I’m doing something a little different this week, and I’d like your feedback — positive, negative, whatever you feel.
After a brief introduction, today’s post will be a short story, one I’ve mentioned here before, that is part of the larger piece of contemporary fiction I’m working on. I wrote it a few years ago, so as to have some component of that larger story finished. It’s long, and it’s dark. If you don’t have it in you to read something like that right now, I’ll certainly understand.
It was never published then, but it feels important to publish now, especially with the convergence of trends that feel like they are accelerating the conditions that led me to write it in the first place.
Over the last few years, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has repeatedly cleared out homeless encampments — one ahead of a press conference; one by Union Station, one just blocks from the White House; one in which a bulldozer plowed through a tent with a man still inside. These efforts increased more than seven fold in 2022 compared to the three years prior. Now, the new presidential administration wants to ramp up those efforts even further.
Over the weekend, Brian Goldstone published a guest essay in The New York Times about homelessness. If you read anything else this week, make it this. Here’s a gift link.
His research puts numbers to many things you may have noticed, but don’t necessarily know. Of the many galling statistics, one in particular stood out to me:
Today there isn’t a single state, city or county in the United States where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a median-priced two-bedroom apartment.
We hear a lot about the unaffordability of American cities, but this drives home that there is no simple escape into some further out suburb or small town from the economic conditions we’ve created. We have an urgent and growing affordable housing crisis, one which looks poised to get exponentially worse given the mass layoffs and proposed reductions in federal funding for those who need it to survive.
There are legitimate safety concerns around encampments. But we must provide an entire infrastructure of alternatives. To do that requires us to see everyone, regardless of their financial circumstances, as our neighbors.
So much of initiating that change comes down to our collective refusal to even acknowledge the existence of those around us who need it most. As if sweeping them out of sight is an answer to anything but our own very slight inconvenience of being reminded of the abject poverty through which some of our fellow citizens are living. If the policy of the state is that these people don’t deserve to exist in our presence, just as we slash the already loosely stitched and fraying safety net barely holding them up…what happens next?
The Professor
Last winter, before the plague, homeless people in the city started dying. Nobody really noticed, because nobody really notices these things. Besides, it was winter, and more homeless people die in winter, or at least that’s what people say.
But then the plague brought the recession, which brought the rental market collapse, which brought a new wave of homelessness, and another spike in deaths. Still, that first wave of homeless deaths might have gone unnoticed, almost certainly would have gone unnoticed, but for James Earl Egan III.
The Smithson College senior was found by an overnight janitor behind Tillman Hall on a still, January morning, his lifeless body frozen on a bed of fresh slush from the prior evening’s bluster. The wetness of the snow, the medical examiner would later explain, was just enough to extinguish the lit cigarette that had dropped from Egan’s mouth while also preserving its place close to his body.
Because the ember was snuffed out, the latter half of the unsmoked roll preserved, the examiner was able to find the traces of the unexpected compound within, able to determine that this was more than some simple accident. It’s why we’re all of us here, now, at the courthouse, you and me and the national media swarm, the protesters and counter-protesters, the politicians and the conspiracy theorists — to see the professor.
Well, the professor and Wild Bill. The churn of tragedy is so dizzying and refreshes so quickly through our news cycles that even a story like the professor’s might have been eclipsed if not for Wild Bill’s decision to turn the entire affair into his latest, most ambitious project yet.
The matter of how this circus came to be is as inevitable as it is maddening. But none of us would be here if not for Egan.
Egan was an otherwise healthy 21-year-old. Based on his body temperature, the coroner guessed his time of death was likely somewhere around 3:30 a.m. The cause was a severe blood clot, but not localized in one spot. Rather, all of Egan’s blood had clotted nearly simultaneously.
The compound found in his blood wasn’t like anything the coroner had ever seen before. With the world still shaken from the plague, severe quarantine precautions were taken, the initial worry being that we might be staring down some new, deadly virus. The CDC sent in teams of experts. But eventually they determined that Egan’s death wasn’t caused by a biological agent, but a chemical one. The answer lay in that cigarette.
Egan’s mysterious death unraveled other, previously unknown mysteries of his life in course. After all, what was he, an economics major, doing outside the chemistry lab in the middle of the night? The vials and tubs left behind back in the lab during his smoke break revealed the building blocks of methamphetamines, the kinds that had spiked recently around campus. Mr. Egan, a man with a decidedly bright future, including a post-graduation job lined up at a Wall Street hedge fund, had gone into business on his own.
Slowly, the reports would leak out that Egan was stopping by the lab, as he had been doing weekly for months, using an old janitor’s keycard that he’d paid a disgruntled maintenance worker to use, to pick up refills on the chemicals he needed. That he’d grown increasingly careless as his scheme had progressed, potentially a result of dipping into his own supply, another revelation of the autopsy. That, in what turned out to be his final trip to the professor’s lab, there was a box of cigarettes laying on the professor’s desk. That the half-smoked one laying in the snow matched that box. It didn’t take a detective to realize Egan had swiped it, bringing it outside to smoke before grabbing his supplies, all of which he had procured and stacked in a neat pile back inside the lab.
