This is how my father and I became estranged.
A year after Evangelyne stopped being my friend—a year in which I was pregnant and then had a newborn while still attending college, when I was engrossed and overwhelmed—Evangelyne wrote an essay about our friendship.
It was first published in the New Yorker and became their most read story of that year. It was later reprinted in various anthologies and in the Evangelyne K. Moreau Reader. After On Commensalism, it’s the work for which Evangelyne is most well-known, and the version of Jane Pearson in the essay has gradually eclipsed my former fame. The essay is called “The White Girl.”
It begins with Evangelyne’s arrival at Santa Cruz and her first encounters with white students, which were almost uniformly bad. Some treated her like an unexploded bomb. Some familiarly patted her on the head. They were always asking her where to buy drugs. She told one white guy she’d been accepted at Santa Cruz straight from prison with only a GED, expecting him to be appropriately impressed. He said, “Well, the bar’s way higher if you’re white.” The week her book deal was announced, a white girl told her it was ironic her career wouldn’t exist without racism, since that was the subject of her writing. It wasn’t the subject of her writing. This was where she was at when I walked into her Approaches to Black Studies class.
Here she told the story of our first meeting: how I’d run away from her in the street, and she’d felt like she was going crazy. She’d given chase and run me down as if she could finally corner whiteness, confront it and make it face its lies. When I agreed to withdraw from the class, she assumed it was just my way of escaping the class of scary Black girls. For that minute, she was in the dystopian world of the old Nation of Islam, where whites were perversities, the botched results of a malign experiment, eternal antagonists to real human beings.
Then I said the words “Jane Pearson,” and the scales fell from her eyes. I was none of that, and she was a self-centered fool. On the spot, she fell in love.
Here in the essay, Evangelyne told my story the way she always told it: I was a victim of sexual abuse who’d been blamed for the crimes of a powerful male. Then she talked about our romantic friendship and how I’d haplessly broken her heart. In this section, I’m described through the eyes of love, which I find saccharine and mortifying. She uses words like “pure” and “gentle.” There’s a metaphor about a stained-glass window. She has us riding those horses in Wunderlich Park—in her version, Dingo isn’t sick—so there’s an image of me in sad, lost beauty, galloping on a horse with a streaming mane through a sun-dappled, primeval forest.
Predictably, this is the section from which people love to quote. I’ve even seen an Instagram photo of someone with the whole stained-glass quote tattooed on her shoulder. I didn’t take this section at face value. I’d often helped Evangelyne with essays written for mainstream publications, and I knew what a tenuous connection there could be between the sentiments in an essay and an author’s actual thoughts. Evangelyne knew white audiences craved forgiveness from Black people, and she could be very crafty about trading gestures of forgiveness for things of real economic value; she could easily turn a stained-glass metaphor into a stream of cash donations. The word “pure” was especially fishy and likely to be a practical joke on unsuspecting white readers, who wouldn’t see anything odd in the association of whiteness and purity.
But the heart of the essay is the section that follows, where Evangelyne wrote for the first time about the murder of her family. Here she came to the titular White Girl, who wasn’t me but a girl in the town where she grew up, Barclough, Vermont. Barclough was the kind of depressed rural town where rich New Yorkers have vacation homes and are broodingly resented by locals. Of course, Evangelyne’s mother belonged to a cult, and the house Evangelyne and her brothers grew up in was a cult house. Still, they were basically more city people, current and former urban professionals, most with advanced degrees.
The cult was called the African Religions Research Institute and lived up to that stuffy name. There was no apocalyptic ideation, no promiscuity, no subservience to a ranting charlatan. They were just overearnest religion nerds, prone to interminable arguments about the worship traditions of medieval Timbuktu or whether Mambila spider divination required a particular spider species. They were adults who slept in dormitories. They performed goofy rituals and wore strange clothes. From the point of view of Evangelyne and her brothers, they spent their time devising ways to embarrass their teenage children. Their devotions were focused on the healing of this Earth—the defeat of war, injustice, and poverty—and their hearts were broken, little by little, because they accomplished nothing. They were an innocent thing in the world.
But they were Black. That meant the cult was suspected by its neighbors of every form of Islamic extremism and voodoo witchcraft—also of every unsolved home invasion and burglary in a twenty-mile radius. Some white locals spied on Evangelyne’s backyard with binoculars to see the people bobbing up and down on prayer mats, drumming and chanting, dancing in masks, and occasionally sacrificing live chickens. One of the ARRI men sometimes took the older children out to teach them shooting, using bottles or (seasonally) pumpkins as targets; this was perceived as “military training” by the paranoid neighbors. There had been some calls to police already, and cops had come to the front door once but weren’t invited inside. The more conspiracy-minded locals had drifted toward the belief that ARRI was a Muslim terrorist sleeper cell.
One day the nominal head of the cult, Malcolm Sundayate, went to the supermarket with the sixteen-year-old Evangelyne, her mother, and her auntie Noor. Sundayate was sixty-three. He had recently undergone a cardiac procedure and also had early-onset Parkinson’s. He walked with two canes and wore a defibrillator vest underneath his faded dashiki. That day, he went along to the supermarket because he didn’t trust the others to choose good fruit, and peaches were in season. He’d never been the popular idea of a cult leader, but rather a gentle, bookish man, a lay scholar and sometime tax preparer. What he most missed about Brooklyn was his hobby of going out at night to feed colonies of stray cats. In fact, when he was shot, it would be with an ancient three-legged cat in his arms, a detail that later featured prominently in articles written about the case.
