Abandoned

until now.”

“I’m displeased,” Callie says. “Very displeased. You’ve cheated me. Us.”

“How exactly did I cheat you?”

She looks heavenward, a prayer for patience with fools. “Do you not remember my wedding?” she asks. “Picking out dresses, flowers, a cake, a ceremony? Don’t you think we’d enjoy doing something like that for you?”

“Maybe. I guess.”

“No. No maybe.” She shakes a finger at me. “It’s a fact.”

“After all,” Alan snorts, “look how great your wedding turned out.”

“Keep quiet,” Callie orders him. She turns back to me. “You need to have a real wedding.”

I shrink, dismayed. “What? Why?”

“Because that’s the way these things are done,” she says, her voice frosty. “We don’t gallivant around, slipping rings onto each other’s fingers and getting some civil servant to sign a paper, and call that ‘married.’ It’s not right.”

“Love is just a chemical reaction designed to encourage propagation of the species,” James declares, without looking up from what he’s doing. “Weddings are a colossal waste of money.”

“Really?” Callie says. “If it’s all about propagation of the species, then how do you explain homosexuality, honey-love? Those of you who wear the ruby slippers?”

He shrugs, continuing to work, not missing a beat. “I don’t know. My theory is that it’s a chemical imbalance or some kind of genetic abnormality.”

Callie says nothing to this. Alan and I stare at him.

Is that what he thinks about himself? That he’s defective?

James senses our attention. “Oh, are you all feeling sorry for me now? Worried about my self-image? Don’t be. I have a lot of value to the species. It’s just not in the baby-making area.”

“This is all very uplifting,” I say, “and I appreciate the offer, Callie, but it’ll have to wait.”

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