The Lord's Hacker
I post this here for reasons that are too unusual to go in to, though it might be interesting to see if it remains online.
It would be lovely if this book weren't tampered with, while it sits on this blog. It would be nice if the "jump break" at the end of the visible section wasn't frozen or broken, so that readers could click "read more" if they wanted to. But do expect some wonky fonts and irregular spacing.
This post has received about 1200 visits since a week ago when it went live, due to word of mouth. Down the road, when there is no more interference, it will be published in book form.
By the way, anyone can read The Lord's Hacker. Please read it here, paste the full manuscript onto your computer or Kindle, or give it to others. Make sure you click "read more" before you copy the book.
The Lord’s Hacker
A Novel, 354 pages
Ryan Blacketter
For Harland, a wild and extraordinary soul
PRAISE
“I couldn’t put The Lord’s Hacker down. Often it felt like On the Road, capturing swift movement and many characters in the American tapestry. The book is psychologically fraught, understated, and rewarding. By the title, I assumed it was an exposé of a Christian charlatan, but I was delighted to discover it’s about love, life, and hope. The writing is raw and evocative and it inspired me to write.” --Jose Chaves, author of The Contract of Love
"Ryan has a marvelous eye for the emotional textures of the most commonplace experience, the kind that familiarity makes almost subliminal." --Marilynne Robinson, author of Housekeeping
“Ryan Blacketter’s writing is often humorous and melancholy in the same breath.” –Mary Owen, daughter of Donna Reed
“[Ryan’s] characters are interesting and real.” --Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices
"The author’s prose is as outstanding as the story it conveys, with spare, raw dialogue and deft scene-setting that is descriptive without feeling overwrought." --Kirkus Review on Horses All Over Hell
BIOGRAPHY
Author of Down in the River and Horses All Over Hell, Ryan is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His books have been explored in Poets & Writers, Kirkus Review, Fiction Writers Review, Paste Magazine, the Rumpus, Largehearted Boy, Pittsburgh City Paper, Canada’s Miramichi Reader, and Rain Taxi Review of Books. He served as fiction mentor in PEN America’s Writing and Justice Program for ten years.
“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”--Charles Baudelaire
1
I worked for a Christian leader who became a tyrant. He ran a successful imprint in the Northwest, and he hired me to edit book manuscripts. At the end of one assignment, he said I was going to contribute articles for Christian blogs to promote the book, in my name—a loathsome project, but I decided to finish these extras he gave me. He rejected the first article, asking for something more “upbeat.” He shot down the next one as well. It occurred to me that he wasn’t inviting my own singular voice and contribution. Instead, he wanted me to alter my attitude until I sounded like one of his educated Christians, as if I was an actor in a series of erudite infomercials.
“I can only write something that is honestly the way I have experienced it,” I replied to his second rejection. “. . . People who have read and enjoyed the Old Testament—a minority—will find my articles far less profound, and far less dark . . . If you don’t like the essays I write, don’t ask me to write them.”
He wrote back: “I demand an instant apology. You sure as fuck don’t need to lecture me on the Old Testament or darkness. From now on I will have a zero-tolerance policy for any snotty bullshit from you. You decide if you want to make an enemy of me or not.”
I rose from my desk and stood beside the calathea plant on a shelf, its stripes like arrows, and scratched rapidly at the side of my head. The dome light was broken in the living room, and the lamps did little to brighten the place. Hard rain beyond the sliding glass blurred the day. A child’s limousine—a pedal toy—crossed the street in the wind and stopped, facing our apartment, twin antennas rising from the trunk. Rain hissed on our porch. The sound was pervasive, and there was the momentary illusion of water falling through the apartment ceiling.
My computer screen shimmered in the dim light. My snottiness and his narcissism were a poor mix. He needed obedience and praise, and I had snags with authority. His invitation to hostilities came easily to him. You decide. It was distressing and interesting—the Christian who made enemies over disagreements at work. When I had met him in Portland at an editing job fair five years earlier, he was large sitting behind his table, and his head was very large. His voice was grand and old fashioned, almost southern, though he grew up in California. He spoke words he must’ve used a thousand times before. He said he believed in “honest exploration of the human heart,” and he snatched up one of his new books—Dante’s Journey—as if to hide behind it.
