Jack Vening on Jack Vening

• The people in the north are as stupid as animals but live long.
• The people in the south mature early but die young.
• The people in the west are daring but not humane. The men have unfortunate faces and misshapen necks, but they walk with dignity.
• The people of the east are tall and large. They become knowledgeable early but do not live long.
• The people in the center are clever and sagelike. We consider beards beautiful and dislike obesity.
• —The World, translated by Elliott Weinberger (2nd century BC)

I first meet Jack Vening when I’m 18 and he’s negotiating the middle stages of the British schooling system. I don’t know exactly how old he is; he and friends belong to “forms” instead of school years; Key Stages, GCSEs, eldritch terms whose origins I never bother learning.

We don’t speak. I learn of him through an error repeated thirty or forty times over: accidental requests from his friends who have mistaken me for him. Jack Vening does not yet have Facebook, it seems. But they believe in themselves, and in me.

It is 2007. I have sideburns and don’t yet understand the mechanics by which social media—true social media, the kind that roots itself to you—will operate. High school has washed past like a wave, taking most of my friends on with it, dumping the rest of us a few feet from where we began. I don’t understand why several dozen young people from Northern England have added me as a friend—it is a part of some process that will reveal itself later, I tell myself.

I learn his friends are from Newcastle, they are from Gateshead. They are from Wallsend, Crawcrook, High Spren, places named long ago. They complain about footballers whose names mean nothing to me. Every so often a boy will send me a link to a liveblog where he writes his thoughts on professional wrestling. “Thank you for this,” I reply.

My friendship with them is as corporeal, I figure, as with anyone I knew only online while I was in high school: the kid from the Gold Coast who was training to be a young bodybuilder; my New Zealand girlfriend, who told me photos of models from glamour magazines were her own, who turned out to be 22, a young mother, an office worker at a corrections facility on the South Island.

More, maybe there is a connection between us, the Jack Venings. The Venings, my Venings, are British. My grandfather fled post-war poverty in Southern England for opportunity in Sydney, finding work at a warehouse manufacturing drugs. They did not thrive; they did find a home near a beach mostly famous as the flashpoint of Australia’s worst modern race riot.

But at least it wasn’t England. England, I’m told, has always been sick with Venings. My mother once said the name came from the Fens, the old marshes in the east that they drained, hundreds of years ago, to produce some of the most fertile farmland on the planet. We are in Scandanavia, we are in Western Europe. For about two hundred years my direct ancestors lived and died in Lambeth, now part of South London, spending most of their time marrying Irish women and flirting with life in the Church of England.

Some left. Two of us, Henry and his son Thomas, made it to Ohio in time to join the 31st Infantry, fighting for the same company during the the Civil War. Thomas was shot drinking water from a river during the Siege of Corinth, Mississippi. His father, heartbroken, was discharged to give greater time to his grief.

For his part, my grandfather knew who his own father was, but not well—only long enough to be given a name. He was left as a baby in the care of another family, the Prestons; stone skinned, boxers, police-fighters. They treated my grandfather as an insurgent. (They were right to: as soon as he was old enough he left to join the police force in London.)

He spent the war years arranging bodies in the streets in front of the rubble he dragged them from; smoking, waiting out air-raids in the dark tunnels under London, and for years afterwards, long after he had emigrated, laid down his tools, saw my father leave and my grandmother pass away. All the way up until the year he died, my grandfather spoke of returning.

Who can say why the deliveries come. A bad joke, mostly; a message. For years I receive packages for people whose names are not my own—Jack Veneng, Jack Venning, “Nestle Boy”.

This is not to say that they are mistakes, other than maybe poor judgement on the part of the sender. I am the intended receiver. They were meant for me. Each time one arrives I am living in a different state, leading, I would like to think, a different life.

The first, for Nestle Boy Vening, is a cylindrical package containing a children’s kite branded by an ice cream company. A note thanks me for taking part in a prize sweep I never entered.

For Jack Venning it’s more perverse. Inside a blank package is a folded hentai magazine — pornographic anime, depressingly graphic. There is no return address other than the name of a bookstore in Japan. I contact my bank to see if someone has been playing with my cards, but there’s nothing, a mystery. When they ask my why I’m concerned, I make up a story about how my mother had been the victim of a scam. I don’t want to be a victim, I say. Who would send this to me?

Then: Jack Veneng’s business cards. I’m teaching at a university in Brisbane, Queensland, when the cards arive. A student who works at a cafe on campus says that she found one of my business cards in the cafe business-card jar, but that she can’t give me the free meal it would entitle me to because I’m her tutor.

She and her classmates write short essays on loss; one writes about fighting the police at a skatepark, one writes about growing distant from her best friend after they attend different fencing schools.

“I don’t have any business cards,” I tell my student.

She brings it in. It’s dumb joke, but it’s funny: a stock image of a race car with some phony details; “Jack Veneng writing services: words like no other words. Don’t find me, I’ll find you, OK?”

Over a couple of weeks I lose my mind and accuse everyone I know. More of the cards surface around campus—it turns out about 250 were printed—until it becomes clear who perpetrated the joke. The hentai, the kite, remain open questions. Regularly, inevitably, the same conversation occurs: “You can tell me if you sent it to yourself.”

For a long time, young Jack Vening blocks my requests and my messages. He claims @jackvening across most sites and sits on it, posting rarely, then not at all.

The problems are brief. When I win a fellowship from my state government in 2014, he is bombarded with mistaken congratulations from arts organisations, members of the literary community, the office of the Premier of Queensland.

Meanwhile, he enrolls in The University of Leicester, graduates with an engineering degree, works briefly for a chemical manufacturer developing hydrodynamic coatings. Dropping in on his life in this way every few years, I feel like a distant relative, someone who never knew him enough to have more than a passing interest—an uncle by marriage who lived overseas; someone his mother knew in the early years of his life. Hovering, unseen.

And every so often a memory will surface. Before Facebook, before sideburns and the children of High Spren, when I was maybe fifteen years old. A comment on my Myspace page from a Jack Vening much older than me, a Jack Vening with a music page and a band in Minnesota.

It was only three words, which were these: “Are you me?”