The Lord's Hacker

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.

I stayed up late, speaking rapid, nasty words to the Christian leader at three am, while my computer hissed, certain he could hear me on the microphone.

“You’re fueled by some deep hurt going back a long way,” I said. “That’s so pathetic. You’re like some sociopathic loser. Maybe you’ll blow up a crowded bus in Paris that you think your mother is riding.”

Rachel came out in her robe.

“Just ignore him,” she said. “He’s trying to get a rise out of you. You don’t even know it’s him.”

“Did I wake you up?”

“No. I had to use the bathroom.”

“Look what I found on my phone.” He’d placed a skull picture on my Facebook menu, the words across the top saying, Take your meds. “It’s supposed to look like an article but it doesn’t lead anywhere.”

“That’s shitty,” she said.

“When I edited one of his author’s books, I wrote in a comment that lithium doesn’t make you high. I wrote that I take it, so I know. Who else knows I take medication? No one else knows that, besides doctors and friends and you.”

“That’s a good clue.”

“I’ll tell you who needs meds—the Christian leader. I have a feeling this is going to go on for years.”

“It’s late. Don’t you have to teach?”

“I’ll come to bed.”

“What’s wrong with taking meds? Is it better not to take them when you need to? I bet that guy wouldn’t seek help in a million years.”

I woke at noon. In the kitchen, in a summer dress, Rachel loaded up the stroller with milk and snacks while Leo took each item out and dropped it on the floor.

“We’re walking downtown!” she said. She was thrilled by the small adventure, and I was disappointed that I couldn’t go.

“Wish I’d gotten up earlier.”

“I hope it goes well today,” she said.

“I’m determined to be more easygoing in class. Half of what made me a good teacher at Oregon State was that I could make students laugh. I actually saw students become happy when I walked into the room, some of them. Can you believe that? Can you imagine that? I made them happy.”

She picked up Leo, and he reached for me. I let him take hold of my finger.

“You were funny before we got here,” she said, “and you’ll be funny again. But you do look very sad lately. I have a feeling that Pittsburgh will help. I don’t think they have any Mormons there. Mormons are only part of your problem, but still.”

“I think I could go crazy if this goes on too long.”

“This Christian leader and his porn. It was bad luck to meet this guy.”

“You think it’s him, then?” I said.

“Sometimes.”

“I think it’s him.”

“You need to get used to having him in your life, or you will go crazy.”

“Okay. How?”

“Pretend it’s not happening. Never respond to him. He’ll move on to the next person who dishonors him, or whatever—poor Christian leader.”

“I think it really is him. He was so hurt and angry that I didn’t want to finish those blog articles. And I mentioned the Bible, when that’s his territory. He even swore at me. Then I told him to f-off and that he wasn’t a Christian, and that’s when the hacking really got started.”

“I know, I know. I think it’s him too. But we’ll wait and see. This might go in a different direction.”

Leo fussed, kicking. “We’d better go,” she said.

Later, I walked the clean lawns of campus. Beyond the sports culture of stoic jocks and ecstatic cheerleaders, there were a lot of hyper-normal kids, as if their delicate interiors were papered with the sports posters and pony calendars of home.

In class I apologized for my sleepiness. “I’m beat. I don’t know how I drove to campus with my eyes shut, but I did it.”

A boy in a baseball hat pulled low said, “That sounds weird and dangerous.”

“Let’s try to lighten up,” I said and shut my eyes for three or four seconds. I did that sometimes in class, as if to escape for a moment.

“We need to lighten up?” The speaker was a large young man in a durag with a red mustache. He wore a rodeo T-shirt showing a bull’s face with smoke curling from its mouth. “Last week you said one of our stories we workshopped was going to shock your schizophrenia.”

“No. I said there were so many characters to chase and ponder in ten pages, it was going to throw me into a manic phase.”

“What’s the difference?”

An image of Rachel’s relaxed face appeared. I mirrored it now, easy mouth, good-humored eyes, but I knew I didn’t have it. My student’s schizophrenia reference had caught in my mind, like a black bag in a tree.

“Are you going to tell us something strange and personal?” said the student in the durag.

“No, no,” I said. But I wanted to.

“Tell us something strange!” came a young man’s voice from the rear. He was the editor of the student newspaper and he liked my class.

“Last month I had to go to the ER for my medication,” I told the class. “I got this tall, church-deacon doc who thought I was a drug seeker. He only prescribed me two lithium pills. He was stern, the whole time, following me down the hallway and watching for a minute, as if I was ready to leap the counter and attack the pharmacist. He was angry I had come in for medication.”

“That sucks!” a young woman called from the back. “Did you get them filled somewhere else?”

“I did. In this med trailer on Fairview.”

The kid in a baseball hat said, “How did you know the doctor was a church deacon?”

“I didn’t. He had a pious look. He sure didn’t like me. I think he thought I was a witch.”

A few students to one side of the room brought out nervous amusement. I glanced at them and returned my attention to the hostile center of the room.

Most were tense and skeptical. The student with the therapy dog said, “A few of us have talked about it, and we want to talk about some things, like your harsh teaching?”

“I’m trying to be nicer. I really am.”

“It still seems like you’re making fun of Idahoans.”

“Well, I was born in Boise and spent my childhood in Lewiston. Went to St. Stans. I’m Idahoan.”

“My mom knows one of the sisters who used to teach at St. Stans,” said the guy in the durag. “She’s at that convent in Cottonwood.”

“That’s pretty country,” said the young woman with the therapy dog. “All those canola fields.”

I left the podium and sat in a chair to face them—window light falling on me—as if to show my comfort and friendliness, and I felt easy, so loaded on lorazepam.

“We used to visit the convent to pick blackberries when I was a kid,” I said. “In the tiny museum there, they had a full-sized baby boy in a huge jar of formaldehyde, its umbilical cord floating. I first saw it in second grade. I looked at it for a long time. I wasn’t scared. I thought it was beautiful. It was like a great ad for limbo. It made me feel peaceful. I wrote a story set at the convent years later, but I didn’t include the baby in a jar. It didn’t seem believable, I guess.”

“See,” she said, “things are going okay for two seconds and you go and mention a dead baby. You always go to something like that.”

“I don’t want to hear it either! I don’t need that image in my head,” said a tall blond boy who clung to his desk.

“Why not?” I said.

“This is not instruction!” said the blond boy.

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s conversation. We’ll get back to instruction in a minute.”

“This is not instruction!”

“Can we not shout, please?”

“I’m not shouting!” he said.

“Has everyone read the essay ‘My Dad, the Pornographer’?”

“Why! Why!” said the shouter. “Are we seriously discussing that?”

A young woman cried now, sitting at the front of the class. A lady outside the classroom looked in a couple of times, her hairdo very tall. It might have been her displeased mother.

A cheerleader asked the class, “Have you guys read the essay? I don’t see what the big deal is. It’s not what you think. There’s no porn in it. You should read it.”

“I’m not reading . . . that,” said the crying one. She’d stopped crying but she was back at it now.

“She’s right,” I said and nodded to the cheerleader. “Who has actually read it? It was published in the New York Times. I think I mentioned that.”

The lady in the hall tipped her stiff hairdo into view again. In my side vision it looked like 1960s hair on a stick. The crying girl fled the room.

A red eraser sailed from the back of the class and hit the wall, next to the door.

“Let’s look at ‘My Dad, the Pornographer,’” I said. Most of the class suffered through it quietly, while a few participated in the craft discussion.

When the room had cleared out, the editor of the student paper lingered, as he did sometimes. He was boyish, with thick bangs and big eyes. He seemed to enjoy my shaking things up in class, as if I were trying to steer this class in the direction it was going. He rose and hefted an enormous backpack onto his shoulder, his face humored and approving of me.

“Condom posters were taken down in the dorms yesterday, by the administration,” he said. “Other signs were removed, for their vanilla sexual content, I guess. One was an ad for a play that showed this, like, happy and disheveled girl, covered up in a blanket as if she’d just had sex. The Mormon mothers run this place. BSU won’t tolerate even healthy expressions of sexuality.”

I stood at the window. In the court below, the bronco statue reared onto its hind legs as if ready to trample someone in the shadows.

“Half the class wouldn’t even engage with the Alice Munro story last time,” he said. We had discussed “Wild Swans,” in which a woman on a train is groped by a man pretending to be a preacher.

“It’s more shocking that it was written by a woman,” I said.

“It’s ambiguous sexually, but it’s kind of healthy, too, since she tells about it.”

“I guess it didn’t go well today either.”

“It depends on which side of the class you’re talking about,” he said. “Pretty amusing theater, where I was sitting.”

I raised my hand good-bye and went down the stairs. I’d taught “Wild Swans” in Iowa City, Eugene, Corvallis, and Portland, and never had a problem with it. Nor was mentioning one’s medication ever cause for alarm in a creative writing classroom.

Next day Dean Tim Blanken emailed me. He said the Care Team was preparing to visit my classroom. Care Team members included HR staff, Dean Blanken, and my supervisor. They were ready to meet in my classroom the next week, and I should let him know if I couldn’t make it to class.

I wrote back, “I’m so fucking sick of these drama brats.” I regretted sending it, as I didn’t want to be someone who swore all the time.

While Leo napped, I told Rachel about the email exchange. I made us sandwiches and we ate them standing at the counter.

“You could’ve gotten away with an email like that in the 90s,” she said, “at a different college. But this place is traditional.”

“They have all the HR stuff going—diversity emails, rainbow posters—but right below that, it’s Mormon country.”

She opened her mouth wide, leaned off the sandwich, and removed a wrapped slice of cheese from it. She unwrapped the cheese and placed it between the bread.

“Sorry,” I told her. “I can’t even make a sandwich these days.”

“You have to come off that high dose.”

“I will.”

“They’re crowding you,” she said. “But everyone is acting like drama queens—you, the students, the administration. Don’t go into medical details. Don’t call them drama brats.”

“I didn’t mean to say they were all drama brats. The worst invention was email. Why would they make it like that? You write something rude and hit send. It shouldn’t be so easy. You should be required to verify an email thirty minutes after you write it.”

“What are you going to do, if they let you go?”

“You think they will?” I said.

“There’s not a lot of room for negotiation here. If you’re not going to let the Care Team in. By the name, it sounds like they’re coming with hugs. That seems unlikely.”

“The Mormon Care Bears. I’m not going to let them in. It’s a wellness check.”

“I guess that’s what it sounds like.”

“We have the inheritance for now,” I said. “I think I’ll go blue collar in Pittsburgh. It might be a blessing. I’m amped-out with so much lorazepam. I’m forgetting stuff. I have to take naps in the student union before class. The other day I woke up with my shoes off and my mouth wide open. I was lying on a couch, students everywhere. Did someone take my shoes off or did I do it? I don’t know, I don’t know! I’d never drive with Leo in the car. But I’m basically driving drunk coming home from class.”

“Quit that stuff. I’d like to see my Pittsburgh boy walking back from his job in his dirty T-shirt. As long as you do something.”

“I’ll do something. You don’t think I will?”

“Maybe you should call the dean and ask him your fate right now.”

“He wouldn’t tell me. It needs to be on his time,” I said. “Let’s forget about the dean and have Ed over for dinner one last time.”

“Good. He cheers us up.” Though my drinking buddy, Ed, lived right downstairs, I hadn’t talked to him much since my hacker appeared.

A termination letter came by email from Dean Tim Blanken the next day. “Your recent actions,” wrote the dean, “are not consistent with the established Shared Values of the university.” He said I had refused a Care Team invitation to address and resolve possible concerns in my classroom. I had made inappropriate use of university email, by airing lengthy personal opinions that were not germane to the class. I had used unprofessional language to students and staff.

I emailed my students to say good-bye. It was halfway through the term. The editor of the student paper emailed that he was beginning an article about my firing. “The article will come out in a few days. I plan to cover both sides. Other students enjoyed your teaching as much as I did.”

“Are you sure you have to write an essay about it?” I wrote him.

“I think it’s the story I’ve been waiting to write this whole year. You’ll come out looking fine. I’ll discuss the English department respectfully too. I want it to be two-sided.”

My adjunct and writer acquaintance, Frederick, was taking over my class. He had been distant with me ever since my tension with the department. But he sent an email now, inviting his friends to see Dead Poets Society at his house—he wore sleeve tats and laughed himself to near asphyxiation when he drank, no matter if the conversation was funny, and he was briefly friendly sometimes. He was tall and good-looking at fifty. He liked to elbow into a group and start laughing wildly, even before he spoke or heard what people were discussing. Maybe it was an asset. I couldn’t always tell.

“Just a heads up,” he wrote to all, “Dead Poets is dark and might bring up painful feelings for some.”

I didn’t know whether his warning about this TV favorite was sweet in its concern or bizarre in its innocence, but it was indeed a Boise comment, the kind people here tended to make. With some friends, Frederick was a soldier of liberal causes. To me he confided a disdain for politics. With his students and certain faculty, he was All-American—all sports and Boise morals, quick to implicate the poor and mentally ill who were accused and ridiculed in the Statesman. His contradictions were careful and ambitious in this small world of adjunct maneuvering. Sometimes, when he drank, he wavered between these selves, as if forgetting who he was for a moment, before launching into two minutes of hard laughter.




At our dinner table, Ed was large and bald, deep-voiced and friendly. Leo talked baby utterances to him as if they were old friends. “Is that right?” Ed asked him. “Good to know, little dude.” Ed’s deep natural laughter provoked our own laughter, stronger than we were used to.

When we drank our wine and Leo mouthed his ice-cream cone, Ed said, “That’s rough, man. I guess they pushed you out of their ivory tower on fire. Damn.”

“Adjuncts are on the bottom floor.”

“I’ve never heard that word, adjunct. It must be derived from add junk. When you get hired, they add the junk. When you get fired, they lose the junk.”

Rachel clapped her hands once, delighted.

“I’m only messing with you,” Ed said. “You guys are going to find new lives back east. I’m from Chicago, but I can tell you that, when you get away from the west, people are a lot less freaked out by shit. I hired a sous chef who had a couple robberies as a young person. In Chicago. She had a nice body. That’s what interested me. You see my way of thinking. No, she had a good resume. That’s all most people care about in Chicago. Pittsburgh is the same way. They forgive and forget—unless you got some grand theft auto or some shit. You guys are going to do fine out there.”

“I might like to be a security guard at the Carnegie Museum. A lot of writers and artists work security in the museums out there, especially in New York City but . . .”

Leo kicked and cried. “This one has to get to bed,” Rachel said. “I’m beat too.”

“I’ll give him his milk.”

“You talk to your friend. Leo falls asleep in minutes,” she explained to Ed.

“Rachel, that was exquisite,” Ed said. “I know—I’m a chef. The ricotta shells were perfect. Hard to get those right.”

She mixed the formula and picked up Leo, who cried harder. He didn’t want to go. “We’re going to miss you,” she told Ed and went down the hall.

“That woman is beautiful,” Ed said. “I can tell you you’re not going to keep her by working no security guard job.”

“Her family’s rich, but she’s more accepting than they are.”

“Women become less accepting as they go on.”

“She was a waitress when I met her.”

“She was slumming, for a while,” Ed told me. “Now she’s got a baby. She’ll want that money shaking down.”

“I’ll protect the museum and write her beautiful cards. Actually, she’s not one for personal notes. What would she like? Candy. Candy, flowers, and good white wine.”

“Hear me now. I finished culinary school top of my class. Made chef in ten years. I’ve had that income and respect. The dollars are nice, but respect—that’s what makes a man. Know what I’m saying? Women need to see you’re putting that smoke in the air. Rachel saw it in you, and she’ll need to keep seeing it. I’m not even bullshitting you, man. Take heed. Don’t ever step into no security suit that doesn’t even fit because some huge old fat man wore it last. You put that fucker on, it’s like Houdini trying to get out, only you ain’t Houdini. Another piece of advice. Buy a second house in Pittsburgh. Let the tenants pay your mortgage.”

“Who’s going to buy the first one?”

“Check out Money Monsters at the library. I think that’s the title. I’ll email it.”

“I’d prefer a book about the poor life. Something romantic. The creative security guards of Pittsburg.”

He laid a hand over his face. “You’re kidding, but I think you’re half serious. That’s for weenies. I’m an actual man. Do you think I’m going to like the sound of that?” He laughed and fell on my shoulder. “I fuck with you too much. Adjunct in flames! Adjunct on fire! Look out. Here he comes off the top story!” Leo cried out. “Oh, sh sh. The baby.”

“He’s a good sleeper once he’s under.”

“You sound depressed. You need to read the king of self-help. I told you. Fifteen years ago, after one of his fire-walking seminars, I decided I was a genius, and I started doing some smart shit. Soon I was sexy, too, magnetic, a powerful black man. Your brain hears the words you call yourself. Security guard. World-class professor. Scratch the first one off the list.”

“I couldn’t trust anyone who smiles as much as the self-help king,” I said. “I like non-smilers. Non-smilers are the real champions. They’re life’s big winners.”

“Damn. You say that weirdass shit to your wife?” He shook his head. “You can’t be no poor dude and a big winner.”

“I’m going to be the first one.”

“All right. Send me some updates of you two in Pitt. I’m going to miss all three of you, especially Leo. That little man is happy!”

“I’ll miss all that tipsy driving out to Lucky Peak.”

He pulled a bill from his wallet—a hundred dollars. “Buy the lady dinner. Wear a jacket.”

“We’re okay,” I said. “But thank you, Ed.”

I opened the door and saw him out.

Though Ed lived in the same junk building we did, he was laying low in Boise after a divorce, trying to figure out what to do with his money. His new Mercedes SLK was parked outside of his apartment, and he liked to keep his curtains open so that he could smile at it from time to time. It was a gorgeous car. 

2

One morning, Rachel read my student’s article on the couch, holding her pink tablet that had a Pavement sticker on it. “It doesn’t look good,” she said. Leo laughed in his bounce chair, smashing the diced peaches on his tray. I opened the sliding glass to the good dirt smell that came off the hills, the patio railings covered with a hundred slanting bungee cords. I had doctored the patio in case Leo got out by accident, certain he could’ve fallen between the wide bars. Boise had few codes, even to protect kids. Young teens often leapt from Boise Bridge into the river. A sign said, “Jump at your own risk.”

Across the street, a drone rose above the tall fenced backyard over there. As if its driver had seen me, the drone rose high above the road and kept still. It was like a large toy helicopter but missing its tail and back rotor, and it sounded like a moped.

“I think they’re watching us with their drone. Under surveillance at nine am. Maybe they’re friends with Dean Blanken. I bet you they’re the neighbors who have that Godsvengeance wifi. Get ready for the drone strike!”

“Do you want to read this?” she said.

“Not really.”

“Your student editor said it was going to be balanced. It’s not.”

I closed the door and took the tablet in my hands. “Fired with a lifetime ban,” I said. “The department chair, Ellis, says they are legally prevented from discussing the reasons for my termination. Who invented the lifetime ban nonsense?”

“And they put it in the first line! You would’ve heard about that.”

“Blanken made it up. It was him or the chair. But Blanken is the one who hates me. I violated Shared Values, I denied the Care Team.”

“Some of your students said some nice things about you. But, yes, the lifetime ban sort of kills anything positive.”

I finished the article and looked up Tim Blanken.

“He posted my termination letter on his university page. It’s been live for twelve hours. The chair can’t mention the reasons for my firing, but the dean can post them on his page.”

“I’m stressed out now, after reading this. This is going to follow us around.”

“No. Ed was right. They don’t care so much about public disputes on the east coast. People yell at each other in the street. Why don’t you go do something fun and I’ll take Leo to the park.”

“I wouldn’t mind going back to sleep,” she said.

“We’ll see you in a couple hours. We can have a late lunch.”

Driving through Hyde Park in mid-morning, I passed a few people seated outside at the ice-cream parlor, and they all seemed at once trivial, dissembling, organizational, in my mood, though we had gone there many times and liked it. It was foolish to disdain them. All of Boise wasn’t in on my firing.

Riding toward me was a man on an outsized giant antique tricycle, wearing an old-time railroad hat. It was Loridian, my landlord ten years earlier in Boise. His face was red in the early sun. He was still handsome, and his carnival persona would probably keep him going. I waved when he passed. He didn’t notice me, or else he pretended not to. Loridian was a craft carpenter, a solid reader, a great conversationalist, a stylish dresser, a noncommittal friend, and a pariah in Boise—after sleeping with so many daughters and sons, wives and husbands. He’d detailed the funny parts of his adventures to me. But he didn’t tell me that he slept with my then-wife Lucia till she and I were divorced, living in Oregon in different cities, and Loridian, still in Boise, presented his boast under cover of commiseration on the phone, suggesting it was her campaign and he gave into it. “She always got what she wanted,” he said. “You knew that better than anybody.” But I had forced him to come out with it—I lied and told him I already knew what happened between them.

The contraption he rode was a spidery thing in the rearview. I had loved renting two sides of that cinderblock duplex surrounded by trees and plants, when Loridian was our friend. I had a new wife now and my contempt for him had gone away.

At Camel’s Back Park, I set Leo’s carrier on a bench so that he faced the desert hill. It was yellow in the sun—charged—drawing the eyes so that everything else seemed to disappear.

“I’m going to miss the light here,” I told Leo. “I’ve never seen any kind of light like Idaho.”

“Mm.” He drank his bottle and scrunched his toes. He was taken by the hill too, and by the sky that was so blue it was purple. It must have seemed like magic country.







Later in the day, during Leo’s nap—Rachel was still asleep—I called English and the dean’s office. Nobody there would talk to me. I spoke to the editor at the student newspaper.

“Did you like it?” he asked.

“Well, you used the photo that Boise Weekly used for my Enter the Mausoleum interview about my grave robbery book. If you were going for Bela Lugosi, that was a good choice.”

“I was thinking more . . . Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs.”

“Who said I had a lifetime ban?”

“The English department.”

“The department chair said I had a lifetime ban? You didn’t ask her anything about that?”

“I didn’t.”

“Look at the university page for the dean’s office,” I told him.

There was typing on his end. “I’m looking at it right now,” he said. “It is a contradiction. They’re not supposed to reveal information about your firing. I could ask the manager if we could do a follow-up.”

“Please do. The administration skewed it. They want readers to draw the worst conclusion, by saying my behavior was too bad even to mention. But the dean is feeding the mothers my termination letter, to let them know that nothing untoward happened. My diagnosis, and the terrifying porn essay, are the real shockers, but none of that is mentioned. They have to talk around those issues, in a way that gives force.”

“I take it you’re not seeing the positives in the article. Two of the students we interviewed love the class. I didn’t mention my own enthusiasm since I wrote the article.”

“The lifetime ban wrecks any positives. Can you find out who made that up? You have a chance to fix this. I can’t believe you didn’t ask about a lifetime ban.”

There was no follow-up, and the article hovered high on page one of my Google pages. I continued teaching two classes at College of Western Idaho, in Nampa. The hallways at the college were high-ceilinged and interminable, like a major airport without any gates. The classrooms were like airport waiting areas. Flyers on the walls advertised patriotic student groups. One day, in my creative writing class, a young woman in the back row spoke in a raised voice to her friend next to her, “He has bipolar!” She had a red, squinting face.

“Who does?” I said, but she didn’t say.

My teenage protagonist in my novel—a sympathetic graverobber—has bipolar, like I did, mine a milder form of it, and I never robbed a grave.

Later in a hallway, Gracelynn, the department chair, a ruddy, outdoors woman, walked toward me with no greeting, all politeness vanished since the Arbiter article had come out. People here seemed to believe that I had intentionally gone to public battle with the university. “Gracelynn,” I said as she passed me, “could I speak with you a second?”

I mentioned my student’s bipolar comment. “Yelling in class and calling people out on mental health issues must be Idaho occupations,” I said. “I’ve seen a lot of that lately.”

“They are Idaho students,” she said. “I can’t ask them to be otherwise.”

Gracelynn turned and walked on. The dean, Winnifred, was also distant. In the department office, where I went to make copies, Winnifred regarded me with a lowered chin and wary eyes and went out the door. Small in a white blouse and blazer, she published well-written blog posts about life in middle age, and she was warm. It was painful that I existed beyond her sympathy now.

A faculty member, a curly-haired youth group leader, made copies. He nodded to me and I went over. He made a rectangle of his mouth and sucked air through his teeth, as if to signify he had painful information. “A law student at the university of Idaho wrote that Boise has a loon running around. That’s you, bro. Sorry. He wrote it on a university chat site, but the screenshot of his post is getting around.”

“I guess Winnifred and Gracelynn heard about it.”

“I can’t confirm that information, bro. It’s beyond my purview. But, yes—they did.”

I left the office after my next class and motored the highway toward Boise, watching my mirrors as if I was pursued. Out ahead, blue sky spread over the capitol building like God’s own promise of good weather for the Boise faithful.

Some of the teachers at CWI carried hidden weapons. Since I knew some of them were armed, the shunning I received was all the sterner. Of course, no one was going to shoot me. But I imagined that one or two of my fellow teachers—or even the rugged chair herself—felt comfortable knowing they could take me out if I tried anything looney.

That stuck in my craw what Gracelynne seemed to imply: it was Idaho students’ nature to ridicule and deride. In fact, most of my students at CWI were friendly and open-minded, no monolith of armed, prejudiced rubes.

In the coming days I managed an adjustment, discovering it was fun to stand against Boise. Though I didn’t want the rumors to get worse, I wouldn’t have pulled a lever to stop them.

All the while, the Christian leader breathed his repulsive breath into our home, a sneaky but active presence, as though he stood in his robe behind the curtains, a rose in his hand, ready for a bit of play. Not only was he hacking my wife’s phone, but he deleted a picture of her on my Facebook—it was the most beautiful photo of a woman I had ever seen. We rode a historical Idaho train after we learned she was pregnant. She was seated across from me in the dining car, in a black dress and her hair long and black, and she looked as easy about life as anyone could.

I looked him up and found a video he created at the Christian college that housed his enterprise. It was a trailer for a mock miniseries called The Interns: four hot young women, one crossing her legs to offer a flash of thighs, one touching a pencil to her open mouth, another leaning forward to present modest cleavage.

He continued to doctor my Google pages. Onto the first page he lifted “Drowning in Confusion,” a negative review of my novel, after he dropped the good ones. It seemed petty to worry about Google content. But all of this matters to a writer. Editors and others get a sense of your accomplishments by glancing at your first Google page. A lack of prestigious content can result in you getting passed over.

Many of these dropped items rose again. Some of them stayed put, and some fell farther down. He had a special hatred of my Antioch Review notice. It was too prestigious. He drop-kicked that one to hell’s own reaches, since it was a very old and beloved magazine.

He dropped another meds meme with a picture of troubled man holding a handful of pills in his hands, the words below, I n-n-neeeed theeese. The meme was the first thing I saw when I opened my phone. Then it vanished. Another photo he placed in my phone featured a screenshot of many people searching a hillside for a lost woman. Another day, when I was at home, he placed a photo of Leo as a newborn as the first view when I opened my phone. I sat carefully in a straight-backed chair in the living room while Rachael held Leo on the patio and pointed at something and spoke to him in the early evening. “Don’t hurt my family,” I said, as if my hacker could hear. A Christian leader. That title seemed as frightening as any mafia now.

That evening, she looked him up on various sites and discovered a Facebook page in his name with four shiny penises in the banner, as if the person who made the page was familiar with his gifts of porn.

“We got him,” she said. “This shows he has attacked others with his porn.”

“Does it really show anything? He’d probably say I made the page.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“We’re not talking about going to court at this point. We’re talking about connecting this person to other cases of porn hacking. This shows it. We’ve got our guy. Come on. I’d thought you’d be happier.”

“I’m happy. I’m not saying I’m not.”

Later, in bed, while Rachel read a book in the light of her lamp, I gazed at the lamp’s shadow in a high corner or the room. “What if it’s someone else? Would that be better or worse? Of course, we can’t know. Fuck.”

“You mean, he’s sending dick pics to other people, and someone else is sending porn to us? That’s very unlikely, Christopher.”

“It seems like he’d be more careful, given his position,” I said. “Now he’s moving to death threats?”

“He’s floating ambiguous images that law enforcement isn’t going to care about.”

“But the conflict seems so small. Why would he come after me for something so insignificant?"

“Narcissistic personality disorder. Did you look it up?”

“I did.”

“I read about it some more,” she said. “A person with that disorder can commit serious violence on a whim and show up at dinner with friends right afterward. No change in his personality.”

“I guess we’re sure now. We’re sure it’s him?”

“You were hammered with porn right after you told him to fuck off. I’m seeing a connection.”

“I know. I got spooked is all. My mind’s going to all the cracks in my own conclusions. It seems scarier that a Christian leader is responsible. It means he’s comfortable committing crimes, right off the bat, no reservations, no moral problems. He scares me. He could do anything. Some random weirdo might walk away when he got bored. But a Christian leader who does this is going to chase you to the very end. He has two personalities, both of them strong. He’s probably psychotic. He needs to do this. He wants to very badly. He can’t stop.”

“Yes,” she said. “We’re like his food or something.”

I leaned forward to see her bedside table. “Your phone! You brought your phone in here!”

“I don’t care what he hears. I’m going to sleep. If I can. Jesus. Now I have to convince you of everything. We know who our porn hacker is. Let’s not forget it.”

“No. You’re right. I needed to hear you tell it. I thought for a second that if I stopped believing in him, he’d forget about us.”

“I need you strong. Keep an eye out for anything else that might reveal this person. I copied the address of that Facebook page. But cops aren’t going to do anything about dick pics. Still, we’re on to this Christian leader. We know who our mean little boy is, at least.”

“Have you prayed about it?” I said.

“No. This guy seems all mixed up with God. I feel like I’d accidentally pray to the Christian leader for a second.”

“Once you get an abusive Christian in your life, your belief is probably cooked. But we can still go to mass sometimes.”

“Those people would tear us apart,” she said.

When she turned off the lamp, I continued to stare at the wall where the shadow was, as if waiting for answers there, in the black room.

I had told my publisher, in Eugene, and a few journalists about the Christian leader’s behavior. All of them disbelieved my concerns and had to get off the phone. There was a social agreement that grudge hackers didn’t exist at all. Any mention of them showed mental instability or a wild imagination. Hackers were like ten-foot-tall squirrels who walked on two legs, smoked cigarettes, looked out of burnt eyes, and dragged wagons full of Molotov cocktails, and we were fools to believe we actually had one in our lives. The only people who believed in hackers were high-level law enforcement.

My hacker’s name was Mathew Stjohn. But we called him the Christian leader, and we called him Father Peeks.





I traded in my Tacoma for a little blue Scion that was like a European car or a piggy bank, so that we’d have a place for Leo to ride, and Rachel sold her old Ford station wagon.

The Arbiter piece had done its work, a carpet bombing of my name and reputation. It was a day wasted when I neglected to show my face to those who knew it, even if it simply meant hitting the record store or one of the bars I went to. Most people didn’t know who I was on sight, but some did, and sometimes they told their companions—that unmistakable leaning together and talking. A few of the ladies who worked at the library stared hard when I went in there. I had been a promising Idaho author when I gave a reading at the library months ago. Now I was dangerous. Boise was a city where you could be infamous fast, and it was a pleasure to attract wholesome eyes about town. I was the mentally ill, pill-popping pornographer who had encouraged his students to take drugs and solicit prostitutes.

It was at this time that Leo began walking, in his eighth month. Rachel and Leo and I danced for two days—he loved the Guided by Voices song “Hot Freaks”—and nobody could pollute it for us.

The following week Rachel, Leo, and I went to my family potluck. They were a handful of friendly people in Western clothing. My aunt was very old and she had light in her eyes. “Well, honey, you look juss like your dad.” They had brought fried chicken, deviled eggs, and Shasta on ice. My cousin Arty was there, a man who lived in a trailer and painted, drew, and made canes. Arty could make two or three friends while pumping gas in his truck.

“Rachel is unbelievable, you son of a bitch,” he told me. “She reminds me of your mother. Is she a Catholic girl?”

“Not really. She wanted to be a Catholic, but we both felt alienated soon enough.”

“It’s not going to be easy to hold onto a woman like that.” He winked in good-natured chiding.

“That’s what I keep hearing,” I said.

Rachel and Leo were surrounded by smiles. When it was time to say good-bye, my aunt’s shaky hand patted us. “You’re a good old buster. Don’t get too much college or your mouth will turn upside down. No, we’re proud of you. But try to stay out of the funny papers next time.”

“Did you have fun, Leo?” I asked him on the drive home.

“Wow,” said Rachel. “Your aunt is old school, with that mountain accent. Were your parents like that?”

“A bit. Not really. My dad went to college. Boise State, as a matter of fact. All the uncles are gone. Man, my grandpa beat all of them. He’d tackle one of them and punch his head, or else chase one into the barn with a hose and whip him. My dad told me that.”

“Did any of the uncles treat their family that way?”

“No, they were verbal assholes sometimes,” I said. “Let’s go for a drive.”

“Leo’s tired. You can go.”

I dropped them off and drove a desert road till I saw the Snake River, deep below cliffs, carving a meandering line in the heat. A canyon wall shone red in the evening light. I parked on the high road and stood at the guardrail on the other side. Rattlesnakes sounded and went quiet. By the water, trails cut through leaning grass. Rattlers must have coiled in the cool shadows. The snakes were out, and I was staying up here.

A man and woman drove a truck up the hill and parked beside me. He appeared very clean in a light green flannel and the woman next to him was tidy. She rolled down the window. It smelled of perfume and powder. They were seniors.

“Some view, isn’t it?” the woman said. “God made that, you know.”

“It’s possible.”

“Possible!” the man said. He spoke in singsong fashion as if to retain a friendly manner: “There are certainties, there are absolutes, and hell or heaven awaits.”

Before I could contradict him, he drove on. They were like a hundred people I had known in Lewiston. There were different kinds of Christians, but some had to talk to strangers about their faith. At least this couple was pleasant about it.

My Idahoans were the hermits in the mountains, the Boise drinkers who were poets and had few friends, and the cowboy philosopher I knew in Riggins, who cared for the horses on the property Lucia and I rented on Seven Devils Road, after we finished our graduate programs. On a windy day in the snow, the cowboy and I traded impressions of the novel Housekeeping, as the snow traveled sideways across the horses and the trees above the creek. “I like that lady snowman,” he said. “The two sisters make it, and it stands in a cold wind. Their aunt Sylvia isn’t one you’d forget. She puts her signature on things. She sure changed Ruth. There’s not too many times where a no-account vagrant influences a child to follow her and it’s a good thing.”

Into the mix was the artist James Castle, a deaf man in a rural town who created art despite a great silence—or because of it—and there was Ezra Pound, born in Hailey, and Mary Clearman Blew, by way of Montana, and John Rember, whose book about the Sawtooths explores identities of an earlier decade in the west.







We stacked our belongings into a pod and cleared out of Boise, setting out for Pittsburgh. We traveled under mouse-colored plateaus of desert sameness, then followed a peaceful line through pine country, under a clear sky. On two sides of the road, pine woods lay visible with rags of sunlight on the ground, and it was all light and warmth in there.

In Wyoming, we checked into a gray-brick hotel where murderers and bank robbers had stayed, one of a hundred outlaw motels in the state. The ground floor was dim and there were leather chairs and green lamps on the tables. I felt more confident about the outlaw pedigree here when I saw a BAR sign over windowed doors: they didn’t call it a “Saloon.”

On the top floor, Leo ran down a hallway. I ran ahead of him to see what he might greet beyond our sight. But there were no open windows.

In our room, Leo settled on the bed and pointed at the TV. He called out when I turned the channel, a show featuring an ape planting his ass here and there and jibbering.

“No, no,” Leo said.

“It’s the Christian leader!” I said.

I landed on Mary Poppins.

“He locked my phone again,” I said.

“Why does he do that?”

“Because it’s a pain in the ass. I have to enter my code every time he does it. And he gets to remind me that nothing—no change of code—can keep him out.” We had already changed phones and got a new computer, changing passwords often. Our hacker slipped into our new devices easily.

“Let’s put the guy out of mind on this trip,” she said. “For six days, we’re travelers, enjoying the view.”

I let my phone fall out of my hand onto the bed. “You’re right. I have an idea,” I said. “Let’s take turns going to the bar. You go get a drink, and I’ll go get one when you come back.”

“You go first. I love this crazy old place.”

I came back with a half pint of Jim Beam and a bottle of diet Coke.

“Did you go to the bar?”

“There was a banker-looking guy watching TV. You can go. I thought I’d prefer to have a drink in our room.”

“I’ll stay here,” she said. “You know, Mary Poppins only gets lifted by ropes occasionally, that’s all. She doesn’t look magical or like she’s flying.”

“Wow—dark,” I said and smirked. “You can really go to the dark place.”

She kicked my leg. “A touch more booze, please? I’m having only one drink, and I would like to taste it.”

In Iowa, we were excited to visit a “national park.” We got lunch at a supermarket, drove country roads to the national park sign, and walked an eternal lawn between two groves of trees that were overgrown in thick underbrush. It was humid and clouds of bugs chased us. In twenty minutes, I felt as if the lawn was rising, though I couldn’t be sure.

“This is the national park? Okay, let’s find some shade for our blanket.”

Leo squatted a bit, with one leg foremost and pointing ahead. A chipmunk had raced to the center of the lawn, hesitated. It turned around and sprinted for cover in the trees.

We drank water in the sun.

“This air is hot soup,” she said. “Let’s get this kid back to the car.”

“Somebody mows this national park. You can see the marks in the grass.”

“I think we’re going to miss the west. That’s okay. I don’t miss it yet!”

In the car, we had a feast of turkey sandwiches and drinks from the cooler. A screen on the rear side window blocked the sun, and Leo lay in shadow. A beneficence was here in the car—we were enroute, between lives, the last place back there and the new place up ahead. We didn’t mention it, but the goodness of it was in our voices as we talked about other things.




3

Our house in Pittsburgh was a narrow clapboard set on a rise of land, with three crooked staircases going up the lawn, each twisted at an angle, as if the ground below was traveling in a detrimental flux. Indoors, Leo yelled as he trotted about, charmed by the echoes he made against the walls and wood floors. The staircase leading up to the bedrooms was steep—it seemed that anyone who fell on it would slide to a rapid injury on the landing. Out back, our yard was a green hill that sloped to our brick patio and back door. The retaining wall in front of our patio leaned toward us at a sharp angle, as if folding against the pressure of the falling yard.

Rachel, Leo and I had stepped out to the patio, inspecting our place.

“Isn’t this nice?” Rachel said, her gaze playing above our yard to the houses farther up. Our house stood in shadow, and blue sky had turned white beyond the top of the hill.

“Leo can’t play out here,” I said. “This retaining wall is going to collapse.”

“It’s fine. It’s been leaning for years.”

“It’s not going to lie down gently on the ground. It’s heavy cement, with a ton of dirt behind it, and one day it’s going to crash down, and the dirt sliding right over the top.” I picked Leo up. “He can play in the side yard.”

Rent for the house was six-hundred, two-hundred cheaper than our Boise apartment. This blue-collar neighborhood in Pittsburgh might have had the cheapest rent in the country. That night, we slept on a queen-sized camping foam in the dining room, the three of us. At first Leo lay in front of his mother, then in front of me, but turned around so that his feet were shoved under my chin, and sunlight found him lying on his back on the floor.

We walked the streets that went down and down into shadows and rode again into the sunlight. A city train rocked into view between two hills, its side clad with square siding that looked faded and patched.

“This is Mr. Roger’s neighborhood,” she explained to Leo, but he didn’t get it. “I wonder if they have any trolleys this far from the city center.”

“I would only hope they’d stop completely, before letting passengers on and off.”

“Of course they stop.”

“They didn’t used to. I’ve seen videos of the trolleys.”

“When—from the 50s? I’m sure they practice the full stop at this late date.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sure they let everyone on and off now. I’m only worried because of Leo.”

“Let’s explore. Let’s check out the city. Don’t be so worried about everything!”

At the Warhol Museum, Leo liked the dark media room. The walls shimmered with projections of old films while Velvet Underground songs played. He ran close to a wall and raised his arms over his head as if to salute the actors who sat, slept, stared at nothing. The films explored uncomfortable and interesting moments of interior lives.

Back in the car, Rachel was driving us across a bridge when I touched the dash, as though preparing for a fender bender.

“I’ve been driving for twenty years,” she said.

Our furniture arrived. The pistachio green walls improved our plaid couch, worn and shabby after the move, one of the legs askew, the stuffing visible at a popped seam on an arm. We bought yet another computer, an Apple laptop, for family use—a silver beauty that would surely minimize the hacking.

We had set up wifi after two days here. Once again, the Christian leader was a constant presence in our home. Hacking must have given him a rush that helped him with his tasks. I imagined that doing his work and hacking us—going back and forth like that—amounted to a smooth and agreeable flow. But at this time he didn’t bother us regarding job applications and the like, as if there was an ethic to his hacking, perhaps a Christian ethic, such as it was. During one lengthy application for the post office, I was, absurdly, grateful that he left us alone when we were engaged in family business. The application took many hours recording addresses going back ten years, etc., and he could have deleted it.

The night was his time for wreckage. Once, I changed my email password, logged out, and the app opened to my inbox before my eyes. I changed the password again, logged out, and it opened. He demonstrated there was no privacy for me online. He owned me there. He discovered any password change, any phone passcode, and recorded them into some system that he was able to use at any time.

My brother worked in tech in Portland. His advice to fight this hacker was to “reset the computer” and “change your passwords”—and other IT-style advice. I had to roll my eyes at that. It wasn’t the first time I had received that caution. In fact, capable hackers got into your computer. They used “forced entry,” allowing them to bypass passwords and all other security. As far as password changes, you might as well write them in chalk on a rainy sidewalk for all the security they provided, unless you had a low-level phishing hacker, who needed passwords. But perhaps this type wasn’t really a hacker. Regarding advice to reset or wipe your computer, an ardent and skilled hacker could have simply reentered after your computer was cleaned up.

We are amazed by the skills of Russian hackers who get into computers at the Pentagon, but we believe that advice from the local IT department is effective against all other hackers. No reset, firewall, or complex password kept my hacker out. Once, I read a detective’s advice about hacking. He recommended turning off the computer whenever possible. He said “Nobody’s getting in when your computer’s off.” But that was wrong. My hacker entered my computer any old time. One morning in Boise, I opened my computer to an advertisement for a counseling service, the words up top announcing, We’re always here for you.

Rachel and Leo were asleep upstairs. I sat at the kitchen table adding to my warped circle of empty beer cans on the table, searching his name online.

“The Interns” video had vanished from the internet, like something hushed up.

This man treated people as he pleased and covered up the evidence. There was no telling if he would stay in the digital realm to inflict his punishments—or have someone enter our home with a child inside. I wanted other people to witness his behavior.

While I cut and pasted emails of faculty he’d worked with, and other Christian faculty, my screen jagged or froze. Grabbing each new email took minutes. It was no surprise that he didn’t want me harvesting contacts from his colleagues and others.

When I resorted to these gonzo tactics over days—compiling an email list that included his wife, friends, colleagues, fellow parishioners, administrators, priests—our hacker was awake to his passion like at no other time. He reordered the words of incoming emails so they were impossible to read, for an entire day. On my phone he presented a photo of a teddy bear with a lipstick frown and its eyes pulled off. He wallpapered my computer with a photo of a woman pushing a baby carriage in front of a hospital, and the photo disappeared seconds after I saw it.

On Sunday morning, he must’ve driven to church angry, then taken communion with a studied ecstasy, walking to his seat with joy for all to see. He was Father Seems. Father Seems cared a great deal about his appearance. Out in public, he was a man of God. At home he welcomed devils into his locked office. What God saw or didn’t see mattered to him little. It was other people—their eyes—that stung him at all.

As if to show he was displeased that I had 125 emails, he closed my Word document of a novel I worked on the next morning. He deleted the last six pages of it—a warning. Though he could have wiped out the emails and my novel, he tended to work in a measured fashion, as if he felt his hacking was less traceable that way.

In my first email, I described the hell the Christian leader had brought to us and explained that we needed people who might listen to our story. One semi-famous Catholic author wrote back to all: “I don’t know what you think you imagined here, but you need professional help.” I looked this guy up. He was a deacon at his church. Online were a few pics of him giving the host at mass with a demon’s glee.

My wife wrote a letter to the women in his life, emailing it to everyone on the list.

“. . . Even if you don’t believe he has hacked us,” Rachel wrote, “then I ask you, why is this public Christian telling my husband he is going to make an enemy of him? And why do you believe it simply stopped there?”

We received notes expressing sadness or offering prayers. One faculty member said I needed a letter from a lawyer to show me how to behave.

I replied to all, “This email expedition is shut down until further notice.” They were with Father Seems. They’d be with him even more if I started a fight against the group.

At the college where he taught, I brought harassment charges against him for hacking me and my wife and for exploiting the college women in the intern video. I attached all of his memes he’d sent and the Facebook porn page. HR told me there would be an investigation. In a month, an HR person wrote, “He said he has done nothing wrong,” the letter stated. Apparently, the investigator asked him if he felt he’d done anything wrong—Nope—and they called it good.

“Directing four girls to bend over and show their cleavage and etc. is okay in a Christian school?” I wrote back. “Why am I not surprised? Christian girls can be put to almost any use, and if anything happens to them it’s their fault.”







The day after my exchange with HR, Father Peeks closed my Word document, in my office, and opened twenty browser pages one after another. Rachel leaned into my office, wearing her painting apron over her clothes.

“Is he hacking you?” she said. “Same here. My phone’s hot and the screen’s gray. I had to turn off my phone so it wouldn’t bug me.”

“He’s on the west coast, at least. In Boise I used to imagine I’d open the front door and find him standing there.”

“He might as well be in the house. I can practically smell his breath.”

The coming days were tense with the anticipation of more hacking. The Christian leader seemed responsible for any irregularity in the world. There was a preliminary construction project that sounded like bombs exploding, in the opposite side of the canyon, the air slamming the front of our house whoosh-boom. The houses across the street were built on lower ground, and the air traveled right over the rooftops. I conjured Father Seems as foreman or army captain, watching our house in his binoculars after the sounds of bombing. There’s a small child in there, he'd say. Bring it to rubble!

Outside of this difficulty with my stalker, Pittsburgh was a gorgeous city with skinny, tall houses in rundown neighborhoods that were affordable and lovely. Many in the country were excited about Pittsburgh’s new rich, hip neighborhoods, as if the city needed to transform into Seattle to gain value as a destination. Our district of Beechview was blue-collar, low-rent, Catholic, and shabby, and all the people we met were from Pittsburgh.

Many neighborhoods in the city were traditional. Unions were big. A working-class pride prevailed. There were churches all over. Downtown, men wore suits and women skirts, and one saw boys and girls in Catholic school uniforms in every district. Muscle cars dominated. Though it wasn’t my world, I was interested in the surface of the city’s culture, which I observed like a tourist. It was all very 1975, alpha men and feminine women, with an old-fashioned worldview implied in most conversations one had or overheard.

Some of our neighbors had statues of Mary in their front yards. Leo drew them out. They asked us a lot of questions. They liked the couple with the toddler until it was clear I wasn’t working. I wanted to say that I had money to last us a while, but I resented the need to explain it, and so we all stopped saying hello to each other. They were friendly with Rachel and Leo, but they presented stern faces to me or else smiled with distant eyes.

When I took Leo for a walk one time, in the cool air when the leaves were turning, I held him by a backpack leash, fearing that he’d run into the street. He was a runner, and he believed all the world was safe. A woman in a rusted Cadillac stopped the car beside us, and we stood at her open window. She wore a wig and had on a heavy blue coat. “Gotta keep ‘em close! Oh, he’s a beautiful boy. Look at his eyes. How’s the job hunt?”

“I was hired at the post office. Holiday shift.”

“That’s only five weeks! You’re going to need something permanent.” She was annoyed but smiled through it. “You’ll find something. You’re the man of the house!”

She traveled on.







We visited the Carnegie Museum often, walking the tall hallways. A Cezanne self-portrait exhibited a down-looking eye, as if to suggest an inward mood.

One day, I took lorazepam and approached the Rodin sculptures and the brief wall of Pissarro, the peace coming on, the listing, floating sensation, the quiet, mild ecstasy and the strange imaginings that happened when I only took it only sometimes. But I had to keep the dose low and take it twice a week and no more.

Rachel and Leo had gone to see dinosaurs in the same building. In two hours, we met in the great hallway that traveled to the café at one end. “Out!” Leo said, and Rachel let him out of the stroller. He trotted between people and around benches, and we were close behind him all the way to the café where he jumped and moved his arms and asked the counter staff for a cookie.

At a table Rachel said, “Leo loved the Van Gogh.”

“What Van Gogh?”

“You missed it? You were standing right there. Leo kept calling it yard. You didn’t see it? We were looking right at it with you. You should go look at it. It’s on the second wall, on a side cap.”

“I missed it? How did I miss it?”

I took the elevator up and found the painting. The Van Gogh was a damp gloomy, gorgeous field. I tried to interrogate the canvas about its melancholy feeling, the wind in the grass, and the unsettled birds, one that flew almost upside down, but I couldn’t get inside it as I wanted to. My heart beat fast. It must have been the lorazepam. I was coming off the good feeling. Holding my phone, I rested on a bench, when I found literary rejections on an open browser. When I pulled up a fresh browser now, literary rejections remained, as if it was my new personal page that described my life and future. I closed Chrome and opened Safari. Both of them showed this site as the default page. I didn’t know what it meant, beyond the Christian leader’s belief that I was going to have a lot more rejections. I had already expected as much.

At the café downstairs, Leo was tired and didn’t mind my picking him up and placing him in his stroller. “You drive home,” I said to Rachel. “I took my drugs.”

“Why? Just to get high?”

“No, not just that. I wanted to forget about Father Peeks.”

Rachel drove us into the slow traffic. I napped on the drive and felt improved. After she got her wine at the state-run store, we drove into the old firehouse beer place, and Leo cooed at the lighted glass doors offering cases of beer. “I want the biggest case of cheap American beer that you’ve got,” I said to a man with a mustache and feathered hair. He had come to my side of the car since he figured I was the one who wanted the beer. He went into a freezer and carried out a giant silver case. “52-pack, local brew,” he said.

“That’s a double case,” I said. “I’ll have to put this in the trunk.”

“That’s a man-sized box, all right,” he said. “Enjoy that, buddy.”

We entered the tubes, the thrumming traffic and the sparkling walls in dim light.

“Pittsburgh is pro-drinking,” I said, as if defensive about the monster case. “No one is going to frown at us for that, at least.”

“We don’t drink like we used to, before Leo came along. That’s a good thing.”

“I was always impressed by how sober we were when hammered,” I said. “We read poetry out loud and paused films to give commentary.”

“We were in love,” she said.

“Were?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“God, I feel all prickly, and like my head’s full of pressurized air. I think if I lie down I’ll float out the window, like one of Warhol’s balloons, and just keep going.”

“That’s a new one,” she said. “Let’s make an appointment for you.”

At home, in the kitchen, I poured out a bag of Asian food in a pan. Rachel liked the dish.

“Let’s get you in your hungry chair,” I told Leo.

“Hungry chairs, hungry momma,” he said.

Rachel laid out a sliced hardboiled egg for the kid. “I looked at our bank balance,” she said. “We bought three museum memberships. I’m not sure what we were thinking.”

“But we’ll have those all year, when we’re broke.”

“I don’t want to be broke,” she said. “The account is sinking faster than we thought it would. The money isn’t going to last a year. Maybe another couple months.”

“I sent off my professional resume the other day to a weekly, and when the editor wrote back, my blue-collar resume was attached. I think Father Seems replaced it right before I sent it, but I know everything seems like a hack now—even my own screwups.”

“He’s responsible for the lion’s share of all this garbage.”

With my fork I picked around in my food and left it alone. There were little shadows under the sprouts and noodles.

“Last night in the bathroom, I understood that he was unable to hack a mirror. He can’t get into this mirror and look at me or Rachel. I considered other things he couldn’t hack. He can’t hack . . . the grass.” My eyes wetted when I said the grass. “We should get outdoors more. People used to enjoy the sky more. I’m sure they did.”

She watched me, her eyes tense and private.

“Of course,” I said, “I don’t know anything about the natural world. I don’t know the first thing about living like that. I’m sure I won’t ever try.”

“We’re both under a lot of pressure. I wish that religious idiot would leave us alone! You’re still taking the one milligram, right? Of lorazepam?”

“Yes. The pills are two milligrams, but I break them in half. I rarely take it anymore.”

“Try not to go back to two. Two knocks you out. I also saw you’ve saved up about a thousand pills in that wide container. Try not to take them unless it’s for an interview. You need that stuff to work while you’re applying for jobs.”

I cast a squirrely glance at the cupboard above the sink. It had seemed better they were open to view than hidden in my trunk. Hidden drugs were dangerous and shameful, while drugs in the light remained legitimate medications.

“Do you think you’ll be able to work?” she said.

“Of course. I’ve always worked. I’m not sure why you keep asking me that. You’re talking like I’m some kind of drug addict.”

“No. This horrible fatass is lying on you while you’re flat on your back. I know it’s difficult. I’m not sure what to do. I’ll make an appointment for you tomorrow.”

At his chair, Leo threw his milk cup and cried.

“Leo and I are going to bed early tonight,” she said.