Egan’s history at Smithson was already complicated. He was a third-generation legacy, but also an athlete. Recruited to play wide receiver on the football team — a perennially mediocre squad that was nevertheless a singular point of pride among the alumni — he had lost his scholarship after sitting out during the plague. Suddenly saddled with what would end up being six figures of student loan debt by graduation, Egan had looked for shortcuts to help stem those daunting costs.
As those details spilled out, the narrative about Egan painted him as a victim of an unfair system. The stock headshot from the school’s website, used by the media outlets reporting Egan’s death, showed a tall, handsome young man with a flop of blond hair and an easy smile. Rather than a thief and a burgeoning drug kingpin, he was presented as a clean-cut, innocent victim with his whole life ahead of him, driven into desperation.
The truth, as usual, was more complicated. But the space between easy narratives is where Wild Bill made his living.
Unlike Egan, Wild Bill wasn’t born with a face for television. His pale, egg-shaped head floated around the frame on his show, sometimes distractingly so. But he knew how to conjure a self-righteous anger and seething contempt with the best of them. He was a showman, a fact he’d vehemently deny. No, Quincy William O’Halloran wanted to present himself as wholly authentic, despite the many adjustments to his profile that he’d adopted over the years, including legally ridding himself of his given birth name.
O’Halloran’s face, in spite of itself, was the face of ENeWs. The Electronic News and Weather network had long since dumped its latter charge, the one that had initially gained it an audience. As hurricanes spun stronger, pinballing around the gulf, and wildfires torched the open west, the network had systematically rooted out the meteorologists that would blame climate change and the earth’s carbon dioxide spike for the severity of the events. Eventually, people like O’Halloran took over, willing to do and say whatever necessary to charge ratings and build followings of acolytes who hung on every half-baked conspiracy put forth, always in the guise of simple questions asked.
Was atmospheric pollution caused by an influx of Chinese satellites? Could the spate of natural disasters really be the result of western governors, working behind closed doors to loot the treasury for “relief” for their own gain? The more people that accepted each accusation, the more brash and grasping the next one would be. More viewers, more suggested treachery. Pretty soon, Wild Bill was given his own primetime show.
Where peers in his orbit, both at ENeWs and beyond, had stumbled by leaning out too far over their skis — palling around too closely with white supremacists, joking too ambiguously about pedophilia — Wild Bill walked a tight ridge atop the cliffs by never tying himself to any issue too directly. He was willing to bring any guest on the show, to give them the oxygen that others wouldn’t, but would expertly tear away just the guest’s fringiest positions, the ones he couldn’t afford to be seen promoting, while implicitly endorsing everything left untouched.
If there was another thing O’Halloran had gotten right from the start, that his ostensible competitors failed to do, it was that he never embraced any politician or particular movement. Wild Bill didn’t care who was president. He had no ambition for higher office, nor to be affiliated with anyone who did. He controlled his own message and did not need to attach it to the powers of the state. His perch atop his own universe’s hierarchy was all that mattered.
Still, after the election, O’Halloran knew he had an opportunity to make inroads with a whole new audience. Where were the disaffected to turn, those who had come to recognize and been soured by the grift, but who still needed an “other” to demonize? There was a swirling void of anger, resentment, and above all, the need for a comforting voice to tell them they were not wrong, no matter what outlandish myths and distortions they’d allowed themselves to believe in order to support their unflinching belief in their own self-righteousness.
Wild Bill had avoided leaning into the pandemic conspiracy theories, or even downplaying the plague’s potentially disastrous effects. He understood the leadership vacuum created the possibility for a fractured, dangerous group of people. It was a delicate balance to bring them in under his wing, one that required an acceptance of the warped, broken American psyche and a willingness to exploit it.
Wild Bill knew that Americans had long stretched the idea of freedom far beyond its constitutional meaning, embracing the idea that they were entitled to do anything, so long as there wasn’t a law against it, no matter the consequences for others. Simultaneously, they’d been encouraged by reactionary forces, including Wild Bill himself, to reject any attempt to further regulate any behaviors, to label them as attacks on that same perceived ideal of freedom.
By perpetuating a grievance state that both encouraged a general lack of accountability and attacked any efforts to make anyone more responsible for their own actions, Wild Bill positioned himself as the opposite of the government. He was the fun parent, the one who let you get away with things the other wouldn’t, but he was more than that — he was the granter of permission, of absolution for America’s guilty conscience.
The question, always, was how far he could stretch what he allowed The Corral, the name belovedly adopted by his followers, to feel they could get away with next. His was the reassuring hand on the shoulder amid the chaos, gently, almost imperceptibly guiding the lost, frenzied masses wherever he wanted them to go.
For the act to continue, it must never give back an inch of hard-fought ground. It was never enough to win the day. Wild Bill wanted to win the war. Every war. On all fronts and all the time, no matter the collateral damage.
For Wild Bill, to apologize was to admit defeat, and it was central to everything he projected to the world that he never, ever be defeated. When a past assertion was proven wrong, he would bury it under new information. But he’d gotten better at keeping up the act over the years, delivering a more airtight presentation by coaxing others around him to say the more outlandish, unprovable provocations.
