After I married Leo, there were four years when I did nothing but play wife, cook and clean, daydream, and it was all about the healing sex of love. I never watched the news. I never went on the internet. I baked every day, and the house was always filled with that narcotic smell. I met Leo at the door in lacy underwear. We made love and feasted on cakes and watched all Leo’s favorite films. In the daytime, I read difficult books to be intellectual enough for Leo, did calisthenics on the living room floor to be attractive enough for Leo, and planned things I would say to Leo. I attended community college courses, during which I took notes that I colored and embellished with cartoons to entertain Leo. I believed my life had been an ordeal that had tempered me and rid me of ego, preparing me to be a saint of love. Nothing else in my life has made me as happy as those empty days.
Leo loved me too, more dilutely or reflectively, dim moon to my sun. He was easily happy, perhaps a little emotionally facile, as men can be emotionally facile. He was on my side but never really grasped my admittedly niche, not-relatable problems. For him, it was obvious I’d been Alain’s victim, and no one could seriously think I was a rapist. Who actually thought it was abuse when a teenage girl fucked teenage boys? People might say ugly things online, but if you just ignored them, they would move on. He also didn’t think anybody really cared that he was twice my age. Anyone who gossiped about that, Leo said, would have to be really bored. Until his family came from Madrid for our wedding, I thought this brand of unworldliness might be a quality all Spanish people shared. In fact, his parents saw me as a criminal parasite, and there were ugly scenes where they screamed the word pedófila and tried to get Leo to call the wedding off. Leo told me glibly, mistakenly, that they would learn to love me.
The plan had always been that, once I had enough college credits, I would transfer to a four-year university. That university was always going to be UC Santa Cruz, where Leo taught, and where I could get cheap tuition as a faculty spouse. I’d taken Leo’s last name, Casares. In community college, that and a haircut were enough to make me unrecognizable. But everyone at Santa Cruz knew that Dr. Casares had married the ballerina from the child abuse scandal, so my anonymity would end. Around this time, I happened to encounter a lot of stories in which unlovable women were unmasked: a lovely immortal, on leaving Shangri-la, withers into a senile hag; a knight falls in love with a lamia, who is exposed at their wedding in her true serpent form; Caprica-Six reveals she is a Cylon just before her cyborg race exterminates humankind. But the story that haunted me most was from the medieval romance of Tristan and Isolde. It was the part where the lovers are banished and go into hiding in the wilderness, living in a magical cave hewn into a mountainside by primeval giants, one of many such caves the giants used for privacy when they made love. The cave’s walls are round, smooth, and snow white. In its center is a crystal bed, and its entrance is guarded by bronze gates that exclude anyone who isn’t there purely for the sake of love. Here, the lovers need no sustenance; they’re magically nourished by love itself. But at last the king summons them back to court, where they will never again be alone together—and, remarkably to me, they obediently go. They return to their worldly honors but sacrifice their magical love forever, and that was how certain I was that I would lose Leo when I went to Santa Cruz.
I was sick with dreamlike foreboding the day I went to my first class. Entering the groomed green campus I’d been imagining all this time, with its polite trees and banks of flowers, its flocks of well-meaning, well-heeled students, I was already sweating. I was hoping to get lost and be too late to go to class, to put off my fate for one more day. But I’m compulsively efficient. I arrived early and had to walk around for ten minutes so as not to be the first one there. When I did go in, exactly on time, all the other students were already in their seats. It was a class called Approaches to Black Studies, one of three courses I could take to fulfill the university’s Ethnicity and Race requirement. Nonetheless, I was surprised to see that all the other students and the professor were Black women. I balked on the threshold. All the students looked up. Seeing me, their faces soured and they exchanged significant glances. At first I thought I’d betrayed my bewilderment in some racist way. Then I realized I was me, Jane Pearson. I bumped into the doorframe coming in and made my way to the last free chair in a daze. The students had all looked away again, it seemed to me angrily. Most had phones in their hands. A flurry of texting broke out in the room.
There were three solid minutes of evil silence before the class began. In that time, I sweated through my antiperspirant and was conscious of the underwear I was wearing, already sodden with sweat. At last, the professor handed out the syllabus and began to talk us through it, but I couldn’t concentrate against the hostility, against the certainty that I was detested, and that all my classes would be like this.
The instant class ended, I bolted from my chair, but as I hurried down the stairs, I noticed another student had rushed out after me. Where the stairs turned, I saw her above: a big, solid woman who looked about thirty, staring directly at me. That feeling of pursuit made me weak all over—Jane, why don’t you want to talk to me, Jane?—and when I got outside, I broke into a run. Improbably, she broke into a run behind me. It became a real chase, us running and dodging other people on the sidewalk. There was a certain satisfaction in running full pelt the way I never could back in Spokane, when I’d been hobbled by that broken foot. Still, when I spotted a coffee shop, I ducked in. It was a trick I’d used many times before. If I stayed near the counter, harassers were deterred or muted by the presence of baristas. For the price of a coffee, I could wait them out in relative security.