Before dawn, I rose and completed three job applications, my hands rapid and sure, filling all the boxes, submit, submit.

Western Psychiatric got me an appointment for the following week. My med-check doctor was short, wore his hair greased back, and smirked out of one side of his mouth, an exhausted, sardonic look.

“No, I don’t think you’re having a manic phase. You’re taking a thousand milligrams of lithium every day, but you could go into hypomania.”

“Oh yeah. I usually like that one.”

“You wrote you take lorazepam occasionally, for fun and anxiety. Let’s save it for anxiety. We’re talking about a drug that is dangerous when abused. Save it for level-seven days. Skip the fun here. This is medicine.”

In two days I attended a bipolar support group, ten or twelve men and women around a seminar table. Many described extreme, terrible events in their lives, and I felt crowded by their stories, fearing my own condition might get worse, and had nothing to say. On the train home I crossed a river in the dark—the windy water reflected the city lights in stray patches in the black—and I fretted about the violence of so many of my kindreds. The singer Daniel Johnston, bloodying his friends and landing in state institutions. “Hi, how are you? I work at McDonalds.” Wham. Last year, Rachel’s friend discovered that her husband had bipolar, and about fifty of her Facebook girlfriends told her to take the kids and leave this instant, and other advice.

I felt a transformation coming on, everything for my family, not a perfect husband and father, but a good provider, and much improved.







Next day the editor of a Pittsburgh lifestyle magazine asked me to meet him at a food and shopping gallery. The current issue had a restaurant review that appeared stylish and compelling at a glance. I was getting ready in the bathroom when Rachel said, at the bottom of the stairs, “Can you watch Leo for two hours later? I’m climbing the walls. I need to drive fast, if possible, and smoke, and listen to The National, or I’ll lose my mind. Can you do that?”

“Of course. Are you okay?”

“You go to your interview. I’ll feel better if one of us has a job.”

In a district nearby, I rode the escalator to the second floor where there was a high-end food court, a sushi counter, a salad bar, no fast food in sight. A man was seated at a table with a pink sweater over his shoulders. His right index finger twitched as I passed by. In two minutes, I went back to him.

“Are you the editor for . . .”

“Yes, that’s me. I thought it was strange you kept going. I motioned to you. I thought that was strange.”

He didn’t seem to listen during the interview, but I got the job as managing editor. “Your resume puts me more at ease than you do. But I have a feeling you can do it. We have a meeting next week. You’ll make sense of our writers’ ideas and tell them how to finish their pieces. Read the past issues and write an essay, about Pittsburgh—something positive—that will be ready for publication. I want you showing your talents right away.” He motioned to my clothes. “That sports jacket’s okay for campus, but we like to dress up. Can you get a couple of new jackets? A new pair of shoes too. Get two cardigans for days you don’t want to wear a jacket. Wear a tie with clients. Prefer the bright, shun the dark. We’re preppy.”

I called Rachel. “That’s wonderful!” she said.

“We’ll see how it goes. I get nervous teaching students, but it seems even more nerve-racking managing peers. I’ll put the clothes on my credit card.”

“Yes. We couldn’t afford those right now.”

Later, when Rachel got home from her drive, I took Leo to the men’s clothing store. He hated the mirror showing too many reflections. He stood smiling at his many faces, then he frowned. He wanted to pull me away from the faces.

“All those faces belong to you and me,” I said, as if he could understand my words.

“No!”

“I’ve got jackets, buddy. Now I need shoes.”

The bill was high. I’d never spent more than two-hundred dollars on clothes in my life. Leo and I walked the mall and got a donut. It was a pleasure to have a job that started in a few days and you didn’t have to think about disasters. It would all go smooth.

At home, I wrote an essay exploring Pittsburgh’s rough and sometime alienating appearance. Once, two thug-looking guys, a black man and a white man, walked toward my wife and me as I pushed our son in a stroller, and one of them said, low-voiced and casual as he passed us, “Happy Father’s Day, man.”

“You wrote this last night?” emailed the editor. “Not bad. It’s sentimental, we like that. This is very Pittsburgh. Have you read the past issues?”

“I have.”

“We’ll see you Wednesday. It still seems strange that you didn’t notice me gesture at you. I’ll have to get over it.”

It was a subliterate magazine full of language like “baby steps” and “love happens,” with an occasional, short review of a restaurant or bakery, surrounded by fake, positive, multi-page articles for law and real estate offices, etc. They seemed like articles until it was clear they were paid advertisements, drafted by the clients and completed by the magazine. It was a sloppy, ill-conceived advertising effort, a catalog of disingenuous content, a heap of gleaming treacle, with no exploration into the arts, culture, or dining of the city, and it was a successful magazine.

On the morning of the meeting, I removed the magic container full of pills and took a two-milligram.

My car rocketing through the Tubes, I followed the British voice on my phone giving directions. In Mckees Rocks, the exit I needed to take was barricaded by many narrow, striped fences. When I leaned onto the next exit and circled the road to the bridge, my car rising, the sky widening, I was elated. The striated clouds lay in the horizon like lines of cocaine. I drove across the bridge and passed the blocked exit again. Sailing the highway, back and forth, swerving onto exits—it was enjoyable. There was a purpose. It was like a contemplation of strategy. Seri directed all this circling and driving back and forth. It seemed she would have rerouted me if it was possible to get to the meeting a different way.

The Cure’s “The Forest” opened with tentative guitar plucks and dark warblings of sound. “. . . Just follow your eyes, just follow your eyes.”

It was a fine half hour circling on the highway, in the sports jacket and haircut. I took a drag from a cigarette and listed in my seat. Not every lorazepam high was a good one. But this was fantastic. When the editor called, I explained what was going on.

He described the roads I needed to take. I hung up and got back on the highway, but I ended up lost in a neighborhood of shops. At the end of a dead-end street, I texted him. He called me.

“Where are you?” he said.

“I’m sitting in front of a pizza store. The famous light is blinking. It just says famous. Isn’t that great? A pizzeria on a dead end, called famous.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“We could write about them—spice up the magazine. Bring in new readers. Come on, a famous pizzeria on a dead end? That has lots of potential.”

“Pitch it to a weekly. You couldn’t follow the simple directions I gave.”

“I thought I went the right way. I went left at the boulevard, and right past the Kroger.”

“I said right at the boulevard and left at the Starbucks. There’s something off with you.” He whispered it, so that others wouldn’t hear. “We have a full table, and you’re forty-five minutes late. That’s why I was worried when you didn’t see my gesture. It seemed like a sign of things to come.”

“There are a lot of closed exit ramps in Pittsburgh.”

“Yes, you might have to get a map. Do you think you’ll make it? Are you getting close?”

“I really don’t . . . know. But I’m going to try. I’ll have to go back and . . .”

“Listen, I’m going to tap the next candidate. I wish you every success.”

The following week they published my essay with a nice banner of Pittsburgh at night. The essay was well-presented.

“It looks good,” Rachel said. “But I need you to keep a job. Don’t just get one. Keep one. I’m losing my mind here. Leo can see it.” She shook her head. “Do we really need satellite TV and the best phone plan?”

“I’ll see if we can get out of those.”

“No, I’ll call them. I’m the frazzled woman with a baby in the house. They work with me. The Warhol and the science museum refunded us. We’ll keep the Carnegie. The car loan will let us go one month without paying. The landlord is reducing our rent by a hundred dollars, and you’re going to mow the lawn and weed. I signed you up, okay?”

“I don’t mind. I know he keeps the mower in the basement.”

I landed an evening production shift, but the security guard in the parking lot—a short man with a Teddy Roosevelt mustache, who appeared to dislike me when he saw my face—wanted to see my driver’s license. I had a sullen look, like an uncooperative teenager, at times.

“You’re here to work a shift, right? You’re showing up to a labor job in a new car. I have to check it out.”

“Do you ask everyone, or just me?” I said.

“This is a new car,” he said. “I have to make sure it’s yours. We’re responsible for the car while it’s on our property.”

“I don’t show my license to security guards. You could lose your job today, and you’d have my information.”

He said I had to leave. “What?” I said. At first I didn’t understand him past that mustache, but even when I had gotten his message, I kept saying, “What, what?” and I drove out of the lot. I was sure he didn’t stop every new car that entered the lot, not if he liked the driver’s appearance.

On the road back to downtown, the reflection of the late sun in the river chased along, the road shadowed and the river bright. I parked downtown. A young black man played the cello in the square. He wore a bow tie and a good suit. Charming, warm in manner, he brought out smiles in the diverse crowd gathered around. I got a coffee and sat at a steel round table, watching him as leaves chattered on the stone floor and the shadows of buildings loomed in the dusk. It must have been possible simply to become like him.

I should have handed over my license to the security guard, and at least worked there for a week—enough to cover rent.







Editing assignments came my way, amounting to a few hundred dollars. Then a $2500 project from a former student landed in my lap. Rachel, Leo, and I went out to a Greek restaurant. A fat man with a high skinny neck approached our table with his waiter’s pad. Leo appraised him. “Too beeg,” Leo said.

“Sorry,” Rachel told him. “He says anything.”

He moved his body in a display of self-confidence. “It’s all right. I’m a big guy and he can see that.”

“What do you want?” I asked her. “You want to split something?”

“The lady knows what she wants,” said the waiter. “Let her take her time.”

She raised her glass when the food arrived. “To four months’ rent. Good job. Keep it going with the editing.”

“Tato,” Leo said. “Good.”

“More potato?” she said. “Here’s some carrots too.”

But that check was gone in two months. And we couldn’t get food stamps. Either nobody answered the line or they promised the food stamps were on the way. After talking to them three times, I called a senator’s office, spoke to an aide, and the food stamp office mailed our card.

A full day of phone calls paid off. The academic director of ELS Language Centers wrote back and asked if I could start now. I had taught for that company in Atlanta years earlier. It was a nine-level course for young high school graduates from all over the world.

“I’m glad you’re excited,” Rachel said. “Are you going to keep this one?”

“Yes, I loved working for them.”

Two days later, I taught idiomatic English to a row of women from Japan and Brazil. I had glanced at the workbook that morning, but now it took a moment to choose the right answers as we went around. I couldn’t quite make out the purpose of the exercise. The phrases didn’t all seem like idioms. The low dose of lorazepam didn’t work today. Though I felt it heavily, it only brought me down. Everything my eyes touched was confusing terrain—the city train map, this page of idioms. A young Japanese woman cupped her nose as she watched me. My face sweated and my nose was shiny. I had rosacea, and I was developing a bad complexion. Sometimes I looked okay, but not when I was nervous or stressed out.

“Number six is Time flies when you’re having fun,” I said.

“Aren’t you supposed to call on us to pick the right one?” a Brazilian woman said.

“I forgot. I’m sorry.”

The next class was advanced reading and writing. It was mostly Arab men, about twenty of them, a friendly and formal crew. I had only twelve copies of the required A Tale of Two Cities, cut to eighty pages for easy reading. The academic director had given them to me.

“Let’s pair up,” I said.

“It’s not a good idea, sir. I’m on page forty, but Abas, he’s on page twenty.”

“Let’s pair up and start over. It’s always good to reread. In fact, rereading is the thing. It’s the new thing.”

I stepped outside and called the academic director. “You’re outside of class?” she said.

“Yes.” I told her there weren’t enough books.

“Here’s what you do. Bring all copies of A Scarlet Letter tomorrow. Have the ones who don’t have the main book read a secondary book.”

“So I’m reading multiple books?”

“I can’t believe you’re calling me during class. Are you okay? I thought you taught here before.”

“I taught advanced grammar, but mid-level reading. I’m not used to the multiple books issue.”

“Did you prepare for the idiom class? Some of the students felt you hadn’t.”

“I certainly did. I’m a little under the weather now is all.”

She was quiet. “I’m coming upstairs now. I’d like to peek in the classroom.”

I got my backpack and lurched past the academic director in the hallway, a tall woman in large frames. She had opened her mouth to speak as I went by. “I just got an emergency call!” I said over my shoulder and went down the concrete staircase. It smelled like a swimming pool in there. They must have had a pool in the building! That fact was strange and worrisome—so much pressure, the walls could blow. I went out to the sidewalk and walked along the front of the building, the wall seeming to rise and drift in my side vision, moving like a ship at anchor.

Rachel had to ask her dad for money—he sent enough for two months—and she didn’t talk to me for three days. Evenings were spent on the front porch. Beyond distant trees, blue signs on skyscrapers—too far to read—burned like messages heralding the end: Decimation, Act of God. I was always able to rush out and get a job anywhere, waiting tables in Harvard square, stocking at Sun Country Foods on Haight, throwing salmon in Alaska canneries. Now I couldn’t keep a job to help my family.







Pittsburgh P.O. was a shrieking industrial city, the biggest warehouse in the world, all of it covered by a high constellation of lights. I pushed full mailcarts that went up higher than my head. The carts were made for Pittsburgh giants, and they fought against any straight line I imagined for them.

Many of the employees reminded me of 1970s firemen, confident and mustached, swaggering, and the women were tough in a city way. Newspapers reported that employees had sex in closets and stairwells on shift, behind curtains, under machines, and in bathroom stalls. I got a significant case of jock itch when I was there, despite much handwashing, but I never caught anything else.

The general manager was like a middle-aged fraternity man in his short haircut, polo shirts, and his large red face. He had picked me out as someone to dislike. In the breakroom, standing at the head of the cafeteria table where I sat with two friends, he told me I had a sneaky manner and laughed it away as a joke.

“I’m doing research,” I told him. “That’s why I’m here.”

When I called in sick the next Monday, after two weeks of twelve-hour shifts, they emailed a termination notice.








4

One day in January, Rachel brought Leo into his room and put him down for a nap upstairs. She found me in our bedroom pulling the shades for our custom of napping when Leo does. “Keep your clothes on,” she said and swiped the light on. “I checked our balance: $62.75. I’ll have to ask my dad for money again.” She was fatigued, her voice small, a sliver of anger dwelling at the bottom of her tiredness. “What is wrong? What is going on? You can’t get some grocery job for a few months? You couldn’t even work the holiday thing.”

“I know, I know. Something happened in Boise. Sometimes, whatever a person has gets worse. People can tell. They can see it on me right away. I know it’s my fault. I’m not saying it isn’t.”

Frenzied wing-shadows flitted at the shades, the birds calling out.

“I applied for the substitute teaching job and they didn’t call me back,” I said. “School bus driver, same thing. I’ve applied for editing jobs, teaching jobs, garbage and security, maintenance, copy store, and customer service, and no one calls. Everyone wants the bottom jobs in Pittsburgh, and I lack the social skills for the better jobs. I lost my interpersonal skills,” I said, and she chuckled at that.

“I’m glad I could cheer you up,” I said.

“Sorry to laugh. I thought it would make a good T-shirt. You could let everyone know what’s coming.”

“Getting degrees is easy,” I said. “But working with people is tough. I’d like to start figuring that out.”

“What’ll you do now?” she said.

“I’m filling out a disability application.”

“God. You have to do that five times before you get it, and that’s if you’re lucky.” She sat down on the bed. “I didn’t know you applied for all those.”

“And the security job at the Carnegie. And the UPS graveyard shift. You remember that.”

“Well, if you still want to fuck, let’s do it now.”

“Don’t call it that,” I said. “It’s like we’re hooking up.”

“Let’s not have this conversation again. I’m not going to call it making love.”

“Don’t I merit that?”

“It makes us sound like we’re Mormons. But we have fun together. I don’t want to hear any insecure talk about it right now.”

She sat quiet before she unbuttoned her shirt partway and appeared to think some more, then stood and removed her clothes.

“I’ll get a job and you can stay home,” she said. “Would you mind that?”

“No.”

“Swing shift, so I can see Leo,” she said. “You make sure you get some editing. I feel better! I wouldn’t mind working at all. But I’d miss you and Monk.”

Leo was designated Monk due to his baldness on the top of his head and the bit of hair on the sides and back. It was a natural monastic crown.

When Rachel worked her first shift at Olive Garden, Leo and I walked the hills of our neighborhood after dinner. It was cold. Bits of powder blue sky appeared in the white cloud cover. Behind us, the sun was going down. He pointed ahead, across the valley and atop a plateau, where a row of houses gave back the red sun in their windows. “Housess burnnn.”

“They’re not really burning,” I said. “Not burning. It’s the sun.”

On a business street we passed a union bar, the insignia painted on the wall next to the front door. A man with a mustache leaned through the open door, smoking and looking out. “I’ll stand the little one a pint,” he said.

“Maybe when he’s ten.”

“Stop in and have one,” he called after me. “If your wife ever watches him.”

“We take turns.”

“Taking turns with the baby,” he said. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Think about the holy family sometime.” I saw he was a little drunk.

I picked Leo up and told the man, “I think about them. You think I don’t? I baptized my son with holy water I took from the font at a Boise church—a vial of it.”

“He’s not baptized.”

“He sure as hell is. Look it up. Any Catholic can baptize anyone.” I set down my son and we walked.

Leo was in bed when Rachel returned, in her black uniform with the nametag on it. I was glad to see her, gazing at her wonderful small chin and her green eyes.

“I didn’t make any money!” she said. “It was slow. I kept my own bank, but by the time I paid them and tipped everyone, I got about six dollars. They supposedly give you minimum wage here, but you only earn it when you have tables. If you’re just assisting other servers with tables, you don’t get anything.”

“Is that legal?”

“It’s Pennsylvania. They designed it to be that way. Great for business. I need to do something else. We both do. I looked you up on break and saw the Arbiter thing is falling on Google. You should write them,” she said. “They have a new editor. See if you can do something with that lifetime ban nonsense. It’s not true, and you might be able to get the whole thing taken down.”

“I’ll write her tomorrow.”

In a week, the new student manager at the Arbiter, Patty Bowen, wrote there was no source for that phrase lifetime ban. The English department had issued no such ban, nor had the dean’s office.

At the bottom of the stairs, I told Rachel, who was upstairs in the bathroom.

“She’s noting it on the first page of the article,” I said.

“That’s something. At least people will know the university made some stuff up.”

There was no one else to tell, besides my friend Jace, who worked on his dad’s nursery in Aurora, Oregon, enduring the hazing of employees who believed he was an effeminate college kid in line to inherit the whole spread, three successful farms, without any knowhow. But he was in fact a quick learner. He’d left a career at IBM to work as junior nurseryman. We talked once a week. Jace went over his humiliations at work while he sipped his Maker’s. He answered now, his voice thin and strange.

“You don’t want to hear about it. It’s getting worse. They threw things at me in the lunchroom the other day,” he said. “A piece of potato fell into the back of my shirt, and I let it sit there while I finished lunch. My dad said nothing about it, after I told him. He never does.”

“Get out of there,” I said. “In ten years, you’ll be in a wheelchair due to nerves. Or you’ll be a cracked old man singing your father’s praises at the Farm Bureau Convention. Come on. Do something else. Teach high school. You’ve got the math degree.”

“This place will be mine someday. I’m going to make it hard for the ones who harmed me. How’s Pittsburg treating you?”

I told him about the BSU article.

“So, you have to go to their site to see correction?” he said.

“No. If you click on the article that I can see on my second Google page, you can see her note already. But you won’t see it if another news outlet picked it up.”

“Huh,” he said. “The original article says you burned the place down, but there’s a note that says no lifetime ban. I guess that’s good. Better than nothing.”

“They burned the place down. The Mormon mothers, a few students, and the dean. And I sort of . . . helped.”

“You’re right,” he said. “They had it in for you. Now there’s a record.”

“I’ll write an article about it sometime.” I heard the clicking of ice in his drink. “I think you should get drunk and listen to ‘Maggie’s Farm’ a hundred times,” I told him.

“I can’t grab my guitar and head out to the highway for a new life. I’ve got a house, for crying out loud, and a wife and two girls. What other job is going to match this salary? I hated IBM more.”

“There’s always a way out,” I said.

“Listen, I better go. My parents are coming over.”

When Jace was my creative writing student ten years earlier, we met for a beer in Northwest. Leaves chattered on the sidewalk in the sun. He was excited about something. He felt in his pocket and took out a receipt for the first Elliott Smith CD he ever bought, the receipt five years old, a 90s artifact kept safe in a clear plastic sleeve. He knew a lot more than I did about experimental music and art. He could talk his way around Infinite Jest with authority and fondness, even reciting footnotes he admired—especially interested in the book as a catalogue of anxieties. Recently he’d turned more masculine, picked up his dad’s opinions, and watched Fox and Friends a lot. I didn’t care about my friends’ politics, but it was hard to watch him struggle to assume a form that wasn’t his own. When he was drunk he liked to say, like John Wayne, “Let me give you some fatherly advice, and get a goddamn job.” He must have said it twenty times. He was always good for a literary discussion—he was often casually brilliant in conversation—but that side of him was on the way out.







Rachel traded Olive Garden for Applebee’s. They didn’t pay her either. She enrolled in a college to finish her degree online and applied to fifty government job postings in the state. In late spring, she got a job at the Department of Health, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

As if to congratulate us, Father Peeks fixed our Pittsburgh address onto my phone, a closeup photo of a letter someone had attached on email. I showed it to Rachel when Leo was asleep for the night, when we drank wine on the couch, in front of Leo’s stacks of colored blocks on the table.

“He wants us to know he’ll find out our new address in Harrisburg too,” I said. “Of course he knows. He’s into everything.”

She was cheerful about it. “Let him come over. I’ll put a knife in his eye.”

“Are you still covering the camera in your phone?”

“No. The other day my phone was hot. I lifted up my shirt and showed him my tits, and my phone cooled in seconds. Ha ha!”

“Where was I at this time?”

“In your office. I wasn’t sure I was going to mention it. I don’t think he’s going to bug me for a while, though.”

“You don’t seem too bothered by it now.”

“He’s some damaged little man. I have a job, and we’re moving to a new city.”

“You showed him your tits. I don’t know how I feel about that.”

“Now he knows what you have and he doesn’t have.”

“I wish I felt better about the hacking,” I said. “He’s got me in a cage.”

“Get a job, for that reason alone. Then you’d have something to think about besides him.”

“Harrisburg, PA. That place helped us right at the last minute. I’ve never been there but I already like it. Nice work sending out all those applications.”

“I’ll be a working mom. It’s funny that idea makes me light as a feather.”

In Harrisburg, we found the Farm Show exit in the afternoon sun, traffic stand-still or creeping. Ahead on our right was the brick fortress spanning three city blocks, a glory hall for country living—featured in descriptions about Harrisburg online. Next to us, on the sidewalk, an old man held a sign that read, “We got this!” He wore a three-piece suit and a gold cowboy hat with “TRUMP” stenciled across the bridge in spidery green letters. He strutted before the sluggish traffic, crouching and holding his sign one handed, wagging his head, then pointing at a car in good fun, like a spry minister. He jumped and waved in the smog. His face gleamed with sweat. His suit was spotted with perspiration down the front and soaked at the pits. He swung up a gallon milk jug of ice-water and gulped from it, holding the sign above his head, his body swaying.

There was much honking and hooting from car windows. A woman behind us screamed with the energy and fierceness of a midnight ritualist or drunken sports demon—a Trump fan.

Families, couples, and solitary voters, old and young, walked the sidewalks, leaving car lots and heading for the Farm Show to see the great showman. One man was bent over in his gait, smoking a cigarette and straining to look ahead. Another lurched, with a shortened arm. They all had heard the call. One skinny man wore high-water slacks and a yellow button-up shirt, his hair marked with a comb’s teeth, as if ready for church in 1962.

“God, let’s get out of here,” Rachel said.

“Let’s visit the train station,” I said. “Leo might like it. Then we’ll eat something nearby and go the motel.” We drove four blocks in twenty minutes, and turned onto a busy cross street.

At the ticket line inside the station, chin-bearded men in black hats and women in bonnets waited among those who were conventionally dressed. We passed through inner doors and found a toy train, beneath the Arrivals and Departures sign. Under glass, the train lay still. I pushed the steel square beneath the glass, and the train lighted up and moved through a town that came alive in lights. I lifted Leo so that he could see. A postman stood with his hand raised in eternal greeting. When the train stopped, Leo wept. I showed him how to push the steel square and make it run. He couldn’t get enough strength behind it. Rachel pressed it for him.

Two large men came down the stairs toward the lobby, one of them repeating, “There’s gonna be a Holy Ghost revival—elect Donald Trump.”

“A holy ghost revival,” Rachel said. “What’s that look like?”

“It probably looks like speaking in tongues. In Lewiston, we had a visiting priest who could shoot fire with his hand—or it felt like fire.”

“I’ll use you for an interpreter if anybody needs to talk to us here.”

“If you see Christian love in me, I point to someone higher.” I produced a nasty laugh.

“You really are crazy,” she said and kissed me.

The toy city went dark, and Rachel took Leo. He made eloquent gestures of loss and sadness as we left the toy train, like a boy carried from his dream.

Next morning, we left the motel and visited a vast park under trees. On a bench we bickered about the apartment we hoped to find—there was little online to help us in the search—and I saw Leo had wandered off, far enough that his distance surprised me, toward kids on a swing set. Leo walked directly toward the backside of a large girl on a swing, maybe a seventh grader, who was achieving good air and might wham her high-velocity bottom into his face. I sprinted. She, swinging, came toward him again and he walked closer to her. On the next swing, she’d likely hit him. When I was close enough, I flew in the air like an outfielder catching a ball when the girl was swinging backward, and I touched Leo’s far shoulder and tucked him to safety, one inch—it was one inch or two—before he would’ve been hit. We lay in the dirt, and he screamed at the jostling. I picked him up and held him facing me.

Some kids sat on a bench with a woman. “Mom, did you see that!” The woman spoke to me but I didn’t hear what she said.

I conjured what could have happened to him. It might have been a knockout or worse. It might have ended in the worst way.

In the shadows under the canopy, Rachel walked toward us, and we met her halfway. My legs shook and I smiled in relief.

“I guess you were watching,” I said.

“I was.”

“This kid is a wild rabbit.”

His screaming had relaxed to a cry. She lifted Leo by his underarms. Sitting on a bench, she placed him on her knees. She had nothing to say about the event. She could be a cool one in situations where I would have expected her to show emotion. It was hard to understand—perhaps some insistence on keeping an even keel, or a need to conceal intense feeling. She had a secret place in her, and that was okay. But she was sometimes like an opaque window.

In the car, I drove us pensively along the shaded park. “You know I saved Leo back there, right? I know you’re glad about it, but . . .”

“You did save him,” she said. “And yes, of course I’m glad about it.”


5

We moved into a house in Uptown—three floors for five hundred a month. Our neighbors were black and white, friendly or neutral, and there were many children about. All the houses were three-story brick. Next door to us was a Kentucky family of eight red-haired adults who owned several pit bulls. On the other side lived a Hispanic man who got around on a bicycle. He was raising two adolescent girls on his own. On the sidewalks they pushed their scooters in new summer dresses, both of them confident, one placid and beautiful, and the other fierce and seeking to win at games. They liked Leo.

Though streets nearby had old storefronts with smashed up windows and apartments full of squatters, there were many streets occupied by families, and ours was one of them. We had a romance for our block. It felt very rich, almost southern, a neighborhood we couldn’t have found in Idaho or Oregon, a real place that wasn’t trying to be any other way than it was.

Rachel and I each had our own office. At night, we clocked hours on our work. Her studio was the whole top floor, and she painted right in the center of it, sitting before her easel. My room was on the middle floor, next to Leo’s bedroom. She’d tap the floor when she was ready to take a break, in case I was available to come up. One time, we wandered in the huge room, admiring the undulating wood floor and smoking. On a tray stood a box of wine, and she stood, filled her glass, and turned in a half twirl, her arms out.

“I can’t believe how much space we have,” she said. “It does something for me.”

“I know. It’s wonderfully inefficient,” I said. “Let’s go to bed.”

“Not, right, now. I’m going to paint until midnight. This whole room is mine. I’ve got a job that’s mine, and a studio that’s mine. You have what’s yours. Now I have something.”

“You’re the best painter I know.”

“It doesn’t matter what you say. It matters what I think.”

“You’re right. Let’s do some more work.”

“Don’t follow my lead,” she said. “Do what you want!”

“Yes, if we’re not going to bed, I will work.”

Two weeks later, on a Saturday afternoon, I returned from the beer store and lifted a case of beer from the trunk.

“We need them cold ones!” said the woman across the street, in a wheelchair, on her porch.

“Hey, Darla.” I waved at her.

“Come on over. I’ll have one, if you don’t mind. Are you busy?”

“It’s nice and shady over here,” I said and rested on her glider, the plastic cushions ticking under my weight. In a yellow dress and hat, Darla was a large woman. “I’m waiting for the church bus to come and lift me into it. We’re going shopping.” She sipped her beer. “Damn, good old Natty Light. Mm! I haven’t seen you all go to church. But that doesn’t mean you’re not going.”

“No. Our kid wouldn’t sit still for it.”

She rested with that thought a moment, sipping.

“If he doesn’t sit still for church, he won’t sit for school, or a job neither. He’ll be out raising hell with the rest of these keeds. It breaks my heart to see a child who can’t listen to the Bible stories.” She finished that one and whispered, “Give me another if you can spare it,” and she laughed. “God doesn’t mind if I have two—a big girl like me.”

She opened the new beer. “Did you hear about the park? Gunshots fired, with keeds playing. Two days ago. My daughter cleared out of here with her two baby girls last year. They’re in Bethlehem now.”

Two doors away, children rode scooters and ran in the street. “Well, this street’s nice.”

“Yes, that’s true. But we’re surrounded by gangs and no-good dudes. Listen to me, I don’t know if you ever heard the name of Jesus, but he’s looking right into your heart. I don’t know what must have happened for you to deny him, and worse, deny your child his love, but I’m going to pray like a thunderstorm coming down in the trees, coming down from the mountain, to get you to turn back to him.”

“If all the churches were full of people like you, I’d go more often.”

“It doesn’t matter what kind of people. God’s in the churches. Every church is God’s house.”

“You were married, right?”

“Still am. We had different ideas. He didn’t like beer. He didn’t like going out and shooting pool. He was a no-drinks, fussy mail clerk, keeping a tight lip. He had God, but no enjoyment of things.”

“I don’t know what Rachel’s thinking half the time. She’s going through something.”

“That’s easy. I see you two. You’ve got to be the man—good job, giving her flowers and a little money. Now she’s the one going to work and coming home. You need to be the man.”

“She loves working. I need to keep a job, though. That’s true.”

In minutes a white bus appeared. When she waved at the driver, I picked up my case of beer.

“Thanks for them cold ones!” she said.

“Anytime. Ask me next time, too.”







In the evenings, after studying, on nights when we took a break from working, Rachel wanted to drink and read or watch a movie. Never a talker, she saved her verbal expression for Leo, her joyful and adult discussion with him, never babytalk. She was quiet with me.

Her dissatisfactions expanded to territories she wouldn’t name. On many days, she included me all the way, and each of those days felt like the subdued hostilities had come to an end. But the bad air always returned. She went to work each day while I cared for Leo and guessed at her complaints. Though I wanted to return to teaching, the colleges were all wholesome, Christian, patriotic, and all I could get was a two-week lecture course on Hemingway in an Osher program. A couple of students argued that Hemingway was a communist, and they wouldn’t let up. They wanted to discuss that more than his stories. At a community college, the chair invited me for an interview, but the dean uninvited me the next day, explaining they were restructuring.

One day, on a hot late morning in Harrisburg, when the sun lighted the red facades across the street, Leo and I studied a picture book on the couch. "Ice-cream, good, cake, good,” he said in his shaky, small voice that cheered me up. A cartoon played on TV, but he was more interested in the book. Out front our mailbox banged shut. When I stepped out, Leo closed the door and it locked automatically. Through the window, I saw he was back on the couch watching his cartoon. It occurred to me to break a back window, but I wasn’t sure when we could get it fixed. There was no way back in—my phone was inside—and I needed to check on Leo.

At the Kentucky house, a man in a red beard answered the door, his skin yellow and white, with bits of blue in it, like berries under ice, and his face was scraped here and there, most of the sores healed, one or two fresh scratches.

“Can you lead me up to your third-story window?” I said. “I need to jump across to my roof.”

“You’re welcome to jump out my window,” he said. “I don’t guarantee the landing.”

A huge TV on the wall provided all light. A dog performed wary circles and a figure eight, a growl boiling in its throat. A sweat-stink rose from something unseen.

We climbed the flights of stairs and entered a lighted bedroom. A white sheet hanging on the wall glowed with two window shapes behind it, yellow lines traversing the cloth like a polluted sunrise. He grabbed the sheet and yanked a nail out, letting it drape to one side.

A woman under a blanket called out, “What the fuck are you doing? Taking people through our bedroom?”

“Our neighbor wants to jump out the window. He won’t take no for an answer.”

“Jump out the fuckin window?”

He raised the window and I leaned my head out. The patio below, in sunlight, was a long way down. In my nervousness, the far concrete surface appeared to sink in jerky alterations of reality, seeming to drop farther down. At the front of the buildings, the walls and roofs of our two houses were attached, but the roofs at the back were separated. Three feet of open air lay between them. I would have to leap onto the steep corner of our roof—under a dormer—and keep running. Beyond this steep area, the rear section of our roof was flat. All I had to do was run across the steep roof under the dormer and get to the rear roof.

“Get him the fuck out of here!” the woman called.

“Yeah, come on. Grow some wings and fly. You’re pissing off my wife.”

I placed my foot on the sill and jumped to my roof and ran in a crescent along that sloped place under the dormer, ignoring the ground below. Then I walked out to the flat roof and held my knees, breathing as though I had run a long way.

A broom lay near our window, its bristles half covered in dry tar. Cupping an eye to the window, I looked inside Rachel’s studio. Leo wasn’t in there. A shut gate on the bottom floor prevented his climbing stairs. I took up the broom and broke glass with the handle, shutting my eyes before each swing. When I climbed in the window, I heard nothing in the house. He might have gotten outside. All he had to do was twist the doorknob. “Leo!” I called and hammered down the staircase, heavy steps on the old wood booming on the walls.

Leo sat on the couch watching his cartoon and eating chopped grapes. All told, he was alone for fifteen minutes.

He took his milk on the couch. “Let’s get those diapers, buddy.”

During his nap, I nailed a wide board over the broken window. It was one inch shy of covering it all the way, so I nailed a skinny board to cover the gap. The window was an eyesore, but it kept the cold out.

That night, I escorted Rachel to her studio before we got to work. She inspected the window and walked to the center of the room where she considered it again.

“Where’s the glass?”

“I cleaned it up.”

“Jesus—why didn’t you ask for a ladder instead of dancing on the roof?”

Gunshots cracked the air in the near distance. We waited to hear more. “It’s a long way off,” I said. “It’s not around here.” I moved to touch her arm, but she pivoted and went to her chair.

“Whatever is going on with you,” I said, “is it something you can forgive me for?”

“I don’t mind taking care of you and Leo. I only wish there was some third person we could invite into our home and I could take care of them too.”

“I’m a stay-at-home dad. That counts for something, right?”

“Working a steady job—with Leo in daycare—would count more.”

“I put in for that job today.”

“The janitor position?”

“A lot of writers and artists have been janitors,” I said.

She groaned hearing this news again. “My dad said that stunt you pulled in Boise pretty much finished your teaching career. You were teaching seniors! Now you’re going to wipe up people’s messes. My dad was proud of you—he gave your book to all of his colleagues.”

“Seeking praise from your dad is your goal, not mine. They hated you as a waitress. Now you found a stable career, and they like you again.”

“You get praise,” she said. “All those little interviews that a very small portion of readers want to read. It’s not much, but it probably helps.”

“You’ll get interviews when you have your first showing.”

“Painting! There’s an idea. I’d like to do some tonight. I’ll do my homework later.”

I descended to the kitchen and took two beers to my office on the middle floor, Guided by Voices looping on my computer, two photos tacked to the wall over my desk—Virginia Woolf in middle-age, appearing much older, her eyes discerning and bewildered, and Bob Pollard achieving a high kick on stage while holding a beer. His lo-fi, warbling voice issued from my computer.

I supposed we could have a girl or boy.

And I see what you mean

I’m not here to drink all the beer

In the fridge

In the room

In the house

In the place

That we both so love.



One lorazepam remained in my pill container—after four days without. A med-check appointment was forthcoming, thanks to Rachel’s insurance. A familiar image washed up: Stabbed on some lawn, I floated to the ground like a paper cutout. It was peaceful, as if I had been knifed with a banana. Ideation meant nothing—images passing like bubbles across my eyes.

Rachel felt she’d chosen the wrong one. Maybe she had. We were three years into our marriage—the sorrow experienced as a damp pressure behind the nose.

“I’ve done some things for you,” I called to the ceiling, hoping she heard me through the ducts. “When we first met, and I paid $1,800 of your back rent? Was I man enough back then?”

She opened my door when I was cutting the two-mil lorazepam inside of a clear plastic device that was like a guillotine, and I shielded it with one hand, the way you might cover a piece of pie that wasn’t yours to eat.

“Did you hear me up there?” I said.

“Something about you helping me years ago? Fine. You did. Listen, check out the clerical pool. It’s a temp service for government jobs here. Get some experience, then find a government job. We could get a house on two incomes.” Her anger was gone for now. I was grateful for every kind word.

“Do you really think we could get a house?” I said.

“You’ll need to keep a job, you’ll have to make some adjustments. Not everyone needs to respect you, or like you. You have the same right to dislike them in private. Keep your angst inward. Stop reacting to people. People can be awful, but you don’t have to police them. They are only people, suffering like you. Let them suffer alone. Don’t engage.”

“God, Rachel. I don’t see how you know all these things. You said everything I need to know—if I could only learn it.”

“You’ve kept jobs before,” she said.

“You’re right. I turned a corner there, but I can go back.”

“I’m going to sleep,” she said. “Well, stay up if you want and take your drugs. Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

She kissed me goodnight and went out.







The Kentucky man was arrested in the morning, then returned next day. Darla told me he trained fighting dogs in his basement.

Next afternoon I had a cigarette on the back porch when I heard the Kentucky man talking on his porch on the second floor, out of view. “He fuckin drinks all day while he’s watching their baby, and lets his baby drink too. I’ve seen it. Know how he kills the yard grass and weeds in his backyard? Sprays Roundup all over.”

“That’s not true about drinking,” I surprised him. “I’d never drink around my son. And the landlord said I could use Roundup. I’m not walking in weeds that are shoulder high. It’s a good way to get bit by a spider or a snake.”

They were silent a moment. “A spider or a snake!” the man mimicked, and the man with him laughed. “There’s snakes around here that roam in the wide open.”

Days later, something big moved through the ductwork of our house. It sashayed in there, heavy and smoothly traveling, as though its skin was made of oiled sandpaper. I went out back and the Kentucky man knelt beside a door that lay on the ground, swinging a hammer. He threw his gaze at me, an eye narrowed, something humorous and condemnatory. His tall red hair leaned to one side like a snow hat. He seemed to have more spark in him since the arrest. I wanted to ask him if he ever got snakes in his house, but our conflict was too fresh. I went inside.

That night Rachel and I were asleep when Leo screamed. I opened his door and he pointed at the wall. The snake moved away, toward our bedroom.

She picked him up, and the three of us lay in our bed. The snake’s noise approached us in the wall but retreated. “Noo,” Leo said.

“It’s okay, Leo,” I said. “It’s only a goose. It’s a good goose.”

“No! It’s not.”

A man hooted on the other side of the wall, followed by a woman’s words of approval. He shouted, “Bring it! Fuck yeah!” as if his arrest had raised him to a heroic stature. “Kill those motherfuckers.”

“Did you hear that?” she said.

“I did. I think he might’ve put that thing in our ductwork. That occurred to me today. But I think he’s talking about the cops now.”

“We’re on his radar, either way.”

Between us, on his back, calm now, Leo raised his arms on the mattress and went to sleep.







When the snow came, Leo played outside with the other children on the street, and I stood a few parked cars away, in view of the Kentucky house and any cars that might have attempted to drive through the snow. To the Kentucky man, any stupid action was a moment of high rebellion. It was easy to imagine him setting the dogs loose on the street.

I found work logging applications at the Department of State. The managers were all men, in white shirts and heavy black shoes. In his glass office, my manager stared down his computer with an ostentatious pose of one who will prevail, and each day placed a stack of forms in the outbox. These conquered stacks of processed forms seemed to compel him to glide the hallways with a masculine and friendly deference.

Behind me sat a young woman at her computer. She had deep eye sockets and gray eyes. She often surveyed the wide office floor with an expression that desired company, though she didn’t talk to me—I was in the clerical pool. One day all the windows drew the eye with the snow falling, and the manager brought her through a strenuous training in front of her screen. He awakened for her the vast and imposing territory of this advanced computer system. I didn’t know what the system did.

“It seems like we could replace all of our programs with this one,” she said. “It’s so powerful.”

“It only knows itself,” he said. “When it comes to the end of its territory, its brain is rendered nugatory.”

“We are explorers. Do you ever feel that way?”

“You know, that’s a feeling I haven’t had in a while. Not since those hungry, nimble days when I was first coming up in the department. But you’re bringing a spark to the office. Not just you. We have a lot of good men and women on the team. You’ll meet my wife one of these days. She’s in charge of systems at Education.”

“I’ve never heard anyone say nugatory before. What’s it mean exactly?”

“It means—rendered useless or without force.”

Once, in early spring, the snow had melted to patches in the yard before the state building. At my desk, I listened to a YouTube playlist, the browser narrowed so that only the top part of the video was visible, at the bottom of my screen. When a Cocteau Twins video played, I must have seen the knife in the water at the same time my manager did. He leaned over my desk and lifted the video into view, watching the shallow river wash over the knife, in a green-tinted light.

“I was just rendered nugatory,” I told Rachel on the phone.

“What happened?”

“The official reason was my performance.” I told her what happened.

“Why were you watching something about a knife!”

“I didn’t know there was a knife. They already didn’t like me. I bet if you watched a video with a knife, you wouldn’t get fired. Because you’re likeable.”

“I don’t watch music videos at work.”

“See, you know all the right things to do.”

That night we watched Blue Velvet on the computer, past the hissing. The hot breath noise was like a neighbor’s air-conditioner that one stops hearing beyond the shared wall, so after a while I stopped hearing it.

Jeffery and Sandy sit in a car in front of a church at night, the lighted stained-glass visible across the street. When Jeffery asks, “Why are there people like Frank!” the video froze.

“He froze it because he wants to remind me there is someone bad who’s after me, and it’s him,” I said.

“How on earth do you know that?”

“I’m guessing. But he communicates with his hacking. I may not always get his message, but there is a message.”

“Now you’ve got one more person who doesn’t like you. Two interactions with Kentucky, and he puts his snake on you. How do you produce this effect in people?”

“I talk back, when I’m supposed to shut up.”

“Yes. And it’s causing problems. Now we have to move. What’s going to happen at the next place?”

“We don’t have to leave. There haven’t been any shootings near us.”

“I’m not worried about the shootings. I’m worried about a backwoods maniac putting snakes in our house.”

She climbed the creaking stairs. When she reached the landing, Blue Velvet was released from its pause. In front of the church, Sandy announces she had a dream about robins. The Christian leader had sat on the other side, listening to our conversation, and he played the movie when he knew she had walked away, to show he had orchestrated the fight. I turned off the computer. The bedroom floor shifted as she got ready for bed.

I read a page of Time Will Darken It. The cheap chandeliers cast a pleasant orange light, touching the old gray wallpaper. Over a hundred years the walls had settled crookedly. If we couldn’t make it in this lovely old house we rented for a song, it wasn’t going to happen in a new efficiency apartment.

The snake moved in a far wall. It sashayed in its dark hallway, doing its laps, climbing the walls, and sliding back down.

Kentucky was sure to put in a rat next, or a family of tarantulas. Damaged people had to do something worse each time they acted in a fight, to gratify their hurts.

Rachel’s father paid what remained on the lease.






6

Our new apartment was in the sticks, a row of bungalow buildings. In front were fields of dirt and wild grass that traveled to a hill of deciduous trees in the middle distance, small green leaves showing in that forest. It was a warm spring morning. I smoked on our second-story deck.

A couple passed on the sidewalk below, the woman holding a baby. “There ain’t going to be no Xbox and no friends coming over,” she said. “You going to pick up my momma and take her to Target at 3:00, like you was supposed to last week. Then you come back home, eat the dinner I make you, and read to our baby girl at her bedtime. You left my momma high and dry.”

“Baby, damn, why you always riding me. I like to have some friends over.”

They were down the path now and I couldn’t hear them. This complex was all married couples, and our discussions went on morning and night, when we all moved two by two, with children, to the parking lot, and resumed when we came home after work.

At night when I wrote emails and posted on two sites, I saw my spelling check had been removed. On LinkedIn, a story publication I posted had been moved to the bottom of the page and the journal image changed to random photos of downtown Portland. Mathew Stjohn was lord of apps, able to reconfigure any page. He didn’t change the mother app—he changed only your page on it. He must have sharpened his talents on a hundred enemies. I looked him up. He was editing a series of classics for Christian colleges, each a lantern for the student who might lose her way inside. Stjohn was like a guide who held the hands of innocents as they navigated the frightening brothels of literature, pointing out the safe rooms where beds were clean and they could sip grape juice and rest on this journey.

I opened my phone to a picture of a swimming pool, severely blurred. Objects floated in the pool. They were teddy bears, babies, or something else.

Heat lifted all through me, but I didn’t speak my anger into the phone. Rachel often said he was only trying to make me crazy. But I didn’t see how such an effort amounted to only. If an evil person succeeded at driving someone insane, that person was, in fact, ruined. But what a perfect crime: Killing someone—spiritually, mentally—but with no dead body to have to explain or bury.









On the morning before my new job, I dressed in a white shirt and sports jacket, believing that I might get a foothold in some occupation and tough it out, for a house, for the marriage. The clerical pool gave me a chance at a new job. While I shaved, Rachel moved in and out of the bathroom. She wore a thick black dress with buttons all down it and heavy brown boots—a love of fine fabric and leather.

But I would have to keep a job. She was right on that point. One day some agency was going to hire me, and my life would be sports jackets and golf, a friend to many, a trusted colleague, a reliable employee, and climbing fast.

“You and Leo have a good day,” I said. Rachel had an early doctor’s appointment. I kissed the wife and baby and took the bus downtown.

At Fee for Service, in a basement of tall shelves, I purged plastic containers into bins on wheels. The floor had light and dark places that went on and on. The effect was like the underwater lights of a swimming pool—and the dim places were more pleasant than the brighter places. After an hour of purging, I held onto a bin with one hand, squatted, and drank water.

My supervisor’s voice called down the aisle. “I can see the top of your head,” she told me. I stood and told her I didn’t understand. She had an impressively large face, with a big chin and a large right eye.

“I was resting for a second. Did you think I was hiding?”

“Those are hard to separate,” she said and went away.

“Don’t talk to me anymore,” I muttered.

She returned. “Did you have a comment?”

“I said I only want to do a good job.”

She went away, leaving me to purge containers and line up the bins. Paranoid of scrutiny, I hastened down aisles, defeating walls of paper, shunning breaks. At lunch I rested in a far corner of the basement, in a pocket of dim light, eating a sandwich I’d brought in my jacket pocket. When she found me back here, a fat man wearing a wide green mohawk stepped at her elbow. They watched me, then went away.

“It’s lunchtime, right?” I called after them. She had told me that the breakroom was across the hall. I wondered if I had broken a rule that forbade eating on the floor, or if it was something else. I had thought I was doing something positive by avoiding interaction with employees.

A door opened and boomed shut as they left. She disliked me, so of course she thought I was hiding. “Fuck you, mohawk,” I whispered. In South Central Pennsylvania, even the alternative-looking people were punitive and rule-obsessed.

They let me work till five. At six my boss, Bill, at the clerical pool, called me.

“You won’t be going back there,” he said. “I’d like you to come in the office tomorrow. Nine o’clock.”

When Rachel and Leo and I entered our apartment, it smelled like chemicals. I went room to room, sniffing the air. “Do you smell that?”

“What.” She placed Leo on his blue circular rug with his toys. “I don’t smell anything.”

“It seems different in here. It feels like someone has been in here.”

“Look,” she said. “Leo’s already asleep. I’ll microwave some chicken nuggets and see if he’ll take a few bites.”

In the night I woke. There was a chemical taste in the back of my throat. I got up and checked on Leo, who slept on his knees and chest, the blanket off him.

I turned on Rachel’s lamp and stood over her. She winced in the light, turning her face away.

“There’s some chemical in the apartment that wasn’t here this morning,” I said. “Did you open any packages you weren’t expecting? Stjohn is careful. He’s obsessed with Leo, and I think he wants to kill me. He knows he can kill me by hurting him. All he has to do is send us a package—or have it sent from a different state. He’s been entering our house electronically every day. It seems he’d want to escalate. I thought I smelled the chemical on Leo’s breath, but I wasn’t sure if I was smelling the whole apartment. Are you sure you didn’t smell anything? Sometimes you have a way of ignoring things because you’d rather not look at them. That’s often a strength, but not if our son is at risk. Can you check on him? Can you smell his breath?”

She sat up in bed and watched me, waking up. “What are you going on about. It’s three in the morning.”

“Did we get any packages recently?”

“No--no.”

“I’d appreciate it if you could smell his breath.”

She tramped to his room and returned. “No chemical smell. There are no chemicals in the house. I would notice. Don’t wake me up about chemicals again.”







After I dropped off Rachel and Leo in the morning, I parked at a meter and walked. Wind threw the rain, slapping it against a street-level window in front of me. Walking toward me were three men in tan trench coats carrying briefcases. It wouldn’t be difficult to recast myself into a tie, trench coat, and wingtips man.

Buildings at the capital were giants of white stone, in twelve square blocks, imposing and sinister on this gray morning. They were like great tombs, a few of them palatial, as if modeled on the Pantheon in Paris. There was something grand about the commonwealth.

I left the rain and walked the marble floors, to an office with cream walls and new crimson carpeting. A pretty young woman sat behind the desk, her blond hair waving down. It was like walking into a lawyer’s office in the 1950s.

“You can go into Bill’s office now,” she said.

With his back to the lighted window, he sat at a fine old desk, his face obscured, as if he were a government agent. The overhead light was off. He must have presented this “man of shadows” appearance to other wayward employees. It was a lot of theater for a temp recruiter.

Bill said, “I don’t want to start this conversation by saying the government is a big scary place, but it kind of is. I’ve seen troublemakers retrained and jailed. I’ve seen them carried off quietly to new lives of court dates and uncertain futures.”

“Am I heading that way?” I asked.

“I want to let you know that getting fired here, one job after another, often ends badly. Please be careful. Usually there’s a gathering anger in the one fired, and the state responds.”

“I’m not really the angry type. I think I’m the irritable type, when confronted with rudeness, anyway.”

He grinned. “How bought a bottle of pop? What’s your poison?”

“I’ll take a 7-Up,” I said. “Before I forget, my wife asked me to mention to you again: we need that form before we can apply for food stamps.”

He chuckled and left the room, turning on the overhead on his way out. He returned with the bottles. We drank those. He was tall and had comb marks in his hair. He sat on his desk, in gray slacks and old wingtips.

“We’ve got an opening at the State Police. How would you like that? Nice people there. You could start today or tomorrow morning.”

“Is that the only office hiring?”

“Right now. It’s a good place to send you. Nice people.”

“I’d like to start after lunch, if you’re sure it’s okay. But would it be too much hassle to give me that form now? We have a small child in the house. They don’t pay my wife a lot at the Department of Health.”

He brightened. “A real government job, eh? Good for her! You know, it’s not a bad way to go at all. The commonwealth has supported a lot of families over the years. I’ve been here since 1972. I’ve seen my share of people trying to take advantage, but here at the clerical pool, people go to work, and they love it, by and large. People enjoy getting their hands dirty.”

“What does that form entail? Is it complicated?”

He stood, opened his drawer, and coughed. “You could land a good position if you play your cards right. HR already has its eyes on you for the Department of Education.”

“This is quite an office. What’s your title here, exactly?”

“No, no. It’s a humble job really. I find people who have a passion for service. They are the ones who reach for the stars. I’m only their coach, or mentor. But I do find people who make this place work, so I am valued here.” He drank his pop. “If you do a good job, you could enter the Department of Education as a manager in training. The commonwealth likes to hire people with degrees.”

“I can get started at the state police right away?”

“Let’s make it one-thirty, so they can prepare for you.”

The state police building was a filthy-looking behemoth, teeming with narrow windows, standing alone in a field, out by the old state mental hospital. I went through security on the ground floor and rode the elevator up.

In the hallway were pictures of state police in action. In one of them, an officer stood by his parked car in a field, but he was too far away, and his face was like a ham with a pair of glasses stuck on it. Another photo featured a state police helicopter turning directly above, but the image conveyed listing instead of circling. My favorite showed two people standing behind a desk unsmiling, a tall fat crew-cutted man and a short woman with large glasses. It might as well have been a picture of two buckets in a closet for all the life it expressed.

My job was to distribute mail and check applications for firearms, ensuring they were complete. There was a box that said “mental defective,” and those went into a different pile.

On the fourth day, I took the mail around when I encountered eyes downward at every desk. No one spoke to me when I said hello. A man I counted as an acquaintance was an Irish named Sam. He attended to forms at his desk by a window. We’d discussed the old Dublin of soggy pubs before it became the new Dublin of bright restaurants, but he winced at the mention of James Joyce. “That one lived like an ape on holiday,” Sam said. He had bushy gray sideburns and square brown glasses.