O’Halloran did not simply traffic in conspiracy. He also enrobed himself in the role of the heel to any well-accepted argument, embracing the contrarian position. Wild Bill may have been an instigator with no regard for long-held journalistic ethics, but he was relentlessly prepared.
Back at Smithson, Egan’s sudden, posthumous fame had reopened another once shut door from his past, one which offered a narrative right in Wild Bill’s wheelhouse. Once the drug news broke, O’Halloran had sent his team up to the college to dig up anything they could on Egan’s past, and one of his loyal researchers had struck gold. Egan had a sexual assault charge from high school that had been handled privately, one the courts had expunged from his record.
The victim was a classmate, an immigrant, a scholarship student, the kind of target with no recourse against someone with the connections Egan enjoyed. Such an act would have rightfully torpedoed someone without such a preordained future. But for a young man who had been ticketed for Smithson since birth, it had merely been a speedbump.
Suddenly, though, the image of Egan’s as a promising life extinguished before it could take flight had been further muddied. A drug-making-and-dealing rapist wasn’t an ideally sympathetic white knight, at least not for most people.
But these details only further served Wild Bill’s cause, especially since he would be the first to reveal them and control the narrative around them.
Still, Egan’s story — and the opportunity it presented — might not even have landed on Wild Bill’s radar in the first place if it weren’t for Anastasia Campos.
The local radio reporter had been one of the few in the media to even notice the initial spike in homeless deaths. Her reporting had gone largely unnoticed, including by Wild Bill. But the two had a run-in on social media the year prior, Campos dunking on O’Halloran for a hypocritical comment about sexual assault, despite his own well-publicized payoffs to women he’d harrassed over the years.
That incident was the main reason most anyone outside the city knew who Campos was. It was also the reason she remained in O’Halloran’s crosshairs, as he waited for his retribution. So when Egan’s death dropped into the middle of Campos’s reporting, it seemingly set up as a springboard for her career and prominence, the kind of story that captures the national attention. But it also pinged Wild Bill, and he came storming into town to make sure he got exactly what he needed out of the story.
O’Halloran wasn’t nearly as wealthy as he should have been, given his salary and willingness to promote nearly any product. Each new contract gave him just enough leeway to settle his most recent charge of harassment or impropriety, something that had become an ouroborosian cycle. Each elevation in status and wealth brought a new intoxication of confidence, followed by a more outlandish action. As each new case settled for more money, O’Halloran used the setback as fuel for his next conquest, both professionally and personally.
Campos wasn’t nearly so simple. She wasn’t some underling he could demean right out of the building. She was a legitimate reporter, one used to dealing with the worst of humanity on a near-daily basis. The only way for Wild Bill to beat her, to win that battle, was to take away the thing that was most important to her, to beat her to the Egan story, right in her own backyard.
Six months earlier, following their online tussle, Campos’s station, WAVS, was sold as part of a media buyout from a vulture capitalism firm. O’Halloran had, quietly, made calls to encourage the new management to hire someone he knew in the market to run the ship, someone he knew to be a loyal member of The Corral. His prodding had worked. And while Campos was unaware of the connection, she had butted heads over her reporting with the new boss, Dean Allen, several times since.
Wild Bill had been content to mostly let the naturally antagonistic forces play themselves out, but now it was time for him to call in his favor. He dialed up his appointed lackey.
“We’re going all-in with Egan tonight,” Wild Bill barked at Allen over the phone, not even bothering with a basic pleasantry. “Anything we should know?”
Taken aback, even though he knew the call would always come eventually, Allen looked up from his desk to see Campos across the newsroom outside his office, but within earshot.
“Hang on a sec,” he murmured, setting the phone down, strolling to the door, and quietly closing it.
Campos heard the click of the latch and looked up suspiciously, but returned to her work.
“Just Egan?” asked Allen, probingly.
Wild Bill paused before answering.
“Is that...is he not the real story?”
“Depends on your perspective, I suppose.”
Wild Bill furrowed his brow.
“What do you know that I don’t?”
Allen looked through the glass to see Campos staring back at him. He casually swerved his chair to the left, the phone tucked under his right ear with his right arm, blocking his lips from her view.
“She’s not working on the Egan story. She’s working on the story of all the homeless deaths. Evidently some of the autopsies looked like Egan’s. She thinks there’s a connection.”
For all of Wild Bill’s bluster, O’Halloran had excellent news judgment.
“Have you read her copy? Is it solid?”
Allen glanced again at Campos.
“I have. It is.”
O’Halloran’s eyes widened as he considered the possibilities.
“You know,” said Allen, “they’ve called that professor in for questioning, on Egan.”
O’Halloran rifled through his notes.
“Dr., uh, what was his name?”
“Kamp. Scuttlebutt is they might make an arrest tomorrow. Campos is trying to get her story out there first.”
That put Wild Bill on the clock, but it also meant his story might be much bigger than he had realized.
“I’ll call you back.”
It was time to call the professor.
His grandfather’s name, Kampfrichter, was an amputee of Ellis Island, with only Kamp remaining through the American generations. When he received his doctorate, the professor insisted his grandfather’s full name be on the diploma, as he wished to wear it proudly in academia. At Smithson, though, the professor’s attempt to honor his family name by restoring it only led his students to go the other way. He was just known as Dr. K.