This wasn’t the day he would be shot. This day he was standing in the supermarket parking lot while the women put groceries in the trunk of the car, when a passing white girl stooped, picked up a half-empty soda can lying on the ground, and threw it at Sundayate. She ran away laughing at her own daring, pursued by a shrieking friend. The soda can hit Sundayate in the face. He lost his grip on one of his canes, flailed in surprise, and fell to the ground. Evangelyne crouched down hastily beside him. The other women started to crouch down too—they were initially afraid he’d had a heart attack—but then they grasped what had happened and started after the white girl, shouting angrily.
The white girl and her friend ran into the supermarket. A white man who’d been watching inside came out and stood protectively at the door, yelling at the women to leave the kid alone. The women turned back, helped Sundayate to his feet, threw the last of the groceries into the trunk, got in the car, and drove home.
The white girl went home and told her mother that five of those “Black Muslims” had chased her with canes, intent on beating her to death. The white girl’s mother called everyone she knew, gathering an impromptu neighborhood meeting in her kitchen. A case of beer was shared, after which the mother made a call to the state police.
The following day, eighteen police arrived at the house where Evangelyne, her mother, and her two brothers lived. Ten minutes later, everyone living in the house was dead but Evangelyne. From her bedroom window, she’d shot two cops, for which she spent the next fourteen years in prison.
Evangelyne dreamed about the white girl all her life. In some of the dreams, she was in love with the white girl. In others, the white girl was in her cell and Evangelyne couldn’t make her leave. In all of them, the white girl was there to murder her. There was always a seemingly irrelevant part in which the white girl ran and Evangelyne saw her streaming hair, unnaturally orange in a way that signified poison. This was the most terrifying part of the dream, expressing Evangelyne’s realization that the White Girl was everywhere, eternal, and could never be escaped.
Evangelyne then talks about seeing me as White Girl, eroticizing/demonizing me as White Girl, and what this taught her about the nature of hatred. When she turned on me, she writes, she knew she was scapegoating me unjustly. I had a right to prefer my husband. Nonetheless, when she saw she’d hurt me, she was filled with the exulting malice of the victim who can at last wield power.
She ends the piece with a firework display of ideas, drawing analogies between police violence, erotic focus, and the fear of the Other. She says that loving a white when Black is a sex act committed upon a mass grave, a desecration or ritual performed to marry hell and heaven. She quotes from William Blake and Dante’s Paradiso. It’s brilliant because of the way it was done. It was rightly called a tour de force.
What I mainly got from it, though, was that she realized she’d been unfair to me and might want to be friends again. I instantly wrote her a sentimental email, gushing about the essay and telling her what it was like to be a new mother.
No answer came. She’d just transferred to Princeton and moved across the country, and I didn’t expect a speedy response. But three months passed with nothing. It felt as if time were being more and more tightly wound on a mechanism not designed for the tensile resistance of that much time. This was when my father read “The White Girl.”
At that time, my father had a new girlfriend who was teaching him to be more open about feelings. As expressed to me in a long, brutal phone call, his feelings about “The White Girl” were that he didn’t appreciate being put in the crosshairs of a professional race-baiter, and he’d tried to be tolerant because he knew I’d been through a lot, no one knew better, but there were times he couldn’t just stand by. I probably realized he’d been opposed to my marriage to Leo, a widower twice my age, which had frankly seemed like just another mistake, but he’d kept his mouth shut because I seemed happy. And he was proud I’d made the best of that decision. He was proud of the life I’d made. But now he learned—with the rest of America—that I was cheating on my husband, not just with a woman, which he wouldn’t have minded, but a criminal, a female thug who had murdered law enforcement officers. Why do that? Could I tell him why? And don’t try to tell him I wasn’t cheating. He knew my fibs of old. What rankled most was that I’d let that woman write about it in a national magazine, and maybe she hadn’t asked my permission, but you couldn’t tell him I couldn’t have stopped her. He was ashamed now to show his face in church. He was ashamed to go to work in the morning. With all he’d sacrificed, I seemed determined to pay him back by publicly humiliating him. It was the lack of consideration that galled him, after all that business with the Cornyn man. How much was he expected to take? Could he hope this would ever end, or did I have more nasty surprises in store?
I sobbed inarticulately all through this. I couldn’t make sense of what was happening. I sniveled and gasped and wiped my streaming face. Benjamin was screaming in the background, and I finally hung up with the blurted excuse that I had to go change Benjamin. As soon as I hung up, Benjamin was fine. He was always a remarkably helpful baby: now he lay very peacefully with his wet face. I picked him up and paced slowly through the house, gently bouncing him to calm myself.
As my tears dried, I realized what I was feeling was rage. My father’s response was really about the nasty lesbian as seen through the eyes of the bigoted members of my father’s church, people who believed gays burned in hell and vaginas brought sin into the world. Never mind the “female thug” thing and how my father’s reactions were tinged by racism. Even his thing about Leo was racist, since my father made sure to tell all his friends that Leo’s last name was “Spanish from Spain,” as if it preyed on his mind that people might think his son-in-law was Latino.