“We’re building bridges,” he said, “inviting everyone to our books. I can no longer keep up with requests for speaking engagements, but I hasten to make the effort. They want me everywhere, in New York, Brazil, Germany.” He smiled and dropped his gaze. “I didn’t achieve this on my own, you know. Believe me, I couldn’t have done something so largescale and laudable on my own. I believe he wanted this enterprise to take flight. Old Yahweh. He steers the ship here.”
I knew he had studied with a great scholar at Yale who published annotated classics, and he went on to publish Christian volumes that were similar. He seemed phony, but admirable. He really had achieved something that moved the world. Los Angeles Times thought so. So did Chicago Tribune. He was a public person and spoke a lot, so naturally he’d come across as manufactured. Successful people were weird, by and large. They were distasteful up close. His hourly pay for editing was attractive.
The enemy email on my screen flickered in an illusion of downward scrolling. My wife, Rachel, with our baby, returned after a gathering of young women from our church.
She held Leo on her hip. “What’s the news on getting the light fixed?”
“The landlord called after you left. He said it’s our responsibility to fix it.”
“Jesus. That’s Idaho for you, I guess.”
I sat on the floor while Leo held onto my shoulder and patted my face. “The other baby took a shine to Leo at the baby date,” she said. “She kissed him right on the mouth.”
“She knows Leo’s somebody.”
“That’s right! What did you do today?”
“That Christian leader said I was snobby or something. Hope he pays me for the book I edited.”
“He has to pay you.”
“I think the rule is I have to do what he wants me to.”
The next week, my author notices dropped from my first Google page in one day—Antioch Review, Crab Orchard Review, Writers in the Schools, Tennessee Williams Scholarship. All had found a new home on Google-page thirty. Maybe well-trafficked internet notices didn’t always stay in the same place, but they didn’t fly away to perch on page thirty, all together, like trained pigeons either.
Despite the enemy email, I sometimes doubted the Christian leader was doing this. It would have required a lot of time to learn hacking at such a high level. He had a business to run that was more demanding than most.
In ten days, the first review of my novel appeared in Fiction Writers Review—rising to the top of my first Google page on day one. The next day, it plummeted to page fifty. Hate blazed in my chest.
That day, the Christian leader wrote an email stating that I needed to write an apology. Then we could discuss it on the phone, and he’d determine if I was sincere and truly remorseful. I didn’t respond to it. In a couple of days, that email vanished from my inbox. He had sent the check and I cashed it. He wrote again. “Your remarks are untenable. I won’t let you get away with this. I need an explanation by the end of the day.”
I wrote back, “Go fuck yourself. You are no kind of Christian.”
Two weeks later, I found 20 trojans had leaped into my computer—after I had clicked on emails or texts I should have left alone. But one suspicious “incorrect wifi” notice sucked at the middle of my screen like a leech all day, although the wifi worked fine. It was stuck there, despite several restarts of my computer. I had to click it to use my computer at all.
In days a hacker seized control of my email and desktop, deleting fifty or sixty copies of book-, essay-, and story-drafts I’d emailed to myself and stored under “Writing.” These exertions provoked images: the Christian leader seizing boxes and tossing documents out the window, the Christian leader pulling a length of duct tape from a roll and standing over my son’s crib. At night, while my wife slept and I lay awake, I conjured him under our bed, grinning like Bob in Fire Walk With Me.
Whoever the hacker was, he didn’t touch the full manuscripts on my desktop, but everything else flew. When he sent me some hair-raising porn, when Rachel and Leo were gone, I left the apartment and walked the long hallway to the back of the apartment, went down the stairs outside, and paced in the grass with my hands atop my head, whispering, “Motherfucker, motherfucker!”
