I can say from experience that he doesn't work much as a publisher. He works his psyops machine throughout the day, here using a light touch, here pulling that lever with a manic hostile force. He also has time to set up false hold music for the employment department calls, and shunts my Author Central phone calls to criminal scammers. He has time to hack my publisher and delete other submissions.
The overall profile presented in this post is of someone who hacks hard and does it a lot. Since I know he uses AI to create social media avatars, I suspect he relies on AI to read incoming manuscripts.
At this stage of his career, Greg is employed as a full-time criminal. Almost every day I feel his rage. But these emotions were evident when he ran Image, too, when he hacked me with child porn and seized on my then-wife's phone to get his peeks. Therefore Greg has been possessed with this great sexual rage and need to cause harm for a long time.
His child targeting and child death hacks are the most disturbing to me, naturally. Something happened to Greg to make him do these things. I have speculated that he was molested as a child. A person doesn't simply emerge into the world with a desire to target kids . . .
It makes sense that he sends dick pics to women, as he did to my date, and torments women like Camilla at Eugene Weekly. When she signed up to investigate Greg, I never heard from her again. But I did hear from someone in her office who told me their voicemail had been mysteriously replaced. I'm sure he hacked Camilla every which way, until she wept and Greg smiled at the pleasure of her suffering.
I believe Greg's predator behaviors with respect to women serve as an enjoyable activity in the absence of sex. He's isolated and sexless, enraged by rejection and the circumstance of age, and he's getting back.
He doesn't only hack women. But the adolescent porn he spoofed to me supported the sex trafficking of girls and financed the killers who made the film.
Greg is a Russian-style porn hacker. When he goes to the Dark Webs for more techniques, he's learning from men who traffic girls. Even when Greg hacks men, he's a misogynist. One time he loaded the top of my Facebook followers with Russian soldiers, prostitutes, and a child porn operation. Greg likes to keep it scary. Guys who cut women on gurneys and sell toddlers on the black market are "strong men." They assist Greg in his campaign of terror. He uses this material because he wants you to shut the hell up, now. He wants to show that he's the one in charge . . .
October 20, 2025 . . .
Last week I called the unemployment department for the fourth time over three months. My online access had been inexplicably blocked. Each time I called I was able to type in a claim on my phone, and each time the call went to false hold music. I used to work at OED, so I know what hold music they used. I looked it up and found they haven't changed their hold music.
Each time I was on the phone for hours. No one ever picked up. Even during Covid--the highest call volume in history--I could talk to an agent eventually.
Last week I hung up, after waiting too long, and an OED employee called and said she saw I had tried to file a claim. We filled out a claim together on the phone, and I discovered I do have a valid claim. There are still a few steps to complete. She recommended I work with Worksource to finish everything up.
Someone at Worksource confirmed that OED uses the same old hold music. Greg used generic classical and wind instruments to create fake hold music and kill my claim. ("Fake OED Music," August 16).
Greg has set up fake voicemails at Eugene Weekly and even at my doctor's office ("Continues Email-Deletion Campaign," January 25).
Meddling with employment insurance is considered fraud or theft, a possible felony in some states. Maybe presenting my case to an Oregon senator would go somewhere.
But since Greg didn't "log in" or leave an IP, he won't get caught--at least not until someone knowledgeable and competent can review these pages and examine my computer.
Greg continues to use his psyops of rhythmic hissing on my computer ("Psychotic Harassment," July 26). But I try to cover it up with white noise or music.
I looked up the phone number that showed as "Salem" on my phone, and found it's linked to a PI number when I Googled it. But PIs don't pretend to be government employees if they want to keep their license.
This is how OED hold music actually sounds:
I hope that some of you could print out these files and mail them to the Seattle FBI. It seems the only way to supply them with the complete file.
Greg has hacked with child death images, interfered with unemployment services, killed jobs, and used a psyops technique to cause grievous harm. I believe these are crimes that the FBI would notice if they were able to see them.
[Note: 4/27/25]. This screenshot has recently been blurred by Greg the censor (and the original email deleted) because it shows that the editor invited me to submit. She says, "Please send me any of your writing you'd like me to consider for hobart." She also says she'd love to hear what I've done with my writing since graduating from Iowa.
Spoofs My Landlord and Tries to Get Me Kicked out of My HouseOn January17 2024 I received a spam letter that stated my Facebook account was going to close. I took a screenshot of it. The next day I saw that the letter had been texted to my landlord from my phone, known as spoofing. But I hadn't texted her this.
When I tried to explain spoofing to her, she didn't understand it. She said, "This was obviously sent by you. I can see your email in the screenshot." Of course my folders are in the picture. I was the one who took the screenshot.
I tried to explain that a hacker has total control of your phone. He controls all your photos and screenshots, and all the functions. If you take a nude selfie, for instance, your hacker can send it to your husband's best friend, from your phone, so that it appears that you sent the pic. One purpose of spoofing is for a hacker to send disturbing images etc. to your boss, your spouse, your kid--to cause rancor and distrust in relationships, because such texts appear to come from your phone, your name. But it's just a spoof, a trick. Your hacker is the one who sent it.
My hacker wanted my landlord to believe that I'm the type of person who sends spammy, creepy, and threatening letters of this kind.
from Law Enforcement Tips the ScaleJune 24, 2025. I had a terrific conversation with the Eastern University HR manager last month. When Greg announced that he was teaching there this summer--and exclaimed how happy he was--I called HR. Greg has shot down several of my applications to teach at universities, as I have discussed. But more than that, I wanted to let her know that Greg sends child porn and all the rest of it. People like Greg should be challenged.
HR's biggest concern was that Eugene law enforcement had found alarming items in this GW file. She said it wouldn't be legal to fire Gregory Wolfe without having been convicted first. But she agreed it was a brand issue for the college, and my city's law enforcement action gave credibility to my allegations. She said she was going to look at these pages and have some "meaningful conversations." . . .
Another Editor HackedIn October 2023 I was going to submit a story to my friend who runs a literary journal in Serbia. She had asked me to send a story, and seemed disappointed when I had told her I couldn't separate a story from my published book. Then I found two stories for her. In the exchange below, she reveals that she was being hacked.
November 1, 2025. Greg attacks my class again, dropping calls and making static on the line. Greg loves this kind of harassment. He can use his hacking tools and try to sour professional relationships.
Interaction with Eugene Weekly Editor
December 26, 2024. I ran into Camilla, the editor of Eugene Weekly the other day, out front of the magazine's office--the one who volunteered to do an article about Gregory Wolfe's hacking months earlier but went silent. I believe she went silent because she was hacked. She was about to go into the office when I was stopping by to tell her the news about the police referral to the FBI. She seemed quite spooked. She put on a mask and didn't want to make eye contact. When I asked if she'd been hacked, she said, "Nope."
Greg Places His Face on My Blog as Warning
March 20, 2024. Greg placed his face on my blog after I posted "A Christian Leader's Life." My blog has always used the picture on the top post for the site picture (after two or three days), no matter how popular a post below it might be. This Moses pic was on my blog for two weeks.
The Censorship Publisher
January 6, 2025. I got an email from a publisher this morning telling me that an old manuscript I submitted to her years ago had been rejected without their knowledge, due to a "possible bug." I think that bug was named Gregory Wolfe.
Spoofs Dick Pics to my Date
December, 2022. I met a Latina who managed a bowling alley at Valley River Center. We planned to go out on a date.
When she and I began texting, she said she received "strange" pics, and said she liked the internet at first but now she didn't trust anyone. I never heard from her again.
The screenshots were deleted from my phone. It's lucky that I had posted them in a private Facebook post.
He also placed a file called "Spoofy Files" that shows a thousand hacks Greg has done, not worth showing as most of them come from this post.
Publisher Lawrence Knorr accepted "The Lord's Hacker" in September 2024. A couple of months later, he told me on the phone that the Christian leader's character was interesting. I asked him if the hacking moments seemed too fantastic, and he told me he believed they could be done.
Five months after that, he released me from my contract. He said that I had complained too much about my editor's rewriting my characters and the staff had lost their generosity toward me. They insisted they were only trying to "help" my book.
He obviously arrived at an about face, and I believe he had Greg's help in that. Also, a publisher writing a negative review about a character in an email that promised a termination letter, seven months after the book's acceptance, seems unaccountably strange--especially since the publisher had read the book before and claimed to like that character . . .
