— Why did I invite you over for movies?
— Yes.
— I was lonely.
— That’s it?
— Thomas, are you planning to harm me?
— No. I don’t know. Maybe. I’m vacillating between wanting to harm you and feeling bad for you. Why?
— Thomas, if you give me your word that you won’t harm me, I can fill in the details of the night you spent at my house. I understand why you’d want to know what exactly happened. I can do that. But I won’t do it if you’re going to kill me irregardless.
— That’s not a word. You should know that. You’re a teacher.
— What’s not a word?
— Irregardless. It’s just like saying either with the long i. You think you sound smarter, but you sound stupider. You should just stick to regular words. Don’t stretch.
— Okay. Sorry.
— Don’t be sorry. Just be smarter. You want to know whether I’ll guarantee your safety. Well, let’s see. I have to say … no. I can’t guarantee anything. I don’t owe you that.
— Thomas, I didn’t harm you. I didn’t harm Don.
— I don’t believe you. And don’t say my name.
— Okay. Then why did you bring me here?
— What do you mean?
— You went to a lot of trouble to get me here. But you’re rejecting my offer to fill in the gaps in your memory. I want you to have peace with this. You’re not the first former student to come to me wanting to know about those nights.
— And what did you tell them?
— The same thing I’m telling you. That what I did was inappropriate but that nothing terrible happened. You were not raped.
— See, this is what I don’t understand. Why risk your job and going to jail and everything else to bring boys to your house if you weren’t going to rape us?
— I told you. I was lonely. And it wasn’t just boys.
— You brought girls, too?
— Thomas, I need your assurance you won’t harm me, and that you’ll let me go. I have people in my life who count on me and who need me. My mother lives with me. She’s ninety-one. I feed her. I’m guessing it’s the afternoon now, so she’ll already be wondering where I am.
— You know, Mr. Hansen, you just made a tactical mistake. You fucked up, you fucked with the minds of however many kids who were under your care, and now you’re making demands of me.
— I didn’t mean it to come off like a demand. I was just trying to give you a sense of the other people in my life. You had an experience with me twenty years ago, but much has happened since.
— Okay, I understand you were trying to humanize yourself there. I know. If I know about your ancient mother, it supposedly makes it harder for me to harm or kill you. But in this case that’s stupid. I already know you’re a human being. And I know that you’re a monster. And now I know you have a ninety-one-year-old mother, who we both know has lived a long life, and besides, she raised a twisted man. So I’m not overflowing with sympathy.
— You won’t guarantee my safety.
— No. But I will say that if you tell me everything, and if what you tell me seems credible, then I’ll be more likely to leave you alone than if you keep telling me about your ninety-one-year-old mother who raised a pederast.
— I’m not a pederast.
— You invited boys to sleep over and you’re not a pederast?
— I acted inappropriately, I know this. But there are degrees to everything.
— You’re so sick.
— Thomas. You’re a smart guy. And given you’ve chained me to a post, I know you understand moral choices that are a bit off the beaten path. So I hope you’ll understand what I mean when I say that there is a good deal of grey in the world. It’s not a popular belief, I know, but most of the world is grey. I know that if a man touches a boy’s ass once, he can be labeled a pedophile forever, but that’s not fair, either. We’ve lost all nuance.
— We’ve lost all nuance? We’ve lost all nuance? You want to talk about nuance now? What the fuck does this have to do with nuance?
— You’ve brought me here because you assume that because I invited boys to sleep over, that I raped them. But I did not do that.
— So why bring them to your house? That’s the part I don’t get.
— Thomas, tell me something. You’re a single man?
— Yes.
— Are you straight?
— Yes.
— Have you brought women back to your apartment?
— Yes.
— Did you have sex with each one?
— What? No.
— Then why bring them home?
— That’s a stupid analogy.
— Did anyone ever mistake your intentions?
— What do you mean?
— When you got them home, was there ever confusion about your intentions? Did anyone ever think you planned to force your will onto them?
— No.
— I assumed not.
— Fuck you.
— But you could have. That could have been your intention.
— No. It couldn’t have been.
— But maybe something goes wrong. Maybe you brought twenty women to your apartment, and let’s say each encounter was safe and consensual.
— Yes. They all were.
— But what if the twenty-first encounter wasn’t? What if, during that one encounter, you both were drunk and there was confusion about consensuality? And later she accused you of date rape. If you’re arrested, or tried, or even just accused, immediately there’s doubt about the other encounters, the other twenty, right? Who knows what your intentions were. Maybe you raped them all. Or maybe you tried to. To the outside world, and to all the women who had consensual relations with you, your intentions are suddenly unclear, even in hindsight. Suddenly, to everyone, you’re capable of terrible things.
— Not possible.
— But of course it is. An accusation alone puts your entire character in doubt. This is how it works. An accusation is ninety percent of it. Anyone can ruin anyone with an accusation. And people are only too happy to be able to write someone off, to throw them into the pile of the depraved and subhuman. One less person. There are too many people, the world is too crowded. We’re suffocating, right? And clearing some of them away lets us breathe. Each person we throw away fills our lungs with new air.
— You’re getting off topic.
— I don’t think so. You have to realize that you’re a victim of this thinking, too. You heard something about me, and you brought me here, fully expecting me to conform to your idea of a throwaway person. But I’m not a throwaway person, am I?
— I don’t know yet.
— But we put no value on each other, do we? There are too many people. There are too many people in any given city, any given country. Certainly there are too many people on this planet, so we’re so anxious to throw away as many of them as possible. Given any excuse at all, we can erase them.
—
— What if there were only ten of us on Earth? What if there were only ten people you had to choose from who had to help rebuild civilization after some apocalypse?
— Oh Jesus. What’s your point?
— My point is that if there were only ten people on Earth, there’s no way that you would think I was dispensable. If I had wrestled with Don and had kids over to my house, you would never think those crimes so unforgivable that you’d send me away. I would still be useful. You’d talk to me, you’d work it out. But with so many people, no one person is worth so much. We can clear away wide swaths of people like they were weeds. And usually we do it based on suspicion, innuendo, paranoia. Whole classes of people. Including anyone vaguely associated with pedophilia. They don’t get fair trials, they’re sent away, and when they try to come back, they can’t even live. They live under bridges, in tents, huddled together.