Despite the honorifics paid to him at Smithson, the professor was not a medical doctor. As a chemist, he had earned his Doctor of Philosophy, but had spent his career teaching chemistry and working on new compounds.
A hemophiliac, the professor had devoted his work to novel concoctions that would help the body create more proteins to coagulate blood. But one of his more recent inventions had turned into a runaway train. The proteins spread like a wildfire through the bloodstream eventually turning everything to jelly. A well-intended effort had become a biological weapon. The professor did not publish his results, choosing to destroy his samples, rather than risk his research getting shut down. But he still knew how to make the compound. And he didn’t dispose of all of it.
Eventually, last year, the professor realized his work could be put into other effect. He’d always considered smoking a disgusting habit, and had confiscated a pack of cigarettes from a student who had left them in his lab, which sat unopened in his office drawer for weeks. Every time he’d go searching for a pen or a paperclip, he’d see them and be reminded of his idea. But he did nothing, until seeing a report on ENeWs one night about how liberal universities were quashing conservative voices on campus.
The professor had never married and lived alone in a modest house near campus. Like many in his generation, he had grown increasingly insular in his news intake, shutting out the outlets that didn’t provide him with enough self-affirmation, until he lived in a bubble of his own design. The ENeWs segment was hardly the first to resonate with his own feelings, despite the fact he’d never faced any real persecution at Smithson for his beliefs, but it caught him at a moment in his own, downward spiral of perceived oppression where he felt ready to do something, anything to be heard.
That night, the professor returned to his office in a fury. He stormed to his desk, tore open the plastic wrap and discarded the foil, pulling a solitary cigarette from the box. Back in the lab, he extracted his compound from its locked storage and, using an eyedropper, carefully dripped the clear liquid down from the edge of the filter to the tip. Once dried, he returned the cigarette to the box, sticking up slightly higher than the others so he’d know which one it was. He wrapped himself tightly in his winter coat and set off to the city’s edge to find a beggar.
It didn’t take him long. Sitting on a milk crate along a side street, the man asked for whatever the professor could spare. The professor produced the cigarette. The man took it willingly, gratefully. The professor kept walking, his senses aflame, listening to the clicks of a lighter behind him.
Moments later, the professor heard the man cough, retching for air. The professor turned away and started briskly toward home, but still heard the muffled collapse of a body into the sidewalk behind him.
The next morning, the professor devoured every media source he could think of to see if the death had been reported. There was nothing in the paper or in the local news. As he had suspected, it was as though nothing had happened. To his calculating mind, there was nothing lost, but one fewer mouth to feed, one fewer body to house and care for. He saw it as a solution.
The pandemic had only fortified his beliefs. The virus was supposed to be an equal opportunity killer. But it wasn’t. Those with greater means and prominence, those more heavily valued by the capitalistic machine, were inherently in better shape to defend themselves, with better healthcare, the ability to work from home, even to escape to their remote hideaways and wait things out. But, crucially, their lives were also valued more by the society at large. The best treatments and even the ability to get tested promptly and efficiently were reserved for the millionaires and billionaires, the pro athletes, the politicians, the otherwise famous.
It all reinforced the growing national ethos that wealth entitled one not just to the ability to buy more stuff, but to a better life.
If you take that as a given, then the inverse must also be true — the poorer you are, the less you contribute to the society, the less you deserve. Stretch that ideology to its breaking point, and what are you left to think of the homeless, the poorest and most destitute among us? If you believe the wealth you control is what you deserve, what is left — other than your very humanity — to guide you to help such people? And if you can bargain that humanity away, then what?
Rather than sit at home every night and stew in a poisonous swirl of ENeWs, the professor charged forward with his new mission. Throughout his devotion to his enterprise, the professor didn’t have some secret desire to be caught. On the contrary, he was thorough, meticulous in his planning to avoid detection. He alternated neighborhoods each night and avoided visiting the same ones on the same day in consecutive weeks. He changed up his coats and hats, keeping to dark, simple colors, never wearing anything that would stand out.
But once Egan died, once detectives started connecting the dots, the professor knew it was likely only a matter of time before they traced his death back to him. If that got out before the news of his project, of what he’d done to so many others, he knew he’d lose control of the story he wanted his work to tell.
Still, the professor didn’t know just how close his enterprise was to coming unraveled, even after initial police questioning, until his phone rang and he found himself talking to Wild Bill, telling him that he needed to come on to speak to The Corral that night.
“Why are you calling me?”
“You know why,” replied Wild Bill, softly. He knew better than to snap at the professor right now, in this moment. He needed to convince him of how to proceed, to give himself up.
“Is this about James?” asked the professor, still withholding.
“It’s about everyone,” said Wild Bill, gravely. “The reporter knows. The story is going live tomorrow. You can either get in front of it or let it run you over. I’m calling you to give you a chance to tell it your way, before that happens.”
A long pause stretched between them. Wild Bill was a good salesman, and he knew what all good salesmen knew: The next person to talk was going to lose the negotiation. He had precious little time to get the professor booked and ready for the interview, to completely reorganize his show to fit all this new information, but the professor didn’t know that. So each man sat silent until, at last, a sigh came from the other end of the phone.
