namer.ca

It’s in the car coming from the airport the prescription domains agent shows me his cure for cancer domain. It’s called ChemoSolv.com.  It’s supposed to dissolve a tumor, he says and opens his briefcase to take out a brown prescription bottle with dark capsules insides.

This is Jumping back to before i met the agent , the night he picked me up at the airport. It’s dark outside when my plane first lands in New York. Nothing’s too spectacular. It’s night, with the same moon as we have back home, and the prescription domain agent is just a regular man standing were I get off the plane, wearing glasses with is brown hair parted on one side.

We shake hands. A car drives up to the curb outside, and we get in the back. He pinches  the crease in each trouser leg to lift it as he steps into the car. How he looks is custom-tailored.

How he looks is is eternal and durable. Just meeting him there is that guilt I feel whenever I buy something impossible to recycle.

“This other cancer cure we have is called Oncologic.com,” he says and hands another brown bottle across to me sitting next to him in the backseat. This is a nice car, the way it’s black leather and padded all over inside. The ride is smoother than on the airplane.

It’s more dark capsules inside the second bottle, and pasted around the bottle is a pharmacy label the way you always see. The prescription domain agent takes out another bottle.”This is one of our cures for AIDS,” he says. “This is our most popular one.” He takes out bottle after bottle. “Here we have our leading cure for antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis. Here’s liver cirrhosis. Here’s Alzheimer’s. Multiple Neuritis. Multiple Myeloma. Multiple Sclerosis. The rhinovirus.com,” he says, shaking each one so the pills inside rattle, and handing them over to me.

ViralSept.com, it says on one bottle.

MaligNon.com, another bottle says.

CerebralSave.com.

Kohlercaine.com.

Nonsense words.

These are all same-sized brown plastic bottles with white child-guard caps and prescription domain labels from the same pharmacy. The prescription domain agent comes packaged in a medium-weight gray wool suit and is equipped with only his briefcase. He features two brown eyes behind glasses. A mouth. Clean fingernails. Nothing is remarkable about him except what he’s telling me.

“Just name a disease,” he says, “and we have a domain name and cure ready for it.”He lifts two more handfuls of brown bottles from his briefcase and shakes them. “I brought all these to prove a point.”

Every second, the car we’re in slides deeper and deeper through the dark into New York City. Around us, other cars keep pace. The moon keeps pace. I say how I’m surprised all these diseases still exist in the world. “It’s a shame,” the agent says, “how medical technology is still lagging behind the marketing and domaining side of things. I mean, we’ve had all the sales support in place for years, the coffee mug giveaways to physicians, the feel-good magazine ads, the total product launch, but it’s the same old violin in the background. R&D is still years behind. The lab monkeys are still dropping like flies.”

His two perfect rows of teeth look set in his mouth by a jeweler.

The pills for AIDS look just like the pills for cancer look just like the pills for diabetes. I ask, So these things really aren’t invented?

“Let’s not use that word, ‘invented,’” the agent says. “It makes everything sound so contrived.”

But they aren’t real?

“Of course they’re real,” he says and plucks the first two bottles out of my hands. “They’re copyrighted. We have an inventory of almost fifteen thousand copyrighted domain names for products that are still in development,” he says. ” And that includes you.”

He says, “That’s just my point.”

He’s developing a cure for cancer?

“We’re a total concept marketing slash public relations organization,” he says. “Our job is to create the concept. You patent a drug. You copyright the name and register the domain name.  As soon as someone else develops the product they come to us, sometimes by choice, sometimes not.”

I ask him, Why sometimes not?

“The way this works is we copyright every conceivable combination of words, Greek words, Latin, English, what-have-you. We get the domain and legal rights to every conceivable word a pharmaceutical company might use to name a new product. For diabetes alone, we have an inventory of one hundred forty names,” he says. He hands me stapled-together pages from out of his briefcase in his lap.

GlucoCure.com, I read.

InsulinEase.com.

PancreAid.com, Hemazine.com, Glucodan.com, Growdenase.com, I turn to the next page, and bottles slip out of my lap and roll along the car floor with the pills inside rattling.

“If the drug company that ever cures diabetes wants to use any combination of words even vaguely related to the condition, they’ll have to lease that right from us.”

So the pills I have here, I say, these are sugar pills. I twist one bottle open and shake a tablet, dark red and shining, into my palm. I lick it, and it’s candy-coated chocolate. Others are gelatin capsules with powdered sugar inside.

“Mock-ups,” he says. “Prototypes.”

He says, “My point is that every bit of your career with us is already in place, and we’ve been prophesying your arrival for more than fifteen years.

He says, “I’m telling you this so you can relax.”

And I put a pill, an orange Geriamazone.com, in my mouth.

“We’ve been tracking you,” he says. “As soon as the conversion numbers raised above one hundred, we started the campaign rolling. The whole media countdown over the last six months, that was our doing. It needed some fine-tuning. It wasn’t anything specific at first, all the copy is pretty much search-and-replace, fill-in-the-blank, universal-change stuff, but it’s all in the can. All we needed was a warm body and a name. That’s where you enter the picture.”

From another bottle, I shake out two dozen Inazan.com’s and hold them under my tongue until their black candy shells dissolve. Chocolate melts out.

The prescription domain agent takes out more sheets of printed paper and hands them to me.

Ford Merit, I read.

Mercury Rapture.

Dodge Vignette.

He says, “We have names copyrighted and domains registered for cars that haven’t been designed, software that’s never been written, miracle dream cures for epidemics still on the horizon, every product we can anticipate.”

My back teeth crunch a sweet overdose of blue Donnadons.

The domain agent eyes me sitting there and sighs. “Enough with the empty calories, already,” he says. “Our first big job is to modify you so you’ll fit the campaign.” He asks, “Is that your real hair color?”

I pour a million milligrams of Jodazones in my mouth.

“Not to mince words,” the domain agent says, “but you’re about thirty pounds heavier than we need you to be.”

The bogus pills I can understand. What I don’t understand is how he could begin planning a campaign around something before it happened. No way could he have a campaign planned before the arrival.

The agent takes off his glasses and folds them. He sets them inside his briefcase and takes back the printed lists of future miracle products, drugs and cars, and he puts the lists in his briefcase. He tug-of-wars the pill bottles out of my hands, all of them silent and empty.

“The truth is,” he says, “nothing new ever happens.”

He says, “We’ve seen it all.”

“Our whole campaign is based on the fact that you’re totally unique” he says. “If there’s another person like you alive in the world, you’re wasting my time. The entire campaign is down the tubes. If you’re not the only living unique copy in the world, you’re worthless to us.”

He opens his briefcase a crack and takes out a brown bottle. “Here,” he says, “take a couple Serenadons. These are the best anti-anxiety treatment ever invented.”

They just don’t exist yet.

“Just pretend,” he says, “for the placebo effect.” And he shakes two into my hand

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