And as far as my happy marriage went, my father had it backward. I had never cheated; Leo had. What was worse, he had cheated with a twenty-year-old waitress from a local fish restaurant and even once brought the girl to the house when I was there with Benjamin, the two of them laughing at inside jokes and exchanging private glances in front of me, while I was aware I couldn’t object. I sat up nights with my newborn thinking how to safely object, but came up empty. I couldn’t risk anything that might end in divorce; no court would award a convicted pedophile custody of a baby. So I worked even harder to make Leo happy, to be sunny and unsuspecting, and ultimately the waitress faded away. And now that it was over, I still loved him and was mostly content with my life, except when I lay awake at night with my true thoughts.
But I had been nineteen at my wedding, and Leo had been almost forty, and my father could have spoken out then. Instead he’d given me away at the altar and washed his hands. He wasn’t the ideal parent I’d imagined, but a cold, judgmental person who’d never understood a thing about me. He hadn’t protected me from Alain.
So I was angry as I hadn’t been in years, as I hadn’t dared be since Spokane. I was enraged and it felt cleansing. Benjamin was happily content with my anger. He nursed and fell asleep, and that sensation of nursing an infant, which had sometimes felt invasive like tickling, or even like the boys in Alain’s time, went clean through me like a wonderful knife, and I knew I was right. For a change, I knew.
Then more time passed, slack time. My father still came over to babysit Benjamin, to listen to the engine of Leo’s car, to have Easter dinner. He came to Leo’s birthday party, and we behaved around Leo and his friends. These normal things still happened, but I never spoke to him privately again. He made no attempt to speak to me. His girlfriend looked at me glitteringly, angrily—a hard-faced woman, I thought. A bitch.
Then one afternoon, six months after the publication of “The White Girl,” it occurred to me to read the email I’d sent Evangelyne: perhaps it had been unintentionally offensive in some subtle way. But when I found it, I saw I’d never actually sent it. For days I’d rewritten it obsessively, but then I’d forgotten to hit Send. Seeing this, I was filled with peace. I wouldn’t bother her now. It was the right outcome. We would both move on with our lives.
Four years passed. I brought Benjamin to class sometimes in the first year of his life; then I graduated and stayed home with Benjamin. I followed him around the house all day, seeing things through his intent, unfiltering eyes. That baby trance never really lifted for me. It was like being a monk, outside of life, every intimate task a rite of worship: rising for matins to be alone with God while the dull, profane world sleeps, and the menial labor made a song by His presence as the years pass grandly or enfold each other in days that cross each other at night, back and forth; and the baby growing, standing up on two feet, learning how to point and say the word “Look!” and the “Look!” month turning into babbling stories he tells about a dragon and a puppy, and my Benjamin was always an easy baby, a sweet little boy, good company. He loved books about polar bears and igloos. Once, when it snowed in the mountains, I put him in the car seat and drove him a hundred miles to see his first real snow, and Benjamin was always good in the car; he loved to sing and talk to himself in his car seat and needed no other amusement. I too have always found it easy to be happy if nothing interferes. I believe my father would have found it easy to be happy if nothing had interfered.
Then Benjamin and Leo and my father just vanished. Every person with a Y chromosome just vanished. Ten days I hunted for my family on the mountainside, fevered, crazed, half dying, then I drove all night to find Evangelyne. By the time she came down from the stage to claim me, I was purified. I was hers. I don’t know how to explain her power. When we left the club en masse and were dancing in the street, in the rain, a woman passing with grocery bags strode over to Evangelyne importantly, interrupting the party to inform her that socialism never worked anywhere, and Mao had killed more people than Hitler, and the woman herself had relatives in Venezuela who’d almost starved to death under Maduro, and anyone who wanted to try that, well, they’d find an awful lot of people fighting them. I couldn’t stop smiling foolishly, Evangelyne behind me, one arm confining me against her as she explained over my shoulder that commensalism wasn’t exactly communism, though they did share a lot of common ground, and she did understand the woman’s concerns, but she hoped the woman would read up and decide on the basis of full information. Then Evangelyne sketched some parts of her program, the woman interrupting to complain, until Evangelyne had grasped the woman’s story and assigned someone to find the woman an apartment from newly vacant housing stock—a ground-floor or elevator apartment, accessible for the woman’s disabled daughter. All around us, people fell quiet in the street and were lulled, brought safely to earth, enchanted by her good-witch powers, while the Venezuelan woman suffered. Her mouth worked and twisted as if she were gnawing a too-hard nut, and she seemed to live a hundred years as she thought this through and fought it, determined not to be taken in. But her body language gave her away. She was swaying to the music, lulled. In love.
And later that night at the pretty hotel, after midnight when we’d been fucking for hours, Evangelyne got up at last and went naked to the window. Of course people walked around naked then; the whole world was a girls’ locker room, and you could walk your dog naked in the center of town, though you couldn’t go into stores. She stood at the window grandly nude with the window open to the rainy night.
I said, “You look as if you’re going to make a speech.”
She said, “I used to not be able to stand at a window at all. I used to be scared.”
“When there were men?”
