Abandoned: A Thriller

by Cody McFadyen

  She points a stern finger at me. “This isn’t over.” Now she smiles. “Having said that, and now that you’re properly chastised: congratulations. It’s about time he made an honest woman out of you.”

  “No kidding,” Alan says. “Congratulations.”

  “Yes, yay, wonderful,” James says, exasperated. “Let’s get back to work.”

  For once, James and I agree on something. “Alan, did you talk to Leo?”

  The door to the office opens before he can answer, and Leo walks in. “He’s going to tell you he has all the information from Hollister’s computer,” Alan tells me.

  “LAPD CCU did a good job,” Leo affirms. “They scoured his hard drive and were able to resurrect quite a bit of data. People make the mistake of thinking a simple delete means the file’s gone.”

  “So?” I ask.

  He points to the computer at Alan’s desk. “May I?”

  He sits down, connects to the Internet, and opens a browser. He types in a URL: http://www.beamanagain.com.

  “This is the website Douglas Hollister spent the most time on.”

  “Beamanagain?” Alan says. “What the hell is that?”

  “You have to separate the words,” Leo explains. “Be a man again.”

  The layout of the site is simple, not graphics-rich. A menu of options is listed on the left side. I read them aloud.

  “Forum. Bitch Stories. Brother Stories. Bitch Photos. Bitch Chat. Brother Chat. Books. Wow.”

  “I spent some time looking through this already,” Leo says. “The site is built around a pretty simple philosophy: American men are being emasculated by American women and the radical feminist movement. It says that American women have, over time, been changed by the feminist movement into narcissists and ballbusters—their words, not mine—and that American men have bought into this and accepted the idea that they are fundamentally bad. They call it the brute paradigm.”

  “Which is?” I ask.

  “Essentially that men are brutes. They’re genetically programmed to be brutes, and they can’t be trusted to be masculine men because masculine men rape and subjugate women.”

  I scan the menu. “Let’s see the photos first.”

  He clicks that option and a new page loads, filled with thumbnails.

  “From what I could tell, there are basically two reasons photographs are posted here,” Leo explains. “One is simply to put a face to a story.”

  “This is her, the bitch that ruined my life,” Callie fills in.

  “Exactly. Then there’s a whole other kind of photo, and it dovetails with another point that gets brought up on this site a lot: the idea that American women let themselves go.”

  “As in …what?” I ask. “They get fat?”

  “Get fat, wear sweatpants to the grocery store, et cetera. It’s generally image oriented and ties into the later complaints about withholding sex as a weapon.”

  “You seem very well informed for someone who’s been studying this subject for only a morning,” Callie observes.

  “I’m a quick learner,” he says, undaunted. “Anyway, the guys on this website lose their credibility early.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugs. “Too much anger, which becomes hate in a lot of instances. If you have a thesis, it should be provable on its own merits. The guys posting here don’t make a good argument for men. They end up perpetuating the stereotype they’re protesting.”

  “Show us some examples of what you’re talking about with the photos,” I tell him.

  “Ummm … here.”

  He clicks on a thumbnail of a woman with a large, round face. A page loads, and it’s a series of three pictures. One is of the woman in a grocery store. She looks like she’s having a rough day; she’s wearing sweats, and her hair is barely brushed. She seems tired. She’s overweight but not obese. The next is a more professional photograph. The woman is smiling. She’s made up in this photo, and her hair is styled. The last is the most unflattering. She’s lying on her back in bed, sleeping. Her mouth hangs open. Her right arm is thrown to one side.

  Underneath the photos is a paragraph. It reads:

  “When I married this bitch twelve years ago, she was hot. Skinny, took care of herself, and was into everything in bed. We’d fuck ’til the sun came up some nights. Three years in, we had our son, and that was the end of happiness. She let herself get fat, she quit work to take care of the kid, and, worst of all, she became a whining narcissist. Sometimes I watch her sleep or eat and it’s all I can do to keep from puking. I’ve asked for a divorce, and in true bitch form, she let me know that she’s going to take me to the cleaners.