The presentation suggests that the closure was due to Greg's absence. Of course, Greg wanted to give that impression. And there is an obvious intention to communicate that it's still closed! You have to select an ambiguous link at the bottom ("details of closure") to see that the journal is now open.
[I had to click on "Details of closure" to see that Image "did not close." This information was not on the main page.]
I wanted to address any who might believe I have no evidence, simply because I lack an IP or a photograph of my hacker caught in the act. As Judge Charles Carlson told me at the hearing, I have evidence that would be persuasive in civil court, and my assertions raise many questions that point directly to Gregory Wolfe. (Carlson said this in 2022, when I had less evidence).
For instance, who wrote the fake Image search results for Gemini? It had to be someone who is a master hacker and who hates Image. I doubt there are two people who fit this description. It was Greg.
Who placed Greg's picture on my blog for two weeks, a threatening gesture, after my post went live? Only my hacker would place his image on my blog.
Who removed the many followers of this blog right before I posted the Gregory Wolfe post? Some other nemesis?
Who deleted the photo I took of my son sitting in front of his computer?
If it was a different hacker, he must have been very sympathetic to Gregory Wolfe and spent a lot of time covering for him and concealing his crimes.
_________________________________________
(after 5, the post continues 1 through 4)
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At any rate, 80,000 isn't a high number these days. It's Greg's number. But he's even working to keep his own low number from reaching 80,000.
Publisher Lawrence Knorr accepted "The Lord's Hacker" in September 2024. A couple of months later, he told me on the phone that the Christian leader's character was interesting. I asked him if the hacking moments seemed too fantastic, and he told me he believed they could be done.
Five months after that, he released me from my contract. He said that I had complained too much about my editor's rewriting my characters and the staff had lost their generosity toward me. They insisted they were only trying to "help" my book.
He obviously arrived at an about face, and I believe he had Greg's help in that. Also, a publisher writing a negative review about a character in an email that promised a termination letter, seven months after the book's acceptance, seems unaccountably strange--especially since the publisher had read the book before and claimed to like that character.
I believe Greg hacked Lawrence, just as he has hacked so many other publishers, and so the latter was forced to adjust his feelings and attitudes about that character. He must've figured Greg was reviewing our emails, and he wanted Greg to leave him alone.
The one commonality hacked people share is that they say very strange things in their rubber-legged, shaky-fingered panic.
It's true that text can go wonky on its own sometimes, but Greg's italics are always meaningful. In the italics above, I believe Greg is disputing that my book will ever be published in book form.
It shows that Greg is a censor and he has a lot to hide. This is how he spends his life, hiding things about himself. Block, block, block!
It's a subtle difference, but Greg's changes to screenshots are always subtle. There's a big difference between clicking on a profile pic and seeing it in full view. Greg intended to present an image of a military man with a delicious bloodlust, and this man filled my screen when I saw him.
His dream of having 4000 Hegseth Christian friends to follow and praise him must be dashed. He clearly blames me for all his troubles.
I have researched this, and Workday is supposed to be available even when you don't have an active job. This is what the homepage is supposed to look like, below. My home page used to look like this before it was changed to operate at 20 percent.
Greg is posting photos of himself that suggest a broken and sensitive soul on the edge of tears. It made him suffer that his targeting of kids and other crimes were brought to light.
When I checked the "followers" option in settings yesterday, I saw it was back, and I restored it, though he may disable it again. But I still have only the one follower. I don't expect anyone who knows about me and Gregory Wolfe to follow my blog though.
Greg is using the "Huh, what?" strategy regarding my assertions. He didn't delete my followers. He didn't disable comments. He didn't take this post offline. What motivation would Greg possibly have to manipulate this blog about him?
I can guarantee that the young hotties Greg invites to hotel rendezvous don't care what he did so long ago. But some of them might admire him if he told the truth about who he is and apologized.
But information about Whitworth seems current.
We showed the Christian world what he's about, but he's moving on.
I don't receive notices from Quillette. It's true that the hacked think almost everything is a hack, so it could be this email is a coincidence. But Greg likes to communicate with emails and memes, because we have an intense relationship and don't talk. When I was writing my book two years ago, my inbox was jammed with lawyer ads about defamation etc. It was obviously Greg generating those.
"In the wee hours of the morning of January 27, 2013, a Wikipedia editor named “Qworty” made a series of 14 separate edits to the Wikipedia page for the late writer Barry Hannah, a well-regarded Southern author with a taste for the Gothic and absurd.
"Qworty cut paragraphs that included quotes from Hannah’s work. He removed 20 links to interviews, obituaries and reminiscences concerning Hannah. He cut out a list of literary prizes Hannah had won.
"Two edits stand out. Qworty excised the phrase 'and was regarded as a good mentor' from a sentence that started: 'Hannah taught creative writing for 28 years at the University of Mississippi, where he was director of its M.F.A. program …' And he changed the cause of Hannah’s death from 'natural causes' to 'alcoholism.' But Hannah’s obituaries stated that he had died of a heart attack and been clean and sober for years before his death, while his role as a mentor was testified to in numerous memorials. (Another editor later removed the alcoholism edit.)
"The answer to this question is on the one hand simple, almost trivial: Qworty turned out to be another author who had a long history of resenting Hannah. The late night Wikipedia edits are certainly not the first time that a writer’s ego has led to mischief . . .
What was especially charming about this hacking trick was
that my post explores Greg’s manipulation of my posts, stories, novels, and
essays. I returned to the main-page post yet again and highlighted a phrase
that I had written in the third draft and screenshotted it. Only then was I
able to copy the final draft into my GW page.
It shows that Greg doesn’t care about committing censorship, though he has posted about his high morals regarding the subject on his site before. It might also suggest that he thinks he’s once again at the end of his rope, and so angry he doesn’t care about appearances. We know he’s been there before, when he lost his audience earlier this year.
November 21, 2025. I got very lucky when EPD manager, officer Kelsey Anderson forwarded my case to the FBI, even though the FBI doesn't pursue most hacking cases and may not tackle this one. Anderson's nod gave credibility to a case that's difficult to talk about to most people. Though I've been able to convince one cop, one judge, and one attorney that my case has merit, most of them refuse even to listen. Older people, especially, can't believe that a top-drawer hacker can hop around to public and private computer systems at will. It's not the world they're used to. In addition, you would need a Mark Zuckerberg to catch Gregory Wolfe, and most cops have only community-college-level experience in IT. That's why I took it upon myself to get the word out.
Judges and Law Enforcement
They do everything by the manual. The FBI even has a specific technique of taking phone calls. They pepper the caller with snarky questions and comments. "What's this guy's motivation?" or "I can guarantee he doesn't have any interest in your Facebook page." Then he or she begins the rapid closure of the phone call, talking in the dazzling speed of an auctioneer: "Thank you for calling the FBI. This call will be documented and you are free to follow up with a complaint." And they hang up on you. All intake people do this exactly the same way.
I know they are looking for words like "I'm going to kill you," etc. and that they are trained to dismiss anything about social media or otherwise frivolous concerns. But my hacker, in fact, uses social media and my Google page as a template in which to present child death images, underage porn, a photo of my friend who committed suicide, etc. It's true the FBI is looking for extortion and bodily harm, but my harassment case is horrifying and dangerous, not frivolous, not imagined, not paranoid, and deserves an investigation.
Judges also tend to dismiss almost all hacking claims. I've stood before a few judges who were visibly angry that I even brought a hacking case. Even while newspapers and attorneys say that Russian-style hacking is increasingly common in America, judges and law enforcement respond to this reality by refusing to believe it even exists.
Since this response makes no logical sense, I believe this shutting of the eyes is a psychological reaction. After all, law enforcement has not kept apace with the high-tech criminal hackers. To open up law dockets to hacking cases would be like opening a portal to a howling infinite that would cause headaches for courts, judges, and law enforcement.
And this is why judges and law enforcement regard with anger and distaste the person who brings forward a hacking case. They can't do anything about it! They don't have the tech. Psychologically they have hardened themselves against you, knowing that your possibly reasonable case can't even be considered. You almost become a criminal in their eyes.
The other day I sent a new picture of my son to the Christian scholars. He's ten, wears a hat over his long hair, and has a natural, happy smile. Even the most hardened prisoners know that children are sacred. But Greg, a "Christian," doesn't know that.