“What am I supposed to do, just admit it?”
“Look, you’re in a bad spot. I’m not saying I can get you out of paying for what you’ve done. But I can give you an unfiltered platform to speak your truth.”
Wild Bill had bet correctly that the professor knew the walls were closing in on him. He wasn’t going to try to make some daring escape or go out in a blaze of glory. His actions were ideological from the start, and if he wasn’t going to get away with his plans silently, the next best thing was to explain them publicly.
Smithson may not have enjoyed the national prominence of the Ivies, but it had ushered many prominent members of society’s upper class into the working world. It was the kind of place that took not just the concept of legacy seriously, but also the practice of it — nearly half the student body now was descendants of alumni. To bleed burgundy — both the school’s singular color and its mascot — was more than a metaphor.
Wild Bill was not a Burgundy. But, despite his affectations and self-adorned, Western nickname, he might as well have been. A New England prep school product, he’d walked the same halls as many Smithson students as a teenager. But he was an Army brat, beholden to no place in particular; as such, he also didn’t really belong to any such slice of high society. He’d attended the state university before dropping out to move to the desert and start his ascent to fame.
That self-exile from high society, the embellished stories of his time out west — and of course the nickname itself — all worked in service of his ability to distance himself from the image of a well-heeled member of the wealthy elite. He had cemented the idea with The Corral and the thick cowboy graphics within his show.
But over the years, he’d adopted a more spare presentation. He filmed now at an empty table in front of a stark, black background, no additional frills. The silly, rodeo-styled nicknames remained, but the self-seriousness of the product itself had never been greater.
O’Halloran had also ditched his glasses a few years back, worrying they made him look too bookish and effete. That move paid off about 18 months later when the conspiracy about Silicon Valley tech companies manipulating what consumers could see through their lenses started spreading around the dark corners of the web, egged on by O’Halloran. Not simply content to have been fortunate enough to have dumped his eyewear ahead of the rumors, he further pressed his own connections to the story, hinting that he’d known all along this was coming, that he had been dropping quiet clues into his shows to warn his viewers. It was never enough to be right on accident; to develop the kind of following Wild Bill had, the one he needed, he had to give the gullible reason to believe in his greater powers.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that many of Wild Bill’s fans think he’s Deadwood, the most prominent internet conspiracy theorist since the plague. When people have needed fanciful claims to stand in for reasonable explanations for their failures, Deadwood has been there to offer them. From anything as public as election results and protests, to individual stories of kidnapping or murder, there’s nothing that Deadwood couldn’t ascribe to mysterious, nefarious forces working in concert to corrupt and deny “real” Americans the happiness and freedom they believed to be their birthright.
Deadwood’s information drops, called burns, often seemed to line up with Wild Bill’s biggest stories. That it was unclear if either one was the horse or the cart, or if they were in any way connected at all, only strengthened the viewers’ resolve to draw lines and connect dots. For his part, O’Halloran was happy not to admonish the suggestions, offering such loaded retorts as, “Well, that’s very nice of you to say,” or just a laugh and knowing smile.
He referenced Deadwood’s burns frequently on his show, but was careful never to do so by name. That deliberateness only reinforced the belief among some in his viewership that Wild Bill was, in fact, Deadwood himself. And whoever Deadwood actually was, they were happy to let Wild Bill’s celebrity further drive their own popularity and spread their messages.
Deadwood’s believers — The Forest, as they often called themselves — did not overlap perfectly with Wild Bill’s Corral, but they were in the game for the same reason, to find something to believe in, to embrace fully with their hearts and minds.
So while it was no surprise to see Deadwood drop a file on Egan just as Wild Bill went on the air that night, the serendipity only further strengthened the connection between them. While The Corral were largely outspoken in their fandom, members of The Forest often hid their allegiance so as not to be shunned by polite society. But the tree pin the professor affixed to his lapel for his interview with Wild Bill left no doubt to anyone paying attention just where he stood.
“Tonight,” O’Halloran opened somberly, his pale egg floating in front of the black backdrop, “you’ll learn the story of a young man with a bright future, whose life was tragically cut short. But you’ll learn much more than that. Tonight, you’ll meet James Earl Egan III’s killer.”
Wild Bill had winged the intro, without telling his producer what was coming, without running it by any of the station’s higher-ups. As the show cut to its stock introduction, he could hear the commotion in the control room through his earpiece.
“Relax, everyone,” he said smugly to his staff, through his lapel mic. “Settle in for the show.”
As the production cued up the preproduced, soft-focus package on Egan, Wild Bill checked his watch. If the warrant wasn’t already issued — which a well-placed member of The Corral within the local police department assured him it hadn’t been — he’d have plenty of time to get through his entire, hour-long block with the professor before the cops came crashing through the door to arrest him.
The Egan segment ended on a long, slow fade into that same, flattering headshot, violins trembling in the background.
“But the truth is, James Earl Egan III was no saint,” Wild Bill told The Corral. “He was a complicated, flawed person, just like you and me.”