  “Pretty angry,” Alan murmurs. “Let’s see another.”

  Leo clicks the photo of a smiling blonde woman. The page loads. The woman is in a bikini bathing suit, standing on a beach. The sun is out, and she’s laughing. She’s in her early twenties, effortlessly beautiful, endlessly happy.

  The paragraph under her photograph begins:

  Inside every hot American woman is a harpy waiting to be let out. Sally and I have been together for fifteen years, married for ten of those. In the beginning, we had a great time together. I’d go so far as to say that everything was perfect. We traveled the world together, backpacked through Europe, smoked hash in Amsterdam. She was always up for adventure, and the sex was great—she was smoking hot in her twenties, and she doesn’t look too bad now. Then we finished college and got married and settled into life. She started watching feminist sitcoms that degrade men and quote empower women unquote (all that “you’ve come a long way, baby” bullshit). The changes were slow and subtle, but what it boiled down to is that she started treating me like the enemy. We fight all the time now, and we haven’t slept together in years. She accuses me of cheating constantly—even though I haven’t. When I try to defend myself, she attacks me and says that I’m full of shit, all men are scum who cheat, etc. Sometimes she cries for no reason, and it will last for days; other times she can get so rageful that it literally scares me. One time she grabbed a kitchen knife while we were fighting. I’ve tried to be the good guy again and again. I’ve tried to talk to her, but when I ask her what’s wrong, she just tells me I’m a “fucking man and would never understand what’s going on with her.” I’ve had it, and I’m going to ask for a divorce.

  “Sad story,” Callie says. “Too bad he hasn’t sought out professional help.”

  Deep, sudden changes in personality always have root causes. The woman this man is writing about could be bipolar and it’s just now manifesting, or she might have experienced a trauma in her life that she hasn’t revealed to him, such as a rape or an abortion or some other personal loss of magnitude. Perhaps she’s remembered something from her past that’s come back to haunt her. There’s always the possibility, of course, that he’s leaving out details and that he’s the source of her trauma.

  Assuming his account is factual, this is the story of a woman in crisis, not a woman out to “destroy men.” Callie’s right. It’s tragic.

  “That’s actually a fairly nice one,” Leo says. “Most of them are like the first: bitch this, bitch that, she got fat, she won’t have sex anymore, et cetera, et cetera. Bitch Stories on the menu takes you to more and much longer versions of the same.”

  “We get the idea,” I say. “Let’s look at the forums.”

  He navigates to the forum index page. There are three different forums to choose from: General Discussion, Man Talk, and Bitch Talk.

  “I think we get the idea on Bitch Talk,” I say. “Let’s take a look at Man Talk.”

  Leo clicks and the forum opens. A list of thread subjects appears. I scan them and see one called Reclaiming the Right to be a Man. “That one,” I say. The page loads.

  Men today are marginalized without even knowing it. They have come to accept that they are “the brute,” “the abuser,” “the rapist,” and worse, that these qualities are inevitable and can be reversed only by women. We accept today that we do no
t hold the keys to our inner selves, that it is the wife or girlfriend who holds the key, and that we must listen to her as our most important teacher.

  That men have been brutish in history cannot be disputed. That women have been treated poorly by men, even oppressed, cannot be disputed. But this has gone beyond a dialogue about aberrant behavior; it has instead become the accepted indictment of all men everywhere. John Bobbitt is the image held up, not Leonardo da Vinci. Ted Bundy is the example of “the lows that men can sink to;” Beethoven is not similarly held up as the “heights that men can rise to.”

  Because we love our mothers, we have come to accept this image and the inherent guilt that goes with it. There are men who have never touched a woman in anger that live in fear of the possibility they might.

  So let’s discuss—what are some things we can do to reverse this process in ourselves? How can we reclaim not our brutishness but our masculinity, which—current opinion aside—does not contain brutality by default as its birthright?