November 6, 2025. It was amazing that EPD's officer Kelsey Anderson forwarded this case to the Seattle FBI. But since Greg "edits" digital law enforcement files by removing the content that pertains to my son, I don't believe they ever received my complete file. When I have contacted the FBI, they don't seem to have the complete file. But they are trained to avoid direct questions and to get off the phone fast.
I hope that a few of you could print out these files and mail them to the Seattle FBI. Not to sign anyone up for chores, but if anyone has the time and wants to help me and my son, this would be an effective measure against Greg's deception. The FBI has an online data collection method for hacking cases, and Greg has a habit of selectively deleting evidence from digital files.
I also believe Greg can reroute my mail into a ditch. They use a digital system now and Greg has made many changes to my postal addresses, one resulting in a fraud alert being placed on my account. I fixed it, but it took some doing.
Greg has hacked with child death images, interfered with unemployment services, killed jobs, and used a psyops technique to cause grievous harm. I believe these are crimes that the FBI would notice if they were able to see them.
The thing that always saves me is writing. I found my way into a draft of a short story this morning. It finally came together and I loved working on it. That's the thing that always kills Greg's psychotic poison.
I mentioned this next story in The Lord's Hacker. When my wife and I split up and I moved to Cincinnati, Greg seized on the weakness of the moment, hacking me especially hard after I had lost my family. He was hacking me constantly and interrupting video calls with my son and draining my phone battery, and a lot more.
It was the first time I realized that Greg was trying to break me down. His hacking succeeded in making me want to swim in the river and not return to shore. He took my pain and tripled it. It's an attractive technique for a hacker because you can't take a screenshot of it, or document it in a clear way. But I understood that Greg had an evil in him that was larger than anything I had experienced.
Then I called a suicide hotline number. Greg keeps track of my calls and listens to them as well. After that night, he left me completely alone. I was able to write without my computer updating for one hour, and there was no other interference. The story I was working on was going very well, and I found a romance to my writing life in Cincinnati. After two weeks, I posted, "Feeling Byronic." That meant I had taken a gloomy mood and found something good in it.
When Greg saw that post and knew I wouldn't commit suicide, he gave me one of the worst hackings ever. It didn't bother me. I had come out of the bad place. But I'm certain he was enraged because I was still alive. He had many beautiful daydreams about my death, and I took those dreams from him.
I think of Jane as his partner in crime now. Like so many weak people, she tried to be a badass hacker. I discuss that in "Jane Smith is Breaking the Law." She had once been the lightest, most joyful, lovely person. Yes, she had been in the cult Christian Israel, but she was something special. Then in middle age she was so broken and embittered--after caring for five kids alone--that she started to rely on Greg for his murder techniques. She has always relied on strong men.
But she didn't understand that Greg is weak too. He has a surface persona that isn't really him, and this surface conceals a great need to inflict harm. People who have a great need to inflict pain are weak, even if they are killers. They have a small flame. They aren't substantial. Their surface qualities are borrowed and faked. They hide a black essence with a smile. They know they're not human in the best sense. Their violence comes from weakness.
I can only speculate about the source of Greg's rage, but I have wondered if he was molested as a child. This would explain his targeting of children that I have seen, his use of child material in his porn hacks, and other things involving kids that I haven't seen but are surely there. Almost always, child molesters and those who target children were molested themselves. Whatever happened to Greg, it was something very bad. I have no sympathy for that by the way. I believe the best way to handle a child molester is to-- I'll leave that sentence unfinished.
When I dated Jane, she was often visiting men in prison. She visited Mr. Christine who had kidnapped his kids from child welfare workers at gunpoint. And she visited some other guy who was in prison. She showed me his Facebook profile. He had wrapped clear tape around his face so that he looked like a bad facelift and deranged. She has always had a thing for "strong" men. To her that means men who are capable of violence that can be used to help her.
In 2023 Bernard Schweizer, editor of Heresy Press, invited me to submit a book. We hit it off, agreed on a lot of things, and sent occasional friendly emails. Then I made the mistake of telling him I had a hacker, since I figured he'd get hacked anyway if he accepted my book. I thought he might bristle at the censorship and stand up to it. Part of his mission involves standing up for free speech. But he went gloomy and wasn't interested anymore. This is a different case, since I was the one who mentioned it, but I figured telling him directly was my only chance. I don't know if he was hacked.
In 2023 Lara Dodds, English chair at Mississippi State, was warm and friendly in our phone conversation. She believed she could find some online classes for me. During our next conversation, the following month, she was distant and rude. She had no classes--a complete switch in tone--and there was no invitation to apply again. Such things happen, but when they are always happening, it feels very suspicious. It was the severe change in tone that was telling. I know that class availability can change in a department.
Margaret Perrow, English department chair at Southern Oregon University, emailed in 2022 that she was sure she could find a couple of classes for me. She complemented my resume and wrote back a hasty sorry, no jobs, and she would be in meetings for a month etc., adios forever. She seemed to have the panic that hacked people tend to have.
In 2022, the assistant of publisher Dennis Stovall, at Ooligan Press, invited a manuscript because I was friends with one of their authors. Then I received a rejection without comment. Since she invited the manuscript, I counted the lack of a single greeting in the rejection to be highly unusual and a likely hack. Publishers write back when rejecting a book that they invited, at least to say it's not a good fit, best of luck. Hacked people know they can't be in communication with me at all.
In 2022 an English chair in Ohio whose name I can't locate, because we only spoke on the phone, told me my experience sounded amazing. She looked at my site. She said they had ten positions opening up the next term, and advised me to apply immediately. When I applied and hit submit, there was no "success" note. The application simply disappeared--a common story because Greg deletes many of my applications. I called the chair and spoke to her secretary, who told me that none of those ten jobs were open. They had all been filled since the previous day.
Again, I understand the terror of a hack. I've felt it myself. But it's time to understand that hacking is a form of censorship--or a criminal nudge in a hiring decision--and remaining still and silent amounts to working hand in hand with a censor and a criminal. It's impossible to bemoan censorship in one case and capitulate to it in another. Things might change the more we learn about the Dark Web world of Russian-style porn hackers.
He also placed a file called "Spoofy Files" that shows a thousand hacks Greg has done, not worth showing as most of them come from this post.
June 15, 2024. Greg rewrote this email that I wrote to my friend Jose. I took his creative writing class for fun. You can only see the difference when you look at "Ryan Blacketter wrote," right below his response, at the bottom. Greg rewrote my initial email. He receives the emails I send to others, reviews them, deletes them, or rewrites them, before sending them to the intended recipient. He also receives emails that others send to me, and he doctors those, deletes them, or sends them to me. This is part of his censorship strategy.
It's rare that I can actually see his doctoring. But this shows it. In addition, Greg seems especially to use my Hispanic and Black friends for his hacking fun. Compare my email, at the top, to the rewrite under "Ryan Blacketter wrote" at the bottom.
If I believed our FB interactions amounted to much--enough to bump her into my FB profile list--then I would have said so. If I was trying to hide our very few FB interactions, I wouldn't have presented them to public scrutiny. Instead, I would have made those pages private, like a sneak. Any speculation about what I was thinking is, of course, mindreading.
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Also Drew is featured. Drew wrote a recent review of Horses, and Greg has pretended to be him in texts he has written me. I suspect Drew was hacked. ("Greg's Spoofs," 9/12/25). You can see in the screenshot that my recent post about Drew's podcast was restricted.
My son, in the middle, is also featured, though we have had almost no contact on Facebook. I didn't name him or tag him when I posted his photos. Since Greg enjoys subtle meaning in his threats, I suspect it's meaningful that my son is right in the middle.
My student Anand is also on this profile list. Greg has dropped our calls many times during several classes, ever since I mentioned Greg during a class six weeks ago (yes, Greg was listening).
Mary Owen is here too, daughter of Donna Reed. Greg hacked Mary two years ago when she was finishing a blurb for my book. I had a draft from her and completed it myself. But I've had almost no contact from her since, except for occasional FB contact recently, though she and I were close friends.
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July 26, 2025. Greg has been making my computer hiss again. It's hard to talk about this because it sounds crazy. I repeat the telling of this since it's ongoing. Also, my previous post about this issue has been deleted.
Criminals use these dark webs techniques more than we know, and Greg is more of a criminal than we might know.
