by Alex McElroy
The men lowered the station wagon off its jack and departed in separate directions. They would probably never speak to one another again. The driver sped away, flipping them off out the window.
“What a letdown,” said Dyson.
“Not exciting enough for you?”
“A letdown for people like you who think the hordes are dangerous.” He started in the direction of the mall.
The mall’s shadow stretched over the lot like a stain. The air was chilled, shiver-inducing. I felt a pang of anticipation as we drew closer. We had grown up in a rural patch of New Jersey notorious for ample skies and groundwater toxicity. Ours was a town of paranoia, of grief. We had lost two classmates to cancer. The disease had taken dozens more in the surrounding grades. As teenagers, we obsessed over escaping—partly out of generic adolescent angst, partly out of an unconscious impulse for self-preservation. We were drawn to expressions of life that seemed endless and immortal, and nothing suggested immortality more than commerce. After school, we darted onto highways en route to movie theaters and restaurants and arcades and flea markets and magic shows and specialty grocers—but most often we drove straight to a mall.
Malls were repercussionless places. There, the future didn’t exist. You ate pizza slices thick as bricks or grease-leaking pretzels under the pretense that no discomfort would follow. The elderly roaming the promenade ignored the grip of mortality. There was no mortality in the mall. There was no paranoia—only praise from employees who wrote our names in script on dressing room doors, who told us how pretty we looked in clothes we couldn’t afford, who lifted samples of meat to our mouths like servants feeding a queen in her castle.
The mall was the kingdom where nobody died.
But time had overtaken this mall—as it had overtaken so many other malls. Fluorescent lights gagged overhead. The air reeked of the cleaning solution used to mop up the vomit of children. The mall teetered between its decay and a naïve faith in its revitalization. Harried managers carnival-barked from the entrances offering sickening discounts: 30 percent, 40 percent, 50 percent, 75 percent. “The Death March of Discounts,” Dyson called it. Stores’ façades masked in plaster apologized for their dust but promised to transform into exciting new enterprises: and soon! At the entrance to a record store was a cardboard cutout of Blake Dayes gripping a guitar by the neck. “The You I Knew,” the title of his latest single, appeared in red script across his body. It took everything in me not to topple the cutout. Four stores down, a poster of Cassandra promoting noise-canceling headphones hung in the window of a laptop store.
Dyson was going off about his cult. He rambled to me about men, the dangers men faced, how men were depressed and threats to themselves. He waved his arms, pointed, nodded diligently, and blathered with the scattered enthusiasm of a child giving a TED Talk. It wasn’t unusual for him to speak in such perplexing extremes, hopping from truisms to clichés to conclusions as if they were rocks in a stream. He ended on a solution: our cult.
“We’ll call it The Atmosphere,” he said. “The men will be Atmospherians. It’s a film term. Another word for extras: people who provide the atmosphere and stand in the background. What better aspiration for men? To cede power, the spotlight, to let others speak, let the action continue without them.”
“Give me a pen,” I said. Dyson was one of the few people left who still carried a pen.
“You don’t need to take notes.” He tapped his forehead. “It’s all in here.”
“Just give it to me.” He handed one over. I marched to Cassandra’s poster intent on drawing an X over each eye, but the poster was hanging inside the glass.
“If you’re interested in a poster I can get you an excellent deal,” said a pouchy man in a tucked polo shirt. He had a face like an electrical outlet. “I’ll throw it in free with a pair of Ear Locks.”
“She’s a bad person!” I said.
“Plus my employee discount. That’s fifteen percent on top of the twenty-five you’re already saving. It’s an unbeatable deal.” He spoke like someone who had never been excited.
“Your company shouldn’t associate with bad people,” I said.
“I do commercials,” Dyson said to the employee. “A ton you’ve probably seen. Movies, too. Blockbusters. And I’ve heard terrible things about how Cassandra treats people. She’s notorious for it. She’s the worst-kept secret in wellness.” Professionally, he was an actor—a career extra in films, TV, and ads—and loved elbowing his experience into conversations. I normally found the habit grating and insecure, but today I was heartened by his defense of me.