She made a little shrug of yes. We both thought then about the siege of the cult house. The cops had fired almost two thousand rounds of ammunition at the house, and bullets had broken all the windows and even penetrated the walls, so the only room undamaged was the upstairs bathroom where Evangelyne was finally found cowering by police, who didn’t at first connect her to the shooter. She was wearing pink scrunchies in her hair and a white flannel nightgown. Of course not a speck of blood on her. I was thinking of this and of Mussolini, who used to make speeches from a window, or, technically, a balcony. Essentially the same.
I said, “So you’re not scared now?”
“Not of that.” She turned back to me. “You know I could fill that street in about ten minutes? I’ve done it. Not here, but I’ve done it. Do you think that’s weird?”
“Do you?”
“Definitely. It’s weird, Jane. Like, you ever have something happen that’s so exactly what you wanted to happen, it feels as if you had to have made it up?”
“No.”
She laughed, then looked tentative. She might have told me something then, but a ComPA knocked and ventured in cautiously to give her the agenda for the following day. Evangelyne told her I was coming on the team and would be working on issues around the disappearance. The girl gave me a long, assessing look, then smiled as if thinking we might be friends. When she was gone, I said, “I can do other things too.”
“You will.” Evangelyne laughed. “Oh, you will.”
The next five months were very peaceful and joyous. It was like summer camp, in the way that summer camp is like a vacation in someone else’s life. I was keeping my side of the bargain, helping Evangelyne to power in those heady months of her annus mirabilis, when that job was easy. For most of that time we lived in a bus with a band of ComPA girls who were all overeducated, needy, riven by love affairs, too intense, someone’s voice always raised while someone else said, “Damn, bitch, please calm down.” It was speeches, interviews, town halls, meetings that metastasized into one-on-ones. All day we texted officials, wrote emails to supporters, made calls, while kicking or making faces at each other, all of America passing in the windows. I did the dull parts: arranged, kept schedules, made reservations. I was also the nice white girlfriend who could give white donors a feeling of safety, a girl with a radiant public goodness like a stained-glass window, like Eva Perón. In this connection, my sex offender status only seemed to add a little spice, as perhaps fascism had for Eva.
Those women were a priesthood and a pack of merry hounds. There was the blind redheaded Alabama girl, Deakin, who played the ukulele on long bus trips. There was Nell who knitted and Darrelle who was a birder and Minky who could fall asleep anywhere. Priya cast everyone’s horoscope and told me my Sagittarius bluntness could be misunderstood by sensitive people. Our beauty, Kaitlyn, let us dress her and coo about the amazing results, and we had long conversations about whether that would have happened Before. Tasha and Yi were our tempestuous lovers who broke up and reconciled at every stop, Yi red-eyed, Tasha stony-faced and unrepentant. Hour by hour, the bus became a malodorous terrarium in which we were penned, condensed, overheating, until we tumbled out, weak as newborn foals, into a hotel parking lot whose silence hit us like deafness, like free fall. We all stretched, saying nothing in the simple hiatus in which no one else knew we’d arrived. Evangelyne was learning to skateboard then, so everybody had to have a skateboard, and sometimes in that first hour they all irresponsibly skated downtown while I stayed behind with Deakin, writing/dictating the we’re here texts.
For those key months, we were a delicate, potent thing, we ten girls sweeping into town, sweet-talking America and conjuring heaven. We would walk at the roadside singing in harmony. In those scared post-August brownout towns, Evangelyne acted like a drug. She was the prophet of Saturnalia who’d introduced “jailbreak” into the lexicon, meaning the everyday crimes essential to every social system—the tax dodging, black markets, drug-fueled nights that were how a system stretched its limbs—and everyone turned wild with her. At Christmas, we led a drunken throng of locals through the empty streets of Memphis. We all packed into a tiny Indian restaurant, drinking bourbon we’d bought along the way, and made the waitstaff eat with us, we ComPAs helping to serve and wash dishes. A few days later, in a grocery at one A.M., the newly minted mayor of Galveston drunkenly shoplifted a six-pack of IPA, thinking to impress Evangelyne, and we drank it in her car in the parking lot, arguing about whether property was theft, until the police arrived and the mayor had to get out and explain. We left every town with bouquets and love letters. There were always girls who followed us onto the bus; in every city, we “stole” some Democratic activist or activist’s daughter who lost her head. One nonbinary kid from Dallas stowed away in the luggage compartment and they cried with a suitcase in their arms when we told them they could stay. On New Year’s Eve, long past the excuse of midnight, a party chair put me up against a wall and kissed me while I laughed into her mouth, until Evangelyne appeared and slapped her ass and said, “You’d best support me now!”
Often the bus became a day-long argument, with people dipping in during breaks, then going back to their work but making faces of agreement or dissent as the fight went on around them. We argued about whether August 26 was proof of God’s existence, or whether the “chromosome line” was evidence it was the work of aliens. We argued about whether it was a lesson, an experiment, a punishment, or none of the above. Was it intended to throw a monkey wrench into our reproductive process to give Earth time to revive? Was it the work of the genocidal God who’d killed all the firstborn sons of Pharoah’s Egypt and brought death into the world as punishment for eating a single apple? We also debated whether it was ever acceptable to call those who were taken “men” (as 99 percent of people did) when that erased all the trans women, intersex people, and nonbinary folks who’d gone. We agreed that the term “the disappeared” (which the left-wing media had now adopted) was insensitive too, akin to referring to Jewish people killed in the Holocaust as “the exterminated.” We argued about whether this left us with no way of expressing our grief, or even talking about the people we’d lost, and we cried and called each other names, and repented and hugged, and started arguing again.
