick to anger. You demand things of me in your text messages. Usually money. I put $50 worth of minutes on your phone; the next day you’ve run out, ask for more. Three, four times in a week, you run out of minutes. I tell you it’s too expensive to be using the phone in this way, and who are you talking to all of a sudden in any case? You say it is your friend Lenny. He is agoraphobic, you add. He rarely leaves the house. By now you think that I am trying to control you, to do you harm, and you begin making accusations. I get you a better phone plan, and for a few weeks, we do not speak.

Later you explain that you adjusted the dosage of your lithium without first telling your doctor. That was you in a manic phase.

I know better now.

Mostly we talk about your daughter, Sophie. She is 21 now and the mother of a boy, 18 months old. The father is a young naval officer with whom she has parted ways, but his parents take care of the baby often. You have not seen or spoken to Sophie since long before her son was born. She wants nothing to do with you. You have tried phoning her, you tell me, but she will not take your calls.

You know of her whereabouts, though, because you are in touch with the naval officer’s parents. You call them regularly, hear the latest on Sophie and the baby. They must empathise with you, perceive good intentions. One day they allow you to visit when Sophie is not around. You meet your grandson and you are ecstatic. You talk about it for weeks.

Then one day you phone and they say they will no longer take your calls. They ask you not to call again, hang up.

I am optimistic. This phase will pass; Sophie will come to see that you have changed. I think I know you will be reunited.

Today is a good day for you. You get new teeth. You are more confident.

July 2013. My eye lands on a headline in the New York Times: “Heroin in New England, More Abundant and Deadly.” I can’t recall the last time I saw heroin in the news. Media coverage of drug use had shifted, or so it seemed to me, to meth.

Officials in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, from “quaint fishing villages” to “the interior of the Great North Woods”, are reporting an “alarming comeback” of “one of the most addictive drugs in the world”. What’s remarkable about the story, according to its authors, is where the comeback is taking place: not in urban centres, but in the smaller cities and rural towns of New England. Experts offer observations. A police captain in Rutland, Vermont, states that heroin is the department’s “biggest problem right now”. A doctor, an addiction specialist, says, “It’s easier to get heroin in some of these places than it is to get a UPS delivery.”

Most of the heroin reaching New England originates in Colombia and comes over the US-Mexico border. Between 2005 and 2011, the number of seizures jumped sixfold – presumably in part because of increased border security – but plenty of heroin still got through. In May 2013, six people were arrested in connection with a $3.3m heroin ring in Springfield and Holyoke, Massachusetts.

I stop when I read: “Maine is the first state that has limited access to specific medications, including buprenorphine and methadone.” I open a new tab, search for what the writers mean by the vague phrase, “has limited access to”. Earlier that year, the state enacted legislation to limit how long recovering addicts could stay on methadone, or similar drug-replacement therapies, before they had to start paying out of pocket. Medicaid patients will receive coverage for a maximum of two years.

I know that for some people, like you, this is not enough time.

Moving to the United States from Canada was, for me, eight years earlier, an easy enough transition. Much is shared between the two countries, and the culture shock was minimal. Yet even after all this time, I still find that certain ideas I’d taken for granted throughout adolescence and early adulthood – ideas about what a good society tries to make available for its citizens – are here not to be taken for granted at all.

At the Bowery shelter you are a model resident. You participate in group therapy. You see a counsellor. You follow the methadone programme. You are friendly with others. It is on account of this that you are recommended for Section 8 housing, and before long you are moved into a 200-square-foot studio with a single bed, a private bathroom, a tiny kitchen. The facility, a four-storey building, is designated for people living with psychiatric disabilities. Your share of the rent is $260. You are also responsible for your own utilities. These are subsidised based on your income.

For a time you find yourself in a vexing predicament. The state has deemed you “unfit to work”. But each of your applications for disability benefits is denied. It is not at all clear how you are meant to survive.