“Soon you’ll know!” I shouted. “Soon you’ll all know.” I sensed people staring and covered my face with my hand to prevent anyone from recognizing me. Any one of the men from my building might be in this mall. “We need to keep moving,” I said to Dyson.
Dyson and I rode an escalator to the second floor and skirted the food court. Cashiers thrust cuts of teriyaki chicken into our faces. Dyson refused, so I took his, and mine, then his and mine when we circled past a second time.
He said, “It’s my fault I haven’t been here for you. But I want you—if you can—I want you to tell me how you are, where you are emotionally. Cults are founded on honesty, Sasha. And trust. We can’t get where we’re going if you don’t tell me where you are.” Had these words come from anyone else, I would have cackled. But he was calming, sweet. And familiar. That meant more than anything else. “Don’t leave a single thing out,” he said.
The past three months tumbled out incoherently: A man who left explicit comments on my photos and videos, the same man who emailed me pics of my head cropped into porn videos, the same man who made new profiles every time I reported him and who used a VPN that the police were too lazy to trace—that man had taken his life after I told him to leave me alone. My ex couldn’t associate with me after the scandal. Cassandra used my downfall as a chance to boost her career. Then the men with their signs. Now the eviction. My mouth emptied as tears rinsed my cheeks. “I’m so embarrassed,” I said. “Crying in a mall on a Tuesday afternoon.”
“No one’s watching,” he said.
I peered around me. People passed without looking, their avoidance intentional. My anonymity was a relief. After Lucas Devry, I’d become recognizable, a point of discussion—exactly what I’d desired for years. In an effort to remake my image—and to pay rent—I had applied for jobs at a number of charities: the ASPCA, the Organization for African Children, Save the Peruvian Mice, Médicos Sin Fronteras, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, Make-A-Wish, Have A Heart, Break A Leg, Give A Lung, Teach For America, Cats in the Schools, and L.A.M.B. But even the laziest Google search disqualified me from being hired.
“Where we’re going,” he said, “none of what happened will matter.”
“You haven’t told me where we’re going. I’ve never been to your grandparents’ place.”
His father’s parents had left him property in southern Jersey, on the northern edge of the Pine Barrens. It was as off-the-grid as you could get without leaving the grid. No shouting, no protesting. “It’s the perfect place for the men to grow and reform,” he said.
“What men?”
“These men I’ve been working with. They’re harmless, but they’re so full of rage. They’re depressed. They’re at risk for… They’re like my father.” He inhaled, collecting himself. “If my father’d had a place to talk out his feelings, who knows what might have been different.”
Dyson’s father had died in a car crash while driving to work the summer between our junior and senior years of high school. It was an accident, we told ourselves, because we both suspected it wasn’t. No explanation was the explanation. But the simplicity of Dyson’s new equation disturbed me. If his father’s death could be reduced to cause and effect, maybe Lucas Devry’s could be as well, and I was more at fault than I wanted to believe.
On the third floor, we paused on a bench so close to the railing that our knees pressed into the glas
s. Dyson gave me a pep talk on all the barriers I’d leapfrogged, the ceilings I’d shattered: “You changed lives. You helped women who struggled with toxic standards of beauty. You gave hope to the despairing, the outcast, the ignored, the desperate, despondent.”
“All that work destroyed by one stupid comment.”
“All that work prepared you for this,” he said. “Everything you thought you did with ABANDON, all the good you brought to the world, all the people you helped, it’ll be nothing compared to what we’re gonna do. Cassandra Hanson, Blake Dayes—you know how meaningless their work will look beside ours? Cassandra makes wealthy dullards relax. Blake writes earworms for idiots. But Sasha: We’re gonna change the world. People will talk about us and The Atmosphere for generations after we’re gone. We’ll make the world safer for everyone. Because the world is full of terrible men. Despicable men like Blake Dayes and Lucas Devry who get worse every day. And nothing gets done. It might seem crazy to do this, but it’s crazier to do nothing.”
