When I first saw Benjamin killed on-screen, I screamed until I was breathless, until my vision swam from lack of air. I believed I would die. Evangelyne ran in and, for a while, there was chaos, people shouting all around while I sobbed in her arms. Blanca was the one who asked me questions, who needed to know who I thought I’d seen. When I begged to see the footage again, Ji-Won was the one who got a laptop and found the clip on FindThem.
The second time I watched it, I had cried myself out. I could answer Blanca’s questions then. I wrote down the names of the men I’d recognized and details of those whose names I didn’t know. Blanca posted all this on the FindThem site with the thread title Mass Fucking Recognition!!!
By then, I was afraid to move, to take my eyes from The Men. Alma wrapped me in a quilt. Ji-Won and Ruth went to the kitchen and made chili. I ate chili and drank beer in front of the flat-screen TV, while the other people all gradually left. Ruth didn’t. At the time I didn’t know this was strange. I assumed she had lived there all along. We talked a lot that night, though I remember not a word of what we said; just talking, and running out of talk all at once, and the relief, as if we’d jettisoned some pointless ballast. Night fell. It never crossed my mind to leave. I was in the one place. We watched The Men.
By that time, Evangelyne had gone. I know now she left the room early on. She’d only watched The Men for five minutes, and had found herself irrationally terrified, sick with terror, like someone with a phobia of snakes watching live snakes writhe in an insecurely covered terrarium. She’d expected this reaction but had not been prepared for its power and persistence. Now she lived in a world that included the snakes. She would never again feel safe.
In the long hallways and unused rooms, she managed to escape the crowd. She slipped out to the back lawn and paced around manically behind the pool house, thinking. At last she lay down in the grass and shut her eyes. When she’d lived in L.A. before, it was a time of crisis and loneliness for her, and she’d sometimes lain out like this, and it had helped her. It did nothing now. When she shut her eyes, she saw the warped animals and the bloodied men on the riverbank. When she opened her eyes, the sky looked flimsy, the pool house and towering palms unreal.
After a while, she heard people leaving: voices in the street, cars pulling away. Then she got up, walked down the road, and sat in our borrowed car, which was now cold. She tried calling my phone, but it went to voicemail. She found some Men sites and checked what was happening now, though she had to stop from time to time and do the breathing exercises she’d learned long ago from a prison psychologist.
At last she came to a decision. She drove to our hotel, making calls all the way. That night, in a hotel ballroom, she held a press conference to announce the ComPAs’ position that The Men was a pernicious hoax. She talked about what had happened at the mansion, how I’d been shown what she called a “deepfake video” of my own child being murdered—this on a day when our public schedule said we were attending a Men open house. It was clear, she said, that I’d been targeted as the girlfriend of a prominent politician and an emotionally vulnerable mark. She concluded by saying this species of harassment merited criminal investigation. Commensalist policy would be to stop The Men by every nonviolent means.
At the end of the conference, almost as an afterthought, she announced her presidential run.
She didn’t return to the mansion at that time. I didn’t miss her or worry about her absence. I lived in that room. We watched The Men.
The massacre clips all appeared to show the same two minutes at different points along the riverbank. The shadows were always the same length. The bright, cloudless weather was always the same. The aquatic creatures arrived exactly forty-two seconds after the adults sprang onto the child. In most clips, all adults took part in the killing, but every now and then, one person abstained. Then the aquatic creatures surged above the water; the abstainer fell into their reaching arms. If the clip continued long enough, we saw the tentacles surge back, bearing the little human figure across the river. They moved in concert, handling the person with what seemed like care.
I was still at the mansion on February 18, when the man carried over the water was Ji-Won’s friend, Henry Chin. Two days later, I was there when it was Blanca’s father, Alejandro Suarez. I was there when Ruth’s son Ethan was torn apart by a group that included her husband, Tom, while her other son, Peter, stood by trembling, then took to the river a little belatedly, stepping straight into a tentacled mass. I was there on May 17, when Billy McCormick was the last to be borne across the river, and the images changed and those who’d crossed were shown sprinting over a cracked dead plain.
It was never clear how many crossed the river. What was clear was that the footage now focused on the loved ones of dedicated watchers. We saw our own men all the time.
They ran in a landscape where not a stick was alive, not a floating seed. The air was thick with dust or rain that glinted like cartoon radiation. There were forests of shattered, leafless trees and wetlands denuded of vegetation, where the water was thick with plastic trash. In a few clips, a half city stood on the horizon, a skyline of partial buildings that appeared to have been gnawed by fire. Some places had entirely lost the contours of our world. There were sculpted fields of orange dust that rose in puffs at every step; there were dunes composed of trash and bone. Once a black palace-like reef collapsed into whirling soot as a boy ran by. We understood: this was a future world in which the men had never disappeared. It was the hell to which we would have been condemned, the Earth they would have made.