“What happened?” I whispered to Sam now, sweeping a finger to indicate the entire floor of desks. “Did I do something wrong? They were friendly at first.”

He refused to lift his eyes. Across the room a young woman, Candy, typed before her screen. She drove stock cars with her boyfriend and produced a brief ecstatic enthusiasm for everyone who crossed her path. On the wall above her hung a painting of Christ laughing in his assent. When I approached, she manufactured her joyful look, but it seemed fixed and it went on longer than usual. She seemed wary even as her high-powered Christian wattage flashed in her eyes and her smile.

“Do you know why everyone is acting so strangely toward me?” I asked.

“So str-ange-ly?” She laughed. “No. I try to focus on the positive. People were talking about that Pittsburgh article on you, if that’s what you mean. Sam looked you up. I’m sure they were only talking about your skillset as a writer.”

“The Pittsburgh interview? I never mentioned it. What were they saying?”

“Everyone in here has their own skill set. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t, even in some small way. I’m sure they’re interested in your talents is all.”

“The article says I have bipolar disorder. They got it wrong. They confused me with the protagonist in my book. Journalists get it wrong sometimes.”

At last Candy’s smile began to die. “My dad, he can fix anything, and my brother and I inherited that. He’s humble about it too. It’s a nice gift that he gives to us and to anybody. He stops to help people on the highway. He’s such a man of God.”

I returned to my desk. So, Sam looked me up. I shouldn’t have spoken about my book the other day, but I couldn’t help telling somebody that I was more than a temp, a designation worse than a janitor. At least a janitor had the ability to come and go invisibly. A temp, though, was in direct service to many people in an office. Eyes confronted him often, and he felt the sting.

The woman who answered the phones said, “Pennsylvania State Police. This is Vengeance. How can I help you?” She was behind a screen or in a different corner of the office. It was really her name. I had never seen Vengeance, but I was intrigued. Her name suggested a bloody ground of hard personal will, imposed upon all who were different. At the Department of State, there was a woman named Tyranny, who was gentle and very good. Maybe Vengeance was a kind woman too.

The manager, a former state police officer, left his office in a corner of the room and walked toward me without meeting my eyes. He passed my desk and spoke with another manager, a woman in a skirt and blazer, whose office was behind a glass wall. She leaned back in her chair and looked at me, but he didn’t turn his face.

While I sat at my desk, I figured this office hazing would last a week and they’d forget about the mental defective who processed forms and mail. At any rate, if I didn’t have the violent, delusional, hallucinatory type of the disorder, it seemed unfair to impugn me for the bipolar diagnosis. But it had been foolish to tell Pittsburgh City Paper about it.

Later, on my way to the bathroom in the hallway, I saw four big crew-cutted state police guys come out of a room laughing. Bill left the room behind them. It was odd the government clerical pool boss would be meeting with four state police. Maybe they were discussing a new hiring—or firing.

While I drove Rachel to work and Leo to daycare next morning, I catalogued my hatred of the job.

“The woman next to me has a picture of her and her husband holding AR-15 rifles. They are pivoted toward each other so the barrels are almost touching. Both of them so grim. Ready for judgement day.”

Rachel had turned to her side window, as if to lean away from my voice. In this mood I had a stressed, rapid way of talking that she didn’t like.

“You might be feeling things too intensely,” she said. “You got sick of Boise too. You move places and you get sick of them. Maybe you get sick of the things you do, and how people react to it.”

“You’re clearly not on my side anymore.”

“Maybe you’re just unhappy. I like Harrisburg. There are different kinds of people here. It’s not only one type.”

“I’ve met some good people,” I said.

Outside of a house on this boulevard, a man displayed signs he painted, one per week, each six feet wide. This one showed a Draculian Hillary Clinton holding up bloodied hands while crying ghost babies floated above her. The sign flew behind us.

“Crazy cult members,” I said.

“Not everyone is like this guy. My building is full of cool people.”

We crossed a bridge—it went over railroad tracks—to the commonwealth buildings, their white-stone grandeur swelling, the closer we got.

Leo cried in back, as if he’d waited until we were done fighting to fuss. “I’m sorry, buddy. I’m okay. Maybe I’ll get used to it.”

When I parked in front of her building, Rachel pulled Leo from his seat. Her “Good-bye” had a bite to it, as if to say I was a grim companion. She carried Leo whose daycare was on the same floor as her office. My hand felt in my backpack for lorazepam.

Harrisburg, PA had attractive sections and an old history—we liked the Scholar Bookstore, Wildwood Park, the river boats, the fire and science museums, the row houses and trainyards, and nearby Chocolate World—but it was hands down the most violent city I had lived in. High schools closed on account of mass fights. When we went to the movies, a girl ripped a chunk of hair off the head of another girl and threw it on the floor. Another day, downtown, in front of Strawberry Square, the three of us saw a pint of leaked blood on the sidewalk. Leo liked the dark red color and Rachel swept him up before he touched it. There was no escaping the feeling of violence in the town. But it wasn’t a race-hate town, at least not among the general population. White and black passed each other in friendliness in the pervasive church and business cultures, and came together as friends and spouses. The hatred on the boulevard was larger than race, more indiscriminate, and any available human was good enough to bleed.

City government and business also required blood to keep the oxygen flowing. A previous mayor had bought civil war and wild west artifacts with public money, police prejudice was ignored, minorities harassed, the mentally ill beaten and housed in prisons, stripped of medication and its buttress of stable thinking, and local industries lobbied to dump more and more poisons into the Susquehanna River. Everyday destruction was evident in the newspapers, the articles flickering with patriotic justifications.

Despite all of this, there was a surface of successful family life that we saw on the hiking trails and in the museums, two-parent households with kids who appeared happy—an aloof innocence, of all family members, that suggested religious instruction, reasonable discipline, and distrust of outsiders. People spoke of faith at city parks and malls, among friends and family, as we heard within earshot.

The city was interesting—I would give the place that—and the good people I met, like Darla, were better than most, as if holding to the light with extra care.







Rachel loved her job, and she liked her boss, Antonio. She mentioned him one night at dinner—“He dresses like Don Draper and I guess he has the money”—and she mentioned him again when Leo was asleep, how he’d turned around a negative feeling in the department and restored trust, in some deft manner. We finished our beers at the table.

“Does he like you?”

“I’ve discovered, after some curiosity, that he’s one-hundred percent committed to his wife.”

“You had to feel that one out, huh? I guess you’re interested in him.”

“I’m interested in a lot of people there,” she said. “To talk to. I wasn’t imagining anything.”

“Why does everything you say have an edge to it? I guess it’s better than if you said nothing. Then I’d know I really should be worried.”

“I like to figure people out. Antonio is probably the most ethical person I know. I never thought he’d try to go to bed with me. Well, I wondered at first. I was afraid of that. I wouldn’t have done it, but I wondered if he’d try.”

“The two of you are incredibly ethical. He’s ethical because he’s committed to his wife even though he wants to sleep with you. And you’re ethical because you didn’t sleep with him, although part of you hoped he’d try.”

“That’s not what I said. A person can be curious about the culture of an organization without participating in it.”

“Like at the Pittsburgh P.O. Employees fucking on site, inside closets and under stairs, and behind loaded carts. I wasn’t sparkling with curiosity.”

“Well, that’s disgusting. Antonio and I aren’t like that.”

I disliked the sound of that, Antonio and I. “It sounds like you have entertained sleeping with him. The thought crossed your mind.”

“You’ve imagined sleeping with someone you can’t sleep with. Admit it. I’m not saying I have here, in the case with Antonio. But we’re animals. We all imagine things.”

“Everything you say suggests how you feel, then you get mad when I say it directly.”

She tittered. “Is that what I’m doing? Okay.”

I went out to smoke on the dark balcony. An owl hooted at a distance. The hill across the far lawn formed a bear-shaped silhouette against the sky, with sloped shoulders and a crop of taller trees, like a head, at the summit. A star near his left ear winked.

Rachel came out in five minutes and took hold of my jacket at the sleeve. “I meant there’s a difference between imagining something actively, hoping for it, and letting images come into your mind, and feeling excited despite yourself. Tell me you haven’t pictured having sex with another woman. You know, since we got married.” Her fingers clutched the front of my shirt now, her face tense and wild with something.

“You’re right,” I admitted. “There’s a difference.”

“I’m going to take off my clothes in case anyone wants to know.”

“You’re not going to imagine Antonio, are you? You don’t want me only because you’re worked up about him, right?”

“No! I’ll admit it’s exciting when someone flirts, okay? Jesus, I’m not a puritan.”

“So he does flirt with you.”

“No. We like each other. We’re friends. Men and women talk to each other differently.”

“Really.”

“Would you shut up?” She whispered. “I want someone to pull my hair tonight, and I want it to be you. Is that good enough?”

But she was only excited about her boss, and so I left her alone. Maybe I ruined the evening or maybe she had. It was hard to know.

Most of the time we kept to ourselves in the evening. She seemed pleased in her thoughts and very inward, as if content to contemplate Antonio or her painting. Once, when she was in the shower, I studied her new paintings—each a small house in Chernobyl, with a courtyard in front, or a poisoned garden. One house was skinny and another leaning. There were no people. Rachel never painted people, only night ships on fire, abandoned aircraft carriers, and houses made solitary and peaceful after nuclear rain. Many of these houses stood under moonlight, peaceful and conspiring, as if glad to be rid of voices. The paintings were very fine.

One night I made pork chops and mashed potatoes while Leo wanted kisses on his mother’s mouth. “Do you mind if I call Samantha tonight?” I asked. “It’s about time for our annual conversation.”

“Not at all. You can talk to her.”

“You don’t mind anymore? Good. It’s a safe conversation. She’s married, I’m married. She and I don’t have feelings for each other. We don’t imagine taking each other’s clothes off anymore. We don’t get all excited thinking about each other. I can promise you that.”

“Wow, okay. I see your commentary there. It’s fine. I already said.”

Before I knew Rachel, Samantha and I had a burning summer of midnight, flung-together kissing in city parks and church yards. More than once, I wept tramping in the streets of Eugene, speaking her name. During the early years with Rachel, I was forbidden to talk to Samantha, not on the phone, not ever.

But I wouldn’t call her now. I was afraid she’d no longer be interested in me at all and Rachel would have picked up on that.

“I’ll call her some other time, when I have some privacy,” I told Rachel while she did dishes.

I picked up Leo out of his chair and we looked at the pictures in their frames in the living room. “That’s the goat that scared you. That’s me and Mom, so in love,” and knew he wouldn’t recognize the sarcasm. “That’s dadda,” Leo said. “That’s momma. Momma’s pretty. Blue dress. It’s nice. Where’s momma?”

“I’m right here,” she said leaving the kitchen with her arms wide for him. “Let’s get you ready for bed.” She took him.

I turned to the sliding glass. It was raining. Lights in the parking lot to one side touched the pavement in yellow bands.







One morning, while snow fell in the windows and sliding glass, there was an email from Prudential—an invitation to apply for a job selling insurance. I had called in sick at the state police, and Rachel and Leo were gone. Prudential found my resume on an employment site and mentioned a hiring program that pursued candidates from various professional backgrounds. Their swamp of business aspirants must’ve dried up in this area.

A blue link carried me to their testing page. I took the exams and signed up for an interview in the afternoon.

Rachel was pleased when I called her at lunch. “That’s a big name. Do you think it’s for you? You’d have to build a client list. You’d have to be good with people.”

“You don’t think I could? I ranked high on the tests.”

“Give it a try. My husband the corporate performer. You never know. People change their lives in a big way at our age sometimes.”

I got into my sweats and jogged the country road, slowing to a walk now and then, exhausted, smiling at cars I met. There would be plenty of time to lose the extra fifteen pounds.

At the Prudential office, a short man with a large stomach interviewed me in a glass room. His name was Mark. He had a small voice, a kind man. He had daughters. His wife was an attorney. She had taught for a while.

“Is there anything about teaching that you could apply to this business?” he said.

“I enjoy working with students with different backgrounds, different personalities,” I said. “I’ve had terms that didn’t work out—I’ll admit that. But overall, I was able to make inroads and build bridges. I earned a GED and two master’s degrees. That’s a long bridge in itself, and it required some careful buttressing along the way.”

“No PhD, then.”

“The MFA is a terminal degree. It sounds like hospice care, but it’s a final degree in my field, and meets the requirement.”

At the mention of hospice, he withdrew into my resume. I always had to say something strange, as if to undermine my chances.

He leaned amicably toward me. “God knows, our best efforts can leave us bereft. Then our talents and abilities are restored, and we thank goodness for the sunshine. That’s probably my wife talking. Nothing stops her.”

“I’m lucky that way too. My wife’s my best friend.”

“Let’s move forward with the final meeting, with our top boss, Darlene. If you make it, you can pay the $5,000 for the license, and we’ll get you started. But you’re not hired yet. Darlene will have to give the approval.”

He and I walked together through the open office. Suzanne, a very tall woman in pea-green blazer and slacks, took my hand in an easy handshake, bending a warm and interested gaze to me. “Ah. The college teacher.”

“He’s meeting with Darlene next week,” said Mark.

In traffic I called Rachel. “It surprised me how friendly they were. I was the only phony in the building.”

“That’s wonderful! A second interview. Did you have to take Ativan?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t be taking that too much. You’ll have to go to the office every day if you get the job, right?”

“There’s also the license fee I have to come up with. 5,000 dollars.”

“Oh.” She was disappointed.

“Do you think a bank would lend it to me? If I got hired?”

“Your credit isn’t so great right now,” she said. “It’s not bad, but it’s not what they want to see.”

“It was seven-hundred when we met.”

“A more important question is how are you going to deal with the social life of colleagues and clients when your anxiety is so extreme. You can’t magically change, can you? I want to support you, but you’ll need a plan. You need counseling. You need behavioral therapy, a total commitment to that, and at least a couple of years.”

The fumes of corporate promise stayed with me through the day. At the very least, the missed chance bought me some esteem in my wife’s eyes. With a better nervous system, I could have made a lot of money.







The Christian leader made an Irish theme called “Christopher’s Hand” and placed it on my Facebook menu page, as if it were the cover of an Irish romance. The Christian leader had “caught” me looking at porn. That was okay, I had a chance to see what his porn looked like every day—remote bullying and harassment, and using porn for his online attacks was apparently a very holy endeavor.

My jogging campaign didn’t make it past that first day. I had gained weight drinking beer and eating fast food, and staying up late, my thoughts shoving against Mathew Stjohn and the state police department all the while.

After break one morning, I wrote Bill at the clerical pool. “I’m not sure why you can’t give me the form I have asked for so many times. I suppose the culture here is so deeply right-wing that you don’t want to have any appearance of aiding socialism. We have a legal right to apply for assistance, but if you want to further a situation that is becoming abusive, I think you should think twice. You would only be creating a questionable legacy.”

At home that night I played Legos with my son on his bedroom floor. He had pictures of construction trucks on his walls and a few animals that Rachel had painted for him, one of them a squirrel that ate a nut with an expression of bluster. Leo created a vehicle for space travel, a black deck with a boy in a helmet riding on it, surrounded by little trees and gems.

“He sees the stars,” Leo said.

“That’s a great spaceship. Is there extra room?”

I got an email from HR and put it away until Leo was asleep. Rachel had a glass of wine at the table.

“They’re accusing me of workplace violence,” I said.

“Why does this always happen to you?”

“You know how many times I asked that guy for the food stamp form? I wrote him a rude letter today.”

She read Bill’s letter on my phone and read the letter I wrote. “You tell him to think twice. That sounds bad. But it’s obvious you’re talking about his legacy.”

“I have a phone meeting with HR. I’m too dangerous to enter the building.”

“You’re a food stamp offender. I’m sure it eats at him that you keep asking for that form. He’d rather die before asking for help.”

“He’s such a smooth, Andy Griffith operator, too.”

“He seriously never gave you the form? What a sleaze! I’ll accuse him of violence. Well, I bet they won’t mention this workplace violence stuff at the meeting. They have enough mundane infractions here to fire you. Did you really leave half the mail on your desk overnight?”

I raised a hand and let it fall. “It seemed like an ongoing project.”

Before the meeting, Bill sent me a revised PDF. There was no language about workplace violence. The HR team called me. They were three loud-talking young men who spoke like vindictive junior high school teachers.

“Your position with the commonwealth is terminated,” one of them said.

“Is Bill there?”

“Yes, this is Bill,” another voice said.

“I’m writing an article for the New York Observer about you and all your state police buddies.” The line was quiet. “Did you hang up?”

“We’re engaged in tech issues here,” Bill said. “I wouldn’t exactly say we’re not listening. We have another call. I wish you every luck in your future en—”

The PA State Police were popular or tolerated in town. With any law enforcement agency, there were good officers and bad ones, but the bad ones seemed to rain down an unchecked hell on roadways. Protected by the doctrine of sovereign immunity, they indulged a pleasure of a myriad beatings and at least a few criminal coverups. They were marauders who seemed to have a special interest in torturing minorities and the mentally ill. After overdosing on his bipolar medication, Robert Leone was beaten for hours on a dark highway. One officer who pounded the young man’s face had broken a finger in the process and blamed Leone for assaulting his finger. Another officer had called an ambulance for Leone. But the officer with the hurt finger used the ambulance to go to the hospital himself. They took Leone to the hospital and beat him further. They lied about his behaviors to a judge and concealed the motive for beating him—pleasure and sport—and he was sent to prison for two years. Former Pennsylvania Trooper Larry Hohol’s critical discussion of the Leone case, on YouTube, was unnerving.

In another case, a young Chinese-American, Christian Hall, who had received a diagnosis of depression, stood on a highway bridge with a pellet gun. When troopers arrived, he raised his hands in the air—he still held the pellet gun—and they shot him in this pose of surrender and compliance.







An Ashley Madison ad appeared on my website, a photo of a woman in a bra lying in bed. Rachel put Leo’s lunch together at the counter.

“Why do you assume it’s Mathew Stjohn?” she said.

“It’s a site for people who want to have affairs. I suspect he heard us talking about Samantha recently, and he knows I look at her profile sometimes. I mentioned her in passing on a recent post as well, a private post. Samantha and I didn’t even have an affair. Our spouses had already left us high and dry. They both cheated on us first, and we got out.”

“Phones are picking up everything these days,” she said. “You might be getting some cross-traffic. I mentioned I had a cough last month, and an ad for cough syrup appeared.”

“Ashley Madison would have no interest in my site. They don’t put their ads on the websites of average citizens. That would bring even more contempt for their service. He’s put ads for adult diapers on my site—scabies, psoriasis. The algorithm is not matching me with all this stuff.”

“I don’t care. I do not care. Listen, I was late, but I got my period today. I didn’t want to mention it unless I was sure. Can you imagine us with two kids?”

It was her second scare. “I’ll get a vasectomy. It’s easy.”

“Would you do that?”

“Would you go off the pill?”

“Well—yes. Of course.”

“You sound like you’re hesitating.”

“No, I feel vulnerable without the pill. I’ve been taking it since I was fifteen. But if you had that procedure and took the tests, I’d give it up.”

I turned off AdSense on blogger. But the Ashley Madison ad remained on my site for six weeks.




7

After the vasectomy, I swallowed two pain pills from the bottle and sat on a bag of frozen peas, as recommended, on our couch. Soon the air transformed with gold streams in it, and I conjured a man riding a bike near the ceiling and towing a burning ship. I saw him and I followed his movement across the room.

In the morning I found Rachel and Leo in the kitchen. I had slept only a few hours, med-groggy now, but I poured a cup of coffee and walked one way and the other.

“I saw a commercial for a senator last night. Kids playing in a park and seniors at bingo. Old men holding Bibles and hugging children. It showed state police officers grilling with special needs kids. They feed us this sugar so they can beat the hell out of people on the highways, and we’ll think they’re out saving people. Mathew Stjohn needs to do that. He can stage a video of himself carrying an old woman from a burning house.” My voice bounced on the kitchen wall and Rachel shook her head, holding the spoon to Leo.

“Stop! It’s nine in the morning. My god, this raving. I like to have some peace on the weekend. I’m so sick of all this analysis.”

“You don’t think I’m onto something?”

“You might have something, but I don’t care!”

She stood and with shaking hands removed Leo’s tray, lifted him from his seat, went down the stairwell, and slammed the door. The pain pills had left me depressed. I wanted my own meds. On my knees in the living room, I searched my pack and found the smallest container in the world, with a screw top, and took one half of a lorazepam. I lay on my back next to the tall bookcase. The reflections on the book bindings made shimmering images that held me in pleasantness. After lunch the good feeling vacated. I walked a horseshoe road nearby, with a small lake in the center of it, passing shacks and looking at my phone.

A friend had messaged me, “Have you seen this? Fired!”

My heart stuttered as I read the article. Father Peeks was fired from his job for sexual and psychological harassment. He required skirts and conservative clothing. The staff had to address each other as mister or miss, etc. He was punitive. There were days of rage and punishment. And he propositioned one of the young women to come to his hotel room at a book symposium.

Stunned, joyful, I lowered myself to a bench in front of the lake and called Rachel. The arm of sun across the surface glittered in beads of light.

“He got caught!” she said. “Thank God.”

“We’ll see how long he’s in the doghouse.”

“For now, it’s great news.”

“Where did you guys go?”

“Bounce World. I really couldn’t take any more rants about the state police and Father Seems. It’s day, and night, and day after day after day. God. I think it’s a good fight, but can you get a counselor or a new friend? There’s only so much I can hear. Not everyone processes things by talking and talking. I don’t.”

“Jace won’t talk about it. He doesn’t like to think such things happen in the world. He grooms trees and plants all day, and gets hammered to escape his own troubles.”

“Then you need a new best friend. I don’t want to hear it all the time.”

“I know. I’ll stop talking so much.”

My email shoutout list included Christian scholars around the country, professors at Loyola and Hillsdale among them. I imagined that some of them were like Dostoevsky, faithful but grounded in the world, understanding human nature, psychology, science, and shunning bubblegum Jesus talk. In a new email, I detailed the worst of the hacking. None complained or blocked me this time. I kept it going, spending time on this weekly shoutout. It was the only justice I had. My email signature was my website address, and I often found seventy or more visits to my site soon after I sent an email. They had come around after Mathew Stjohn’s firing.

While the Christmas tree winked, its presents torn open weeks earlier, I moved in and out of rooms at night, holding a beer and discoursing about the Christian leader, explaining that I only had something quick to tell Rachel. Most of the time it was a brief comment.

“You’ll appreciate this,” I said one night. Rachel held a loose hand at her brow, as though she was fatigued and struggled to see what was on the TV.

“On this conservative site, in the comment section, these right-wingers are saying his firing is a drive-by shooting of a strong Christian patriarch.”

Rachel read the comments on my phone. “What assholes,” she said. “Listen, my dad keeps asking if you found another job.”

“Did you tell him about Prudential?”

“No. Why would I?”

“To let him know that I’m not simply lazy. You always tell him about my warehouse jobs. You only give him the bad news.”

“Maybe we need a break. You could go somewhere. For a while. Then we’d come back together in six months. You could get this Christian monster out of your system, and I could have some time to think and paint.”

She left the living room and I found her sitting on the edge of the tub.

“You need to figure some things out,” she said. “I won’t serve as some wall for you to bounce your frustrations against. Go somewhere and get a counselor. Come back when you’re done with it.”

“I know, I know. I know. I’m the one who’s been talking about everything, when you didn’t want to. We’re only taking a break, then? You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“I could take my half of the tax returns, I suppose . . . How about Japan?”

“Too far. Too expensive. You’d have to visit us at least once or twice.”

“Do you really think a break would make us closer?”

“I think it’s going to save our little family.”

Our little family. The phrase was a rare sentimentality for Rachel, and I didn’t believe her.

“It’ll be easier to communicate with Antonio when I’m gone,” I said.

“There’s nothing there,” she said. “Look at our emails if you want.”

“It would be easy enough for you to delete some.”

“You can’t delete emails on the state system. You can see my private emails, too.”

“I don’t want to look,” I said. “Well, I guess your parents hate me, so I have to go.”

“That has nothing to do with this. They don’t hate you. They want stability.”

I was self-conscious of my appearance, extra weight and a bad complexion, and I knew I should have kept jogging.

“What do you want?” Rachel said.

“I’m sorry. I was staring at you but thinking of other things. Good night.”







A new life waited in Cincinnati.

In my rented car, the driver’s seat was fixed in a vague leaning position toward the side window. The problem of that angle, as I drove the highway, amplified in my mind. I felt off kilter and nauseated. Dark clouds formed a low ceiling. A Ford Fiesta followed alongside, a young teen in a hoody in the back seat, exposing her upper teeth in a mimicry of disgust, as if my middle-age face had brought out her scorn. Later, night seeped into my car, and my chair seemed to straighten. The deep-voiced Hopi chants of my Koyaasnisqatsi soundtrack felt right. A hard wind kicked up. On a hill beside the highway, oak trees danced like geriatrics in pain. A speeding SUV swerved ahead and slowed, then blasted onward as if to challenge the storm.

When I arrived in Cincinnati and found my hotel’s quiet road, the wind kept on. A parade of trash hastened across the road before me, under a streetlight. I eased the car through this crossing. In the rearview, the flow of garbage had broken and swirled in the air for a moment and resumed its march. The wind produced a nervous eee, eeeeee as it touched my car. Ahead on this wide, meandering street, as I drove up a hill, more garbage tore downward in the gutters like haunted rabbits in my front beams. As I crested the hill, a red hotel sign burned.

At the counter inside, a skinny young man talked too fast and grinned in his hotel blazer. He was young and bald, all bone, and the skin around his eyes was blue and wrinkled. “Everything happens in Cincinnati. You see the tall ones and the low ones, the ins and outs, the fresh women and the ones all busted. Nobody wants to move away, because everything happens in Cincinnati. You know, though. You picked it. You picked Cincy off the map like a burning cigar because it felt good right away, am I right?”

The hallway carpets had cigarette burns near the elevator. In the bar, on the top floor, I gazed past reflections of beer signs in the windows to the far shore and the lighted parking lot beyond. Naked trees seethed on the ground above the river, as if they felt dread and alarm.

My room had good sheets and a new TV. Next day I rented a studio apartment near campus. All the windows had been scratched by a key or a blade. The tenant who defaced the glass must’ve wished to blot out the world, as if he didn’t know that was best achieved by books, drugs, and alcohol.

On my second day in the studio, I walked close to the walls. The carpet had various gray patterns with bits of black threads in the material, as if to defy stains. It was ugly in here, and empty except for my blow-up mattress and what I could fit in two duffle bags.

Leo’s face and small teeth swerved into my mind. My head felt liquid with sorrow, as though a warm rain passed through me. I wanted to hold his small arms and kiss him on the cheek as I had done so many times.

When I called Rachel on video, my face slipped, though I had willed not to cry. She returned a hard expression in her manner of refusing certain emotions.

“Look it!” Leo presented a notebook page that Rachel had written a title on. “Airport Pancake Factory.”

She turned the phone and they were both in view. “He’s writing a book. That’s his title.”

“That’s a great title, Leo. I miss you so much.”

We exchanged one or two adventures of the last two days.

“I’ll call you back in an hour when he goes to bed,” she said.

She called and we spoke on the phone. “I think I want to break it off,” she said.

“I know,” I said. We were quiet on the phone a while.

“I saw you took the pain killers with you,” she said. “Why did they give you so much! You had four days of recovery and they give you seventy? Hey, I want you to put those in a dumpster, right now. You promise?”

“Yes.”

“I have some studying to do before bed. Get rid of that stuff. I’m not kidding.”

I found the container in my bag and shook out three. Other tenants on my floor smoked—the smell was in the hallway—and so I smoked too. Later, feeling wonderful like a helium balloon, I dragged the back of my head against a cold window, side to side, standing there, a tingling electricity all through me.

In two weeks, I received packages from Rachel—a leather chair and footrest and a desk. “Leo and I want you to be happy there.” She included a letter. “Let’s do a face video when you set up your studio.”

“I’m feeling good today,” I wrote. “I think I’m built to live in little rooms.”

It was morning. I poured all of the pills into a half-gallon jug of orange juice. The transferal of responsibility to the jug was complete—the pills would find liquid form, much diminished, vulnerable to getting spilled into the kitchen drain on a whim, one step from destruction. Everyone knew about these pills. Their devastation had tramped across the screens of digital newspapers. Now they were a local brand of orange juice, caught like spiders and drowned.

In the afternoon, I shook the jug and gulped twice, but I could have no more than that each day, since I didn’t know how many pills I was taking. Once I got drinking, though, in the evening, I had more sips—very careful in the administering. Since I didn’t feel the pain killer, I drank a bit more of the orange juice, until the back of my moist neck felt ice-blue. Then came the dull energy, and the pleasant wind-tunnel noise in my head. I walked across my studio floor and back again many times, taking short, slow steps and reaching my cigarette hand out toward my scratched-out reflection in the window, as if I might walk out this window and climb into the clouds.

Putting together the furniture next day helped me forget my bank account. I had three weeks to make rent and bills. With all the parts and screw bags on the floor, I smoked at the window. It was foggy outside. The edges of the scratched glass revealed the ground below. The drop was only thirty feet. I’d had it in my mind that it was a good sixty feet down. I took the equivalent of two shots of the orange juice and got back to work on my chair. There was the sensation of rising, as if my studio were an elevator, climbing up through the trees, and then lowering, going down and down.

If I ever did fall out the window on accident, I would end up with broken bones and an ambulance ride—that’s all. A squirrel had gotten into the space above my ceiling, an occasional visitor. Its claws tapped as it walked a diagonal path. I didn’t mind. It never made too much noise up there. The two shots hadn’t done anything. It was time to lose the orange juice. The pills were okay for a couple of weeks, but any more and I was going to be in trouble with them. Booze had to go as well.

The out of doors—and the people walking—seemed to call to me with an urgency, and I went out there.

It was late afternoon, all views foggy. I walked up the steep road, passing an Irish bar and two frat houses, and walked the campus streets on the plateau above. A Dairy Queen’s red lights touched the wet sidewalk. A crowd of sporty young men and women moved into the front door, shouting or laughing. There were no good restaurants or cafes. I stepped into an Indian restaurant that was like a garage, called Krishna Carryout. There were four perpendicular booths, each next to a window looking onto the street. Behind the counter were three irritable-looking men and one sad-looking old man, the latter with untamed white eyebrows and white hair that grew stiffly from his T-shirt collar. The hair had a shorn appearance. When I ordered food, this man had a gentlemanly manner, much nodding that seemed to involve his whole upper body, no obsequiousness, but only the self-interested politeness of a business man.

In minutes another man handed me an open Styrofoam container of Chicken Tikka Masala. “Take it. Take it!” he commanded. He gave it to me and flicked his fingers in my direction as though to get rid of me.

There was an open booth. The meal was terrific, the chicken perfect, the sauce incredible. Their rudeness didn’t bother me. I would have taken slaps on the back of the head if I could take my food to a booth and eat in peace. They were gods in this fall-down joint. They should have been on national TV for their achievement.

After the food, I wanted to stick around, resting in the warm place, but the old melancholy man appeared at the short wall across the aisle. He presented a withdrawn smile, as if to communicate that I had eaten my food and it was customary to leave.

I went out to the foggy evening, still warm after the meal. Maybe Rachel would change her mind and want to stay together. We still liked each other, though I knew she wouldn’t like it if I didn’t drink at all.

Nighttime always invited me to drink. All the promises to myself about quitting booze were erased when the evening neared. As I tramped down the steep hill, the lamps on short poles came into existence, as I approached each one, then each was swallowed by the fog behind me.

I texted Rachel at my studio: “The chair and desk are put together. Thank you much!”

“Let’s do a video call. You threw away those pills?”

The video conference worked for a moment, then it froze on Leo’s crying face. Our words jagged eep, ah, dep, etc.”

“My phone has full wifi,” I said. Then I heard Leo scream for five seconds and say, “I want to talk to Dadda!” Then the call disconnected. Rachel didn’t call back. She likely put him down for an early bedtime.

My phone was dead when I looked at it in a minute. A full charge was reduced after a two-minute video call. “You twisted piece of shit,” I told Father Peeks on the other end, though he couldn’t hear me talking on a dead phone.

Seeing your child’s unhappy face on a phone rated high in the catalog of suffering.

In the kitchen I took four good sips of the orange juice. I turned off the overhead, plugged in my salt lamp, and listened to Do the Collapse. There were new interviews with Bob Pollard to read. I sipped modestly at the orange juice and drank beer. In the night I woke on the floor, resting on my forearm and my neck hurting, wind hammering my walls in regular whumps that rattled the windows. I crawled into my bed. Later I woke on the floor at the foot of my bed, as if a ghost had shoved me off it and let me sleep in the cold. My watch said three but it was light outside—it was three pm. I’d slept the whole day.

My son’s face on the phone was there in the image I conjured on the floor. I felt the shame of these drugs I couldn’t quit.

The jug had three inches of juice remaining in it. I Googled how to dispose of pills dissolved in liquid. Not finding anything, I dressed and carried the juice around back to the dumpsters, unscrewed the cap, sprinkled in a lot of dirt so that I wouldn’t sneak down later to find it, and fastened the cap and threw it in. It wasn’t proper to dispose of it that way, but I had to get rid of it, and it seemed better than putting it in the sink or toilet. Also, I had to get rid of it right after waking or I’d talk myself out of it later. But I’d drunk most of the bottle, so getting rid of it amounted to a denial that I must have taken fifty pills in two weeks. Also, it was better psychologically to quit while you had some left. That way, you were quitting it, instead of it quitting you.

A temp agency placed me at a company to examine medical equipment. They had me starting on a Saturday. When I received the assignment sheet the day before starting the job, I searched the Cincinnati address in the bus route app on my phone, and it found a business location across the river in Kentucky, thirty miles beyond that border. After searching it again, the app brought up Dayton, Ohio, where the band members of Guided by Voices lived. A general search on Google, though, showed the address as fifteen miles outside of downtown Cincinnati.

It was Mathew Stjohn or it was a glitch. I had been wrong before about something I believed was a hack. But while the hacked one thought everything was a hack, twenty hacks per week was no glitch.

At five in the morning, I walked past buildings at the bottom of the hill. One of them was a store front, empty of windows, the orange-painted walls outside glowing in the light of the street. Ahead, on a boarded stone house, a balconet greeted the morning, as if waiting for its flowers to be put out.

At the bus terminal I asked three drivers what bus would take me to my work address. No one knew the answer. At sunrise, a driver with short gray hair and a pleasant, old face reached for the top of his wheel and said, “I’ll get you there, man. Get on board. That’s all you have to do.”

In twenty minutes, the bus stopped at a new Chevron, sunlight flashing on its stainless-steel surfaces.

“This is your stop!” called the driver. “Pass the gas station and walk two blocks.”

With twelve others in a warehouse, I opened boxes and inspected equipment for fissures in the glass, under the bright examination light above my desk. Most of the items came in a clear plastic sheath the size of my hand. The instruments had glass heads like spoons or else a cluster of tiny glass bulbs like the eyes of spiders.

A woman in a white coat walked among us, inspecting our rejects and answering questions. She spoke in a Russian accent. “Eye break!” she called. “You have to take it,” she said to me, “or else your eyes will die and it’ll be company fault.”

“That’s good enough for me.”

“I didn’t mean die. I meant weaken.”

Near the ceiling were many narrow vertical windows. When my eyes found them, the warehouse appeared to darken and vanish, and the blue lights of sky were like a row of coffins.

After lunch, there was misery in every object—the grade-school clock in the lunchroom, the transistor radio on my QA desk. The warehouse was far too big for such objects. It was an unforgivable act that Rachel had pushed me to dump the pain medication. A doctor had prescribed that exact number of pills! For a minute I planned to scare up some med salesmen downtown, if they existed, but I knew I wouldn’t find anyone and left the idea alone.

From the station downtown, I walked the half hour toward my plateau. In the heat and brightness of a spring afternoon, I rested halfway up the hill, leaning on the wide stone railing that protected walkers from a fall. A Saturday market went on far below. The sounds of an electric guitar bothered my skin. It was impossible to know why anybody attended such events, pressed among so many people. They all moved around very closely, I could see that. I plodded up the winding street toward my apartment. The white sidewalk shimmered with its gold specks in the sun. My face was dripping. The sun jerked in my sideview like a plastic bag on a stick.







Later in the night, porn floated onto my phone, a room of twelve women hanging upside-down on ropes. I clicked out of it. Terror swirled me down to a place of introspection and worry. The upside-down women appeared alive. One of them spoke, as if saying, “Are we going to walk out of this room?” I wanted to know how long they had to hang upside-down like that. Stjohn must’ve hunted the dark webs for hours to find this one. He was showing the kinds of photos he enjoyed viewing.

I got out of bed and lay on the carpet across the room, watching the high street lamp that shivered a dark industrial blue. The light seemed to communicate malevolence now that it had found my face. “Fuck you,” I spoke to it. I wept for a second, or tried to, then crawled back to my bed. All of this had to stop. There was surely a way to make it stop.

In an hour, my mind had sifted the dread away. When the upside-down women returned to mind, I launched the image away. I knew Rachel was fine. She was right. He only wanted to harass us.

Leo’s crying face haunted my thoughts. I wasn’t much of a dad, but I might become one later, if I gave myself a chance. The first thing I had to do was to remain in the world.

A woman picked up the hotline phone, whispering to someone near her. Then she spoke into the phone. “I know why you’re calling. What’s going on?”

“I don’t think I need anything, but I wanted to call and make sure. I don’t believe I’d do anything.”

She whispered to someone again. Her giggle rose to a laugh. The phone was quickly muffled. She wasn’t laughing at me. It was likely she was drinking with a friend and forgot about her shift.

“I’m so sorry. To tell the truth, I didn’t know I was on call for tonight. I’m looking at my schedule. I’m not on the schedule. I can always refer people to the hospital,” she said. “But I should tell you it’s like being incarcerated. It might feel that way. They have to make sure you’re not a threat to yourself or others. Do you take medication?”

“Lithium and Ativan.”

“Okay. One’s for bipolar and the other’s a control drug. Hmm.”

“Medication is considered negative in a mental hospital?”

“They’ll probably give those back when you leave.” She covered the phone and spoke to someone.

“Probably.” I killed the call and wrote Rachel about it.

“She doesn’t know anything. She’s a volunteer,” she wrote back. “Do you need help?”

“No, no. I wasn’t sure if I needed to go into the hospital or not. I’m sure the answer is no. I don’t have a plan.”

“Let me know if you start wanting to. Don’t forget, either. Tell me right away. But let’s talk on the phone a minute, till I know you’re okay.”

That night, later still, images of dead or distressed people rode the Facebook feed—a young man resting faceup on his back in water. In another, a young, naked woman sobbed at the person who took her picture. Her breasts and genitals were blurred, as if the Christian leader wished to express modesty—the Christian thing to do. Father Peeks was modest and very Christian in his Russian-style porn hacking. Thank goodness for that. But these weren’t anyone’s Facebook posts. That was clear. Nor did any of my friends appear to see these photos.

He must have listened to my hotline call or saw my text with Rachel. The images he planted on my feed were like invitations to complete my desire. In addition, I believed any talk of suicide would have disgusted him, even while he tried to bring it about. He was so built up in his false personality that human brokenness was anathema to his own image of personal success—a cloud of ego that existed in the territory of the brain.

Next day when I looked up my name online to check for the next disaster, I found twenty-five pages of porn descriptions covering my Google wall, written in Danish. There were no images. Here and there were words in English, like cock, pussy, tits, and each porn description had my name in it once—page after page of this porn junk and nothing else.

I called Rachel. She saw the porn descriptions when she Googled me. All of that verbal Danish porn was on my wall for three days. Most of his hacking was only for me to see, but this was for everyone, perhaps especially for the eyes of the Christian scholars on my email list. I had written them about his death images and his insane porn. But there was something wholesome about this hack, the Danish language, the lack of images. By making this public, I believe he wished to communicate to the scholars that his hacking really wasn’t so nasty as they may have heard. Sure, he dipped into porn, but he did so modestly, the way a bishop might do it, or the holy father himself, keeping his eyes mostly on God.

He left me alone for two weeks—a record. I wrote without my computer hissing or my Word doc narrowing or vanishing. Leo’s face filled my phone without any technical issues. It was at the end of these two weeks that, one day, I felt extraordinary. My shabby, poor life here seemed all right. I was walking, eating fruit, losing weight, writing.

When I posted a painting of Byron, with the words “Feeing Byronic”—gloomy but working hard and finding some romance in my situation—the heavy hacking resumed, the usual chaos on my phone and computer, the thirty-minute Windows updates, the eternal loading of Word.

I left my desk and smoked at the open window. It rained hard, a surprising dank smell out there. The Christian leader had been quiet for two weeks because he hoped I might commit suicide. When he saw I was elated, instead of dead, it burned him.

But I went out to the street in a good mood. The rain was gone but cool currents remained, clouds traveling in heavy blacks and grays, the dank dampness here and there but fresh smells too, in the muggy day. A piece of black cloud tore away slowly from its mother cloud and formed a defiant shape of a skeletal hand, reaching downward like a thing that wanted to take hold of something alive and make it gray, but two of its fingers lifted and detached and its thumb broke into pieces.

The Christian leader had been praying on Twitter, shouting out to his holy Jacobs. He posted articles from colleagues and praised God’s name, winning friends for his benefit and protection after his firing, an old game. On Facebook, Father Peeks wanted all to know that to live for Christian love was a privilege. There was no sorrow to his words, no culpability. He sang his godly claptrap so that he’d get noticed and others would see how much he lived his faith. It worked. While the women in his former office were still in bandages and tourniquets, a right-wing college hired him to teach summer term. When Christian leaders were accused of sexual misbehavior, their followers got especially fired up. Accusations aroused them. Father Peeks got the job at the school as a reward, a high five.

Along the street, trash gathered in fields of tall grass. The street meandered through this trash zone, toward downtown. On the side of a building was a mural of a Hispanic boxer, his face bewildered. He crossed his arms but one of his gloves was coming off. He was a discomfited champion, warmth in his eyes despite the toughness and confusion. I couldn’t have handled getting hit in the face so many times.

I came to love Cincinnati’s streets. While New York was cleaning up, this midwestern city defied the example.

I crossed a boulevard and walked under seven huge fans set in a wall, blowing like jet engines. The windows on the bottom floor were mirrors, warped and spotted with dark specks. My body reflected tall in one of them, short in another—it was like a house of mirrors. Buildings in this area were singular industrial creations, homely, functional, and sometimes charming.

Three hours walking the streets in downtown Cincinnati. Though I’d lived in New York City, Boston, and San Francisco, this was the first time I had discovered the fun of true city walking. The buildings were each different and alive, with terrible faces and pleasing ones. They did something for me.

A man beckoned me to his stoop. He wore slacks and no shirt.

“You don’t have a car?”

“Naw.”

“I’ve always had one. I was an umpire for kids’ baseball. Janitor at the same time. I bought this house doing that. And I always had a car. Don’t forget, you can get everything you want, no matter what you’re doing. That’s my message for you. That’s all I wanted to say.”

“I’ll get a car one day. I like walking for now.”

He smiled and nodded up once. “Okay. You walk, you walk. You enjoy it, that’s what matters.”

I lifted my hand and went on.

Before bed, I opened my phone to a picture of two parents dead in a front seat and a living child in the back seat. I made sure I closed the picture, so that I wouldn’t see it again. When I shut my eyes, it felt like that was the world I was going to sleep in. So I stayed up reading ZZ Packer, and hers was the world I went to sleep to.




8

In April, when my small publisher wrote that they accepted my collection of stories, my website dropped on Google within the hour. The Christian leader hated any good news about my career, and he held vigil over my email. On the bottom of Google page three, I found my website hovering there. He was God’s own administrator, comfortable protesting any decision he disliked. God must have winked at his porn-and-death salvos as necessary actions in battling his enemies.

The porn descriptions had evaporated from Google. Only one passage containing Christopher, cock, pussy, fuck remained. My website returned to the top of Google in a few hours.

On a Sunday morning, Leo and I talked on video for thirty minutes. “I have to go soon, Dad. I’m going to see caverns in a game.”

His voice and language were different, after two and a half months. Our video time hadn’t been sufficient to bring out the subtle changes much. That wasn’t any surprise. My heart went down. It wasn’t any way to be a father.

Rachel picked up. “You want to come visit next weekend?”

“Yes,” I said. “I wanted to say thank you for pushing me to get rid of the pills.”

“I’m glad you’re off those things.”

The Greyhound punched through West Virginia. Through a grove on the side of the road, a boy ran with a bow, his face painted in camo, passing through shadows and light.

Near Harrisburg, I found a Facebook message from a man who liked my first book, only he’d sent this note in 2015, four years earlier. I was getting it only now.

The Christian leader wanted me angry and frustrated before my trip. He often used hacking to sour my time with people, to make it unpleasant, to kill it. But I wasn’t going to bring that to Leo and Rachel.

At the Harrisburg train station, I got off the bus in the sticky heat of an overcast day. It was a long time ago that we visited here and watched the toy train go around inside. Rachel’s car was parked in front. I got in the back seat.

In his child’s seat, Leo looked away. “Hi Dad,” he said.

“He’s been talking about your visit for days,” she said. “He’s just not used to you.”

I held his hand on the drive. In the apartment, on the couch, Leo and I played his game. We mined for diamonds and got a tool that made you strong to fight a dragon.

“Look at this, Dad.” He shot at the dragon and it smothered in flames.

“Nice work.”

Leo gave me a half hug. He showed me his screen with six pictures of sea life. “Black Dragonfish. Look, Dad.”

It had long teeth and it reflected no light, cruising the ocean invisibly. Rachel had said they subscribed to a kid science channel.

“How does he reflect no light?”

“He fills his stomach in a certain way, I only saw it once,” she said. “It’s time for his nap,” she said and flashed me a smile. They went down the hall and she came back and cleaned up lunch dishes. “You got in shape!” she said.

“It’s all the walking I mentioned.”

She invited me to take a nap but only on the condition that it didn’t mean anything. I knew it would bring storms onto my head later, but of course I didn’t refuse. On her dress were small neon ponies. She led me to the bedroom, as if I didn’t know where it was. This certain smile of hers appeared to invite me back to her heart. Now it seemed I had always misunderstood that smile.

Late at night we had the easy conversation of two good friends. All was light and humorous, stories of jobs and odd people encountered.

“My parents want us to move to Eugene after new year’s,” she said. “I suddenly feel like it. Would you want to come with? We’ll go in a few months.”

“Yes. Isn’t it expensive, though?”

“It’s all expensive, the whole country. My parents are helping us out. I could give you a little to rent an apartment, if you can’t save enough. Have you gone on any dates yet?”

“No. What about you?”

“Not yet. The men at the commonwealth are very chaste. They don’t even notice me.”

“They don’t? That shows you how backward they are.”

“We should go to bed one more time before you go,” she said. “It won’t bother you too much, will it? Later?”

“No. I like that dress so much, I was hoping I could take it off twice.”

In the morning, Leo thrashed in his eating chair and called out, “Shut up! Stop it!”

“Your dad will visit again soon,” she said.

“Of course I will.”

“We can visit him too,” she said. “Would you like to visit Dad in Cincinnati?”

He nodded. Rachel lifted him from his seat and placed him in her lap. He slapped my palm hard a few times. He wiped his eyes.

“Then we’ll go back to Oregon,” she said, “the three of us.”

“Did you hear that, Leo?” I asked. “We’ll all live in Eugene. That’s where your mom and I grew up.”

“You won’t live with us.”

“But I’ll live close by. At least in Eugene I’ll be able to see you every day.”

He shook his head, as though denying the merits.

On the bus to Cincinnati, there were spaces of welcome neutral deadness past the pain of leaving again.

On voicemail, my recruiter had said I had done an amazing job examining medical equipment but it didn’t quite meet their requirements. Her positivity was nonsensical, but I liked her. She left another message as well.

“How would you like to work on a barge on the scenic Ohio River?” she said. “Think it over.”

My job examining medical equipment was a perfunctory task that allowed me to space out while listening to my transistor radio. They had caught on.







The barge lay at the shore, a rusted vessel with high walls. But the size of the barge surprised me when I was inside of it, the shadowed east wall appearing to reach very far as early sun poured into the tank, tendrils of fog drifting, and the shadowed places gave the impression of rooms and gardens. It smelled of seaweed and cold ocean. The walls had chalky markings that appeared to have gotten wet and dried in attractive images. Though I wanted to inspect the walls, someone called “Load it up!” from the plateau above.

In a sunny corner of the barge were waist-high stacks and piles of steel spools, damp in the sunlight, each weighing 2000 pounds. I stood behind a metal “fence”—it was ten feet wide, and on the front of it, four cannon-like pieces were mounted. A hoist rope was attached to the fence. An old man stepped into a stand-up forklift and started it up. Carrying a spool in his forks, he pushed it deftly onto one of the cannon barrels. All I had to do was stand on the bottom rung of the fence, to keep the load on the ground. He brought more spools. Now and then the fence lifted bouncily, inches from the ground, the hoist rope very taut. The fence would gather thousands of pounds, but all it needed was one person standing there.

When the cannons were half full of spools, I saw the old man’s mouth was open on one side as though pulled by a hook—a wedge of yellow teeth and gray wet gums. The other side of his face was sound. As he moved skillfully about, he turned his head like a swivel as he backed up, spun around, came forward, presenting his photogenic face and his damaged one. His face frightened me. Then I got used to it.

“Hey, fork!” called a voice from the plateau. It was the boss, hands resting on knees, beside the Gabonese man who was the crane operator. They stood at the cliff’s edge watching the forklift toil. The Gabonese called in a French accent, “This speed is not acceptable.”

The Gabonese and the boss were together in authority. The old man had said he was from Gabon. They didn’t use names here. The boss was boss, the old man was fork, and the crane operator was the Gabonese.

“I’ll pick it up!” the old man said.

The old man’s broken mouth gave him a sly appearance on that side of his face, but his opposite profile suggested honesty and pain. When the cannons were hidden by spools, he told me to back away and waved at the reflected cockpit window above, and the load went up, the cannons slanting downwards, all of it bouncing with a drawn-out slowness that was like a beast breathing, the load turning in the air, rising, all 30,000 pounds of it.

When the load was going up, I wandered to a shadowed wall. They had dusty white patterns in them that formed images, as though some artist, working in a water and salt medium, had done his work. Another artwork presented a farm road and fields of wheat leaning in places where the wind was strong. The salt and the dark walls created a world that was barely seen, then astonishingly vivid when the eye caught it right. Though a sun dropped onto this wheatland, there was a sensation of night, a daytime chiaroscuro.

We did another load after that one and sent it rising into the sky.

I called the old man over. “Have you ever seen these salt pictures on the walls?”

He narrowed his eyes at the question. “Don’t get excited about accidents. Don’t spend your time that way.”

“Have you noticed how perfect the images are? Look at this one.” I walked over to it. “It’s an arctic landscape—icebergs at night.”

“I don’t see that.”

“What do you see?”

“I give it no importance. It’s salt sloshing in a whale’s brain. Hey, don’t stare at the walls down here. You’ll get yourself hurt or fired.”

“What are we doing now?”

“It’s lunch time. They’ll lower the cage for us.”

“This barge is so vast.” I leaned my head back dreamily. “There’s so much happening in here.”

He stepped away and turned, speaking over his shoulder. “I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

The cage rose into view, carried by the crane, and rested on the barge floor. The old man and I stepped into it. Our cage lurched above the wall, offering a view of the brown Ohio River and Kentucky on the other side, trees and business buildings. When the crane had moved us to the plateau, the old man opened the cage door. The Gabonese stepped out of the crane’s cockpit and smoked as we walked up to him.

“After lunch the boss wants you to clean out the machine shop with a squeegee and hose,” said the man. “Spray out the oil on the floor. Can you do this?”

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

“You’ll have to do more than that. He always checks everyone’s work. Can you do it?”

“That’s where we left our lunch. It looks pretty filthy.”

“Yes. That’s why you’re cleaning it.”

“I’m sure we can make a difference,” I said.

“Good. Thank you.” His eyes smiled. “He gives tips sometimes to people who do a good job. I’m not saying he’ll give one to you. I want to say he likes to reward his best workers.”

“How long have you worked here?”

“Seven years. I’m the assistant manager. The boss, he really wants to reward hard work, you know?”

“He seems all right,” I said.

The Gabonese seemed on the edge of friendliness. I asked his name.

“I’m Ade,” he said, pronouncing it like ahday.

“Have you seen the salt pictures on the walls?” I said. “In the barge?”

“Yes. I have seen them. What did you see?”

“Landscapes. Very compelling landscapes. What about you?”

He laughed. “I saw many fields.”

“I saw fields.”

“It’s best not to look at the walls,” Ade said. “We’re not paying you for that. But a person can get lost in them, I know.”

“Do a lot of people look at them?”

“No.”

“I’m glad you saw fields,” I said.

The old man and I walked up a littered trail through trees, growing too close together so that our feet reached in long steps over bulging trunk limbs, a chemical smell lingering here and here, and light sifting onto the ground. We left the grove and turned onto a gravel road. The old man said his name was Steven.

We approached the machine shop where we had placed our bags on a filthy table inside. “Did you bring a lunch?” I asked him.

