Air Heart

It was 1998 and I needed an e-mail address. Back then, nobody used their real names for e-mail. E-mailing was like C.B. radio—you used a handle. I remember thinking for a few seconds and then typing “aeelectra” into the little box on the Hotmail screen. Success. I had signed up. In those stray moments trying to come up with what was essentially a totemic pseudonym, an image arose before my mind, silvered and fine. It was a photograph from National Geographic, the January 1998 issue. The photograph was a bust of Amelia Earhart wearing a Mona Lisa smile. Her pilot’s license photo, a Venus in a fur-lined flying cap (freckled, gap-toothed, and tomboyish in the talking pictures), a high-modern Man Ray-esque tragic paradigm whom death stalked and fame carried.