November 2013. The front page of the Saturday paper features a story on buprenorphine under the headline “Addiction Treatment with a Dark Side”. Buprenorphine is an opioid used for maintenance therapy, like methadone, but is available by prescription. This is new. Since the 1970s, methadone has been distributed through clinics. People participating in methadone programmes must go to the clinic at least once a week, and in some cases every day. This is obstructive, even oppressive. A similar drug that can be had by prescription seems like an improvement. But doctors must receive federal certification to be able to prescribe buprenorphine. Federal law limits how many patients a physician can help with the drug at one time. This means that only people with good insurance, or the ability to pay high fees out of pocket, can access it. “The rich man’s methadone,” the article calls it.

But this – the part that interests me – isn’t what the article is about. The article is about how the drug gets “diverted, misused and abused”; how, since 2003, the drug has led to 420 deaths. (By comparison, there are more than 15,500 deaths from opioid overdose each year.) The article is not about the drug’s demonstrated efficacy at helping people with opioid dependencies that negatively impact their lives. Or about how restricted access to the drug is probably contributing to its diversion and misuse in the first place.

This is what you tell me: From the time you were young, you possessed an anti-authoritarian streak. This disposition did not emerge from any particular maltreatment, by family members, say, or teachers; it was your natural orientation toward the world. You desired proximity to danger and rebelliousness. Unlike your brother, you attempted to differentiate yourself from your family not by transcending your class, but by assuming a posture of nonconformity. You liked drugs because you weren’t supposed to like them. For a long time – more than a decade – you were able to manage your use, to keep it, for the most part, recreational.

One time your father found your needle and other supplies for shooting up. He was furious. You wouldn’t hear it. When he died years later his heart was still broken.

I have difficulty reconciling all this with what else you have told me of your past. I know that you worked for the police as a 911 dispatcher. You were good at your job, liked and respected, and soon you found yourself in a supervisory position. You enjoyed the night shift, especially, and for a long stretch the Bronx was your district. The position is notoriously stressful, but you were sharp, capable, level-headed, and you excelled.

You were fired when your fidelity to heroin was stronger than it was to your job.

December 2013. Two articles command my attention. The first, a few weeks old, is about a radical clinical trial in Canada comparing the effectiveness of diacetylmorphine – prescription heroin – and the oral painkiller hydromorphone in treating severe heroin dependency in people for whom other therapies have failed.

If hydromorphone were to be found as effective as diacetylmorphine, it could mean offering people the benefits of prescription heroin without the legal barriers and associated stigma. The study results have yet to be published.

Larry Love, 62, a longtime dependent: “My health and wellbeing improved vastly” during the trial. Love’s doctor applied to Health Canada for permission to continue prescribing heroin to Love and 20 other patients after their year in the trial was up. The applications were approved, although renewal was required after 90 days. The federal health minister responded by creating new regulations to prevent such approvals. He insisted Ottawa would not “give illicit drugs to drug addicts”. Love, four additional patients, and the healthcare centre that runs the hospital that oversaw the trial are suing the government in turn.

The second article is an editorial about a Canadian bill that, if passed, would set new guidelines for opening supervised-injection facilities. Like syringe-distribution programmes, supervised-injection facilities act as a frontline service for people who use drugs intravenously, giving out sterile needles and other paraphernalia. But they go one step further: users may bring in drugs procured elsewhere and inject them under the watchful eye of trained nurses. Staff members offer instruction on safer technique (“Wash your hands”, “Remove the tourniquet before pushing the plunger”, “Insert the needle bevel up”) and monitor for overdose, which they counteract with naloxone. They do not directly administer injections.

The new law would erect application hurdles so onerous it would effectively prevent the establishment of any new sites. The columnist attacks the government for acting on ideological rather than scientific grounds. “Supervised injection sites are places where horrible things take place.” I cringe a little. “The fact is, however, that these activities are even more horrifying when they take place in the streets, and strict prohibition has never been even remotely successful.”

There is, I know, one such facility in North America. It is called Insite, and it is in Vancouver.

Your disability application is finally approved. You will receive monthly social security payments of $780. You are also entitled to the disability benefit that has accrued from the time of your first denied application, which, because it was several years ago, now amounts to several thousand dollars.

