William offered his clients virtual spaces where the rules were set by fantasy and love, by gambling. His fortune grew in rhythm with his subscribers’ secret desires, their longing to watch women with extremely long armpit hair wrestle in mud; or to follow someone whose ambition, at the age of twenty-five, was to become the heaviest woman in the world by force-feeding herself through a funnel; or to watch a woman sleeping with a powered hair dryer on her pillow as she chewed on squares of toilet paper. William was also one of the first to create virtual dating sites, where love is divided into several groups and subgroups. After a doctorate in psychology and several years as a practising social worker, William knew the human animal inside out. Above all, he’d learned how to spy on it from a distance, just as he spied on his clients.
Every year, he hired an academic whose work consisted of opening up the world to him like an encyclopedia, in the way his father the log driver brought with him one book at a time to read at night at work sites in the woods, quoting to his fellow workers the next morning, and to his children when he was back home six months later. William thought Kool-Aid was something to help out “coolies”—he was still a young boy when his father compared the work of men in the bush to that of labourers in another age.