We watched until it was real, until the room around us dissolved and became a figment. I would wake from sleep knowing Leo was coming, he was coming like a catfish swimming blindly up to the glass of an aquarium, and I stumbled out of bed, compelled, down the unlit stairs that gleamed resentfully by moonlight, and came in behind Ji-Won and Alma where they watched on the sofa with a quilt on their laps, as the clip changed and it was Leo. He ran among the thin, blackened trunks of a forest that had burned. The trees posed with a scarecrow air against a streaked yellow sky. Leo trotted, his face blank in an unfacelike way, blank like a demon’s head.
The clip changed. I turned and went to the kitchen and put some oatmeal on to boil. Out on the lawn I could see the ComPA guards Evangelyne had posted by the gates; one girl glanced up to the window, sensing a movement, but didn’t meet my eye. I turned back to the boiling water with its furtive scent of oats. I felt Alejandro Suarez coming to the screen, swimming up, and I closed my eyes and saw him run, in the mud and the rain, in the wind that sucked at the hot, gritty air, in the dark of shut eyes, he was coming to us. The clip changed. I opened my eyes. I got bowls from the cabinet. There was a hint of dawn in the window. I had lost a little time, but the oatmeal was still okay. When I got back to the library, Blanca had joined Ji-Won and Alma. We ate in a staggered formation that allowed us all to see. Upstairs, Ruth was showering. She was the one who never gave up on hygiene, who answered the door when the doorbell rang. All awake: a sense of time gone still.
And in a way, we were just watching television through the fall and rise of civilizations, as many other people do. We watched The Men while North and South Korea were unified, while the first female cardinals chose the first female pope. The day Evangelyne first drew ahead of the Republican in a three-way poll, we were watching The Men, and we were watching when she made the “For the Children” speech that cemented her position in second place. There were wildfires in Canada and drought in South America; refugees fled from cities where infrastructure had failed without male workers; and we watched men running through the dead land. Power plants and oil refineries closed worldwide from lack of skilled workers and diminished demand, and a climate agreement was reached that reflected these new, more permissive realities. Fish populations rebounded in the Atlantic and moose appeared in the streets of Moscow. People talked unironically about Gaea, Themyscira, Eden. We five watched our screen. Spring turned into summer, and now our ComPA guards ranged freely throughout the house. They cooked elaborate feasts in the kitchen, fucked in the beds, spoiled the dog with treats. Laughter rose outside as they splashed in the pool and ran through sprinklers, young and cloudless. It was as if a new, pure generation had arisen in the months since we’d started watching. And we were watching when an objectively different generation was born, the first human beings conceived without sperm, without sin.
The last weeks moved like rock underground, the tectonic grind of unseen things that only change through violence. Outside it was June, it was July, and our curtains were full of troublesome sunlight. In The Men, soot, dust, and scalding air. And we talked sometimes in the worst of the night. Blanca talked the most, about her father and the house they’d had in El Paso with a tall dog gate around the kitchen, where Blanca would lurk and wait for her father to come home with women late at night. He always spotted her and ordered her to bed, but let her shake hands through the bars. She never saw the same woman twice. They were tired, annoyed women wearing too much makeup; nice women who asked her questions in Spanish but kept looking uncertainly at her dad; teenage girls who giggled soundlessly, carrying their beat-up shoes in their hands. One white lady flinched from the sight of Blanca, saying, “What’s that?” and her dad just laughed. Blanca had always thought her father was rich; then she went to a private Catholic school and found out that was wrong. He would have been rich if it weren’t for Blanca’s medical bills, he’d said once; then he corrected himself and said he was rich, because he could afford her care. Once Blanca had a colostomy bag for months while she healed from a bowel resection, and her dad wouldn’t hug her all that time. But he always came to the hospital and wore his lucky sweatshirt. It wasn’t his fault she was born a mutant. She should want him back.
And Alma said she now resented her brother, though it wasn’t his fault he was the prince of the family, the chosen one who could do no wrong. Maybe he hadn’t stood up for her, but they were kids when their mother threw Alma out, and with his gentleness came a kind of weakness. He bent whichever way the wind blew. It was true that, in Alma’s many rock bottoms, he never let her stay at his house. But he drove her to AA meetings and rehab. He wouldn’t give her money, but he talked her down from ledges. She should want him back.