So I joined the line for coffee with sweat coursing down my sides, reeking, my life with Leo up in smoke and all the people in the coffee shop noticing me, the stinking freak, the pedophile, the rapist. I had to leave Leo. It could never work out. I could never finish school or get a job. He would have to support me all my life, and he would lose his job the instant any rich parent found out I was on campus. We could never have a child, since the government could take it away for any reason or no reason, and I couldn’t go within five hundred yards of a school, and I’d been kidding myself. I must have known I was deluded. Why else did I race to answer the phone so Leo never heard the obscenities and death threats? Why else did I monitor the mailbox, clandestinely destroying the letters I got from men who combed through sex offender registries for female names, letters full of violent obscenity and sometimes specific plans that involved breaking into my house when I was alone? Leo had done nothing to deserve this life. We could never have a child—
—and the other student entered the coffee shop, sweaty in the face and annoyed, and came straight up to me, saying, “Excuse me? I’m in your class? Could I talk to you a second? I don’t want to freak you out, but if you just have a second?”
I said, “Okay,” almost voicelessly, looking toward the baristas. The favor would be that I not rape kids. The favor would be that I hang myself.
She said, in the tone of a person keeping her temper to get something practical accomplished, that she and some friends had planned to make this one class all Black women. They’d wanted just one class with all Black women, and it wasn’t that easy to find a Black female professor teaching a requirement. So they’d gotten together and planned it, and they’d all signed up the second registration opened, except I snuck in too. And she knew this wasn’t my responsibility. No one was saying it was. But if I could just take a different section … it was important to them. She could explain if I wanted. She wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.
At first I couldn’t switch gears. I was still looking for a barista to protect me, sick with adrenaline, dying in public. Then it all fell away. She kept talking, explaining, while I stared at her, almost crying. My body was cold with sweat, and the thought of the Black girls’ classroom moved me so much I wanted to thank her on my knees. Even I could do someone a favor. I could help with a thing this pure. It was as if she had handed me a star. The instant she finished, I said, “Of course.” I’m a practical person—I had been a Cleopatra—and I got out my phone and got it done in one minute.
When I’d finished, she was visibly stunned. She’d been braced for any white-girl bullshit; I’d literally run from her in the street. Then she said, “Hey, have we met before? I meet a lot of people, but I feel like I know you.”
I said, “No, we’ve never met before.”
“Not at a political thing? Do you live in Santa Cruz? I know I know your face.”
“I do live here, but I don’t go out much.”
“Okay. I guess I must be wrong.”
Her eyes had cooled, growing subtly sarcastic. It struck me suddenly that she was thinking I couldn’t tell Black women apart.
I blurted out, “Or, if you recognize me, it could be from … because I’ve been in the news?”
She inspected me while my face grew hot. The coffee line moved forward a step, and I used the opportunity to turn away. When I glanced back fearfully, she was frowning.
She said, “No way. You’re not Jane Pearson?”
For a final sick moment, I thought of denying it. Then I said, almost whispering, “I am. But—”
She cut me off with a shout of laughter. “No! No fucking way! You’re Jane Pearson? That’s what it was? You’re fucking Jane Pearson? I heard you were at this school, but for real?”
She put out her hand. I flinched and only belatedly realized she was inviting me to shake. I took her hand gingerly as she said, “Evangelyne Moreau. And if you recognize me, it could be from, I killed two cops when I was sixteen. Girl, I’m just like you! I’m done! I could cure cancer tomorrow, I’ll always be the cop-killing Black girl. I mean, you fuck one goat!”
Her laughter filled the room. After a pause, like a delay in transmission, I burst out laughing too. All the people in the coffee shop looked up and looked away. I realized they’d been eavesdropping all along. Nobody was typing or talking anymore. The whole room was about us.
But for the first time in six years, I wasn’t afraid. We left the coffee shop together, talking, and everything was different from that moment.
Of course, I’ve often told the story of that meeting. When I do, two things predictably occur. First, the person I’m talking to, amazingly to me, doesn’t know the “you fuck one goat” joke. (A Scotsman is guiding a visitor around his hometown, pointing out the landmarks he’s built with his own hands: the pier, the bridge, the tavern. After each of these he says, “But do they call me MacGregor the pier-builder? No! Do they call me MacGregor the bridge-builder? No!” … until at last he bursts out bitterly, “But ye fuck one goat!”) The second thing that happens is that people don’t believe Evangelyne would make that joke. To kill two cops is one thing; to laugh about it and compare it to fucking a goat is another. Evangelyne was never disrespectful about the lives she’d taken, people said very stuffily, blaming me.
But when I met Evangelyne, she was fresh from prison, where she’d known a group of women who’d almost all been beaten, raped, and terrorized, who had lost loved ones to suicide and murder, and were changed, unhinged by grief and horror, so some nights the prison seemed more like a refugee camp where they’d all taken shelter from a terrible war. The people outside did not respect this pain. The people outside kept voting to hurt these women more and to hurt their children, who’d been left without parents in the world outside. Yet no one expected the outside people to express remorse. Add to that the fact that the two cops in question had shot Evangelyne’s family in front of her. I thought she’d earned that joke.
For a long time, she loomed larger in my mind than in my life. I’d somehow assumed we would be instant friends, but Evangelyne was always besieged by people, all infatuated just like me. I followed her rise to fame online. I thought about her in the car. I was then an Asian Studies major, and, after I gave up Approaches to Black Studies, we had no classes together. Sometimes I saw her from a distance and felt a jolt as if something significant and dangerous had happened. Once or twice I joined a group around her, but soon felt uncomfortable and left without speaking. Her personality haunted me like a fragrance; Evangelyne the person now seemed lost.