“No!” he said. “I forgot it in the fridge. I made a lunch last night.”

“I’ll give you one of my sandwiches if I can have a couple smokes.”

He gave me the cigarettes and lit one. He took a drag by plugging the open side of his mouth with his long thumb and sucking it that way.

I got my backpack from a table inside the greasy wreckage of the machine shop. Outside of the building, metal stairs went up to the roof. We sat at the bottom of the stairs, in the weak shade of a tree, his good side facing me. Ahead, close enough to hit with a rock, a train clanked and groaned, rocking along a trestle. Beyond the train, a tractor dipped and rose on uneven ground. We saw it in the spaces of the passing cars.

“That’s the boss driving the tractor,” Stephen said.

“Is he the reason why this place is so fucked up?”

“It’s a work site. It’s going to be dirty.”

“Does he have a house here? A family?”

“The guy who had your job yesterday said he lives here with his young girlfriends.”

“Girlfriends?”

“One at a time. I really don’t know any more about it.”

“Come to my poisoned ground,” I said. “Let me pollute you for a couple of months.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The rear of the train rocked past. The tractor had gone from view.

Stephen was from Nebraska. “It’s a nice town. There’s plenty of work there.”

“Why are you here?”

“I don’t know. I like to keep things positive. Listen, I didn’t say there’s always work. What kind of sandwich was that? My stomach feels funny.”

“It was a turkey and cheddar with avocado,” I said. “The turkey is very processed, so I’m not worried about it. Is it going bad in your gut?”

“There was no mayo on it.”

“That’s a good thing. Mayo goes rotten fast. Well, I think you’ll be okay.”

“I’m fine. I was only asking.”

“Well, let’s clean this shithole up, why don’t we.”

Inside, I pressure-hosed the oily concrete floor and pushed a squeegee on its long pole. Waves of black water entered a narrow water trough, flush with the floor, along the back wall. I sprayed the oil-black floor and squeegeed it many times, with no difference in appearance, the floor no cleaner. Small light caught my eye above. A high wall in that room was broken to reveal a piece of sky and white cloud. The adjoining wall was smashed at the bottom so that wires were exposed. The two steel worktables were greasy, leaning with piles of manuals, gears, small boxes, and a “chewy” cookie container that offered a fist of moss from its peel-back flap. Two aluminum trash cans vomited up McDonald’s bags and trailed them under the desk—two-thirds of it was McDonald’s trash—and it looked as though the bags had been sprayed with oil.

I kicked the food bags onto the center of the floor, squeegeed them out to the front, and scraped them into a tin garbage can with my foot.

“There’s nothing more to do in here,” I said.

“It looks good,” Stephen said.

Out front, I folded myself onto a three-legged chair while Steven rested on an upside-down bathtub. The skinny yard of junk reached down the road to the intersection and the littered orchard beyond it. The boss, on his tractor, drove toward us, his head gaining recognizable form—large and bald. He was ruddy, large, healthful. He parked before us.

“Did you clean the shop?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Stephen said. “We’ve been at it for two hours.”

“Why are you sitting down?”

“We’re on break.”

“Is that so? You could have been on break for two hours. Always wait for someone to break you.”

He placed his boot on the double rung of ladder, jumped down, and vanished into the machine shop. I heard him complaining in there. I didn’t like his voice, loud and querulous, and I had a headache. I worked for $12.00 an hour in a red state that appeared to have no standards for employers.

He came out of the shop and spoke to me. “All you did was throw some fast-food bags outside.”

“Is that all you see?” I asked him.

“I can see what you did and didn’t do.”

“We cleaned your uncleanable floor and trashed a thousand bags. We tried.”

He considered me. He had no right to look like Andre Gide, as he did to me then. “You have a certain look, you know?” he said. “You look like you got out of court, but you’ll have to go back to find out what happens. My brother had that look. I know you passed a background check, but . . .”

“I didn’t used to have any look at all,” I said. “I’ve got a hacker.”

“A hacker! Someone who steals all your passwords?”

“He’s a porn hacker. He’s a Christian leader.”

His face hardened. “Christian leaders don’t hack with porn. He’s probably a leftist using that identity for his purposes—if what you’re saying is true. My daughter had a hacker. She sent money to a place she supposed was for student loans payments.” He shook his head. “She didn’t sleep for a month. I don’t need any hackers around here.”

“I’m not a hacker.”

“You look like one.”

“Do I?”

“You have a phone?” he said. “He can hop into all the phones around you.”

“He only hacks me for fun. He’s rich.”

“A rich person doesn’t need to hack anyone. I don’t know where you get your stories.”

He winced and spoke silent words, casting his eyes about. Then he said “dang it,” and fished in his back pocket and brought out his wallet. He gave us each a five-dollar bill. “Take the forklift out of the garage. Separate that pile of trays under the bridge and stack them neatly in four rows. If you want to get paid a full day, you will need to work a little more.”

The boss turned his tractor around and drove toward the littered grove. Behind the shop was a garage, stacked to the ceiling with pallets and greasy junk—near the ceiling was an upside-down 1960s office typewriter, hanging askew next to an upright heavy wooden desk that was placed up there. The forklift had been backed into a vertical rectangle of clear space.

“He left the forks up,” I said. “That’s the number one rule. Look, the suicide nob is broken off.” I moved eyes all around it. “The rear bar on the overhead guard is crimped. If a load falls on it, the driver is dead.”

“Man, you hate this guy!” he said. “He just gave us a tip.”

I turned the key and drove the fork toward the bridge, while Stephen walked alongside.

Under the trestle, the forklift motor got louder. There was the wom wom, wom wom of a different train passing above. I jerked up the forks to separate trays, and he stacked them, for an hour.

Ade parked near us on an ATV. “The boss is putting the lid on the barge for now. That job is finished until further notice. He said you both did great work for us, but we have no job here anymore. We are pleased to tell the agency when work is ready.”

At the end of shift, Stephen and I walked the road to town. When the road curved, a view of Cincinnati opened—ordinary buildings, nothing commanding. But the city must have had something for me in it.

“That wasn’t a bad way to get let go,” Stephen said. “He said we were great.”

“How’s your stomach?”

“Good. This fiver in my pocket feels pretty nice, too. You feel like an energy drink? There’s a little store by the bus stop.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll have to get a new job fast.”

I had stayed calm and didn’t get upset at anything, but I brought out all that business with my hacker. My new rule for future jobs was to stay relaxed and do not talk. Everyone else seemed to do that already.







The advertising agencies didn’t write back, nor the publishers and colleges. The notice about my Boise firing had dropped farther on Google, no longer a flag for my oppositional nature. Still, no one emailed, no one called. Since Stjohn had swallowed incoming messages before, dispatching them to his limbo of communication denied, I assumed he might be killing my Cincinnati correspondence as well. But maybe I simply wasn’t right for those jobs. My trouble with jobs was my own fault. It seemed I could keep one if I finally killed the habits that got me in trouble.

One day, when I completed an online application to work at the public library, the screen vanished when I hit submit. There was no “success” or anything to show that it had gone through—pages of tedious work out the window. A phone call to HR confirmed they didn’t have my application. I ran downstairs and got on a bus.

By the time I got to the library to fill out the application there, it was one hour till closing, not enough time to recreate the application. I lay in a cushioned chair, contemplating a stairway going up and out of sight. Father Peeks was in the building, his spirit ascending through floors, tracking me by my phone, or by my email accounts, leaping into any computer I used, pole dancing large-bottomed on his digital stage, wearing only his priest’s collar and a thong. There was no point seeking privacy, unless I was prepared to pick up the technology of 1979. Magazines and publishers no longer accepted snail mail. Any request for an exception would identify me as an aberrant non-email person.

At a near desk, a chubby bearded patron in a tucked-in white Oxford read a book—a brother in likeness to Mathew Stjohn. I saw his doppelgangers around town, riding a bike, browsing at a bookstore, ordering coffee at Starbucks, appearing everywhere, like a dead relative.

When I called an advertising agency the next day, as if a professional job could save me or help me write a book, I was unable to get past the young woman answering phones. She explained the hiring process. Ad agencies had headhunters, and they sought people who had worked at a high level already, lawyers and marketing managers and so on. “We tend to find them before they find us,” she said.

An aging nonprofessional with social anxiety, I had better hold onto my mop.

At the end of the month, when I had enough for rent but not bills, I visited the food pantry. In a warehouse downtown, I waited with the others and a woman at a desk issued my card. She slapped down a bus pass too, her face open and kind. “Now grab one of them baskets and start shopping. God bless you.”

Two short hallways shunted me to underground corridors of freezers and supermarket displays, powerfully lit by fluorescent squares. The place must’ve been designed to obviate a midnight ransacking.

All told, I collected frozen pork and sliced chicken, fresh green beans, canned fruit, cereal, milk, cheese, bread, tortillas. In a high park near my hill, I rested my bags in the shade of a tree and called Rachel. In the smog, buildings downtown appeared to crumble at the edges, all of them jagged at this distance. Maybe it was the bad air that made everything appear nibbled from the outside. Rachel answered in the quiet voice she used when talking at work.

“I wanted to ask you something,” I said. “That time we were together recently, it didn’t mean anything, right?”

“No, we talked about it.”

“It meant something to me. But I don’t want to badger you. I guess I’ve always been the girl, and you were the dude. I get hurt easily, and you strut through everything.”

“We’re both a mix. Most people are.”

“Well, sleeping with you is a bad way to get over you. I know this is world news.”

“No more, then. We won’t do that anymore. How’s the advertising hunt?”

“Finished,” I said. “It’s something writers used to do, but now it’s all marketers and lawyers. I thought since I got that editing job in Pittsburgh, I could get something here that paid.”

“Try to find something you like.”

“It’s one intolerable thing after another. I’m sure I’d find advertising to be the very worst job in the world. I don’t know if there’s anything I’d like to do.”

“I read an interview with the lead singer of The National,” she said. “He worked in advertising. Once, the team gathered around his laptop to see the work he’d accomplished: placing a Mastercard ad to one side of the screen. The client was really pleased. That job would make me want to lie down in front of a bus. Sorry. I didn’t mean to use that kind of language.”

“You know, we have the same sense of humor at a distance. But not up close—except for when I visited. Have you noticed that?”

“It’s because I don’t have a sense of humor when life is too hard.”

“What if I finally kept a job?”

She sniffed. “You need to start dating. We both need to.”

“We’re not even officially divorced yet.”

“We’ll be divorced in a month. I’ve filled out all the papers, and they’re ready to send to you.”

“We’re not technically divorced.”

“If you’re one month from marriage, you’re married—unless you plan to change your mind. Divorce works the same way. So don’t worry so much. We have Leo in common, and we’ll stay close.”

At home I opened a dating site to quit thinking about Rachel going on a date. There were compelling women in Cincinnati, one who worked in a candy factory in Kentucky and still felt like a curious teenager even though she was in her late thirties. Soon we spoke on the phone and made a plan to take a walk the next day. Her name was Grace.

Grace and I met in front of the campus Target on Saturday. When I saw her, she laughed due to nerves.

“You look like your pic,” she said. “That’s a relief. I didn’t want to meet no three-hundred-pound burger man.”

“You want to walk downtown?” I said.

“Let’s stay on campus. You know I’m a college graduate? A Christian college. I used to do admin support on campus here.”

“I saw that. Not bad.”

“I saw you have degrees. Is that real or did you make it up?”

“I got mine at a joke shop. At least that’s what employers seem to think.”

“You’re messing. I like that. Let’s walk.”

The university was built up very close together, with narrow lanes beneath tall structures, as if there was little room to build and they had to go upward. We walked along a stadium. “Follow me,” she said and trotted through an open gate. We climbed into high seats and kissed like children, holding hands.

“Okay, how old are you really?” she said.

“I don’t want to say.”

“Did you lie about your age? Because I did. I’m not above being a liar—in case I gave you that impression. White lies are okay.”

“It wouldn’t let me lie,” I said. “It said Facebook had me at 49. Why did they let you get away with it?”

“I said 38 when I’m 42.”

“Wow. That’s old! You don’t look it. No, that’s not old at all. I’m kidding you.”

“Well, you do. You old.” She laughed and slapped her ankle. “No, you look pretty good. Listen here, though. I’ve got to know one thing. I’m going to come out and say it. Where you at with the Lord?”

Men threw baseballs on the green below, diminutive figures so far down. A coach came out and batted grounders. More guys jogged out to occupy bags and the pitching mound.

“Your pause tells me something,” she said. “What are you, then? An atheist?”

“I’m an agnostic Catholic.”

“You can’t be that. You’re contradicting yourself. Agnostic is the same as atheist.”

“I grew up Catholic, but half of it went away. I still have some of the wiring.”

We watched the men play ball, the good sound of the ball hitting the mitt.

“Would you be open to exploring a Christian faith for yourself?” she said. “Maybe I’d be a good influence on you.”

“What if it was the other way, and I influenced you?”

She stood and her face was hard. She dragged her finger under her nose and looked at my nose. It might have been a signal that my face was shiny. She took her seat.

“I’m not going to lose my faith for anybody.”

“Well, I didn’t exactly want you to. I thought maybe we could meet halfway. If I were dying, I’d pray to Jesus. Who else am I going to pray to? I pray to him sometimes anyway.”

“All right. That’s something to work with. You married?”

“My ex and I agreed to start dating. We’re separated, divorce papers on the way.”

“Well, we could date when you’re divorced, maybe. But I ain’t going all the way.” She licked her thumb and cleaned one toe of her Converse. “I better get home. I promised my dad I’d help in the garden.”

“Do you have kids?” I said.

“One boy, Carl. He’s sixteen, lives with me at my dad’s house. He’s a youth group leader and works at Panera. Not much at school but he’s a good little man. I saw your little boy on Facebook. He’s beautiful.”

“He is. Thank you. Can I still call you when I’m divorced?”

“You could. Sure. I don’t know what I’ll say—unless you plan to take a step in the right direction with God. That’s your business. But finding a Christian man is mine. Stay here. I don’t mean any offense, but I want to walk home alone.”

She rose and went down the staircase, her white shorts and blue blouse growing smaller at the bottom, and walked out of the park.

It wasn’t till the next week that I looked at the dating site. The whole configuration of women was different. Before, there was a variety of women, black, white, large, small, etc. Now they were all the same. The Christian leader had changed it on my app. He was communicating something like this: You want to date black women, go ahead and take your pick.

I slapped a half-full coffee cup onto the floor. Grace wasn’t good enough for him. Of course, meanwhile he was promoting “diversity” on his site. As hidden as my hacker was, he could show his essence in a moment. Since he didn’t think he was visible, he behaved in ways he never would in public, but he was visible to me.

He had gone to the worst place, believing no one would ever catch him there. He revealed his ideas about black women—all them partiers requesting a booty call—and he heaped these stereotypes onto Grace.


9

There were no jobs the next month. I wrote my brother an email explaining my warehouse career was over and asked him for a couple hundred bucks. He was a computer engineer in his 50s. He wrote, “I worked in a warehouse after high school. I pushed a cart around on the first day, up and down rows, till I found a pair of ladies’ underwear on a shelf, or something like that.” My brother and I exchanged barbs. We had a long-standing habit of smirking putdowns. His smirk was evident in his email.

“Let’s talk on the phone,” I wrote.

“I don’t have a lot of time to talk on the phone. Besides I have some pretty intense politics.”

“You mean your Bernie Sanders politics?” I wrote. “I like Bernie. I don’t think liking Bernie in the Portland tech world is very intense, though.”

A temp agency came through with a job: picking up trash at the Reds stadium, starting in a week.

In the morning I saw, on the Facebook menu, an article about men who do one stupid thing after another. “You’re only half right, Mathew Stjohn,” I yelled into my phone. “I don’t look at questionable pics while eating donuts in a locked room!” After shouting, I held my breath listening for any sound next door. Maybe he hadn’t placed that article there.

I swiped my bottle of lorazepam off the floor and took a half milligram.

At Krishna Indian, my credit card was denied. “I’m afraid that’s it,” the old man spoke to my card as he gave it to me, “unless you have another way to pay.”

I didn’t want to give up the Chicken Tika Masala. “Can I pay you next time, please?”

He spoke with the meanest one, at the stove. That one didn’t even look at me. The old man returned. “You can have an order to go, no cost.”

I got out my thank you quickly and waited by the door, so he wouldn’t have to explain I was forbidden to sit at a table.







That night I read The Antichrist. It was one of Henry Miller’s favorites. He typed out a passage of it at his editing job when the manager leaned over his shoulder to read it, and Henry was fired.

Somewhere in Tropic of Cancer Miller describes his homelessness. It was something like, when the money ran out, I went back into the streets again. He was a vagabond artist—on the streets, off the streets, clinging to his work, letting the hounds come for him in the lonesome cold, then lucking into warm shelter once again, by the grace of his charm. But in such difficult moments I was too despairing. I couldn’t take a blow and play it gracefully and light-hearted the next day, and I had a hard time connecting with people. Henry Miller said, “Hopeless, but without despair.” But that wasn’t my nature. Without a place to plug in my coffee pot, I’d know the final coldness of the world had found me.

My brother never wrote about the $200. I didn’t care about his unwillingness to help so much as his inability to ask how I was doing or wish me well. He was exploding with corporate positivity on social media, atta-boys for coworkers, photos of him laughing with his team, and a banner pic showing him and his wife slow dancing. Maybe he had something good there. It was hard to know what was going on with people, especially when they buttressed their social media with so much positivity. When I was a gung-ho undergrad in Eugene planning to study law, we took a grizzly linguistics class together—he was a lazy, poor writer, six years older—and he dropped the class midterm. Once, on campus, I told him he had a twig in his hair. He shrugged and said, “Why would I possibly care about something like that?” He had a singular enunciation and precise emphasis, so any reply was absolutely his. He was worried I would become a “career junky, chasing money.” He was a skinny hipster who ate raw onions like apples and enquired of people how many shits they accomplished in a week. He took black-and-white photographs at the trainyard. Then he quit college and took up a study of fat books on computers. He discoursed on theories and applications, quit reading Burroughs etc., and emerged in five or six years as a well-paid tech genius. He studied computer engineering on his own. At this time, I was the poor writer and he was the ambitious career man. We had swapped goals and outpaced each other’s first intentions. But we ran different races, once again, and so it was hard to talk to each other about anything. Like so many adults who had unserious and pretentious art phases in their youth, he believed the arts were pretentious. Still, he had accomplished something, after years of discipline and almost no college, and I was impressed. I was glad he wasn’t a writer. I wouldn’t like competing with a brother who was as smart as he was.

My balance hovered at $300. I was sure I could hustle rent and pay late. The job at the Reds stadium was canceled. Two previous workers had returned to their posts.

Through the summer I had many jobs, each lasting two or three weeks or less. In September, in the candy factory across the river, I looked for Grace at the punch clock, but I recognized none of the hair-netted women. My task was to sit beside a conveyor belt, near the ceiling, and watch for noncompliant candy. Anything that wasn’t bright blue and sparkling I had to snatch and discard in a bucket. My chair was bolted to the floor there. A different conveyor belt slanted directly through the headspace above, so this position required sitting. One had to duck and waddle to reach the chair. Machines hammered in the warehouse so that yelling was needed, and the sweet smells in there were no good, a nauseating syrup. The job invited sleep. I sat with an elbow on my knee and my head propped on my hand and dozed here and there. At the end of the day, I was let go, but I took home a cool seventy bucks for eight hours snoozing.

The bus to Cincinnati crossed the river and surged up a road, in shadow, and I felt the new coolness in the air coming through open windows. The evening light was distant. There’d been enough damp underwear and drenched T-shirts, enough sweat in the eyes and sweat rolling down one’s butt crack, in this scorched, good town.

August rent was due soon. I had paid late the last two months and I could do it again. There was something wrong with me if I couldn’t land a mildly professional job. While my Iowa comrades got advance money from publishers or worked part-time editing for good money, I was getting fired while parking cars and making sandwiches.

Basquiat slept in boxes in Central Park, but he was young. It was easy to embrace a romantic lowlife in one’s twenties. Try and do it at fifty. Burroughs did it, but he had family money.

At the end of the month, with $170 dollars in my account, I called Rachel.

“Come stay with us for a month,” she said. “I don’t want you to be homeless.”

“What will your dad say?”

“He wouldn’t mind. It’s not like you haven’t been working.”

“I know I’ve cost him a lot of money.”

The landlord released me from the month-to-month contract, forgiving the thirty-day notice. He worked at Merrill Lynch—he lived in a palace down the street—and I hadn’t expected such kindness from a man who wore designer jackets and boat shoes.






10

At Rachel’s apartment, most of my books had been replaced by colorful binders, one antique doll with a shut left eye, like a wink, solitary photos of Leo, and one of him with his grandparents on a recent visit to Oregon, Leo standing in front of his grandpa, who gripped Leo’s shoulders, while his elegant, British-born grandmother laughed, her gray hair swinging. Former director of the university library, Leo’s grandpa had banked his grandson’s college education the previous month, anticipating costs in fifteen years.

I was grateful, but I didn’t want Leo to have too much help. My dad had gotten through college driving a cab in his thirties, and I had some pride in his modest endeavors.

At dinner Leo gave me a printed photograph of me feeding him milk when he was a baby, in a wooden frame. “That’s a great picture of us,” I told him. “Thanks, Leo. I love it.”

“That’s his favorite picture lately,” she said. “We were looking through all the pictures of us on my phone.”

“You gonna stay here for a while, Dad?”

“A month or so. Then we’ll all be together in Oregon soon.”

“I saw my cousins and my uncles, and Grandma and Grandpa. We saw a whale at the coast. Grandpa gave me a hundred dollars.”

“He’s opening a bank account for him in Eugene,” she told me. “For his personal use.”

“I know they’re all crazy for Leo. That’s good enough for me.”

A Harrisburg employment center called me with a job in town. I had signed up for jobs on my phone, at the Cincinnati bus station. I stocked a holiday department store near Rachel’s apartment, with about forty others. Women arranged holiday items and apparel displays, while men sorted freight in back and moved boxes on pallet jacks. For the last part of the day, I hung up costumes in a Halloween aisle.

Near closing, I pulled a cart of flattened boxes down a long center aisle and pushed out the double doors. It rained across the parking lot, but not where I was. Then the shower advanced toward me with clear intent to soak me through. But the column of rain seemed to veer away. My phone rang when I was tossing boxes into the dark mouths of the cardboard dumpsters. I answered. It was the department chair at Ramapo College in New Jersey.

“I’m on an unlikely mission, I know that,” he said. “We need someone who can teach two classes tomorrow morning, with your syllabi completed before eight a.m. The first class starts at 8:00. Is it something you’re interested in?”

I had sent out resumes the previous year.

“I’ll be there. Where am I going?”

“Mahwah, New Jersey. I need you to be certain. I did look at the trains between Harrisburg and Mahwah. You could make your syllabi on the train and print them out at the library before class. I’ll email the courses now.”

“I look forward to it. Thank you!”

“A colleague sent your resume. We saw you’re mentoring at the PEN Justice Writing Program. The dean liked that. But we should discuss the pay. It’s part-time, only three thousand a month take-home. Many of our instructors rent rooms in New York City.”

Rachel and Leo waited for me in the car.

“That’s amazing,” she said as we drove to the apartment.

“I’m not completely blackballed after all. I just need to get there, rent a closet, and wait till my first check.”

“Dad, you’re going?”

“I’m so sorry. I couldn’t wait to see you, and now I have to go! But we’re really moving to Oregon, right?”

“Yes,” Rachel said.

Leo was holding his breath and crying. “I missed you so much and now I have to go,” I said, “but I’ll visit again soon, and then we’ll move all together. Thanks for that picture of us. I love it.”

At the apartment, Leo and I sat together in his closet. That’s where I found him. “I think about you all the time,” I said. “I hate it I can’t see you every day. This is going to be good for your dad, though. Do you want your dad picking up trash in public?”

He thought about it. “Yes.”

“You do?”

“Yes. You’ll stay here. My friend’s dad is an old plumber.”

“They make good money,” I said. “I’m going to New Jersey for a little bit, and I’ll visit you once a month. Then we’re going to be neighbors in Eugene, and you’ll have your grandparents out there.”

That night I emailed friends who lived in New York City. Mary Owen wrote back saying we should take a walk when I got to town. Mary had recommended her agent to me the year before, but it didn’t go anywhere.

Rachel paid for a long-term motel in Mahwah, for the first week of classes. After that, Mary helped me get a room in New York City, in the building where she owned an apartment, in the Bronx, near Yankee Stadium, and I moved in on a Friday night. My landlady was an old woman who left me sandwiches in the fridge. They were healthy, full of sprouts and tomatoes and spiced tempeh or something. The woman’s daughter had stayed in the room I rented, but she was on a Fulbright to Israel. I had been in the room only for a Saturday when the sign “Breathe” over my desk bothered me. It was like a command—breathe! breathe! Finally, I placed it in a wide drawer in the armoire.

A yellow card appeared on my phone—a grinning monkey saying, I forgot my meds. Though Father Peeks was a malignant narcissist and had his own troubles, he felt free to comment on my medication, letting his own mental urgencies slide. He never would have admitted to weakness. Then he could return to hacking and peeking, breaking employees and colleagues, crashing his fists over other people’s decisions.

On Sunday, when I searched the train schedule from Penn Station to Mahwah, the destination read Albany, NY. The bus schedule, when I checked it, had me going to New Hampshire. I saw this before, on the city bus timetable in Cincinnati. He liked to slip into any app and make it wonky.

My bank showed a minus balance, and I was unable to sign in. Though he’d done that many times before—showed a fake negative balance—I believed it each time. My bank was nearly impossible to call, the queue long. My iPhone gave the wrong time. Facebook presented ads on breaking addiction to porn to someone who watched it twice a week. My computer hissed again. While staring into my phone, the screen dissolved into pixelated storm that froze as if the phone was finally dead. He wouldn’t allow me to give a shoutout to his Christian colleagues this day, though I tried. When my “compose” box kept closing on my computer, I imagined his hand slapping it away.

Father Peeks had created a separate site for my Observer articles and shoved it right under my website on my first Google page. He often led with the essay about Milo. It was a negative article, but since it supported the speech and publication of anyone, my editor gave it a title that supported Milo directly. Today Father Peeks froze the article so that it was unclickable. Anyone who saw that first page would believe that I liked Milo. They wouldn’t see that I written, “Too much stupidity issued from his pretty mouth.”

The Christian leader could make you look poor, crazy, right-wing, unloved, scandalous, unpublished—or like any other thing that was his fancy that day. He spent a lot of time on these efforts. Father Seems. He made himself appear a way he wasn’t, and he returned this favor to his enemies.

Later in the month I had dinner and a pitcher of beer at the Yankee bar next door. The bar was all dark wood and there were pictures of famous players on the walls. My students’ compositions were earnest and sort of wonderfully innocent. I liked these kids. Half of them explored moments of personal greatness, through sports and hard work, “recognizing that it was through colossal achievement on the football battlefield that I could attain that high and holy mark on the academic field.” They were a clean, sporty group, the boys and girls alike, no drugs, no rock and roll—generation Z, or, Zoomers.

New York City, in 2019, was the cleanest city in the world. I’d heard that NYC was now a museum. But in fact, it was an outdoor office place. The fashion was office Friday, and personal soaps were the new perfumes and colognes, these soap clouds producing headaches everywhere.

A surprising number of Target stores littered the neighborhoods. This company supplied the true rulers of the city: the stern young people who were like the children of successful murderers. They were juniors and seniors and recent grads. This stern face must have been fashionable. I saw it all over town. These young men and women felt it was important to show this face of death. All of them wore it, protesters, young professionals, frat-and-sorority kids. The young serial killers left the streets around six pm to drag their Target bags of soaps and detergents into their apartment buildings where they dreamt of cleanliness.

The city would return to its glory, a rebellious and artistic town. It was New York City. It wasn’t going anywhere. Brooklyn Bridge would sleep until a new generation of melancholy children, years from now, drowned their phones in the East River and made art, going inward again, reaching for the flawed and permanent, and all the soap washed away.

In the daytime, I often relinquished the city to the young assassins and crossed the park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One day I felt shaken up, and I didn’t want to stroll in the museum. Instead, I rushed room to room. I gave a passing onceover to each object of art and moved on. The point wasn’t to study today, but to get lost in the images, to conjure them into a storm and wallpaper my mind with it. A large Picasso eye reared up, and the terrified teeth of a Basquiat chattered. A Jackson Pollock boiled on the wall. Cezanne’s blue hills shivered and twitched. Mary Cassatt’s red bonnet gave way to Alfred Sisley’s day of rain and sunshine. After three hours, this overload of images filled my mind, producing oblivion. It stayed with me later as I crossed the park, my eyes crowded with the chaos of moving art.

On a Friday I left school and rode the train to Harrisburg. Rachel and Leo and I had a terrific time. It was like a different town now that our moods were so improved.







One day in November, when I didn’t have classes, I had a meeting with the dean. She wrote to apologize for waiting so long to meet and discuss how my term was going. My bus was coming into Mahwah, yellow leaves falling and snow coming down, Volvos and Mercedes, in contemporary styles, moving in the streets.

The bus parked in front of the long lawn of Ramapo College. A walking path to the college undulated alongside a stone wall. Gusts blew in the grove, and the snow went every which way. Windows in the long glass building ahead gave back trees and the snow rushing sideways.

At the front of the building, I hesitated in the snow—I should have smoked a cigarette by the road—when Rachel called.

“You know how he gets fevers every two weeks. Today at the urgent care, he cried out when the doctor touched his belly, so he admitted him. They want to rule out appendicitis.”

“I can hear him laughing now. He’s okay? I should come out there.”

“He’s sitting up and eating chips. I’ll call in two hours and tell you where we are.”

I darkened the phone screen. Images washed up beside me that I didn’t want to look at.

My legs moved up the stairs inside. Figures traveled in the hallway. I waited in the department lounge area and chatted with the goateed office manager, though I quit talking and he went back to work.

“The dean is ready for you,” he said, and I entered a large office that looked onto the grove and falling snow.

She indicated my chair.

“Yes, all is well,” I said. “I hope you’ve heard good things.”

“I haven’t heard anything at all. Do you have a sense of their progress?”

“Not really. Students seem to tread water in some kind of soup, most of them, until the end of the term when it’s time for them to show what they have learned, in their final papers.”

Her face muscles twitched in tiny movements as she contemplated my fantastic words. “Soup. A soup pedagogy.”

My lips went rubbery and my eyes teared. “Sorry, my son’s in the hospital.”

She allowed her chin to bob with sympathy.

“Well, I hope you’re following their individual trajectories as well.”

“We meet and talk about their papers.”

“Are they doing rewrites?”

“They have the option to rewrite, to improve their grade. I’m using the same syllabi that I turned into you on the first day of class.”

When I involuntarily sucked air through my nose, thinking about Leo, the dean lifted one arm and lurched to one side, as if to interrupt my pattern of fear for my son and return me to the meeting.

“Well, I’m afraid we’ll have to endure this soup strategy for now. But do what you can to teach them individually too.”

“Okay.”

Someone entered behind me.

“Doctor Raventer!” she said and stood. “How is your daughter enjoying NYU?”

Standing in the doorway, Doctor Raventer was young and pot-bellied in a T-shirt and black velvet jacket. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said to me.

“No, we finished up,” I said.

I called a car and took the train toward the city. Over wetlands, during a break in the rain, a mass of birds swelled all together in the sky, then twisting and rushing along the ground in a carpet. They rose and moved to one side, like a curtain blotting out sky. My car entered the shadows of the station. Rachel wasn’t getting back to me since I left the college. Over the speaker a male voice wheezed “Secaucus,” like some despairing update in a different language.

In the station I rode the escalator, the lights at the top far away. At a deli I had a coffee at a table. I was going to look for pictures of Leo, but I closed my phone. Looking at photos might have been a jinx of some kind.

Rachel called in an hour. “Leo is fine, he’s doing well. The doctor said he’s fine. We’re heading home.”

“No appendicitis?”

“No. He’s a mystery boy, but he’s good. He was very brave.”

“I’m leaving tonight,” I said. “But don’t worry about picking me up. I’ll enter the apartment quietly.”

“No, don’t come. You don’t want to miss classes. Leo is great. We’ll see you for Christmas. It might be—”

“Don’t say confusing. It won’t be confusing for him to see his dad after he gets out of the hospital.”

“I was going to say it might be an experience overload with you here. He’s gone through a lot. He needs to rest up for a day. We’re taking the day off together tomorrow. Stay there. Do not visit.”

“Okay. But I’d like to talk to him.”

“Of course.”

My alarm sounded at three a.m., I jumped on the subway and train, and returned to the college. After my classes, in the cafeteria, I saw the dean. She came up very close and spoke words that didn’t seem to matter. She was friendly but I felt she was giving me an appearance checkup. I had talked to her the previous day, after all. She had no reason to get so close and smile at me like this, looking at my nose. I had forgotten the benzoyl peroxide I usually brought in my pack, and I had forgotten to wash up after class, my nose probably shiny now, as if I was afflicted by an interminable adolescence, produced by nervousness.

Helen said, “It was so nice talking yesterday.” She made no inquiry about my son.

I bought face soap at the student store and washed in the bathroom. In the adjunct office, Steve and Tamar worked at their desks. Short and bleach-blond, Steve had a story published in Best American, and Tamar, a tall Israeli poet, got new reviews each week.

“Did you tell the dean you want to be considered for a rehire?” Tamar asked me.

“Oh, she’s contemplating rehires—I wondered what was going on with her.”

“You should! Postpone your trip out west and make a little more money.”

“I could stay one more semester, but she’s not going to ask me. Besides, I’m looking forward to seeing my kid.”

“He’ll be okay. He could survive in the mountains if he had to. He’s a strong boy.” She had an attractive, teasing mirthful habit of saying things she didn’t mean.

“Well, I think I have some value to the program here, but . . .”

She laughed. “You’re kidding, right? We teach freshman. We have no value.”

“Yes and no, yes and no,” I said. “In my head, at least. But my soup pedagogy is going to be big news.” I told them about it.

“On the cover is you lifting a big spoon and all the students falling into the bowl,” she said. “I’d read it.”











That evening, I ran into Mary Owen at the apartment mailboxes. She had short hair and a ruddy complexion. She was skinny. This daughter of Donna Reed was a hot-looking sixty. Sometimes our Messenger texts scrolled down and down, over the past three years. We knew a lot about each other.

We found we were wearing similar shirts, black untucked button-ups, and jeans.

“I like yours better,” she said.

“We should trade.”

“I don’t know if I want to disrobe in the lobby.”

“No.” There was no one else around. “Let’s hang out.”

“Sometimes I think I want a change,” she whispered. “I’ve thought about staying the night with you—or we could go away for a weekend. It’s a fleeting . . . You’re not the only man I’ve considered. Ha ha!”

“Would your girlfriend be okay with that?” I said.

“No. That’s why it couldn’t happen. But I think about it.”

When a white-haired man in a black trench coat entered the building, a gust of air from the gray day came in. Mary and I were quiet as he checked his mailbox.

“I’d better go in,” she said.

“Let’s go to a bar one of these nights. We can each bring someone. Bring your girlfriend.”

“We’ll see.”

I got my mail and she was gone.

At the end of the week, it was not a surprise when Mary neglected my phone calls. Everyday friendships were possibly strange for her. She had stardom in her house as a child. She saw her mother leaving all the time, at a time when mothers didn’t leave, and it must have made her weary of going out into the world. In fact, I didn’t know beans about the psychology of the children of the famous. Nor would I have trusted that any of it applied to Mary.

Mary did call back, though it took her a month. We hit an old bar in the Village. On the walls were pictures of jazz musicians in the 50s.

We sat at the bar. Mary’s voice was tired after a drink. We had coffee, and she was ready for another gin. To have something to talk about, I brought out interview questions.

“There’s really not much to tell. I’m poor. I drive a twenty-year-old Mitsubishi Mirage, beat to hell from living in the Bronx, and my girlfriend is a janitor. The money I get is a trickle. I can buy an apartment or a house where I live, but I must be careful.”

Toward the end of the night, I asked, “Did you really want to go to bed?”

“It’s a fun dream on Sunday.”

“It’s a fun dream on Sunday. That’s something you might have said in a teen magazine. I love it.”

“I didn’t get interviewed like that then. I get them now, though it’s all about Mom.”

“I’ve read a bunch of your interviews.”

“Most of my friends don’t want to hear about it, which is fine. I’m not friends with people so they can read my interviews. The interviews are for strangers, for the most part.”

“The interviews are for strangers,” I said. “That’s a line Eva Gardener delivers before she shoots a guy to hell.”

She lifted her empty glass to show the waiter.

“Thanks for noticing my good lines,” she said. “I never drink this much. Well, I’m afraid I have nothing fresh to say about Mom. But I did wonder if our family was as important to her as the TV family. The kids on the show were ten and twelve, the same ages as my brother and sister. I was one and a half when the show started. But I have spent some time wondering about it. Sometimes you don’t know this or that about a person.”

“I agree. I used to think there was always a way to, you know, fathom someone.”

“You have to live with not knowing about people sometimes,” she said.

That night I lay on my bed and found pictures of Mary online, like a lovestruck teen. It was lucky that I’d had this date. We’d had coffee and walked before, but now we had a few hours together. It seemed we both had a depression that followed us around sometimes. Maybe she was as poor as she said she was. I hoped she was at least somewhat poor, by Hollywood standards. There was a better chance that she’d stay friends with me.

Another day, at a church, I saw her speak about her mom before a showing of It’s a Wonderful Life. They gave us hot chocolate. It smelled of snow and cold when more people came in. Mary stood under soft lights at the podium, in a dark blazer, beginning her talk with this news: Jimmy Stewart blamed her mother for the movie’s financial failure. Mary didn’t care for Jimmy Stewart. I had read that in interviews. I sat forward in the pew, smiling like a fool at this woman. Mary was intelligent but ordinary in the way she lived. My mind worked to open a path for us, but nothing would’ve happened. Setting up a date for coffee or drinks required a month of planning. But she allowed texting any old time. On text she was warm, close, and I mattered to her. Our texts gathered in friendship, but I spent time with her only on three days. While she talked under the lights now, it occurred to me, as if for the first time, Mary Owen is gay! When I finally understood what I already knew, the crush went out of me in a day or two.

She texted that she had a 1988 Porche in a garage, as if setting the record straight about her wheels situation. It seemed like an invitation to take a drive with her, but at this time she got anxiety attacks at night and felt like hell in the day, so nothing ever came of it.

Mary moved to Iowa City with her girlfriend—a janitor at high schools, who liked vintage suits and 1950s crime novels. At nearby Donna Reed Museum, Mary was the treasurer, but she wanted out of Iowa City soon enough. She was like me, always some dissatisfaction eating her.







When a community college in New Jersey hired me, I told the chair I had made $3000 a month at Ramapo and I’d work one semester if my salary was in the range. She wrote back, “We have a nice community here.” She didn’t mention the salary. Rachel advised I take the job. She and Leo weren’t leaving for a month anyway. I had written twenty-five letters of inquiry, when I had decided to stay one more semester, and I supposed it was lucky that one paid off.

Before the start of the term, HR neglected to write back about the salary, as did the English secretary. After two weeks teaching, my first check was $425. The salary wasn’t going to cover life in New York City. They knew that, and they had refused to tell me. There might have been a way to supplement, with a part-time job. But my applications at temp agencies turned up nothing. Recruiters told me my experience was insufficient or else they had no jobs. I called housing at the community college. They had no rooms for faculty. I wrote the chair explaining the impossibility of my situation. No response.

One night I lay in bed with the streetlight coming in. They tricked people into working at the college, as if knowing that no teacher would leave his post partway through the term.

We all didn’t have a mother or aunt to move in with. The chair should have said my take-home pay was less than $1000 a month. Ramapo’s $3000 had been barely enough. I felt awful about leaving my students, but I couldn’t teach as a homeless person. At any rate, the chair could teach my classes if there was no one else.

Most people would have gone out and found that extra job. I had already tried, seeking to save up for my move west. It was so easy to find a job when I was in my twenties. When I was here in the nineties, I walked into the Strand and got a job in five minutes, young and hip-looking. Now, in middle-age, I looked like a dad. But there might have been something else, too: the hard, bewildered, burdened look. My face was no advertisement for my abilities. In terms of paying jobs, teaching was the only magic that restored me to lightness—I’m not counting BSU here—and so far the community college job was going well.

In the morning, I texted the chair a pic of my medication bottle and said “I have to go away for a while.” It was a cowardly suggestion, that her disingenuousness forced me to seek a mental-health stay, though it might’ve been a sound prediction if I stayed in the city without money. They should have told me what the salary was in the beginning. Refusing to provide that information should’ve been illegal. Maybe it was.







On a crowded Greyhound bus, in Indiana, a woman scuttled down the aisle toward me—her mouth like a rupture in a paper bag, her eyes like smears of pink glitter across ashes. Three young men followed her and all of them sat behind me. It was a warm breezy day in February, white clouds banked high in the north, like leaning ships.

Three of the four crowded into the bathroom and returned to their seats, and the remaining young man vanished into the bathroom alone and returned. The woman had a voice that was breathy in the manner of a 50s starlet. “You can hold a job on it. In fact, you can really shine. You can show qualities that your coworkers yearn for but will never find. At my job at Hearst, for instance. I rose to the lofty environs of regional manager and found a gold mine, a money shrine. We can make that happen here.”

“Hearst is a big name,” one of the boys said. “We don’t have that yet.”

“Your dad was the happiest soul I have ever encountered. Did you know you can kill yourself with drink, heroin, or pills? But you can’t kill yourself on meth.” Her fast dry laughter jagged, very pent up, and finally came unleashed in sexy laughter that threatened to go on for the rest of the trip.

“I’m not ever going to do it except on special days, on days that are true beginnings,” another boy spoke up. “I’ll sell it to dumbasses, but I won’t do it much.”

The third young man didn’t speak at all.

They disturbed my excitement for this adventure. Traveling Greyhound on the west coast was pleasant—reasonably calm people and not too many of them, at least in the 90s, when I often found a reason to go to San Francisco, to live there or visit.

I opened a book and tried to build a wall against their conversation for two hours—until they got off beneath dual grain towers and waited across the street under a shelter, at a gas station long shut down, the pumps wide and their blue trim faded. The woman laughed into her cell phone, grinning and throwing her head back, her face brown with makeup and her neck white as a trout’s throat.

On a road between fields, a distant silo moved in relation to the bus with supernatural slowness. In a backyard stood a woman in slacks and a blouse pinning up clothes on a line, speaking on a Bluetooth. A boy standing near the fence waved furiously at us, and held up his arms at right angles toward the sky, as if he’d take off, flying by his own powers. I waved at him.

A high school girl entered the bus, holding an infant. She passed me and sat in the back. I rested my eyes and it was midnight when I opened them again. The baby cooed. Later, a man got on, the overhead lights capturing his beard and large baseball hat, and the lights plunged to darkness. Thin-voiced he said, “Babies, babies. I hear babies. I love babies. Where is the baby? Can I touch him?”

“Get the fuck out of here!” she said.

I stood and felt the high luggage compartments as I went back. There was nothing to see in the dark. “Stop it,” the girl told the man. “Get away!” She was crying.

“Sit down,” I said to him, and he said “Babies.” I walked toward his voice, holding my arm out, touched his back, and grasped his arm at the elbow. I turned us so that he was in front of me. Near the driver the seats were visible, the first two rows vacant. I steered the man into the closest seat. “Driver, stop the bus. Did you hear what this guy was saying?”

“We can’t. We’d be way off schedule. If he’s only talking, then I’m not worried about it.”

The man who loved babies smiled and held onto the seat arms.

Late in the night the girl shouted. I dragged the man to his seat again. Everyone ignored him. They let him sniff and breathe over this kid and her baby, “Ohh, mmm, mmm.”

In the morning, at a gas station with a store inside, the girl waited behind me in line at the register, her baby fussing. The girl wore a Monster Trucks sweatshirt and a silver tiara with swaying green wands on it and attached to those were the delicate eyes of a creature that came ashore on a terrible world. “I just fed you. Can’t you be happy?”

“What did that guy do?” I said. “Did he touch your baby?”

“Who wants to know?”

“I was the one who dragged him from you, twice.”

“I can take care of myself,” she said.

“Good. I thought I was appointed the resident security guard. No one else was helping. Should I leave you alone then? Let that guy do what he wants?”

“Yes, leave me alone,” she said. It was my turn to pay. The cashier had a mottled round face that was indifferent or neutral.

“I’m happy to leave you alone,” and I took my cigarettes.

“Stop talking, then,” she said.

At the end of the line, a man called out, “She told you to leave her alone. You’d better honor that.” The man who spoke was tall in a leather jacket and his pony tail rose from the center of his head and spilled back of him. He had an Irish accent.

He joined me for a smoke in front of the gleaming silver bus. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Someone said you tried to help her. She’s clearly a miserable little thing with that baby. Jesus Christ. A baby with a baby.”

“Where are you going?”

“Los Angeles. My brother’s there. I’m looking forward to my connecting train in Chicago. This is shite.”

I had bought a mini flashlight to harass the man who loved babies, to wiggle the light on his neck. But he didn’t bother them that night.

In the morning, a woman spoke from the seat behind me. She had silver eyes and tight white curls. She was going to Montana. “Oh, you’re from Eugene? Where do you go to church?”

“I used to go to St. Mary’s.”

“Oh! That name brings images of the holy family.”

The woman bent my neck about her Montana heritage. In the seat next to her, she had a valuable collection of Indian dolls lying in boxes under plastic viewing windows. She suspected one of the dolls was removed on her travels last year, “by friend or foe, and sold for purchase price on the world market. Where did you come from?”

“New York City.”

“Oh that place is infected. On TV, the hot spots are pulsing red.”

“I left just in time. I didn’t even hear about it till I was on the bus.”

“I have prayed for them. I don’t think it’s going to happen in the mountain west, especially in states where they pray very hard on a daily basis. But no one knows for sure, do they? Do you pray?”

“No offense,” I told her. “I can’t face this way anymore. It’s hurting my neck. We’ll talk down the road.”

A junkyard appeared on the slope of a hill ahead. When we were closer, the junk spread across a field and scattered down a ravine, rotten couches and box springs, old TVs, boxes of clothing open to the weather. A narrow path of trash continued along the highway. On the ground lay a mattress and a single-person orange tent fastened to the ground. Out of its mouth blossomed piles of bright sweaters.


11

In downtown Eugene, the bus spilled me out and strained toward other places. It was warm here, too, but the light was thin and distant, a winter light. It was Spring and Winter having a conversation, a good way to arrive. I was reading “Watermelon Sugar,” a popular book in Eugene in 1983, when I moved here from Idaho. Back then, it was all hippies, poets, musicians, and new wave and punk rock kids. Some of my friends had hippie parents. Many of them were responsible and kind—working in natural foods or juice companies, or building cabinets in the woods, back when it was cheap to live here—and sometimes they gave us pot or acid. When I was thirteen, my friend Jim Fahn and I often rode our ten speeds out of town after midnight, coming off acid, and we’d ride up the shadows of Gimple Hill and sail through Rainbow Valley, the country open and visible when there was a moon. On their property was a big house for parties and, by the garden, a tall yurt where the six children climbed ladders to their own sleeping platforms on the walls. Their mom slept in a coffin on the floor. It was strange—more goth than hippie—but none of the kids seemed bothered by it. Jim was a constant storm of benevolent energy and laughter who wore a leather jacket. His high curly hair, cut above the ears, always had stray curls dangling in his eyes. Years later his big sister, wild curly hair like his, emerged on local TV, reporting in rainstorms and falling snow.

At any rate, Jim and all my other friends were no longer in Eugene. It had been a California escape town for twenty years until it, too, was overpriced, full of meth, heroin, fentanyl, and guns, but the crimes were noticed only sometimes. It was still an attractive place with parks and distant pines on the hills.

The Eugene library had expansive rooms in which to sit with other bums who carried bags. On the second floor, tall windows poured a vivid light into the room. The stone cross on top of St. Mary’s Church—across the street—asserted its form in the window. My old girlfriend Samantha and I had gone behind St. Mary’s when we had known each other a week, and laid down together under groomed bushes. In twenty minutes, we stood again and kissed. We kissed for four hours on that wall behind the church.

A man named Dave answered my ad “Seeking Room.” I picked up my bags and met Dave at his house in Springfield. He looked to be a ruddy country man in his straw cowboy hat. Inside, he had pictures of Christ on his living room walls. His email stated he was a former Springfield City Counselman.

At his kitchen table sat a tall gray-haired man in a robe, near seventy. Dave introduced him as Steve. “I’m working at the ice-cream factory!” Steve said. He spoke in a gruff, loud way that was meant to convey humor, but I didn’t get the joke.

The rooms of the house went back and back to the rec room. At the pool table I withdrew the $400 rent and $100 deposit. Still in my New York City clothing, I wore a black trench coat and a scarf that was so long it needed to be wound twice.

“You don’t mind if I smoke a little weed sometimes,” Dave said.

“Not at all.”

“I smoke in the morning and leave it alone.”

“Is Steve your brother?”

He pulled the door closed. “An old friend. He was an Army Ranger who became a meth addict. He ended up at the Salem mental hospital. He’s schizophrenic. He gets wiggy for a day sometimes, but he won’t do anything but pester you. They have him on the medication.”

“Where’s a grocery store?” I asked Dave.

“Walmart’s a five-minute walk. Go out the front door, take a right, another right, and walk past Jerry’s.”

We wandered to the kitchen, Steve gone now. Dave pointed out the wood counters and wood chandelier holding ten wide bulbs, original fixtures in this home built one-hundred-and-twenty-five years ago. He saw me inspecting the row of cowboy hats on the high walls.

“I guess I’ll take a little rest,” I said.

My bedroom was off the kitchen. I shut the door. Light came through a diaphanous white curtain, hanging over the one window. A forklift crossed my view outside, in the lumber yard beyond Dave’s backyard.

The room was cheap. I was priced out of the apartment market in the area. Not only had they tripled the rents, many landlords required that you have worked a job for six months before applying.

One day in the morning, I fried bacon while Dave and his friends were in the living room. One of them said he saw a group of Chinese run across the street in masks like they saw the Corona virus coming. “Nothing racial in the house,” Dave told them. That comment surprised me. When I looked Dave up, he had been excoriated in the Register Guard for his right-wing views, and he lost his job to a very public DUI. But he seemed like a good man.

Steve appeared in the kitchen in his robe. He pointed at the wall behind which Dave sat with his friends. “Did you know he moved my airplane?” he whispered. “I told him not to move it, it’s five-foot long. Now a wing is cracked.”

“I really don’t know anything about it.”

Later, out front, I left to catch my bus when Dave crossed the yard to his SUV.

“It’s a collector’s item!” Steve said, walking at Dave’s back. “At least it used to be. Before you got your hands on it.”

“You bought it at the toy store.”

“Yes, but I painted it. That’s where you get the value.”

Dave turned around. “Stop. I’m sorry, Steve. I’ll pay for another one from the toy store.”

“It’s worth five hundred.”

“I don’t believe that.”

Dave got in his SUV and drove. To avoid Steve, I hurried beneath the oak tree and trotted to the bus stop around the corner and up the street, where I opened the book I was reading. In a minute came Steve stepping in his flipflops. With a forefinger he flicked his white mustache twice in anger.

“It’s important to me that you see the damage,” he said. “Please come with me.”

“I really don’t want to get between you guys.”

“My family has always been people who have to see something with our own eyes. Don’t you believe that I have seen the damage?”

“I’m not qualified to know.”

He laughed derisively and glanced away. “I was in the Reagan wars, you know. They paid me to paint my face and live in the river for two weeks at a time. Imagine me drifting, my face hidden and my eyes blinking, waiting to see my target. I don’t like to talk about that time. But there was a time when Ranger, as a title, earned some respect.”

“I respect it. I couldn’t do anything like that.”

“No, you couldn’t!” He flicked his mustache and walked.







At a bookstore downtown, the cashier, in a thigh-length blue velvet jacket, said she had always wanted to read the book I placed on the counter—Hunter S. Thompson’s Rolling Stone articles. She had pail blue eyes and a lovely wide face, a stripe of gray in her hair, and she rang up my book.

“I bought my first Catcher in the Rye here—all the titles required for young people. Junky, The Subterraneans. At the campus location.”

“All the buildings on that block are coming down,” she said. “A giant outhouse of quads is taking its place. They’re targeting anything with culture—the Bijou, the Beanery.”

“I guess they’re selling voluntarily.”

“No. They have new California landlords who double the rents, to force them out.”

“People would have protested that when I was a kid.”

“Now they want spas and thirty-dollar health drinks. They’d only fight if their omakse bowls were forbidden.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s an eight-hundred-dollar plate of sushi.”

“Is that common here?”

“I’m sure it is.”

When I left the store and walked a block toward the library, she came jogging behind me. “Do you like Tai Food? I order it from this cart around the corner. I have an hour lunch. I’m eating in my car today. You’re welcome to join me.”

Parked on the second floor of a parkade, she ran the engine for warmth, the headlights drilling the concrete wall. Over our take-out, waiting for the car to heat, we discovered that we each had a hacker.

“I’ve never met anyone else who has a hacker,” I said. “Who’s yours? Do you know?”

