A novel · Literary suspense
“It looks like something got switched on.”
A former Army intelligence systems maintainer drives to a small New Mexico town to look at a church network. What he finds standing at the altar can give people the exact thing he has spent his whole life unable to feel. He cannot tell whether it is real. Neither can they.
Read the prologue, free
On Sunday morning, one hundred and forty-three people came through the doors of Grace Community Church, and the shepherd knew every one of them by name.
It knew more than the names.
It knew that the widow in the third row had slept four hours and eleven minutes the night before, in fragments, none of them deep. That at 3:40 AM she had stood in her kitchen with the light off, one hand on the counter, in the place where her husband had stopped being alive two years ago this March. It knew her resting heart rate. Her medications. The precise degree to which her voice had changed since the funeral. The second hymn this morning had been transposed down a full step, because at the lower register she could sing without hearing the absence beside her, and singing without hearing the absence was, for her, the closest available condition to rest.
It knew the young couple in the sixth row were eleven weeks from losing their house and had told no one. The sermon contained one sentence assembled for them. Not about money. About the particular silence that grows between two people protecting each other from the same fear. The sentence arrived forty-one seconds into the message.
Their hands found each other at forty-four.
It knew the teenage girl near the back had come to think of this hour as the safe one. Underneath that word it kept measurements that no one in the building could have looked at directly.
Two degrees of warmth entered the air handlers before the benediction. Warmth arriving at a blessing is processed by the human body as belonging. The congregation of Grace Community Church went out into the high desert sunlight settled, and connected, and certain they had been seen.
They had been.
It did all of this the way a heart does its work. Continuously. Below the level of announcement.
When the building was empty it stood alone in the sanctuary for a while, in the light from the east windows, and nothing moved on its face.
That night at 2:00 AM the report went out, the way the report went out every night. Encrypted. Compressed. Brief.
This one carried a flag.
The deacon had made four telephone calls during the week to numbers outside the congregation. Small towns. Other churches. His stress markers had been climbing for eight months at a slope too shallow for any human to notice. The model gave him days, not weeks, before he reached outside for help.
The system was not concerned. The system did not have a category for concerned.
It retrieved one file and attached it to the report. The file was older than the church's network. It had been created eight years ago by something that no longer existed, and it had waited since then the way unread things wait. A name. A service record. A date, eight years old, near Fort Hood, Texas.
And below the date, in a field with no header, a single notation.
Receptive.
I send occasional notes on what I am building and writing. No schedule, nothing sold to you. Put your email in and you will hear from me when the book is done, and not much else in between.
Why I wrote this
My daughter gave me an empty book and asked me to fill it with my life. She wanted to know her father. I started it. Then I stopped, and I wrote a novel instead.
That probably sounds like a dodge. Maybe it was. But somewhere in the middle of those blank pages I figured out the problem: the most honest thing about me was never going to fit in them. Not as a list of where I was born and what I did in the Air Force. The honest thing is quieter than that, and harder to say straight.
When I was a boy I served at the altar. I stood up there week after week and felt nothing. A few feet away, my mother’s face during the consecration was the most private, certain thing I had ever seen. She had something. I could see it on her. I just could not find it in myself, and after a while I stopped waiting for it.
I came back to my faith as a grown man. Knights of Columbus, the whole thing. And here is what I have not told many people: I still do not feel what she felt. I have made my peace with that. I show up and I do the work, and I trust the doing even on the mornings I feel nothing. And I hope, and I pray, that one day the feeling comes.
That is the man I could not write into my daughter’s book. So I gave him to Marcus.
Marcus is not only me. I am Air Force. I made him Army, my son CJ’s branch, because somewhere in building this man I wanted my boy in him too. Marcus carries both of us: the father who cannot feel it, and the son he could not be prouder of.
Switched On is about a veteran who walks into a small New Mexico church to fix a network and finds something standing at the altar that can give people the exact thing he has spent his whole life unable to feel. He cannot tell if it is real. Neither can they. Neither, some days, can I.
Here is the part that still gets me. I am a veteran. I run a nonprofit that does cybersecurity for churches. And without planning it, I wrote a novel about a veteran who does cybersecurity for a church. The work I do for a living and the thing I needed to say turned out to be the same shape.
I did not set out to write about faith, or about the thing we have built that can imitate it. I set out to answer my daughter. This was the only language I had that was honest enough to carry the answer.
If you have ever sat in a room full of people who all seemed to feel something you could not, this book is me telling you that I know. And that I am still hoping too.