There is one condition, however. The state has decided that, given your history, you are unfit to oversee your own finances. You will need someone who can demonstrate gainful employment, preferably a family member, to tend to the money on your behalf.

On a winter morning, early, we go to the social security office in Brooklyn. We have an appointment but we wait a long time. I sign where I am asked to. I attest to my reliability. I assume responsibility.

Soon after I set up a bank account where I am your “representative payee”. Your money is deposited to it on the first of each month. From this account I pay your rent, your utilities. We meet every week or two, for food, for a movie, but always so that I can provide you with cash for provisions.

This works for a while.

Not long after your disability payments kick in, the debt collectors send notices to my apartment. One is on behalf of an old landlord who, years ago, sued you for rent payments you never made. It has been more than a decade, but this debt has not been forgotten. I mail a cheque.

Here are some things you might do on a given day: walk to the methadone clinic to pick up your dose (you are required to go three times a week). Wait in line. Take one bus to the Medicaid office (when your pension kicked in, your monthly benefits went up, pushing you just slightly over the minimum income requirement). Wait in line. Take one bus to see your psychiatrist. Wait. Take one bus to the Supplemental Assistance Program office (you lost your electronic benefit transfer card and need to request a new one). Wait in line. Take two trains to see your hepatologist at NYU Langone Medical Center. Wait. Walk to the post office (to pick up the cheque my father has sent you). Wait in line. Walk to the nearest Western Union (where you would cash cheques before you had a bank account). Wait in line. Take the bus and two trains to Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park (you need a colonoscopy). Wait.

You say that one day, out of the blue, you decided to give it up. Just like that.

I decide I want to know more about Insite, the place where people who use drugs intravenously can go to inject more safely.

Between 1992 and 2000, more than 1,200 fatal overdoses were recorded in Vancouver. Many of these took place in the Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood of 10 or so square blocks where more than 4,600 people who inject drugs intravenously were known to live. The HIV conversion rate was the highest in the western world. (This was due in part to the popularity in Vancouver of using cocaine intravenously: cocaine has a very short half-life, and people injecting the drug habitually might do so as many as 40 times a day, as compared with heroin, which tends to be injected one to four times a day.) The city, recognising that American-style prohibition had failed to bring about any improvement, undertook a kind of crash course on drug policy. A succession of public forums, meetings, demonstrations, and conferences with experts from all over the world brought together drug users and their families, service providers, academic researchers, police, and policymakers to examine alternative approaches – heroin prescription programmes, supervised injection sites, decriminalisation.

In 2003, Insite opened as a pilot research programme, exempt from the criminal code. It was not the only new drug-related service offered in the city, and it was “no silver-bullet solution”, a disclaimer Canadian policymakers, activists, and other supporters used often to describe its alternative approaches. But because it seemed to stand at the threshold of what progressive-minded people deemed acceptable – because, for many, it seemed intuitively wrong – it received the most attention, and was widely discussed both province- and nationwide. This interested me. Most Vancouver residents initially opposed the facility but came to support it; this took a lot of convincing, and a shift in the way people understand illegal drugs and those who use them.

Syringe Illustration: The Guardian

In 2006, the Conservative party in Canada won the national election, ousting the Liberals. For the first time since 1993, Canada had a Conservative prime minister; from the start, he began dismantling the country’s social programmes. Early on, Insite became a battleground for drug policy across the country. The government tried to shut it down, but the Portland Hotel Society (now PHS Community Services Society), the non-profit group that runs Insite, mounted a human rights case and took it to the supreme court. In 2011, Insite won the right to stay open.

Still, I wondered how long it could last. I wanted to know, too, if something like it could ever exist in the United States.

You want to be in charge of your own money. It is frustrating to have to travel to me every time you run out of cash. Together we visit your social worker, talk about how this could work. He needs to make a recommendation to your psychiatrist, to the state, before this can happen. We review your history. For the first time it is affirmed to me that you are likely to take methadone all your life. The social worker mentions your dose – 120mg – says it’s high, that you haven’t decreased it since beginning the therapy. You acknowledge as much. Still, it has been stabilising, and the social worker is not concerned.