I mentioned the woman, a friend of a friend, who claimed that someone had planted a microscopic radio in her nasal cavity [Post deleted. Greg might restore it, but I can't find it now]. From a remote distance, this psychopath could fill her head with shrieks and sounds by moving his joy stick. Who's going to believe that? Nobody. She's obviously crazy! But the FBI believed her and worked to find the villain who did this to her.
Greg is also very high-tech and interested in achieving similar torments. When I was writing "The Lord's Hacker"--a book he didn't want me to write--he repeatedly employed a rhythmic hissing at a certain pitch, and it affected my inner ear. Then he finished it off with a volley of hacking techniques that wore me out and reduced me to an incoherent state and I went to the hospital for five days.
It was an impressive hack, with a rising arc, a climax, and a skillful denouement, almost as if he were laying me out for the night or beyond--in a long box, perhaps.
Greg seems to save the hissing for when he's really angry, such as when I introduced new email addresses to my shoutout page the other day.
He uses this psyops method because it does physical and psychological damage. I've captured the sound on a video recording and posted it in another entry here, but it's hard to experience it through the recording. After all, computers do hiss sometimes. It's normal.
But when my computer awakens to sustained and rhythmic hissing, at times when Greg would be especially angry--like when I was writing a book about him--I witness a meaningful pattern. It's not a normal computer sound. Also, this psyops seems of a piece with his other death-dealing hacks presented here. He's surely one of the evil characters who hunts the skies in the dark webs.
Submissions, Round Two
September 22, 2025. My second round of submitting "The Lord's Hacker" is already fraught with evidence of censorship. My search results for small presses one day were extremely limited, because Greg controlled the search. Only two lists were available, and they contained information from ten or fifteen years ago. I posted about that.
When I sent an emailed submission to Clash Books the other day, I received no automated note in return, nor when I wrote them on their form. Every time I've submitted without receiving an automated note, I have received nothing back, no note, no rejection. It goes out to the wind. Greg has deleted countless emails. It's possible some presses don't use automated notes, but the fact that I don't receive rejections suggests interference.
When I submitted to Autumn House Press on the same day, I discovered that the bottom of the page was fake, and I was submitting to a vanity press. I'm sometimes hesitant to mention such things because it sounds so fantastic. But many of Greg's hacks show an impressive ability to merge pages or create a false bottom of a page.
I've posted about this censorship, but I'd like to place these and future submission hacks on my featured posts, in one ongoing entry. Greg's censorship is one of his greatest moral failings, especially since he calls himself a "renowned" literary editor and publisher. He might compartmentalize his crimes and pretend they don't exist, but that's his fantasy, not ours. This might be his last chance to salvage his reputation and do what's right. But I don't believe he'll change. It seems the only way he knows how to fix things is by hacking. But that activity is precisely what will sink his reputation and his legacy.
Greg removed two lists of publishers from my desktop. They were both current lists of houses that accept submissions without agents.
Soho Press is listed as a publisher who accepts unagented books, but they also stopped doing that years ago.
When I returned to Autumn House, I saw they aren't in fact accepting submissions! I have seen Greg pull off this move before. He slows down or freezes the screen while he creates a false part of a website or writes a false note--whatever he wants to do. As I have said, he's very high tech, and quite elaborate.
The presentation suggests that the closure was due to Greg's absence. Of course, Greg wanted to give that impression. And there is an obvious intention to communicate that it's still closed! You have to select an ambiguous link at the bottom ("details of closure") to see that the journal is now open.
[I had to click on "Details of closure" to see that Image "did not close." This information was not on the main page.]
Publisher Lawrence Knorr accepted "The Lord's Hacker" in September 2024. A couple of months later, he told me on the phone that the Christian leader's character was interesting. I asked him if the hacking moments seemed too fantastic, and he told me he believed they could be done.
Five months after that, he released me from my contract. He said that I had complained too much about my editor's rewriting my characters and the staff had lost their generosity toward me. They insisted they were only trying to "help" my book.
He obviously arrived at an about face, and I believe he had Greg's help in that. Also, a publisher writing a negative review about a character in an email that promised a termination letter, seven months after the book's acceptance, seems unaccountably strange--especially since the publisher had read the book before and claimed to like that character.
I believe Greg hacked Lawrence, just as he has hacked so many other publishers, and so the latter was forced to adjust his feelings and attitudes about that character. He must've figured Greg was reviewing our emails, and he wanted Greg to leave him alone.
The one commonality hacked people share is that they say very strange things in their rubber-legged, shaky-fingered panic.
He had the motive to delete all of my blog followers, disable comment functions, delete some of my posts that focused on Greg targeting my child, delete my emails about Greg, delete emails his friends sent me, delete emails that had attachments of screenshots of his work. He had the motive to delete police reports I’ve filed about him, delete records before I requested a restraining order, delete my emails to Oregon Judicial Watch. And he had the motive to cripple my Amazon author page right after Lawrence Knorr at Sunbury Press accepted The Lord's Hacker (a book about Gregory Wolfe). When that wasn't good enough, he hacked Knorr, resulting in a dismissal of my contract, and on and on ("Greg Hacks Another Publisher"). And these are only the hacking incidents in which Greg was saving his own butt!
Criminals say that if you want to kill someone you should kill some random person you don’t know. Then the clues won’t point at you. That’s true for choosing your hacking victim as well.
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Last night I started watching "The Wolf of God," when I discovered the subtitles were off. When I tried to turn them on, the screen froze, then I was kicked out. I tried again and was thrown out. Then I discovered the subtitles were on, but the screen was black. (Two screenshots below). It was definitely a Gregory Wolfe operation.
Like some of the very bad characters I mentioned above, Gregory Wolfe has a surface belief in the church. He has devoted a lot of time to writing about his faith, but he compartmentalizes his evil behaviors, justifies them as holy acts in defense of the church, and probably even forgets about them sometimes. He wants to believe that he's a true son, and so he works fast to disable or hush up any negatives about the one true faith. In this way, he proves to himself that he really is working on the side of the church. I doubt he has any trouble justifying the illegal porn, child targeting, and all the rest of it.
It's also strange that he'd believe that covering up evil in the church is somehow working on the side of the church. Since that makes no sense, I think he simply decides to believe it, while forgetting that the evil people are in fact enemies of the church, and that he's one of them.
This photo presents a smiling and successful Gregory Wolfe, editor of Image Journal. He's got the Christianity Today vibe. He looks warm here, and probably wants to fit in with normal Christian culture to make his brand attractive. I know he had narcissistic personality disorder then, but at this time his illness remained hidden.
In 2022, only one of the study guides showed the midterm essay prompt, but most of it was bot language, beeps and bops, with my name or the name of the short story appearing. Then it turned into a student business essay at the bottom of the page.
June 24, 2025. I had a terrific conversation with the Eastern University HR manager last month. When Greg announced that he was teaching there this summer--and exclaimed how happy he was--I called HR. Greg has shot down several of my applications to teach at universities, as I have discussed. But more than that, I wanted to let her know that Greg sends child porn and all the rest of it. People like Greg should be challenged.
This is how OED hold music actually sounds:
August 13, 2025. Determining the accuracy of a hack isn't an exact science. Sometimes I know what happened right away, and I continue to know what happened. Other times I decide a post is weak or it doesn't illustrate what I had thought, and I cut it.
Regarding Sunbury Press, at first I believed I was simply let go from my contract, and I didn't think about it for a couple of months. Then, out of the blue, several facts presented themselves to make me certain that Greg had hacked the publisher. Your mind can work on an issue while you're not thinking about it, of course. Those posts that take a little time are often the most illustrative.
In other posts, I simply believe Gregory Wolfe did it. He has a history of sending me porn, for instance, and I know that he has sent other people porn. In 2018 I found a fake Gregory Wolfe Facebook account that had a banner full of penises. I discuss this elsewhere. Whoever made that account knew about Gregory Wolfe's dick pics. I came to know about them personally five years later when he spoofed pics to my date via my phone.
That might not add up in criminal court every time, without an IP. But as Judge Charles Carlson told me, it could add up in civil court, where a "preponderance of the evidence" test is used. That's the test I do my best to follow here. I'm not a lawyer, but I try to present the reasonableness of my assertions in my own layman's way.
When this post first went online, Greg's face appeared on my blog in warning. All my blog followers were deleted. Comments were disabled. And the post went offline. Only Greg had the motivation to control this post about him, and he executed the attack on multiple levels, within two or three days. The connections are obvious and persuasive, despite the lack of an IP. This satisfies the preponderance of the evidence test.
