About the prison years, there was little to say. The first year she was almost comatose with grief, to the point of once needing to be force-fed. The doctor recommended heavy meds plus electroconvulsive therapy, which she accepted, and it probably saved her life. But if she had problems with her memory, that was something ECT could do. It also took the last remnants of her faith, which was mostly a relief. She had suffered at the COs laughing and mimicking her when she tried to chant in Yoruba. She also spent a lot of that year crying about her problems to other inmates, which went surprisingly well, considering that 90 percent of them were white and 100 percent had their own problems. A lot of COs taunted her and kicked her around—she was a cop killer, after all—but there were prisoners who treated her like their own child. People are a lot of things.
She’d been in that prison about a year when she got a letter from Seattle, Washington. The envelope was covered in Forever stamps, though the letter was just four sheets of paper.
Poppy wrote:
I moved to Seattle (do you think it’s far away enough?! haha!) but the mail works just the same here. Been in the hospital a looong time. Then it took a loooooong time to find you because I’m dumb and no one wanted to help me! But I been writing to the government and newspapers and everyone to tell them you never shot anybody. Don’t they know those cops are the same lying dumbasses who bought my crap about how you were sacrificing kids to Hoodoo??? But nobody listens I guess when they see the letter’s from a loony bin. Like a crazy bitch can put you in prison, but the same crazy bitch can’t get you out! So I maybe can’t make it better what happened BUT I’M CRYING FOR YOU ALL THE TIME.
The last three sheets of paper were covered on both sides with hand-drawn tears.
Poppy would continue to write to Evangelyne for thirteen years.
For the first three years, Evangelyne read the letters, although she never wrote back. This was also when she started work on the book that would later become On Commensalism—at first a thankless task. The COs were always tossing her cell and scattering her pages to the four winds. She had no research materials at all; the prison library was a set of encyclopedias and a few shelves of tattered romance novels. When she was in gen pop, she had to concentrate against the pandemonium of radios, TV, chattering, whistling, snoring, and even the occasional cellmate fart that interrupted a crucial train of thought. In seg, the only writing implement she was allowed was a tiny golf pencil. But she ground on, and slowly the work became her lifeline. She weaned herself off medication, and when the mother of an ARRI victim sent her commissary money, she ordered a clear-case typewriter. In the fourth year of her sentence, she finished a draft. It was then a Frankenstein book made up of half-baked jargon, flights of sentimental prose about “daughters of a world in chains,” plus a few of the ideas that would later make her famous in embryonic form. She typed six copies with carbon paper, and soon half the prisoners were avidly reading it: Evangelyne’s first fame.
She was planning to send a copy of this mess to Cornel West. She knew he taught at Princeton and thought a package addressed to “Cornel West, Princeton University, New Jersey,” had a chance of being delivered. She’d even convinced herself the typewritten pages would impress him with their authenticity. Then she thought again and mailed it to Poppy.
At the time, Poppy was already infamous in the LGBT community of the Northwest. She was everyone’s worst-ever girlfriend, a universal muse and stealer of hearts who periodically went catastrophically mad, ran amok, and left scorched earth. She dated a celebrated artist, then a restaurant owner, then two poets in a row, then a journalist, and ruined all their lives. Everyone in lesbian Seattle had a story about calling 911 on Poppy. Often she peddled books and junk in the street, and once she built an imposing art structure in Discovery Park that she said was a “religious machine.” There was a brief controversy about its removal until Poppy set it on fire herself and was carted to a psych ward yet again.
When she was on her meds, she attended community college and worked as a dog walker or veterinary assistant. She functioned well enough in those roles, though she was never exactly sane. Even at her best, she heard voices, which she believed came from a demon realm. A typical letter from Poppy opened with the news that she’d gone to the zoo and received a message from the zebras, but the message was incomplete, so she went to the aquarium, where she was arrested for fighting the guards because she didn’t have the entrance fee. She would apologize for writing “loony stuff,” once excusing herself by saying, “I got to get back to taking meds, but if I take them I feel like shit, like when Wily Coyote swallows a canonball.” Under this, she’d drawn a picture of a coyote with a massive cannonball in its stomach and the caption IS THIS HAPPYNESS? She wrote a lot about gender, most of it unhinged. In one letter, she said men didn’t have souls and that was why they grew so large; in another that sex roles were demonic and therefore only “animals, amoebas, plants, and mushrooms” could know God. She was obsessed with climate change and pollution and believed she could hear trees screaming in pain because the earth was poisoned. Human sacrifice was another preoccupation, and she sometimes talked about the preparations for her own sacrifice. She now called this “the Miracle” and believed that when it occurred, the world would be “delivered from evil men.”