I pretended I couldn’t tell he was flattering me. I wanted him to say more.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “But don’t worry. Cult: it’s an organizing principle. Strong leader at the top. Two leaders in our case who dictate how those below ought to live. Have there been bad apples? Absolutely. Jonestown. Heaven’s Gate. The Manson Family. Rajneeshpuram. But the model is perfect. Because if any social group ever deserved forced isolation, ever needed their worldview shaped by trusted leaders—for the greater good—it’s men. White men, especially. And we’re the only ones brave enough to commit to this work.”
“I just want this all to end.”
“Wrong,” he said. “You want vindication. Exoneration. Hell, you want revenge. You deserve it. Imagine Cassandra’s face when she sees you interviewed on morning talk shows—spreading your message of radical transformation for men. Imagine how quickly Blake will call you, desperate to get back together, when he sees you’re more famous than he is.”
“I’d never get back with him,” I said, though I’d often imagined it.
“Of course not. You won’t even answer his calls.”
I shaped my hand into a phone and spoke into it: “See you in hell, you goat-voiced fraud.” Dyson was laughing. But the pain of losing Cassandra and Blake flooded back into me, and I curled over my knees. “You don’t get it,” I said. “People despise me.”
“You said what anyone would have.”
“I won’t be any help.” I regret it now, but I wanted him to tell me he needed me, for him to douse me in praise. I wanted to be convinced.
He intuited this: “You’re organized. Brilliant. Persistent and patient—everything I’m not. I’m a big thinker. An ideas man. I shoot from the hip. Pow! Pow! But you have experience. You already made one program from scratch—had it senselessly taken from you. You’re an expert about group management, planning. I couldn’t possibly do this with anyone else.”
“You do need me,” I said, stupidly confident.
“And you need this. You’ve hit rock bottom. You’re broke. Evicted. The Atmosphere is your only path to redemption. I wish this could happen some other way, but this is the world we have: Americans love reckonings. They’re obsessed with atonement. Reform some men, prove you can care for guys like Lucas Devry, and the media will slobber over your tale of redemption. Boom: you get your life back.”
He insisted the plan was simple: The men would arrive at his property in a week. Over the next six days, he and I would prepare the camp, brainstorm strategies for transforming these men, strategies for bringing The Atmosphere to the public’s attention—“For your sake,” he said, though I knew Dyson was desperate for notoriety, albeit too proud to ever admit his desperation. He promised me a beautiful cabin in the woods and men who were ready to grow and evolve.
“How does that sound?” he asked.
“Too good to be true,” I said.
“Sometimes things can be good and true. Have confidence in me for once. Just trust I know what I’m doing.”
He was right: I had no confidence in him. But if something went wrong, I had confidence in myself to fix it, or escape. I stood and leaned against the railing, rested my arms over the edge.
Dyson took this for what it was: a sign I would join him. He edged in beside me, shoulder to shoulder, and I felt unexpectedly safe.
A young girl screamed from the ground floor of the mall.
She was pointing at a purple helium balloon that was drifting to the ceiling. “I got it!” Dyson shouted. It was a foolishly confident thing to say and even more foolish for him to stretch over the railing. I pressed a hand to his back to hold him in place. I was sure the balloon would slip past him, that a gust of central air would blow it beyond his reach and that he’d tumble over the railing to his death. But he palmed the balloon with one hand and cradled it to his chest. He rushed down the escalators to deliver it to the girl. Bystanders applauded the miracle they had witnessed. The girl hugged the balloon. Dyson refused the mother’s attempt to slip him some bills. He ascended the escalators as if gliding on a wave of his own self-satisfaction and pride. A bright, blinding light of inevitability shined inside me: Perhaps I had every reason to trust him. Everything he described would happen exactly as he described it. I was sure of it then.