Wild Bill laid out the allegations against Egan from high school. He painted it all as a he-said-she-said situation, without representing either side sympathetically. That meant omitting information he knew about the victim — ”alleged victim” — in order to portray a balanced approach, rather than one that appropriately weighed the information. But nobody could prove what details Wild Bill did or didn’t know.
Wild Bill’s tagline was “All Voices Welcome,” simultaneously a nod to the fringe groups who comprised some of The Corral and a shot at his more censorious competitors. It gave the sense of universal participation without taking any actual risks. But of course, it was not really true of those voices Wild Bill chose to amplify. He could have interviewed the victim for her side of the story. But then he’d have lost control of the narrative.
“But everyone deserves a second chance,” said Wild Bill, as much about himself as Egan. “He proved that, both with what he did on the football field and then, once he lost his scholarship, what he did in the classroom, setting up his future. And isn’t that all we can really ask of a man?”
The more his audience had to bargain away their empathy for others, the more tied they would become to what was left. Once they had forgiven Egan for his crimes and accepted him as one of their own, the more strongly they would support him and, therefore, O’Halloran himself, even if neither were really one of them.
“But now he’s dead. Up next, the man who is here to tell us how — and, more importantly, why — that happened. The man who killed him.”
Wild Bill didn’t care about the optics of bringing the professor on. He was impervious to the shame, not to mention the professional ethics, that constrained journalists. He understood that giving someone like the professor the platform to speak on national TV could be seen as an endorsement of his views, but he would never admit to it. He was, as he would say, simply here to ask the questions that nobody else was willing to ask.
This way, Wild Bill didn’t have to engage in the actual line-stepping himself. By offering his platform, others would do that work for him, constantly pushing the boundaries of legality and standards and practices.
He didn’t always reward such behavior with his attention. Wild Bill had good reason, both Pavlovian and practical, not to air every outrage. But the more provocations that occurred, the more he could pick and choose the ones to prompt on any given day, his own Overton window for a community of viewers that was growing and bleeding into the real world increasingly every day.
There was no mechanism against ENeWs calling itself “news,” regardless of what truths it stretched or outright falsehoods it presented. By simply avoiding slander — or at least limiting it to groups too nebulous to be defined, individuals too powerless to pursue legal action — the outrage machine could continue to churn onward. And by taking a fringe network and moving it into the conversation, rather than establish a show at a traditional news organization, Wild Bill had been able to bend the rules and norms to his whims as they suited him.
Where others leaned too heavily on fear, Wild Bill tapped into other base instincts. At its core, his show was about empowerment. If there was outrage, it was fomented in service of the idea that The Corral deserved better, deserved more; more freedom, more power, more ability to do and say whatever they want without retribution from polite society.
But The Corral wasn’t some cult walled off from the rest of the world. It was a collection of citizens, of policemen and accountants, of uncles and grandmothers, of participating members of society that purchased and consumed and attended school and church and sporting events with everyone else, despite living an entirely differently constructed set of basic truths.
If things were worse now — and, really, who could argue that they weren’t? — were they not necessarily better before? By showing The Corral a view of the world in constant degradation, the argument for a return to the way things used to be, or to lean into drastic, new solutions, rarely even needed to be articulated out loud. It was implicit in every furrowed brow, every shake of the head, the silent motions of complicity that endorsed his various guests’ outlandish views or actions without ever saying so.
As far as O’Halloran was concerned, any advertiser willing to attach their name to Wild Bill’s show was an evangelist for his message, and therefore a worthy endorser. While the early incarnation of the show was sponsored by some medically dubious supplement peddlers and ethically questionable financial schemes, eventually it attracted bigger and bigger advertisers. Even attempted boycotts to try to pull big money from the show only worked temporarily. The Corral was so fervent, and Wild Bill so genuinely attached to his sponsors, that the viewers would flock en masse to support the companies that supported their community. Advertising with Wild Bill was a goldmine. So no matter the heat, the social pressures from advocacy groups, or board members, or media reports, there were always companies who looked at the bottom line and made the judgment not to walk away.
And now, Wild Bill was back from that commercial break, filled with ads from sponsors that would cry into the phones to management tomorrow morning about the optics of their cars, or supply stores, or chicken sandwiches appearing on screen right before a murderer. But they’d stay, especially once they saw the ratings. Wild Bill knew that. He hadn’t asked for permission, and he wouldn’t need to plead for forgiveness, either.
“Now, doctor...”
The professor was angry, having seen himself called a murderer, thinking only about Egan, not believing it to be true. Calling in on a video conference from his home, the sickly yellow light dirtying the walls behind him, he immediately looked amateurish against the clean, stark presentation of the studio.
“Hold on just a minute, Bill. I never meant for anything to happen to James.”
“I know that, doctor. You’ll have your chance to speak about Mr. Egan. But Dr. K,” Wild Bill paused, turning to face the professor, “why don’t you tell us why you’re here tonight.”
The professor stammered and halted in his seat. He had been put on the spot and wasn’t sure how to proceed.
“Well, you invited me.”
Wild Bill smiled.
“Sure, I invited you to give you a chance to explain what’s happened here, at Smithson, in the city.”
The two stared at each other through the camera, silently, for a seemingly endless stretch. This time, Wild Bill was on the clock, and he took matters into his own hands.