From the letters, Evangelyne knew Poppy was currently going out with a local journalist. She now sent Poppy her manuscript, along with a letter curtly asking if Poppy’s girlfriend could read it and maybe help get it published.
For a few weeks, nothing came from Poppy. Evangelyne couldn’t sleep for rage. In the never-dark prison night, she stared at the ceiling of her cell, thinking about the deaths at ARRI, about sacrifice and whose human sacrifice mattered, about Poppy’s cheery, babbling narcissism that Evangelyne could not switch off. She thought about Cornell and the beautiful life she could have had if Poppy had never crossed her path. In the nights, her anger turned to fear, which made the prison feel like the last safe outpost on a haunted Earth, and Poppy the evil that stalked outside, a demon from a hell realm. Even Uncle’s abuse now felt like part and parcel of Poppy, as if there were an Uncle-and-Poppy entity that had fouled Evangelyne’s mind with rape and incest, then gone on to butcher her family.
Then, after three weeks, a package arrived from Seattle. In it were three photocopies of the manuscript Evangelyne had sent. All over each copy were notes: one set from Poppy’s girlfriend, one from Poppy’s English professor, and one from Lucinda Gar, whom Poppy had met in a coffee shop and enlisted to help. Poppy enclosed a letter that said, “Let me know if you want ANY more help! WE ARE ALL HERE FOR YOU!!!”
From this time, Evangelyne’s fortunes changed. She spent the next ten years in prison doing research, completing her education, and writing and rewriting On Commensalism, provided with every resource she needed by scholars nationwide.
She never wrote to Poppy again. She destroyed Poppy’s letters unread, though the prison officers wouldn’t stop delivering them, saying that would be interfering with the U.S. mail. After her release, she cut off contact with anyone who might be in touch with Poppy. No letters came, and eventually she stopped expecting Poppy to turn up at her door. In the meantime, she went to UC Santa Cruz, then transferred to Princeton. She wrote three books and earned a generous second income on the paid speaker circuit, spreading her wings. In all this time, she didn’t hear from Poppy. She even found a way of talking about her history without the mention of Poppy. Only once she tried to write about it, in the “White Girl” essay, which was originally all about Poppy Beacham, but she ended up cutting those sections before it went to the editor. When it was published, Evangelyne was terrified that Poppy would come out of the woodwork to set the record straight. When that didn’t happen, she felt safe for the first time since she was sixteen.
This sense of freedom continued until, in December 2018, she accepted a post at UCLA. She was hoping to revive the languishing ComPA organization in California; she felt she’d transcended the emotional problems that had undermined her first attempt. In Los Angeles, she bought her first house, a midcentury modern bungalow in Santa Monica, not far from the mansion where we were now sitting. The house represented a hope for selfish happiness, a thing Evangelyne had been afraid to imagine and never really thought could be. In fact, it turned out to be her fatal mistake.
The problem was the homeowners’ association in her neighborhood, which kept fining her for violations like having pumpkins on her step at Halloween, allowing a guest to smoke in the driveway, and having an “inconsistent carport.” Evangelyne could never make it to the meetings, so the HOA remained an enigma to her, though she knew the unfriendly woman who lived on her right was the president of the board. She asked her only Black neighbor if he thought she was being singled out. He said, “Oh, hell yes,” and told her that woman was a Republican activist who’d gone around asking people if there was any legal means to stop Evangelyne from moving in. “Because you’re a criminal, you understand. Of course she didn’t ask me.” The crowning insult was when the HOA issued Evangelyne a citation for having an unreported dog. Evangelyne had no dogs, while the Republican neighbor’s dog barked all night. When classes ended for the summer and she had free time, Evangelyne hired a lawyer to file suit against the HOA for harassment.
The papers were served on the HOA on August 25. On the morning of August 26, police appeared on Evangelyne’s doorstep to say they’d received a call about an African American female breaking into a home. Even though Evangelyne was in a bathrobe, they insisted on seeing ID and a property deed before they would agree to leave. Once they’d gone, Evangelyne got dressed and went to knock on the door of the Republican neighbor, who admitted she’d called 911 but didn’t see why there had to be so much fuss about a simple misunderstanding. The woman was disarmingly tiny and seemed alarmed by Evangelyne’s presence. Evangelyne began to explain why people shouldn’t call the cops on their Black neighbors, but when she got emotional, the woman looked panicked and slammed the door in her face. Then Evangelyne heard—or thought she heard—the woman calling 911 again.