  “This is a long thread,” Leo observes. “This first post, the one that starts the thread, is two years old. There are almost two hundred pages of replies and discussion.”

  I scan down through some of those that most immediately followed this post.

  One reads:

  It’s hard for me to admit this, but I read your post and I cried. It was pretty unexpected. See, I’m a decent guy. I was married for ten years, and I have two children, a boy and a girl. I love them to death and I really work to be a good father. I never cheated on my wife. Yeah, I know, a lot of guys say that, but it’s really true. I had my temptations, but I never felt the pull strongly enough to actually stray.

  My marriage fell apart about two years ago. I see a lot of guys on this site are pretty angry, but that’s not my scene. We fucked up the marriage mutually, and the real basis of it is that we should never have married in the first place. We weren’t marrying each other because it was what we most wanted. We married each other because it seemed like a good match. It “looked right.”

  To make a long story short, I read your post and I cried because I realized the basis of making that decision was exactly what you wrote about. Cheryl was a good woman, and I needed a good woman in order to be a good man. God, what heartache I could have saved us both.

  “I’m starting to understand,” James says. “This site is built on a set of dichotomies. Brother Talk is more philosophic. It involves in-depth discussions on the subject of masculinity, as opposed to Bitch Talk, which is more of a full frontal assault on women and feminism in general.”

  “That’s a pretty accurate summation,” Leo agrees.

  “I can see how that would help our perp,” I say. “He’s not interested in posts like the one we just read. He doesn’t want the grief; he’s looking for the hate.”

  When it comes to the relationships between men and women, it always seems to be the extremes that rule: love or hate, no in between.

  I’ve had a complicated relationship with the war of the sexes for most of my life. I was raised by a father who treated me less as a female and more as a human being. My father was a dreamer, a man who’d tilt his head up in wonder to search for the blue sky peeking between the tree leaves. He appreciated simplicities, the small things, and he tried his best to transfer this understanding to me.

  My mother was the one who loved the dreamer but kept her head out of the clouds. She anchored him to the ground with a mix of love and anger so that he didn’t float away. The problem with Icarus men is that they forget the sun can burn, that even if they manage to escape the earth’s atmosphere, space is cold and dark and deadly.

  I landed in between the two of them. I have my mother’s anger, but I’m capable of my father’s wonder, and the truth is, when I think of my parents, I see myself more through my father’s eyes than my mom’s. His eyes said one thing to me: You can be anything you want, and I’ll love you.

  He let me shoot guns at eight, even though he hated them himself. He didn’t bat an eye when I told him, during high school, that I planned a career in law enforcement.

  The men in my life, those successors of my father, have all been good men, not intimidated by my dreams but loving me for them instead. We’ve used our strengths to fill in for the other’s weaknesses, and not because we were trying to prove something. I don’t cook, because I never learned, not because I’m trying to make a statement about women’s duties in the home. When Matt and I were married, I cleaned the toilets, not because it was “my job” but because Matt begged me to. Cleaning toilets truly grossed him out; I had no problem with it. It was a love thing, not a man-woman thing.

  Still, I haven’t been immune. I wasn’t just a woman when I joined the FBI, I was a woman-child, and physically small. This made me a target to some.

  The most significant encounter was with an old-timer by the name of Frank Robinson. He was over fifty years old and had been with the Bureau since he was my age. I was assisting on a case in an administrative capacity, and Frank was either second or third in command.

  At one point after a briefing, I found myself alone in the conference room with him. I was gathering up papers and putting them into folders. Frank was sitting in his chair, leaning back, chewing on the cap of his pen while eyeing me thoughtfully.

  I tried to ignore it, but he kept staring, so I stopped what I was doing and confronted him.

  “Do you need something, sir?” I asked.

  He smiled, and I saw the shades of ugliness there. The hints of a leer. “I was just remembering why I never liked having young female agents in the Bureau.”

  “Why is that?”

