by Alex McElroy
“That’s right,” he said, nodding vigorously. “You’re making—”
“The world safer,” I said.
“We offer a place for men to come together safely, to communicate, to enhance job skills through community-oriented training sessions.”
“Sounds like you’re making man hordes,” said Art.
“Nobody makes man hordes,” I said, with a laugh of derision. “They’re a natural phenomenon. Inexplicable. Though some social biologists claim—”
Dyson gave me a shushing look. “Just the opposite, Art. We’re keeping men out of man hordes. We’re giving them alternatives. Safety.”
“So you’re some kind of philanthropists,” Art said, unimpressed.
Dyson leaned close to him. “It’s all very lucrative. Or so we’re hoping.”
Art’s laugh weaseled free from his mouth. “You aren’t hiring, are you? My nephew’s gifted. You can’t measure his kind of intelligence with papers or tests—it’s a very hands-on kind of brilliance. He’s great at breaking things down: bleachers, stages, bounce houses, picnic tables, tents, mailboxes, windows. He’s a savant. A perfect man for parades. But parades don’t come every day. And he lacks discipline—I admit it. That’s the frustrating part. So much talent, so little drive. He needs a kick in the pants.”
“He sounds like a real thinker,” said Dyson.
“Da Vinci,” I added.
“But we don’t have time to interview anyone. Our clients get here Sunday.”
Art scratched his head. “Five days isn’t much time.”
“You’re telling me,” said Dyson.
“I should leave you to it,” Art said. “Dyson and…”
“Dyson and Stacy,” said Dyson, to protect my privacy.
“Don’t forget your gun,” I said to Art.
When Art walked out of earshot, Dyson asked what I was doing out here on my own.
“Forest bathing,” I said. Though I should have asked why he had followed me here. “To relax, like you said. To lose myself among nature. Detox. To blend in with my surroundings.”
“You’re holding your phone.”
“It’s not even on,” I said. It chimed at that moment.
“I’ve put so much work into making sure you’re happy here, that you’re safe, you’re fed, entertained. If you don’t want to be here, you shouldn’t be here.” Tears slid from his eyes.
“You’re not actually crying, are you?” For as long as I’d known him, he could cry on command, and I had to caution myself against buying into his feelings too quickly. There was a lonely stone of emotion inside him. What emerged on the surface, however, were often exaggerations, pleas for sympathy and attention—and love. I knew he was manipulating me. But knowing this seemed to make me immune to the manipulations: if I fell for it, I was choosing to fall for it. And I always chose to fall for it. I had wounded Dyson deeply when we were teenagers—he nearly died because of me—and, against my wishes, I felt responsible for his grasping loneliness and manipulative habits. Yes, he might’ve made himself cry, but the tears truly were tears, his pain authentically painful. I regretted questioning him—and regretted regretting it.
“Are you asking if I’m hurt? If I genuinely feel bad that you’d rather slip out here to stare at your phone than go swimming with me?”
“What’s the big deal about swimming?”
“If that’s what you’re asking, yes: I’m actually crying.” He marched toward the cabin.
My stomach sunk in shame. I caught up with him, apologized. I held out my phone. “I don’t even need this,” I said, ready to toss it over my shoulder. It started ringing: Cassandra Calling… Cassandra Calling…
“Is Cassandra Cassandra Hanson?” he asked. He watched me watch the phone. Make a choice, his look said.
I made the only choice I could in that moment, even though it pained me to do it. I shut off the phone and threw it at the base of a tree toppled onto its side. “Good riddance. Better to detox. Better to be here with you.” But as we walked away, I peered over my shoulder to make a mental note of the tree, its warped, bare branches frizzing up from the trunk.
seven
WHEN DYSON TOLD the story of his acting career, he referred to it as a time of exploitation and sabotaged promise. Hollywood’s sociopathic elites refused to give him the attention and support necessary to foster his obvious talent. They chewed him and chewed him until they stole every lucrative nutrient from his body—only to spit his leftover husk in the toilet.
Dyson did have talent, just not the type suited for the starring roles he believed he deserved. He excelled in the background and at the edge of the screen—passing by, blending in, skimming past—free from the demands of expressiveness and memorized lines.
When he moved to L.A., after high school, his first acting gigs came in the backgrounds of commercials, roles like Man waiting in line for a sandwich shop ad, Clapping soccer coach in a spot for a laundry detergent. In auditions for speaking roles, he fell prey to what he called “Temporary Lyric Aphasia.” His lines fled his memory like birds shaken out of a tree. On the rare occasions he remembered his lines—and the rarer occasions he recited them accurately—he still had trouble landing roles. This was, in part, a problem of appearance. Acne scars splotched his cheeks. Years of dangerous dieting made him pale and disconcertingly built, slender but wide, a spatula’s build. It wasn’t unusual for him to apologize for his proportions.