Evangelyne only lost herself for a few seconds. In that time, she beat on the door, kicked notches in its paint, screamed threats. Then she came to her senses. She was a Black woman in a rich white neighborhood, shouting about beating a bitch’s teeth down her throat while the bitch called 911. Leaving, she tripped on the step and almost fell. In that jolt of lost balance, she knew.
Evangelyne didn’t even go back to her house. She got in her car and drove. In traffic, she called a ComPA friend, who volunteered to meet her at Bed Bath & Beyond to help her pick out a security camera. When Evangelyne arrived at the store, three ComPA girls were waiting for her. She’d calmed down enough by then to joke about the meltdown she’d had on the nice white lady’s doorstep, acting it out with funny faces and making the others scream with laughter. The girls googled what she’d done and decided that, in California, she was only guilty of vandalism to the door, though in Florida the woman could have legally shot her. Then they wandered the store for most of an hour, engrossed in an emotional conversation about police murders, the carceral state, and white women who dialed 911 whenever they saw a Black person looking happy. They traded stories of bad encounters with police, and the tone was one of sisterhood, but Evangelyne started to feel estranged. Police racism was real—no one knew that better than Evangelyne—but these girls weren’t facing what she faced. She wasn’t just Black. She had killed two police. She knew how she would die.
Instead of expressing these feelings, she ended up buying a home security system in addition to two outdoor security cameras. Then she lingered in the store with the ComPAs while one of them considered buying venetian blinds. Evangelyne was punch-drunk by this time and joined with the others in making lame jokes about Commensalist window treatments, laughing performatively loudly. When a white sales assistant hurried toward them, they bristled, thinking they were going to be asked to leave, but it turned out the girl had recognized Evangelyne and wanted a selfie. While Evangelyne was posing with the girl, feeling better (maybe being famous would protect her from the worst), her phone rang with a number in Reno, Nevada. Not recognizing the number, she didn’t answer. A minute later, the phone buzzed with a voicemail, which she also ignored.
Evangelyne drove home alone and spent the rest of the afternoon writing. She’d gotten the worst of the terror out of her system and actually had a productive day. At about five thirty, she took a break to install her new security equipment. It took almost two hours because Evangelyne had never learned how to do anything handy; one of the notorious defects of women’s prisons was a lack of educational programs. By the time she finished, she was physically exhausted. She might have gone to bed without knowing what had happened if she hadn’t remembered that, with all the disruption, she hadn’t checked her mail that day.
In her mailbox were the usual journals and one book for peer review. There was also a fat manila envelope, postmarked from Reno and forwarded from Evangelyne’s old department at Princeton. From the handwriting on the envelope, she instantly knew it was from Poppy.
For a minute she was paralyzed, sweating by the mailbox, searchlit by her new motion-sensor light. When the light went off, she instinctively waved to get it back on, then felt more afraid when it worked. Walking back to the house, she was conscious of being filmed by her own cameras. She glanced at the Republican neighbor’s house, of which she could see only the long driveway. Evangelyne was gripping that manila envelope so hard all her fingers hurt. She told herself she would throw it away immediately without reading the contents. She thought this even as she got inside, slammed the door, dropped her other mail onto the floor, and tore the envelope open.
It contained roughly fifty pages of psychosis. At first glance, this looked just like the letters Poppy had written her in prison. Evangelyne started to leaf through rapidly but almost immediately stopped at a drawing of beakless birds labeled DEMON FREINDS. She’d never seen a drawing of Poppy’s demons, and she started to read the writing below. It was about how Poppy was fated to burn to save the dying Earth. She was the first sacrifice required by the demons of earth and sky. A thousand other women would burn with her; their names were written in light. The sacrifice of the Thousand would open a Door to the demon realm. “Then the Evil will be pulled through that Door and the demons will Take them for their Keeping. This is the Second Sacrafice, a Sacrafice as aweful as the time of Noah.”
Evangelyne almost stopped reading then. She had wandered into her kitchen and glanced at the trash can. Still she didn’t throw the letter away. Instead, she sat down at the table and turned on a lamp. She read on about how, through the grace of the demons, the world would become a haven of peace, ruled over by wise queens. Pollution would be cleaned up, and the “genecide of Earth” would come to an end. But the Door would be left open, and some “Lot’s Wives” would look back through it, feeling pity for the Evil Men. The Evil would sense them there and start to march toward the Door, “like dogs on the scent.” If the Door wasn’t closed, these Men would find the opening into the world and flood back in. Then everything would go back to before. The Thousand would have burned in vain.