“Tell you what, we’re going to take our last break so we can talk to the professor completely unfiltered and uninterrupted on the other side.”
As the show cut again to commercial, Wild Bill glared at the professor, his voice no longer soft and cajoling, but sharp and bitter.
“There’s no turning back. This is happening. Get on board.”
The two sat silently until the cameras rolled again.
Finally, the professor opened up. About the compound he’d created, about that first night, about the plan. Wild Bill let him go until he’d exhausted himself, spilling out his unfettered, unrehearsed manifesto.
“You’re talking about eugenics, basically,” said Wild Bill.
“No, no,” the professor insisted “nothing of the sort. This isn’t about isolating and promoting blonde hair or blue eyes or high cheekbones. And I’m not racist, not in the least.”
Steam shot up the back of Wild Bill’s neck. His two defining impulses were at odds with one another in this moment. It would be best, for the larger war, to support the doctor in this assertion, to ignore the data right in front of him. But the contrarian in him wouldn’t allow it. Couldn’t.
The egg of Wild Bill’s head tilted downward as he pulled a sheet from a stack of research.
“You say that, doctor, and yet you’re weeding out people based on their socioeconomic status. You can’t deny that has some connection to race in this country.”
Even couched as it was, this was a remarkable admission from Wild Bill. To suggest, even tangentially, that having darker skin might lend one an inherent disadvantage — and vice versa — was tantamount to heresy in the ENeWs world, and in The Corral in particular.
It was a dangerous door to open for his viewers. They’d been trained to coordinate vicious protests and online attacks of public figures that cowed to the progressive movement du jour, those that ceded any ground, that criticized them in any way; most of all, for those that apologized, for anything.
But by allowing a conversation about race to be had, then summarily dismissed, Wild Bill was fighting all the wars at once. He was casting aside any implications of race from Campos’s story. He was reframing the question of who deserves to live and die around the prosperity gospel, around the idea that those who are rich are so because they deserve to be, and likewise those who are poor, with the crucial caveat that the many poor members of The Corral are only so because of nefarious forces beyond their control.
That tightrope walk was his greatest skill. There wasn’t nearly enough value in being a reliable feedback loop for preexisting beliefs, in being a warm fire for The Corral to cozy up to and thaw their anxieties. No, Wild Bill had to provide both new information along with the feeling that it was complete enough not to have to search elsewhere for confirmation. To be its most effective self, The Corral needed to be a complete and closed ecosystem, impervious to facts beyond its walls.
“It doesn’t matter what race they are, what matters is where they ended up,” said the professor.
That’s what Wild Bill was waiting for, the articulation of the bootstraps mentality that conveniently ignored the institutional bias and generational, systemic racism so baked into American structures that it was all but invisible to The Corral. A simple nod of affirmation was all he needed to cement the idea that these people, all of us, get what we deserve in the end.
The professor explained that, before he hatched his plan, he would simply take occasional walks south from campus, late at night, threading between the camps and shantytowns that had started popping up all along the fringes of the city. He’d get asked for money, but he’d never give any. Often, he’d then get asked for a cigarette. The request disgusted him.
“Despite everything we know about cigarettes, they’re the only thing they want other than money,” he told Wild Bill. “They know they’re cancer sticks, that they’ll kill them eventually. So instead of letting these people become a long, slow strain on our welfare and healthcare systems, I just accelerated them to the end.”
“So you wouldn’t hand them out unless someone asked?”
“Right. Well…” the professor tailed off.
That was how it had started, anyway.
Despite the strict rules the professor had set for himself, he knew he’d bent and broken them when needed along the way. He’d set out with the idea that no children would be harmed. But he wasn’t checking IDs. Sure enough, one teenager who had asked for three smokes — for himself and two friends — had been just 15, the youngest of the friends just 12. The professor knew, because that one made the obituaries, if not the crime section.
As the professor talked, Wild Bill’s production team scrambled to get the details of the teens into his earpiece. Wild Bill singled out those boys, told the story of their families, working- and middle-class parents who lost jobs, some who got sick during the plague, all of whom ended up destitute as the social safety net failed them. And now, their children had been taken away by this man, this monster.
Other than Egan, these were the only victims O’Halloran chose to humanize. Even he couldn’t abide even the slightest possibility that he was endorsing what had happened to those children. And his willingness to draw the line somewhere only encouraged his audience to toe up to that same line.
“Do you have kids, professor?”
O’Halloran knew that he didn’t. As the professor dipped his head, Wild Bill let the words hang in the air.
The sheer enormity of the death toll was, itself, desensitizing, which worked in both the professor’s and Wild Bill’s favor. With the professor’s defenses down, the broadcast hour starting to wear thin, Wild Bill decided it was finally time to ask the question he’d been building toward all along: If the professor even knew how many people he’d murdered.
“It’s impossible to say.”
“Too many to count?” snapped Wild Bill wryly, for effect.
The professor stared coldly ahead. But Wild Bill wanted a number. On his show, you were on his turf.
He wasn’t a prosecutor, here to convince a jury to take the professor’s life, nor to spare him. But Wild Bill knew it was the question his viewers demanded, the one they lusted for, as they did after every plane crash or mass shooting.
