Ji-Won first heard about The Men at a truck stop in Battle Mountain, Nevada. It was October, and she was driving a mail route from Kansas City to L.A., in a truck she’d been given in those first months, when a trucker was anyone who volunteered, when the training was one long, grueling day, then they gave you a route and you left the next morning. The roads were still hazardous. Through Nevada and eastern California, there were towns with no food supplies or water, and some truckers had been ambushed and killed. Now everyone carried a gun, and trucks traveled in convoys of a dozen or more. Rest areas and truck stops were guarded by the military.
The truck stop where it happened was also a food distribution point, where locals came to receive potatoes, onions, blocks of government cheese. When there was cheese, people came from miles around. This was a cheese day, and Ji-Won and many other truckers were in the line too. It was early morning and still chilly with the dry Martian cold of the high desert. The low mountains along the horizon were black against the sun that was rising simple and blinding in cloudless sky. Ji-Won was wearing Henry’s fat coat, a corduroy jacket with sherpa lining. She’d been driving six hours, long enough that being out of the truck felt unnatural. When she’d taken the trucking job, she’d shaved her head for practicality’s sake, and now her scalp was cold. She had the feelings of a turtle coaxed out of its shell, or perhaps of a naked heart on a timid foray outside the body.
The line was the motley line of those days: some women had coats thrown over pajamas, their hair unwashed and faces deformed by grief; others were neatly dressed and made up, and these already appeared a little retro. People touched each other more, so it was difficult to tell which pairs were couples. And, of course, there were the wolf packs of little girls not obviously attached to any adult, chasing one another around the gas pumps and crawling underneath the trucks. Half the parking lot was covered with their chalk drawings of horses, princesses, rainbows, monsters. A few had gathered around the ComPA patrol at the gas pumps; one ComPA was holding her rifle aside to let a child tie a red satin ribbon around her waist. It was the first time Ji-Won had seen ComPAs this far east, and they seemed to have displaced the usual U.S. soldiers. There was only one soldier here, a poignantly childlike Black girl in bulky camouflage, looking bored and footsore, leaning by the bins of cheese. Sometimes she smiled wistfully at the ComPAs, who paid her no attention.
There was no particular moment when Ji-Won noticed the girl handing out flyers. Awareness must have gathered in the back of her mind; then she was suddenly watching nervously as people pointedly ignored the girl, some rudely turning their backs. The flyer girl went on doggedly, making each rejection last long enough to be uncomfortable. She was a heavy, earnest-looking white girl, red-cheeked in the cold of morning. At first, Ji-Won guessed she was asking for money; panhandlers often worked these lines. But her clothes looked too expensive, and the women in the line were being too rude. Everyone seemed to know what the flyer was and to have come to a consensus that it was offensive. It was the sort of thing Ji-Won didn’t know about because she never talked to anyone, and when the girl with the flyers reached her, she accepted one out of curiosity. The people all around her subtly drew away. The flyer girl herself was so surprised she took a beat before she gratefully beamed. Ji-Won braced herself for conversation, but the girl just said, “Don’t make your mind up until you see it. You have to see it for yourself,” and carried on along the line.
The flyer said:
WATCH “THE MEN”!
SEEING IS BELIEVING!
THEY ARE STILL ALIVE AND
YOU CAN HELP FIND THEM!
MANY ARE FINDING THEIR LOVED ONES NOW!
Sons, fathers, husbands, brothers—
WE CAN HELP!
SEE AND BELIEVE: www.themen82019231.com
FIND A SUPPORT GROUP: findthem.com
Ji-Won read it twice, feeling weak all over, shivering now in the cold desert sun. She took a deep breath but still felt as if she couldn’t breathe. She took another deep breath.
Suddenly the line began to disperse in front of her. The depot had run out of cheese. One woman paused beside Ji-Won and said, “You should throw that away. No kidding. You know what that sick crap is? Have you seen it? They’re just exploiting people who are grieving. It’s sick.”