Then one day, I saw her in a student parking lot with her inevitable entourage. This time she waved me over. They were talking about her book, which had just come out. She turned to me and promised to give me a copy, but the conversation drifted on, and I began to feel self-conscious. Of course she didn’t really want to give me a copy. I’d somehow made her feel obliged. As I was thinking of slipping away, a girl casually lit a joint and offered it to Evangelyne. Evangelyne balked, then accepted it self-consciously, handling it like a dangerous insect. She gingerly took a drag. I was already full of panic, as if the sky had been lifted off like a lid. I’d been off probation for a year, but the terror of crossing any line remained. At twenty-three, I’d still never had a drink in public. I hadn’t smoked weed in seven years. Still, when Evangelyne passed the joint to me, I took it. As I lifted it to my mouth, a car pulled into the lot, and Evangelyne and I both startled, ducked, and stepped convulsively toward a nearby dumpster as if to take cover. I let the joint fall from my hand as the girl whose joint it was said, “What the fuck?” She stooped immediately to pick it up. Of course the car was nothing. A student.
I turned back, making myself straighten up, and saw Evangelyne’s face, so angry and sensitive. That set me off. I started to cry.
The joint-giving girl saw my tears and said, “Oh shit. What’s wrong?”
I said in a tense bitch voice, “It’s just that I can’t do anything illegal, even borderline illegal.”
“It’s not illegal here, it’s California,” another girl said.
“It doesn’t work like that,” I said. “Not for … Some people are vulnerable.”
“No, wait, how are you vulnerable?” said the joint-giving girl. “I mean, you’re vulnerable? What?”
She looked at Evangelyne for backup, but Evangelyne said, “Jane, hey. Let’s get you that book.”
As we walked away from the others, I was twisting in shame, still crying. What I’d said was crazy, and I’d said it that way, uptight and shrill. And the reason I was scared was that I was a sex offender, which I couldn’t say, though they probably knew. Evangelyne knew. Evangelyne was about to tell me to leave her alone. She would say I had to stop acting like we were friends. I was a rapist, a pedophile, worse than a murderer. She was about to say the words.
By then we’d gotten to her car, her new Miata that was her earthly love, though she still only had her learner’s permit and couldn’t drive alone. For her, of course, this was no practical obstacle. She opened the trunk, which was full of author copies of On Commensalism. It was the first edition, where the cover art was a photo of a coral reef, and twenty of them scattered in a car’s trunk made a striking, psychedelic array. I spontaneously smiled and wanted to compliment it, but I was still crying a little.
She started to reach for a book, then paused. She was struggling, as she did with anything personal. At last she said, “You were right. You can’t smoke that shit on university property. You can’t even smoke it in public. That’s a crime. And you really can’t give it to minors. Why I handed it to you? I know you’re over twenty-one.”
My tears had gotten worse. “Okay.”
“No, I’m saying, I have to know all that. I have to think about it. They don’t. A cop comes by and sees me with a joint? What you think’s going to happen? You were right.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I don’t know. I was embarrassed?”
“Okay.”
“It’s like you’re asking, why am I a fool? I’m here trying to thank you.”
Then she stooped and fished out a book. The dust jacket was already rumpled at the edges; no physical object could pass through Evangelyne’s hands without sustaining some damage. At that time, she always carried a pen in her breast pocket, so as she handed me the book, she put her hand to her heart. Our eyes met. She said, “You want me to sign it?”
“No,” I said. “I want to be your friend.”
She smiled. I’d been smiling for a while. She got out the pen anyway and wrote her phone number in the book in place of her name.
On Commensalism, Evangelyne’s first and most popular book, was written in the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison in Vermont. She began it when she was just seventeen and finished it fourteen years later, just a few weeks before her release. It benefited from the reading she could do as a famous prisoner with friends in academia who photocopied articles for her, but also has the listen-up, real-talk voice of a jailhouse raconteur. Like many people, I read it in one sitting and was forever changed.
In biology, “commensalism” refers to any relationship between two organisms in which one organism benefits while the other is completely unaffected. One example is the cattle egret, which feeds on the insects flushed out as cattle graze, with no effect on the cattle. Another is the various species that take shelter in termite castles without harming or even disturbing the termites. In Evangelyne’s political philosophy, many economic relationships we think of as parasitic are more correctly seen as commensalist. The most important example is progressive taxation. The wealthy may complain about being taxed to help the poor, but they live just as long and happily with marginal tax rates of 95 percent as they would with marginal tax rates of 0. Other examples are the squatting of buildings, garbage picking, and some kinds of theft. Whenever value flows from the rich to the poor, it’s commensalist. When value flows from the poor to the rich, it’s not even parasitism but amensalism—a relationship in which one organism harms another with no benefit to itself. This may seem counterintuitive. Surely the rich do profit from such relationships? Doesn’t the slumlord who grows wealthier gain some benefit from that wealth? Evangelyne’s answer is no. Even if we measure by subjective reports of happiness, the rich gain no benefit at all from their wealth. We must remember that rich people are just organisms and can benefit only as organisms. They aren’t their fortunes, which are inanimate, insensate, and have no interests.
