by Alex McElroy
One day, I mentioned a movie I wanted to see—an ad for it had come on during my allotted TV-viewing time the previous night—and Dyson invited me over to watch it. “You’re lying,” I said. The movie was still in theaters. He assured me his father always got movies before they were out. “And we’re allowed to watch it all the way through?”
“Yeah,” he said slowly, baffled by the question, and I was too embarrassed to bring up the movie policy at my house: My mother serialized them using an egg timer. She cut off watching even if only a few minutes remained.
At Dyson’s stop, I followed him to the door.
The driver grabbed my backpack. He snapped twice, opened his palm. “Gimme your permission slip.”
“You never ask for permission slips,” Dyson said.
“Change in policy,” he grumbled.
“This is discrimination,” Dyson said. “You hate us. You hate children.”
“You have ten seconds to find it,” said the driver.
I made a show of fishing through my backpack.
“It’s with the office,” said Dyson.
“Can’t let you go without a note.”
“Radio the office,” said Dyson.
“Yeah,” I said. “Call the office.”
“Don’t think I won’t drive you back to school.”
“Go ahead.” Dyson sat down on the nearest seat. “We have time.”
I sat across from him. “All the time in the world.”
The driver glanced at his watch. “Don’t do anything stupid.” He shooed us off the bus.
Dyson’s driveway was winding and pocked. We walked through the scent of something rotting—a fox, said Dyson—and crunched over branches that had fallen to the ground. On the walk, we celebrated our victory over the driver, repeating Don’t do anything stupid buffoonishly. The driveway opened up on a boxy white house with red shutters that was plugged at the foot of a hill. It reminded me of an ambulance without wheels. The unmown grass had gone to seed. Rain started tapping the leaves.
At the door, Dyson shushed me. Inside, patchouli and dust sharpened the air. Navy-blue curtains blanketed the windows. He pointed at my shoes, took his off. I kept waiting for a mother or father to appear and explain the rules of the house, for Dyson to use me as an excuse to negotiate for new rules. But no parents appeared. And Dyson hadn’t spoken since we entered. Perhaps silence was the only rule of his house.
In the kitchen, a single window above the sink cast a box of gray light onto the floor. Chanting sounded from the darkened living room beside it. “Daddy’s sleeping,” said the room.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Dyson?” said the room.
“It’s me, Mommy,” he said.
“Is someone with you?”
He sighed. “A friend.”
“What friend? Let me—you need to tell me when you—” His mother entered the kitchen wearing a mossy kimono that trailed her for several feet. She was a tall, snowy woman, pale and rounded, with gently pitted marks on her face. Her lips were thin, large eyes pinched close together, and she kept her dirty-blond hair in a single braid flung in front of her chest. She cupped a cold compress against her forehead. “I am in no state for a guest,” she said. “My exams are taking everything out of me.” She was an aspiring doula, and for as long as I would know her, she was always training for exams, though I don’t think she ever applied for certification.
I introduced myself.
“You must be Dyson’s girlfriend.”
He groaned. I looked at my feet.
“What have I told you, Dyson, about imbibing society’s notions? You are never too young for love. Society imposes so many misguided ideas about the right time to love. I fell in love when I was seven years old. Much younger than you. And it was the finest love of my life.” She squatted to our height. “But please don’t tell your daddy. He’s sensitive. It would hurt him too much to know I’ve loved other men.”
Dyson’s mother had the personality of a plasma globe: the crooks of light inside her awoke to the slightest human interaction. She ran an arm across my shoulders. Her touch was as light as a scarf. “I am a spiritually curious woman,” she said without prompting. “I need to be. It is the only thing keeping me buoyant. I mean it. I’ve been through a lot. Dyson will tell you. Tell her, Dy. That’s why I’m like this. That’s why I’m so…” She paused for a breath. “Kooky.”
“I’m gonna make chicken nuggets,” Dyson said to me.