The woman lingered with a civic air. She was wearing a tracksuit and fuzzy slippers that had once been white, and she had the dramatically chapped, reddened skin of a middle-aged white person who works out of doors. Her breath smelled of wine and toothpaste.
“Okay,” said Ji-Won.
“No, serious. You don’t believe me?” Then the fuzzy-slipper woman got out her phone as if she and Ji-Won had agreed this was what should happen. As she tapped at the screen, she said, “Some people say it’s made by Russia. There’s lots of conspiracy theories, but I’m pretty sure it’s just a scam. If the government wasn’t so effed up, they’d find the people doing it and shut them down. It’s evil. I lost my two sons, and if I thought I could see them again? That’s how they suck people in. And the people who are into it, it’s like they’re hypnotized. It’s like an old-time cult.”
Ji-Won should have made an excuse and left, but instead she waited, struck by the strange conviction that this was the solution to the mystery of why she’d come here, although there was actually no mystery to why she’d come here. It was her job to come here. She’d been standing in line for cheese.
“Okay,” the slipper woman said, “feast your eyes. It’s supposed to be a film of where the men are now, but it’s just these actresses doing nothing, with a bunch of screwy CGI animals. I think it’s actresses, anyway. Some people think it’s real men. I don’t.”
She moved to stand shoulder to shoulder with Ji-Won. There was a moment when the pose distracted Ji-Won; it was the closest she’d been to a person in weeks. Then she registered what was on the screen.
Several men were shown kneeling in a grove of trees, all staring directly ahead. Their mouths moved in an uncoordinated way, silently gnashing at the air. In the far left of the frame was a gargantuan beast with the general appearance of an elephant, but with a rounded head and bright blue eyes. It was so large, Ji-Won thought it was a painted statue until it shifted its weight and shudderingly sighed.
What struck Ji-Won was not the image itself—a lot of video art was equally strange—but its quality. It was blurred, but only in patches, as if it had been filmed through a smeared pane of glass. The elephant-thing was much too big, but everything else was normal size. All the colors were off. The men’s clothes and the sky had a Technicolor garishness. It had the extravagant palette of certain kinds of folk art—lime green, turquoise, chalk white—and was fraught with the bright melancholia of that art. Ji-Won should have known what kind of photographic process she was looking at. She’d lived among artists all her adult life and was familiar with every kind of video equipment. She’d even helped one man turn his van into a pinhole camera. She’d worked in dark rooms and had altered photographs both manually and digitally.
This image made no sense to her. The best she could come up with was that someone had doctored the image piecemeal, painting it in places and creating the elephant separately with animation software. But the men were men, not women or CGI. She couldn’t see them as anything but men.
Then the clip changed abruptly to a lone man walking toward the viewer across a poison-green lawn that seemed to bulge with light. As he approached, his face came briefly into focus. Ji-Won was startled into speech. “I know him.”
The woman flinched and hunched toward the phone screen, squinting. Then she scoffed and said, “You couldn’t. Think about it. How many Chinese people are there? Like a billion? For that to happen like that? Plus you can tell it’s a girl dressed up like a man. Look how delicate she is.”
The man was Vietnamese. He had lived in Ji-Won’s apartment building in New Hampshire.
The woman must have read resistance in Ji-Won’s face, because she said, “I guess you better join those people, then. One more cracker for the cracker barrel!” She laughed angrily, then frowned back at the phone as if it had wronged her. The clip had changed again: two small boys were walking away from the camera laboriously, up to their knees in swamp.
“Okay,” Ji-Won said.
The woman turned off the screen and said, “I got to watch the charge. We don’t always have power here. Sorry what I said about the cracker barrel. But you don’t want to get mixed up with those people.”
Then the woman repeated all the things she’d already said about The Men, watching Ji-Won with wounded suspicion. Ji-Won nodded, pretending to listen. She couldn’t remember the Vietnamese man’s name, which she’d only ever seen on his mailbox. He’d worked at UPS, and in the film, he was still wearing his UPS shirt, brown and yellow.