In other cases, patterns are revealed. Greg has sent many death images and many pictures of my son. Since I know he likes to create terror with illegal porn, I extrapolate the same motivation when I receive child death images and other death images of old friends who are actually dead. I know I don't have two hackers, one for porn and one for child death. It's Greg doing both of those.
It's fascinating that Greg doubles down on his hacking when he's been exposed. I believe he started hacking as a way to scare his enemies and protect his brand, but now his motivation has devolved into pure ego. He's like an insane, dying general lying in the desert outside of a village, shooting at anything that moves--women going to the well, children playing soccer, his own men. There's no point to it anymore. He just wants blood.
. . .
I have generally discussed Greg's porn hacking in vague terms. In the next entry, I'm a bit more direct, to create a picture of what Greg does.
The ten-year-old that appeared after I clicked on this photo was fully clothed but sexualized by her makeup and clothes, sitting on a bed and talking. I clicked out instantly. I gave up looking at porn all together at this time, as I didn't want Greg spoofing me any more kids. (Who would have thought he'd plant child porn on FB reels? I suppose such escalation is common to porn hackers).
August 5, 2025. Greg blocked my call to the Oregon Employment Department yesterday--an action that could land him in prison. I have three weeks off now, and I have the right to file. Greg has blocked this call before. Here's his typical setup.
When I called a few times, I found this "User Busy" card on my phone. The initial block gave Greg a moment to set up a fake call that seems successful, with the OED introduction and instructions, but when I'm finally waiting for someone to answer, fake hold music comes on the line. OED has characteristic hold music, but this generic classical was not it. He allowed the real call to play for a moment, then attached the false hold music that went on forever.
I knew it was a fake call, but I let it play for three hours just to show it was a doctored call. A three-hour wait is something we saw during Covid, not now.
Greg has set up false hold music and voicemails before, so that my calls don't go anywhere. I've posted about his phone splicing before, and also shown that he placed a fake voicemail at Eugene Weekly, when he was hacking them.
Greg often blocks applications to "services." On the one hand, he's a secret Texas Republican encouraging personal responsibility, but for the most part he uses that position as an excuse to hack.
According to Barton Family Law, NPDs often use GPS tracking, stealing passwords, and social media blocking to control everyone in their house.
Cameras might be used in rooms with a "trust but verify" justification. A family member might be forced to strip for an underwear inspection to ensure that he or she hasn't recently had sex. Gaslighting and shaming are used to cast the NPD as a victim and the family member as a perpetrator, in all situations. Even small disagreements are seen as acts of murderous disloyalty that must be punished.
Greg believes the whole world is under his fatherly control. He drops into anyone's computer to view emails, private posts, and catch a peek if possible. He tracks people's movements on their phones. He limits or alters internet job searches to show you that you can't see what you want to. In cases of extreme "disobedience," he hacks your family to make those around you unhappy. He spoofs dick pics from your phone so that your dates and others believe you're sending the pics. He will produce psyops noises on your computer to disturb and physically harm you. He will create errors in your manuscripts. He will hack your current publisher or employer. He has hacked my publisher Wipf & Stock and Sunbury Press, accomplishing my removal in the latter case.
Some people he has hacked will show out publicly as Greg's friend. A few years ago, a Seattle Pacific faculty member who was on my email list wrote me this panicked note: "Greg is a friend of mine! He has made an incredible contribution! There's no one else like him!" Hacked people often seem panicked like that.
Since Greg dominates, controls, and terrifies his coworkers, I read this man's testimony as a tortured person's declaration of obedience.
One time, when we were FB friends, Greg posted, "Should I forgive her?" Just that one line. Greg's always wounded, always the victim, another common feeling of NPDs. How could the world not love his deep hunger for abuse? Can't people see his accomplishments and love of God?
Greg likes to believe he has achieved something large and world-changing, and he has: He has developed a system to keep all the world under surveillance and to punish anyone who disagrees with him.
The Cruel Giant Who Sank in the Bog
August 2, 2025. Yesterday I posted that Bukowski's poetry was much finer than his raunchy novels--his poem "The Genius of the Crowd" is gorgeous, perfect--and Greg commented with an avatar named Gary Rowan, who says I have no "well known literature." Recently, elsewhere in this larger post, I mentioned that Gregory Wolfe is going to be a hyperlink in my biography, and my assertion roused the narcissist. Greg wanted to push back.
Gary Rowen is clearly an avatar. Why would this Gary Rowan happen to subscribe to a private FB Bukowski group? How would he happen to have the same view of me that Greg has? If I'm so unknown, why does Gary Rowan know me and have such strong opinions of me, especially when I didn't mention my writing in the post?
It's true my books haven't seen a lot of sales. That's partly due to Greg trying his best to cancel them. He disabled my Amazon account, cut the Antioch Review's FB posts about my books, deleted Down in the River from people's personal websites, and hacked Sunbury Press's publisher so that he released me from my "The Lord's Hacker" contract for no good reason, and etc. I explore these and many other similar actions elsewhere in this post.
Then I became more well-known than Greg wanted. In the coordinated anti-censorship campaign of this post, I was able to reach thousands of people regarding Greg's scary behaviors, with some valuable help.
Since my books enjoy some critical success, I believe they will be known one day as censored books and will live on despite Greg's efforts to cancel them. That's all I hope for. I have no grandiose visions, only the wish that my books are not buried by a tyrant.
People don't like censors. They side with authors who were censored. Therefore Greg's obsession to ruin my career backfired--a benefit I didn't expect, as I didn't know my posts would get passed around as much as they were. But of course I hoped my news would get out there somehow. Half of my posts explore his erasure of me and my works, and his interference with my submissions. The chance that something positive could come from this ten-year nightmare is welcome. Any censored author would rejoice at such a possible benefit, even if doesn't come till long after he's gone.
I hope I discuss the possible resurrection of my work with some humility. It's not guaranteed to happen, but it gives me a measure of hope that I haven't had in a while.
Greg's books sold well due to his position at Image Journal. He received good notice from friends and well-wishers. But their critical success is spotty. In Beauty Will Save the World, he presents several strong introductory essays from Image volumes, but there is no structure to the book. It fails to rise as a narrative, and it reads like a flatline. I read this book after Greg had published me at Slant. I saw the power of the writing, and the weakness of the book, and many reviewers also noticed these conflicting qualities.
I can't be sure if "Beauty," his most well-known book, will live. But I suspect that the world will not tolerate a censorship publisher, porn-hacker, and targetter of children to teach it about finding beauty and saving the world. Nor is Greg fit to discuss the best ways to build character in children through reading. I present my mock review of Books that Build Character in featured posts. It's a bad book up and down.
Greg used hacking as a way to secure power in his little empire, and it was hacking that brought him down. Now that, my friends, would be a great story, about a cruel book-hating giant who sought to control everyone in his kingdom and finally sank in the bog. It would be fit for children and anyone else who has a natural love of justice.
Criminals use these dark webs techniques more than we know, and Greg is more of a criminal than we might know.
I mentioned the woman, a friend of a friend, who claimed that someone had planted a microscopic radio in her nasal cavity [Post deleted. Greg might restore it, but I can't find it now]. From a remote distance, this psychopath could fill her head with shrieks and sounds by moving his joy stick. Who's going to believe that? Nobody. She's obviously crazy! But the FBI believed her and worked to find the villain who did this to her.
Greg is also very high-tech and interested in achieving similar torments. When I was writing "The Lord's Hacker"--a book he didn't want me to write--he repeatedly employed a rhythmic hissing at a certain pitch, and it affected my inner ear. Then he finished it off with a volley of hacking techniques that wore me out and reduced me to an incoherent state and I went to the hospital for five days.
It was an impressive hack, with a rising arc, a climax, and a skillful denouement, almost as if he were laying me out for the night or beyond--in a long box, perhaps.
Greg seems to save the hissing for when he's really angry, such as when I introduced new email addresses to my shoutout page the other day.
He uses this psyops method because it does physical and psychological damage. I've captured the sound on a video recording and posted it in another entry here, but it's hard to experience it through the recording. After all, computers do hiss sometimes. It's normal.
But when my computer awakens to sustained and rhythmic hissing, at times when Greg would be especially angry--like when I was writing a book about him--I witness a meaningful pattern. It's not a normal computer sound. Also, this psyops seems of a piece with his other death-dealing hacks presented here. He's surely one of the evil characters who hunts the skies in the dark webs.