“Carrots, honey. Your humors are off.” Your humors are off meant he was thicker than his father liked.
“The carrots are droopy,” he said.
“Because you never eat them.”
“Sasha wants chicken nuggets.”
“Sasha is welcome to as many as she likes.” She loaded the nuggets into the microwave. Dyson bit into a carrot as limp as a deflated balloon, eyeing the nuggets as they heated and spun, spun and heated.
“Dyson’s never had a neighbor his age,” said his mother. “Do you have siblings?”
I shook my head.
“Your parents made a wise decision. Two children, three. They’ll only fight. Worse. They’ll gang up on their parents. That’s how I was with my sister. A smear campaign against our parents. When Dyson’s daddy and I were deciding, I thought: It’s hard enough raising one child. Try raising two kids who conspire against you. I commend your parents.”
“They’re divorced,” I said. It seemed like it needed saying.
“Ohhhh. No. No. No,” she said. “That shatters my heart. There’s already too little love in the world. People say it’s so difficult, preserving a marriage. But what’s the alternative? Abandoning love? Accepting that love doesn’t deserve your effort? Dyson: Daddy and I could’ve gotten a divorce, couldn’t we have, sweetie? After the thing. But what would that have solved? Nothing. There were hard times, but we got through them because we—”
Dyson lunged an arm toward the microwave, trying to open the door before the timer went off. He was too late: a first chime, a second, a third, then an elongated chime louder than the others. He and his mother went silent; they angled their ears to the ceiling. Footsteps pummeled through the upstairs floor. Dyson’s head drooped in defeat.
“I’ll talk to him,” said his mother. But her voice tremored.
Footsteps descended the stairs and crossed the dining room. None of us let out a breath. I knew enough to fear whatever they feared.
Dyson’s father lurched into the kitchen. He was a short, dense man, built like a tombstone. He wore a loose Bugs Bunny T-shirt with holes under the arms and blue basketball shorts. His clean-shaven face was reflectively smooth. He peered through the microwave window. “You’re not eating this crap, are you?” he asked Dyson.
Dyson shook his head.
“We’ve talked about this. They’re softeners. What do softeners do?”
“They’re for my friend,” he said.
“This is Sasha,” said Dyson’s mother. “Our new neighbor.”
His father’s eyes grasped the cords in my throat. He was the type of man who felt most powerful when feared. So I feared him, out of courtesy—then actual fear.
“What do softeners do?” he asked Dyson again.
“Softeners make you stupid and fat.”
He slapped the back of Dyson’s head, then tossed the nuggets into the trash.
Dyson skated glances around the edges of his father, unable to look at him directly but unable to look anywhere else. I couldn’t look away, either. He was gravity incarnate in this house. His wife pawed his shoulder, asked if he wanted something to drink.
“What I want is two more hours of sleep. But looks like I’m working out early.” He stepped into the basement and slammed the door so hard a magnet fell off the fridge.
Dyson’s mother’s smile came out as a grimace. “You’ll need to make it up to him later.”
I said, “Can we watch that movie?”
“Not while Daddy’s exercising,” sai
d his mother.
“The TV is downstairs,” said Dyson. “With the gym.”
“I might need to go home,” I said.
Dyson’s mother peered out the window. “Is your mother picking you up? Because you can’t possibly walk in this rain. Never. My god. It would be irresponsible of me as a parent—no, a community member—to let you out in this weather. You can’t underestimate rain. Even showers like this. Showers like this, you think it’s nothing and boom you’re facedown in the dirt. Is that what you want? That’s not what you want. I’ve seen people—men far stronger and older than you, athletes in their prime—taken down by rain much lighter than this.”
I asked her a question with my eyes: Could you drive me?
She shifted the compress to the other side of her forehead. “Oh, dear. I am not a driver. Not in my condition. In my condition, Dyson will tell you, I shouldn’t have access to a TV remote. But there’s plenty to do while you wait.”