At the same time, the phrase “cracker barrel” kept repeating in her head, with its overtones of “cracker” as a racial pejorative. The slipper woman was a cracker, but Ji-Won was not. There was a Cracker Barrel restaurant on Route 10 that was still open, though it usually had no food. Sometimes the women there just served hot water and called it “Venusian tea.” All the truckers went there because every night the waitstaff hung a sheet on the wall and showed Mad Max: Fury Road. One day Ji-Won arrived too early for Mad Max: Fury Road, and they were showing Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, in which, through a series of misadventures, Abbott and Costello actually go to Venus, which turns out to be populated by girls in skimpy clothes who’ve never seen a man and are driven mad by lust at the sight of Abbott and Costello. The truckers all laughed their heads off. Someone yelled, “It’s true! Costello’s looking pretty good to me now!” and someone else said, “It’s prescient fucking cinema!” The Venusian queen was named Allura.
Ji-Won could have talked about this to Henry for hours. Henry would have loved that scene at the Cracker Barrel. He would have believed her about the neighbor.
When the woman was gone, Ji-Won went to her truck, got out her phone, and watched The Men. She missed the next two convoys watching it. Then she went to FindThem.com and spent another hour looking through the classifieds. In the house share section, there was only one room available on Ji-Won’s route. It was the photos of the mansion that decided her. She’d never lived in a beautiful house.
She took a selfie of herself with the truck, then added a photo of her unlimited gasoline permit. The subject line of her email was: Good at fixing things, never at home.
Ruth didn’t see The Men for another two weeks. By then she was living in Los Angeles with her daughter, Candy, and fighting with her every night. The day it happened, Ruth had boarded a bus to go to a job interview in Santa Monica. She missed her stop, got off in a random place, and couldn’t find the bus stop to go back. She ended up crying on a residential street while her thoughts crawled back and forth. There was no one around. Her footsteps and the wind were the only sounds. The sun was going down, the housefronts in shadow, but the yards to the east still blinding and golden. She was walking nowhere, in a strange L.A. desolation of apartment buildings everywhere and not a living soul.
She heard the ComPAs coming a long way off. It was audible that they were marching in step, but it didn’t occur to her that they were soldiers until they appeared around a corner, nine women in cardinal-red uniforms, walking down the middle of the empty street. Ruth knew what ComPAs were from the news, but these were the first she’d seen in real life. They marched in solemn formation, faces forward, passing Ruth as if she were invisible. Most carried rifles, which were all different, but one of them carried a trumpet instead, and another a big-bellied Mexican guitar. At the intersection half a block beyond Ruth, their leader barked a word and they all halted.
Then the trumpeter raised her horn to her mouth. She blew a long, high, tremulous note, into which the guitarist began to strum. The other ComPAs raised their heads and sang, and all around, unseen, other voices joined in, countless feminine voices like flowers opening in a desert landscape. It was a song Ruth had never heard before, the kind of sentimental Mexican ballad she would normally ignore as having nothing to do with her. Doors and windows opened along the street, and women poured out, appearing on apartment balconies and porches and spilling onto the sidewalk singing. It was now revealed that this was a Hispanic neighborhood. For a moment, Ruth thought she was the only white person and felt a shameful jolt of racial paranoia. And maybe the singing was mandatory, Ruth thought; maybe those rifles weren’t just for show?
But then three young white women came wandering along the sidewalk right by Ruth. They were staring at their phones, not singing. Ruth drifted toward them, embarrassed to be so comforted by their presence, as the song came to an end. All the people stood for a minute, silent, observing a somber pause in which the wind was heard once more. Then suddenly the crowd lost its coherence. Some women began to talk among themselves; others simply went back indoors. At their leader’s barked word, the ComPAs shouldered their rifles and marched off down the street.
The phone girls looked at Ruth, then back at their phones. Ruth said in a soft voice, “Hey, I’m not from here. Could you guys tell me what that song was about?”