Poppy was writing to ask Evangelyne to remember this letter and close the Door. Poppy would tell her how, and it would be easy for someone as smart as her. The time was not yet come; all Poppy asked was for her to read this and remember. Everybody else thought Poppy was crazy, but Evangelyne was raised in the Ancient Wisdom. She knew sacrifice was real. Her people had—
Here Evangelyne turned a page and found a crude drawing of a group of men on hands and knees, who seemed to be tearing apart a child. One of the child’s arms had come away, and streams of blood were shown in red ballpoint.
This image put Evangelyne over the edge. She started to leaf forward hastily again, now looking only for any indication that Poppy knew where she lived. The fact that Poppy had sent the package to Princeton was comforting. Still, Evangelyne was wondering if she ought to warn UCLA security. She looked at the Reno postmark again and was about to check Google Maps to see how far away it was, when she thought, with a cold, hard shock, of that phone call from Reno, Nevada.
She found and listened to the voicemail. It was from the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office, calling to speak about Poppy Beacham.
She opened a bottle of wine and drank a large glass. When she called the number, it rang and rang. She might have given up, but as it rang she heard the voice of her Republican neighbor outside and froze. The woman was shrieking, sounding hysterical. At first Evangelyne was trying to remember where she’d put the property deed, but she slowly realized the woman was screaming a name. She was calling her child to come in.
At that moment someone answered the phone, a girl who sounded brusque and defensive but softened when Evangelyne identified herself. The girl said she was just a volunteer and she would go find an officer. Rattled, Evangelyne poured another glass of wine and ended up spitting a mouthful back in the glass when a new woman came on the line. This woman introduced herself as Officer Meg Herrera and asked if Evangelyne had someone with her. Evangelyne began to cry immediately, knowing Poppy must be dead.
When she could control her voice, she lied that she was with her roommate. Herrera said she was sorry to have such awful news on such a night, but Poppy Beacham had passed. She’d been found this afternoon by hikers in the desert north of Reno, where Miss Beacham appeared to have doused herself in gasoline and set herself on fire. She was still alive when found, and the hikers had managed to get her to the hospital in Gerlach. From there she’d been airlifted to Reno for emergency treatment, but her injuries were too severe. She had been pronounced dead an hour ago.
“Of course a lot’s happened since then, and things have been in real chaos with … what happened with the men there. I guess you’ll understand. So I have your name written down as next of kin for Miss Beacham, that’s all I know. There’s only four of us here, and that’s including volunteers, but if there’s anything we can do … I’m not finding many people tonight I can help.”
While Officer Herrera spoke, Evangelyne was pacing with the phone, sometimes stopping at the wineglass and drinking more. She didn’t understand all she was being told. She understood Poppy Beacham had made her next of kin, Poppy Beacham had had her phone number. When Herrera finished, Evangelyne stopped her pacing and was staring out the glass doors to her backyard. An animal ran past, which she first took for a coyote. But it was dragging a leash: a dog. The neighbor was still calling in the night, monotonously now. The name she was calling was “Thomas.”
Without thinking, Evangelyne ended the call. She spent a minute trying to figure out how to block the number, then turned off the phone entirely. The voice of the Republican neighbor grew louder, then fainter, then stopped. A door slammed; she had gone inside. Meanwhile, Evangelyne stood over her garbage can and tore up the pages Poppy Beacham had sent and shoved them down into the wet trash with her fingers. Then she washed her hands, tied up the trash bag, and took it to the bin in the garage. She rolled the bin out to the curb, though it wasn’t scheduled to be picked up for another day. In the event, it would not be picked up for a week. When it was, it would be because Evangelyne herself had reorganized Los Angeles trash collection.
Leaving the bin at the curb, she was worrying she wouldn’t sleep that night and wondering if another glass of wine would help or make it worse. She only slowly noticed a change in the landscape, which then became intelligible as a number of cars parked in the street, not in front of her house, but at a little distance in both directions. The closest car had its inside light on and both front doors open. It was strange enough that she walked down the road to get a closer look. As she went, her vision adjusted to the darkness, and she suddenly saw it was a cop car. Altogether, there were eight police cars, parked along the road in both directions, all just out of sight of Evangelyne’s windows.