But a moment would come when we all fell silent. The phones all stopped and we looked up. Because our influence was growing exponentially. We were opening chapters in Atlanta and Chicago, then in Terre Haute and Laramie, then they were opening themselves. We found a hundred candidates for special elections, ran signature campaigns to get them on ballots, and won, all in the same three months. The Atlantic called us “The Anarchists Beating Government at Its Own Game.” The Wall Street Journal asked: “Can Our Democracy Survive the ComPA Coup?” We were an idea people felt they’d had themselves while looking out their door one post-men morning at the weeds growing up in America’s streets, a morning overfilled with cacophonous birdsong, as a neighbor passed in pajamas, undone and barefoot, weeping openly: a world of tears and springtime, a world made real.
I was the one who wrote the disappearance into the party platform. In the bus, I would put in earphones and scour the internet for research. When there wasn’t enough, I got in touch with universities to prod them to sponsor more. From Evangelyne’s email address, I wrote to scientific luminaries, nudging and badgering, calling it a ComPA priority. I signed everything as Jane Pearson, for Dr. Evangelyne Moreau.
This work was sometimes featured in our newsletters, since it was popular with the grassroots. Internally, it was not. On the bus, there was an ongoing argument about whether this focus bordered on “androlatry”—the religious worship of men that had become very common in those months. Many spiritually minded women saw the vanished men as ascended bodhisattvas, and some even claimed to be guided by them or healed by their masculine intervention.
Of course (the ComPAs said) the concept of “men” had always been religious. All women were sold the idea of men as superior beings, closer to God, and the idea of servitude to men as a pious duty of all females. God made man in His image, and woman as a softened, degraded form: the gift of a slave for Adam’s birthday. Only men looked at heaven and saw a mirror. A girl world (said the ComPAs) might dispense with all hierarchical religion, might have no gods above. Even erotic love might lose its tone of upward worship. Trans men could be masculine without making sex into a two-tier system, as cis men always had. We could love one another face-to-face, where before we had loved only through a glass darkly: so the ComPAs said.
In the midst of all this, I thought about Leo and Benjamin less and less. I was always in a crowd, then in bed with her. And I was happy like an unhatched chick in a warm egg, waiting. If I sometimes had a flash of Leo during sex and was sickened by unbearable pain, or if I sometimes felt like the husk of a once-living organism without Benjamin, I put it in brackets. Kept going. Went to work. And Evangelyne was sympathetic to my pain but hadn’t liked Leo and hadn’t met Benjamin. Of course the pain returned in dreams, in which there was a baby I’d lost through negligence, and then I found him, mutilated but alive, and I knew I had to save his life, but would forget him again, then find him again, every time in worse condition, and I would flail in guilt and lose him again, and wake up crying. Then I went to work.
All over the world, women had these dreams and woke up crying and went to work. There was so much work to do. And I would have found it easy to be happy that way if nothing had interfered. It didn’t matter that Evangelyne ordered me around and had no time to hold my hand when I cried about Benjamin—that meant nothing. Our relationship was charged and delicate; an ideal friendship touched by fire. Once she said to us all, “How someone treats you is nothing to do with how they see you—until it becomes how they see you.” Then she asked, “Is that anything?” meaning, Could it be used? We pondered, the cozy, uncomfortable hum of the bus all around and a heavy East Texas rain making lines of wavy light on the windows, lines that trembled and were deformed in wind. It was the early days, when the water supply was still unreliable in many places, and the roofs of apartment buildings were covered in buckets, tubs, kiddie pools, trash cans—makeshift rain barrels of every color, shape, and size. Houston stood on the horizon with its unlit office towers already looking like monuments of a lost civilization. There were no cars on all the spaghetti loops of highway, nothing but rain and lightning, and in the bus, the light was moody and strange, the artificial bus lights overwhelmed by the gray light pressing on the windows. We have no real face; they are masks that are borrowed and passed on, that live for millennia and are what a human is. We didn’t understand that then. I understand now. There is no truth about life.
But I loved her. Even if my love was a face I made, I loved her all the time and was out of my mind sometimes with the feeling and the rain and the lightning. I had no other face.
The day the Ghoreishi paper came out, Evangelyne didn’t comment publicly. Instead, we scheduled a visit to a Men home. It was the home of one of Evangelyne’s exes, a very common animal in lesbian circles, who happened to be having an open house. Evangelyne and I would fly to L.A. from New York—our first flight since I’d joined the team—do the visit, watch The Men at the house, then have a meeting to decide our position. As I understood it then, this appearance was a sop to Men believers, as an atheist politician might feel obliged to show their face in church at Easter; Evangelyne was publicly respectful to Ghoreishi but privately hostile to The Men. I still hadn’t watched it for this reason. We had seen short clips on the news, but they always looked very clearly fake, or they did with Evangelyne there, disgustedly saying how fake they looked. I did want to watch more seriously but kept putting it off until I was alone. Now I put it off until the open house, when Evangelyne couldn’t disapprove.