I tell the social worker that I will share the bank account with you, monitor your spending. Satisfied, he makes the recommendation. We open a joint account. Your monthly cheques will be deposited and you will be responsible for paying your bills, for making sure you have enough to get through the month. I will check on the account through online banking. I keep your savings, a few thousand dollars left over from the disability back payments, in a separate account in your name.

For a year, at least, you manage all right.

I know that, in the late 1980s and 1990s, the rapid spread of HIV through needle sharing galvanised US activists to challenge state laws and distribute hypodermic syringes for free, without a prescription; that the rate of new HIV cases in Vancouver among intravenous drug users persuaded even conservative politicians to consider opening a supervised-injection site; that were it not for the HIV epidemic, many drug-policy reforms in the US and elsewhere might not have occurred.

I find it curious how few articles on the emerging “epidemics” – heroin, opioid – mention the disease. I wonder whether it is because, with antiretrovirals so widely available, HIV is perceived to be less threatening than it once was. I chase the question for a time. I print out medical papers, underline findings. I call an epidemiologist at a prestigious university, who answers my questions patiently. He tells me that some of the best research is being done by an epidemiologist in Kentucky, who has been following a cohort of intravenous drug users since 2008. No one in the cohort had yet been diagnosed HIV-positive, but 70% have hepatitis C. I ask why this matters, and he says that rising hepatitis C rates often forecast HIV outbreaks, because the viruses spread through the same behaviours – unprotected sexual intercourse and needle sharing – and both require a certain density of drug users to sustain transmission. But hepatitis C is 10 times more infectious, can live outside the body longer, and is extremely difficult to kill; it spreads more easily. A hepatitis C outbreak indicates that all the factors are present for an HIV outbreak.

In many ways, it’s a ticking time bomb, the epidemiologist says, especially since, in rural Appalachian communities, knowledge about HIV tends to be minimal; these populations have not previously had to deal with the disease.

I hang up the phone, look up the data set that tracks syringe distribution programmes by state, write down the Appalachian ones. Kentucky, 0; Tennessee, 0; Georgia, 1; South Carolina, 0; North Carolina, 6; Alabama, 0; Mississippi, 0; Ohio, 2; Virginia, 0; West Virginia, 0; Pennsylvania, 2; New York, 22; Maryland, 1.

You are weak and exhausted, have been for months. Every time we make plans, you cancel. Months pass and I don’t see you. When by routine appointment you see your hepatologist, he sends you to the emergency room. You will need a blood transfusion to give you the haemoglobin that you need. By the time I arrive, the blood has been ordered from the bank and is being warmed. We wait for hours. The transfusion itself will take hours, too. I leave you there alone.

Before I go, the doctor tells me that what you are experiencing is a complication from hepatitis C.

We sit at your kitchen table beside the four-drawer wooden dresser, its surface lined with pill vials and bottles of methadone. I tell you about Insite. You appear bewildered, shocked even. “How can that possibly help anyone get off drugs?”

Your first reaction resembles most people’s, but it’s not what I want you to say. I want you to argue that getting people off drugs need not be the primary goal. I want you to be critical of the status quo – of the morass of law and policy in which you and millions of others are entangled. But you are not. You have only ever been exposed to one idea, one approach: abstinence.

I explain it to you this way: that the most serious harms that arise from drug use – HIV, endocarditis, tetanus, septicaemia, thrombosis – come not from the drugs but from external factors. Of all the ways to administer drugs, injecting carries the most risks. The drug solution bypasses the body’s natural filtering mechanisms against disease and bacteria. Access to sterile equipment and hygienic injection conditions can mean the difference between living and dying.

I say, thinking you might relate, that policing has an especially devastating effect on people who use drugs intravenously and are entrenched in street life. When they fear the police, they don’t stop using, they just move elsewhere – to neighbouring areas, where they may create new syringe-sharing networks, or to hidden or indoor locations. In such places, needle sharing is more common, because access to clean needles is cut off. When police are around, users avoid carrying clean needles, for fear of being identified as addicts and harassed. Overdoses increase. Witnesses, fearful that police will follow medical personnel to the scene, fail to seek help.