June 26, 2025. Back in 2017, I felt like my "Polemical Literature" essay was a little off when I read it after it was published in the Observer. It seemed to contain items that I had not put in. At the time, I didn't suspect Gregory Wolfe, my hacker, though he had deleted or changed parts of my novel and short story manuscripts. My Observer editor wouldn't have changed anything without telling me first. I had a sense of mysterious uncertainty about the changes, but I moved on from it.
I wrote that people could Google me and find the post on my site, and I had a lot of visits. For a while I continued to post on the Iowa Facebook page and received just as many likes.
But soon my posts on that Facebook page were limited to one or two likes. Then my posts were restricted. I could post but never received likes. Greg can actually limit the number of likes a post gets. He can also cover a post so that it's not visible to anyone. This is part of Greg's gaslighting. He wants me to think that no one is interested.
He has done this on my own Facebook page. He seems to preset the number of likes a post will get. At one point, for about a year, I was getting five likes for every post, and all the likes were from other countries, as if he wanted to avoid Americans hearing word about his behavior.
It seems precious to bemoan your Facebook likes--until you realize that it's your censor who is limiting your voice.
Recently the "infected" post on the Iowa page was deleted. I doubt admin would hunt down that post from so many years ago and delete it. Greg deleted it.
Here is a representative Iowa Facebook post before the censorship began.
He has published almost no women at Slant, and the swapping of my photos with women suggests he believes women are inferior. It's a way of laughing at me, as if to say, "Ha ha, I've replaced you with silly little girls, because that's all you're worth"--something like that. One of my screenshots showed two swapped women's photos next to each other, but he has deleted that.
This has been going on for months.
Greg cares a lot about the concept of a job. He lost his job at Image and feels ashamed about that. But he also lists "artist" or "writer" as his job on LinkedIn, so there must be a crosscurrent of desires running through him. "Academic writer" would be the best description for his avocation. I'm actually an artist and a writer, but he ridicules the part-time jobs I do so that I can write.
Greg's Always Hunting and Hacking
April 13, 2025. I’m staying at my ex's and Greg is hacking her computer. If this video is allowed to go through, you can hear her computer hiss. When Greg realizes I’m videoing it, the hissing dies down. Turn up the volume all the way before you watch it.
December 26, 2024. I ran into Camille, the editor of Eugene Weekly the other day, out front of the magazine's office--the one who volunteered to do an article about my hacking but went silent. She was about to go into the office when I was stopping by to tell her the news about the police referral to the FBI. She seemed quite spooked. She put on a mask and didn't want to make eye contact. When I asked if she'd been hacked, she said, "Nope."
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Background: Judge Charles Carlson
Highlights
Enemy Email
Illegal Porn
My Hacker Fired for Sexual Harassment
My Hacker is Known for his Dick Pics
Ashley Madison and "The Evil Dead"
These screen shots were deleted from my phone. It's lucky that I had posted them in a private Facebook post.
Manipulates Dating Site
In May 2019 I dated a black woman through a website in Cincinnati when I was divorced. She was a Christian and wanted me to be one, and it didn't work out. In a few weeks, I looked at the dating site again and saw it was all very large black women who were looking only for sex, at least that was all I could see on the site. He seemed to say, Oh you want a black girl? Try one of these.
Sends Infected emails to My Student
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Hacks Colleagues and Editors
Spoofs Dick Pics to my Date
When she and I began texting, she said she received "strange" pics, and said she liked the internet at first but now she didn't trust anyone. I never heard from her again.
Another Editor Hacked
Psyops Noises Issue from My Computer
Hospital Stay
Swaps Digital Info on Caller ID
In November 2023 my hacker switched the name of my doctor and my pest control in my phone's address book, to suggest that I needed to be treated like a pest. He often switches caller ID so I don't know who is calling. My digital world is so full of glitches, I don't believe in glitches anymore.Friend Requests From Kids
Blocks My Phone Calls etc.
Sometimes I can call my doctor's office, but it rings and rings. Or a robot answers and puts me in a cue, but it's not the standard music that my doctor's office plays, and no one ever picks up.
Spoofs My Landlord and Tries to Get Me Kicked out of My House
At the very least, my hacker is certainly not being careful right now. His brand has tanked, and he blames me instead of his behaviors. He's doing things, with greater repetition, that he wouldn't have done last year.
It was Wolfe, pretending to be my son! Yes, things are getting weird. No surprise, he deleted this digital touch exchange, and deleted the screenshot of it later.
Suicide Included in My “Friends”
Constant Social Media Censorship
In November 2023 I joined the Facebook page Beat Poems On the Road and was receiving 500 to 900 likes on my posts. The admin, Steff, got hacked and cut me off. In Facebook pages I frequent, my hacker often uses an avatar to bark at me and complain to the admin about me. If this doesn't work, he hacks them until they drop me. I have experienced this five or six times. In the case of Beat Poems, I believe he couldn't handle that I was getting so much exposure, and he had to put an end to it.
One judge, in 2021, told me, when I mentioned my hacker's porn harassment online, "That's his free speech!"
There is something wrong with our laws on cyber harassment right now. We can't seem to locate a sensible position on the issue. When we police speech online, we tend to target political speech, so we correct that overreach by backing off and allowing ghastly crimes to go unchecked.
If someone sends you death images and porn and then twenty pictures of your son or daughter from your iphone memories, in meaningful and threatening repetition, not even the fiercest Libertarian would say, "Free speech! I love this!"
But I was pleased to hear this judge agreed that his behavior may well be psychotic and dangerous and that the internet is a running ground for criminals. At least she didn't pretend that all is well and that it's free speech.
"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. Greg 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 really 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. Greg even wallpapered my Google pages with porn descriptions--In 2019 I Googled my name and there they were (see below)--and it took three days for the junk to clear out.
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. Be skeptical of me too, but at least I have had some experience with a master hacker, and I've shown fifty-plus pages of real-life hacks. It's true some of it is just based on my word. But most of it is based on alarming screenshots and narrative of my experience.
I don't wish to dismiss all IT people, only to say that most of them aren't ready to defend the Pentagon. But one IT guy I met actually had a lot of experience with hackers. He worked with a lawyer I employed last year. He was familiar with top-drawer hacking. When he looked at my GW post, he said it was obvious that I'm the victim of a crime. The lawyer said the same thing, but they asked for money I didn't have beyond the $700 I had already handed out.
Places Face on My Blog as Warning
March 20, 2024. Greg placed his face on my blog after I posted "A Christian Leader's Life." My blog has always used the picture on the top post for the site picture (after two or three days), no matter how popular a post below it might be. This Moses pic was on my blog for two weeks.
Deleted Blog Followers
Eugene Weekly
March 27, 2024. After I posted "A Christian Leader's Life," the Eugene Weekly editor said she wanted to do an investigative article on Wolfe. When I called days later, I found a generic, robot voicemail and left a brief message. Later in the day it struck me as odd that the voicemail would be generic. He has placed fake voice systems on my phone before.
I left my house, getting away from Wi-Fi, and called again, down the block. This time there was a real voice thanking the caller for contacting Eugene Weekly, but it was closed so I left no message.
Greg has intercepted many of my calls, often just to be a creep, but sometimes to keep me from talking to someone he doesn't want me to talk to.
Eugene Weekly
Questions
I wanted to address any who might believe I have no evidence, simply because I lack an IP or a photograph of my hacker caught in the act. As Judge Charles Carlson told me at the hearing, I have evidence that would be persuasive in civil court, and my assertions raise many questions that point directly to Gregory Wolfe.
For instance, who placed Greg's picture on my blog for two weeks, a threatening gesture, after my post went live? Only my hacker would place his image on my blog.
Who removed the many followers of this blog before I posted "A Christian Leader's Life"? Some other nemesis?
Who deleted the emails from my hacker to me and then restored some of them but not all? Who else had a motive?
Who deleted my email containing the porn descriptions that my hacker used to cover my Google pages, the email I had sent to the scholars? Who else would want to?
Who edited "A Christian Leader's Life" a few times after it went live, to convey a frivolous and unedited and sometimes confusing vibe so that I had to keeping rewriting it?
Who replaced the screenshot of the fake email that contained the iPhone memory?
Who deleted the photo I took of my son sitting in front of his computer? It was wallpapered with my book cover art that my hacker had helped create. My hacker had the motive.