He’d waited until the end of the interview to press him on it, for dramatic effect and sustained ratings, sure, but also strategically, to both warm the professor up and wear him down before dropping the hammer. And Wild Bill seemed to understand that the professor knew that exact number.
The long silence between them, the black screen filling the background void, was punctuated only by the rhythmic tapping of Wild Bill’s pen on the desk.
“I don’t buy it,” he said, at last, to the professor. “You are an obsessive. You’ve recounted things to us here tonight in astounding detail. If you didn’t know exactly how many cigarettes you’d handed out, and how many people you’d killed, you’d be unsure of whether or not there might be other innocent victims out there waiting to die, like Mr. Egan. So despite whatever that number of people is — people that you’ve killed, doctor — I don’t think you’d sleep at night if you knew that there were potentially others out there, who you deem innocent, who…”
“Three hundred and forty-seven.”
Wild Bill was rarely interrupted on his show and even more seldomly rendered speechless. The pen tapping had stopped. An aching silence stretched between them.
“Three hundred and forty-seven...people? You distributed poison cigarettes to — and killed — three hundred and forty-seven people?”
“Yes.”
Wild Bill sat back in his chair, soaking in the revelation.
“Does that include Mr. Egan?”
“He doesn’t...I don’t...no, he’s different. He was an accident.”
“So, three forty-eight, then?”
Wild Bill dropped the line without a hint of compassion or remorse, shorthanding the expression of the number itself, an intentionally cavalier delivery to lay the professor’s genocide bare.
“No! You asked me how many I handed out, how many I...removed. It’s three hundred and forty-seven. But I take responsibility for James. It’s why I’m here. To be held accountable for my role in cutting that young man’s life short.”
O’Halloran let the moment hang in the silence, allowing the professor’s determination that one, privileged life deserved more reverence than 347 mostly nameless, faceless unfortunates. But Wild Bill also had a chance to push one more button, to drive this interview all the way home.
“So you lied to me, then.”
The professor startled in his chair.
“What?”
“You lied. You said it was impossible to say how many people you killed. But you just said so.”
The professor looked flustered, but determined.
“They don’t care.”
“Who doesn’t care?”
The professor waved his hands wildly.
“Them. Society. They don't care about those people. Nobody cares about those people. They all just pretend like they do. And so we waste all this time and money on them. They’re happy to let them die, so long as they don’t have to watch.”
Wild Bill cut in.
“How do you know they don’t care?”
“Because nobody really cares about anybody else. We’re all only out to save ourselves in the end.”
“And it takes someone like you, and a campaign like this, to prove that.”
The line was half question, half statement, delivered on that knife’s edge of plausible deniability. If pressed, Wild Bill could lean into the idea that it was, in fact, a question, not an endorsement. To his critics, he could insist it be heard as such. To his followers, it was an implicit acceptance of this worldview.
The Corral would never consume any reporting from Campos on the professor’s story that Wild Bill hadn’t cut and framed in exactly the way he needed. The insular bubbles of information he had been reinforcing for his viewers for years ensured that. They’d never learn that Campos herself had been homeless for two years as a teenager, that her brother had died during that time, that it was a fundamental force that drove her decision to focus on the stories she did.
But Wild Bill wasn’t quite done.
“If all these homeless deaths are the cost of a more efficient society, then, is Egan’s death not simply the cost of conducting that greater business?”
“No, I can’t...he can’t...he was one of us,” said the professor.
On this, Wild Bill and the professor stood on common ground. All the work he had put in cutting the young man as a sympathetic figure to his audience had paid off.
Wild Bill dipped his head ever so slightly at the professor’s final remark, but any possible perceived reverence for the moment was shattered by his unrepressed, self-satisfied grin. He’d sealed Dr. K’s fate, but he’d also made him a martyr, not just for the professor’s own cause, but for the chaos Wild Bill had churned into a career.
The attention Wild Bill had brought to the case immediately stirred up an entire microeconomy around the professor’s cause. If there was a buck to be made, someone was making it, selling T-shirts with “FREE DR. K” emblazoned across the chest, or bumper stickers with just the outline of his perfectly square, wire-framed glasses, or, on the extreme end, setting up crowdfunding campaigns to raise money for his bail. Never mind that the professor had been explicit that he did not deserve to walk free, due to Egan’s death. At least five fraudulent online fundraisers pulled in more than $2 million in combined funds before they were shut down.
But O’Halloran didn’t care about the grift. Wild Bill’s work was done. He had allowed his audience to condemn the doctor for his actions, while letting them bask in silent solidarity with his goals. Absolved of their own racism, their own disdain for the poor, for those they saw as less American or less Christian or simply less than themselves.
Wild Bill would storm into town with the rest of us for the trial, for the maelstrom he’d created, for the chance to draw more eyeballs, more future recruits to The Corral, to continue to grow his army of devoted followers. He could eat off the follow-up stories of the good professor for months, maybe even years, depending on how long the trial stretched, whether or not the professor was sentenced to death. But the loyalty he’d earned from his viewers — from the permission he gave them to be the worst of themselves, washed clean of their guilt — that was permanent.