“I go onto these local pro-life sites and enrage the fuck out of white men.” She speared a potato and waited to bite. “I say if you keep fucking with our right to health care, we’re going to burn your churches, we’ll train monkeys to shave your chest hair, and make you live in boxes where you can’t stretch out all the way. I’m pretty vocal about all that stuff.”

“That sounds stressful.”

“For them or me?”

“For both sides.”

“They’re the extremists!” she said. “I suspect my hacker is some right-wing Christian that thinks I’m a witch. A lot of people moving from California are right-wing Christians. Maybe fifty percent. Are you a Democrat?”

“No. Not registered. But I tend to lean away from whoever’s in charge.”

“You don’t vote?”

I wanted to know this guy’s hacking method.

“He follows me in a drone. Before work, I jog down the street to this field and dance—I call it Dance Babylon Down—and the drone perches over the same pine trees. When I leave work, he follows me home, all the way down Coburg Road. If I stop at a grocery store, it’s waiting for me when I come out, high over the telephone wires, its red light flashing.”

“There’s a whole drone-surveillance culture out there,” I said.

“I’ll burn their fucking beds down!” she shouted and I flinched. She ate her food. “Sorry. How’s your food? I don’t think we know each other’s names yet. I know your first name from your card. I’m Emerald. Wonderful to meet you. Give me your number and we can hang out again. I’ve got a boyfriend, but I want to try something new. Somebody can shoot me, but I don’t care. Everyone’s getting so Puritan again. What happened to liberals having trysts, and not worrying about the churchy side of things? We’re becoming like Republicans. My boyfriend and I don’t even like each other. He’s a right-winger! It took me two years to find out.”

She called when she got off at three the next day. I was reading at a bar on campus where they had wide booths and a light above each table.

“Where do you live?” she said when she dropped her bag and sat across from me.

I told her I was staying with a cowboy Christian who was pretty nice. “He was a city official a few years back.”

“What’s his name?”

“Dave.”

“Dave Ralson?”

“I think so.”

“He’s an extremist.”

“He must have mellowed out,” I said. “My only complaint is the constant smell of weed all day. It’s actually not so bad.”

She drank her beer. “So, you’re waiting for your wife and child?”

“We’re separated. We’re waiting to complete the papers. It’s taking longer than we thought. We’re both dating.”

In an hour, she wanted to take me home, to say hi to Dave and see my room.

“You’re not going to give Dave a verbal lashing?”

“No, I’m not going to fuck things up where you live.”

We parked at the curb in front of Dave’s house. The porch light burned and his front curtains were open.

“There it is,” she said pointing at the sky. The drone blinked high above the house across the street, following Emerald deep into Springfield, five miles from Eugene.

“You don’t have any clues who it could be?” I said.

“It could be one of a hundred dicks I’ve yelled at online.”

“It’s an empty little shit who can’t handle disagreement. We know that much about him.”

When I opened the front door, Dave rested in his La-Z-Boy, in front of the TV. I introduced Emerald. Dave grinned. He was high and it augmented his friendly expression. On the TV a man and two boys knelt in the shade of a tree, gazing at the plateau in the near distance. “It’s the Henderson boys, ain’t it, pa? They’ve come to take the rest of our horses!”

“What’s this, Liberty Valance?” she said.

“That’s a classic. This is the ranch channel.” He changed the channel. A row of people in animal costumes stepped in place to fast music on a stage. Dave chuckled. “All these people are stars under their costumes!”

“That’s certainly true with me,” Emerald said.

In my room I turned on the salt lamp. We sat in the orange light on my bed and smoked a joint she brought out.

“Dave actually seems pretty nice, in a right-wing way,” she said. “I won’t put up with his shit if he starts proselytizing, though.”

“He won’t.”

Emerald lay on her back and mentioned Rousseau and Apollinaire—two figures encountered in a book she was reading. The previous year, as a PhD student, she taught French language and literature at the university and, one day, walked out of the gates.

“I had no time,” she said. “The program was designed to dominate you, to leave you no room for yourself. It was like being married to twenty men you have to serve, service, and cook for.”

“In my head I just saw twenty Cotton Mathers pushing you around.”

“That’s exactly right. Twenty Cotton Mathers. I will burn their beards before I break my back for them. Women actually ran the program, but I don’t know—it felt like men did. There were two shitty little, accomplished men who dressed well and talked in loud French in the hallways and we were all supposed to love them.”

We talked amid the beep beep of the evening forklift and the shots fired on the western channel. We smoked the joint, and she hooked a finger in mine.

“No kissing. I’ll have sex with you but I won’t kiss.”

“Why?”

“We’re not together. I only kiss my boyfriend. Maybe we’ll kiss down the road, or maybe we won’t.”

“Only your boyfriend. You really are a French girl.”

“No way. I’m not some demure fifteen-year-old, trafficked into a limousine. I’m forty-five, and I’m old enough to do what I want, as all women are.”

“Can I do what I want, too?”

“No.” A corner of her mouth tugged in humor. “I’m in charge now. You’re going to do exactly as I tell you. If I like it, I’ll let you do what you want for a while.”

“That’s a lot of pressure. You’ll find me weeping at the edge of the bed afterwards.”

She smiled at that.

Later in the night, while Emerald sat up reading in bed, her bra on the pillow, I saw that a recent twenty-something woman on Facebook had become an eleven-year-old girl in makeup and a glittering shirt that offered cleavage she didn’t have, showing the tip of her tongue in her teeth. The older avatar—who had friended me before—liked classical music and Charles Dickens. This child avatar liked eating ice-cream cones. Father Peeks quite easily dipped into online collections of “sexy” children and used them as little soldiers for his psi-ops campaign. He was like a dark-webs general who had driven armies of young people over deserts and snow, marching them through a thousand computers.

Emerald stood behind me where I sat at my computer. “Are you sure it’s the same account?” she said.

“She wrote me a note in Messenger when she friended me. Look.”

“So, he likes eleven-year-olds. What a nasty fucking shit.”

“You have no idea. This is one pic from a locked room full of horrible ghosts.”

“Who is this guy?” she said, and I told her.

“He tried to manipulate an employee into his hotel room,” she said, “and he’s still walking around? He should be in jail! We’re going to fuck him up on Twitter. I’ll get my girl army after him. He’ll feel like he’s been sodomized by a thousand witches with sharp sticks.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Why?”

“Sometimes I feel sorry for him. He’s already been exposed.”

“You feel sorry for your abuser, after what he’s done to you, your wife, and your son? That’s fucked up.”

“It’s only my mood right now. Most of the time, I want him to die. But I don’t want to be in that mood all the time.”

“I get that,” she said. “I’m in that mood all the time. But it suits me, don’t you think?”

“Well, I like the way you are. You seem like you’re in a good mood when you say all the crazy things you do.”

“That’s right. I enjoy kicking men’s asses. Some men’s asses. Not all. Not yours.”

“Did you have any fun tonight?”

“In bed? I prefer a little more domination. I want someone to take charge more. I did give very specific directions. First me, then you.”

“That’s true. You did. I was trying to hold on till . . .”

“Till it was over?” She laughed.

“It was strange not being able to kiss you.”

“Well, get used to it. I don’t kiss.”

She dressed and we entered the dark living room, and I saw her out. “Is the drone still there?” I called to her when she opened her car door.

“No, it’s gone,” she said.

Later, I composed an email to the Christian scholars, writing that my hacker comes into my house every day wearing nothing but his Catholic Charities T-shirt, and drags himself like a dog up and down the carpeted hallway, emitting small pleasurable barks.







In a few months, after financing a car at a Springfield lot, I went to work at the Employment Department in Wilsonville, an hour’s drive. On the second or third day a manager was training me on the computer when my chin jerked in sleep. I told her it was the medication I take. She had a square face and feathered hair. “If you’re on meds you need to run those by the top boss before I can work with you,” she said. “He was in the military.” I didn’t know if that was a warning or an explanation.

The boss, Evan, accepted me into his office, the only light a small green lamp on his desk. He gazed at the wall in front of him. “I take lithium every day and lorazepam once or twice a week. Is that all you needed to hear?”

He didn’t say. He gazed at the wall. It was military theater or he was, in fact, spooked. I let myself out slowly, to give him time to speak if he had anything to say.

At my desk, after two or three weeks, I took calls and completed applications the best I could, but got confused with the calculations and the turgid notebooks that explained them. There was much talk of Evan, who steered this liver-colored carpeting through the storm of Covid. People whispered his name or spoke of him in deferential voices, occasionally mentioning his military background.

“But what did he do in the military?” I asked an old man in a clip-on bowtie, with a Blessed plaque on his desk.

“You’re jealous,” he said.

“I might be, if I knew what he did,” I said. “A friend of mine, an officer in the Marines, was a sniper in Afghanistan, and I do envy his experience.”

“Focus on your own achievements. Focus on the customers. Hey, these are Oregonians you’re talking to. You’re going into battle for them. You’re saving lives.”

“I’m trying.”

The floor was taking calls when half the computers shut down. In a moment Evan flew into the room, elbows out and long legs jack-knifing. Many faces swung to his entrance. He traveled the length of the room and addressed the emergency at a distant computer.

In twenty minutes, full power returned and there was clapping. Men and women stood here and there to join the applause. He must have flown jets or served in the Navy Seals. I never found out what he did.

Before five, an email announced I was transferring to the Beaverton office. It was twenty miles away, next to Portland. I packed my materials, strolled past the many Blessed plaques, and pushed out the door to the parking lot.

It was a hot spring day. Red-tinged clouds towered over hills to the north, the pleasant smell of distant fire smoke. Traffic on the highway was slow with gawking drivers.






12

In Northwest Portland I moved into the Westcliff, a red brick apartment building that I had lived in ten years earlier. There were Persian rugs in the hallways and built-in book shelves in every studio, with poor construction that allowed sound to travel dwelling to dwelling, but a nice place all the same, bright light falling into my yellow kitchen and the main room comfortably dim. It was less than a thousand a month, half the price of most studios in town. Leo liked the place. He recorded commentaries of video games while they played on his laptop, like the bright kids on YouTube who spoke on games, culture, history. He was gaining a lot of knowledge in the fun facts to know and tell variety, despite his useless schooling on Zoom during Covid.

At the Beaverton office, on my second or third month, I filled out a request for a patron’s earnings in a recent quarter—an easy form I had filed many times. When I hit submit, the form on the screen appeared to smolder and burn. It was a digital effect, not something one found on Word, and I knew I would sound like a crazy person if I explained it was a hack.

My supervisor had neon red hair and a mask that said “Nope.”

“You’re not being hacked,” she said. “This is a government office.”

In this office were a lot of polite chucklers who hugged small barrels of soda and showed each other pug videos in the breakroom. It wasn’t the FBI.

I returned to my cube. A middle-aged woman, perpetually smiling, sat across the aisle. She told me a story now, but I couldn’t hear her voice—never could. I'd told her I couldn’t really hear her, but she never raised her voice. She moved her mouth, and I tried to mirror her expressions, laughing with regret or humor, while giving hints that I was turning back to my work now. The light from the cloudy windows glowed on her face and she seemed a disembodied head, whispering. I had to turn away.

One day a man called from Eastern Oregon. When I told him he hadn’t made enough money in the last quarters to qualify, he said, “I know your name and where you live, and I know about everyone else. You might wake up dead one of these days soon.”

I emailed my manager about it. She didn’t write back. I wrote the Oregonian, who also didn’t take death threats to state employees as important news. They ignored my emails too.

After one more month, I was terminated for too many sick days. Despite the good pay, office work topped my list as the very worst job. Avoidance of people was my strategy—especially the hillbilly HR woman who trotted the carpet barefoot in her country dresses, and the man from eastern Oregon who had a link on his email to his Christian blog, with a little yellow cross next to it. He often sent me emails with his link front and center, as if to say Read my Christian blog. No thanks. The only one I came to like was the small-voiced talker I couldn’t really hear.









My computer no longer hissed, but panted now, like a regular breath of pleasure, ahhh, ahhh. Father Peeks understood the need for a change-up—finding new harassments, in case I was getting used to the old ones. But the panting was easily covered up by playing music. My favored music for a month was The Doors album that included “The End.” I chose a face from the ancient gallery and walked on down the hall. Mother? I want to . . . He wouldn’t allow this album to play on my computer while I was writing. He was very moral on that point. When I hit play on YouTube and returned to my work, the music stopped. Though I could play the album on my phone, it often ceased when I came to “The End.”

After two weeks of leisure, I got in my car with my red delivery bag. Downtown, in late morning, the shade of buildings darkened the sidewalks and the people walking there. Sandwich House, on 10th and Broadway, did not exist. My phone beeped when the app wanted me to pick up an order enroute to Sandwich House. Then my navigation went sideways, maps fanning in redirection. The directions carried me across Hawthorne Bridge and I hooked around and drove the Morrison Bridge. The directions threw me into China Town, the Waterfront, then to a Burnside pizza shop that had no order for me. I drove in this peripatetic manner as if swept about by winds, until my real orders—visible only for seconds each one—were picked up by other drivers. Hurled across the downtown grid, this way and that way, I followed the constant misdirection until I parked at the park blocks, next to red-painted stone bases whose statues had been removed and the bases were like platforms for urban sacrifice. My phone revealed that I was across the river, fourteen blocks away, sitting beneath a freeway. I returned to my apartment and lay on my back nervous and tried again before dinner. When I picked up an order, the navigation spun again, as if all coordinates had been altered and my phone scrambled to adjust. The low sun on Burnside gave back red in the windows as I drove toward my destination, the Zoo. Instead of going there, I turned onto my street and hunted a parking place while the sun was going down and the day turned to dusk.

Days later I pushed a cart in an Amazon warehouse, filling bags for orders. It was five hours a day. The Christian leader couldn’t hack my cart.

In the early morning one day, when I was in bed, a man screamed outside, “They don’t even know the number!” He cackled and repeated his message. On several mornings a homeless person shouted complaints at first light, often a different man or woman, as if each had been assigned this block to cry out enigmatic words. The early-morning shouting was the only disturbing noise I ever heard while I was here. It was hard to know how bad the riots were—the right exaggerated and the left downplayed. A right-wing journalist had taken up the fun of running at Antifa crowds, as if begging for a response he could video, and they slammed him. The perennial truth: both sides were unsound. Once, in a hot Starbucks parking lot, three young men in black had commanded me to turn off my car engine. I didn’t obey them, and they went away. Emerald liked Antifa, pronouncing the word Antifa. They probably had some principled people up top, and others who enjoyed authority and violence for the fun of it.

I talked to an intelligent soldier of the group sometimes while smoking outside the apartment. She was my age and lived in a basement apartment. She wore her hair short, and she was “big boned” as my mom used to say, large and fit. She fought the hard right-wing, and though she didn’t care for the current left ideology, she found more independent people in the movement than she’d expected. She grew up with anarchist Mennonites, near Bandon.

“I’m not centrist—I’m left,” she said once. “But it’s my own left.”

“Did you ever pound any Proud Boys?”

“No. I march, I shout my head off. I’m not one for busting heads.”

When the screaming person had gone away, I got up, read the news on my phone, and called Rachel later in the day. Leo was animated in the background.

“There’s no reason to be in Portland,” I said. “My friends are gone. Jace doesn’t want to meet. He’s decrying the mask hysteria while he’s bunkered in his house. Now he’s worth too much after inheriting the business—he can’t even go outside.”

“I can’t believe they’re still rioting.”

“They only come out at night. It’s slowing down.”

“Well, you’re in Portland. I wish I were.”

“It’s not Portland, even with some restaurants opening. The other day, I walked past an outdoor restaurant and this young man and woman sat at a table, and she says, You were going to tell me about your new system at work. That’s the new conversation. Not music. Not ideas.”

“There’s no other work?”

“I got a job tutoring high school kids, but it doesn’t start till Fall.”

“We’re about to head up there. Make sure you get Ovaltine. Leo said you didn’t have any last time.”

“Already got some. He didn’t like the chocolate syrup I got.”

“He says he loves being there. We’ll see you a couple hours.”

When the buzzer sounded, I let them in the building, two floors below. In my studio he gazed at the light blue walls and hardwood floors, diffuse light coming in the windows. “This place is like butterflies,” Leo said. “I thought that last time, but I wanted to keep it a secret. Kay, you can go, Mom.”

On foot we toured 21st and 23rd, some of the shops open. Despite the high cloud cover and cool day, the sun appeared in cheering bursts. Leo jumped onto a bench when two women walked by. “I’m a troll—you have to pay me!” he said to them. They didn’t laugh. One of them trotted back and said she hoped it was okay they had passed for free.

“Yes,” Leo said. “I don’t actually make people pay.”

“That’s good to know,” she said.

“That was nice of her to come back,” I said to him. “People seem mean now, but they only feel funky after staying inside so much.”

“I wish a had a flower for her.”

“You seem good.” I asked him what he’d been up to.

“Hanging out with my grandpa. We’re studying Spanish. Finjimos que . . . seamos monejas.”

“Let’s pretend we’re monkeys! That’s great. Right to the subjunctive. That’s advanced.”

“How did you know it was monkeys?”

“I lived in Spain a long time ago. I remember some things.”

He was suspicious. “You never told me that.”

“It wasn’t really a great trip. It was after college, and my first wife and I were unhappy.”

“Why were you unhappy!”

“We couldn’t meet anyone. The town center was nice, but the neighborhoods were depressing.”

“You don’t know anyone now, and you’re happy.”

“I know you, and Mom, and Emerald.”

“Did you know Grandpa’s rich?”

“Yes. I’m surprised they don’t travel more. I’d go to Paris.”

“They go to the coast. They have waves that sneak up on you. They carry you out to the ocean. Grandpa was chasing me around last time, in case one of the waves got me. He was being funny about it.”

Next day Leo and I drove to Salem to meet Rachel halfway. In a McDonald’s parking lot, Leo stayed in the back of my car crying, and Rachel got in there with him. “It’s okay,” she said.

“I don’t like waking up and you’re not both home.”

“I know,” Rachel said.

She was gentle with him, and he got into her car. Rachel lowered his window so that I could talk to him. “I’ll drive down in a couple days,” I told him. “Then you can visit again before I move back to town.”

“You didn’t get the right Ovaltine,” he said.

“I got it this time.”

“You were supposed to get the orange kind.”

Leo reached out his hand toward me as they drove away.







Ten days remained to find a room in Eugene. Dave had been out of touch, on vacation, though he finally wrote explaining he had two new renters, adding that Steve had moved out, into a house down the street, and that I might ask him about a room. Steve emailed that he did have an affordable room for me.

“Drink in the house anytime, no problem. It won’t be a temptation for me. I have to blow into that straw every day or else go to jail.”

Steve and I had talked a lot while smoking on Dave’s porch, discussing prices for jeans at Fred Meyer, and the advantages of the Walmart pharmacy. He had gotten his medication right, an increasing pleasantness from him.

When I parked in his driveway now, with everything I owned in the car—my books had been shipped to Rachel’s—I saw that Steve’s place was a double-wide trailer that had been dragged and set down in front of the owner’s house. It was a common way to pay the mortgage in Springfield: push a trailer onto the front lawn and rent to a couple of warehouse laborers.

“You can call the landlady and leave references,” he’d written me. “It’s a formality. She’s trusting my judgement on you.”

The day was sunny and humid. A wheelchair ramp rose along one side of his trailer, the door open and a TV commercial blasting from inside. In the sun, I walked up the plank carrying boxes, placing everything on the porch. Inside, a 75-inch TV shrieked from the wall. It was an auto repair show, heavy metal playing while two men worked on a truck in fast-forward. “Hey, Steve!” I called, stepping inside. On the wall hung a matted poster of a piano with rose pedals scattered on the keys and a framed stock photo of a family on a beach, a small girl laughing on her dad’s shoulders. The place smelled of damp wood and faint sour milk. In the kitchen, on the shelf of a doorless cupboard, were pairs of diminutive glass pop bottles, each two inches high. Between them stood a plastic Joe Camel, who seemed the focus, pride, and prize of this display. His right leg was burned, as if someone had torched him thoughtfully with a lighter.

I was setting up my room when Steve filled my doorframe holding a grocery bag. “Dr. Christopher!” he said. “Are you hanging your degrees?”

“No. I’m not a doctor.”

“Who’s going to saw off your arm if you get gangrene?” he said.

“You’re the only man I’d trust.”

He crouched in laughter and feigned a punch for my stomach, like we were two fellas on leave.

“One thing I admire about you,” he said. “You always tell the truth. That’s true with me as well. A cashier at Walmart, last week, she gave me five dollars too much. I alerted her to that fact. I says, I can’t tell a lie because I’m a Christian. Are you saved yet?”

He’d never asked me that before. “Not since I was a kid in Idaho. Everybody I knew believed we’d raise our hands and get called home.”

“Rapture. You don’t believe in it?”

“I believe in Dostoevsky.”

He let out a disheartened breath. That must have sounded like highfalutin name to throw around.

“Okay, Doctor Christopher. I have something else I want to ask you. Boy, it’s hot back here!”

“I have a fan somewhere.”

He left the room and came back with a brochure on submitting patents. He said he’d pay me “cash money” to summarize it in plain language.

“Choose your wage,” he said.

“Thirty-five an hour. I’ll keep track of the hours.”

“The last hour will be you explaining it to me verbally.”

“We’ll discuss it right after I’m finished with the project, so I don’t forget the material,” I said. “Is there any way we could turn the TV down a little?”

“Oh, now we’re turning it down, huh? Okay. I’ve got wifi headphones I can wear, if it’s going to hurt your princely ears. No, I’m joking here. Sure, I’ll turn it down.”

I got to work on it, annotating each page, and finished in a week. It was a six-hour job, seven after we discussed my notes.

On the far end of the porch was a covered area, with a roof and walls. We sat in the chairs there and smoked. The two windows looking onto the landlord’s house were empty of glass.

“Let’s talk about the brochure,” I said.

“Not today, not today.”

“But we have to look at it in a week or so, or I’ll forget it,” I said. “It’s pretty dense stuff.”

“I’m talking to my lawyers today,” he said.

“Lawyers plural. Sounds serious.”

“My wife is holding my daughter hostage in Utah. She feeds her sugar in her food and whispers ill sentiments while holding up photos of me. The girl I raised now recites slogans against me like some North Korean prisoner."

“When did they go?”

“She believed I acted willfully in my drug use. I was snared into meth addiction by a man I trusted. He told me they were vitamin C pills crushed up. A fella from church, an imposter. He needed another addict to help pay his bills.”

“You got into that when you left the state hospital?”

He moved his hand gently to remove an ash from his knee. “There’s no need to play interrogation here.”

“I didn’t mean to sound like that.”

A recent line of paint followed pointlessly down the center of the porch floor and down the wheelchair ramp to the driveway. He saw me looking at it. Another white line went up the front door.

“Half a paint job, that’s right. I’m holding the landlord hostage until she decides to buy me more paint.”

He smiled and his right hand played about his ankle in a feathery way.

“I got a woman disbarred once! I recorded her on my phone and played it to a judge. She told someone about my addiction. Big no-no,” he said. “I also got my ex-wife on the recorder, too. She said I will never see my daughter again.” He flicked his mustache. “That’s kidnapping. Fleeing across state lines with ill intent. My daughter’s fifty, but my ex-wife has her brain gutted like an empty bedroom stripped of childhood joys. She took her when I was up in the state hospital. When I was resting. In the hospital. Trying to straighten my life—” He cut off when his voice cracked. “I’ll tell you how I got into the state hospital. It’s a funny story. Cop brought me. I was going around for weeks saying my name was Jimmy Stevens.”

I waited to hear more but figured that was the end of the story.

“Better go,” I said. “Emerald invited me to meet her at 5th Street Market. She called a second ago.”

“Emerald! She’s a good little gal. She’s got a great pair, too.” He slapped his knee. “Don’t tell anybody at my church I said that! Did you pop the question? Hey, I got a couple smaller planes. We could paint them at the kitchen table later.”

“I usually do some work at night, in my room.”

He went sullen. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. Don’t smoke too much pot at 5th Street.”

“It’s not a hippy place anymore.”

“Well, I doubt it’s very Christian.”

I swung onto the freeway and drove through downtown Eugene, with a truck speeding up behind me, honking. My former hippy town of Eugene, Oregon, was filling up with money trucks, expensive ones that saw no farms or ranches.

Near the river, 5th Street Market was a pricy hole for high-end consumers who liked to peek around expensive shops. But in the 1980s, it was a different kind of place. Restaurants in the food court had wooden facades and counters, the meals healthy and affordable, the staff and owners friendly, not in a customer service way, but in a natural manner that revealed the successful lives of these people who weren’t rich. There was a long narrow section in back where anyone could drink coffee and watch the trains pass, spending an easy two or three hours with friends. It was all windows full of sky back there. People read books. Aficionados of music and film burst forth—young and old. Once, in that rear section, a few middle-aged bakery employees staged an impromptu square dance, wearing aprons or baker’s hats, and many good, shabby-looking people stood and clapped, grinning. Now 5th Street was a mall-influenced food court with limited seating, designed for a hasty lunch and return to shopping—three floors of overpriced sweaters and mixing bowls. 5th Street was a destination for unhappy couples. It was for stiff, professional young men who wore flesh-colored jackets, zipped halfway over oxford shirts. It was for people who had spent their lives dealing with crime in some other city and had learned to present hostile faces to almost everyone who didn’t appear wealthy. It was for kids who followed their parents around. It was for seniors who wore implanted teeth, who popped their mouths open and kept them open in a mimicry of feeling, as if to communicate to others at their table, with their frozen horse faces, “I’m enjoying this experience.” Even the rear seating area had been removed and walled over, as if to dispatch every corner that encouraged conversation or an inward glance alone.

But I visited now and then, just as I visited other businesses that had changed, going place to place like an old man who disliked the new ways. I parked in the 5th Street parking lot, feeling a little sick about living with Steve. It seemed he wanted my company when I only wanted a room alone. My head came forward in sleepiness. When I opened my eyes in ten minutes, a Camus quote washed up: “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” I laughed through my nose. Remembering that quote cheered me up, and the nap restored me somewhat.

In 5th Street’s courtyard, I climbed a flight of stairs and folded myself on a bench. A group of young people in university T-shirts rested at a table below, in the middle of some animated remembrance, touching each other’s arms and laughing. An open section of the second floor showed the basement level where a brick fountain poured—a watery music in the courtyard. A five-year-old boy blew bubbles while his young parents watched from a table.

I called Emerald. “I pretended that you called me so I could get away from Steve, at the house,” I told her. “You want to meet?”

“No, I’m afraid I had a stern talking to, by a jackhammer, and I don’t think I can walk right now. I’m a pleasure model. Did I ever tell you that?”

“Who was the guy?”

“An old friend from the French department. My boyfriend and I are in an open relationship as of yesterday. When I told him, he had nothing to say. I don’t think he even cares. I don’t know what he feels about anything.”

“What’s new with the hacker?”

“He went away but came back a few days ago. I’m staying off the pro-life websites for a while.”

My contact list had few friends. I called Jace.

“Steve is wildly cheerful, then very gloomy and suspicious,” I told him. “I knew he was cracked. I have to look for a job. I don’t have that ideation shit anymore, and I don’t want it to come back.”

“I’m going to ask you . . . never to talk about that again. Ideation business.” He was a bit slurry already.

“I wouldn’t do it. I’ve got a kid. I told you that. Are you at work?”

“There are professionals. Don’t put that on . . . your friends. I’m working from home.”

“Okay, but you told your wife years ago that you were thinking about cashing it in—unless people stopped bullying you at the nursery.”

“I told you that?”

“At 21st Street Bar.”

“That was different. It was an extreme situation. I wanted her to . . . tell my dad. That was about leverage. Listen, if you can’t swear to me, right now that you’ll respect me by . . . avoiding these kinds of topics . . . starting right now.” He stretched out the now.

“I’ll promise.”

“Why are you spamming my email?” he said. “I’m not going to open those.”

“I didn’t send you anything. What did you get?”

“I run a respected business here,” he said. “I run a respected business. We have clients going back . . . thirty years.”

“Mathew Stjohn must’ve sent it.”

“I got three emails in your name, called Is this a picture of you?” he said. “What’s he sending me?”

“I’m glad you didn’t open them.”

“What the hell? Will he keep sending me this stuff?”

He spoke something I didn’t hear, his mouth away from the phone, and hung up. Jace had his own bedlam of terrors. Though at last he commanded his father’s desk, I doubted his promotion helped. He was always nervous and fearful, despite his drinking—I knew he couldn’t risk knowing me after learning who sent those emails.

Other friends dropped off at this time. B.J. Trusell had published an article in a big magazine that explored something I said years ago, about throwing away pages and starting over. It had come out a month earlier. I wrote B.J. before I moved back to Eugene, and he was cagey, though he used to write me a lot. Of course, there were any number of explanations. He was also a father of young children, exhausted and tense. But he wouldn’t engage with me, and I believed that Mathew Stjohn had shaken his computer, so that important manuscripts and stories seemed to fly away—a plain warning to stay away from me and never to write about me again.

An editor of a New York magazine, where I’d published playlists for my two books, also wasn’t getting back to me, despite a long history of friendliness. Two months earlier I recommended B. J.—and followed up twice—and he didn’t get back.

Also at this time, a small book publisher had invited me to submit a book, out of the blue. When I submitted a manuscript, he sent a form letter within days, instead of a polite rejection. It seemed he would’ve sent a polite decline since he had invited my submission. Half a dozen other contacts were aloof as hell, pulling back from enthusiasm.

A community college had invited me for an interview and closed the door on it the next week, pleading “restructuring.”

Brother Censorship rode his horse at night, wearing his great helm, raising his torch, a Christian soldier in his dark crusade. I assumed he would use his digital mastery to take down B.J.’s article that had my name in it. He did the next best thing. When I Googled the magazine and my name, nothing came up. On publication day, the article had appeared instantly on my first Google page, then vanished two days later. But the counter on my blog was climbing fast. The magazine article brought traffic. Subscribers may still have been reading it from the magazine’s website.

In the old days, when B.J. and I taught at Oregon State, we bandied around many tough subjects by email, including the rumor that our department chair was a hacker. B.J. swore she had hacked a former adjunct. She photoshopped the guy’s photo and made three chickens on a farm, three chicken-shaped faces of the adjunct, with chicken feet, and an axe lying nearby. “The frame showed the university name all around it,” B.J. had written. “She used university tools. That was brazen. But he’d published a very nasty commentary about the low-IQ, agricultural history of the college, and all the people who go along, like tired farmers, so I guess he didn’t want to stay here anymore.”

I left 5th Street and drove past other landmarks of my teens, the Bijou, Prince Puckler’s Ice-Cream, and Lenny’s Café—it was now a hospital parking lot—and I didn’t know where to go. I conjured Steve flicking his mustache. I was hungry, but I never cooked at his house, so I hit 7/11 on campus, and bought cheese nachos and cigarettes.

Later, Steve painted a new plane at the kitchen table. On the floor were scattered five or six old magazines from years earlier, one copy of Newsweek featuring George H.W. Bush, all of the glossy covers glowing in the weak light. I felt anger coming off Steve as I entered the house. When I went to the kitchen for a glass of water, he said, “Clean up those spills by the coffee maker,” he said. “That’s your mess, not mine.” I wiped the counter. His previous, easy personality all but vanished, and he’d swerved into irritable moods.

I went to my room and skimmed my emails for something I might have missed. Four days earlier, a Midwest library journal wrote me asking if my review of B.J.’s novel was still available, and I responded that he could have it. But he didn’t write back.

I called the editor now. It was six-fifteen where he was, but he picked up. He said he’d emailed me two days earlier that the piece was going to be published, but he needed confirmation.

“You didn’t get my second email?” I said.

“No. Just the one. But I see mine in my sent box right now.”

“Would you have published it if I hadn’t called?”

“No. We need your approval, of course. We can publish this in the fall.”

It seemed that Brother Censorship discarded certain emails that had good news, those from smaller journals and publishers without money or power.

When I Googled B.J., I found all his articles had vanished from his Google pages. He had many articles published at the big magazine—all of them gone. The Christian leader didn’t want B.J.’s articles leading anyone to me. The piece in which B.J. mentioned me had set Stjohn’s narcissistic mind afire. It produced one of his worst periods of hacking yet. I was in the middle of it now.

Steve cursed in the living room, then grumbled something accusatory, as if he, too, suffered at the hands of an unseen adversary.

When I clicked on my Pittsburgh interview on my blog, the link opened to a Boise State janitor position. I found the Pittsburgh interview online and swapped the bad link on my site. When I clicked links to other interviews and reviews on my blog, they all went to janitorial services and advertisements for caulking and bathroom wizard pages and the like.

My forthcoming job was light maintenance at university family housing. Father Peeks kept track of what I was doing.

That night, I placed an ad for private students in fiction writing. The one who responded was seventy-five, a former stage actress who also acted in commercials. We met at a café on campus and I liked her right away. She had the ability to insult me while mitigating hurt feelings, since it was clear she liked my company. “Your nose is uneven on the sides,” she said. “You’re growing a bulb there.”

We stayed late on our second meeting and took pictures of each other—quick friends. “God, look at this nervous claw hand you’ve got lying on the table.” She pointed her phone at me to show the picture. “We’ll have to edit that out. That sucker is going to scuttle across my face when I’m trying to sleep.”

I mentioned my hacker, and she mentioned her mother in town, who was dying—the reason she’d moved from Los Angeles.

Two days later, in the morning, she called. She wanted to know why she was getting strange emails in my name. “They look infected.”

“How does my name appear?” I asked. “Is it the email I always use?” She spelled it. The only difference was that it had an extra letter, a middle initial.

“It looks like someone is trying to scare people off of you,” she said.

“I think that Christian leader is sending infected emails to everyone I know. I’m glad my mom’s not around. He’d get her for sure.”

“It made my skin crawl when you told me about him. How many fully erect men do we have to endure? You should have seen those Bud Light sets. It was a forest of hard-ons. Everyone thought they had the right to take my bathing suit down.”

When we hung up, I wrote B.J., asking if he received any infected-looking emails from me, with a middle initial. “That pervert is sending these emails to everyone I know.”

“I won’t reply to any more emails that deal with conjecture,” B.J. wrote back, in five minutes. “Why would you assume that’s what is going on here?”

“I think he’s hacking you to turn you away,” I wrote. B.J., and again, as with Jace, I had the feeling I’d never hear from him again.

Now conversations about hackers brought out distress in B.J. and the need for judicious language. At any rate, the Christian leader had shown that he wanted to frighten all of my professional contacts, friendships, and private students, as if seeking to kill me without a trigger being pulled.

My books’ rankings on Amazon had gotten worse. The books had been ranked in small categories before (520 in contemporary literature, 212 in small town literature, etc.), but now they showed only the general sales on Amazon, well into the millions, and those numbers were suspiciously high as well, as they had jumped so fast. My books weren’t big sellers, but it seemed clear the numbers were altered.

Next day I found that my Amazon page was removed. Rather, when I typed my name into a general search on Amazon, nothing appeared. Tiny, blue letters below asked, Are you looking for Christopher Hendrickson? But that message was easy to miss. An Amazon Central support person told me the system had changed my name to Hend. This can happen if many, many searchers typed in a partial name, so that it altered the algorithm and auto-corrected the name, but it was very rare. I didn’t have enough people searching my name, outside of my brief appearance in the big magazine. I disbelieved that the few hundred people who had ever typed my name could have changed the whole damn algorithm in the largest online company in the world. That didn’t happen. Stjohn had altered my Amazon search results on his own.

One morning I found a blog post about me, on my first Google page, appearing to have been written by a young college woman. It said I dropped out of high school after three tries to finish, I later graduated from the University of Oregon, my novel was based on my life (meaning I was a mentally ill grave robber), and I had bipolar disorder. No accomplishments listed beyond my BA, just ponderous news, failures, mental health concerns—ready to inform anyone who looked me up that I was some underachieving oddball and no more.

All of his avatars were young women and girls. This one had created her blog a few days earlier. My bio was her first order of business in launching her site. Moreover, it soared to the very top of my Google pages—an unlikely rocket ride.

The Christian leader also dropped the “likes” on my Fiction Titles page so that they were below his number of likes on his own book page.

When I unloaded all of this news in a shoutout to the Christian scholars, one of them wrote me back, though I didn’t recognize his name, Jay. “You don’t have anything on Stjohn,” he said. He wrote several emails throughout the day, challenging my assertions and disputing my evidence in vague terms. I believed it was Stjohn, pretending to be “Jay.” A friend of Mathew Stjohn might write once or twice, but I doubted he’d devote an entire day to it. Jay said he didn’t even glance at the foolish things I said about his friend. If that was true, it was impossible for him to know I didn’t have anything. When Jay wrote back again, I blocked the email.

After sitting in my room and holding my head, I pushed out of the house and walked, leaving Steve to his perusal of the New Testament in his reclining chair. A long walk to Walmart for a half-case was better than hanging around that place. I walked the long neighborhood road alongside a fence blackened with privacy tape. Old cars and tire stacks showed in flashes. A silent dog in there followed the sound of my walking and sniffed at the fence. In the distance ahead, the blue sky was stained yellow, above the high green building whose black letters read Kirtus Wood Products. Heavy white steam rose from its twin stacks. The air smelled like broccoli boiled in antifreeze.

A man slowed his new mustang as he passed me, as if to communicate that he judged my appearance. He wore a mustache, a silky mauve baseball hat, and enormous glasses—a Springfield winner. His girlfriend, who was pretty, laughed beside him. They drove on.

It scalded me that I had to return to Steve’s house. All he ever cooked was spaghetti, the wet smell gassing into my room each night. I wanted to climb up the front of Kirtus Wood Products and float into the sky amid the clouds of steam.







But luck hadn’t forgotten about me. It was a distant wanderer, but it kept me in mind for gentle chores sometimes, when I had to pay rent. I had gotten this very relaxed job at family housing at the university, pulling a green cart burdened with an air compressor, a vacuum, a bucket of paint, and a caulking gun. It was June, hot in the second-floor apartments, cool in the bottom ones. Often I worked with Colt, who was silent until he needed to speak his piece about some issue. He’d inherited property in the country, for instance, and he stood up for homeowners’ rights whenever he had the chance.

On my second week, in a bottom unit, I painted the bedrooms and living room while he removed and cleaned the ceiling fans and fixed any appliances. The canvas on the floor caught the dripping from my roller. In the living room Colt showed me a photo on his phone. It was a deer carcass lying with a forty-five on its neck.

“I shot this fucker on the road yesterday. He was standing there when I approached in my truck. Parked, jumped out, snuck up and shot it point blank.”

“I’m surprised it didn’t run.”

“It was dazed.”

“It was probably hurt or sick.”

“Then I did it a favor.”

It occurred to me that I had passed some cultural test over the past two weeks. I was a safe person to show this illegal kill to.

“Did you need the meat?” I said.

“I thought it would take a cool photo.”

“It’s not very sporting.”

He withdrew his phone, his eyes wary.

“There’s different rules in the country. We used him for food, I’m not saying we didn’t. I wasn’t just passing through. That was my road, the road I live on. The state affords greater leeway to homeowners, as an implied matter of law.” He went to the kitchen. “I’ve got to swap out the fridge door. It’s all jacked up. Coleson said you went to South!”

Out the sliding glass door lay the football field of South Eugene High School, and beyond that the rear of the school—a white-and-purple fortress spanning three blocks. There was the courtyard, the old smoking section where I hung out with friends who dealt acid and pot.

The school sparkled in the furious sun. His photo of the dead deer stayed with me like the smell of bad meat.

“My favorite thing to do was take acid on a sunny day,” I said.

“Acid! You take that enough, you’re legally insane.”

“Bullshit.” I returned to the kitchen and leaned my hands on the counter. “I took it over a hundred times. Acid was a great part of my education. At fourteen, I was examining my nature. I was also talking to smart friends.” I painted a new wall in the living room while he caulked the sink.

“Who was your leader,” he said, “some progressive dude with a man bun and a third eye?”

“At Lenny’s Nosh Bar we discussed Pink Floyd, Jim Morrison, Holden Caulfield, the manic genius of Jello Biafra, who sang in the Dead Kennedys. Jello seemed wild and high during shows, but he wasn’t on drugs. He cracked some code that involved speaking crazed and dangerous truths. We talked about all of this. We were smart kids. We weren’t always on acid. Sometimes it was Christmas Trees, pot, Ecstasy, or 40 ouncers. We were normal kids too. We had sex with our girlfriends and stole candy at Hirons. We imitated the voices of cartoon robots.”

“So, instead of playing sports and getting high on that, you were trying to be a 60s guru type. Normal, huh? It’s normal to have sex with fourteen-year-old girls?”

“We were fourteen too.”

“Lord love a duck. Who did we let in here?” He produced friendly laughter. “I’m only messing around.”

Next day, Colt and I remained in that apartment, hanging new blinds and tinkering. He didn’t talk to me all morning. It was likely my comments about acid concerned him. I was using a small red gadget to read the strength of fire-alarm batteries. It looked like a helmet, with its red indicator pointing to “weak” or “strong.”

“I’d like to wear a large version of this, a helmet.” I held up the helmet-shaped alarm tester. “Then you guys would know if I was weak or strong that day.”

I enjoyed razzing him. He stopped his roller on the wall where he was improving my work and gazed at the football field. “Let’s go find out our next assignment.”

“Only kidding around,” I said. “You seemed worried about my acid adventures. There’s nothing to worry about. I haven’t taken it since I was seventeen.”

“Nice day out there. Can’t wait to build me a bonfire tonight.”

“I haven’t had anything but pot.”

“Okay. I smoke weed too.” But he didn’t brighten. “Marco said it’s looking good in here.”

We pulled our carts into the tall garage, passed through another door, and checked out the assignment board in the hallway. A couple of the janitors had stopped by Marco’s office down the hall. They were talking about Jesus. At his desk, Marco, the manager, an Italian in a white beard, told one of the janitors, “Good man!” Whenever anyone said something about Jesus, he said, “Good man!”

Marco let us take half hour breaks instead of fifteen. He padded our hours if we had to leave an hour or two early. It was okay to take naps on the floor of a unit we were fixing up, if we were hungover or beat.

My instinct was to quit. But I showed up the following day. In the long room where we relaxed on couches and had lunch—the wall before us was a window that looked out on grass and a rainy day—a housing supervisor sat on a couch opposite me, eating a meatball sandwich. “Where’s Colt? He’s always here.”

I was talking to Coleson, the groundskeeping supervisor, who seemed to like the things I talked about. He had a business degree, with some liberal arts, and regretted forgetting everything he’d read. Today we discussed Dorris Ranch in Springfield and what a great park it was—groves, trails, the river.

“I got lost there a few days ago,” I said, “but I didn’t mind. I found myself in the middle of this eternal grove, and I didn’t know which way was the parking lot, or which way was the river. I was completely lost out there, and I enjoyed it.”

The housing supervisor put his sandwich on the table and stood up. He directed a sour mouth toward me, shook his head very wide in vaudeville fashion, collected his backpack, his sandwich, and got out of there.

Coleson was laughing at my story of lostness. He had a loud quick laugh that was contained enough to bring out in front of bosses—controlled, not silly. He found everything funny.

“You liked it,” Coleson said, as though fascinated. “You liked being lost.”

“Out there, sure. For an hour or two. When you don’t know where you are, it’s all unexpected. Everything is strange. You’re lucid, more on your toes, with new thoughts. But normally, I wouldn’t like being lost. If I’m trying to drive somewhere in town, I’d want to know where I am. I’m not a complete acid head.”

“You’re putting us on, right? You never took so much acid.”

“No. It’s all true. But I know if I say it, most people will have a problem with it. Not everyone does. You don’t seem to.”

He only laughed and laughed.

After work I parked outside Leo’s summer camp—a gray building in a grove of high pines. The program was connected to his grade school. The rain had quit and it was sunny. I called the office and told them I was here early to pick up Leo. It was a pleasure to pick him up after work. In a minute, here came Leo running out the front doors toward me on the sidewalk, and a heavy woman chased behind. Leo wore pajamas with a lion’s head bouncing at his shoulder.

“Dad! I don’t want to go back there, ever. I hate it! I hate that place!”

“The school or the camp?”

“Both.”

The woman breathed hard in teddy bear pajamas. “I told Leo and his teacher that you were outside, and class would be over in ten minutes. He jumped and ran immediately. The appropriate thing to do would be to tell your son to return to his classroom and wait for the bell.”

“He’s already out here. He seems upset.”

“Returning to his seat—even if it would make him late—would show him that he has to wait.”

“I’m going to take him now. He’ll be back tomorrow.”

At the Dairy Mart drive-through window on River Road, we got small fountain drinks for 40 cents each. I parked near the bike path. At a ford in the river, where water shivered over rocks in the sun, we sat on a bench in the shade of black cottonwoods, and watched the river.

“Aren’t lion pajamas too hot?” I asked him.

He stepped out of them, wearing a T-shirt that said Get the Zombies.

“I didn’t think I’d ever get out of there. Thank you so much, Dad!”

“What’s going on there?” I asked. “Is it anything bad? You can always tell me or your mom. Is there a bully? Is there a mean teacher?”

“No. You can’t say anything they don’t like. I said my school wasn’t Howard Elementary but Coward Hellementary and my teacher yelled at me.”

“Save snarky comments like that for the playground.”

“But I also wasn’t able to say why I thought whales were destined to be outer space creatures,” he said. “She said No, no! Shut your mouth or I’ll hit you a hundred times.”

“Whales longing for outer space? That’s a great idea. Keep saying things like that if you want, as long as you don’t take over the class.”

“Okay. I’m going to!”

“We’ve got two hours till your mom gets off work. Anyplace you want to go?”

“Valley River. At this store, they sell extra-long katanas that you could probably slice through five people at once, if they were standing close together.”

“Wow. That’s a powerful slice.”

He smiled. “They play a video where a Japanese man hacks at a hunk of meat. The meat’s hanging from chains and he slices off chunks like it’s nothing. My grandpa and I went there.”

“Let’s go.”

He smiled and his eyes were elfin, framed by his long hair.

Heat tipped through autumn. Coleson was my boss now, as I had transitioned to groundskeeping full time. We mowed, raked, and groomed the property. One morning on break, I washed my hands in a dim bathroom, when Coleson appeared behind me. My face was sweaty and shiny. I was going to splash water on my face, but I was self-conscious now. He had walked into the bathroom and stood watching me in the mirror. Not wanting to turn around, I turned off the water and we carried on a conversation like that for minutes, while I saw his image in the mirror and he saw mine. It seemed he should have gone and used the bathroom instead of waiting to wash his hands right off. Then I understood: he must have used a toilet, and he was on his way out, not on his way in.

I plunged to the task of washing my hands and splashing water, then cleared the way for Coleson, laughing.

At lunch the next day, Friday, we got our delivery from a sandwich place and rested on the soft couches in the long room.

A thin, tall janitor named Earl ate with us that day. He pushed his rolling yellow rubber trash can around the grounds in T-shirts that showed his skinny muscles at seventy-two. He was distant with me, due to rumors, I guessed. John had recently broken up with his stripper girlfriend. She was twenty-nine when they met. He was sixty-five. He’d gotten her off drugs and made her car payments every month. He went to the movies with her parents sometimes when she was working. It seemed like a good thing.

Coleson and Earl discussed a man who’d set up a small tent on the property this morning. They had found him together.

“He moved his hand in bird-like gestures and said nothing at all,” Coleson said.

“It was a strange encounter,” Earl said. “Another drug casualty. Speaking of strange encounters, I heard you and Coleson had one in the bathroom.”

I sweated. “Half the people here think I’m crazy. That’s okay if Coleson does too.”

“Half?” said Earl. “A lot more people than that think you’re crazy. You need to take inventory.”

“Good. I hope that guy who executes deer on the side of the road thinks I’m crazy. He’s a sound judge. Did he show you the pics of that deer on his phone?”

Coleson wasn’t laughing now. His jaw was hard. Colt was a long-time handyman and favorite in this place. It wouldn’t do to have a temp come in and criticize him.

“Let’s get to work,” Coleson said.

On the south side of the grounds, I raked leaves, filling six plastic barrels. Spenser’s Butte, in the distance, described a downward slope of pine trees against the sky. I had climbed those trails for years, often seeing only one or two people on the way up. Now it was a place for crowds, a thousand fitness lovers using the trails for their workouts, entire offices pushing themselves on a Saturday, achieving the summit as a sweaty, joyous team, all of them heroes who loved the Ducks.

When Coleson said he had no more work for me that day, I asked Marco in his office if he had work. “You go, and I’ll swipe you out at three.”

I went out the back door feeling lucky to have found the one place in America that wasn’t about hustle and time. It was the most leisurely of my working life so far, and I didn’t want it to end the following month, as scheduled. I knew I could quit talking and blend in, over time.

Steve had sent me a text two hours earlier. He wanted me to go to the county jail and sign a form stating I wouldn’t drink in the house where he lived. He’d had a hearing for his DUI, after much delay. The judge asked him if he had any roommates and if they drank.

The text dissolved into spelling errors and run-ons. I called him.

“The judge said you have to go sign that thing today,” Steve said.

“Are you sure? You’re the one under court control. I don’t mean that rude, but it seems like they’d be restraining you, not me.”

“Now you listen to me, young man,” he said, like an actor in an old TV show. “The judge has spoken. The form is waiting for you at the outside window, next to the front doors. You need to go pick it up. Post haste!” he shouted.

At the county jail downtown, I crossed the courtyard to a window next to the front doors. A woman sat typing in there, facing to one side. She stood, slid open the window, and revealed her bell-shaped, quilted dress.

“No, you’re not required to fill out the form. It’s voluntary.”

“What’ll happen if I don’t? I mean, why does the form exist?”

“It’s a question about what could happen to Steve. If law enforcement finds him with any alcohol in the house, he would have to return to jail.”

“Do they do inspections?”

“No, only if police were called to the house for something else and found alcohol there.”

“You’re sure, right? I don’t have to sign it?”

“Read the fine print on the form. It communicates everything I said.”

“So, if they found my beer in the fridge, he’d get busted and not me? But if I signed the form, I could go to jail if they found alcohol?”

“Yes. He knows the terms. Judges are careful to spell it out during the hearing.”

At the double-wide trailer, Steve contemplated his plane at the kitchen table, staring at it darkly. He had painted black stripes along the wings. The small window by the front door gave light, but it hardly touched him where he sat at the table.

“Doctor Christopher! Did you sign on the dotted line?”

When I explained what the clerk had told me, he flicked his mustache. “You didn’t listen to me. I told you what the judge said. Why are you listening to a clerk?”

“You might have misunderstood the judge. I’m not going to sign it because, if the cops found booze for any reason, I could be incarcerated. But I’m putting in my notice. I’ll be out of here in a month.”

I went down the hall. “You owe me money!” he said, and I turned.

“For what?”

“You were going to summarize the patent book.”

“That was months ago. I reminded you three times. I told you we’d have to do that within a week or two after I finished reading it, so that I wouldn’t forget the material. But you put it off each time.”

“You’re whining. I don’t like that sound in a man’s voice. We’re going to do it right now.”

In the small light, he was a partial silhouette, with one side of his mustache showing and one eye, like a person who lived half in shadow.

“You’re going to get your butt over there and sit on that couch, little mister.”

“You’d need to pay me for one more hour. Then I could review the pamphlet, get up to speed with it again, and we can go over it. That’s difficult material. Do you think I’ve kept it fresh in memory all this time?”

“You’re not going to go over this thing I already paid you for?”

“No!” The word was shrill. “You’re the one who violated the terms. We agreed to look at it in a week or two, after I finished annotating the thing.”

I saw he had extended his reach toward me and brought it back. He had recorded some of our exchange with his phone.

“I’m going to get my deputies on you,” he said.

“Anyway, I’m putting in notice.”

“No! I’m putting you on notice!”

Next night I brought out a bottle of Vodka and drank some of it while I watched Paris, Texas. Each time I poured a drink, I slipped the bottle into the red delivery bag next to my desk, hidden in case the police stormed this house—unlikely, as Steve followed the terms of his DUI.

I got a little drunk, my three steps to the bed were uneven. Out of a hard sleep I heard my name pronounced and knew the overhead light was on. When I looked, I saw three sheriff’s deputies in my room, each of them young, as if they had come from a high school baseball game. It was two-fifty in the morning.

One of them held onto stapled papers. “You’re being evicted, tonight. Steve has filed a restraining order against you.”

I sat up in bed. “How did he do that?”

“A judge signed off on this. Do you have a place to go?”

I said that I did.

“What does the restraining order say?”

“I can’t communicate that, but I will give you this form, and you can read the instructions. In the meantime, please get dressed and take only a few necessary things with you. You’ll be able to return later with a police officer to get your items. They’ll give you fifteen minutes to get everything then.”

I dressed and placed a sweater in the red delivery bag—the vodka bottle inside of it—filled a duffle bag with clothes, and got my backpack, computer, notebooks, and lamp.

Out in the driveway, the flood light over the garage door was triggered and cast its beam on me. The deputies followed, and one who hadn’t spoken yet told me, “If you feel this guy lied—or wasn’t in his right mind—you’ll have your day to talk to the judge.”

“He’s a recent meth addict and he’s schizophrenic. He was a pretty nice guy most of the time. I guess you guys can see his history.”

The deputy who had spoken first gave me the forms. I tossed them on the front seat and motored the freeway to Rachel’s.