Of course the book is more complex than this, and in later chapters, Evangelyne gives a commensalist account of capital and markets, reinterprets various historical practices in the light of her theory, and introduces key concepts like “jailbreak,” “jubilee,” and “powerless relationship.” But that simple idea of commensalism, where eating the rich is a natural process, accounted for the book’s notoriety, for the disgust it engendered in its opponents, and for its forty-eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Those forty-eight weeks were the weeks of the Commensalist Party’s first short, brilliant life. They were also the weeks of our friendship, when I was at Evangelyne’s side while she made history, carrying my battered copy of On Commensalism to branch meetings when there was just one branch, designing ComPA flyers, working the laminator, working the phones. I neglected my studies to be her muse or amanuensis, or whatever I was. I neglected my marriage for her, though my marriage turned out to need not much, to get along fine without me. She and I were attuned to each other from the start, could spend long days in each other’s company and act in wordless tandem. We talked things over frictionlessly, like a single person thinking aloud, or, in the car, were silent together and felt it as a fortified solitude. But in most of my memories, we’re in a crowd. She was seldom alone, maybe couldn’t be alone. Raised in a cult, then incarcerated, she’d lived among noisy crowds and slept in a dormitory most of her life. Now she lived in a cloud of acolytes, constantly talking and listening and writing down notes, until I started writing down her notes for her. She was never too busy to invite a roomful of strangers home, where she always had penniless ComPAs staying, whose inflatable mattresses appeared in random places as if adrift on tides and who came to the door to greet her like dogs, all jumpy and laughing with the pleasure of her, jealously eyeing their new rivals. Then she cooked bad spaghetti for everyone, drove people home in her car, and left them changed forever. By the end of my first year at Santa Cruz, she’d met everyone at Santa Cruz, so I knew everyone at Santa Cruz. They knew me, and, thanks to her, I was never the sex offender there; I was Evangelyne’s friend who’d been unjustly blamed for the crimes of a powerful male. One memorable night we were invited to a party by a writer Evangelyne knew online, a party of mostly middle-aged people neither of us had ever met. When I arrived a half hour after her, Evangelyne introduced me to everyone, and they were all already outraged that I’d been blamed for the crimes of a powerful male.
Her history had left her with odd zones of secrecy, to me completely unpredictable. Even when I was her closest friend, I often learned what was bothering her by reading a piece she’d published in Jacobin. Once she went to Sacramento for the night and came back with a black eye and a broken wrist; she’d been attacked by racist thugs and spent a night in the hospital. She’d called me that night and spent an hour talking ComPA business, never mentioning that she was in a hospital, never mentioning the men with baseball bats. When I asked her why, she said, “I didn’t think of it.” She would entertain large groups with prison anecdotes but got annoyed if I asked about her time in prison. She also never talked about her family’s murder. When I first heard her tell that story, it wasn’t in a heart-to-heart conversation but in a speech at the California Democratic Convention.
The worst episode was the time she told a few of us about her first prison girlfriend, who called her “Angie” and got a tattoo of “Angie” on her ass. I asked thoughtlessly if Evangelyne had had a girlfriend before she went to prison. She looked at me as if she hated me. There was a chilling silence in which, to our horror, her eyes filled up with tears. Someone asked if she was okay, and she looked at them as if she hated them. Another woman hastily changed the subject, and that was the last time I asked Evangelyne a personal question.
I must have known she was in love with me, though I always dismissed the idea to myself, much as one might dismiss a common superstition. It was obvious and still very easy to ignore as a thing that shouldn’t be true. For context, I’m good-looking in a commonplace way. I’m exceptionally tall, as mentioned before, and when I put on any weight I’m just titanic. Of course, that can be attractive; I decisively fill a bed. My hair is dishwater blond, which I now like, although for years I lightened it. I grow my hair to my shoulders. It’s straight. It swings and pleasantly has no shape. I have blue eyes, a color I’ve noticed only idiotic women have in books. I do have a simple-minded face. The famous person I most resemble is Eva Perón, who had a very simpleminded, good-hearted face, incongruous in a fascist. My body looks good when I dress carefully, but is awkward nude, narrow-hipped with big, floppy boobs that look tacked on. When I was thirteen, I read a pulp science fiction novel called Captive of Gor, in which a fashion model is abducted and taken to a planet where the women are all sex slaves, and the sex slaves are all gorgeous so that the model is nothing special there, and in token of this, she’s given a common slave brand called a Dina, a simple flower that is the mark of a run-of-the-mill, ten-a-penny sex slave, and girls with this brand are all called Dinas, a story that comes back to me whenever I look in a full-length mirror.
