True, he had a lingering, somewhat morbid tendency to talk about his “ordeal,” but he’d been badly shaken by it, so perhaps that was natural enough. Sometimes it was the moment of victory he’d want to relive, and he’d go back over his meeting with Mel Sauer with voluptuous relish, as if there were still vital juices to be sucked from its memory. Sometimes it was the dread that had come before—the sense of imminent ruin. Meanwhile he’d become more obsessed than ever with the assault and harassment scandals that seemed to be breaking just about every week in the news. The stories triggered violently contradictory responses in him, all of them transparently visible as he sat at breakfast in his shabby blue bathrobe, reading the New York Times. The progressive liberal in him would rejoice in the fall of some dinosaur mogul or smug college jock, drunk on their sense of unassailable omnipotence. But then, as he began reappraising the story from the point of view of his own experience, misgivings would seize him. Might the accusations be false? Or at least exaggerated? Or oversimplified? If the truth happened to be complicated, could that complication ever be addressed by a process that recognized only the strictly differentiated categories of predator and victim? Was it possible to get a fair hearing in the current climate, where a good chunk of the populace seemed to have come to a tacit agreement that it was better that a few innocent men should be ruined than a single guilty one go free? He’d remark on his own quickness to condemn accused men; his willing—even exultant—participation in the ritual of public denunciation that these stories offered would make him shudder at how close he’d come to being the victim of that quickness and willingness, himself. Then, as if catching himself sliding into sympathy with that week’s proven sleazeball staring at him from the pages of the Times, he’d frown and toss the paper aside, muttering “Fuck this asshole, anyway.” And then a week or so later the whole cycle would start up again.

“I’d like to make a documentary about these men,” he said one morning, jabbing at the paper. “I think I could get them to talk, and I think they’d have interesting things to say about what it means to be disgraced in this era. They’re all very different of course, but collectively they comprise an interesting anthropological phenomenon. They’re guilty, I don’t question that, except in a few instances, but they’re also functioning as sacrificial figures. We’re entering a phase of political theater not unlike what you had in China and Russia back in the day. The morning denunciation. The noon denial. The evening firing squad. Or in our case just the firing—so far. I’m thinking of ‘The Tarnished’ for a title. How does that sound?”