13

At Rachel’s house I let myself in and saw her down the hall, outside of her bedroom, holding an aluminum bat. The house was netted in the shadows of many nightlights in the two front rooms, kitchen, and hallway.

“I should have warned you I was coming over,” I said.

“You scared me. Thank God I didn’t have a gun in the house. A restraining order? Why? Who?”

She turned on the light over the kitchen table. On the first page, Steve had written, “I’m an elderly schizophrenic gentleman and today I witnessed my roommate holding a knife in the kitchen. He was howling, howling at nothing. He kept asking for more money.”

“This is absurd,” Rachel said. “You’re howling, like a wolf apparently, howling at nothing. Jesus. Who was the judge who granted this?”

“They probably allow any senior citizen to get a restraining order and sort it out later.”

She turned pages. “You have to take this to the DA and tell them you have no firearms. You can’t go within a thousand feet of Steve’s house or risk prison time.”

“What if he thinks I’m haunting his window? Then the deputies will come for me again.”

“If that happened, you could hand over your phone. They could see where you go. Well, I have to go to sleep. We’ll talk more tomorrow. You can sleep on the couch.”

In a week, I found a room to rent in a woman’s house in Springfield. In the kitchen windows were rows of flat rocks with love painted on them, and many wall hangings displayed that word.

Norma had a four-beat mirthless laugh that made me uneasy. On my second day there, she came into the kitchen when I was making a sandwich.

“I saw that you write books. My dad wrote a book, an academic book about communities where people run amok, in other countries. Some lightning bolt that goes into people and makes them run around and go wild.”

“I can’t blame them a whole lot. We do it in America too.”

She seemed politely pained and uncertain about that. Nervousness took me—I had to talk through it.

I said, “I think Jean Paul Sarte’s idea—the hell of other people—describes our central problem.”

“I think it’s important to keep things positive.”

“He’s not saying that people are hell to be around. He’s saying that when they know things about you, bad things you might have done, they remind you of yourself. If someone sees you steal money, then it’s an anguish every time you see them. The sight of people makes you heavy with your own sins.” I sweated, knowing it was an ill-advised comment to make in Springfield, on my second day here, but I had to keep going so that it would make sense.

“He’s talking about all of us,” I said. “We all have a private life and things we want to keep to ourselves.” I couldn’t shut up. “I’m not saying I do any of these things. Let’s say you see me rip up a parking ticket. Now my action is going to loom shamefully in my mind whenever I see you.”

Her face hinted at disgust. “I’m going to hike Mount Pisgah,” she said. “Be back in a couple of hours.”

At seven pm, I lay in my bed with the lights off, The Wheel of Fortune playing in the living room. Dread poured into me, the chance that the judge, at the hearing, would side with Steve. I wouldn’t be teaching anymore. And I might not get custody of my son if anything happened to Rachel. She and I were divorced now, with joint custody. But Leo could get tossed out to fosters rather than placed with me. It was a hard kick to ponder that one.

When the dread left for a moment, it came back into me harder, and I took each wave as a shock to my head and heart, with much wincing and hot eyes.

I sat up and took the restraining order from my desk. There were three pages for three witnesses that would appear at a hearing. A witness could be someone who knew about the case, or it could be a character reference.

Next day, in late morning, Dave answered when I called. “Can you meet me at that bar next to McDonald’s?”

Our table was near the Keno machines. Dave, in his cowboy hat, was astonished by my story.

“That’s not right. Steve’s the one who gets in all these crazy fights with people. You were a better tenant than he was.”

“Would you be willing to be one of my witnesses? Say no if you want. You’d have to write a letter to the judge, give your phone number, and wait for a phone call. It’s a telephone hearing.”

“Steve would be pissed about that, huh? Known each other a lot of years.”

“Forget it. I can find someone else.”

He got two more shots at the bar and set them on our table. “I’ll do it. That guy gets mixed up about what’s going on. When do you need a letter?”

“As soon as you can write it. One thing I wanted to ask: Do you think he made it up that I robbed him with a knife, or did he really believe it?”

He turned his head to one side. “I’ve never known him to hallucinate. He only gets mixed up. But those things can change over time, sure. I’ve never found him to hallucinate.”

“Thanks for doing this. It’s going to mean a lot to the judge.”

Norma wasn’t home when I returned to the house. The only time I felt easy here was when she was gone, a rare occurrence since she worked at home. Today’s mail delivery was scattered on the floor beneath the slot—a brochure from a pro-life organization and a magazine about new age spirituality. I tended to favor contradictory identities, but she appeared to undergo a transition that was something like a heart transplant, with unlikely success, despite her dream of existing as a carefree Northwest spirit woman. Norma told me she’d been a George W. Bush Christian wife, trying with her husband to live according to Biblical principles. Now she spoke of “the universe” as her guide.

I brought my pain to my bed once again and suffered about the worst possibilities. But instead of taking a sleeping pill in the middle of the day, I rose and walked the streets to figure what I could do next. Down the street was a long warehouse with twenty shut bay doors, sun reflecting on pieces of the metal in uneven smears of depressing glow. The hot days were never going to end.

Five blocks away stood a Catholic church. It was like a large wooden house, painted white. The door was open. The foyer smelled of food, and a Hispanic couple came down a hallway, the woman holding a dish. It was hot in there. I sat in a pew beneath colored windows to unburden my head. My prayers weren’t felt. I kept cutting them off and starting over, as if this one might climb, as if this one might do something for me.

Later, Rachel and Leo and I had pizza in the backyard, on a glider on the back porch. Late sun reddened a length of fence on one side. I felt better over here.

“Of course I’ll do it,” she said. “You picked your son up from summer camp every day,” she said. “I’ll write a good letter. I’ll include my address at child services.”

Leo sat between us and she smoothed his hair. “His teacher called me today. Buddy, do you want to tell your dad what you were worried about?”

“Yeah. The cops.”

“He heard us talking about the sheriffs so much and thought something could happen to you.”

“It’s not a big deal,” I told him. “I have a hearing coming up, at court. Even at the worst, I wouldn’t have to go to jail.”

“You won’t have to?”

“No, no. It’s called a civil matter. That means people gather to talk politely about things with a judge, and everybody drives away. The bad kind is a criminal matter. You don’t want that. Does it makes sense?”

“Yeah. I feel better.”

“Steve and I had a disagreement. It involves thirty-five dollars. I refused to finish the last part of a job because he broke the terms of our agreement. It’s one of those things.”

“That doesn’t sound very bad.”

I called in on Monday and pushed out to country roads, seeking open spaces to catch hold of my thoughts. A wide valley took me into it. Where the fields ended on one side, colorful trees began. Hawks drifted in concentric lines above a hill. Near to the road, an old barn had caved in, the collapsed front door looking ruined at the mouth, two slanted beams like broken teeth. I didn’t know what was true about this restraining order. Sometimes I felt like I was a criminal, and it was only a matter of time until they found me out. They’d hear my combative voice on the recording. They’d accept the assertion of the robbery based on that. He was going to get me though. This old man knew how to work the courts to his favor. The dread pressure worked on me again. I threw it back of me in the road.

I had seen Steve’s landlord, Sue, watering her flowers in the narrow grass between our double-wide trailers. At the town of Lorain now, in a gas station parking lot, I found her number in my wallet. I wasn’t sure if she was in range of my cell, but she answered.

Sue had a noisy manner that I took for country confidence. “I heard some deputies woke you up! Yes, I know Dave. He’s your witness? What kind of witness? I see. He’ll be a good witness to have. I’ve noticed a few disturbances with Steve. This isn’t his first crazy rodeo. It was nothing I’d call the cops over. Once, my son left Steve’s barbeque out in the rain. Steve followed him whispering close at his neck for days, just around the yard. He said my son was going to pay cash money for the ruined barbeque and he recorded him on his phone. I told him if he ever talked to my son like that again he wouldn’t be living here anymore.”

“Would you be willing to be a witness?” I asked.

She let go of a long laugh that was low and gravelly. “You want me to talk to the judge, on a phone call? Okay, okay. Dave’s backing you, and he’s got all those law enforcement buddies. Besides, I never believed Steve’s story about you. Hell, when you moved in—former college teacher—I thought he was going to end up robbing you. He’s handy with the easy lie though. He’d lie his grandma out of her last diaper if he needed it for a hat.”

I called Rachel.

“I’ve got his former best friend and Springfield city counselman,” I said, “my ex-wife who works at child services, and his landlord. That’s a pretty good lineup.”

“Good work—wow,” Rachel said. “You can’t go within a thousand feet of him, but you’ve got him surrounded where he lives.”

I called Dave.

“Oh, you’ve got Sue,” he said. “Good. The court will ask you to get someone to deliver these letters to Steve. Then Steve’s going to understand that he has no letters on his side and won’t ever get any. He’ll feel scared, especially because of his lie. He did lie, I’m sure of it now. The only question is, will he ask the judge to dismiss the order or find a way to delay the hearing, to be a punk.”

In bed that night, I found two Quora articles about prison life on my Facebook menu page, thanks to Mathew Stjohn.

“Fuck you, you titty-grabbing shit,” I said for Mathew ’s benefit, if he was listening. “God, I wonder what kind of body count we’re looking at here—the people you’ve broken, and everyone you’ve hacked, and all the ones you’ve destroyed or tried to.”

A chair leg scraped the floor in the living room. I drew air in my teeth, certain Norma had heard my vulgar words.

In the morning, when I made it to the front door, ready to leave for work, she laughed her laugh, as if loosening up and wanting to end any tension. “Have a glorious day,” she said.

After work, at the Eugene library, I wrote about the Christian leader on my blog and posted it on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Facebook page.

In a half hour a woman commented, “There’s a warning on your blog. It says this content is infected, do not open this.”

I replied to her: “The Christian leader does that. He makes anything from me look like infected. You can Google my name and my find my blog. Then you can see all of this about him on the first page.”

My blog post received good traffic. It was probably true that it wasn’t the right venue to display this ugly fight. But the hacked person had a right to tell people what happened, when there was no one else to tell.







Rachel let me use her house for my telephone hearing, when she was at work and Leo at school. My witnesses were ready for the judge’s assistant to call them. Rachel had said if she got a call at work, she’d step outside and sit in her car. I stood at the picture window, rain hammering the roof and hissing in the grass, fat raindrops breaking in the street. A black Suburban cruised by the house, then passed going the other way, as if it was a state vehicle hunting my phone signal in the rain.

It was dim in the house. I kept the lights off, wearing Leo’s blue blanket over my shoulders. At the kitchen table, when I reviewed my pages that I had logged at the courthouse, my phone rang and the judge announced himself and hammered his gavel. They got Steve on the line. He was groggy.

“I overslept,” Steve said. “I’ve got these medications.”

“You did present a doctor’s note about that.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do this today.”

“Do you still feel that you need this restraining order?” the judge asked.

“I do. I need it. I also have other business with this man. Small claims court!” he shouted into the phone. “He still owes me thirty-five smackaroos. I’ll file documents today and get my deputies on him. In fact, call up my deputies! Let’s do this now.”

“I’m not calling any deputies,” the judge said. “This is a separate court and a separate matter.”

“Your honor,” I said. “That’s what he said before—before three sheriff’s deputies woke me up at three in the morning. He said he was going to call his deputies on me, and suddenly they appear. Does he actually have authority with sheriff’s deputies—or some connection in the government? Now he’s threatening the same thing.”

“I need to speak!” Steve said. “Allow me to speak. I want to know when I can bring this man to heel in small claims.”

“Please don’t interrupt again,” he told Steve. Then to me, “Mr. Hendrickson, the deputies are simply messengers. We work with the sheriff’s office to dispatch protective orders.”

“So, I might find more deputies standing over my bed?”

“We have one restraining order we’re dealing with. I don’t think we’ll need to worry about dealing with another one.”

“He needs to give me his address,” Steve said. “I don’t have it. I don’t see it on these pages.”

When the judge spoke, Steve shouted, “Your honor! Your honor!”

“You are not going to take over here. Mr. Hendrickson doesn’t have to give you his address or any contact.”

“How will I serve him?”

“Your honor, can we do this today?” I asked. “Steve has obviously found some energy.”

“I need to get some witnesses. He has stolen mine! Took my best friend,” Steve said, his voice changing with emotion.

“My email address is on the court documents,” I said. “Can Steve serve me with that?”

“Yes,” said the judge.

“He works his words,” said Steve. “He’s tricky. Now he’s being magnanimous, doing his four-legged dance.”

“I’m not going to allow you to take any more of this court’s time,” the judge told him. “We’ll reschedule for ten days out.”

One day before the rescheduled hearing, I got a notice from the courtroom that the hearing was cancelled. I left work after lunch. In my bedroom I walked around, touching at my elbows. Next to the closet door hung a painting of a tree in a field. All the proportions were wrong—a child’s tree, but with no delight or magic. It was signed by Norma. My life was absurd. I lived in rooms with other people’s bad art on the walls.

He was going to delay every hearing he could, dragging it on for months or years. Meanwhile this restraining order was a boot on my neck. With such a black banner flying above me, I was far more likely to go to prison than the average person, the basic assumption of my good-will now tainted by accusations of elder abuse, robbery.

The courthouse phone number shunted me to message, and I hung up. I got in my car, hooked it at the freeway, and parked in front of the Eugene courthouse in the rain. There was a line for the security check, where visitors placed shoes, belts, and backpacks. The building closed in twenty minutes. By the time I got to the windows upstairs, there were two people ahead of me. I gazed at their backs with silent unhappy pleading to leave, and finally the window was open. A frowning older woman with a chain on her glasses greeted me.

“My hearing for my restraining order was delayed again,” I said. “I want to know how long he can keep delaying this.”

She looked up my case. “I don’t know what’s going on with this. It’s in review.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means it was sent upstairs to a judge.”

“Is that good news for me or bad news?”

She didn’t say. “Maybe you’ll have an answer tomorrow.”

“It could be bad news?” I said. “It could be bad news?”

“It could be bad news or good news.”

“But, more likely, it’s bad news.”

“Goodness. You’re going to have to find out. I don’t know the answer.”

Next day Coleson and I pushed our wooden waste carts along one side of the property, raking leaves and trimming bushes. It was sunny, cold, and wet, the sweet smell of leaves and grass almost nauseating. I asked him if he’d ever got in trouble with the law. He said he got a DUI years earlier.

“Did that come up in the background check here, when you applied?”

“Most companies don’t mind DUIs, as long as you go to the classes and pay your fines.”

“Wish I had a DUI,” I said. I told him about the case with Steve.

“Wow, that seems serious. Is it?”

“It’s not that serious. The restraining order will remain or it won’t. Obviously, I’d rather it didn’t. But a restraining order is an accusation. That’s all it is.”

“He has schizophrenia,” he said, “and you have bipolar. Will you guys be bringing in experts to say which condition is worse?” Of course, he was mocking me, but his mirth had gone away.

“Neither one of us is worse. But I haven’t told any lies. What matters is who was maliciously harmful in this situation. That’s what they’re adjudicating here.”

“Adjudicating! Wow. I didn’t know that word existed.”

“You’re right, it’s a pretentious word. But I don’t think they’re adjudicating anything. Nobody is investigating this. Some judge will take it off his pile, and the fate of my world will depend on their mood, whether it’s morning or late afternoon, or whether they feel gloomy or upbeat, whether they dislike elderly schizophrenics who imagine things or those who are accused of robbing them.”

“That’s your analysis of the American justice system.”

“They look for evidence, too,” I said, “but mood and personal prejudice—that’s part of it, especially in cases that don’t make the news. Half of judges are going to side with the elderly person. They just are, for psychological and social reasons. That’s the reason why Steve got a judge to sign it in the first place.”

“They should side with the elderly person, or the disabled person, in many cases, to tip the scales in their favor, a tiny bit. I would.”

“Even when they’re wrong?”

“It depends.”

“That’s very civic of you, Coleson. Maybe you could write a guest piece for the Register Guard.”

Before one of the units, flattened trash lay tangled in the pampas grass. We raked out the milk cartons and cigarette packs and left the rest.

“Maybe you and Steve can get past this and move back in together at some point,” Coleson said. “It’s called reconciliation. I’m not saying you wouldn’t have work to do.”

“I see you’re still making jokes.”

“You made a joke, about me being civic.”

“That was unmistakable sarcasm,” I said.

“Yeah, and pretty rude. You sounded hostile for a second.”

“I’m jumpy lately. Sorry.”

Coleson wore a cream-colored hat that spelled Oregon Coast in cursive. “No joke. You guys need to fight for your friendship.”

“You obviously don’t want to talk about it directly,” I said. “Let’s change the subject.”

At ten minutes to three, we were about to enter the garage when Coleson said, “Wait here a sec.” He marched through the door. In minutes, Marco came out very wide-eyed.

“You can clock out,” Marco said. “We had a meeting today and decided we don’t need any more temps.”

“I was scheduled to work another three weeks. Did Coleson tell you about my situation?”

“Coleson didn’t tell me anything at all. I don’t know anything about your situation.”

“My old roommate—” I began, but he said, “There’s nothing else to say.”

Coleson was probably required to tell Marco about the legal issue. I didn’t blame him for that. It was my fault for telling anyone.

“Let’s go,” Marco said. “Please leave your badge on the workroom table. I need to ask you to go right now. That’s standard.”

I followed him into the back door, tossed my badge on the table inside, shouldered my backpack, and drove a long street of shabby houses, half of them occupied by drug dealers, I was sure. Maybe all the houses in Eugene were drug houses. At any rate, they’d connect me with one of them. Steve would tell the Springfield police I was a meth dealer, and therefore it would be true, since he was an elderly Christian and a vet. Then I’d go to prison.

I put on Alien Lanes and skipped to “A Salty Salute,” turning it way down, then up, then down, then up and up.

Disarm the settlers

The new drunk drivers
Have hoisted the flag
We are with you in your anger
Proud brothers
Do not fret
The bus will get you there yet
To carry us to the lake
The club is open
Yeah, the club is open



They must’ve taken the bus because they lost their licenses. I laughed for the first time in a while. I had seen Guided by Voices in Iowa City, Cincinnati, and twice in Portland—not so many times. My old GBV friend, Mave, in Portland, was another friend I’d lost. We knew half of their albums. That was a lot of albums to know by the prolific songman Bob Pollard. The best concert online occurs in Oklahoma City 1996, on a claustrophobic stage, too small for Pollard’s microphone swings and high kicks. But the Whiskey A Go Go concert is worth checking out too.

At any rate, at least I wasn’t fired at family housing. Laid off was better than fired, though my restraining order had a chance of disqualifying me for unemployment, if it knocked around various government bureaus. But I wasn’t sure how it worked.

Altocumulus had changed the sky to a million gray rags, and the horizons were white, the color washed out of the day. A train horn bawled in the near distance like an outraged animal. I slowed at a crosswalk. When college students crossed the street, each of them seemed to have some private foreboding. On the next block, a man in a wheelchair knocked at a side door of the hospital with a stick, as if to get someone to let him in.

It was true I could turn rude in an argument, bringing out the desire in people to harm me. Likeable people could rack up DUIs and hack the world. Likeability was the secret. It had nothing to do with kindness or decency. Maybe I could transform.

At the Kiva, downtown, I ate from a small box of curry chicken on the sidewalk, staring at the road, when Samantha slowed, frowning, in her gray SUV. She watched me as if to see what there was to see—my eyes like ashes, a hard face, my mask hanging from one ear. She drove on through the green light. Samantha had married a man who’d inherited a lot of money. They bought a house at the coast and an apartment in London. He wore bowling shoes and played accordion to ducks—he was named Eyeball—and she no longer swung with the joyful current of the world. I had seen her pictures and videos on Facebook. She had the same face I did, both of us turning out hard. Once, after Rachel and I got married, Samantha wrote to me and said she hoped she and I would always find a way to love each other. When Rachel and I were divorced, I wrote Samantha and said I would always love her, and she carried the note to the CEO of my publisher and had all advertisements of my book removed from their site.

Many months earlier, Rachel told me Samantha had gone to work for Mathew Stjohn—after his firing—but she cleared out of there recently. Rachel looked at her profile now and then, too. We swapped news about her sometimes. Since I had mentioned his army of sexy child avatars to the Christian scholars, Rachel and I wondered if Samantha had heard about it. But I was more eager to know why she chose to work for him in the first place—after four women on his staff claimed harassment. But I knew we wouldn’t have an opportunity to talk again.

My phone rang and I was sure it was Samantha. But it was the assistant to the judge. “I wanted to tell you right away that the restraining order was dismissed.”

“Will it be online?”

“No. You can request paper copies at the courthouse.”

“We won’t have a hearing, then? Couldn’t it find its way into the internet?”

“No. It’s over. Even if it were found in a background report, it would say dismissed. They couldn’t hold it against you.”

I laughed. I gazed at the sky through branches in the strange light of afternoon. “Thank you,” I told her. “I can’t believe it’s finished. So, it’s permanently gone. No one is going to reinstate it.”

“It’s done,” she said. “It’s dismissed, and the judge has signed it.”

At the library I chose A Farewell to Arms from the stacks. Samantha and I had read Hemingway together, one time discovering we were on the same page of Farewell, in the middle of the book, when Frederick loses his leave and he and Catherine are unhappy together in a hotel. In a comfortable chair, beneath a great window full of sky, I read the first pages of soldiers marching and leaves falling, of forests lost and mountains captured, of Gorizia bombed, and I was glad for the restraining order for it delivered me to this relief.

Of course I’d always love Samantha. She had been a beautiful mother of five small children, a tango dancer, a Christian, and attentive to the most delicate sounds of weather or speech. She was brilliant, nuanced, original, kind, a reader, a planter of sunflowers. When she worked at a café downtown, old men and children used to get in line to talk to her. Sometimes they wouldn’t buy anything. They only wanted to say hello to the wonderful woman they had seen here before and would not ever forget.




14

A temp agency called with a job the day after my unemployment claim was accepted. I had to attend the interview to stay eligible.

At the university recycling plant, the boss was Donny, a hippie from Muscle Sholes who was angry that Eugene was a car city now, “no different than Dallas or Atlanta, only most of them vote Democrat. It’s a conservative business town with progressive cover.” I told him I agreed. A respectable hippie, he was a rare person anymore who voiced complaint during this era of office positivity. In my interview I told him I’d work six hours, not eight, that I’d walk away from anyone who was rude to me, that I didn’t hustle, nor did I stress if I forgot something I was supposed to do. “I’m forgetful by nature. I’m right brained, so a to-do list on a sheet is going to turn into colorful balloons, and one or two of them are going to float away.”

“You got the job, man,” Donny said. “We can’t find anybody to work here during Covid.”

“I thought Covid was going away. I really tried not to get hired.”

“We’ll keep you for six weeks and lay you off. Sound doable?”

Mornings, I drove a tiny garbage and recycling truck through the university. It was green and tank like, with a hydraulic bed and fat tires that allowed jumping curbs.

I bumped along my route one day between classes. Many young women wore stern faces. But it surprised me how many of the stern ones smiled at me while I drove this vehicle. They seemed to appreciate all of us who were out tidying up their campus in our little trucks.

At the recycling compound, after lunch, I walked a dirt road to the compost area where forty or fifty totes were lined up beside an outsized dumpster. The recycling crew dropped off totes. They had shown me how to dump them. In front of the dumpster was a lifting mechanism, a steel vertical beam with two steel arms open wide. The arms closed around the tote in a mechanical gripping, lifted it until it was upside down above the dumpster, and shook the tote in spastic insistence until the oozing dorm food had gone into the dumpster.

From under a parked delivery van came a white cat, squinting in the light and holding one paw in the air, then the other, as if its feet hurt. It looked worse for wear but beautiful.

“Let me find something,” I told it and opened a few tote lids. I returned with a handful of bacon, tossing it under a truck. He dragged the slices to the shadows farther underneath it.

I sprayed out the empty totes and lined them up beneath a roofed shelter. On my break, I checked my fiction titles page on Facebook and it was “unavailable.” I examined other hackable places. My blog site had gone wonky with various fonts I couldn’t fix, some tiny like ants, others so huge that only three words appeared on the screen.

Each week there were new hacks—two or three at once, most of it blatant, as though Brother Censorship wanted me to know he was here, blocking my access to the world.

I thought of the courts and what I might accomplish there. Seated on a step ladder, I read on my phone that I could request an anti-stalking order. Mathew Stjohn was indeed a stalker.

Over the weekend I summarized the hacking and included all the screen shots. On Monday I called in at work and went to the courthouse. In a small room, a patient woman who looked like an aging Farah Fawcett sat behind bullet-proof glass, leaning her head to one side and the other as she listened. She had short fingernails painted pink.

“Fill out these pages. Sign where I’ve placed the yellow stickers. Then a notary will check your work. You’ll have telephone court tomorrow. They’ll tell you what time frame.”

Before lunch the following day, I drove my route in the garbage truck with a hand on my pocket to feel my phone vibrating when I had a call. It was almost lunch when I settled the truck to rest in Pioneer Cemetery. On my phone the judge beat his gavel, announcing that telephone court was in session. It was a gray day and I walked below statues of gray soldiers, pondering their faces that appeared gloomy in the small light beneath pine trees.

“I’m not going to grant you this order,” he said.

“What about the porn hacking? I haven’t even shown you all of it.”

“That’s his free speech,” the judge said.

“Free speech? You’re bringing free speech into this? He doesn’t care about free speech, I can promise you that.”

“The law allows individuals to display offensive material, in a limited manner.”

“What about the fake blogs about me, featuring mental health concerns. That’s not harassment? It’s not slander?”

He chuckled. “You mean when he posted something you didn’t like and it gave you hurt feelings?”

My breath was ragged. I wheeled around and walked the other way, holding the phone so I wouldn’t breathe into it. “Harassing someone for eight years is not limited, your honor.”

“Approach the state legislature. Until the laws change, the internet is the wild west.” That was the real point. Free speech was a false item he’d brought out, the only limb to cling to. Father Peeks would keep up his molestation efforts for as long as it pleased him. He banged his gavel and the line went dead.

This judge was on the board at the Oregon Country Fair, a hippy operation. He was snarkier than I would have expected for an older man with liberal leanings. Hurt feelings! He must have known it was an absurd response. Not only were the hacked disbelieved, even their feeling was something to ridicule.

At the recycling plant, Donny waved to me as I parked in the row of small green vehicles. “Don’t forget to gas up your truck before you go.”

I backed out and drove it past the machine shop and parked beneath the shelter of the compound’s gas station. Earl from family housing was there, gassing the small truck he used. He had a tense, humored expression. He had small blue eyes.

“I didn’t know this was everybody’s gas station,” I said.

“I didn’t know they gave the temps access.”

“So, how are the rumors over there?” I said. “I guess they’re even better now that I’m gone. You heard about the old man who said I robbed him?”

“We talked that one out.”

“Did you hear the judge dismissed it? I emailed Coleson about it.”

He left that one unanswered. He returned the nozzle to the pump.

“You didn’t hear?” I said.

“It’s hard to separate the true from the false.”

“It’s public information at the court. Anyone can request the court documents.”

“Well, there’s a lot of people telling stories about you,” he said. “Why is that?”

“Go live in Boise. The Mormons would be talking about you, a senior citizen, and your stripper girlfriend—believe me. The whole town would know about it. They wouldn’t like you at all.”

“Let them talk, let them talk!” he said.

“I heard she was an occasional prostitute.”

“Not so, not so. They like to exaggerate. I won’t pick apart their lies. I found her on drugs and left her with my juicer and a jogging regimen.”

“People talk about you there more than you thought,” I said.

I got in my garbage truck and drove. The western sky had opened to the falling sun. Shadows of the buildings in the late afternoon created a false dusk, and I was pleased to rattle the old man. My email dinged, and I saw I had an appointment the next day. He was a real psychiatrist. I was eager to explore the psychology of my hacker.

My new doctor worked in a crowded clinic in Springfield. He had a wide beard and longish hair and wore a sports jacket. Behind his desk, he leaned his chair back in deep recline.

“I don’t believe in hacking,” he said. “It’s only a state of mind. If something’s happened to you that way, you might be more a part of it than you think.”

“You don’t believe in it?” I said. “The same way you wouldn’t believe in the easter bunny?”

“Many illusions compete for our attention on a daily basis.”

“I know I’m a part of it. I fight back, and he fights back, too, illegally.”

In the bit of light from the high narrow windows, his beard was like brittle grass. We sat quiet and he fell asleep and woke again.

“You wrote on the form that you want to discuss what to do when you get hypomania. You also said you get intense and try to alienate people. But we’re getting into the weeds about this hacking illusion.”

“See, that’s pissing me off. Why is it an illusion? I’m being hacked by a Christian leader who has made it his profession to harm young women and others.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Which part?”

“All of it.”

“Google his name.”

“No, no. We’re not going down that rabbit hole.”

“You’re the one who has illusions,” I said. “You want to construct a careful psychological reality that doesn’t have any icky places that are hard to discuss. That’s how you deal with the illusiveness of hacking. The FBI says it exists. Police know it exists. But you—Doctor what?”—I scrutinized the degree above his head—”you say it’s not even real. That’s not helpful.”

“I’ve read books about this, my friend. Have you? Have you read any books on the psychology of hacking?”

“I’ve experienced it almost every day for years. Have you? Have you ever experienced it?”

“This isn’t a pissing contest. You’re wearing yourself out.”

“I can’t believe it. A patient tells you he’s being hacked, and you say it’s not—”

“Some patients see the light flicker and believe they are being hacked. How am I supposed to respond to that, by affirming it, or changing the conversation?”

“I can show you screen shots on my phone.”

“No, no. Let’s talk about how you alienate people sometimes. I can tell you that is a more fruitful subject.”

Next to me was a plant like a rope, shaped like a cane, with four or five shiny leaves on it. “God that’s a horrible plant,” I said. “Okay: I keep meeting these awful people.”

“And they keep meeting you,” he said.

“I know. I attract them, fight back, and keep them around. I figured that out on my own. It’s best not to fight in the first place.”

I took out a cigarette and held it in my fingers unlit. The doctor nodded off and woke again. He had his eyes closed or almost closed, though brief squinting and fluttering of eyelashes showed that he woke up and was listening.

“It’s partly my fault. I keep meeting these tyrants who want to control me, and I fight back. This makes them angry.”

“Of course it does. I wouldn’t want you to get angry at me—at least not any more than I saw today.” He snoozed and woke again.

“I’m caught between fighting people and not fighting them,” I said, “and I know there are consequences for fighting. Do you know Caravaggio? He painted saints with dirty legs and common, wrinkled faces. In the streets, people melted in fury when they saw Caravaggio. People couldn’t handle his commonplace saints. Ai, Caravaggio, I kill you!” The doctor opened his eyes. “His enemies came at him in the street. He got used to swatting his adversaries with a cane on his way to the restaurant. He got too used to it. He went overboard. Things would have gone better for him if he hadn’t fought so much. I’m not violent, but I want to push back at monsters, verbally.”

His tented his hands at his mouth. “I’m at a loss. I’m not getting your message.”

“The Vatican eventually put out a hit on Caravaggio. He carried a sword without a permit. But I believe he fought back against all the officious worms and religious conformists who wanted him to behave. That’s why he was murdered. But isn’t it kind of admirable that he fought back?”

“Murder, my friend, is never justified.”

“That wasn’t my point at all.”

The doctor rose and opened the door. He hesitated and left the room. When I walked out, he and a short bald man spoke in the office behind the counter.

I got out of there, hoping I hadn’t brought hell down on myself yet again. Maybe they were calling the sheriff’s department.

The office manager called as I was getting in my car and told me I was banned from the clinic. “The doctor was literally snoozing,” I said. I explained what I had said about Caravaggio. “I hope you understand,” I said, “but I have no choice but to file a complaint with the Oregon Medical Board, and I’m going to call a Senator when I get home. In the meantime, I’d like to get started on the appeals process in your office. This guy can’t even stay awake in his chair.”

“It’s okay,” said the manager. “It sounds like a misunderstanding. We can find you a different psychiatrist in the office—if you’re willing to sit down and tell your side to me, the doctor, and the patient relations coordinator. Thank you for your patience, sir.”

“Sure,” I said. “Thank you.” I was always calm with any manager. They had been warned that you were irritable, so a calm voice was essential.









When I received my first unemployment check at the house, Norma gave me a two-week notice. She said her Montana friend was moving here, so she could open a shelter for cats in the city, called Huckleberry Haven. In the hallway that night, I heard her talking on the phone upstairs, before I went into the bathroom. “Life is very easy for him now,” she said. “He comes and goes in the day. He had something at court, and he writes all day on his little blog.”

She had mentioned this “easy” life of wanderers in Eugene, collecting tax payers’ money while the rest of us worked. My food stamp envelopes were also coming to her house.

There were a few rooms under $800 on Craigslist and Facebook. I saw a cheaper apartment on my first glance through the listings, but it had been deleted when I returned to it a moment later. Of course, it sounds unreasonable to say that the Christian leader was so focused on me that he deleted Craigslist ads on my app. But Craigslist had no practice of deleting notices when the places were unavailable. Even rented apartments remained on the site for a week. My new psychiatrist would have said I was delusional, reading into such minutia as Craigslist entries. In fact, she also believed all my concerns about hacking were imaginary, like the previous doctor.

Rachel said I could move in with her and Leo. “Helping out with rent and food would help us,” she said. But when I got there, her mouth looked disappointed. “Stay for a month or two. I know it’s next to impossible to find an apartment out there.”

“You don’t seem happy about this.”

“I’m not, I’ve got my routine. But you’ve got no other place to go, and I’m broke again. My dad helps with many things. I can’t ask him for the basics.”

“Thank you, Rachel.”

Next day I called my publisher to order books for a reading at Barnes & Noble, and asked to talk to the CEO. Stevens & Marshal was in downtown Eugene. When he came onto the line, he was breathless and distracted. I asked if they could make themed bookmarks that I could hand out. “We’re keeping your story collection in print!” he said, his voice stressed, and he coughed. My novel had gone out of print a month before—that imprint had left Stevens and Marshal the year before and gone solo, and my novel was dropped—but I didn’t know why my story collection would be at risk.

“Who wanted this book gone?” I said. “That’s a Stevens & Marshal title.”

The publisher coughed twice, gasping. “Oh God. I have to go!”

“What’s going on?” I said.

“I really have to go.”

I got in the car and parked in front of the publisher downtown—their offices were upstairs. I called the receptionist, explaining I was outside and would like to talk to the CEO. I got out of the car and waited in the café, on the bottom floor. From the publishing offices, stairs came down to the coffee bar and bakery. I knew he had been hacked and felt we might be able to talk about it. When the CEO came down the stairs, a middle-aged, balding man in a Patagonia jacket and a tie, he saw me and left the cafe at a trot, shouldering his bag.

I hadn’t registered that the publisher’s face was fearful until after he left. My body went hot with anger. I got out of there and drove. Cars and busses went faster than I wanted to go. A bearded chubby man crossed the walk in a suit, another Stjohn lookalike. At Hendricks Park, above the many blocks of university houses, I ambled among the rhododendron bushes, feeling the anger drift. It was a hazy day with the sun coming through.

There was something secret about the hacked. They didn’t wish to talk about it, fearing another round of suffering and disaster. The CEO had stood by my book, despite his severe rattling, and that took courage, though I knew he’d never talk to me again. Brother Censorship wanted both of my books out of print. But the publisher endured the insanity and violence of a hack, and kept me on. I’d know for certain that Stjohn had hacked my publisher if he never spoke to me or emailed me again. He could have no contact, or else risk another hacking. That was the usual way it went. At least he was holding onto my book. That was a principled action. People like B.J. were the true cowards, climbing under their beds and holding their breaths in fear, and taking no risks. I reminded myself not to count on B.J. if there was ever a French Resistance situation in America. Members of the French Resistance challenged censorship and tyranny at every level, and not even the possibility of meeting SS torturer Klaus Barbie could make them very afraid.

On a higher lawn were seven wild turkeys, bowing in their slow walk, feathers back, like old men who have their hands behind them as they reviewed their worries.

The second anti-stalking hearing was held in a courtroom after Thanksgiving, when Covid had abated at last. The judge, in a pageboy and black mask, traded her attention between papers on the desk and the screen in front of her. Into the mix of screen shots, I had included a photo of my son’s back as he watched his computer. Onto Leo’s desktop, days earlier, Father Peeks had wallpapered my book cover for my novel, a teenage boy standing before a river at night, watching the water—evoking the water burial scene in the book. I believe he did this to persuade me that my son’s life was in danger, if I went forward with this second hearing. But it was intimidation—not murder—that was his true intention. He wouldn’t suffer getting his hands dirty, nor allow any reason for the police to visit his expensive home. It was the intimidation that was real.

In the courtroom, a twenty-year-old boy was the first to approach the judge. He sat in a desk below her. “A girl at work texted me that we could have sex. I was only trying to do my job, when it happened.” His curly hair was wet in back. The sleeves of his tight polo shirt pinched his skinny biceps. “I was minding my own business.”

“I’m so sorry that happened to you,” the judge said. “It wasn’t appropriate. That’s awful you had to go through that. Horrible. Truly. But I’m afraid I can’t issue this for you, since she only sent you one text and made no threats.”

When it was my turn to approach, her face hardened. She seemed to believe I was at fault here, for bringing a hacking case, as if I should have known that any mention of hacking was forbidden.

“He said he was my enemy,” I said, “and the hacking has been nonstop. Isn’t there a connection that warrants discussion here?”

“You don’t know who did any of this,” the judge said. “It’s impossible to know who is doing this. Without any proof . . .”

“I’ve got a raft of this stuff he’s been sending me, and he said the same things to me and the woman on his staff he propositioned. He ridiculed us both for our working-class backgrounds. There are many other connections like that, if anyone cared to study this case in depth. Also, someone made a Facebook page in his name, the banner full of shiny pics. He’s known for sending those pics, and I’ve received my share, and worse.”

She frowned at the unpleasant mention of pics. “Find an IP address—or any kind of proof—and we’ll take a look.”

“He has deleted many emails that he sent to me. He has deleted some emails I sent about him to other people. And he has deleted some emails that his friends have sent me. He also deleted an email that contained screenshots of porn that he sent me. Who else is going to have the motivation to delete all these emails about him? I believe the answer is no one. What other hacker would be protecting him in this way? A computer crimes expert could explore this and other evidence, and show which emails were deleted. No advanced hacker is going to leave his IP behind.”

“Come back when you have something I can look at. And bring an IP address with you. We’re moving on. Next.” She read the name.

In February, the third judge was a large man with a mustache. His name was Charles Tyler. He had a conservative look, and I was pretty sure he’d have little patience for a writer who identified his hacker as a Christian leader. He reviewed my pages.

“Something is happening here, with all this hacking business,” he said. “I wouldn’t put up with it either. But you are seeking the wrong tool. A restraining order is used to stop someone who has made immediate and clear threats to a person. You need to sue this man. That’s what you need to do here.”

“You’re the first judge to acknowledge that I’m onto something,” I said.

“You need to get a lawyer, or act as your own lawyer, and you need to sue. You might have a shot in civil court where we use a preponderance-of-evidence test.”

That night, Rachel argued against suing as my own counsel. At the table we drank wine, Leo asleep.

“You’d get destroyed in court,” she said. “He has money and lawyers. You wouldn’t even know what level of proof you need to satisfy.”

“The highest proof that I could manage. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“Well, he could make you pay for his legal and travel fees. He could file a counter suit for libel.”

“You saw what he did to us when Leo was a baby. He hacked your phone too, getting his peeks. You don’t want me to do anything about him?”

“You got the word out. You told his friends what’s going on. If going farther with this hurts you, it’s not going to have a benefit. If you’re imagining some courtroom victory, I don’t think it’s going to turn out that way. It’s lawyers who win in court, almost always. And even if you could afford a lawyer, I doubt you’d find one to represent you. We’ve been over this, but I think it’s time to walk away. You have a judge who believes you. That’s actually big news right there. Did you tell the Christian scholars that?”

“I did. It is big news. That’s why I want to keep it going. He really did pick the perfect crime, though. Lawyers only represent those who are accused of hacking people. I talked to a few more lawyers after the hearing today.”

“Focus on getting a job.”

“Last month I applied to six colleges. I don’t even know which applications are getting through. Some of my rejections might have to do with StJohn, but I don’t know, I don’t know how many. After I applied to LCC the other day, an HR woman called me and said I’d left off my Iowa transcripts, and my address was wrong. But I know I uploaded them. I know I put in the right address.”

“I thought you were done with teaching.”

“Yes. But I go back to the idea sometimes.”

When she was in bed, I stayed up late on the couch with drinks. But my arms and shoulders shook and I had a pressure in the back of my head. My shoulders felt uneven. My arms were cold and my head was hot.

In the morning, a recruiter from the University of Oregon English department wrote me. “We only call people who meet the requirements and who have experience. I don’t know if I’ll ever call you. There is no need to contact me.” I’d written him a few times until he was irritated. Maybe he ran across an aggregated copy of the Arbiter article, and sensibly didn’t want to hire me.

It would have been painful to return to adjunct teaching when I was increasingly nervous and sweating. But there wasn’t much else that I felt good about doing.

It was nine am. When I went down the hallway, I saw Rachel and Leo were already gone. They had left while I was asleep on the couch.

Days of rain and gray. Two months of unemployment found me watching TV, leaving novels half read, and walking the mile-long road to a pizza parlor. At Thanksgiving and Christmas, I was invited to festivities at her parents’ house, but favored driving country roads on my own.

One day at the pizza parlor, I played videos in the game room and relaxed by the fireplace. My med-check doctor’s office had left a voicemail the day before, but I saw now the record of the call and the voicemail had been deleted. I called the doctor’s office and wrote down the appointment in my notebook. It was lucky I had seen the incoming call.

But Stjohn didn’t delete the email that I received now, informing me that my tax return would be deposited in days.

I texted Rachel. “I can start looking at rooms,” I said.

“Sounds good,” she wrote. “Leo’s going to miss having you here, though.”

“I’m so tired. I can barely sit in my chair. What does it mean when your arms are cold?”

“It means you should see a doctor.”

I said good-bye to the kids behind the counter. “Thanks for the refills! I’m going back to take a long nap.”

“It’s well-earned, sir,” said a skinny boy, taking his visor off in mock respect.

At Rachel’s, I slept in Leo’s room through the night and most of next day, and rose after three in the afternoon. My eyes felt small and burning. A fatigue was deep inside of me once again. Coffee helped not at all. Sunlight flared in the picture window, the wood floors agleam, the cats standing watchful on the sill. Protective creatures, they rushed to Leo whenever he had bad dreams, mewling as if to save him from his torment.

Rachel had emailed a list of affordable apartments. When I called the numbers listed, all of them required something I didn’t have or a cosigner. On a rental site I hadn’t used before, there were two rooms available. I called them both and jogged out to the car to view them before sundown.

In Springfield, behind littered woods, stood a double-wide trailer pocked on the right front, by the door, as if it had been pelted with rocks. A woman opened the door, her facial puffiness severe, like a baby’s mask in a dystopian play. When I stepped in, the house smelled of dog and body odor. A digital clock flashed on the kitchen counter. “I’ll fix that,” she said.

“I don’t mind.”

“You’ll mind if you can’t figure out what time it is!” she shouted.

“That’s probably true.”

“The room’s down here.”

Down the hall, a toilet ran. Farther on, a man peeked out of a bedroom, close to the ground. Either he was very short or he was on his knees. That door shut before we passed it. She opened the room at the end of the hall. It looked onto the sparse woods and the concrete wall of a grocery store beyond.

“Deer come and play in them woods.”

“Nice.”

“We run a clean and sober household. Nothing goes on in them rooms that you wouldn’t do in the open. There’s no locks for that reason. I’ve rented to three meth heads and I won’t rent to another.”

“It looks good,” I said. “I have another room to see before I decide.”

The other house was past the community college, on a highway exit. In that neighborhood, it was all manufactured homes and fancy doublewides, with front porches and plastic skirts to hide the spaces underneath.

The front door was open when I came up the steps. Standing inside was a bald man whose head was large. “Come on in. This is my room—off limits, you understand? The other room is that one.” The couch faced the room for rent, and the TV was set up next to the door. I would have to enter my room and exit it with his eyes on me.

“Do you like to rock out?” he said.

“Sometimes.”

“That’s fine. Crank it up once in a while. I do. The only thing I won’t put up with is telling lies. The last renter, he broke the toilet and later broke the door, but wouldn’t own up to it. That’s fine if a person wants to be that way, but I’m going to get on his tits. The second time he lied, I was on his tits like a pit bull, and he moved out.”

As I drove neighborhoods in Springfield, wind spun thin fog and moisture into whorls above the road. It was hard to see the housefronts and any “for rent” signs that might have hung there. They didn’t exist anyway. There must have been a town with rentals, say, three or four hundred miles away, outside of western Oregon.

It was late when I got to Rachel’s. She was sorting through programs on TV.

“There are no rentals,” I said. “I searched all day. I called all the poverty housing—and I’m nowhere close to the top of the list.”

“You’ve got to do something. Check out rooming houses.”

“I have. Maybe I could get an apartment in Moscow.”

“Moscow, Idaho? Isn’t that far away?”

“It’s a seven-hour drive. I could visit twice a month. There’s nothing here. The whole Northwest is gone. I’d go to Portland, Seattle, or Boise, but those places are gone now. They’re all Santa Diego satellites. Is there anywhere you want to move?”

“Sure. Chicago. But my parents are here. They’re getting old,” she said. “You’re moving to Moscow, Idaho? Really?”

“I’d rather not, to tell you the truth. I’d rather stay here. I would. But how? I can’t live with hicks anymore. They hate me. They call the sheriff. Meanwhile, Mathew Stjohn is deleting opportunities.”

“Are you sure it’ll be different in Moscow?”

“It’s a small town. People are easy to talk to. There’s not all this crime and overpopulation, so it’s easier to rent a place.”

She clicked through movies and TV shows. “Well, I’d help you visit when I can,” she said. “But are you sure about this trip? In the dead of winter?”

I turned to the window and opened my arms partway. “There is nothing here. Can we all go to Moscow? Please, please. We’ll get separate places. I know you can get a good job, and I’ll do anything I have to.”

“No. I just started my new job.”

“Do you want to stay at the food stamp office indefinitely?”

“I like it. It’s a lot more gratifying than child services.”

“It’s a good job. I only meant you could get a similar position in Moscow.”

“You want to fly state to state like some weather pattern, go ahead. But Leo has a connection here. His new calmness? There’s a reason. He gets lots of love here. He’s learning languages with his grandpa, and he explores town with you—he gets a lot from you, by the way—and he sees my sister and her daughter when I need a babysitter. Come on. He needs all of it. Leo and I aren’t going anywhere. No. No way.”

“You’re right.”

In the morning, I told Leo I was moving and I’d see him every other weekend. The knight character in his screen ran across a field. “Okay, Dad.”

“I have to move to a nearby town, to find a place to live. It’s too expensive here.”

His eyes followed the movement in the screen. In a chair by the couch, Rachel read a Shirley Jackson novel.

“I’ll miss you,” I told Leo. “But I’m going to see you all the time. I’ll make sure of that.”

“I know.”

I couldn’t speak for a minute, though I wondered how much damp eyes were worth—if I was getting ready to leave.

“I looked up Moscow,” she said. “It’s the one town in Idaho that’s mostly liberal. We’ll visit sometime. Average temperature lately has been about fifty degrees. That’s not bad.”

“I hope they have some hippies. Lewiston’s right next door. We were the truck capital of America—more trucks per capita than any other town. I wrote a paragraph about it at St. Stans.”

“I wish you could stay in town. This used to be the best place to find housing.”

“Could you check Craigslist rooms on your phone?”

She checked it. “There’s one $500 room on River Road, and one for $650 in Coburg. Both posted yesterday.”

“See, those weren’t on my phone when I was looking yesterday or this morning. Look at this. They’re not on my Craigslist now. He’s deleting them. StJohn is changing my app! Does that sound crazy? Hacking me on Craigslist?”

“I see it. He’s doing it. Jesus. How does he get in there?”

“Anywhere digital—he’s in. He can enter any app. That’s all he does.”

I called the first room she mentioned. An old woman said it was rented. The second one led to voicemail: a man had several interviews lined up to see the room.

“Several interviews to rent a room?” she said. “Jesus. Hold on. Let’s look on some other sites. Here’s an apartment for a thousand. No, that’s a quad in one of those ugly high rises. A quad, for a thousand dollars!”

“Those are for students.”

“Eugene is definitely out. Here, call this number. They have three rooms in Rainbow Valley.”

I did so. “The recording says all the rooms are rented.”

She looked up something on her phone. “Even the motels are full. Students are staying at motels while their out-of-state parents search for apartments. We’re a month into the term and thousands of students are still looking for housing.”

“I’d better get going,” I said.

Leo’s knights groaned as they fought together in his game. I opened the garage door and backed my car into the driveway to pack the trunk. At the kitchen door, Rachel asked if I needed help. In the chilly house she had put on a black poncho and a black cloth hat. She was saving on the heating bill.

“You think he’ll be okay?” I said.

“It’ll be hard, but he will adjust. It’s not like you’re moving across country. You’ll see him. You’ll be part of his life.”

I laid my hand on the lawn mower’s handle, pressing down twice so the front wheels lifted. “I never should have gone to Cincinnati.”

“That was our decision.”

“It was a lot easier for you to decide to end it with me out of the house.”

“Your staying would only have delayed it. Maybe we would have ended up hating each other. This way, we’re friends.”

I nodded. “I’ve thought about that.”

“Listen, you should get a second phone—a cheap one for private calls.”

“He could see it,” I said. “Do you think Stjohn could be rerouting my calls about rooms?”

“Let me call one.” She dialed the number to the landlord who was conducting many interviews for a room, and talked to him and hung up. “Well, he didn’t have a bunch of interviews. He said he rented the room an hour ago, to the first person who called.”

“Jesus! See? She what he does? Even on Craigslist.”

“Yep, he rerouted your call to a fake voicemail! How the hell does he do all this stuff? He’s running a pretty high-level harassment operation, just for kicks, apparently. It would be impressive if it weren’t amazingly stupid. You think he’ll get on my phone now?”

“If he sees you’re calling a bunch of places for me, yes. He’s probably listening to this very conversation.”

Leo appeared in the kitchen door, red faced. “I hate Mathew Stjohn! You’re always talking about him, and you should know Mom doesn’t like it. Mathew Stjohn is like some large blob of snot, with a fat talking face inside of it. He’s not even a person!”

“No argument,” I said.

“You know he’s going to follow you wherever you go, right?” she said. “You’re his pinball machine.”

“How are you going to visit us, Dad?”

“I’ll drive,” I said. “Are you hungry? Do you want some cheesy triangles?”

He went away. He turned up his game so that it shrieked in the living room.

“You mind if I leave in the morning?” I asked Rachel. “I’d like to have one more night hanging out with him.”

“Sure. You can put him to bed. I’m going to do some painting.”

I set his plate on the couch, next to him, and he lowered the sound on his phone. He felt for the cheesy triangles without looking at them. Leo slammed his opponent with his flashing sword, but he fell down anyway, and the other knight raised his arm in victory. He knew I was going, and he didn’t lift his eyes much.








15

The navigation on my phone had led me to highway 99, a slow road north. The directions app worked fine. Everything worked when something sad was happening, when at last Father Peeks could have a bowl of ice-cream and a nap. A yellow-gray morning light swelled over fields of industrial agriculture—a miasma of fog and chemicals that seeped into the vents in my car like a chalky bleach. A tight curve in the road hit me. I threw my car into the opposing lane, threw it back again, tires sliding, and parked it on the shoulder. My fingers wouldn’t let me light a cigarette. I had missed the reduced speed sign. A semi hurled past me going the other way, its jake brake ratcheting. In minutes a crowd of geese flew overhead, wings brushing and the geese calling out, a music of reassurance, a heralding onward.

At Corvallis, I pushed east to I-5 then skirted Portland, heading toward desert towns of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.

While I drove alongside the Columbia River, fog blankets obscured the far banks so that only glimpses of the land appeared. The high waterfall on my side of the highway was hidden from view as well. Farther on, a glassy floor of calm river opened to view for a moment, with a promontory on the other side of the water. Years ago, my parents and I drove this road, from Lewiston to Eugene, after we had to leave Lewiston. My dad had quit drinking at a clinic and confessed it at Bible study. The Madisons had high standing at St. Stanislaus and couldn’t suffer the news that he’d ever been a secret drinker. Soon the other families followed, and their kids, too, stayed away.

Boat lights flashed on the river. Fog unraveled itself in the breeze—it was a tug hauling two grain barges that were eternally long, narrow and green like an industrial insect—and fog knitted a rapid closure of that view.

Soon the canyon opened to little towns laying claim to silos, feed stores, football fields. At Lewiston, I crossed the bridge over the Snake and was sentimental about Prospect Avenue—a lane that, across the water, traveled along the plateau. At the end of that street was 1819 Prospect, where the lugubrious magic of childhood played out.

The room I rented was across the street from Jennifer Junior High. I marveled that I went there for six months, before attending the Christian junior high. At Jennifer, the farm kids drove trucks to school then—children who worked on farms were allowed to drive—and a few of those kids wore black cowboy hats and dug their chew from a rear pocket and slapped a finger on the tin. They called my brother “Critter” and chased him around in their cowboy boots.