And Ruth talked about how Peter had consumed her life, never gave her a break from pain. She was getting old and had a young son, but Peter still had to be the star of the show. He would lose his job and get kicked out in the street and find some lowlife to break his nose just so Ruth would come and kiss it better. All the phone calls from hospitals, the suicide threats; he had to make everyone who loved him hate him. She wanted Peter safe with every cell of her body, but she didn’t want him back.
And Ji-Won remembered a night she’d been driving to Henry’s apartment, and just as she pulled into his parking lot, he called to say she shouldn’t come. At that moment she saw a boy—a shining, beautiful, deerlike boy—get out of a pickup truck and sprint up the building’s outside steps to the second-story balcony. Before the boy reached Henry’s door, it opened. In the lit doorway, Henry still had the phone in his hand. He was wearing a flowered shirt Ji-Won had found in a thrift shop and tailored for him, and he was transfigured by joy. He hung up without saying goodbye.
I had never hated Leo. He had been there when I had no one else, and it’s hard to forget that kind of love. We’d fucked so many hours, days, weeks. We had a child, and that child was Benjamin, who cried when Pinocchio turned into a donkey, who was frightened of trees falling on him but believed if one of us stood beside him, we could stop the tree. My son had Leo’s face. There’s a thing that happens when a man lifts a child in the air, and the child screams ecstatically because it’s safe. Leo Casares could be that man, not only for Benjamin but for me.
But in these weeks, my feelings changed. It was the clip of Benjamin with men swarming over him, painted in blood—and not just Benjamin, but three months of men tearing children to pieces, painted in blood. Not one man fought. Not one saved a child. Perhaps this was compulsion or automatism—but what in life is not compulsion and automatism? When was I free from compulsion and automatism? Still I am my life.
A real man would have saved his son. That was what men did. So I’d been taught. So I’d fatuously believed. It was instinctive in a man to defend the weak, to protect the ones he loved. My father and Leo had kept me safe—so I’d been told. So I’d believed. But I watched those murders and considered my life and found not a single instance of a man protecting me, only countless instances of men who talked about how they would protect me: Leo saying he would like to beat Alain to a pulp; my father wishing he could be there for me in Spokane; all the boys who had said they would fight for me, but they’d fucked me for Alain and said not a word in my defense when I was prosecuted for rape. All the world of men was a vast Spokane, where women and children were abused, and men blamed the women or wrung their hands and said they would have stopped it, if. It was good cop/bad cop: one cop made you give him a blow job, the other deplored it after the fact and said, “Take care of yourself, you’re a lovely girl.” It was Alain, who expected you to treat him as a kindly father while he orchestrated your serial rape, and he could laugh at himself when exposed as a sham but never change, never stop devouring children.
Evangelyne came back on the final day, when the wasteland footage gave way to clips of towns. These could be identified as real geographical cities, but with the buildings derelict and overgrown, the trees in parks dead and swathed in dead moss, the roads all choked with drifts of trash. Here the men, the adolescent boys, the trans women and girls, were seen to be coming home: the Japanese shown in streets with faded Japanese signage, the French in Paris and Rouen, an old Siberian man walking down an overgrown road through muddy taiga. We felt we were nearing the end. The colors were milder and the images clearer. They walked instead of running and appeared to have human joints, to weigh what humans weigh. Even the beasts had a valedictory air and moved with a tender solemnity, like parents shepherding their children to their first day of school, or to an abattoir.
It was also in these hours that watchers of The Men began to vanish. They melted into air. They disappeared like men.
Evangelyne came into the room, then balked. I noticed first of all that she’d been drinking. She was wearing rumpled campaign-trail clothes, her hair lopsided from dozing in the car. She’d taken off her shoes to come indoors, and I could see the raw, abraded patches the shoes had made across her first two toes. I couldn’t speak. I have never loved anyone else; that was what I felt. I wasn’t going to speak.
She asked if I was all right, but absently, preoccupied by something else. When I didn’t answer, she sat on the floor in a corner, angled away from the screen.
We already knew, because we lived among ComPAs, that Evangelyne had surged ahead in the polls. Karen Xi had been set to comfortably win: donors were flooding her campaign with money, and her lead had stabilized. Some pundits were already calling the race. Then Xi’s former company asserted property rights to the genetic material of infants born by IVG, meaning every baby now being born. Xi reacted to the resulting uproar impatiently, saying it was a technical issue relating to DNA sequences and would never affect those children’s lives. An email was leaked in which Xi told a staffer she couldn’t stand by and let her colleagues be burned at the stake by Neanderthals when they’d just saved the human race. She wrote, If the voters are that fucking stupid, they should vote for Evangelyne Moreau.
In the course of a week, Xi’s numbers tanked. There was now no realistic chance Evangelyne would not be president.