Our uninvited guest favored the evening for extended hacking. Rachel and I often watched a movie on a computer when he entered our home. The computer hissed, going hot as it had never done before. It was as if a seething presence nested there. But the movies played on without interruption, as if his intent—at this time anyway—was simply to let us know he was in the room. It had to be the Christian leader. This hacking had rage in it. No one else hated me that much. It made no sense that I had provoked such fury, but I seemed to have done it.
One night I kicked the coffee table so that it stood askew. “What can we do about this guy?” I said.
“I doubt we can do anything, Christopher—unless you know a hacker.”
He favored my phone at first, but hacked my wife’s, too—hot to the touch whenever he hacked. We stopped taking our phones to the bedroom or the bathroom. Rachel called him Father Peeks, as he liked to get his peeks. We had covered up web cameras with pieces of tape and disconnected WiFi when it wasn’t in use. But we removed the tape to take selfies with our son, and didn’t always remember to put the tape back on. Regarding WiFi, he was able to hack even when our WiFi was turned off, though it seemed impossible.
One sunny morning, two weeks later, when Rachel was at the store and I was writing an email to a friend, the browser disappeared. When I went to drafts in Gmail, there was no draft. Maybe my hacker wasn’t the Christian leader, but I believed it was him, and I had the feeling he wanted me to know it was him. He didn’t fear getting caught. He saw himself as God’s air traffic control man—he had cart blanche to drop planes out of the sky, making magic baby waves from the tower window and crossing himself when the smoke rose from the crash.
As I gazed at the screen, an image of two dice appeared on the desktop. Then an image of a file, signified by three pieces of overlapped paper, as if he wanted me to believe he’d planted scary files in my computer, or was going to.
I got Leo from his crib at the end of his nap and rested on the couch. I held him, so that he faced away, and gazed at a wall a long time, light bands playing on it like phosphorescent prison bars. Rachel had been gone for an hour. It seemed possible that she could get in a wreck. This was Boise and not Detroit, but terrible things happened here, too. Now the Christian leader favored Rachel’s phone. Rachel was beautiful. She must have been nice to see in that peephole. God, how I wanted to fly an elbow into that man’s face.
The living room swelled with direct light as the sun cleared trees, and Leo cried. “I’m sorry, buddy, I was only thinking for a minute. Let’s play. Mom’s at the store.”
I set him in his bouncer seat, and he called out “bombom,” his name for ball. I bounced a red beachball at him and he grasped for it. When I placed it in his hands, he gummed its surface, and smiled at the shiny red circle that he clasped.
Rachel called. She had forgotten diapers and had to stop at the pharmacy.
“Is everything okay?” I asked her, my voice more anxious than I had wanted.
“Toilet paper, too. I’m forgetting everything. How’s Leo?”
“We’re trying to play catch,” I said, “but I can’t get this malevolent altar boy out of my head. I’m literally waiting for him to walk in the front door.”
“You can go for a walk when I get home, if you feel like it. I know it makes you feel better.”
“Maybe I’ll go after dinner,” I said. “It’s already hot. Listen, drive really safe. Wait for three seconds after the light turns green.”
She laughed at me. “Thanks for the DMV safety message.”
For dinner I cooked the fresh pasta Rachel bought, but I was captured by the boiling linguini too long, staring into it like it was some Lynchian image of torment and corruption. The pasta was ruined. I made salads with leftover chicken instead.
In the evening, I left our apartment and walked two blocks to a trail that lifted into the foothills. Miles above the trail was the entrance to Boise National Forest, a blue sketch of pine. It was March and the heat was already on us.
Even out of doors I saw Father Peek’s warm smile, I heard his radio voice—mannerisms from years earlier, when I had met him. Since then, he’d adopted an edgy persona, and I saw that face too. His voice was no longer 1950s IBM, but serious, hip, intellectual, relevant. It was these two versions that I saw in my mind. They changed back and forth, like twins appearing one at a time to trick you. “I’m Jimmy!” said John. “I’m John!” said Jimmy.