The day before, we were in Manhattan for a Conception Crisis conference. I hadn’t gone to any of the morning events because Evangelyne and I had had a fight, after—for the first time—she’d mentioned “The White Girl,” and I said I knew she hadn’t been totally truthful in that essay. Evangelyne reacted with shock. I was shocked at how much she was shocked. We were silent for a full minute, sitting in front of a room-service breakfast in one of those beige hotel rooms with “art” photographs of the city on the walls. Outside the window, a sheer cliff of office windows faced us, and steely February weather that would pervade my memories of that day. She had the posture of a person facing a reckoning. I was afraid and began to haltingly specify that I meant the love stuff about the stained glass, the horse with the streaming mane, and “pure.” At first she looked very relieved, then she frowned and said, “What? That was true.” I said self-consciously that it just seemed sentimental. She scoffed and said, “So the essay was bad?” I pointed out that we hadn’t gone riding that day because her horse was sick. She said, “They had more than one horse. We went out riding, Jane.” I said, “But I feel like the word ‘pure’ plays into stereotypes about whiteness?” She said, “Now I’m racist? What?”
I started crying, which always annoyed her but which I couldn’t help. I tried to explain that she was smarter than me, and it sometimes made her motivations opaque, so I naturally started imagining things. She said, “That’s bullshit, Jane. If a man had written that essay, you’d be able to hear it. It’s not rocket science. It’s love.”
It got no worse than that because she walked out. She had a way of pulling the plug and leaving me alone and hysterical. That day, I knew I was wrong in a way that exposed me as rotten and deserving of hate, though we definitely hadn’t gone horseback riding. I had still never ridden a horse. She must have gone back with some other girl and gotten the two events mixed up. She had a surprisingly terrible memory. I went to a mirror and watched myself cry and the ugly faces I made. I was a nonentity. A slave for Adam’s birthday. A Dina.
At the same time, part of my mind was aware that she really was smarter than me, and she’d just kicked up a lot of dust. She’d been braced for exposure, then had looked relieved when I specified that I meant the love part. There was some lie in that essay, a lie she was afraid to face. Immediately I suspected it was in the story of how she’d killed the cops. In the essay, she’d repeated the version her defense attorneys presented in court. She’d been asleep in bed and was woken by gunfire. She’d picked up a gun to defend herself, because that’s what Americans do. It was dark. She was unworldly and a little myopic. When she crept to the window and peered out in panic, she never guessed the attackers were cops. She fired on them in terror.
The cops, however, said that the first shots came from the house, that they hadn’t fired until fired upon, that one of their men was killed before they fired. They said Evangelyne was the cause of the massacre.
Sometimes, when I was angry at her, I thought this might be true. At such times, I thought of my suspicion as a hunch. At all other times, I saw it as shameful malice, an idea I entertained only because it would hurt her if she knew.
As I thought about this, I got a text from the airline, saying our flight to L.A. had been canceled. On the heels of this, I got a text from Evangelyne saying I should come down to the lobby. I cleaned up hastily and went. She was there with some Lower Manhattan ComPAs and a bioethicist she’d met at the conference. She introduced us all, very friendly, as if there was nothing wrong. I was charming to them in my wife persona. They were taking a lunch break, talking excitedly about the morning’s events. We all walked to Ground Zero, although it was really too cold for such an outing. At that time, people liked to be outdoors, as if we needed to inspect the world bequeathed to us by men, in this case the Financial District of Manhattan. Finance had just won its fight to be a priority sector in the Christmas budget, but the area still felt abandoned. With the people gone, it had a Skynet vibe, our tiny group dwarfed by glass-faced skyscrapers seemingly built to accommodate alien organisms of gargantuan dimensions. Or perhaps the buildings themselves were cybernetic giants on which we lived as fleas.
I was thinking this, walking just a little apart, while they heatedly talked about Karen Xi, the biotech executive who’d delivered the conference’s keynote speech. Xi’s company, GenPro, had recently succeeded at producing embryos with two mothers through the use of in vitro gametogenesis, a process through which an embryo could be grown from any cell. The first human fetuses conceived this way were already in their second trimester, and twenty-three of the initial ninety-four embryos were developmentally normal and healthy. The others had either spontaneously aborted or were aborted through the choice of the mother. The research team had already identified areas for improvement. A problem going forward was that, for reasons not yet understood, every fetus that remained viable was female.
Xi covered all this in her keynote speech before warming up with a crescendo of verbiage about innovation, American freedoms, and the pioneer spirit and announcing her presidential run. Now the ComPAs were irritably saying Xi might win. Voters were so naive, they would easily accept a biotech executive as an outsider candidate. And at fifty-two, Xi had a hard-edged beauty; she looked like the A-list actress who would play Karen Xi in an action movie. She had some previous political experience and, best of all, a tragic backstory. Her youngest daughter was one of the Burning Girls, the two-hundred-odd women who’d committed suicide horribly on August 26.
On the other hand, Xi’s work in biotech, however necessary it now was, had a strong ick factor. For instance, because of past legal judgments, Karen Xi might own children born from IVG. She was also known for lobbying the government to relax regulations against “human-animal chimeras.” These were just animal embryos with some human genes, and they had real medical applications, but it didn’t play well with voters. Imagine a half-human, half-pig baby, born to donate organs—that alone ought to kill her electoral hopes, the ComPAs concluded gloatingly. The bioethicist said the joke on Twitter was that if Evangelyne Moreau and Karen Xi both ran, the election would be between one candidate named Dr. Moreau and another who literally was Dr. Moreau from The Island of Doctor Moreau.