  He stood up, downed the last bit of coffee in his Styrofoam cup, and let the leer fly. “It’s distracting. Always wondering the same questions. Satin or lace? Natural or shaved? Big clit or little?” He licked his lips and the next words were practically a purr. “And the most important question of all: Does she swallow?”

  I remember how shocked I felt in that moment. How violated. He wasn’t touching me, but he was. His hands were all over me, even though they were hanging there at his sides. I felt myself blushing and hated my face for the betrayal. In the midst of it all, his eyes, drinking my reactions down.

  Everything I’d dealt with up to that point had been essentially harmless. Less harassment than hazing, testing me to see what I was made of. I’d push back hard, give as good as I got, and that would be the end of it. This was different. It was a direct assault based on a perceived imbalance of power, and it was overtly sexual in nature.

  I was young and unscarred then. I hadn’t taken a life yet, and my proximity to the low men I’d later hunt was still more than once removed. My gift of seeing was just a seedling, but it had begun to put out shoots. It was taking dark root in the dark cellar part of me, and on that day, it spoke.

  Robinson had done fairly well in the Bureau, it whispered to me. He’d spent years in financial crimes, doing excellent work, but had fought hard for entrance into the Behavioral Analysis Unit. His work there had been less than exemplary. Sufficient, but not stellar.

  It’s the work of a distracted man.

  The whisper was like a caress in my mind, and in that moment I knew who Frank Robinson was. His actions had exposed a need. The thing inside me had taken it close, battened on it, and delivered him up to my knowing.

  “I understand now why you wanted to be in the BAU, Frank,” I said to him, “and why you’ve played second fiddle there.”

  His eyes narrowed at that. I walked up to him, got close, so that I had to tilt my head up to see his face. I was absolutely unafraid.

  “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  I remember how I smiled at him, how I knew it was a cruel smile, an unfrightened smile, a grin of satisfaction powered by certainty.

  “You’re a voyeur, Frank. Some part of you likes what you see. The part that makes you go home at night and masturbate, thinking about what those men do to those women.” I leaned into him, even closer, sti
ll smiling, unable to stop myself and not wanting to even if I could. “Do you ever take a case file home, Frank? Maybe copy some photos? I’ll bet you do. I’ll bet you have a folder hidden away in your house, full of victims’ photos you’ve cherry-picked along the way.”

  His face turned ashen—with anger, yes, but also with a glimmer of fear. I was like a shark smelling the blood, not just hungry but enraged. He’d violated me. I was returning the favor, and a slap wasn’t enough. I wanted to turn him inside out.

  “You’re not a real monster, Frank, I know that. I doubt you’ve ever raped anyone. But you feel the pull, don’t you?” I nodded at him. “That’s why you said what you said to me. Catharsis through sublimation.”

  “Cunt.” It sounded like he’d been punched in the stomach.

  I bet your cock’s limp now! I remember thinking, ugly and satisfied, my meanness a brightness, like a bitter penny.

  He backed away, heading toward the door. I watched him all the way out, still grinning like a jack-o’-lantern. He’d turned once to look back at me, and I saw something new there, an incredibly complicated mix of emotions and tiredness and oldness. There was respect, and anger, along with shame and fear and a certain thoughtfulness. Behind it all, like a child peeking around a door frame, was a younger Frank, from a time when he was still clean. I saw he could remember that time and yearned for it. I’d reminded him that he had a mother.

  That was the first time I truly understood the difference between a bad man and an evil man. Frank put in for retirement a week later.

  I’ve been blessed and cursed, depending on viewpoint and circumstance, with unique insights into the truth of human beings. I’ve been raped by a man, but I’ve watched a video of a young girl giggling as she strangled cats and buried them in her backyard. The overwhelming majority of those I chase are men, but I once arrested a woman who cooked her six-month-old in the oven because he “cried too much.”

  I am not blind to the differences between men and women, but I have seen the truths: The capacity for violence is there in all of us, and there’s a world of difference between the flawed and the evil.