I have an imagination. As a girl, I was Katarina, a gypsy escaping Hitler, tumbling down city snowbanks and eating icicles, collecting cans and telling Nazis and neighborhood children that they were evil, that their mothers should discipline them. I watched Matlock and had nightmares, dreams where my hairdryer would slip into my bathtub and I would convulse like that dead-eyed, fishy-skinned brunette. I emulated discourse with my Barbie dolls, none of whom were named Barbie. Veronica was my favorite, a valley girl who routinely met her doom with Hitler or a hairdryer, sometimes Hitler with a hairdryer. I arranged my dolls in lines on the floor, alphabetized by first name, and imagined they were in a database, only database wasn’t the word I used at first—but by age fifteen my dolls were fields and the invisible lines on the tan carpet were table dividers, and I imagined Microsoft Access in the flesh, theory incarnated.