The girl released the balloon. A collective gasp spread through the mall.
three
IN THE ALTERNATE version of my life, I turn Dyson down and move to a dusty bedroom community with a name like Oak Bluff or Bounty or Franklin, any whitewashed suburb where the townsfolk brag about farmers’ markets and walking trails and really breathing the air. In this life, I answer phones at a charter school. I marry a man named Kevin with soda can thumbs and a forehead the size of a billboard. He owns a landscaping company. He accuses me of cheating on him with every man we pass in the street. We create three unconscionably ugly children who adore plain bagels and lizards. I might appear happy—I might even convince myself of this—but I would be brittle with boredom, a musty husk of myself tumbling through a life I abhor.
Dyson knew I would never settle for such a life. I wanted the life I had earned, the life that had been taken away from me. I wanted to matter again. This was what he offered me, and I accepted the offer. I buckled in and moved to The Atmosphere, not only because I wanted to, as Dyson insisted, make the world safer, but because I was angry: at Cassandra and Blake and Lucas Devry and the hundreds of men who traded shifts outside my apartment and the thousands who’d threatened my life online and the millions who merely existed. I wanted to be better than them. I needed them to know that I was.
Nevertheless, I often daydream about that quiet life in the suburbs with three kids and a Kevin. It happens more frequently than I would like. That life is an escape hatch from the pressure I find myself under now. No, that life would not have satisfied me. I would not be happier there—which isn’t to say that I’m happy today. But I would not feel so guilty. If I had chosen that life, Dyson would still be alive.
four
DYSON AND I met on the bus on the first day of third grade. The summer just before, my mother had moved us into the house neighboring his. “Row six. Two-seater,” said the bus driver when I boarded. He was bulbous and gruff, with eyebrows as thick as pelts and a metal bar through his septum. Dyson sat in the three-seater across the aisle, the only other kid on the bus. He and I lived on the outskirts of town—people called it the boonies, though I hate the word boonies, with its whiff of condescension and terror—and our rides lasted half an hour longer than everyone else’s. The driver resented us for this. So he demanded silence from Dyson and me.
As the bus filled, Dyson made fart and sex noises for the kids passing his seat, or he clapped his puffed, freckled cheeks or lifted his shirt and shimmied to shake the flab of his stomach. He was a chunky kid who used his chunkiness to amuse. Sex and fart sounds were not, on their own, inherently funny, but to children these sounds were hilarious when delivered by a fat
kid. They laughed in passing. They fondled his tummy. “Fuckin’ Dyson,” the sixth graders said. Sure, nobody sat with him—but they appreciated the work he put into debasing himself. They remembered his name. In class later that day, he imitated our homeroom teacher when she turned around to write on the board, her gestures distorted by the funhouse mirror of fatness. Dyson modeled himself after the TV fat boys who lived in the echo of laugh tracks. They spoke in the most idiotic of voices and ate too much to be smart. Their stomachs consistently jiggled. They fell on their faces. Their chairs collapsed under their weight or their asses got stuck in their chairs. Fat boys punctured conversations with thunderous farts. They grumbled, “Me hungry,” in deep, garbagy voices. The benefit of being a fat boy, Dyson decided, was having your personality chosen for you. He had no incentive to become someone unique. He played the role of fat boy half out of convenience, half out of fear. He feared anonymity. He feared kids forgetting his name. He preferred the spotlight of ridicule to the chilly dignity of neglect.
Performing for others depleted him, though, and during that extra half hour on the bus, when we were alone, he would fiddle quietly with a Game Boy to relax. Sometimes he let me play. My mother put strict limits on TV in our house—she hated the way women were portrayed on TV, in ads, in movies, and I was granted no more than thirty minutes daily. Video games were an unimaginable luxury. I played whenever Dyson offered. Over the course of the school year we developed a competitive alliance, passing the Game Boy back and forth to complete difficult levels in Zelda and Mario. Dyson raced easily through the levels but had trouble with bosses, whereas I hated the tedium of completing a level and often died from risky decisions made out of boredom. Yet I never needed more than two tries to conquer a boss.