They all glanced at Evangelyne then, checking hopefully to see if she’d decided to run. Evangelyne smiled noncommittally, looking at Ground Zero as we passed. She mentioned that she was flying to California that evening and had to keep an eye on the time. She used the first person singular—“I’m flying to California”—as if I weren’t there. I remembered again that the Men thing we were supposed to attend was at her ex’s house. Half the ComPAs in L.A. had dated her, of course, but in this context, it felt different.
I thus felt some satisfaction in announcing that our flight had been canceled, so time was not an issue. There were no other flights to L.A. tonight.
But at this, the bioethicist got excited and said she thought she could get us a private jet, if Evangelyne was interested. She knew a woman who’d inherited a jet. Evangelyne said, “Hell yes.” Everyone laughed at her excitement. I too managed to laugh. One of the ComPAs put in shyly, “Wouldn’t people think it was hypocritical if you flew in a private plane?” Another ComPA scoffed. “Come on. They call Evangelyne hypocritical for breathing air.”
By that point, we’d reached the waterfront. Flocks of people were praying and meditating there, as was common in public places now. Perhaps because it was that atmosphere, we fell silent and drifted meditatively apart. The bioethicist was texting her friend about the private plane, while the New York ComPAs pretended not to be waiting on the outcome, demonstratively gazing at the gray river. Evangelyne and I walked off from the others and headed down a pier. The morning’s argument was tangible between us, but neither of us mentioned it. We looked back at the wall of skyscrapers built from the sweat of millions of people, not just people here but all around the world, wherever money was made by sweat. The clouds had parted. Sun fell from on high. The day itself seemed to tower, and the praying women below appeared to be worshipping the buildings, even though they were facing away from them.
I said, “I just realized you’re running for president.” Evangelyne smiled and threw an arm around my shoulders, startling me. She seemed lighthearted suddenly, or perhaps the word is reckless. She stretched out a hand and swept it past the skyscrapers, saying, “All that stuff built by people thinking one way … we could get rid of it all. Do you believe I could?”
“You don’t want to keep the private jet?”
We both laughed. She said, “Baby, don’t try to keep me honest. I’m already honest. You don’t even know how honest I am.”
“Okay. But power corrupts.”
“You think?”
We laughed again, so hard it felt performative. The fight of the morning was between us, the ghost of it, a gossamer, provocative thing, as Evangelyne grappled me to her and we kissed in the cold of the riverfront, aware of the others waiting for us and possibly watching as we kissed. And I was thinking of the people on the shore who weren’t us, all the people living their real lives, who could never matter as we did. I was thinking of them enviously. I was remembering my life.
That night I found her a pilot. All the while I was out of sorts, unbalanced, scared like a person who hasn’t worn enough layers for the weather and has forgotten what it’s like to be warm. The fight and the waterfront scene had changed my mind about something, I wasn’t sure what. But getting the pilot was just a matter of badgering people until it happened. Half of real power comes from badgering people, a very underutilized tool.
Evangelyne and I took no one else on the plane. It was our plane now: a low, oblong room with an anodyne Hilton aesthetic, a reminder of how unimaginative the very rich can be. Nonetheless, as it took off, we laughed in adolescent victory. Our own motherfucking plane!
Evangelyne led me to the bed and we had sex while the plane achieved cruising altitude. We hurt each other a couple of times with the occasional turbulence. Afterward we lay on a few stacked pillows and looked down on miles of rock mountains in moonlight, the details all picked out in snow, with plunging valleys where dark trees grew and a bright tail of water subtly moved. Against this was the prosaic white canister of the jet engine, snug beside the window, and its massive intimate noise.
This was when she first hinted at the truth, though I didn’t know that was what it was at the time. We were talking about the plane and how much this was like a fantasy, and she said she’d long been dogged by the feeling that everything that came after August was a dream.
When I asked what she meant, she launched into the story of her August 26, a story I’d heard many times before. It was about a white Republican woman who’d lived in Evangelyne’s neighborhood and led a campaign of harassment against her, mostly conducted via the homeowners’ association. This HOA was always issuing fines to Evangelyne for trivial infractions, and sometimes for things she hadn’t done. On the morning of August 26, Evangelyne went to confront the woman, and they had an argument on the woman’s doorstep, in the course of which Evangelyne lost her temper and said she would like to punch the woman’s teeth down her throat.
At 7:14 that night, Evangelyne was working at home alone. She had her phone off as she often did and didn’t notice when the disappearance happened. At about eight P.M., she went out to take her garbage to the curb. On the street she found eight cop cars, all parked just out of sight of her front windows. All had their lights out. All were empty. It was quiet all around, not a cop to be seen. At her feet on the lawn she saw an object she would later identify as a high-tech battering ram. It took her a long time to trust her instinctive feeling that the policemen were all gone.