I have no idea why I would inspire erotic devotion in anyone. But I do. I unnervingly, reliably do. Many of the boys from Alain’s time became unhappily infatuated with me, a part of the story I generally leave out. The Brazilian boy I often mention was head over heels in love with me, a fact I never mention. He continued to write me from São Paulo even after I was married to Leo, a detail I tend to conveniently forget. There’d also been a lonely deliveryman in Spokane who followed me all around town, attempting to explain his love to me. I dismissed this at the time and lumped him in with the men who harassed me. I still don’t know if that was wrong or right. And Leo, and Evangelyne, and one of Leo’s friends who had wanted to leave his wife for me, so I had to reject him whisperingly in the hall at a faculty party. It’s always been easy for me to attract romantic love. Not friendship. Since I was sixteen, my core relationships have always been sexual. I can’t change this fact about myself, though at that time I attempted to deny it and believe I could be something else, dismissing the many times Evangelyne fell silent, gazing at my face, and wistfully smiled or didn’t smile, and the way it felt. I had needed a friend.
The next phase began with Lucinda Gar. Lucinda Gar was a white ethnic studies professor who’d been one of the first academics to answer the letters Evangelyne wrote from prison. Ultimately, more than two hundred scholars wrote back, including some household names, and Lucinda was one of dozens of people who sent Evangelyne books and articles. She was the only one, however, who raised funds for Evangelyne’s legal fees, sent press releases to journalists making the case for Evangelyne’s innocence, introduced Evangelyne to a magazine editor who published a selection of her prison letters. Lucinda also flew to Vermont to visit Evangelyne in Chittenden, bringing stacks of letters from Lucinda’s students, who were all studying Evangelyne’s case. When Evangelyne’s release date was coming up, Lucinda fought to get her accepted at Santa Cruz despite Evangelyne’s lack of conventional credentials. Many parts of Evangelyne’s current good fortune were facilitated by Lucinda Gar.
But as soon as On Commensalism entered the New York Times bestseller list, Lucinda changed. Suddenly everything Evangelyne said was met with condescension or veiled hostility. Lucinda suggested Evangelyne see a psychiatrist to deal with her “issues,” and when Evangelyne demurred, Lucinda wouldn’t stop texting her the names of psychiatrists. Lucinda came to every Commensalist event and always sent a follow-up email suggesting how Evangelyne could improve her ideas, her presentation, and her appearance. Lucinda would invite Evangelyne to lunch, then make long phone calls at the table, and if Evangelyne asked what was up with that, Lucinda became sighingly patient, implying Evangelyne was a prima donna and everything with her was a minefield. Once Evangelyne mentioned dating a girl, and Lucinda made a sarcastic grimace. She said, “You forget I know you were straight before you went into Chittenden.” This was absolutely not true, and Evangelyne asked where Lucinda had gotten that idea. Lucinda said it was natural to be confused for a while after getting out of prison. At that point, Evangelyne stopped seeing Lucinda.
But Lucinda had just been warming up. She now wrote a long post on Medium claiming On Commensalism as her own work. It was derived, she said, from a series of letters she’d written Evangelyne in prison, with a few interpolations from letters Evangelyne received from “other prominent scholars.” To any specialist, she said, it was obvious that someone with Evangelyne’s meager background could never have written such a book, “however much that inspirational narrative has boosted its popularity.” Then Lucinda Gar went through the text of On Commensalism, finding references she claimed were beyond Evangelyne, from articles she said would have been inaccessible to Evangelyne in prison. Many of these were articles Lucinda had personally printed out and mailed to Evangelyne.
Nothing in Evangelyne’s experience had prepared her for this particular betrayal. She would call me in hysterical rage whenever there was any new development: an interview Lucinda had given to a journalist, an email from the lawyer Evangelyne had hired to handle the defamation suit, an op-ed written by a gloating conservative about how the Left was devouring its children. I would talk Evangelyne down from going to Lucinda’s house and breaking her windows, and once I drove out at one A.M. to meet Evangelyne at the Santa Cruz Pie Shoppe and listen while she drank coffee after coffee and cried tears over Lucinda Gar and wouldn’t take one of Leo’s Ativans because she was afraid the cops would stop her and test her urine.
Then I went home to Leo. Or I know I must have gone home to Leo, although it feels counterintuitive, and I have no conscious memories of Leo during this time. I also must have cleaned the house and done laundry, although I have no recollection of this, and it strongly feels as if I didn’t. I still had sex with Leo and talked to Leo every day, I know—but it feels as if the Evangelyne period happened to a different person in a different town, to Jane Pearson and not Jane Casares, Jane Pearson who could never have become a housewife.
Things had gone badly for a while. Evangelyne had to move out of her house because the landlord didn’t like the ComPAs staying. The two candidates we’d fielded in local elections had lost their primaries by wide margins. The big book prizes had all been announced, and On Commensalism didn’t even get nominated. All this made Evangelyne uncharacteristically short-tempered, mercurial, and paranoid. Sometimes she was rude to strangers, tainting the organizing she’d once done so well. The ComPAs were suddenly shedding members. Thirteen months after its inception, Commensalism already felt like a spent force.
One day Evangelyne and I went alone to Wunderlich Park, a small park in the redwoods with hiking trails and a riding stable. We’d booked a trail ride; it would be the first time either of us had ever ridden a horse. We’d planned this weeks before, in high spirits, but on the drive up, we were out of sync: she was out of temper with everything; I was conciliatory and chipper. Then when we arrived, the horse Evangelyne had reserved, Dingo, had a cold and couldn’t go out. The staff was very apologetic and had already issued Evangelyne a full refund. Still, Evangelyne’s state of mind was such that I ended up having to google colds in horses to make sure it wasn’t a lie, that they weren’t discriminating against the cop killer. In fact, horses get a lot of colds and then they need rest just like human beings. Of course the stable people still might have been lying, or (as I joked) Dingo might have been malingering. Evangelyne didn’t laugh at that. She suggested we walk a trail on foot. On the trail we were silent and even saw a flock of turkeys without saying anything. We both just stopped on the trail and watched the turkeys passing through the trees for a very long time.