Who is so focused on my son that he has to keep sending me his pictures to convey a threat? Who else deletes his texts? Some other random hacker?
Who demeaned, repeatedly, working class people in fake blogs and on my blog, just as he demeaned the working class background of one of the women who fired him?
Who else would spoof my police report about my hacker, placing my landlord’s name and email and phone on the report?
What else would be interested in my communication about my hacker to the police?
If it was a different hacker, he must have been very sympathetic to Gregory Wolfe and spent a lot of time covering for him and concealing his crimes.
Froze My Site Visit Counter
June 22, 2024. Right after I posted this today, I saw thirty people visited the site right away. Then the counter was turned off. That's Greg's way of staying in charge--again with the censorship. He also turned off my visit counter when I posted the two paragraphs from Poets & Writers last week. He doesn't believe anyone should get notice that's a little better than what he has. He's also angry about that post because he doesn't want to explain why I dumped Slant, especially since he pretended that it was his idea that I left--awkward! [The counter resumed six hours after this post went live].
When I blocked one young prostitute, my screen froze on my phone, but I was able to block the rest on my computer.
June 28, 2024. Greg deleted this polar bear photo from this site and from my desktop today, and I took another screenshot of it. He has deleted other photos related to his harassment concerning my son, as described elsewhere in this document, possibly because he doesn't think that obsessing about someone else's child is a very good look. He would be right.
Some radicals say that Christians are often perverts. It’s more accurate to say that perverts are often Christians. They need an identity behind which to hide. Most perverts understand they can’t live in society as the way they are. Some become Christian leaders. Christian author M. Scott Peck explores this phenomenon in People of the Lie.
This morning when I opened my phone I found that an off-white “card” had been placed over most of the text of our emails. Last year, Gregory Wolfe sometimes placed such cards on the very Word doc of The Lord's Hacker as I was writing it. He never left it there for more than a minute. He was just using one of his myriad hacking tricks and wanted to send the message that he’s in charge.
This time I believe Greg's covering up my emails with the editor communicates that he’s going to cancel my arrangement with the editor, that he’ll ruin it somehow, as he always does.
Greg’s censorship is tricky in several ways. Not only has Greg sent infected emails to publishers in my name—and will likely do so again—but there’s also the psychology of the publisher to consider. Though most publishers find censorship despicable, they also don’t want to walk into controversy or open themselves up to attack by malevolent actors.
It’s easy to look back at beloved writers who were censored and wonder why they were so alone in their fight, like Isaac Babel and Rousseau.
It’s only later, usually after the censored author and his enemies are dead, that supporters seek to publish their censored work. I don’t place myself in that company of luminaries—nor do I see most rejections as censorship—but I do expect fearful silence and cold shoulders from any publisher who learns of the hacking. That’s what Gregory Wolfe wants too. He loves to see his terror result in destroyed relationships and neglected books. He’d burn them if he could. Being a publisher must offer psychological cover for this passion he has for censorship.
All Greg has left is the ability to frighten people. When Orwell imagined the future as a boot stomping on a human face, he surely conjured tyrants like Gregory Wolfe. I hope there are some, like the fighters in the French Resistance, who are willing to take some risks against a true enemy of humankind.
They do everything by the manual. The FBI even has a specific technique of taking phone calls. They pepper the caller with snarky questions and comments. "What's this guy's motivation?" or "I can guarantee he doesn't have any interest in your Facebook page." Then he or she begins the rapid closure of the phone call, talking in the dazzling speed of an auctioneer: "Thank you for calling the FBI. This call will be documented and you are free to follow up with a complaint." And they hang up on you. All intake people do this exactly the same way.
I know they are looking for words like "I'm going to kill you," etc. and that they are trained to dismiss anything about social media or otherwise frivolous concerns. But my hacker, in fact, uses social media and my Google page as a template in which to present child death images, underage porn, a photo of my friend who committed suicide, etc. It's true the FBI is looking for extortion and bodily harm, but my harassment case is horrifying and dangerous, not frivolous, not imagined, not paranoid, and deserves an investigation.
Judges also tend to dismiss almost all hacking claims. I've stood before a few judges who were visibly angry that I even brought a hacking case. Even while newspapers and attorneys say that Russian-style hacking is increasingly common in America, judges and law enforcement respond to this reality by refusing to believe it even exists.
Since this response makes no logical sense, I believe this shutting of the eyes is a psychological reaction. After all, law enforcement has not kept apace with the high-tech criminal hackers. To open up law dockets to hacking cases would be like opening a portal to a howling infinite that would cause headaches for courts, judges, and law enforcement.
And this is why judges and law enforcement regard with anger and distaste the person who brings forward a hacking case. They can't do anything about it! They don't have the tech. Psychologically they have hardened themselves against you, knowing that your possibly reasonable case can't even be considered. You almost become a criminal in their eyes.
As far as the FBI, I believe the only luck I'd have there would be to find an individual agent who thinks outside of the organization. I've been lucky to meet one police officer, one lawyer, and one judge who are indeed able to think independently about this issue, and now I hope to meet one FBI agent. I'm not holding my breath, though.
By the time I knew her, she had mostly normalized. She had taken one of my creative writing classes and we started dating later. When my then-wife Daphne asked her to stop sleeping with me, she wrote that she liked me too much to stop. I was glad, since I was in love with Jane. After all, she and I had both been cheated on. We didn't need to honor those commitments. But we struggled with the affair. One day I was never supposed to contact her again. The next night we'd fly to each other in some city park. Even years later, we weren't supposed to contact each other, but we still made plans to catch up.
In 2013, when I was remarried, Jane wrote that she hoped "we'd always find a way to love each other in some way." My new wife, Becca, was uncomfortable with this contact, and I stayed out of touch with her for a couple of years, until Becca was okay with my catching up with Jane on occasion. There was nothing romantic about my and Jane's contact at this point.
In 2015, Jane told me on the phone that I was "not allowed" to write about anything she'd told me about her husband and the woman he'd had an affair with. She said it was her material. I'd told her I was including some of that story. We kept in loose contact. We were trying to stay out of touch, but we'd exchanged emails and planned telephone calls over the next three years. She was on my email shoutout lists for my first book, and in 2018 she said that was too much. Once again, we decided to stay away, but ended up planning telephone calls.
Her mother told me she was "our little drama queen." She was all over the map in terms of how she perceived a situation, then insisted that she'd had one fixed idea all along.
In 2019 I got divorced. A few months later, in an abject mood, I wrote Jane that I'd always love her, remembering the note she had written me. She showed my email to the CEO of Wipf & Stock, her new boss and my publisher.
It had been foolish to write the email I did, so many years after the note she'd written me about finding a way to love each other. Then she went to work for Gregory Wolfe, after he was fired for sexual harassment--my first publisher and active hacker.
I was surprised she went to work for Gregory Wolfe. Neither she nor I were Puritans. After we had broken up years earlier, we both went through months of haphazard hookups with multiple people, like those recovering from a breakup often do. We were sloppy, stupid, but not cruel.
But I had told her about Wolfe's hacking and sexual harassment, and I supposed she didn't care. Greg's gaslighting of a young intern was a calculated moment of dishonesty and cruelty. It wasn't a sad dalliance that might be forgiven.
In 2022, after I mentioned the woman who influenced Karmina, without naming Jane, on a public Facebook post, I received a rare manic hacking that went on for days. I doubted that Greg would take it on himself to hack me for a Facebook post that didn't name Jane, so I believed that she had complained about it to her former boss, Gregory Wolfe.
I often give updates about characters I'm writing and mention the people who inspired them. Many times I have posted about my first wife, Daphne, who had told Jane to stop sleeping with me. Daphne is a smart Latina poet who attended Reed College. I have also written about Becca, who is all over The Lord's Hacker--she's the exemplar of that book--and who remains a good friend. I have posted about many old girlfriends, wives, friends, and family members, in public and private posts, and none of them scandalous. And Jane's character in Karmina is compelling and sympathetic.
In 2023, I posted a photo of Jane's laptop resting on a cafe table, while referencing Karmina and not naming Jane--the picture was taken in a cafe in summer, and evoked the mood of the book--and again came the savage hacking in the style of Gregory Wolfe.
I have written about many people in magazines as well, with changed names. No one but Jane and Greg has ever implied that I don't have the right to write about my own experience.