I’d always found this tale too good to be true. I half expected her now to admit it was a lie. But she told it exactly the same, with what was clearly genuine emotion, balking and sensitive, reliving that night. I realized with a tweak of self-loathing that it must have happened exactly that way—her rolling the garbage can out to the curb, the cars in her peripheral vision, the startled recognition, the terror. She’d been certain the darkness was filled with police whose guns were trained on her. She had stood in the road for fifteen minutes, paralyzed, hands in the air, not getting it. By the time she felt brave enough to investigate the scene, her clothes were soaked with sweat.
“But what I keep going back to,” she said, “is the minutes just before they disappeared. I’m sitting at my kitchen table reading a letter, and I don’t know these cops are surrounding the house. I don’t know I’m about to be killed. Because you know that was what was about to happen. It’s too easy for a cop to say I came at him, to say he had a reasonable fear for his life.”
I said cautiously, “So, not the part where you’re standing in the street?”
“Not at all,” she said flatly. “It’s the house.”
“Why do you think?”
“It’s what I’m telling you. I feel like this is a dream. I keep thinking I’ll wake up back in that house, only this time there’s no disappearance. The cops go ahead and break down the door, and nothing stops them. I mean, the men disappearing? That’s not real life. Cops executing a no-knock warrant on a Black girl who threatened a nice white lady? A Black girl who happens to be a known cop killer? That’s real life.”
The plane had passed out of the turbulence and now felt unnaturally still, as if braced for something. She too seemed braced for something, though her voice was calm and clear.
“It sounds like PTSD,” I said. “I mean, not to dismiss it.”
“Yeah. No, I know it sounds like PTSD.” She shrugged as if this were immaterial. “But I’ve also heard of people having dreams like that, extended dreams, when they’re on life support. There was a woman in prison who’d been shot seven times, and when she was in the hospital, she hallucinated whole weeks of life. Like, getting up in the morning, making breakfast, dressing her kid for school—that level of detail. All the time, she’s in a coma in an ICU. Did you ever hear of that?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I can’t be alive. That’s what haunts me. I’ve got no business to still be alive. So this trip? The Men? Baby, I need this reality to be real. I don’t want to be dealing with unexplained videos. I don’t want any spooky math that shows impossible things are happening. That Ghoreishi paper? That ruined me.”
“So why are we going to a Men thing?”
“Because it’s my job. Because I’m not a child. Shit, Jane.”
Then she apologized and said we should get some sleep. She shifted to lie on her back. For a while, I kept thinking of things I could say about the way she treated me. I again suspected her stories weren’t true, or at least that she was withholding something. The fight of the morning nagged at me. I’d really never ridden a horse. That wasn’t true. At last I was distracted by the dawn, a colossal light coming over a bowed horizon of red Nevada desert. I remembered I’d be watching The Men in just a few hours, and my anger passed.
We landed at LAX and someone gave us a car. We went to the hotel to shower and change, then on to Benedict Canyon. Evangelyne drove because she knew L.A. In the car, she talked about what it had been like to live here, speaking in a self-conscious way that reminded me again that she’d dated the woman we were going to see. When she’d been looking at Men open houses online, she’d recognized the ex’s name and called on impulse. Alma McCormick. Now I looked around uneasily at the assorted mansions, most a little unkempt now, their gardens brown, grown out of shape. If we ever broke up, Evangelyne might ask me for a favor and turn up with a new girlfriend. Evangelyne pointed out the mansion at the crest of a hill where we were going.
It was just us two, and walking up in the cool bright sun, I felt the insecurity of not being met by sympathizers, of not being in a ComPA phalanx. Did people support us here? Were we about to be surrounded by hostile Democrats? Inside, the house was like many houses where we’d done fundraisers: an atrium foyer with cozy furniture, a fireplace with a massive stone surround. The furniture was all too far apart because the room wasn’t human-sized. I instinctively looked around for a place from which Evangelyne could make a speech.
Here I was hit by excitement, remembering I would soon be watching The Men. As I thought this, Evangelyne abruptly strode away and hugged a disturbingly pretty woman. Of course this had to be Alma McCormick. They laughed excitedly in each other’s arms. I expected Evangelyne to look back for me, but she kept talking, shaking Alma gently by the shoulders. The people all around smiled sentimentally. No one looked at me.
I was newly aware I hadn’t slept. I decided to slip away before Evangelyne remembered to introduce me. I didn’t feel up to that conversation. I crept off down a corridor and asked a few women by the bathroom if there was a place to watch The Men. They gestured onward vaguely to where Ruth Goldstein stood in a doorway. I felt that excitement again. I had the nonsense thought: We’re off to see the Wizard. I went to Ruth and, although I could see the TV, I asked if this was where they were watching. Blanca Suarez and Ji-Won Park looked at me. I had a minute to think, This is it, though I was also distantly noticing the branches attached to the walls and the crude rope barrier. I was making a point of noticing them to hide my emotion. Look, I was trying to say, I’m noticing the strange things here. I’m not the strange thing.
Then I looked at The Men. I liked the cats. The men were less shocking than I’d expected. They were like men from any film made before August. Their jerky movements made it seem obvious the images were manipulated; it was hard to believe so many people were fooled. When the killing began, I didn’t strongly react. I thought it was a typical scene from the show. Two strangers shoved past me into the room. There were screams throughout the house. I asked if this was normal for The Men, and Blanca Suarez snapped at me for the first time. I wanted to laugh. I was watching The Men and I was fine. I wasn’t taken in. I was fine!
Then the clip changed.