We joined her in the living room to listen to some of her favorite chants. She stretched across the entire couch. Dyson and I made room on the floor amid an army of plastic Eastern God statues. His mother practiced a range of new-age healing methods, she told me, subscribing to a kind of de gustibus Eastern philosophy that combined but never committed to yoga, meditation, acupuncture, Reiki, chanting, and tea. In time, I would know people like her well, scattered, good-faith people desperate for fixes, the people most often hurt by the people they loved.
Dyson’s father was a small-time crook—shoplifting, passing bad checks, selling bootleg CDs and movies. He had broken a man’s jaw in a bar fight when Dyson was five. He spent seventeen months in prison. The charges funneled him into a life of part-time employment and night work. He’d never been a warm person; time away made him remote. In the aftermath of his sentence, Dyson’s mother treated her husband with caution verging on terror. She did all she could to ensure his family never disturbed him. This made it impossible to feel at home in their house—especially for Dyson, who ached for his father’s love but could never ask for it, out of concern it might shatter the fragile stability of the home.
Dyson’s father rumbled out of the basement. His gray shirt was oceanic with sweat, drip-drip-dripping on the linoleum floor. He filled an enormous stein with tap water and, gripping the glass instead of the handle, emptied it all in one terrible gulp before returning upstairs.
Dyson waited for me at the door to the basement. I was nervous to go in after his father, fearing what might be downstairs, but he tilted his head impatiently toward the door. His mother shooed me away. The basement stank of mildew and rust. Its concrete floor chilled me through my socks, though the air was warm from his father’s exertion. Workout equipment cluttered the room: a bench press, barbells, round metal clips for tightening weights to the bar. Flimsy mirrors of various heights covered the walls, each one seemingly tilted at a unique angle. A torn futon hunched in front of a TV. Towers of VHS tapes stood on either side of the screen. They were marked with drags of masking tape. At my house, tapes had titles like Sasha Preschool Grad and Sasha 6 b-day. Here I saw titles only from popular movies.
We sat inches away from the screen. Dyson kept the sound a couple clicks above mute. I’d never watched a bootleg movie before and had trouble adjusting to the blurry picture and the heads of the viewers and their coughing and chewing. The basement door opened and his father barreled back down the steps. Dyson handed me a pair of headphones, then capped a second pair over his ears and plugged them in using a splitter. I couldn’t concentrate on the movie through the grunts of his father counting as he did crunches. At one hundred, he collapsed with a lionish growl, then stomped back up the steps. I removed my headphones and told Dyson I needed to leave. “See you tomorrow,” he said. He waved over his shoulder as I ascended the steps.
Shamanic drumming sounded from the living room. I tiptoed to the front door, gathered my things, and ran home through the woods that separated our houses. I didn’t expect to return.
But the next day, when Dyson asked if I wanted to finish the movie, I followed him off the bus, as if the decision had already been made for me. Soon I was obsessed with the illicit strangeness of his bootleg movies. Watching them meant watching two different performances. There was the movie—always at a remove no matter how deeply the cameraman zoomed to the screen. The camera never captured the entire screen, either, and these missing slivers held my attention more than the movie itself, corners of disappeared film where anything might have happened. The second performance included the heads of the audience members, the cameraman’s coughing, the sound of cellophane wrappers peeled off boxes of candy. During one movie, ushers escorted the cameraman out for recording, and every movie we watched after that was electric with tension.