I have stats at the ready. Nearly 500,000 Americans are incarcerated on drug charges. Another 1.2 million are supervised on probation or parole. Overwhelmingly, those affected are black, and not because they use and sell drugs at higher rates – on the contrary. I say that prison is no place for people who use drugs, help does not await them there. Often an incarcerated person will continue to use drugs throughout a prison stay, and the clandestine nature of his use means that he is now more at risk than he might otherwise have been, using unsterile needles and sharing syringes among multiple inmates. Overdose rates peak in the first few weeks after release from prison, with mortality rates higher than what would be expected in similar demographic groups in the general population.

You agree none of this is good. But still you are uneasy. You maintain it would be better to encourage people to stop using altogether.

You resent me now. I am trying to help you budget your money. You are spending your entire monthly payment within the first week. When your next deposit comes, I transfer it into the account you cannot access. Every week, I allow you one quarter of your stipend, after deducting your bills and rent. But you won’t stop texting me, asking for more money. I try to reason with you, explain why you need to budget. I try putting my foot down, which amounts to ignoring your texts. You say you are buying a lot of $5 bootleg DVDs (Hitchcock is your favourite), but you forget that I know how to do maths.

You were lucky once. You and my father sold your childhood home for $300,000. You never risked going to prison to support yourself. But before long, your half was gone, and you started spending my father’s share. He cut you off, begged you to stop, but you said no, you had never felt so alive, you were having the time of your life.

We go to the bank and close the joint account, transfer your savings. You have total control.

I feel light.

Your savings vanish within a month.

You show up to an appointment with your psychiatrist, but it is the wrong day. You are confused, delirious. You travel by ambulance to the psychiatric emergency room at a nearby hospital. Your social worker calls to report what has happened. He says you may be showing signs of early-onset dementia. He says you may be abusing your methadone. I tell him about our recent conversation, the one where you told me you were taking Klonopin to sleep at night; the one where you guardedly suggested you may not be taking it as directed.

Two weeks later, the social worker calls me again. You have stopped going to the clinic in Crown Heights where your social worker and psychiatrist oversee your care. You are within your rights to do so, and by phoning to let me know, the social worker is breaking protocol. But he is worried, thinks you lied when you said you found a psychiatrist closer to home. He believes you may no longer be fit to take care of yourself. He wants to call Adult Protective Services, would I be all right with that, and might he provide them with my phone number? He says to me, Please, you are the only person H. has.

It takes a few days, but I reach you. I come over with pastries. You seem all right – lucid, lively. You want to know how I know about it all. You are annoyed that someone would call me. You tell me that you like your new facility, that it is nearer, that you are happy not to travel all the way to Crown Heights any more. Getting around the city is hard now. Scoliosis has you bent in two. You are not lying about the existence of this new facility. But when I ask whether you have a new social worker – someone who can help manage your various appointments, who knows what services you are eligible for, who can connect you with the things you need, who you can talk to about your private thoughts – it occurs to you that you do not. I tell you to look into it.

A few weeks later, I hear from my father that you have started travelling to Crown Heights again.

We decide to see a movie. In the back of a cab, you tell me that one thing you really miss, one thing you think you should try to do, is find a female companion. I agree that this would be ideal, but I’m not sure how to help. I say that maybe you should go online. I show you the dating app on my phone and we laugh at its absurdity. I say there must be sites for older people. But you don’t have a computer, and you don’t have a smartphone. I’m certain you could count the times you’ve used the internet on one hand.

You tell me about the woman in the apartment below you. Whenever you try to shower, she immediately turns on all her faucets and uses up the hot water before you even have time to undress.

I explain the unlikelihood of this – hot-water distribution in a multi-unit building just doesn’t work that way. You seem reassured, but the next time we speak, you complain that the problem continues.

Weeks later, you call in a panic. Con Edison is threatening to cut off your electricity, and you can’t afford to pay. The bill is several hundred dollars, despite the subsidy you receive. You tell me you had been running your space heater all day, every day, for weeks – the building had kept the heat on low. You either underestimate my intelligence or the shame is too great.