But the day it really happened, the day she called me a worm and a fucking nonentity and banished me from her life, was the day she met with the man from the town where she’d grown up. In that small Vermont town, Evangelyne’s family had lived in a house with thirty to fifty other Black people, the numbers depending on the time of year, who were all members of the African Religions Research Institute, the cult in which Evangelyne was raised. Twenty-seven of these cult members, including Evangelyne’s mother and two brothers, were shot dead by a SWAT team after their white neighbors told police they were Muslim terrorists. The man she was meeting with was one of these neighbors.
The man now wanted to make amends so badly he was flying in from Vermont to do it. For reasons she didn’t explain, Evangelyne agreed, and I knew not to ask. But I had to be there to hold her hand, to be (as she said) her white-girl buffer. She didn’t often bring up race with me, but this neighbor had called down murder on her family for being too Black in his white neighborhood, for worshipping Black gods in a Black way, and she’d been the one to go to prison, so in the forty-eight hours leading up to this meeting, which we mostly spent together, she talked about race incessantly. I walked on eggshells and was afraid to speak. When I did speak, my voice sounded jarringly white, white like a wrong note. I began to understand why certain ComPAs called me Ballet Becky. I remembered every race-related episode I’d been through as a white girl in the ComPAs: one girl told me my Asian Studies major was cultural appropriation; another girl called Alain a man of color who’d been imprisoned for my crimes; once at a party a Black guy said he’d just adopted a kitten and I expressed surprise, and he made a face and said, “Becky doesn’t know a brother can have a cat,” and the other people laughed, and I didn’t know why I’d been surprised, so it actually could have been racist surprise. All this now recurred to me and made me defensive. Whenever Evangelyne talked about race, I froze up, then said the wrong thing, and she looked away from me, miserable and strange, like I was personally killing her.
When the day came, I drove her to the meeting, at that same Pie Shoppe. As we got out in the parking lot, Evangelyne said, very hostile and sensitive, “Don’t fucking leave me.” We’d been told to look for a silver SUV, and before we got to the Pie Shoppe door, a silver SUV pulled in. The SUV drove to the far end of the lot and fussily, very slowly parked, pulling out and back in again to get the angle right. When the driver’s door opened, Evangelyne reached as if to take my hand, then didn’t. A nondescript white man got out and raised a limp hand to us in hello. Then two other white men got out of the car. One was burdened with a video camera; the other, with a big handheld microphone. The neighbor had brought along a film crew. Evangelyne saw these people and shrank, stepped back convulsively as if to take cover behind me, saying breathlessly, “Fuck you. Fuck you. Shit, get me out of this. You have to get me out of this. I can’t do this.”
The neighbor was walking toward us with a big smile, waving like a nice guy certain of a warm welcome everywhere he goes. The other two men came behind him, unsmiling, raising their equipment into place. They could have been local news or InfoWars; I couldn’t make out the logo on the microphone. I suddenly saw my place in the world and was filled with Cleopatra, with my old powers. I stepped forward and blocked Evangelyne with my body, saying, “It is not appropriate to bring a camera crew without telling us ahead of time. This conversation is over. Get back in your car. Go home, this isn’t happening.”
I turned back and found Evangelyne staring at me as if again seeing armed men surrounding her childhood home. Then she buckled and turned away too. Behind us, the neighbor was sputtering, apologizing. I could see her feel it like a rain of bullets. Still, she got into my car okay. I got in and we were driving with Evangelyne crying, her hands in tight hurt fists, saying, “Thank you. Thank you,” then seeming to change her mind and saying nothing, us fleeing across those California hills, all sleepy grass in gold with a dusting of purple wildflowers in dry profusion, then on into the redwoods’ darkness, which dabbled over us like water, to come out at the beach at last and fling ourselves out of the car and walk, laborious over the sand, nobody else there but one Latino man splashing through the shallows, running, flying a silly-tailed kite. We walked away from him, the shaggy cliffs over us morose and mossy, out to where huge stretches of kelp lay messily heaped like piles of ropes, and, in a jagged canal of runoff water, a scum of lime-green algae was startlingly bright among the rainy-day colors. Seagulls high-stepped among the kelp, occasionally sharply taking flight as if shocked by an unbearable memory and leaping to escape it, riding the air for a minute above it until the sea reached up and seized it away.
Then Evangelyne stopped. She waited for me to stop, to turn to her and feel the last thing come. And she asked me to tell her if she had any hope, while I kept my distance and couldn’t meet her eye. Couldn’t breathe. I was looking at the ocean.
I said at last, “Yes, but I can’t just …”
“What?”
I didn’t answer, so she said she loved me. She said I must have guessed, everybody else had guessed, and her voice was small in the ocean’s roar. She said, “Jane, please.”
