Don didn’t know why men did such things. But she knew you had to be scared of them. You couldn’t provoke them. They could yell without it sounding like screaming. They talked nonsense in broken sentences. But you wanted them to like you. You wanted to please the coolest gangster. Or serve him. So as not to get beaten up. Like Don’s mother. Like all the mothers on the block, who mostly raised kids on their own because the men left as soon as they didn’t feel like beating their women anymore. Among women, stress-induced depression was the most common disease in the country. Sort of a disease. Whatever. Women. The suicide rate among women over forty rose to an absurd level, the exact percentage Don had forgotten. A lot of kids with depressed alcoholic mothers lived in constant fear of coming home to find family members lying dead somewhere or hanging or facedown in a bathtub. The coming generation, made up of psychotic former children of poverty, Ritalin-crazed psychotic former children of the dying middle class, and the sadistic former children of the elite, would be well prepared for the new era.

Incidentally—just emerging back then was the movement of

The

LEFT BEHIND.

Men.

Young and middle-aged throughout the Western world who found themselves in homoerotic unity under various names. Alt-right, neo-Nazis, National Action, Aryan Brotherhood, White Nationalist Party, League of St. George, Blood & Honour, Stormfront, Identitäre, Vigrid, Deutsche Heidnische Front—the involuntarily celibate

Groups—

That gave them back a feeling of power that

Women

Had taken from them. Millions of white men had been emasculated. Right. Wrap your head around that.

Fucking hell. They had too much testosterone or not enough, both painful conditions, and found themselves in a world that no longer needed them. Useless and angry. Not loved and not listened to. Doughy around the middle,

Women,

That is—individuals that you could purchase, as so-called policewomen, judges, doctors. Like foreigners with glasses. Like if a dog were to become a politician. Women were something they could all agree upon as responsible for this malaise they felt in a world that was no longer comfortable. Which had never really been comfortable, but at least you weren’t confronted with it in the old days, for fuck’s sake. In the old days there’d been no internet to tell you how uncomfortable it had become. It could really make you bitter.

Well, it was not proper to wander through the streets of the Western world beating women. So somebody else had to be on the hook. Foreigners. Same as women, just with bigger penises. With which they stole the women away from white men, the women the white men hated. Okay, it was complicated. Fuck it.