That story, of course, was one I knew. Evangelyne had told it all the time: how she’d seen those cop cars and found the battering ram on her lawn; how she’d been the focus of a raid that had vaporized, raptured, turned into air. She’d told that story a hundred times. She’d told it to rallies of thousands of people.
But of course she had left Poppy out. She had lied about Poppy Beacham all her life, Evangelyne said, tired and hoarse. She sat in shadow, leaning back against the one bare patch of wall, Ji-Won’s branches projecting all around and above her as if protecting her, like the forest around Sleeping Beauty. We hadn’t moved. We hadn’t physically responded to her. We watched men marching, almost invisible in dust, and Evangelyne was bright among us, fragile.
She said, “You know I fought against believing this. Even after I saw those videos that looked exactly like Poppy’s drawings—even then I wouldn’t say, Okay, The Men is the Door. Poppy’s right. It’s all true. So even when I was trying to stop The Men, I was acting as if we could fight it rationally. Like, maybe there’s a Disappearance, maybe The Men looks just like Poppy’s drawings, but this is still reality. There are still limits. If I jump from a roof, I break my back. The sun still rises in the morning. And if it’s the real world, there’s somebody making those videos, and we can find their computers and shut them down.
“But all that time, I knew. This isn’t that kind of real. This is the reality I learned about when I was a child, where you get things done by prayer and ritual and, yes, by fucking sacrifice. So I’m pretending to be rational, but all I really want is to have Poppy Beacham’s letter back, to read it to the end and find out how to shut that Door. Because I believe if I can’t shut it, I’m going to wake up back in that house, and the cops will break in and shoot me down.
“So I’m thinking, what would Sundayate do? What would Sundayate believe? What did I believe, before they put me in prison and burned it all out of my head? And I’m here because I once believed in love as a holy thing, as a power that maybe created the world. And if I were still that pure and stupid, I would know the answer is love. If I could convince you I’m enough, that this world is enough, I think that Door would close.
“I don’t even know if you’re hearing this. If you are, I don’t know how to convince you. I get that you lost your family. You’re not Poppy Beacham. You don’t owe me this. But if I’m right, you’re not just killing me. You’re killing all the work we did. We’re so close to getting there, Jane. We can make this world everything humans ever dreamed of—all the wildest dreams anybody ever had, that’s all within our reach. I love you more than that Leo loves you, and I’m going to be president. What is he? What did he ever have to give you? I don’t want to be offensive, but in that world, you’re a housewife with no skills and no options. Think what you can do here. Think what you can be. Don’t be a goddamned fool. Choose me.”
Of course, all the time she spoke, we watched. We watched strangers arrive in shattered houses, dead woods, flooded streets. We watched one man reach home and the land come to life all around him and the sky turn blue. We watched Henry Chin on the street outside his apartment building in Durham, New Hampshire. We saw Leo walk back to the campsite and Alejandro Suarez struggling back to the hospital complex where Blanca was having surgery. We watched Peter Goldstein swimming in the flooded street of a shattered New York City.
And as Evangelyne asked me to choose her, Billy McCormick stepped on the dead earth outside our window and it shimmered and grew green. The water of the pool clarified and became bright blue. A coyote ran past.
Behind me, Blanca got to her feet. The colors on the flat-screen TV silvered. I saw this even as I looked away. They were the colors of the room, where the light had changed. It was dusk. I couldn’t see Evangelyne.
Time might have passed. I would never find out. I would never learn more about that world.
Ji-Won had gotten to her feet.
I got to my feet.
Ruth and Alma got to their feet.
The screen had gone tiny behind me, and all around the forest was jarring green. It was spangled with dew and moonlight, and the hushing sound of trees was oversewn with the cries of insects.
I took the first step away. I saw the flank of the tent, with a faint spot of electronic light in the tent’s mesh window. The others were there and gone. I was lying in a hammock with my boots still on, skin sticky from mosquito repellent and the unwashed sweat of a long day’s hiking. The large night around me made this feel clean. I remembered it all, every molecule and trembling of air: I had had an idea about watching the stars come out and feeling wild and solitary, bound to no one else. I had wanted to indulge my fantasies in which I’d never married and Alain hadn’t happened, in which I had my whole life free. It was dusk, and the sky was all one color: grayish violet, silken, dim. There had been times I’d been frightened in the world, bad times. This was not a bad time and I was happy.
I opened my eyes. The lime-green leaves of the alder above me were trembling and luminous, brighter than the sky. I could see the tent. My son and husband were here.