The owner of the house came out to her porch, in white jeans and turtleneck, her hair suggesting doves in flight.

“I saw your note,” she said. “You wrote a book about St. Stans!”

“I went to St. Stans. But I wrote a book that takes place in Lewiston.”

“They don’t carry your books at the libraries. I called the university library. She said your first book, about the river, was removed. That’s the word she used.” She waved a hand. “This isn’t an interview—you’ve got the room. I’m a plain talker. What about the second one—the Lewiston book?” she said. “What happens in that one?”

“The mom becomes a lesbian. That’s probably not a draw in this town either.”

“Is that all? Good for her! What’s wrong with that? I’m glad you got her out of the house. Is she based on your mother?”

“No. My mom was a very traditional Catholic woman.”

“Oh.” She was less interested in talking about that. “Come on in.” I followed her into the hallway, and the house smelled good—rose water and laundry soap, not too strong.

We went down a staircase to a room of two beds. “I knew about your dad getting pushed out. There was a woman who tormented everyone with her judgements. No, it wasn’t Mrs. Madison, the perfect mother. It was Jane Addleman. She and her husband had two wonderful little girls. She outed someone else, a gay woman, who then moved away. Turns out, Jane was gay! She lives in Boise now. She’s probably still snitching on people, exposing lesbians who slept with a man or whatnot. Well, there are other gay women in Lewiston, more than I had thought. We’re not hated anymore, but we keep to ourselves.”

“The Addlemans seemed like the nicest family,” I said. “I’m surprised.”

“They were all warm and loving. Name of the game, right?”

“That’s why I don’t go to mass anymore. Too much bloodletting with a smile.”

“Mr. Addleman remarried. He’s in Boise.”

In the morning, I commenced the slow assent of Lewiston Hill, a wide four-lane road instead of the two lanes they had when I was a kid. Near the top, the old restaurant with a lookout in the dining room was boarded. One day my family had dinner there, after anticipating it all week. My dad sat smoking in the booth, a hand on his forehead, as if inhabiting his own box of anxiety. “Kathleen, get the boys in the car. I’d like to get back home.”

“We’re not going,” she said. “The boys haven’t had dessert yet.”

“These kids need dessert,” he called to the owner, a man in a cowboy hat.

“Coming up. My daughter’s the only waitress. She’s in the can.”

As if responding to this news, my dad covered his face with his hands and breathed out, “Oh, God.” A parole officer, my dad wasn’t an asshole. Instead, whether sober or drinking, it was as though he had a great hole in his chest through which poison rain slanted. He took it into himself for the most part. He coached my baseball teams and worked his jobs and went to mass, and he carried this burden of the poison rain. At the lookout restaurant, it was the first time I had this very adult insight about my dad: he loves me, he’s just unhappy. But it wasn’t a realization. It was a feeling that moved through me like a breeze. Sometimes he cried out in his dreams. “No!” he shouted once, “the boys are in there!” That sentence I contemplated a few times, chewing on it for comfort. The boys are in there, the boys are in there. I would have liked to know where we were, in his dream—trapped in the attic that someone was ready to set afire, for instance.

At the top of the hill was Moscow, my new town. The trees budded early, and the roads had no sidewalks. A young man with three kids walked the shoulder of a country road. I waited for them to cross a side road so that I could turn onto it, following signs to the university. A blond girl, who was my son’s age, had one eye covered with hair, and she swung it back of her to see me waiting in my car. She was fiery and seemed to behold prophecies. She appeared to see something in my face, but her hair spun as she turned around and grasped the man’s hand.

There were sidewalks on campus. I went into a bookstore and asked the young clerk if he knew how to go about getting a room or apartment. He wore red sunglasses, lightly tinted, a dayglo green sweatshirt, and his hair was cut longish like a social champion in a John Hughes film. “Don’t you have a house somewhere?” he said.

“Yes, in Eugene, but I’m trying to sell it. I’m always getting out of town, wherever I go. I mean, I stay for a while, then fly to the next place.” Then I told him more than he needed to know. “My son has his college paid for. My ex-wife’s dad is rich.”

He didn’t seem to know why I was telling him all these things.

“I don’t have any hot tips for you. I think there’s a group for older students who are returning to college.”

“I could teach here.”

“You have a PhD? I’m starting mine in Seattle next year. I’m afraid a PhD is your ticket to ride,” he said. “Unless you want to be a comp dog.”

The rejection from this preppy burned. I turned away. There was an Idaho section of trail guides. I skimmed the titles—one of them was something like Stay on the Path, for Goodness Sake. My right arm tingled, but the left one was okay.

“Don’t people rent rooms and apartments around here?” I asked over my shoulder. He was behind the counter.

“College students do,” he said.

“There’s got to be older people who rent rooms here.”

“I’m not saying there aren’t.”

“So, you could give me a tip if I were young?”

“I could tell you how to contact student housing.”

Something in my head was going this way and that way, as if I needed to sit down, but I ignored it. I crossed the floor and touched a bookcase near the counter. When he’d finished ringing up two young women, I asked him, though I knew the question was self-pitying and absurd, “Is there any reason why you don’t want me living here?”

He laughed, high and giddy, and began some task behind the counter, comparing books to information on his screen. I went out to the sidewalk and looked up real-estate agencies on my phone.

“We do have rentals,” she told me, “for college students and sportsmen.”

“What about the other people?”

“Look on Craigslist,” she said.

Below a list of high-priced rentals was a room on a farm, $300. “Yes, still available,” he emailed. “Please fill out this form and hit submit. It’s for my safety.”

In a café I stood at the wooden bar at the window ticking through the form. “This isn’t going to work,” I whispered to myself. “How much do you want to bet?”

It all worked fine except for the zip code on my address—always something preventing me to finish any form or application. I restarted my phone and began again, still no good. I wrote the man about the farm again, explaining I couldn’t type in the zip code. He didn’t write back. When I texted Rachel, “Can you fill out this form on your end?” she wrote that the form went through fine when she filled it out.

I called her. “See? Nothing works when I apply for a rental. He’s going to interrupt all the affordable rooms and good jobs! This place is $300. Father Peeks forbids it. It sounds crazy but I know he’s doing it.”

“I know what he does. I’ve seen it. But you may not know every time.”

“He could drive someone to suicide just by blocking their ability to type in a zip code.”

“Well he’s not going to do that to you.”

“How the fuck is this guy a Christian leader? He’s the Judge. He’s suzerain, invested with the moral authority to inflict punishments in any territory.” I was noisy. There were people around. I turned to three middle-aged women inspecting the pastry case, one of them seeming more curious than offended, holding her glasses in her hand and smirking.

“I guess I’ll try Missoula,” I told Rachel.

“Isn’t Missoula a bit far?”

“I can still make it in a day’s drive. Where else can I live? The only rentals in the area are these apartments in Pullman, nearby. They’re full of mold, and they don’t even clean it between tenants. I read about them in the comments. These same mold-dwellings are very strict with credit and income. There’s ice in the carpets too. You should read some of the comments.”

I landed in Missoula before dinner. Now that I was here, the likelihood of failure in this town harassed my mind. I got sandwiches in a grocery store and ate in the car. Most of the rooms were $700 to $1000. There were two $500 rooms, but they didn’t write back in a half an hour, forty-five minutes, or an hour later, nor did they call or answer the phone. I talked to a professor who had two rooms for rent in his house, each $1000.

“You’re really jacking up the prices,” I said. “Is the professor business going okay?”

“It’s the going rate, for something nice and clean.”

At dusk, my car rocketed down a pine canyon. It went on and on. Black clouds loomed in the low sky, touched with red light on one side, and the color bled away. Farther on, while I ascended a rising highway beneath a rock face, I despaired of this road that wouldn’t ever stop. I was nothing on this map. It would swallow me and no one would know.

Near midnight I flew down a mountain and climbed another, through falling snow. The road climbed into deepening inches of powder, and my wheels moved easily over it. There were no other cars, no tire tracks. As my car made a tight curve, the back wheels slipped sideways and I quit the gas pedal until the car righted. The snow came harder. It was two hours driving up and up through snow. Though the snow amounted to inches on the road, I was surprised I didn’t need chains. Then, on flatter ground, I didn’t know if I was going up or down. Some of the cold went out of my shins. The land went down steeply and the snow was gone, the road wet, and I heard the water slush in my tires. In ten minutes, the snow resumed, and my car rode upwards again. The snow touched the windshield too fast for my wipers. I saw only glimpses. Currents of snow slipped across the road in myriad blankets like spirit forms that hastened in stealthy malevolence. At some point, the highway had become a one-way. I was all over the road, keeping to the right side, then finding myself on the left side. Lights flashed in my rearview—the first car I encountered in the mountains. The vehicle passed me, a Bronco hammering through this mess at sixty-five.

The road bottomed out again and relief entered my chest, only to find the road rising—eternally. There were a few houses on the road here. A utility truck was parked. A man stood before the hood and shook his head at me, pointing back where I had come, as if warning me not to continue through the mountains this night. In an hour, I traveled on a narrow road that passed through high country, my side of the road appearing to fall away like a cliff—there was no telling how far—the snow relentless all the while, deeper up here, and my tires held on.

Father Peeks might have stood on a tower above these mountains like the evil Saruman, watching me in his crystal ball. While the mountainous west was probably a territory beyond his influence, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that his skills conjured disasters in these canyons. Father Seems could take control of my steering wheel, turn it to one side, and I’d enter another world.

The road swung through great rocks and went down and down, clouds opening to an imperfect moon in a low sky. My legs were thawing out again. All through the mountains my legs were icy or thawing and my torso hot. There were lights below. I entered the town listening to “I Need My Girl,” by The National, and parked in front of the lighted convenience store that was closed. It was four a.m. I didn’t know where I was going. My phone map said I was in Wyoming. Laramie had a university, but it was far downstate and too small to have a lot of options. But, of course, it made a lot of sense, what I was doing here in Wyoming. It was clear and sensible. In fact, I didn’t know why, but maybe getting some sleep would help. I pulled out medication from my left pocket, many of them scattering to the floor. I was supposed to take four small tan pills but I only had two right now. I wasn’t sure if I had taken them yesterday, but I had two bottles in my bag, and I’d catch them up tomorrow.

In bright morning sun, I drove through this collection of ten buildings that might have been a town. At a restaurant gas station, I had eggs and toast at the bar, surrounded by large men. A skinny young man came in swinging his arms and legs in a swagger. In the bathroom, two urinals stood higher on the wall than I was used to. The town was built for men who were six-foot-three. On the gas station side of the building, the pretty forty-year-old in country jeans and blouse seemed to recognize me as a bum at first glance.

When I got in my car, I felt as if all the towns in America were like this one. We all wore bitch face now, men and women, left and right, even old people and children—even dogs and horses wore it—and I, too, wore it.

A farm lay at the end of town. A girl came out of the house in a pink coat, raised her doll in satisfaction and galloped in the shimmering snow.

I called Rachel. She didn’t answer but she called back in twenty minutes, when I drove the rural highway. “I feel like the whole Northwest just spat me down canyons and over the mountains and out the other side.”

“You could try Iowa City, I guess.”

“They wouldn’t let me teach there. That’s where I had my one and only manic episode. I rhapsodized about the river running backwards in my fiction workshop. Maybe I should keep going, to the east coast. That’s the only place you can easily get teaching jobs. But I know this is ridiculous. I’m getting farther away all the time. I can’t tell how much my hacker is doing and how much is normal life.”

“He’s responsible for some of it, and part of it is all yours. That’s all you need to know.” She let out breath. “It doesn’t sound like you’re giving each place a shot. Is the whole west coast really at maximum for housing right now?”

“Yes, yes. The woman at the real estate office told me one option would be to buy a home. Oh, wouldn’t that be nice? I have no job, some tax return money. Please approve me for a million dollars. I should’ve tried those mossy apartments near Moscow. Everything seems so idyllic from a distance, then you get there and it’s no good. But wherever I end up, I’m going to stay for four months, long enough to get some recent teaching experience. Then I’ll head back to Eugene. But there is one possibility. Let’s say I get a full-time teaching job in Dayton. They’d approve me for a house there, right away. Houses are cheap there. I wouldn’t ever quit working again or cause any trouble at work. You and Leo could move out. I know I caused you a lot of stress, with jobs and everything. I’m saying I’m going to Dayton to fix it up for us. You might not even have to work for a while, unless you wanted to.”

Rachel was silent. I reached at the windshield to clear away the spots on the glass, but it was only sprinkling. I was very tired. The sun fields and the road were too bright to look at. I slapped down the visor.

“I know you love me,” I said. “You weren’t able to before, since I was such a fuck up. But I promise you all that is in the rearview.”

“You need some sleep. You’ll be able to see it clearly tomorrow.”

Rain kept on. “I just thought,” I said. “I thought the three of us . . . It seemed that if I could make life easy for you. Dayton is where I need to go. They have colleges around there, but not too preppy, and Bob Pollard lives there. I’m not going to try to meet him. You saw that letter he wrote me. He liked my novel! But there’s a whole Guided by Voices world in that town. It’s very blue collar. It’s off the regular path. That’s something I need right now. I keep thinking of that line: Post-punk ex-men parked his forklift. Remember that song? It’s on Alien Lanes. I just need a place to write while I’m driving forklift and getting ready to teach and buy a . . . house.”

“Leo misses you,” she said. “He was yelling and crying at his game yesterday. I could tell it was because you were gone. But four months isn’t going to hurt him in the long run. People have to move sometimes. I don’t know what to make of this trip, but I want you to get that teaching experience. You need something recent. I hope you really go and get it. But to tell you the truth, you sound a little keyed up.”

“I’m almost positive I can fly out for a visit twice a month,” I said. “I know you love me. I want you to say it.”

“You’re Leo’s dad—I care about you. But do you think we’d keep in touch if we didn’t have a kid? Sometimes, sure. But not every day. Not very often. I don’t mind talking so much right now, when you’re traveling, but I can’t keep going with these long phone calls. I have things I need to do.”

“I guess we’re not going to get married again.”

“No. Never. Not a chance. We just got a divorce. What are you thinking?”

“You sound so vehement.”

“Divorce is vehement.”

“With most people, I suppose it is,” I said. “I don’t get how I’m only in Wyoming right now. I should be farther along.”

“Listen to me. Get on 1-80. Get an atlas that can’t be hacked. Keep me posted.”

Travelling south to I-80 required hours of movement without making headway east. Thin clouds wore a yellow skin. At a two-way bottleneck, I waited while a station wagon full of high school kids crept alongside me, going the opposite way, a guy kneeling in front of an open back side-window, blowing a horn and flipping me off.

Two days onward, one a.m. found me sliding past Iowa City, a hard place to get a job or an apartment. Headlights rose up in my rearview and backed off. In minutes, police lights spun behind me. I parked on the shoulder and lowered the passenger window. It was a state police officer, in his twenties. He tipped his beam onto the mess of trash in the passenger’s footwell, all the fast food and empty Gatorade bottles from the trip.

“I stopped you because you’re drifting quite a bit and going far below the speed limit. I thought you were drunk.”

“Yes, sir. I didn’t realize that. I haven’t slept much, a couple of naps.”

He took my license to his car and came back. “I’ll kick you back to the highway, but I’ll ask you to pull over and sleep as soon as you can. I can’t make you, but please do it.” In his Mustang, he motored onto the road, and in seconds, his taillights were small and far away.

In the morning Rachel called to make sure I was going to Dayton. While on the phone with me, she booked three nights at an extended stay motel. “Then you’ll be able to show up and relax a minute, without having to get a job that very day.”

“I don’t deserve that. I deserve you to tell me to find the nearest lake and drive right into it.”

“You’re being harassed by a religious creep, and you might be having a breakdown—I don’t know. I don’t think I’d put up with it otherwise. We’ll consider this a mental health vacation. Maybe it will give you something.”

Lovely Rachel. It was astonishing to have someone who helped me out so much when I merited a stern good-bye.







Dayton was shabby and interesting, a good feeling here. Downtown, it was all concrete, with buildings like 1980s convention centers, but there was parking everywhere and not too many people around. The library was new and uncrowded. Though I had slept well, a deep tiredness pulled in me. In a chair in front of a window, I watched the tire store across the street through slanting snow. I leaned forward, my arms hanging beside my legs, and I listed here and there, open-mouthed like a tormented puppet when I opened my eyes—I woke a few times and found myself in this pose—until a library guard made me sit right. He had a mustache and a thin gold necklace over his blue shirt.

At a computer I put in applications at Manpower and the library. I applied to the art museum security office and at a glass factory. There were a few glass factories in town. Guided by Voices guitarist Mitch Mitchell had worked at a glass factory. I thought I might check it out. I sent resumes to three English departments.

I called several apartments and discovered I needed six months of employment at all of them. One woman I spoke to referred me to Catholic Charities, who referred me to Craigslist. I placed a “seeking room” notice there.

Manpower called for a phone interview. “I have a job for you. It’s packaging bullets, a comfortable pace. Swing shift. Three pm to midnight.”

I took it. Later in the day she emailed me, with “job cancelled” in the subject line but no text in the email. A friendly email would have given a brief explanation. This wasn’t friendly. It was possible she or the bullet factory owner looked me up and found me objectionably educated. More likely it was the Christian leader. He had sent so many infected emails, and I knew he examined my emails, coming and going. I didn’t know why he’d want to interfere with me in Dayton, at such a low job.

That evening, I returned to my room that smelled of cigarettes, at the Red Horse. Smoking in the room killed the smell. A roach crossed the floor. The curtain had been cut around the air conditioner, in a square shape that was overlarge. Someone had looped heavy string through holes cut in the material and tied it to the air conditioner vent, but a gap remained on the top and side. I saw people’s midsections as they walked past my window at night, and they saw me sitting on the bed.

I sat drinking beer and watching The Visit. I had come in halfway. It was about some disturbing right-wing grandparents in Pennsylvania.

Later, my phone rang when I was asleep. The voice said, “Wrong number. Wrong number.” I knew right away it was Mathew Stjohn. I hung up. There was no mistaking his voice. It was the most characteristic voice I’d ever heard—thin and high, a bit Southern. I had watched his lectures and speeches, and his interview with the famous Yale professor, and talked to him on the phone. I knew what he sounded like. It may have been his free speech to steal my number off my phone and call me in the middle of the night. The only way he could have my number was that he looked it up in my contacts. That was his free speech. He was probably allowed to come into my bed and hump my leg while he whispered his intentions to take my pants down—in a limited fashion, of course. The courts surely protected such behaviors.

This intelligent man who was sensitive to meaning and metaphor meant something with wrong number. He communicated that he had flung me across the country, or assisted me in my own foolish efforts, through his manipulations of apps and his psychological warfare. I got the wrong number when I ever got in touch with him. I would grant him that. And maybe that went both ways.

Next day was Thursday, plenty of time for people to respond on Craigslist before the weekend lag. I’d take any room available. If it was bad, I’d move in a month. In Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller describes viewing a room for rent: he walked into a dark room where an old blind man slept. Inside this room was another entrance to the room that was for rent. Henry skedaddled before he stayed one night. Feeling around a blind man’s dark room to find his doorknob was too much for him. But I’d take it. I’d take that or worse.

The English chair at a college spoke to me when I followed up on the phone. “This looks great, Christopher. I invite you to apply on our HR website. We have ten positions opening for fall.”

Next morning was warm, with cold currents of air. I brought my questions to the library each day. At a reference desk, a tall woman wore a long white diaphanous gown that covered her blouse and pants.

“Do people rent rooms here, month to month? You know, instead of renting an apartment?”

“Have you thought about owning? Dayton is a good market to buy a home.”

“Don’t people rent here? Aren’t there people who rent anymore? I drove three thousand miles to rent an apartment and I can’t even do it. I came to the very town I thought I could rent a place. You seriously don’t know anyone who rents even a room?”

A sour look grew on her face. I understood it wasn’t a reference question. I leaned off her desk and walked through downtown. The clouds in the sky were patterned with shapes of beds—beds and beds over the whole sky, as if they filled a hospital floor.

I had lunch in a sandwich store, eating soup by the window. A tall man strutted by, wearing aviators and a three-piece suit—probably one of the town giants, the owner of a security company.

The building across the street threw a shadow over this store. I had $800 remaining in my bank account. An unemployment deposit was forthcoming. They allowed out-of-state draws on my remaining balance. I considered my trip east, reviewing the highlights in the mountain snow, and was trepidatious about returning on the same path.

There were no coffee shops that I could find, downtown. The closest Starbucks was two miles away, at a Kroger’s, and I drove there. A woman pushed a shopping cart out the front door, bearing two small boys and grocery sacks. Her hair had a fallen-down appearance, hanging in one eye, and she smiled at me. A tall old man in a Carhartt jacket stepped behind her and knocked my shoulder. “Sorry, friend,” he said and touched my shoulder as if to square me away. Friend. It was old-fashioned to call a person that. I liked it. Eugene was nothing but mean faces anymore, rich California rednecks and the college ogres who opposed them. No matter what side people were on, they were grim at the mouth, and here was a friendly city.

In the Kroger seating area, on my computer, I applied to teach at the college where the chair liked my resume. The page narrowed. I clicked it and brought it back. It narrowed again. I gazed at the screen for a moment, when it was restored. The application didn’t allow me to save in segments. Instead, it was a single scroll, with one save at the bottom. There was a small chance that I could send it where it needed to go. When I clicked submit, the application vanished, no “success” or “your application was received.”

HR at the college didn’t pick up. I called the English department and asked the secretary if they’d received my application.

“Let me see if we can access it. What’s your name? Give me one minute. No, let me make a call. Hold on.”

Through a high window in the Kroger seating area, I watched a dark cloud in the form of a jogging person. One of his arms was missing, and his leg had come detached. His head twisted around and his body came apart at the middle.

She came on the line. "I did speak to the chair. We didn’t receive the application, but that position is no longer available.”

“She said there were ten positions,” I told her.

“These things change, day to day. I’m afraid our numbers aren’t looking good. We were hoping for good numbers, but they didn’t come through. We’re looking at some restructuring ahead.”

“All of this happened since yesterday, when I talked to the chair?”

“I’m afraid so.”

On Saturday, I paid for a fourth day at the Red Horse.

“Nothing’s coming up,” I told Rachel. “Not one email about the Craigslist ad, or any of the other ads I placed on sites. Wrong number! How many other people is he doing this to? How does he get away with this shit?”

“Are there other colleges?”

“The other ones never called back. This chair was enthusiastic. Ten positions vanish in a day? What in the hell did Father Peeks do? Hammered her with infected emails, most likely. It’s probably the one way he can have something like sex.”

“God, I wish that man would get called home,” she said. “Why does his so-called Christian community put up with this person?”

“What am I going to do now? Should I come back? Could I? Maybe I could stay with you for a month, work in a warehouse, and bite the bullet on an expensive room. I can ditch my car and get on the bus line.”

“For a month, maybe. You could stay for a month. But that’s it.”

“So, I’ll come back then. What an idiotic trip. He probably owes me a few thousand dollars by now, from all the applications he’s deleted.”

“More than that if you consider earnings for an academic term.”

I headed west. When I crossed into the fields of Indiana, a pre-fab mansion on a low hill turned in the sky as I drove beneath it. With its white plastic shutters and white front door—its Winnebago in the car shelter—it was ugly and cheap looking, but the rooms must’ve been warm.

In Wyoming, there was a big wind, and the stirring snow in the fields shimmered in crystalline currents in the sun. At a truck stop I ate a sandwich at the one free booth. All over the back parking lot, long white semi-trucks stood in the parking lines, reflecting light. I bowed my head and ate with a half squint.

On my phone screen, my inbox was stacked with Dayton responses about rooms and apartments for rent. The Christian leader had held onto them until I was across the country, unleashing them when it was too late. “Motherfucker!” I whispered. I was too tired to get very angry. When I had told my cousin Arty about the Christian leader—he knew a lot of bikers and former prisoners—he said, “That’s the kind of guy who gets murdered.” But I only had the usual and mundane reaction against the act: prison time.

I got a coffee and pushed through the afternoon. A sign announced that Boise was coming up. The desert around here was gray, sweeping in distances toward wrinkled hills.

The Boise freeway was crowded and unrecognizable, new businesses and hotels everywhere, with ground lights illuminating facades. I got out of there. I didn’t want to see Beverly Hills in the Boise desert—a place that once had boarded-up buildings downtown and affordable living all over town. In the 80s and 90s, Boise was a wonderful nowhere for creative clerks.

Wide lanes spilled my car through the night, the reflection of streetlights casting a watery appearance on the road. A wind picked up force. High trees moved their limbs in a slow dance, like creatures inured to their torments and ready for weather.

The highway revealed little beyond the edges. It was all shiny black road, wind and trees, and it went on for many hours. A train shrieked nearby. My eyes hunted for it but I couldn’t see. When the train called louder, I knew it ran parallel with me out there in dark. Then a streetlight revealed the train’s form, the driver’s windows a faint orange, the figure inside making a silhouette, the man’s head large like the Christian leader’s. I had been keeping pace with the train ever since I heard the whistle.

My head was fuzzy. Too many hours sliding through black night. It was one-thirty and in no time at all, it was four. I parked to one side of an all-night gas station and slept.

Late morning, I was in Oregon woods. At Lake Timothy, a line of cars and trucks traveled at two miles an hour to turn into the camping ground, all of them crowding in there. In college I camped here with friends and girlfriends, when it was a quiet lake and no people that you noticed much.

Farther down the highway the McKenzie River country was all scorched. I had read about it when I moved in with Dave, people scattered up and down the highway to their families’ homes or to hotels. Many trees were blackened on the trunks and branches. I watched for a turnoff where a century-old covered bridge offered good trout fishing in its shadow. But I blew past it, best not to know whether the bridge remained. My high school friend, Zack Snyder, from McKenzie Bridge, often hooked into a native trout there. He tugged the hook from its mouth gently each time, holding the fish half underwater, using pliers, and they swam away unharmed. His dad was a forest ranger. At sixteen, each of the three Snyder boys had to go into the mountains alone, with a rifle, a map, a compass, a fishing pole, and scant food, and return home skinny and transformed, for better or worse, a week later. After our wedding, Rachel and I took a picture of ourselves together under the bridge, she in her ring and the two of us lost in a brief love.

It was three in the afternoon when Rachel opened her front door, smiling as if I was family, arriving safe. “Hey, come on in,” she said. Leo watched his screen on the couch. “Hi, Dad.”

“Come here,” I said and pulled him to me.

“I’m playing this game with my knights. I’m a skinny one, but I’m as strong as the big ones. You can also change your avatar anytime you want.” He shifted through the lineup of knights, huge bald ones, skeletons, and one wearing a backpack with an arm reaching outside of it.

“Who’s that in his backpack?” I said.

“He has a demon in there.”

“What’s the benefit?”

“You can unleash him and let him chase people.”

“Have you eaten anything?” Rachel said. “We were going to order a pizza.”

“Sure. I think I’ll lie down. I didn’t sleep a lot.”

When I was in Leo’s room, she brought me a pillow, her tired eyes less patient. “I understand what happened, but that was a waste of resources. You spent your whole tax return. You spent all of it, didn’t you? Do you have anything left?”

“Not much. I can keep claiming weeks until I get a job.”

“That’s not enough. You need a job now—anything. Be a night stocker at Rite Aid. I’ve had tons of survival jobs. You have a month here, a month to earn money and you can’t lose the job once you get it. Well, get some rest. But you’ve got to find a way around this monster.”

“Look at these emails from people in Dayton. I didn’t get them until I was going through Wyoming.”

“My god. I wish there was some way you could leave the digital world.”

“I’ll rest for a couple hours and look for a job, by, you guessed it, email, so he can delete any emails from department chairs or editors, making sure that my only jobs involve picking up garbage in the rain. You can really control someone’s life by controlling their email. I bet you that’s chapter one in the dark-webs-hacking book. Destroy this person. Take away his employment. Then go to mass and smile.”

“Are you okay?” she said.

“Yes and no. I’ll be better.”

“Rest up and have dinner. Then you can look for something tomorrow.”

Later, Rachel and I were up having drinks. She watched a movie and I read about the Georgia Southern Baptist sexual abuse accusations, landsliding through the media.

“It seems like the one thing these accused preachers have in common is they all say, Nope, nope, wasn’t me. Didn’t do it.”

“That sounds familiar,” she said.

“God’s liars. I think Father Seems wrote the book. Commit evil, do what you want, keep it in the dark, never admit anything. It’s a Christian leader thing. It comes with the job.”

It was that night I decided to write a book about Father Peeks.





16

At Sno-Temp one evening, I backed my fork into the “deadman” warehouse of forty below and crept with my load of two pallets. There were many warehouses of various temperatures. As I proceeded down the big aisle, lights appeared in twitchy squares about my rig and the ceiling clicked. When I located the bin-number in the center of the room and fitted my pallets into the space, I rested my fork while my breath gusted, wearing protective overalls and a big snow hat that said FREEZER. In the constant light over the wide door, falling snow was illuminated—it drifted off the frozen ceiling. I sat there until the wide door flew open and a fork sped inside. The light squares danced before his path as he motored the aisles.

“The boss says you’ve been sitting here for ten minutes,” yelled the man in a long red beard, who traveled anywhere in the plant at breakneck speeds. It was necessary to yell in such a cold place. “You’ve been crawling around at five miles an hour all day.”

“I’m still getting the hang of it. But I dropped the load off.”

His headlights burning, he dropped from his rig like a man dismounting a powerful horse and inspected my pallets.

“These pallets belong in two different places. You got one right. I’ll fix it. You could try to go a little faster. He wants you in the thirty-degree warehouse to practice speed.”

I left deadman and cruised the corridor of glacial warehouses, eased into the sunlight, and crossed a parking lot where semis stood with their rear mouths attached to docks, like slender giants at feed. On the far side of that building, I entered the dock in the staging area. The boss picked up a beer pallet with his fork and raced it into a semi’s cargo container. He was a thin tall man in a Motorhead T-shirt who traveled by foot at miraculous speeds and pushed his fork to its limit.

“Let’s go!” he called to me. “Let’s work this together!”

Inside the cargo container, I set the beer down. When I backed out of it, he shouted that the pallet was angled, and so I went at it again and popped a case with a fork, the cans hissing beer.

“This is number seven this week. Leave it. It’s break. Let’s go outside.” Even while going to break, he hustled.

We leaned on his car outside, a 1989 Honda, and smoked. I made a high wage driving fork, and he must have made double or more.

“Don’t rub your eyes,” he said. “That’s a good way to get gonorrhea. My wife got that when we were stationed in Japan. She used to go to these baths. All the women would sit their little pussies on these stools that never got washed. I thought she’d cheated on me. Then it was in the paper—a huge gonorrhea breakout at the baths.”

Two guys came outside and went to a car in the middle of the parking lot. “Jered is the fastest dude on a forklift I’ve ever seen,” he said. “He learned to drive forklift in prison.”

Jered had enormous ears, faded tiny tats on his neck like spiders, and a little face that blossomed into a mean smile.

“I try to stay out of his way,” I said.

“He’s short but he’s got a nasty headbutt.” He laughed. “He’s the toughest on enforcing rules around here. Don’t let him step on your dick if you’re doing your job, though. All right, I’d like you to stage a wall of Ninkasi. I want you to be careful and speed up. I know you got a hundred on your fork exam. Now I’d like to see you get your muscles into the machine. This is when it starts to happen. I want to see some magic. Show me you’ve got some wings.”

“I’m used to the old forklifts,” I said. “Not these powerful, fast ones.”

“Don’t talk like a little bitch. Let’s kick some ass.”

He threw open the front door to the staging area. He attacked the air with his arms and legs as he walked across the floor, his upper right body leading. After shouting at me for wrapping a pallet too slow, he showed me how to do it, and I finished the job: a dizzy, spinning ride that produced nausea.

In the thirty-degree warehouse, I backed up carrying two pallets of beer. He shouted for me to stop. “Okay, everything should be happening at once. You’re turning the wheel, looking behind you, your load coming down, your forks straightening. It’s too jerky with you. You’re doing one thing at a time. You’re like someone who can’t walk. You take a step and hold still before your other leg comes around. You’re moving like a crippled person here.”

“I know! You’re right! I’m waiting to break through this.”

“Your shoulders are high. You’re thinking too much. At some point, you’re going to stop thinking. Hey, did you ever play sports?”

“Not really. I was on crew for a semester.”

“Crew! What kind of pussy shit is that?”

“I know. I was on exchange in New Hampshire and I wanted to try it.”

“Okay. Did it ever come together for you, when you learned how to row?”

“Yeah. You’re right. It was when I quit thinking about it, after a month.”

A horn sounded behind us. Jered wanted past with his load, but my fork was blocking his way. “Sit there a minute! We’re training here,” the boss said to Jered. Then to me, “Lighten up. Relax. You’re in your boat.”

“Let’s go, Christopher!” Jered said, ignoring the boss. He pushed the horn for a long, whining protest.

The red-bearded man flew through the warehouse door and parked near us, his long beard iced and frosted white. “Freezer’s out in deadman.”

“Cacophony of cluster fucks,” said the boss. He rushed, walking, out the wide door, and red-beard followed him on the fork.

I placed Ninkasi pallets on the wall outside, in the staging area. When I returned for the third load in the warehouse, I found a pallet where my fork had sat before, where the boss and I had stalled Jered. I pushed it out of the way and unloaded another two pallets. In the staging area, Jered stood at the long desk, doing math for an order. He shaped a murder face for me. Later, when I returned for beer pallets, his fork stood where he’d placed the pallet before, and I couldn’t pass. I honked.

“Sorry,” Jered said, standing on the other side of it, eating a sandwich. “I’m on break.”

Ten minutes before midnight, the boss called out, “O.T.! We work till 2:00 a.m.!” I finished staging the beer order and stood at a computer scanning an order form. The boss had shown me the steps but it seemed impossible now. I was stressed and groggy—a bad mixture, capacity for thought and action all but disabled.

Jered appeared at my side. “Are you almost done with that?” he said.

“No. I’m trying to remember the first step.”

“Move over,” he said. “I’ll do it. Go over there, man. Go sit down. I’m not training you here. I’m getting past this so I can do my shit.”

Out the window I saw the boss sailing past on his fork, the parking lot damp and reflecting light. It had rained briefly. In minutes he returned and parked it.

“Are you okay?” the boss said. “Did something happen?”

“No. He wants to do my form by himself. I’m just waiting.”

“He’s a hard ass. I told you. I don’t expect you to know how to do those for a while,” he said. “Let’s stage another section of Ninkasi now. At least think about speed. At least think about it.”

In the warehouse, nearing two in the morning, I forked another pallet of beer cases. This stack stood three pallets high and listing.

On his fork, the boss raised the two top pallets and set them down. Then he raised the broken pallet and set it in staging, in a far corner of the room. “Take all these cases off and find the broken ones. Then restack it. It should take twenty minutes if you hustle.”

“I’ve worked ten hours. It’s the middle of the night. I don’t think I can do anything else.”

He dropped to the floor and placed his hands on his hips. “You’re going to break that pallet and walk out?”

“I can’t keep on going. I’ll run into walls. I’ll drive into more cases. I literally didn’t know if I was going backwards or forwards for a second. I’m not putting up with Jered’s prison manners. I’ll call the police if he touches me.”

“You’re toughening up. That’s good. Get pissed. But you’re restacking this pallet. Let me help you. Then you can go.”

The boss muscled through the pallet, doing most of the work. When it was done, I plugged in my fork and left.

Next day the boss entered the meeting room as we stepped into our snow pants and got our coats and gloves ready. “You’re working deadman today, all day,” he told me, “shadowing Jones.”

Standing next to me, the boss scrutinized a form. Redbeard, Jones, turned his humored eyes on me, but he skipped his gaze away. The first time I worked with him, I followed him on an electric pallet jack, watching him sleigh about in the false snow. He made it known that my feeble shadowing creeped him out. He wore his long ice-beard like a tragic honor given to men who lived alone in cold places, and he didn’t want anyone trailing him.

The boss wore duct-taped New Balance shoes. His black jeans were shiny with the filth of years but appeared washed nevertheless. Jered came in wearing an orange hoody and showing his bad teeth, as if he expected something fun. If I had been in prison, I would have stayed far away from orange clothes.

“I went around telling you all what happened with Hendrickson last night,” he said. “He tried to leave after breaking a pallet. Nobody could fucking believe it. The rule is, you break it, you fix it. Warehouse rules. I don’t care what time it is. Put your balls on and take care of it. Man the fuck up. Swing your fucking dick. I swear to God,” he told me, “if you’d left last night before fixing that pallet, you wouldn’t have a job today.”

“I get it,” I said. “Under normal circumstances, that’s true. But I wasn’t feeling normal. Everything was wrong.”

“You push through it. You swing through it.”

“No. I couldn’t see straight. I couldn’t think right.”

“Do it again and see what happens.”

Aside from Jered, who sat with hands in his sweatshirt bouncing his knees together so the bones cracked, the others seemed awkward at this calling-out.

“Listen, you’re training, that’s fine,” the boss said. “You’ll get it at your own pace. But I want everyone to know the rules. There’s an ethic here.”

Everyone cleared out to start work, and the boss pretended to examine the form. Jerud rose and went out the door.

“Did you talk to him about that harassment?” I said.

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

“Nope. He’s an ass kicker. I’ve said that.”

I took off my freezer overalls, draped them across a chair, and dropped my ID on the table, and left. That job would’ve been rewarding to master. It was impossible to explain my wonky head, how everything came loose in a physical job like that. Once, at a different job, I pushed through that enfeebling anxiety, while sorting salmon in Alaska on a high platform and running conveyor belts of different fish into the cannery bins that sucked like devils—even got a promotion my second summer at Ekuk, when I discovered I wasn’t a very nice lead worker on so little sleep. But I was good at the job. That might’ve happened here if I’d stuck it out.







In two days, I leapt into housekeeping at the university dorms, working with a crew making beds for international track stars and kids camps. My crew leaders were two women in their sixties. One had a smoker’s voice. Once, during break, on the couches in front of the elevators, she said to us, “How do you like my Chinee: Chingling, meowmeow, ah so, hing hong, chingalee.”

Many laughed. Even a few of the student workers chuckled at this display. After break, I was disinfecting mattrasses and closets when I heard a man in the hall say, “Trump’s still running this country—we are everywhere.”

“Trump can’t even read,” I called. “He moved his mouth when he read to himself at the podium.”

When I vacuumed the room, a lead came in and waited for me to turn it off. About fifty, gray-haired, he was mildly muscled and congenial. He was French-Canadian and tutored kids in musical instruments in the evenings.

“Be careful what you say about Trump,” he said. “Housing is pro-Trump, top to bottom.”

“Trump’s gone. We have a new president. He’s no good either, but I’m not going to be forced to love Trump.”

“Yes, but you don’t want people to dislike you.”

“Maybe I do.”

“There’s a rule in any organization: stay quiet about the enthusiasms of the culture, if you want to stay.”

“That scum actually ridiculed a disabled journalist. Then when he was president, he had Evangelicals lay hands on him at his desk. Fuck that guy.”

He leaned to me, glancing at the door twice. “I don’t like him either,” he whispered.

Later in the basement I pushed a bin of dirty towels into a room where two guys in leather jackets sat on a bench. It was air conditioned and cold. One man, in mutton chops, rose and yanked the bin away. He went behind a curtain and appeared with a bin of new towels.

“I don’t see how you do this, at twelve fucking dollars an hour,” he said.

“It’s fifteen, but I agree it’s not much.”

The other man had a beard and a pony tail. He ate a fruit pie. “He’s only razing you, buddy. We got razzed, too, back in the day.”

“You’re pretty old for a temp,” said the other one, “but maybe they’ll have an opening.”

“We’re the same age.”

“But I’m a crew boss.”

With the familiar resentment, I waited at the door with my cart. “I need an easy, stupid job like this one in order to write books. You know who hired me last year? Prudential. But I turned them down to work in a warehouse. You think I’d have time to write if I was selling life insurance?”

“Sounds like a bullshit story,” said the man with mutton chops.

I opened the door so I could pull my bin into the hall after I spoke. “Look me up. I’m here because I like dumb jobs and turn down all the good ones.”

One day we worked towel service, opening dorm rooms while most of the athletes were gone, when a worker named Boon—a tall guy who boasted of his many motorcycles, his house, and his guns—went on about Sturges, the motorcycle event he planned to visit in a couple of weeks. He was my age and a well-liked temp.

The French-Canadian knocked at a room and called “linen!” A blond woman appeared, six-four, muscular and smiling in her track uniform. She asked us to give her five minutes, so we waited. Most of the rooms were empty.

A skater my age, in a Suicidal Tendencies T-shirt, asked me, “Can you still skate a halfpipe?” he said.

“I can’t even get on a skateboard anymore. I’ve tried.”

Boon said to me, “Why are you working here if you publish books?”

“It’s something to do. I never made any money at it.”

The blond athlete appeared and left the room to us. We stripped the sheets of both beds and made them new. Boon made his bed the fastest. He stood next to me while I creased the blanket in a hospital corner. The French-Canadian stepped out of the bathroom with a bucket of cleaning items.

“You write even though you don’t make any money,” Boon said to me. “That’s not American. It’s not the American way.”

I laughed as I picked up the old linen. “I haven’t heard anybody say the American way since I was in Idaho in the 1980s.”

“You don’t like the American way?”

“Sure. But it depends on how you say it and what you’re talking about. I like cold beer, free speech, and the great American Lawrence Ferlinghetti. But I don’t need to own a house or go shopping all the time.”

“Everybody wants a house.”

“I used to, but owning a house is another way to get stuck. I want cheap rent, no major worries. I like to move around. I want to leave something behind when I die, besides three bedrooms and a basement.”

“Would you buy a house if you were rich?”

“Probably. Then I wouldn’t be stuck. I could dump it and it wouldn’t destroy my bank account or my self-esteem.”

Boon turned his head and kept me in view. “Sounds like you change your principles according to what’s going on in your life,” he said. “You’d be a communist if you were broke and needed a handout.”

“I love handouts,” I said. “Especially Oregon writing grants.”

“That’s coming out of my check.”

“Thank you, Boon. Thanks for writing me all those little checks.”

“What in the fuck,” Boon said.

We left the room. A pleasant intensity stirred in my chest, but I was done making trouble at jobs.

When the French-Canadian knocked on the next door, an African woman showed her face. They spoke French together. The woman was delighted.

Estella joined our crew after lunch. At seventy, she’d worked at Housing for twenty-five years. We got along. We were in a room together now, when she joked, “You’ll have to come over when my husband’s not home, to have a beer and relax.”

Boon rushed in and removed a sheet in two jerks of his arm. Estella and I worked one bed together, as we did sometimes.

“I could make a bed under your kitchen sink,” I said. “I’d be like a phantom.”

“Yes. I’d discover you there when I came down to drink water.”

“I’d shoot you,” Boon said. “I’d shoot you dead if you entered my house.”

“You often talk about blowing people away.”

“Why did you fall out of teaching?” the skater asked me on break, outside. He and Boon and I stood in the shade of the building. Next door was a new red-brick dorm ascending against the blue. Rumors had gotten around about me. I was disappointed they were mostly true.

“I have schizophrenia,” I said, smiling at Boon, making it up. “When I taught in Corvallis, I dressed up like a bird for a week, with these wings on my back. I found out how to get on the roof of the student union and called to students on the lawn. I went to the Salem hospital for three months, and they let me work in my own room. Finished my first book in there.”

Boon danced back a few steps. “Whoa!”

Of course he’d tell everyone, the bosses, the motorcycle enthusiasts, the sober Christians, the Trump lovers—all those I saw when we gathered in a dorm basement each day before work.

We continued to swap out linen. In thirty minutes, the top boss, JW, a short, chubby man showed up. He was friendly with everyone. He said we were moving to a different dorm. Another crew would finish here. We all walked underground, through hallways, past a mirrored recreation room and laundry facilities with industrial washers and dryers, and doors that were painted in terrible dark red or black.

We came upstairs and everyone raked pointlessly in a closed courtyard. Estella was keeping close to me. When I picked up a rake, the French-Canadian took it from me. “You and Estella don’t have to work,” he said. Estella and I stood and watched the others raking and sweeping.

“Are we here because of me?” I said.

“They asked me to keep you company,” Estella said. “They think you need watching. This place is that way. But let’s watch them instead. Last year, one of the leads told me not to speak Spanish. She said this is America and we speak English.”

“What’s up with this America bullshit? We’re all poor here, except JW.”

“I’m not poor. I have a house I bought through my job here. But I’m going to speak Spanish when I want to.”

“Did you complain?”

“Yes. They said I needed to speak English in case it was an emergency and we all needed to understand each other. But that wasn’t why she told me not to speak Spanish.”

“No, it wasn’t. They can’t stop talking about guns and blowing people away, though.”

“Did you really dress up like a bird?”

I laughed. “No.”

“Too bad. I wanted to see you in your bird costume.”

Boon was talking to one of the managers nearby. “It was probably this guy,” he said, not trying to lower his voice.

They were talking about the two thefts in different dorms—a cell phone and a ring. We heard about those yesterday. They were considered lost items until one of the athletes was angry. Then they were thefts.

I spent a few days noticing people’s reaction to me. Once, a young man who had had brain surgery—a good part of his brain had been removed—said to me, “Are you okay?” He wanted me to know he didn’t think I was fine, and maybe I wasn’t. I was foolish to spring my mental health status on this Trump bunker, even a made-up one.

After work one day, the air was on fire—90 degrees. The hunting sun followed in the trees. I crossed the boulevard and walked the bike path a mile to Autzen Stadium where my car was parked. I looked at the clock on my phone and saw it wasn’t time to leave—it was only lunch time. I went back toward the university. I sat on a bench out front of dorms. An Asian student, a young woman, said, “Are you doing okay?”

She asked the question as though she really wondered. Grateful she had asked, pleased that she noticed, I said, “Everything’s fine. How’s your term going? Good. I graduated from here in 94, but I never lived in the dorms. I’m not sure why.”

“I’m going to go in now, okay?”

“Okay.”

A short blond woman named Dorette found me sitting out here later. “You’re on my crew now. Why are you sitting here?”

She took my arm and pulled me to the underground. We went up to the hallway of a dorm I’d never seen, with high ceilings and tall windows. The windows traveled the hall until they grew smaller in the distance and the people down there were smaller too.

“There’s no reason to talk about your personal issues here,” she said. “There is work to be done. There should be no talk of diagnoses or anything like that.”

“You’re right. I’ve noticed you around. You’re very 19th century or something. I like that.”

“You mean I’m old-fashioned.”

“I heard you’re Catholic.”

“Are you?”

“Sometimes. Not really.”

“With God, it’s either yes or no,” she said.

“For me it’s sometimes, but not much.”

She waved that craziness away.

At the head of the crew, I stripped beds with two movements of my arm, the way Boon did it. Dorette folded the green blankets while I gathered the linen and someone else got the towels. She watched me. In the next room, she took my hand and opened my fingers to make sure I hadn’t taken something. I didn’t mind it. I even liked the close watch. We got the linens in their carts and now we swept the other way, sanitizing beds and touch points and making beds with hospital corners. When I crossed the hall to another room, Dorette ran to me and took my arm. “What are you doing?” she said. Her eyes were distressed.

“I don’t think I ever met anybody like you before,” I said.

She got shy and walked away. Halfway across the hall, she asked me what I was doing.

“I’m getting this,” I said and took hold of a vacuum cleaner.

Estella and I worked together then. They had three crews working that dorm. She said, “I like watching you bend over and doing your work, when you’re vacuuming under the beds with the hose.”

We had crushes on each other. Estella was loyal to her husband. She was an older lady, but she had fire, as they say. She was too old for me to consider, and I too young for her, but we felt something for each other though nothing could ever happen. Sometimes she made us a terrific lunch of chicken enchiladas. We ate in the common rooms when everyone else ate the three-dollar lunch in a dorm nearby. She brought lunch today. We sat downstairs on a couch in front of pop and snack machines.

“Buy her flowers,” she said about Rachel. “You don’t know what that means to a woman. Can I tell you something? God told me that you two will get back together. He told me in my prayers on Sunday.”

“Thank you, Estella. That’s very kind. But I think she’s done.”

“That’s terrible. You have a child together, conceived in marriage. How can she be the kind of woman who, who . . .”

“Yes, but we like each other as friends. That’s good for Leo.”

“She needs to take care of you. That’s part of her vows.”

“She didn’t like that part. I don’t blame her.”

JW opened the door where we were having lunch. He wore the lime green UO Housing T-shirt that showed a drawing of a small spray bottle on one side. “How’s everything going? You guys are making great progress over here.”

He went away. “He’s checking on you,” Estella said. “He never comes to the buildings like that.”

Others gave me long lingering assessment stares in the morning when we all met in the basement each day, sitting at tables where coolers of Gatorade waited replenished. A couple of them looked at me with idiotic mysterious faces, along with a lowering of the head to one side—a mocking expression meant to show they were studying me. They imitated each other’s hazing style.

Once, while a very large deaf woman searched a long hallway seeking a vacuum called a turtle, three housing bikers passed her, turned at the hallway, and one of them made barking noises like a seal. Though I hated them, I remember thinking that I didn’t care at this moment. The deaf woman didn’t like me, but that wasn’t it. I was tired of caring about their idiocies. Nothing shocked me anymore. When I found the turtle in any empty room, I brought it to her.

“Come on, Christopher,” she said. “Pick it up. You’re always dragging and leaving everyone else to finish.”

Another day Estella and I cleaned together at a tall ugly dorm called Barnhart. We stuck together unless our crew leader separated us. While cleaning the windows, I had a fear of looking all the way down, people and cars moving like toys.

“Why would they make kids live in this Eastern Block dump?” I said. “The air comes through the windows. Look at this bathtub-sized carpet stain. Did someone die in here?”

“It’s awful,” said Estella. “To think how much they have to pay every term! Many of these dorms are old. They have metal beds from the 1950s. They have fury places on the walls below the beds that come back after we clean them. They breathe that. We clean it, but it comes back. People send their children to this university, believing it’s clean.”

On the third or fourth morning at Barnhart, I knocked on the glass door of the ground-floor entry and a housing manager let me in. She had a wrinkled chin and rich long hair. She hustled off and went into an office. At the elevators, a man in a sports jacket and trim beard waited. Right away, he swerved his eyes to mine and watched me. When the elevator doors opened, we went in together. Again he watched me with his face rankled in open disgust, as if he knew about me.

“What floor are you going to?” he said.

“Seventh,” I told him.

“Are you going to jump?”

“What do you mean?”

“Commit suicide.”

“How’d you know?” I joked.

He didn’t say. At lunch I mentioned the conversation to the French-Canadian, who had nothing to say about it.

Next day I left a room I was cleaning to find a bucket, and the building manager told me to hurry up. “We’re not doing a deep cleaning up here,” she said. The man who’d confronted me in the elevator came down the hall now. His smile, a general greeting, included me. He asked her something about the heating system.

If this man’s feeling about me was any indication, the GED motorcycle club had a stronger dislike for me than I knew. They had probably told him I was the bird man, the one in the Irish hat and boots.

Housing HR called me and asked what was going on. “You’re starting trouble over there now?”

“I’m not starting anything. Your staff are low-education, poisonous losers, and apparently you intend to hire exactly that profile. It must be hard to find such low-end types.”

In ten minutes, the manager of Dalt, Elisara, called and fired me. She said I was fired at housing and now I was fired at Dalt. I mentioned my harassment, the shooting comments, the suicide invitation, the hick supervisor who practiced her Chinee, and the man who barked like a seal in the presence of the deaf woman. But the university was an important account, and I must have been causing trouble there. Maybe I was causing trouble—trouble against the trouble. The only surprise was that others didn’t speak up. I called the president’s office about this place, and the assistant called the university police. The officer called me after an investigation and explained that no laws were broken.

“There are rules for classroom and administrative behavior,” I told him, “where news might leak to the public and parents. They send out press releases about those rules, and they enjoy being people who care so much. But there are no rules for the basements here.”

“Well. I’d better get going. Let us know if—"

“It’s all for appearances—once again,” I said. “Every time. Never believe it when an organization talks about its values, unless it’s to admit they shouldn’t be trusted.”

“I only investigate laws that might be broken.”

“The president’s office won’t speak to me anymore. They probably think the assistant made a mistake by calling you.”

“Take it to the legislature. We’ll keep a copy of this on file.” He hung up.

I wasn’t going to the legislature. Fighting tyrants in basements was only sport for me.

Rachel never fought with tormenters. At any conflict, she left the room, she shut down her computer, she retreated. Good, peace-loving Rachel, who remained a gift to me in the world, whether she was my girl or not, and she was a gift to Leo.







As more wealth flooded my city, I stocked Amy’s frozen dinners at Fred Meyer’s, in natural foods, and looked up items on my phone scanner for customers. Sometimes it was pleasant to do something easy like fronting shelves. My favorite coworker was a former minister from California, young looking at forty-five, all clean living. I liked talking about the Old Testament with him. Though I could tell he recited his talking points from his days of ministry—"Job never blames God, no matter how low he gets,” a ministry of self-help, for the beaten down—he was the only one in the store who’d read anything good. He always tried to keep moving when we talked, fronting shelves. He told me they hired managers off the floor. Once, in an elegant departure, he fronted shelves away from me and took off on quick feet.