He called me in tears after every bombed audition and, though I knew his issues ran deeper than luck, I would assure him he’d been unlucky, that he’d crush his next audition. During this stretch of disappointments, however, a production company’s finance team uncovered his true talent during a quarterly audit: commercials in which he appeared outperformed those in which he didn’t. Measurements were taken, results charted and graphed. Focus groups shown nearly identical ads—the only difference was the inconspicuous presence of Dyson—preferred his commercials 97.4 percent of the time. In follow-up surveys, nearly 87 percent of participants reported purchasing the advertised products after the focus groups. No one at the production company could explain why his presence made consumers want to purchase the products, and though some employees theorized that his physical imperfections domesticated the ads, helped consumers see themselves using the products in their own lives, no true cause was ever determined. Profit motivated these companies. Dyson increased their profits. He was an answer freed of a question.
As news of his talent spread, Dyson received waves of offers for TV and film. Caked in grotesque makeup, he snarled and lurched against a fence the year The Walking Dead broke out. He passed Don Draper on the sidewalk in the pilot for Mad Men. He was lanced to death in the background of an early Game of Thrones battle. Or he lanced someone else. It didn’t matter what he did, only that he appeared—rather didn’t appear but existed discreetly onscreen. For three years in a row, the top-five-grossing films all featured Dyson in some capacity. He was Hollywood’s greatest asset—until he wasn’t.
His gift—the curse, he would say, when he spoke of that time—abandoned him as abruptly and inexplicably as it had arrived. He played a cashier in a laundry commercial shortly before the detergent was found to have mild flesh-eating properties. He landed the role of an intern carrying coffees on an acclaimed prestige TV show; a week later, its lead actor flashed his genitals at his costar. The director of a blockbuster film died of a heart attack on set the day Dyson showed up for filming. The film earned pennies on the dollar. The finance teams reviewed the numbers; they retested his commercials; they quit calling his agent. His agent quit answering his calls. And Dyson quit on the hope that he would ever be—had ever been—more than an extra.
He found work pouring stiff drinks for aging men at an Irish dive on the outskirts of L.A. These men complained to him about their bosses and children and wives (currents and exes and almosts) and the absolute lack of respect they received in their lives. They obsessed over respect—who respected them and
who didn’t and who ought to show more of it—creating obtuse networks of propriety. Dyson catalogued their grievances like a librarian. The men were cranks, unlucky and embittered about it, but they shared an important trait: they were all of an age similar to his father. Dyson doted on them because he yearned to dote on his father. So he listened strenuously to his regulars. He complimented them. He nodded along to their monologues and their gripes. He even told them secrets about himself, shared his acting anxieties, anxieties about working so late—and alone—at the bar.
One evening, after he locked up, two men assaulted him as he walked to his car. They kicked him unconscious and broke into the bar using his keys. Dyson woke up in the hospital with three broken ribs. The assailants were regulars. After Dyson got out of the hospital, he was fired for being “so generous with his mouth.”
That afternoon—over lunch in the cabin, a few hours after meeting Art Flemings—was the first I’d heard of the attack. Dyson insisted he’d been too ashamed to tell me. Shame was far from a worthwhile excuse—shame had never silenced us before—and I felt snippy with him for hiding the attack from me. “So that must be why you’re doing this,” I said. “To get back at men like the men who jumped you.”
“Our men aren’t like that,” he said.
Sometimes the weight of Dyson’s naïveté threatened to crush me. All that separated our men from the men who had jumped Dyson was opportunity. His gullible trust made me pity him—and fear for myself.
“We’re not helping these men out of some sadistic hunt for revenge,” he said. “We’re doing this—at least, I’m doing this, and I can’t speak for you—for men like my father. For men so depleted by shit luck and terrible jobs and depression they can’t stay awake on the road. Do you know how many men are killing themselves every day?”
“Do you know how many are killing women each day?”
“That’s what I’m saying,” he said.
“It’s not what you said.”
“Don’t forget about man hordes. Thousands of new hordes each week. They’re a sign of something deeply wrong in the souls of men today. And it’s only gonna get worse if we don’t take care of it.”
Suicides, murders, and hordes. These problems seemed far greater than anything we could correct. “We’re only two people,” I said.
“Revolutions have started with fewer,” he said. “First we perfect a model of rehabilitative love and compassion for twelve men; then we broaden the scope and recruit. The more men we bring in, the fewer there are in the world harassing women and killing themselves.”
“So our recruits are suicidal harassers.”
“Our recruits are human,” he said, as stern as a sledgehammer.
Unemployed and adrift, with three tender ribs, a year away from showing up at my doorstep, Dyson applied to work as a certified Listener for a company called We Hear You. We Hear You—known as WHY—paired freelance Listeners with its pool of clients in need of affordable therapy. Listener certification required an online credit check, zero professional recommendations, a two-hour animated tutorial, and a multiple-choice quiz. He video-called his first client ten minutes after completing the quiz.
One-on-one sessions paid very little money—he needed to see at least eleven people a day, every day, to meet rent—though he soon advanced to group sessions, the real moneymakers.
“But it wasn’t about money,” he told me. “It was about helping people—on my schedule. I always admired you for giving back to your followers. This was my chance to give back, to reach tons of people at once.” His cohort consisted entirely of middle-aged white men—men like the men he’d known at the dive. He knew how to talk to these men, knew to be deferential and impressed, to repeat to them what they told him—to make them think they influenced him. The men were enrolled in the session to work through their emotional defenses and wounds.