On June 21, 2024, a few days after I made public a positive rejection of Karmina, I received a similar brutal hacking--in excess of the usual hacking--and again I believed Jane had told Greg that it wasn't my material to use, and he hacked me like a devil. Why would Greg care if Karmina got rejected somewhere? She must have complained to him again.
Jane has a history of calling strong men as needed, such as when she needed a washing machine and tearfully called her dad. Then she outed him later, by name, as a Trump supporter in an online magazine, as if forgetting her own questionable right-wing past [the article is now offline]. I'm not a Trump supporter, but goodness, leave your dad alone. And I know Greg likes to play the strong, chivalrous Christian leader when he gets a chance, and I bet he likes flexing his hacking muscles for her.
I had emailed Jane about Greg's shocking activities as a hacker--he lives in the very toilet of the world--but she wasn't interested. She commenced her own hacking efforts, though still a Christian. In 2023 I saw she'd covered up one of her letters online that she wrote in support of the man who kidnapped his kids at gunpoint. When I clicked on it, a message read, "your computer is now infected."
I believe I have been hacked about ten times by someone who uses this style of hacking--"your computer is now infected"--and it seems connected to the person who tried to cover up the letter Jane wrote. That would suggest Jane was the hacker.
In 2024, when I clicked on her letter in support of the Christines, it went to a line up of porn pics--a change in tactics. She was using porn now, like Gregory Wolfe, both of them Christians. This seemed to me like Jane's new method of blocking the letter she'd written when she was a member of the cult. I was able to take a screenshot of the letter before it bounced to porn.
I received more "Your computer is infected" hacks. I assumed Jane was communicating that I needed to avoid writing about her.
Only one passage in Karmina explores what I heard regarding Jane's husband and his affair. Fictionalized, it involves a birth and burial scene in a park in Ashland, and since I heard the story and made it fiction, I intend to use it. I already have.
If Jane is working with Greg to censor my book--and sharpening her own hacking tools--she is breaking the law, following her mentor into a dark webs criminal underworld. She might retaliate against me for exposing her, but that's what hackers do. They want to live anonymously in their crimes, and they shriek when the sunlight reveals their behaviors.
When I knew Jane, she was an uncommonly bright, religious church woman with many contradictions. She danced tango, discoursed on the books she read, disciplined her kids with heavy wooden spoons, and made friends with men who could help her financially or otherwise. She was also a warm, inspiring, and impressive person.
However, now and then Jane appears to be drawn to men who are extreme and potentially dangerous, as if such men can step in and provide comfort and assistance on a bad day. She invents narratives about their goodness while she impugns their adversaries, just as she did when she posted about her armed Christian patriot friend, Brian Christine, years ago.
Hi everyone!
I wanted to write you really quick and tell you about a family we
know that is in dire need of help, and especially PRAYER! Their names are Brian and Ruth Christine, they have five girls Bethany, Miriam, Lydia, Olivia and Abbey Rose.
Some of you who are from Oregon may have heard of this family as their case has received quite a lot of media coverage. For those of you receiving this who are unfamiliar with the Christine family, I will try to give you a brief account of their situation.
Brian and Ruth are a young married couple who, after meeting and
marrying in Ruth's native England, moved to Indiana where Brian was born.
As they began to have a family their desire for their children was to give them a Christian based homeschooled education. Brian had a lifelong dream of converting a bus and traveling around the United States, so the couple set to work customizing a home on wheels with all amenities. Their intention was to incorporate their travels into the children's education while they were still young, giving them a hands on experience. For example, while studying rock formations, visit Carlsbad Caverns... you get the idea. Brian had an internet based business which allowed him to work while they traveled the
country for about a year, very happily, when they arrived in Grants Pass, Oregon. They made friends, got involved with the community and thought that they had found a place where they might want to stay for good when their traveling adventure was over.
Then the unthinkable happened.
The Christines had been participating in a program at the public
library with their oldest daughter Bethany, then 5 years old, whom they had taught to read. They had occasionally parked their bus at the library while the children took part in library programs and Brian did computer work. Someone observed their bus parked behind the library, and for reasons unknown, made an anonymous call to child protective services say that their were some kids living in a bus behind the library who looked hungry.
Ironically, when the police showed up the children were in the bus
sitting at the table eating sandwiches for lunch. Their mother was taken aback when the armed policemen and child services workers indicated that they were seeking the children. Surely this must be a mix up and they were looking for someone else! Ruth promptly sought Brian, who was working in the library. By the time the family returned to their bus it was surrounded by police cars. When they refused to let the children go with social workers, Brian was arrested and the three oldest girls Bethany, Miriam and Lydia were whisked to the hospital for physical evaluations. Ruth, who was at the time pregnant with their fourth child, followed the children to the hospital,
distraught and wondering what to do.
At the hospital the three oldest girls were subject to interviews
filled with leading questions which manipulated the toddlers into answering in a way that would make the parents guilty of abuse. they were also given thorough physical examinations which diagnosed one of the girls who had a Band-Aid on her forehead as having a minor skull fracture, although no x-rays were presented to prove this when the parents requested them. The children also had to go through invasive sexual examinations although there were absolutely no allegations of sexual abuse. They were then placed in
foster care.
Brian and Ruth were told that they would be given visitation with the
possibility of having their children restored to them, only after they went through evaluations and the proper rehabilitation programs. They were obviously furious and refused. Over the course of the next several months they went on radio shows, picketed the court house and fought in court to get their children back. During this time Ruth gave birth to Olivia, their fourth daughter, and placed her in the care of Brian's mother in Indiana.
The state of Oregon sought relentlessly to obtain custody of Olivia as
well. It seemed that the more Brian and Ruth drew attention to the abuse of power exercised by Child Protective Services and the harder they fought, the more the state sought to demonize their character to the media. Being of limited financial resources and seeing no end in sight, Brian and Ruth finally decided to play the State's game to get their kids back. But the couple were then told that it was too late and their children were to be adopted out soon. Brian and Ruth were however awarded visitation with their children.
With their backs up against a wall, they did what most parents would
do, they took their kids back. After a visitation, Brian followed the social workers van and allegedly at gunpoint ordered the workers out of the vehicle. They got as far as Montana with their children. They were then captured and Brian and Ruth were sent to jail. Some months later, Ruth gave birth to their youngest daughter, Abbey Rose while shackled to a hospital bed.
You may be asking yourself, why would the State go this far if they
were innocent?? It's not a pretty answer. Child Protective Services in the state of Oregon is an agency with little or no checks or balances. For every child in foster care and every family going through "rehabilitation," they receive large amounts of funding. The system is clotted with cases that are not authentic abuse or neglect, for instance, cases where a parent spanked a child in a public place, or if someone deemed a child the child looked dirty. (Anyone with children who play outside knows how easily children get
dirty!)
Recently, federal policies have been put place to provide the state
with thousands of dollars for every child that is adopted out from their system. It has become a lucrative business, with no accountability. Basically it's all about money, and rules that are not
right. Many of you receiving this email who are from Oregon have seen first hand the corruption in our state.
So what can we do? A LOT! Currently Ruth Christine is out on bail
trying to prepare for their trial which will be in Roseburg, Oregon
beginning April 30. Pray for the jury selection. Pray for the trial. Pray
also for their children. After a heated court case and lots of negative
publicity for Oregon CPS, the three oldest children were adopted out to Ruth's parents in England and the two youngest girls are under guardianship with Brian's mother.
Forward this email to others.
Donations. Ruth is trying to raise money to provide for legal
assistance and Brian's bail. If Brian were out on bail it would enable him to have more contact with an attorney and better prepare for their trial. Also if Brian and Ruth are sentenced to terms in prison this time would be invaluable to them to be together before being separated. Brian's bail is set at $60,000, currently $11,500 has been raised. Donations can be sent to:
. . .
Watch Ruth tomorrow April 18th on NBC's The Today Show at 7:30 am and find out more about them. Since Ruth has been out on bail I've had the privilege of spending a week with her. I can't tell you how much it has blessed my life and my children's life. I continued to be amazed at how in the midst of so much she has a way of ministering to others and glorifying God even in her trials. I believe Brian and Ruth to be sincere and innocent individuals, and I hope that you will join me in doing what we can for this family in need . . .
God's blessings on you and yours,
The Lord's Hacker
The Lord’s Hacker
A Novel
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 through 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.
“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.
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.
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
“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.
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.
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. They must have entered
in a group. 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.
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