But it was outlandish to believe that such a man, so careful of his image, would send scary porn and hack my wife. If it was him, he’d have to be disturbed, and he’d have to feel he was absolutely hidden. But many other Christian leaders, priests and ministers and others, have buttressed their good image in the light of day while trotting out at night to touch boys and girls in the dark. A hidden life seemed much easier for a hacker to accomplish, especially a good hacker who left no trace.
Enemy. You decide. Your remarks are untenable. I didn’t have anyone else in my life who spoke in such absolutes, except God. I wasn’t a big Catholic but I grew up that way. Rachel attended the initiation meetings and joined up, so that we could all go to mass.
I tramped up a hillock and ran down the other side, the low sun following like a hunting thing. The pines in the wilderness above looked farther away the closer I got to them. A hiker would have to start out before dawn to make it to those woods. He’d get stuck up there when the sun was coming down. He’d find the road, but no one would stop for him, and he may not survive. Always a worrier but now full of dread, I fretted over the little unreal images that skipped through the mind: Dropping Leo on pavement, overdosing on my medication, seeing Rachel succumb to a man’s intense stare.
It was only the shocks of this sudden hacking. I’d get used to it. Our hacker had been with us a few weeks. He wouldn’t stay forever.
For now, I wasn’t present for my family, and I was grumpy with my advanced fiction students at the university. It was all going sideways here, at the Mormon-influenced Boise State.
In the previous week’s class, a young woman with a therapy dog had asked why I seemed to dislike the students. I didn’t tell her that this senior-level workshop felt like a religious high school class. This religious innocence of many students had bothered me for the past two terms, and the stress of the hacking amplified my distaste.
“We have our own ideas,” she said. “We can disagree on some things. You hate all of our stories so far.”
“No. I hate the stories I’m writing, not yours. Your stories make me irritable sometimes, that’s all.”
“Why don’t you let them be what they are.”
“Half the class is writing about how it was wrong to steal money,” I said. “Wrong to challenge Dad. Wrong to rip up a midterm in front of the high school teacher. Wrong to take drugs or have premarital sex.” On stage before them, I had an underwater feeling with my heavy dose of lorazepam—worse than at other times—and I closed my eyes and opened them in long intervals that gave me privacy. “It’s wrong to do no work. It’s wrong to leave your baby with your mom. It’s wrong to be prideful, and ungrateful, and one protagonist learns at the end, It’s completely unhealthy to drink alcohol in large quantities. Actual quote. But you’re college seniors. Meet someone weird at the bus station and buy him coffee. Talk to a prostitute. Hang out at the public library and roam the stacks to listen to people talking. Invade a private conversation, in secret.”
“That’s completely wrong,” the young woman said.
“You need to get some unusual experiences under your belt,” I said. “Most of these stories suggest you’re leaning too much on high school years.”
“Hang out with prostitutes,” she said.
“Talk to an old man waiting for a Greyhound bus,” I said.
“He wants us to hang out with prostitutes,” she said.
It was all good advice, but I lacked a disarming mirth to make it worthwhile. I used to have that good humor, in Oregon. Instead of inviting these Idaho kids to an inspiring and slightly deviant adventure, I was like a grim priest sending them on a nasty errand.
Dusk announced itself on the trail. The Boise National Wilderness was a black smudge near the sky, and I stood on a rock to catch my breath. In the near distance, in the foothills, stood the lighted cross at Table Rock. The Jaycees built the cross in 1956. I can imagine those crew-cutted killers. Friend, I’d like to bend your ear about the good shepherd above and how, with his teaching, we can prosper right here in the City of Trees. When my dad was a corrections counselor at Old Idaho State Penitentiary, some of the staff witnessed to him about Jesus, but he preferred the company of prisoners. During a riot in the early 1970s, the warden gave him a gun and told him to stand on a wall and point it at the inmates. He stood on the wall but refused to point it at anyone. I wonder how many Jaycees would have refused to point their guns. Probably none. They would have pointed their guns while they preached to them about the one above.