“They were enrolled or they enrolled on their own?” I asked.
“You know what I mean,” he said.
I certainly didn’t.
According to Dyson, the men were pitiable cases, out of work and divorced, estranged from their children, emotionally stunted and incomprehensibly angry. They admired Dyson, according to Dyson, because he was the first man in their lives who treated them with kindness and care. He took their concerns seriously—and it helped that he’d been on TV. They couldn’t believe that a “movie star” found value in their lives. After years in L.A., he had built up a cache of acting truisms, which he tossed to the men like fish to seals:
You only get the parts you try out for.
To inhabit someone else, you must be yourself first.
It’s who you are when the camera’s not rolling that counts.
However, the men returned to their weekly sessions deflated. In those sessions they were gentle and tender, but away from Dyson they succumbed to frustration, bitterness, rage, alienating the people in their lives—those who remained. What they needed, according to Dyson, was structure and love. They could never receive proper structure and love, according to Dyson, outside of their sessions, not meaningfully at least, and after weeks of seeing their progress torpedoed by time apart it became clear that if they wanted to get better, truly get better, they needed to insulate themselves from everyday triggers and come together in a protected environment where they could be valued for being tender and gentle humans.
So Dyson invited them to his grandparents’ property.
twelve terrible men
DYSON POSITED TWELVE archetypes of terrible men. If we could prove ourselves capable of turning each type of terrible man into a good man then we could, reasonably, transform any man into a good man. Proof of concept would attract attention from investors looking to finance philanthropic causes.
“So this is about getting rich?” I asked. Dyson and I were sitting outside on the porch after dinner. Barney lay draped over his thigh, sleeping.
“Wealth helps,” he said, like it was a phrase everyone used. “Wealth helps.”
The twelve archetypes were:
Stubborn Man
Righteous Man
Accommodating Man
Military Man
Workaholic Man
Sports Man
Negligent Dad
Yoga Man
College Man
Addict Man
Professor Man
Cheater Man
Each of our men fell into one of these categories. It’s how they were selected.
“But why did they select us?” I asked. I still couldn’t fathom anyone coming here. I may have bailed on my life to join Dyson, but he was my oldest friend. I felt beholden to him. My apartment was under threat; I had come here for safety. I doubt these men had ever truly felt threatened. Surely they hadn’t felt threatened at home. What could make twelve men—twelve terrible men—abandon their comforts to come live in the woods?
“Their lives are not comfortable,” Dyson told me. “They all live alone. They’re desperate for meaning in their lives. For connection. They need community and they can’t find it on their own. Most of these men are unemployed. They’re about to be thrown in the street. Their families—those who still talk to their families—gave up on them years ago.”
“They must want more than community.”
“All anyone wants is community. To be loved and respected by others.” An unspoken and stuck in his throat like a wad of gum. He was hiding something.
“What else do people want?” I asked.
“I may have promised them job training. Skills they can take back into the world.”
“I don’t know how to train people for jobs.”
“You know much more than you think you do.”
“What kind of jobs?”
“All that matters is that we stay confident.”
“Dyson.”
He brought a hand to his forehead. “Coding,” he muttered.
“Who here knows how to code?”
“You know how to build websites and m
ake videos. I’m a pro at videoconferencing.”
“Videoconferencing isn’t coding.”
“For these men it is. They aren’t tech savvy—they aren’t even smart. We show them how to make a few videos, how to build a website, they’ll think they know how to code. And that’s just as good as teaching them code. We’re younger than all of them. We’ll be their hip millennial friends—they don’t know enough to not trust us.”
Dyson had no right to show such confidence. Hearing him talk clenched me in the same claustrophobia I’d felt when I arrived. “Tell me about the men,” I said.
“I don’t want to prematurely shape your opinions.”
“Tell me about the men or I’m leaving.”
“You don’t have anywhere to go,” he said. He made it sound as if he was concerned.
“Don’t think I couldn’t find someone to take me in. I could sucker some random man in the street—it’s easy for me. I’ll move in with my mother if I have to.” I wouldn’t. And Dyson knew that I wouldn’t. But he also knew that voicing even the mere possibility of returning to her was proof of my seriousness.
He set Barney on the porch and stepped inside the cabin. Barney licked his front paw, sizing me up. “How much has he told you?” I asked the cat.
Dyson returned to the porch carrying a manila envelope. He handed it to me. “The dossier is inside.”
STUBBORN MAN: Randy Dent
Past Employment: In-laws’ furniture warehouse in metropolitan Oklahoma
Past Loves: Wife and daughter
Greatest Regret: Refusing to take his sick daughter to hospital
Greatest Grief: The end of his marriage
Desires: Forgiveness
Sign of Completion: Self-compassion
RIGHTEOUS MAN: Gerry Simpatico
Past Employment: IT director at Bakersfield area elementary school
Past Loves: Sandra Tomlin (unrequited)
Greatest Regret: Letting down former students
Greatest Grief: The death of his brother