When I looked, she was self-possessed, recovered from her weakness of the second before. I was terrified. I said in my worst uptight white voice, “I couldn’t leave Leo right now. I’m pregnant.”
Now I stood at Don’t Cry with Luli, in the world where the men had all evaporated, facing Evangelyne and feeling it again. I was a worm, a nonentity, a coward. I had hidden behind my unborn child. I was now only ten feet from the stage. I’d stopped chanting “I Am I,” among her followers who still chanted “I Am I,” still deafening and heaving like a storming sea, and I was frozen by that self-loathing, when Evangelyne saw me and faltered. The women were chanting, “I am the best!” Evangelyne leaned forward, squinting. I strained both toward and away from her. I was aware of Luli looking back and forth between us with prurient interest and of the crowd’s dimming energy, their confusion.
There was a full minute when I knew I’d failed. Our friendship had been six years ago. Any feelings she’d had for me were gone. She’d had a dozen girlfriends since, all hotter, better educated, kinder, more interesting, not freakishly gigantic, not famous pedophiles, not Beckyish, and with firm, young breasts. She would ignore me or ask that I be shown out. I’d gambled everything and lost. I deserved to lose and I had lost.
Then her eyes opened wide and her whole face changed. Her body went happy all over. I made a little peeping noise in my throat. My heart was so affected, my vision blurred. When I could see again, she was reaching out to me, grinning. She was right at the edge of the stage, and she seemed to be about to jump but was cautious of the height—so happy, and about to, but no, too afraid. I started fighting toward her, my feelings silly and streaming like water, like an opened hydrant, anarchic in the sunshine of July. As I got close, she knelt and clambered down, and the very last people between us made way, the whole crowd deferring, deforming itself to give us space, so Evangelyne—big and real and smelling of good live sweat in her silver dress—was there and I had her in my arms. She kissed me full on the mouth, and I went out of my mind, my hands on her bare shoulder blades where the skin was so cool and tender. Without thinking, I kissed her like I would Leo, her tongue in my mouth and my body responding just like that, as the people chanted, “THE BEST! EVAN-GE-LYNE! OF ALL THE PEOPLE! IN THE WORLD! YOU ARE THE BEST!” and some women close to us had recognized me and were joyfully shouting my name to each other until the whole room shrieked with romance. They screamed for the victory of love as Evangelyne kissed me for the first time.
And I wanted her and didn’t, no I did, with the pillowy feeling of her breasts against mine, and that silly spooked voice in my head, and my skin thrilling with surprised suppressed desire, and of course all the positive attention all around, and Evangelyne laughing in my face—her soft beer breath—saying, “Jane! Jane Pearson! Are you serious? Now?” The next thing I remember, we were outside, with the whole crowd that had streamed out with us, that had borne us out like a sea to take over the street and drink wine there and dance like witches. San Francisco! The good gay city! Ours! The heiress had opened her car doors and was blasting a jaunty country song as it gently began to rain, and we didn’t stop dancing. I was hanging on Evangelyne’s neck and kissing her throat as if I were drunk and crying as if I were here for her. I danced with her wet self in my arms, her drenched skirt clinging to my legs. I danced in the thickening rain, and since everybody there knew who I was, I could dance like a fool, like a former ballerina, making beautiful shapes and spinning on a toe, with Evangelyne laughing at my grace like it was the craziest thing.
And the next thing I remember is the pretty hotel. It had no towels at all. Its towels had all been looted and we would have to air-dry after the shower, the hotel woman sheepishly explained, but even this was like a holiday, a terrifying holiday, a holiday of clinging to a plank in the ocean, because the door was closing and then we were left alone with a king-sized bed. It was happening. Evangelyne asked me, “Are you okay with this? I know you’ve got to be in mourning,” but I said, “Yes, yes, yes,” and hurried it along and was pulling off her clothes, light-headed and scared, and her breasts were surprisingly beautiful: rounder than mine and somehow bright. I’d never touched another woman’s naked breasts. I was conscious of not knowing if I wanted to, if they were a fascinating toy or a problem. She lay on top of the covers with me and stroked my breasts, her eyes half lidded, and I saw the faint bright stretch marks on her belly and was out of my depth, alight. I’d never thought this could really happen. I cupped her breast and it was indescribable like all sex. I really did want to have sex with her, but the feeling of having to do it right, but being out of my depth, was like Alain, like that first time in the Jokers Wild Hotel and Casino, when I’d thought I would die, when I was violently afraid.
I almost started laughing when she reached down and got a dildo from the side of the bed. She cocked it interrogatively, Yes or no? I wanted to ask whose place I was taking, who that dildo was lying in wait for, but I just nodded. I didn’t want to laugh. It was one of those strap-on dildos made to resemble a dick with uncanny-valley realism, covered in something like and unlike skin—brown skin, a detail I’m ashamed to admit I first perceived as “political.” Then she held me down and kissed me, and I moaned without thinking and prepared to be ravished. I didn’t know if this was right, but when she touched me, when she entered me, I didn’t dare open my eyes and it was good like sex, and it was, it really was, and I came. And came again and came. It went on a while before it seemed to be diminishing, hurting a little, and she stopped. She kissed my face, and I didn’t dare open my eyes.