The assistant manager walked the store each hour, his lips showing his teeth and his feelings of agony. He was usually at the store. When I worked in the morning, or closed at night, he was there. Maybe it was the hardest job in America, probably beating out air traffic control by a nose.

I liked to say that I started at the top and worked my way to the bottom, but I thought I’d said it too many times, like a duffer who loses track. My head was hazy, despite my regimen of taking lorazepam only twice a week now, when I needed it, and only two tall boys a day. But a grocery was a good place for those who have felt the hard kicks.

For now, my boss had signed me up for forklift training to get my license. Also, I rented a backyard cottage where Leo stayed over a lot, and Rachel got to have an occasional date at her place or, most of the time, relax with the house to herself.

Once, when I stocked ice-cream, a woman my age said she would like my company for a moment. She smiled behind a mask. I wore a mask too, though the mandate had been lifted.

“Can you help me find something?” she said.

“I could look it up on my store phone.”

She wanted waffle ice-cream cones. “We could take a little walk together and you could show me where it is. It might be nice to have a little conversation at some point.”

“It’s not coming up on my screen. You could see at customer service.” Nervous, I neglected to ask for her contact. Her words seemed forward but ambiguous, and I didn’t know how to respond.

She took her cart away. On days off I hunted the grocery aisles looking for the woman.

When I couldn’t make my car payment, I managed to sell the car back to the lot where I bought it. A bill remained, but the monthly payments on it were low. That was good news. The tires needed changing and I’d been putting off the oil change. I was looking for an apartment and I needed all my money for that.

I rode the bus around looking for the woman from the grocery, when I saw a naked man dancing on a side road, on a calm street in the Whiteaker. We passed him in halting traffic on a cross street. The man danced and bowed, making tendrils of his dipping arms. He had a smear of charcoal on his right buttock. Across the street were two women watching him. In puffy overalls with the words Cahoots across the front, they waited for the right time to talk to the naked man. He was good-looking. The Cahoots women seemed sympathetic and amused as they waited, and serious at the same time. White Bird Clinic—they administered Cahoots—was part of old Eugene. They were an organization of hippies who distrusted the police to greet the mentally ill in situations of crisis. In a city that increasingly failed the poor, White Bird was a godsend. Jim Fahn’s dad—the family who lived in the yurt in Rainbow Valley—had been a counselor there.

The bus moved on. I thought I recognized in the naked man an emotion I had known before—joyful understanding that he was “touched.” It required a vibrant celebration, perhaps even shedding of one’s clothes and a dance in the street.

The woman I met at the grocery store wasn’t going to appear anywhere. It took a miracle for people who didn’t know each other to meet twice, while acquaintances saw each other regularly in town. It was part of the denial force in the world.

One day the chair of English at the university in Ashland wrote, “I’m sure we could find some classes for you.” During a Zoom meeting she said there were many opportunities for teaching online. She wore horn-rimmed glasses and a cardigan buttoned up to a white blouse collar—a stylish 50s look. In a week she emailed, “I’m sorry to report we don’t have a lot of classes right now. The university is restructuring. I won’t be available. I’m in committees for the next month.”

I Googled my name. Halfway down my first Google page was a “Rate my Professor” page for the New Jersey community college where I had quit. There were no reviews, and no reason for its upward climb on Google. She must’ve known that the college wasn’t on my resume and assumed there was something wrong. Also, my BSU firing notice had been yanked up fifty pages to rest on page two. That was also Stjohn’s work. Maybe he’d given her some light hacking as well, sending an infected email in my name. I doubted he’d sent pics to a professor with money.

Another hacked administrator, scared to death. All English departments were restructuring, especially those who showed strong interest in my application.

Since I began writing this book, Father Peeks placed strange books on my Amazon page, including The Ventilator Book, by William Owens, MD (Note the spelling is nothing like my name). Father Peeks wanted to communicate death, death! He may have believed he was the god of Sodom and Gomorrah, able to unleash disaster, and it was so. My Amazon page existed—accessed on my Google page—but my name still wouldn’t appear in an Amazon search. He shut it down so that I couldn’t sell this book.

The Christian leader awakened with thunder and war when Rain Taxi Review of Books interviewed me. He summoned God’s worst for a week. When the issue of Rain Taxi came out, the editor wrote, “Please send me your address and we’ll get a free copy out to you.” He had already asked me for my address three times, so I knew Father Peeks was deleting my emails that included my address. Then I couldn’t post the Rain Taxi website page on Facebook or any other social media. When I copied the new issue, the previous issue’s art appeared when I pasted it. This trick showcased his skills as a hacker. Rachel was able to cut and past the new page, but I wasn’t. I sought out computers at the Eugene Library and at the University of Oregon. But he tracked me by my email accounts—a paranoid-sounding claim that was absolutely real. He was notified when I signed into any of my emails. Brother Censorship allowed no hiding, no privacy.

When I posted about Mary Owen, he disabled my Facebook app and prevented my downloading a new one for twenty-four hours. One morning, he disabled the cursor on my computer so that I couldn’t write this book. It was only when I took a video of my hand trying to type that he restored the cursor. Another day, he placed a “card” in front of my screen so that I had to quit writing, only text on the far right of the page in view. He clogged my email with general notice about litigation.

He sent me a thousand pictures of my son, and images that appeared to be of dead children. My computer sounded with a rhythmic hiss—the sound was rhythmic this time—but only when I wrote. It effected my inner ear and made me nauseated sometimes. On my Amazon page, he placed a book called On the Run, as if I had a lawsuit waiting and I wouldn’t get far. He disabled my Google Analytics, so that I couldn’t see who visited my site. The only communication he generally allowed on a consistent basis was my email shoutouts to the Christian scholars. That way, maybe on the advice of his lawyer, he could tally up the number of times I defamed him with “illegal spam,” as one of his friends had called it in an email to me. But when a harasser was stalking me and my family—every day, and out for blood—I was going to let people know about it. He also enjoyed altering my photos on Facebook, coloring my hair gray or staining my shirt urine-colored—his playful side coming out.

One day, while Becca had coffee with her friend from work, Leo and I sat on bar chairs at the kitchen counter. He was looking for a game online when I saw “Porn Monster” written into the search bar of his phone and it vanished in a moment. Leo found his game that featured bouncing balloon faces. I didn’t know if Stjohn called me porn monster or bragged about his own title.

On a Facebook post—with a privacy set to “only me”—I wrote I would blow him to hell if he touched my son’s phone again. Then he came at me with full lash and kick, a fresh hacking at the hands of Beelzebub. If he had read my secret post, he had no business doing so. If I had written in lipstick on my bathroom mirror that I would blow him to hell, it wouldn’t be my fault that he broke into my house and read it. But this dealer in a thousand death images must have been very sensitive about his own safety.

Once, at the grocery, I asked out a Latina shopper, a regional manager at a bowling alley. She had intelligent eyes and I liked how she pronounced regional manager, like a Mexican whose English wasn’t perfect. It was a lovely sound, better than standard English. She said we could have coffee soon. We texted for a while after that, then she quit texting. I asked her if she had gotten hacked, by any chance. She admitted that she’d gotten “silly pictures”—dick pics, I was sure—and our texts died down after that. I told her I had a hacker who hacked with porn. She said she wanted to be friends. We wrestled about the importance of not giving in to bullies and perverts, but she had too much to lose, it seemed. She wrote that she liked technology at first, but she found out that she couldn’t really trust anyone.

One day at the Eugene library a short man in a wide beard came down the stairs toward me. “Strand Books!” I said, and pointed at his T-shirt. “I worked there briefly in ’97,” I said.

He laughed out loud. “I grew up in New York. I taught in the high schools in the 70s, to special needs children. It was the best time, when the city was falling apart, and David Bowie played in concert. Hey, I was going to go around town to bless some places. My family moved here when I was in high school. I’m not religious but I like to bless places. It’s for myself.”

We got inside his ancient Subaru and parked at South Eugene High. We approached the long white building, a summer light hitting the grass and sidewalks.

“I had the same math teacher as Richard Brautigan,” he said. “Math teacher! Isn’t that funny? He was an all-right teacher. Nothing special. But I loved many other teachers here.”

“They used to have a mural in a back hallway of the Beattles, all flying over strawberry fields and smoking joints. That was in the mid-80s.”

“Wonderful history. That’s how things were back then.”

“Let’s see this blessing,” I said.

He touched his chest and bowed slightly to the school, that was all. His name was Jim Digger. Seventy years old, he served ten years in penitentiary for dealing heroin, but he didn’t do that anymore. He lived in a camper behind someone’s house in town, as he couldn’t rent as a felon.

Jim cast his blessings before a handful of remembered sites—the Bijou Movie Theater, the fairgrounds, Saturday Market, and a campus dorm. “The girl who lived in this building, she was built like an Art Crumb Amazon, a very large and wonderful behind.”

Late afternoon we stood in line for coffee at Full City, downtown. For the most part, the café was for older couples who were quietly liberal, who had their summer with Ken Kesey, maybe, and now collected investment checks. The new owner had frosted hair and wore a visor, and she made coffee drinks along with the college-aged girls. The man in front of us, tall in Carhart pants and a Walk for the Cure shirt, engaged her about “freeloaders.” “I just had a Saturday Market guy ask me for five bucks,” he said. “Not change. He wanted five bucks.”

“They’re on the way out,” said the owner. “The writing’s on the wall. California people are some of the most hard-working folks I know.”

When it was our turn, the owner seemed to remove herself from my presence by some act of mental distancing. The week before, she had seen me stocking eggs at the store. That was okay. I probably disliked the store more than she did. There was no explaining that I was a sojourner of blue-collar places, a seeker of easy isolation and comfort, with a hacker who killed any good jobs.

Jim and I sat on the bakery side of the cafe. The bakery side had attractive light blue walls and big wooden tables. New Country issued from the stereo.

“Here’s my number.” I gave him a piece of paper so he could call me on his flip phone. “I put down my address if you can’t get through.”

“It was a good day,” he said. “A day of discussion and blessings. I’ll show you my drawings sometime. I'm recording our natural world before it goes away.”

“You’re such a hippie—I like it.”

“That’s exactly what I am. We’re on the way out, I can tell you that, like the woman said.”

“The whole town’s on the way out,” I said. “New Country. They’re playing New Country, in a café. I’ve been coming here for thirty years. This new owner’s kind of a hick.”

“You can find interesting things happening anywhere. The library has some of the warmest people working there. Something’s always going on there.”

“I’m taking my kid there tomorrow. Anyway, it’s a nice building.”

When the café closed, Jim and I walked in the late sun, the light warm on the street and the storefronts. He and I were friends right away, like kids who needed company and had plenty of room in their lives.

The next day, at the Eugene library, a tall man walked one way and another in front of the reference desk, clearing his throat and coughing. Two women sat behind the counter. The building smelled of smoke from a fire that was burning in the grasslands out by Fern Ridge.

“You don’t think the lord knows about this town?” the man said. “Smell the fire! Smell the burning of the earth!”

Leo and I waited in a line to talk to the librarians, who didn’t seem to take questions at the moment, while the man gave his sermon. Leo went up to a librarian who was middle-aged and stressed, her shoulders very high and her physiognomy locked in a pleasant and helpful look. When Leo shouted in a confident voice, “We want to look at science books for my age!” she leaned forward and offered him a face that suggested a mild growl. It wasn’t cartoonish, it was subtle, but it was there. The other librarian at the desk—a large young woman in a gingham dress who reminded me of church—had a pained but pleasant face as though trying to endure the preacher, the smoke, and her rude coworker. Neither of them told him where to find the science books.

“Let’s go,” I whispered to him. “They’re trying to deal with this guy.”

“She made a face at me!” he said as though thrilled, as we went down the stairs. “I don’t think she meant it though.”

“You’re right. They’re having a bad day up here.”

More and more, the library was a place for bums to lie around cursing softly in the chairs and patrons to talk back to the video games on the computer. The lovely building was a center for everyday disquiet and vapid escape. Another librarian, a friend, told me almost nobody checked out books anymore, except for children’s books. Once, in the stacks, when I looked for a Thomas Hardy biography, I saw a small dried human turd lying on the carpet. It might have shaken out of someone’s pants unknown, but it had a suspicious look of something placed there on purpose, like a quiet “fuck you” to libraries everywhere.

Next day, in the morning, I received two friend requests from kids in the Philippines. I blocked them. When a high-school-aged girl called asking for her friend, I told her it was the wrong number. It wasn’t the first time that high school girls had called me. I believed he located kids’ phones in my area and switched their friends’ numbers with mine—another unbelievable and tedious stunt. On my Facebook feed, I saw a photo of a boy lying on his back in a field, in the distance, in shorts and a striped shirt. Either he was okay or he wasn’t. I clicked on that profile. There were many posts, but all of them had been made this very day. Another pic of my son appeared on my phone, so that I saw his face when I picked it up. There were other photos that I wished I hadn’t seen.

My hands shook when I called the Eugene Police computer crimes department, and told the intake woman the worst of all I had seen.

“Write out descriptions of everything you take to be a direct threat, with dates you discovered each one, and any screenshots. Then mail it to this address.”

“I’ll mail it tomorrow,” I said.

I shivered as I held still before my window. I held my arms and my elbows jerked, forcing air out of my throat. Outside of my window, shelves of gray clouds, broken in sections, rose so that my eyes traveled up and up. The sky was like a half-section of a cathedral, open to view. I watched the clouds for a while, to keep my mind off the police and the porn. Bits of blue showed high, in little feathery cuts. Whenever I called law enforcement about this case, I feared Stjohn was hatching his next spoof.





One night—it was a week after my phone call to police—I answered my phone, and a man wanted money. He said he would keep calling until he got what he wanted. I’d had one tallboy of malt liquor that was like a sourness of spirit all through me. When my phone rang again, I let the soft bells of my ringer go on and on. My house was messy, so that the place seemed smaller. I noticed the dishes in the sink and the clothes and books on the floor. It was a crowded feeling. In my side vision, the walls rushed with something like sideways energy trails or water, and vanished when I confronted them directly. All that rhythmic hissing in my computer had brought me to this state. My computer, turned off, seemed to make the hissing now, and I sometimes heard the sound when I walked or took the bus. In Vietnam, American troops issued into the jungle the recorded sounds of weeping, anguished words in Vietnamese, so that the Vietcong solders would believe their ancestors had returned from the dead. Now hackers used psyops techniques.

I answered the phone. “Let’s talk about the money,” he said and I hung up. It may not have been Father Seems who called, but I was sure he put me on the list the caller was using.

“Get the fuck out of my house, Father Dark Webs,” I whispered. I didn’t want him to hear. He might do something else. What I’d read about the dark webs suggested that much of it was devoted simply to killing the human spirit. Of course it was.

That panting noise had to stop. It sounded sexual, and it was clear the porn, the extortion, the harassment, the death wish, the hacking of friends—it all originated from this pleasured breathing. On my desk was a package of sleeping pills. I took ten, only enough to kill the visions and forget the man who wanted money. The phone kept ringing. In bed, with the bathroom light coming through the open door, my memory went as far as my feet. My bed was like a long box, my feet at a great distance, and the wall of books was the footboard. Then I remembered Leo—of course, I had a child!—I wouldn’t ever forget that—though he was a fuzzy reality, his face out of reach—and I called the hotline and, later, Cahoots knocked on my door, and three friendly young people brought me to their van.

At Sacred Heart, I landed in the ER mental facility. They put me in a hospital bed and drew blood. Later a nurse, a tall woman in scrubs, asked me what kind of sleeping pills they were.”

“I’m not sure. I only wanted to go to sleep right away.”

“Okay. They make sleeping pills to keep people from trying what you tried to do. What matters is that you tried. That’s the real concern here.”

“Tried what? To go to sleep?”

“No. To kill yourself. They forwarded your phone call with the hotline.”

“Not to my knowledge. I may have been trying to do that—on some level?—but not to my knowledge. I wanted to knock myself out, that’s all.”

“You were sobbing.”

“Only because I might have done something I didn’t want to do.”

In two hours, someone brought me to a room in a wheel chair—a small white room, a bed on the floor, a chair by a wall. The man who brought me was in his twenties, wearing a small uneven mustache and a long scar on his upper cheek. He was sullen. “Bathroom’s across the hall,” he said and pushed the empty wheelchair out the door. “A nurse will come around,” he said over his shoulder.

The bathroom in the hallway had a soft door that latched with Velcro. On my way back to my room, my neighbor stood and watched me pass in front of his door. He had an angular face and a killer’s eyes. Some of the patients were locked in their rooms. But they let the killer walk the halls as he wished, distributing his porn and his Bible literature or whatever it was that he’d carried in here.

My room had two or three bits of food on the floor. I studied a grain of broccoli while lying on my bed—a grove of trees in there. On the walls were squares of flesh-colored paint, as if they had painted over horrible messages written by some rebellious patient. But the ugly messages, whatever they were, seemed to live on despite the cover up, exerting their alarming intentions anyway. But I was glad they covered them up.

In the morning, a nurse brought a good breakfast. She had big eyes and seemed more friendly than was possible in this place.

“You might be transferred to Pod Two today,” she said. “You seem like you’re doing okay. Pod Two is for people who are having trouble but aren’t a threat to anyone. They’ll either keep you there or send you to Pod Three.”

“Is Pod Three okay?”

“I’d love to go to Pod Three for a few days. But don’t worry. Pod Two is okay. You just don’t want them to keep you here.”

Shouting traveled from down the hallway.

“Some monster on the loose?” I said.

“He’s a shouter. Security is talking to him.”

“What do they like to see in Pod Two?”

“That you’re calm and social. Getting along.”

“I’m those things. Will you be there? This isn’t the friendliest place I’ve ever been. I’m sort of not looking forward to Pod Two.”

“No. I like it here. I like the challenge. I work with people in trouble. But Pod Two is fine. Better go now.” She went out.

In the afternoon, two male nurses wheeled me to Pod Two—it was like a large visiting room with bedrooms all around it. They brought me into one of the bedrooms. Later a young man and an older man came into my room. The older man said, “We have to check your buttocks and the bottoms of your feet. Make sure you’re not being abused.”

I stood, and they checked all around my body.

“Has anyone harmed you?” the young man said. “You’re not being hit with anything or forced to eat something you don’t want?”

“No. No. Nothing like that,” I said. “I have a hacker, but he’s not physically . . . I actually only met him once. He’s a pretty decent person, in my opinion. He could be a lot worse. He went to Yale. He’s a very nice person.”

“A hacker from Yale,” said the young man. “It seems like he’d have more important ways to spend his time.”

“I did see a judge about him.”

“Somebody left a hole in your back,” said the older man.

“I had a cyst removed a long time ago.”

“There’s a hole. A slit. See someone about that.”

“Are things getting in there, do you think? What kind of things could get in there? The judge sided with me, by the way. But it was all very polite. These things can be talked about calmly. That’s how I do things.”

The young man had stern eyes. “You can talk to your doctor and nurses about him, if you want to.”

“Okay. Yes, sir. I understand.”

At night, outside my double-sided clear plastic window, there was a partial white wall that showed sky above it, though Pod Two was on the top floor. They didn’t want people seeing us in here. Over the wall, metal caps of tall streetlamps shone blue, and it was like they were peaking over the wall at me, but I didn’t believe they were watching. The dome camera on the ceiling was enough for security to see whatever they wanted.

After sleeping for twelve hours, I joined some of the men in the common area, the TV playing a comedy. A man with a towel over his head stood in his doorway. “You messed up,” he told me. “You won’t go onto Pod Three after sleeping like that. They like to see you behaving normally.”

“What do they want to see?” I asked.

“Work out in your room, use everyone’s first name, and don’t take any shit off anyone. They’re well-practiced in the art of double talk. How are you feeling? means Are you a psycho right now? Talk back, but don’t freak out. They actually like my ability to see their psychologies laid out like hamburgers on a grill.”

After dinner, the man in the towel instructed a young blond patient that he had to stop listening to his doctor. The young man was in a chair in front of the TV, and the towel man bent forward talking to him. “He has his degree but I know the streets. I can have him snuffed out.”

The young man said nothing. He was a kid, barely eighteen. Outside I would have said he was sixteen. In a half hour, he yelled at a nurse, an Asian man who had a dark but reasonable expression, “I don’t want all these jumpy fucking meds!” The young man flitted his hands about his head, as though imitating an electric storm. “Everyone else is calm.”

The nurse said, “We can talk about it, and get with the doctor. Please don’t yell at me.”

“He can say his opinions.” The man swayed about so that his towel moved beneath his chin. “Don’t try to overpower him. That’s not why we’re here. You don’t know your job.”

“We’re all trying to be respectful, Kurt. We’re all trying and getting better. I’ve seen you try. I know you try.”

Kurt removed his towel. I saw for the first time that he was tall and muscled. “Kurt is speaking his mind again. That’s not okay. I’m going to dazzle Kurt with compliments and spin his cerebral cortex one-hundred-and-eighty degrees to achieve compliance.”

“You can talk to the doctor about removing or replacing any medication,” the nurse said to the blond kid and went away.

In the chair next to mine was a middle-aged man in a black goatee who volunteered that he’d stolen a police car in Texas, to drive to his friend’s funeral in Oregon. His face was pinched in a giddy frown. I was on twenty milligrams of Abilify. He was on a lot more of whatever they gave him.

“I stole another car at a grocery store in New Mexico and made it all the way,” he said.

“Did you make the funeral?” I asked.

“Yes, I did. I made the fucking funeral. That’s what I wanted to do. I switched cars outside of Texas. I’m not saying it was a good way to do it.” He shook his head. “Kill for a cigarette. Can’t even step outside for a smoke. This is not freedom. I’ll tell you that, buddy. Did I mention that I stole a different car outside of Texas?”

His name was Rich. He had an old-fashioned manner, like a man who rode trains in the 30s.

When the movie ran the credits, he went to his room and Kurt told me, “I wouldn’t mess with that guy. I bet he didn’t tell you this part: His car got smashed in Texas and he lost his wife and two kids. Two weeks later he stole the cop car. If you mess with him or say the wrong thing, I will personally answer you, and you won’t like that.”

“Is he okay? I’m glad they brought him here.”

“You’re saying all the wrong things, man.”

“You’re right.”

The blond kid stood at the security window behind which the nurses and doctors watched us on the screens, completed forms, or spoke together. “I’m so sorry!” he said. “I’m so sorry! I don’t want any harm to come to my doctor.”

Next day they wheeled me out of there and dropped me off at Pod Three. It was for well-behaved people who needed heavy meds—a small ward with sky blue hallways, a large library of easy books and soft couches, and a high lavender privacy wall on the patio. There was a sensory room where you controlled the colors of the light. We were allowed to stay in bed, to attend groups or not, and there was a toilet in each room, though a ceiling camera watched. We were on the ground floor, close to the people and the world outside. Out my window, at the far edge of an inaccessible patio, stood a heavy wall of security glass that was opaque and shone blue in the streetlight at night. It was like staring at a frozen waterfall. When people walked on the other side of the waterfall, on the sidewalk, their vaguest shadows swam in that glass like spirits.

By day, I read an Edward Albee book in my room, called Black Sun.

I had been in Pod Three four days when my diminutive doctor, an Albanian-American woman, said, “I have diagnosed you with severe bipolar disorder. I would like you to continue with Abilify at the same dose when you leave.”

“Severe? Why?”

“A person’s diagnosis gets thrown around a lot. I want future doctors to know that you really have it. I believe it’s severe.”

“I won’t get put on a hold, will I?”

“No. You are a voluntary patient. You can go tomorrow, or stay a few more days.”

“How about day after tomorrow?” I said.

She leaned to see my book. “Black Sun. I hope that’s not too troubling. Are you enjoying that?”

“Yes.” I described a scene for too long, when the protagonist meets a young woman in a forest. “She’s very pretty and strange. I don’t really know what it’s about.”

“Okay, I’m glad you like it. I go now. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I talked to Rachel on the phone next to the glassed nurses’ area. She agreed not to tell Leo where I was, but only to say that I was sick and resting up at home. “Severe bipolar,” I told her cheerfully. “It’s strange how good it feels to have all these people thinking about you, even if they’re wrong. You want kind people to be wrong about you. It’s better than mean people being correct.”

“These people might be right,” she said. “You’ve been on a wild streak. You sound better today. How will you get home?”

“A taxi. No hospital bill—my poor person’s insurance covered everything—and a taxi ride home. That’s Oregon. It’s still a blue state. Anyway, I’ve never rushed out to a highway to control traffic with my mind. I’ve never donned feathers or worn special clothing.”

“No, but you drove to Moscow and kept going, all the way to Dayton.”

“I obeyed all the traffic laws,” I said. “I was a peaceful traveler.”

“You sound okay, but I guess they still have you on the drugs.”

“None that I don’t welcome. I’ve never been so happy to forget everything.”

The day before discharge, a team of people met with me one by one, to get me on track for counseling and med check.

Back home, the panting resumed on my computer and a browser dropped. “Hacking me as soon as I get back from the hospital? Leave some room for the holy ghost!” But I didn’t mind so much—I was rested. And Mathew Stjohn was troubled too, poisoned by an illness that was far greater than mine. He had his manic periods, no joke.

Everyone knows that people who go through a hard time experience heightened compassion—concern for stray cats, etc. In the coming days I wrote emails to the Christian scholars about Mathew Stjohn, explaining that something terrible must’ve happened to him as a child, and we needed to try to understand him and not to hate him. But that mood didn’t last a week.

His hacking techniques, over the years, were designed to create grave harm, even suicide, I believed. But he hadn’t got me. He wasn’t going to. A counselor had told me that seventy-five percent of the children of suicides commit the act themselves. “Suicide?” I said. I was offended. After all, I had only taken the pills to shut out the hacking, the hissing, and the phone calls.

A week after I got home, on my profile list of Facebook friends, StJohn placed an old friend of mine who had died by suicide the year before. He placed it on the top row, then in the center row, and later on the bottom row.

When I posted on my blog twenty pages of screen shots and narrative about the years of hacking, StJohn deleted all of my followers except Rachel, and replaced my face on my blog with his own face, perhaps a warning to the Christian scholars and others. Then he rewrote much of the blog to make it look haphazard and unserious. I fixed it, and he changed it again. I fixed it again.

On a new police report I filled out, regarding his harassment, he replaced my contact info with my landlord’s, and she believed I had put down her address, phone, and email. The police had called her about the reported crime.

Later, on my Facebook profile lineup, he placed a picture of a body, lying face-down in a black coat with the hood up, in a dim field—a child’s body, with little ankles. Whether the child was dead or not, it was a death image—another threat. But I didn’t recognize the profile or the person whose page it was. One comment on this photo read, “Nailed it!” alongside a picture of a hammer. There were people who would laugh and joke about a death image of a child, but it seemed far too demented for a public post. I didn’t believe it was real. Stjohn, the Christian leader, had made it up. StJohn created that page and added that friend to my page. He’d probably created it with AI. He had birthed many AI “friends” whose job it was to praise him on his page or harass his enemies. I printed this picture and mailed it to the EPD computer crimes, asking them to include it in my file.

Six weeks earlier, the Eugene Weekly editor emailed me that I was on the list for an investigative article. But she didn’t write back anymore. I wrote her again now, but I knew she would stay silent. Either she was hacked or she decided against the article. If she wasn’t hacked, a polite no thanks would have been professional, since she offered an investigation. I figured she was hacked, but of course I wouldn’t learn the details, not until we were all very old.

My funds had dipped to a hundred dollars. I didn’t have it in me to return to the grocery yet, or talk to them about the week in the hospital, and I was fired. They called it “job abandonment.” One more part-time check was on the way, a very short check. Since the job was twenty-seven hours a week, I hadn’t earned enough to float for a bit. When I applied to a city agency, they approved money for rent, paying my landlord directly. It was Stjohn’s bill, but they paid it. Boon was right—I was pure commie.

I cleared out bags of books I didn’t want and many broken things, an old toaster that refused to pop up, and a shattered red-glass lamp shade in a plastic bag. There were shirts and coats I never wore—all of it went to the trash. I wasn’t moving, but it felt good to tidy up. Things were working out, in some depressing, off-kilter way. I sold my car, I got help with rent, my hospital bill was covered.

But I had a hacker who was fixated on my son, and I spent time conjuring his murder—the gun I’d use, a 38 Special with hollow points, and his frightened eyes before I opened a fist-sized hole where his nose used to be.

It was good I didn’t like guns. Things rarely worked out well for the ones who used them, and after a while I put the murder images away. Murder was Stjohn’s territory, not mine.

Next day I bussed out to Rachel’s house, jumped off at the boulevard and tramped down the long road past small houses built very close together. We all had dinner and Leo told me he was studying Japanese every day on a language app.

“Maybe we can meet in Japan someday,” I said.

“I’d be happy to translate for you.”

“Good. One of us should know the language.”

When Rachel and I stayed up, I found I couldn’t drink more than two or three sips of wine. I lay on the couch.

“You can sleep there if you don’t want to mess with the bus.”

“I have to quit taking these new drugs,” I said. “At the bus station, I thought your house was in South Eugene.”

“That’s the opposite way. Are you all right?”

“I’m better. I’ll keep getting better.” I told her more about the pictures my hacker was sending, and the death image of the child face-down in a field.

“He’s only trying to drive you crazy,” she said. “Your complaints about him are all over your email—and your blog. Stjohn knows that.”

My voice was groggy and slow. “I only hope he’s in charge of all that evil in him. I’m not sure if he controls it . . . or if it controls him.”

I blinked at the muted cooking show on TV, everyone zany and laughing hard. Rachel picked up Leo’s glass and two small plates from the coffee table and stood in front of the TV.

“He wants you to do something to put yourself in the hospital,” she said. “He wants you to spend all your money so you have no resources. He’s a manipulator. He works people. He’s not a killer.”

“No, he is. A person who intentionally tries to drive someone to kill himself is a killer.”

“Well, do you think Leo’s in danger?”

I thought about it. “No—I still believe Stjohn wouldn’t jeopardize his own safety. But he is, well, he is psychotic, but not in the way I used to mean it. I mean . . . he’s actually psychotic. But he stays online, as far as I know. Leo said he’s never seen anything on his phone that wasn’t kid friendly. I think he’d tell me if he had—he’d like to see Stjohn get in trouble.”

“He’s already in trouble.”

“One of the Christian scholars boosts my posts now and then. Every time they boost one, I get about five hundred new visits to my site. I’m waking up, talking about Stjohn.”

“Good. Blast that devil.”

“Someone must be emailing my posts via their own email list. The news is getting out, even though the post is offline.”

“They’re helping you. Now you can back away from social media. Get off Facebook, for starters. Don’t look at it anymore. Shut down his central toys for harassment. He’s not going to get you or Leo. We’ll get you a typewriter and you can go offline. I’m already getting alerts on what sites Leo visits. He can only look at his phone in the living room, when I’m up.”

“Okay,” I said, and soon I went to sleep.

All it took was a few days without Abilify to get my memory back.







At a Christian event in Georgia the next month, Mathew Stjohn was preparing to moderate a discussion among three authors—his first public appearance since he was fired for sexual harassment. He had eased off hacking in the weeks before his appearance. He hacked much less when he was happy, naturally.

But something must have happened to Mathew ’s hope to ascend. In days, he hacked me very hard. I wrote a letter to the Christian scholars about it. I also thanked the person—I left him or her unnamed—who sent back my self-addressed-stamped-envelopes. (On a landline call, I had asked someone on the email list if he could tell me what dates he received my emails each month, as I wasn’t sure they were all getting through. This person returned the information in the envelopes I sent).

On the day I mentioned the envelopes to the Christian scholars, an elderly professor emailed me, “REMOVE ME FROM THIS LIST. COMPLY IMMEDIATELY!!” He had been on my email list for eight years, but now he had to leave as if exiting a burning building. Stjohn must have believed he was the man who returned my envelopes—he was a fiction writer who taught “neurodiverse literature”—and he hacked the elderly man as if spinning him about like a beachball in water, until he was fearful and shaken.

Around this time, a false Word alert appeared whenever I started to write: “Someone has made changes since you were last here,” as if Word could tell the difference. Another hack required me to enter a password before working on my manuscript. Most of the time I was able to work anyway.

Mary Owen was hacked during the week she was writing a blurb for this book. She wrote very upset and afraid, and said many things that didn’t seem to be the real cause of her distress. I asked her twice if she had been hacked, and both times she left the question unanswered.

When I created a new email account and sent pitches to agents one day, at the library, there were no bounce-back messages, such as “Give us six weeks to respond,” etc. My thumb drive was probably infected, sending its location to Mathew Stjohn. Most New York agents wouldn’t like to receive a handwritten query, but I wasn’t sure what else I could do.

At home that night, my Netflix and Prime Video had been logged off and passwords removed. The available browser showed an old Prime account, and the customer service phone number reached a phone sex line—I didn’t know they still had those. Father Peeks must’ve had an app in which the hacker typed the nine-digit number that his victim would see online, then below that, the number he’d actually reach.

All the ill-gotten toys of a full-grown Christian leader whose true passion was tormenting others. “No pleasure but meanness,” says the Misfit.

Stjohn was using a profile picture on his accounts that looked hurt and menacing—a threat, a warning. He had removed from Google pictures the photo of himself smiling, taken in his thirties when he was a successful young Christian editor.

One editor didn’t respond to two emails over two months, so I finally called him. He said he hadn’t received any new emails from me. Then he searched my name and found both of them. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m usually very good at staying on top of my email.”

StJohn had changed his censorship game regarding email. Many editors and others weren’t getting my emails, but they found them lower down in their email boxes, after I called them or rewrote. That way, the emails would appear overlooked but not deleted. People found this hard to believe, but he didn’t only control my email, but the emails of others I corresponded with.

When one of the Christian scholars wrote me that he didn’t believe StJohn could get into my email or make my computer hiss, I wrote this on my increasingly long Stjohn post:

I have heard so many people over the years express doubts about a hacker's ability to control various worlds online and inside a computer. Someone on Facebook asked me, "So this person enters Facebook headquarters, and then what?" That's a common one. In fact, the hacker gets into your Facebook app. He doesn't need to go to 1 Hacker Way and get past Zuckerberg's karate moves. Once a hacker's in your computer, he can access everything that you do. He can see your screen the same as you do--if he's advanced, that is.

“Change your passwords." This is advice I've heard from tech people, many who make a lot of money. This advice is also a favorite of cops. Even IT "experts" will tell you that you need to change passwords often. You should change them to guard against low-level types. But advanced hackers use a technique called "forced entry" to bypass passwords. I remember when I was in Pittsburgh I was changing my passwords all the time, and that never worked. StJohn may have some program that captures password changes. But don't forget, Russian and Chinese hackers have recently blasted their way into Pentagon computers, despite the most advanced defenses in the world, and owned them at every level. A good hacker can certainly get into my computer and yours.

At any rate, yes, he gets into Gmail, Facebook, Blogger, LinkedIn--all of the apps.

Regarding his ability to reorder Google content, one person told me years ago, "I doubt he has access." Again, hackers hack. They don't ask for passwords or dig them out of your trash. I have documented that many items rise and fall rapidly on my Google pages. StJohn even wallpapered my Google pages with porn descriptions--In 2019 I Googled my name and there they were--and it took three days for the junk to clear out.

Many believe that the process of changing Google content involves greasing the algorithms and spending a lot of time finessing downward movement of content. The people at Reputation dot com don't use dark webs techniques, and if they do, they sure wouldn't want you to know it.

There's a lot of innocence about hacking. But things are changing. More people know what spoofing is now, for instance. The FBI knows that a spoofer owns your phone and can send your pictures of your naked body to your husband's friend, so it looks like you're sending it to flirt. And the FBI no longer says corny, low-level stuff like, "Did you change your passwords?"

If an IT dude who seems smart about defending your computer but has no experience dealing with an advanced hacker--if he tells you "nobody's getting in" and "change your passwords," I hope you'll be a bit skeptical.

IT people repeat "change your passwords" like a mantra. That's wise, since you don't want a spammer to use your Gmail account to send out a thousand messages about flipping houses in your name. But anyone who knows about high-level hacking knows that hackers hack, and they don't need passwords.

A large part of StJohn’s hacking involves spoofing--especially a technique I call invisible layering. In other words, when I'm corresponding with someone in text, StJohn can send items in my name that become part of the text on their end, but I can't see the additions on my end, in the text I'm writing.



My head was a box for digital fire storms, and I was exhausted by it. There was no escape from it, not in the street, not in the bar. I had to get out and walk and not think. One day at the river—it was warm and windy, and many kids shouted at the play area down the path—I lay under a tree and closed my eyes and saw a burning screen. When I opened my eyes, there were white clouds and blue sky. Beyond the play area, a dragon kite flew, its long body shook in the wind as it descended, then it climbed back up. A kite was a wonderful idea. I’d have to buy one for Leo. I was unable to fathom whether Leo was in danger. StJohn was unhinged, and he clearly wanted to come across like a killer. But I was foolish to keep checking Facebook, where I made myself an audience to his psychological trolling.

I gave up social media at that moment. I became addicted to the news instead, within a week, but the news didn’t come with that red notification bar that Facebook had, so I didn’t have to keep checking my phone when I was reading a book.

One day, I tried to get another restraining order. About twenty of us who sought the order waited on the third-floor of the courthouse. The walls were made of smooth gray brick, suggesting a style from 1957. Mounted on the wall was a bouquet of three small pine trees of black steel. The branches looked bare and suggested the aftermath of a forest fire. When a bearded fat man in a tweed jacket and mauve slacks came toward us, his chin raised, I knew it was the judge. He walked past us in our seats against a wall and turned at the corner of the hallway. In a minute, his young assistant, a cheerful woman in a skirt and blazer, opened the door and announced that court was in session. Inside, we found the robed judge at his high desk, and we all raised our right hands.

He granted the first two orders on his list, then called my name. His face had the expression of contempt that I was used to in many judges—they didn’t like any mention of hacking—and he called me to the long desk below him. He said, “I’m not granting this order for you.”

“Didn’t you see those death images of children?”

“I see no death images.” He sorted through my pages that I had given at the intake window downstairs. “This is the fourth restraining order you’ve requested. I believe it shows an obsession.” He pronounced the word quickly, as if it was a nasty thing he had to rid himself of. “And it has nothing to do with this StJohn person.”

“The kid facedown in the field was the first page of evidence.”

“It’s not here. I’ve explained that. I’m not sure it ever was here.”

“Well, I saw it there, when I submitted everything at intake. I still have the file on my email. I printed it at the library yesterday.”

“I’m not following your crumbs into the dark forest,” he said. “You should stop going there yourself. You have better ways to spend your time.”

Outside, I lifted my umbrella in the rain. For a moment I felt uncertain of my freedom, as if sheriff deputies might step out to take hold of me for attempting to deceive the court. A suspicious, scornful, and unreasonable judge . . . Lost evidence . . . Maybe it was just a normal day in a small-town court. But those death images of kids were there. Maybe StJohn had plucked them out, once they were uploaded. Of course, it was crazy even to consider that. But he’d edited my book, my blog functions and entries, my police reports, Amazon, Facebook, Gmail, Google, and he tracked my plans and movements on maps, emails, and texts. He sure could’ve altered documents in a little courthouse like this one.

I walked to a café around the corner and stood in line with the lawyers in trench coats, and sat at one of the small round tables. But it wasn’t all lawyers at the tables. I removed my tie and shoved it into my backpack, as I didn’t want anyone to think I was an attorney.

It wouldn’t have mattered if the judge had seen my evidence. He would’ve looked at a style of harassment he’d never seen before, and therefore dismissed it. It was true they had their statutes and careful rules and criteria. But they also couldn’t come out and say, “We’re helpless. We lack the skills and knowledge about hacking. We’re forced to present a hostile face against you, rather than enter the black hole of a hacking case where we’d lose our persona of order and control.”

The only time a judge would admit that was in a bad dream. It was interesting also that they all said such different things. Their statutes may have been clear, but anything they said about hacking was all over the map. They seemed completely unstudied in this area. Though I also lacked the tech, I would’ve been happy to teach a class to the judges regarding my experience. At least they might learn what getting hacked looked like and felt like.

When I finished my coffee and moved toward the door, a tall young man who had feathered, longish hair took my arm. He was one of those in the courtroom. One of his eyes had a mild squint, suggesting a humored cynicism. He wore a black leather vest over a shirt without a collar.

“Only when we have no privacy to write and think on our computers will we finally have the technology to fight hackers,” he said. He stood behind a large group who were ordering.

“Some people win hacking cases. A few, here and there.”

“I didn’t mean that as discouragement. It was only a philosophical comment. That judge was harsh with you.”

“Did he approve yours?” I asked.

“No,” he said, but he didn’t say what it was about.

“Well, I’ll try again in a few months.”

I went out to the rain and walked a half block before I remembered the umbrella in my hand and opened it. A black van accelerated behind me and blasted past, “A Ray of Light” issuing from its open window. On a rear door was a three-foot sticker depicting a rocker with his guitar. The driver punched the gas further to make the light at the end of the block. I was sure it was the judge, heading to McDonald’s.

Many have commented about the arbitrariness of the law—especially frightening when prison time was at stake—but for a judge to get so personal and nasty when a child’s safety was at issue was repellant.





When a temp agency called about picking pears in Eastern Oregon for a month, I caught a Greyhound and stepped down in Medford. After the fourth day picking, I had the strength to trot with my ladder—it was wide at the bottom and skinny up top—and run up into the trees to pick two-handed in ninety-degree heat. My half-bucket apparatus fit close against my stomach, with the straps forming an X against my back. The greatest trick was to find the shiners, pears that were hidden in the leaves. You found them by running your hand along the undersides of the branches while you picked.

My crew was stronger after three days, and I was stronger with them. In the row next to ours, a Mexican crew approached with their Mariachi music, talking together and singing, and they were far past us by the first break, although they appeared to move with ease. At lunch, they were far across the orchard, a half mile away. In the distance were slanted dark hills where the shadows of small clouds moved like ships.

Sirus rested in the shade of a tree, his baseball hat covering his dreads. He had kids from three marriages in two states and he played it like they were a big family. All of his children were “high-vibrational beings,” and they were easy about life, occupied by their own interests.

“Are we supposed to keep up with these crews?” I asked.

“No. They’re some of the best workers in the world, hired from all over Mexico. They make more money than we do.”

“Where will you go next?” I asked him.

“To live on the open ocean in my sailboat. The only thing left to learn is how to tow a garden.”

“For how long?” I said.

“For the rest of my life.” He appeared angry and excited at once.

I laughed. He had admitted that he was a “crazy hippie.” When he failed to assure me that he was really going to live on the ocean—to make me believe it by dazzling me with his many preparations and so on—I supposed he was serious.

The orchard boss’s horn squawked, signaling the end of break. Our crew continued its slow path to the end of the orchard, four native English speakers in a workforce of three hundred. There was a high school kid who was nineteen, who claimed he was four hundred pounds, and an old man, both of them steady workers who rarely talked.

“This tree is telling me her story!” Sirus called to me. “She’s happy to give up her fruits. This is her life’s purpose.”

“You want to believe all that stuff,” I said. “But I don’t think you really do.”

“All living beings tell their story.” His grin flashed behind branches.

In the bunkhouse after dinner—it was a warehouse full of a hundred men—I resisted the heavy sleep that would come. His sailboat plan was cowardly or it was heroic. He was going after something or he was running away. I really couldn’t tell. But the idea took me, the swelling waves of the sea, the ships, the rafts of garbage out there, and everything that was below. The open ocean. For the rest of my life.

But one evening the following week, at the cafeteria, he asserted that carrots were high-vibrational beings, and I dismissed this as lunacy.

“You’re trying to be the dark figure in my dream,” he said.

“Maybe so,” I said and smiled at him. “There’s a reason why you’re escaping to the ocean. Are you going toward something, or away?”

“I don’t need this negativity, man.”

He rose with his tray and set it down with some of his many friends among the Mexicans. His friends included women, who worked in packaging. Sirus was good-looking and communicated a lot with expressions, though his Spanish was even worse than my tourist Spanish.

Workers were up late in the massive bunkhouse—Saturday night, and no work the next day. Sirus was outside talking to three women under a streetlight. I went up to them. One of them spoke a little English. She wore a black baseball hat.

“Why don’t they let women work in the orchard?” I said.

“We want to work in packaging,” she said. “We have conversations.”

“We have conversations in the orchard.”

“You’re not a good worker, though. He is. Sirus is a good worker.”

She went away, stepping in the gravel. The other two went with her.

“Sorry to break up the conversation,” I told Sirus.

He sat on a picnic table by the bunkhouse. “You can’t be social. Your vibrations are therefore low, when you’re nervous. But they’re very high when we’re working together. You need to transfer that working creature to social situations.”

“I do better one on one, I guess. I’m going to bed.”

“Hey, we’d both like the female spirit to animate the orchard. The universe heard you stand up for that. That’s all it takes for the world to start a change.”

“I can’t tell if you’re joking around when you talk like that.”

“It’s my tapestry. I want to believe these things. It doesn’t mean I always do. Listen, I did my work as a father and a husband. There are tensions there. But now I’m choosing another way. It’s not dark, man. It’s light.” He smiled warmly. “Good luck sleeping in the loud music and stinky feet.”

The next day was Sunday—a day off. I had written an editor who had published a disgruntled interview and took heat for it, and she wrote back. We fell into a rapid exchange that lasted a half hour. She asked me to send her anything that might be right for the magazine, and that was her last line written to me. I sent her a story and asked her to confirm receipt. I refreshed the browser in the bathroom, the kitchen, the front yard, and I knew what had happened. The next week I wrote her again. She didn’t write back. My only question to myself was, did Stjohn send dick pics so that they appeared to come from me, or was it some other form of hacking?

Stjohn viewed my screens always, even on Sundays anymore. I had looked up his church. It was shut down. He must’ve found a way to take communion. Maybe a priest friend stopped by his house carrying a black box containing the sacred body and blood of Christ, executing a quick administration of the sacrament before Stjohn tramped back to his office.

On the last day, as Sirus and I waited for the school busses to take us to the airport or Greyhound, I told him I expected a letter from him. We stood in the parking lot, each of us assigned a bus number.

“No letters, my friend,” he said. “No computers. No phones.”

“No neighbors. No electric bills. And no pants.”

“That’s right.”

“Will you see your families before you go?”

“I may, I may not. I’ve already done the honor of bringing my children into the world, and I’ve given the women joy, as they gave to me.”

“You won’t see your kids, for the rest of your life. I say that amazed, not judgmental.”

“I see my children every day,” he said. “I see their faces in the sky. I see them running across the hills.”

“Here’s my bus pulling in.” I raised my hand goodbye and walked the other way.

In the town, I had the day to wait for my Greyhound. At the library I wrote two decimating emails to the Christian scholars, setting a fire and dumping on the gasoline, despite the nice feeling I had after picking pears with friends. But a couple of hours later I wrote a third email.

Sorry for overwriting. I know the just thing in me is also the flawed thing. Stjohn and I are similar, both of us built with a supernatural force in us that won't quit, and we pursue our work and our nemesis in the same day, the same hour. We like the fight, the way a bright detective and a bright criminal enjoy it, though of course we are making our hearts sick. Like all men of justice, I have neglected to admit my similarity to the one I'm chasing. My avatar of detective flickers in a digital malfunction, and when I pass a storefront I see in the glass that I'm the criminal now. It's something like Nietzsche said, that when you choose to have an enemy, you will become like him, and I have done so. I'm more wounded, more sensitive, quicker to take offense, though with my good qualities too. I wonder if you'd believe it if I told you that Stjohn’s passing, when it happens, would hit me like an estranged brother's.





Those were my best words about Mathew Stjohn in eight or nine years. I felt light-hearted knowing I was a bastard in this fight, the hatred in me growing larger with every sunrise, and I could have ignored it from the start. As I shared culpability, there was room to make a choice, and I was free a little bit.

I snoozed in the hot shade at the city park, waking many times to glimpse the low brown hills, full of shadows, slanting like tilted fields, at the edge of town. The hills were expansive and untouched, the great rocks appearing small enough to lift and carry in one hand for no purpose but the fun of it.

On the bus to Eugene, I welcomed the tiredness as fences near the road jumped and dipped and swung away and came back, as if trying to escape their track. When a supervisor at the EPD computer crimes called, CSO Ferrier, I answered his questions. He said he’d looked at the post on my site. He wanted to know how my hacker was placing the death images in my profile list for my Facebook friends.

“He hacks into the app, not the corporate website. That’s really all I know. I’m not sure about the technical side, beyond that. But he gets into many sites and wallpapers them with whatever junk he wants to.”

“Well, this isn’t what you want to hear, but I referred this case to the FBI. It’s beyond our expertise. You’ll have to start over with someone else. We don’t have the tools or training for this level.”

I kept him on the phone going over other things I’d learned about hacking. He was a good listener for a cop—for anyone.

“He made a mistake when he went after kids,” he said. “FBI won’t confirm receipt of my materials, but you can file a report to let them know that I referred it.”

It was good to talk about hacking, but I didn’t have a lot of faith in the FBI. Nothing was going to come of it. The Oregon FBI intake officers on the phone had often asked me snarky questions like, “So what’s this guy’s motivation?” as if a Yale-trained Christian leader was out of step with their hacker stereotypes. Also, the FBI wanted hard physical evidence and direct threats like, “I’m going to kill you.” That made sense, but it didn’t account for subtle, careful harassers, who were also dangerous and capable of anything. I doubted they’d want to take long looks at a bunch of photos of kids who weren’t directly part of any investigation.

Still, a police supervisor had found something there—a threat. Maybe my material would land in the right hands at the FBI too.

“Are you kidding me?” Rachel said when I called her now. “This is amazing! A huge boost to your credibility. The police saw something in your files. Let people know about this. No matter what happens, they referred your case to the FBI. Now other organizations will be open to your complaint. Who knows, you might tell your story to Oregon senators in a few years.”

“It is good. Yes. I see it. You’re right. This could open doors.”

My small house was in the backyard of some friendly pot smokers who were a satisfactory mix of country and hippie, on a street with high pine trees, next to the Masonic Graveyard—a pleasant and well-tended place to walk. My landlady liked me and she liked Leo, who impressed her friends with his humor and smarts at the regular bonfires.

Fall-time found me with the usual suspicious rejections. A New York publisher, who was eager to see my complete manuscript and invited it, went silent—no polite rejection or update from one who asked to see my book many months before.

The hacking played out on smaller stages too. When a Serbian friend, a magazine editor, asked for a story, she said it had a virus banner attached to it. “I hope you’re not going to fuck my laptop,” she wrote on Messenger. I went through all the explanations. “I think I’m going to block you,” she wrote. “You went to court and still he does this to you? It’s your fault.”







Leo came over to stay at my place on the weekend—eight years old by now—and set down his language briefcase, with his many practice sheets and alphabets. After drinking sodas, we crossed the street to the park. Under a tree he saw a rock with a woman’s name. “Is that a grave?” he said. He was worried.

“No, it’s a memorial, nothing underneath it. Good wishes from a friend.”

“Oh, nice.” He squatted and patted the rock. “Nice to see you,” he told the woman.

He got in with a bunch of kids on the merry-go-round. He yelled at a boy his age: “The Orca whale has a bite force of nineteen-thousand pounds!” Leo laughed, his hair flying. Two boys and a small girl grinned at him.

When he ran shouting, kids followed him. On a climbing structure, he pointed out to a boy something on the wall. “It’s somebody’s privates.” He covered the girl’s eyes. “Don’t look.”

After forty minutes, he picked up a flat rock as big as a plate, from the dirt near the fence. “Can I take this?” he asked.

“Sure. I don’t think they’d miss it.”

“I’m ready to go back to your house.”

On the carpet he opened his briefcase and pulled out alphabet sheets and a black marker. Leo studied phrases in Japanese, Latin, and Elvish. He’d taught me how to say “Come join us” in Elvish: “Talo, govano ven.” He brought out a few Japanese words, pronouncing them well.

He found a sheet that had the Sumerian alphabet and spent two hours drawing letters in black ink, from 5000 BC, on the rock. It was gorgeous writing, and not just for a kid. Some of the letters were like musical notes, others like arrows and drawbridges. He had studied languages for months, on his own.

“Dear God, Leo! Look what you did with an old stone you found. You’re a smart one.”

“Not really.”

“Of course you are. What’s it say?”

“It’s a Sumerian bar joke! It’s a dog walks into a bar joke. I’d rather keep it to myself.”

“What do your teachers say about this language interest?”

“They like it. Okay, I’m going to play my game now.” He lay on the couch with his phone.

On the couch together, Leo and I pursued our separate interests. I read the crime novel Your House Will Pay, and my body heated as I resisted writing an email to the Christian scholars. Stjohn had recently spoofed a threatening Facebook cancelation notice to my landlord, using my phone. He impersonated my son in Digital Touch, inviting me to play a game where we touched the colored dots, though Leo told me later that he’d never used that app. He didn’t care about the FBI. He was his own private CIA operation.

Leo laughed at something he saw in his screen. I felt his laughter in my chest, and closed my hand around his ankle and shook his leg a little. My laptop on my desk seemed possessed with black energy, as if it wished to drag me across the room so that I would write savage email number 2027.

But I left it alone. There would be time for combat some other time. I was certain Stjohn and I would fight until the very end of our days, when it was urgent to think of our actions in life, the people we loved, and how we had spent our precious time.