Evangelyne didn’t talk about this. She sat on the floor, exhausted and silent. In the television light, she looked very soft: a heavyset woman of almost forty, her posture bent with worry, in a dove-gray vintage suit with dark embroidery around its lapels. Still, even sitting slumped on a floor, there was intelligence in every line of her body. She was great as Napoleon might have been great, with a potency that came from the blood, from the gods, from being born to rule. And it struck me that she’d burned every hour of her life as fuel for one endeavor. Before she could have one scintilla of peace, she’d demanded that the whole world first be good, and she’d doggedly believed she could make it good—an incarcerated Black woman who had no conceivable means to change the world, much less make a bad world good. Yet here we were.
Still I couldn’t turn to her, not fully. I had to look at the screen, at the street where a man named Yaniel Arias was walking. He was the only dwarf who’d crossed the river, the husband of a watcher in Havana, a neat nude figure who now marched tirelessly in a miasma of ash. Evangelyne was indistinct in the corner—we were all dark and indistinct in that room with only the flat-screen light, and even Yaniel Arias was a shape in a darkness—but Evangelyne was dark like a path.
And she said she had come to tell me the truth. It was a truth she’d hidden so long, it felt like it belonged to death, not life. But when she was done, we had to leave this place. We had no time to spare.
1. This is the first of our homecoming clips. By the time we see it, a hundred watchers around the world have already vanished, erased as their homecoming clips ended. In some cases, a family member or friend came in to find the viewing room empty. In some, there was a visitor in the room at the time who went into a fugue state in which they were dazed by euphoria. When they came to, they were alone.
Henry Chin is first seen a long way away, approaching the camera in real time at a leisurely walking pace. In the foreground is a shopping street in Durham, New Hampshire, a few blocks from Henry’s old apartment. It’s identifiable by the remains of signage, though none of the storefronts is intact. The road is overgrown and littered with trash, scattered bones, and the rusting heaps of military vehicles.
Henry negotiates this terrain with the usual blank unconcern of the men. His clothes are still soiled with the dust of the journey and spattered on one side with a child’s blood.
2. This is the last clip I saw of Leo. He approaches the camera through the black masts of a burnt forest in a violet dusk. The light is poor, and the feline creatures walking beside him shrink and grow like shadows. At a certain point, all the feline shapes peel away and he is left alone.
Still the clip continues. He comes closer and closer, until his face looms startlingly into the screen. I’m intent as if I need to understand his expression; there’s something threatening about his face. When the clip ends, I want to think about this, but Evangelyne is still speaking. I’m trying to hear Evangelyne.
3. Here Alejandro Suarez is shown from above, walking in ankle-deep water on what was once a three-lane highway. Cars are scattered across it as if hurled there at random. Some are crumpled. Some lie on their sides. Again it is night, and Alejandro walks effortfully, unsteadily, like a drunk staggering home from a bar. Occasionally one of the bird-things passes by, its wings spread stiffly, crossing the screen with startling speed.
Gradually we notice the surging of the shallow water, the odd impulses of light that cross it in waves. A large piece of metal like a car fender cartwheels down the street. The silence of the image has fooled us. We are watching not a drunken man, but a man walking in a gale-force wind. Smaller scraps of wreckage fly past his head, but Alejandro continues undeterred, not ducking or flinching from the storm of debris. There’s a doggedness in his movements. We feel the great distance he has come.
4. This clip is very brief. It shows Peter Goldstein swimming in an oil-slicked canal that flows between tall mounds of rubble that sparkle with shards of glass. His dark head surfaces for a moment, then dips again and he’s gone. Behind him a wave recedes—a surge of tentacles that seethe, then submerge, leaving only shivering moonlit water.
There’s something poignant about the clip’s brevity. It’s one that would often come to mind when I thought about The Men in later years, when we could no longer see the videos.
5. This is the last clip we saw. It shows a patch of brown land strewn with burned debris. At its center is the crisp outline of a rectangular pit, filled with trash and murky water. The skinny trunks of three burned palm trees are identifiable by a fourth unburned tree in the same line, its waving yellow crown looking softly colorized in the hazy air. The background of the scene is lit by the blackish orange of fire still burning. Specks of soot fall constantly through the air. For a moment, the shape of a gargantuan elephant fills the frame. Its hide is smeared with soot, and its outsized humanoid eye seems swollen.
Then it’s gone. In its wake, the earth is suddenly green with healthy grass. A change of light strikes the pit. All the trash disappears, and the pit is glowing and sweetly blue, the underlit blue of a pool. At the corner of the image, where there was previously a litter of woody trash, there is now a dainty white cabana—the same cabana visible from the window of the room we’re sitting in. As we grasp this, Billy McCormick walks into the frame.