Then I sobered, faced with the task of making her come, which I went at first with my hand, too timidly, unconfident, plagued by terrible memories of boys and Alain. I was both grateful and annoyed that she’d taken the strap-on off and tossed it somewhere, that she didn’t expect me to don the strap-on, which might have been easier but weird. And I was about to dive in orally (those words, “dive in,” passing through my mind and being comical in a way that was unfunny), but she asked me in actual words, as I could never do, if I wanted a vibrator, and I said, “Okay.” The vibrator she helpfully found almost instantly made my hand numb, and I kept thinking, Don’t cry, don’t cry, and this could go on forever, and I had to look at her cunt and it made me embarrassed, but soon she tensed all over and her legs straightened out, and the feeling of making a woman come, which was mainly the same, just relief that you’d succeeded. Then I didn’t know if I should do it more. I did it more, just gently, trying to intuit it, but that terrible fear had returned. A hotel bed like the one in the Jokers Wild. I was touching another woman’s cunt. But she did come again, less dramatically, almost resentfully, then took my wrist and moved my hand away. She kissed me on the head, and it was okay then. It was her, and I was able to forget it in kissing, in even feeling arousal again. So suddenly happy. Of course she was attractive to me. I loved her. My mind began to nervously chatter about why she even wanted me, enumerating my physical attributes and dissociating in a familiar way that was comforting. My body enjoyed the things and loved her euphorically, while I was elsewhere, worrying. It felt normal.
And the sex finished for real. She slept and I lay thinking in the bed with her. I was thinking of Leo and Benjamin. I also thought about my car, where I’d often been with Leo and Benjamin, a car I’d blithely abandoned to the twins, assuming I’d get it back “somehow.” It would rust away at Micah’s house with no gas. Another lost thing. My lost little boy. My husband who had really been the flesh of my flesh. I’d betrayed him. And nothing good again.
Evangelyne woke up and found me crying. She smiled and didn’t make me feel bad or weird. She stroked my head and said, “Hey. Hey.”
“Sorry. I know this is fucked up. It’s not you.”
“I get it.” She smiled at me awhile. There was no one who had such a kind, smart face. Interviewers always called her “wise,” which felt condescending when they did it, but was true. She was wise, kind, every way good. But, as I watched, she began to think. Her brow furrowed in a way that could have been adorable in anyone else. I felt it coming and quailed.
She said, “I’ve got to ask myself why you’re here, though. I mean, I feel your hand in my pocket. That’s a big hand.”
She was smiling indulgently still, as if she thought my ulterior motives were cute. I said cautiously, “You know I had a son.”
“I know you had a husband.” She laughed to soften it. I laughed, but I was frightened. I took a deep breath. Then I had nothing to say but made a thinking face as if I might.
She laughed again, getting it. “You think I can fix that? Oh shit, Jane. It happened to me just like it happened to everyone else. I got no magic powers. You think I can bring the men back? Really? I hope that’s not why you’re here in this bed.”
“But it’s not as if you can’t do anything.”
Then I lay there exhausted while she really thought about it, staring at me as if using my brains. I hadn’t eaten since the day before. The room was spinning. Her recklessness and gaiety, that witching aura she had, was everywhere. I felt her thinking my thoughts.
At last she said, “We’re not even the government yet. Not close. You want something like that, maybe help me be the government.”
I didn’t try to hide my relief, and when she saw it, we both laughed. She shook her head and said, “Jane Pearson. What have I gone and done?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll help you. Yes.”
Banu Ghoreishi, Nahida Siddiqui,
Caitlin Allbright, A. G. Sanchez
Introduction
The existence of The Men constitutes an unexplained phenomenon, assumed to be related to the events of August 26–27. In this study, 366 Men watchers in the United States and Canada were monitored for a period of fourteen days. Participants were recruited through online advertisements placed on the FindThem.com website. All agreed with the proposition “My primary aim in watching The Men is to see my loved ones.” Each participant provided researchers with a target list of loved ones they hoped to see. The appearance of these targets in The Men was recorded for each participant.
The researchers identified three watching strategies: viewing strategy (n = 101), group strategy (n = 45), and name strategy (n = 221).
Viewing strategists watched The Men for as many hours as possible. Group strategists collaborated in groups of five or more to watch for one another’s loved ones, maintaining twenty-four-hour vigilance. Name strategists did not watch The Men but relied instead on the lists of names that appear periodically in the footage. Name lists have been shown to reliably correspond to people shown in the video (Antin et al. 2020; Siddiqui & Antin 2020). Both major Men websites maintain searchable lists of names, with links to the corresponding footage.
These three strategies were predicted to be equally successful at finding people on The Men. This study demonstrates for the first time that this commonsense expectation is wrong.
For name strategists and viewing strategists, no targets appeared on The Men in the two weeks covered by the study. This was unsurprising, given the few individuals shown in that time: 382,201, or .001% of all people with a Y chromosome alive on August 26–27.
For group strategists, however, 115 targets appeared. The researchers were unable to suggest an explanation for this remarkable discrepancy.
Participants in the study also submitted to two medical examinations. No significant medical changes were detected in participants that weren’t attributable to the extended periods of physical inactivity undergone by some watchers of The Men.