My mother would never have approved of my watching movies at Dyson’s. So I never told her I went to his house. One afternoon, when she called home I wasn’t around to answer. Her punishment was severe. She confined me to our house for the summer, where I read the humidity-sticky fashion magazines she stacked under her bed. I assumed my friendship with Dyson had ended. Then one morning there was a knock on my door. By the time I opened it, Dyson was scampering toward the woods. On the doormat sat a small red box, a purple bow blossoming on its top. Inside: a movie that had opened that week.
five
DYSON PARKED IN front of a bare brown barn in the center of a clearing. Yellow-crisp grass widened out to a crown of pine trees. Their tips knifed into a stony sky. In front of the barn were two stubby sheds so lacquered and bright they reflected the sun like shields. The front of a school bus nosed out from behind the barn. A gurgling generator unloaded a warped column of smoke that rose like a worm inching into the sky. Johnsonburg—the closest town, barely a blink on the side of the road—was twenty minutes away by car. Standing in the center of the clearing, I felt the grip of isolation. Like a mouse in a fist.
The property was some of the cheapest in the state: fifteen acres scraped across the northern rim of the Pine Barrens, a dense expanse of forest home to a mythical devil, cranberry bogs, and sulfurous, inhospitable soil. The Forest Service had recently set fire to miles of trees to prevent future fires, and the air had a charred, ashy thickness that sludged my throat and made my lips flaky. The clearing had an impatient quality, like it had been waiting too long for something to exist here. I could almost hear it tapping its feet.
“My dad’s parents wanted to start a summer camp here,” Dyson said. He dragged a tube of Chap Stick over his lips, then tossed it to me.
“Not a camp for children, I hope.”
“They could never make up their minds.” His father had built the barn over one humiliatingly hot summer, and the man had always resented his parents for never making use of the property. “He used to hide bootlegs out here. CDs and movies. Unload them at local flea markets far from home.” Dyson seemed very proud of this fact.
I drifted away from the car and took a few selfies with the pines at my back, intending to post them so Cassandra might see. Nature retreat, I would comment, and thank a large cosmetics company to make her think I’d landed a sponsorship. My face was greasy and pale, the lighting was dull, and after months avoiding myself, I had trouble finding a flattering angle.
“Good luck posting those photos,” said Dyson.
“I’m not planning to post them,” I said.
“The cell service is pitiful here. That’s the best part of this place: complete isolation.”
“I have one bar.” It dropped to No Signal as soon as I spoke.
“When the men get here we’re destroying their phones. To cut back on distractions. Might be a good idea for you to destroy yours,” he said. “In the interest of fairness.”
“What about safety?”
“Think of this as a detox.”
“My safety. I don’t want to be alone here without a phone.”
He inhaled deeply, sucking up every molecule of air in the clearing. “The perfect cure for all those t
rolls and harassers.”
I reminded him that I wasn’t sick. I hadn’t come here to detox—but to make Blake and Cassandra jealous. “Just because you’re not sick,” Dyson said, “doesn’t mean you couldn’t be healthier.” He smirked like he’d said something profound, then went to the barn to unload supplies. I took photos of The Atmosphere: its rugged ugliness, the gaudy sheds, the paint-chipped barn, the grass thirsty for water, the generator, sparrows looping through the sky. My service flashed in and out, never long enough to post anything. But it gave me hope there was signal somewhere on the property.
Inside the barn, lightbulbs dangled from frayed cords attached to the ceiling. Paint scent fattened the air. Plywood boards and power tools huddled in a corner—supplies to build the next round of sheds. Close to the door was a plastic picnic table “big enough to fit thirty men!” Dyson shouted. He stood on the kitchen and pantry side of the barn—behind a freshly painted black metal fence that split the room down the center. I stepped through the door in the fence. Dyson was stocking the shelves with health foods: almonds, alternative milks, seaweed sheets, gluten-free pastas, dried beans, bran flakes, and canned vegetables.
“Not much food for twelve men,” I said.
“That’s what sets us apart from all those other retreats for men, those corporate scams,” he said. “We start at the stomach. If we want to change men, we need to change how they eat. Teaching boys to eat ‘like men’ teaches them to find self-worth in consumption. They’re conditioned to consume excessively, to ignore boundaries, to pig out, to scarf down. To take without considering cost for themselves and for others. And what happens next?” He tapped his forehead. “Consumption of resources, of money, of time, and of land. Not anymore.”