Boise was a good place to leave. I’d left it twice before—I loved the city when I was away from it—but this departure would amount to a great event. I had received an inheritance from an aunt I barely knew. The money waited in a special account like tickets to anywhere. It was a year’s salary, enough to get us somewhere and keep us for a while.
In the apartment parking lot, I walked under our lighted sliding glass door, excited to talk to Rachel about our trip. She was light-hearted and smart, with a quick and well-reasoned understanding of practically any problem I brought to her. We’d see our way through this hacking together.
In the apartment, she watched a crime show about a killer who backed over his best employee in his car, sawed his bones, and buried him in a suitcase. Rachel painted her nails, as cool and unfazed as the glass of iced tea on the coffee table.
“This killer was everybody’s favorite boss,” she said. “His face made them feel welcome every day. He ran the March of Dimes table at the fair.”
“I’m sure he was very caring and supportive before he started killing everyone.”
“There was blood but there was love. He wasn’t one of these cookie-cutter types.”
“How are you and Leo?” I said.
“He went right to sleep. I had a whole hour to read.”
“Pittsburgh still your first choice?”
“Yes. It’s the only big city where you can show up and rent a cheap house. They have incredibly cheap rent in some sections. I was reading about it today.”
While she watched her show, I wandered to the bedroom, the bathroom, as if expecting to find my hacker behind a door.
That night, while emailing friends and recording grades, browsers danced, the movements playful and orchestrated. One browser narrowed to a tiny box and vanished. Another found the shape of a transom, as if inviting me to gaze into it and see who worked the controls in there. My mouse was restrained, freed, restrained. When I used my phone to record a video of the dancing browsers, my computer screen went still, as if he viewed both screens at once, and I turned off my phone.
New “files” images scattered across my desktop like cards, each signified by a dollar sign. I searched the obvious locations for pictures but found nothing. The Christian leader wanted to create panic that my computer now had something frightful on it.
Next day I wrote and called the police in his state, the FBI, and the Idaho State Police computer crimes division, detailing the document deletions and the porn bombing, and discovered that law enforcement only pursued hacking cases involving money or bodily harm. The computer crimes officer at the Idaho State Police dispelled the common belief that somebody had to be “really good” in order to hack. He said hacking was common. Hiding an IP address was the first thing you learned. As far as prosecuting a hacker, he said you could find articles about people who won hacking cases, but in general it was hard to prove. Any good hacker was going to hide his evidence. Judges tended to throw out those cases, and it was hard to find a lawyer who would take a case against a hacker. Lawyers defended people who were accused of hacking. They didn’t run to assist those who were its victims.
“So,” I said, “with ninety-nine percent of hacking cases—we can’t prove them, and it never happened. Courts won’t listen and people think you’re a little unhinged if you talk about it.”
“That sounds about right. But I don’t think your hacker is a minister.”
“Not a minister—he’s a publisher.”
“If he’s really doing everything you say, he’s a full-time hacker. And I think you’re right that he thinks he can get something from you.”
“He’s free to check out my bank balance. There’s not much there.”
“I’d remove everything about your family online, especially your baby. Take down any photos.”
“You think he might be interested in them?”
“Play it safe. You don’t know what he’s after.”
I took down all pictures of Leo that night.
When I contacted police agencies, my hacker returned some of my notices to my top Google pages. But the hacking of our phones and computers continued just the same.
I looked up articles on hacking cases. Its practitioners were employers, ministers, lovers, husbands, wives, friends, real-estate agents, even high schoolers—all plunging into the unpatrolled forest of the internet, seeking the pleasure of inflicting pain unobserved. There were many hackers with personal grudges. America seemed pent-up and dangerous, many thousands of intelligent people breathing through their teeth in rage, or laughing out loud, sitting behind locked doors and digging sticks into their fellow humans. There were also righteous hackers, those who exposed corporate criminals, for instance, but it was the grudge hackers who made the internet blink red.