Still looking at her phone, one girl explained that the song was “Amor Eterno,” often sung at Mexican funerals. In it, the singer was mourning a loved one and living in a loneliness like the grave, looking forward only to dying and being again with the one she’d lost. The ComPA patrols sang it every day at sunset to honor the men.
Then, seeing Ruth’s eye drawn there, the girl turned her phone so Ruth could see its screen. She said, “And here are the men.”
1. This is the last of the “leading edge” clips. We start with an aerial view of the river, its mustard-yellow water bulging against its shallow banks. One shore is now covered with standing men, all motionless, facing the opposite bank. Only at the far left edge of the screen an empty patch remains.
From our vantage point in the air, it’s clear that the men are gathered in discrete groups. Each group, whether of four or twenty, centers around a child. The men stand evenly spaced in rings of roughly ten feet in diameter, encircling a child but facing the river.
Filtering among the men are animals: lurching elephants, creeping cats. A swirl of white birds circles above. In the water, a creature occasionally surfaces, a pallid thing of indeterminate shape whose bulk extends massively, deforming the water.
This scene continues unchanged for several minutes. At last another group of men jogs into the last empty patch and halts, already in their bull’s-eye pattern.
2. We’re on the riverbank among the men, in a section where everyone is naked. They’re all oriented to the opposite shore, at which they fixedly stare. One tiny infant, surrounded by four men in a neat quincunx, is on all fours with his head raised but unsettlingly still. Among the frozen humans, the horse-sized felines stalk restlessly. An elephantine behemoth switches its tail and turns its head as it daintily picks its way through. Even where the riverbank seems most crowded, the animals move unimpeded, inspecting the men with an air of anxious industry. The shadows of misshapen birds above cross and recross the image.
By the time this set of clips appear, the riverbank sequence has been playing uninterrupted for weeks, and the sense of tedium and paralysis is overwhelming. The only apparent development is that the men have grown visibly thinner. When they’re clothed, the clothes hang loose, and in nude clips like this one, ribs can be counted and pelvic bones jut. Among the skeletal people, the health and sleekness of the animals strike the viewer as ominous. The impression given is that the animals are somehow feeding on the men.
3. As this clip begins, a grayish object rises from the surface of the water. At first it appears to be a rock that has uncannily begun to float; then two lumps on its surface move in tandem and become distinct as eyes. The object is a face, crowned with protruding eyes but otherwise featureless.
A moment later, another head rises near the first. Then another and another, until the river is pocked with floating heads. On the bank, the cats, birds, and elephants have fallen still. They stare at a point in the air, the same point toward which the aquatic eyes have turned their slotted pupils. The men are angled, equally rigidly, toward a different point.
Once all have fallen still, the image rapidly darkens until the screen is almost black. It sweepingly brightens again, then darkens. This repeats in phases that take about two minutes each. When it’s dark, a pale moon flies across the sky; this appears to be our moon. When it’s light, we see the shadows of the men and animals turning, lengthening and shortening. At the end, the men are visibly thinner than they were when the clip began.
4. This is the first “tsunami” clip. It begins unremarkably. We’re among the men and animals, who are all stiff with attention. The darkening and brightening have stopped, and a minute passes with no change. The only movement is the trivial stirring of grass in wind, the slight changes of light on flowing water.
Then the group breaks into frenzied motion. It happens so abruptly it takes a second to see the human beings aren’t involved. The men remain as still as furniture. Only the animals are on the move: cats springing and bounding past the camera, birds taking flight, an elephant charging with a hurried flounce, the water agitated as the aquatic creatures dive.
In thirty seconds, the animals have all vanished. The men remain as rigid as before, all staring at the opposite bank.
In the riverbank series, fewer people appear per clip. The credits are correspondingly short: between fifty and a hundred names. About a fifth of the names are followed by asterisks. By the time of this first tsunami clip, it’s been determined that the asterisked names are those of children.