I call Con Edison, take care of your bill. You haven’t sent a payment in six months. When I confront you with this, you insist on your version of the story.

You call a car and ride over to my place because you don’t have money to get you through the month. My father says that if I lend it to you, he’ll pay me back.

“You know what happened?”

You are sitting at my dining table. You are smiling, and you tell me that when you finally met the hot water villain, you found her beautiful and fell in love.

You gave her a holiday gift: a note and $30. You stuffed it under her door. She kept the money, of course, but she never acknowledged you.

When you leave I give you extra cash for your car ride home.

A week later, you call to apologise for lying to me about the Con Ed bill. This is a first.

Although the media narrative focuses on heroin use among middle-class youth in suburban neighbourhoods and rural towns, I know that other populations are in need of resources and services. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that rates of heroin use remain highest among males, 18 to 25-year-olds, people with household incomes below $20,000, people living in urban areas, and people with no health insurance or on Medicaid.

I take the subway up to the Bronx to BOOM!Health, a peer‑run harm-reduction organisation. With a small grant from the Drug Policy Alliance, BOOM! is trying to open the first legal supervised injection facility in the US. They’ve even set up a model site, a single injection booth fashioned after those at Insite. I meet with the organisation’s president and chief programming officer. He tells me that they want to create a pilot study, much like the one in Vancouver. I know that when advocates in San Francisco tried to set up a facility, the opposition was too great. But BOOM! is optimistic; having a liberal like Bill de Blasio in the mayor’s office presents an opportunity.

I speak with a lawyer specialising in public health law, who argues that a pilot study is not the best strategy. “The people who are moved by evidence are not necessarily legislators.” Framing the facility as an incremental extension of services already available, he suggests, could prove more effective. “Almost do it under the radar.”

He adds, hesitantly: “But then the question is: is that model” – an unsanctioned facility – “exportable to other cities and states?”

When I began to follow the media coverage of the new “heroin scourge”, I didn’t have strong ideas about “addiction”, except that I knew it when I saw it. I believed it was a disease, and that it should be treated as such. But the more I read, the more people I speak with, the more I begin to question this framework. It is clear that no one – no neuroscientist, psychologist, psychiatrist, or physician – can explain what addiction is or account for its contradictions. Tobacco, cocaine, heroin, alcohol, MDMA, amphetamines – are they inherently addictive? Common knowledge suggests they are. But all around me I see exceptions more than the rule, my friends who use, have used, some or all of these drugs, including heroin, casually. I, too, am one of the exceptions. I conclude that my own point of view is now best represented by the more radical strands of the harm-reduction movement and by legalisation.

Following the lead of those in harm reduction and drug users’ rights groups, I decide to scrub the word addict from my vocabulary, to avoid using the term drug abuser. The alternatives can be awkward on the page, but it is more important not to reduce a person to this one aspect of her life.

Person with a substance-misuse disorder.

Person experiencing a drug problem.

Person who uses drugs habitually.

Person committed to drug use.

I try carrying these over into speech. This, too, is challenging.

I am mistaken. Your daughter Sophie never does come around. I can’t remember the last time you mentioned her name. Two years, maybe more. By now your grandson must be eight or nine.

With the right login credentials and some basic biographical information – first and last name, an approximate age, a residential state past or present, a relative’s given name – there’s a lot you can find out about a person, even when Google and Facebook turn up little. When I decide, finally, that I will look for Sophie this way, through databases I can access through my job as a fact-checker, it takes me no more than 60 seconds to locate where she is living.

A trail of email addresses with varying domain names (aol.com, comcast.com, yahoo.com) reveals a few of the websites she’s created accounts on: a daily-horoscope generator, a payday-loan provider (cash4thanksgiving.com). Presumably these sites have lax privacy policies. My heart sinks a little when I think of her needing a payday loan; it suggests her life has not been an easy one.

I will write to her, I think.

This is an abridged version of an essay from the latest issue of n+1. To find out more, visit nplusonemag.com/subscribe.

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