The Atmospherians

by Alex McElroy

  “Little jolts of tension whenever we spoke. I didn’t expect to resolve it. For all I knew, that was how family worked. You’re always mad at each other, scared of each other. I figured our lives were on track.”

  Then his daughter got sick. Peter lay on the floor clutching his stomach. Gerry and Dyson argued in the corner of the square. All over town children were getting the flu. For weeks, Susan insisted they ought to get their daughter a flu shot. Randy wouldn’t allow it. Everyone who got the shot became a little bit sick. Even a little bit sick was too sick for his girl.

  His parents blamed doctors for his brother’s death—for failing to undo the inevitable—and he carried their paranoia and blame inside him. Her fever climbed to 101. He refused to bring his daughter to the ER. Instead, he put her to bed with cough syrup and an aspirin, hoping sleep would lower her fever, make her tummy less grumpy. In the morning, Bridgett lay stiffly in bed with her eyes fixed on the ceiling. They rushed her to the hospital. The virus resisted antibiotics. The doctors were sorry. So sorry. She was less than a month into her eleventh year.

  “A smart friend of mine, this philosophy guy who quit on college to work construction, used to tell me God is a novelist. Nothing is too convenient for God. You think: I couldn’t possibly lose my daughter at the same age as my brother. But God—and I don’t mean God god, because fuck him, I mean whatever’s shaping this world—only has so many notions.”

  Randy grieved. Susan grieved and resented. They spoke to each other in barbs, thirsty to hurt. She filed for divorce. “Divorce meant the end of everything: job, barbecues, the conversations in supermarkets, fishing trips, love from her parents. All of it gone. And why? Because I wanted to protect my daughter from quacks.”

  Dyson shaped his hand into a pistol. He paced in front of Gerry-as-Susan waving his handgun-hand. He pointed it at Gerry-as-Susan—head, then stomach, then heart.

  “I wanted her to love me again—that’s it. Like she’d loved me when we met, when I was a mountain of trouble and need. I thought she’d love me again if I was in trouble.”

  Dyson-as-Randy pressed his fingertip-barrel to his left forearm. They fired. Dyson dived forward in pain.

  The men on the benches applauded and hollered. Dyson jumped to a stand. He locked arms with Gerry and Peter. They bowed. Fled the stage. Randy carried his chair to the center but didn’t sit down.

  His history didn’t surprise me—I assumed each man harbored some violent or disturbing act in his past—but knowing what led him to Dyson, then here, and knowing he didn’t know that I knew, made Randy malleable and small in my mind, like a cloud of pillow filling, or mud. The rain had calmed down by this point, and the performance seemed to have ended—but Peter and Gerry joined the other men on the benches. Randy circled the chair. He eyed the empty seat, cracking his knuckles, his face tight with nerves. The energy in the barn sharpened. He clapped his cheeks to psych himself up.

  Dyson stepped into the center of the square wearing a loose cotton dress patterned with suns and Mary Jane shoes. A wig clung to his head—blond—the sides pulled into pigtails. His outfit was one giant lollipop short of a joke. But no one giggled or snickered. They leaned over their laps, as captivated and haunted as I was. Dyson sat on the chair. Randy got on his knees.

  I turned away from the peephole. There was no reason to punish Randy with some deranged public sex act. How stupidly cruel. No wonder Peter couldn’t have sex with me. I wanted to drag open the door and end this before it happened. But I was curious, too, as curious as I was disgusted—and I returned my eye to the hole in the wall, prepared for the worst.

  Randy clasped his hands. He pleaded, “Bridgett, my love, my baby girl, my only child: I can’t begin to tell you how much I love you and miss you and how sorry I am that I lost you.” He listed everything he loved about Bridgett—the buttery scent of her hair, how she said the word happy (like hippy), her terror of cats, her dream of one day riding a horse (“such a simple, obtainable dream and I kept putting it off, kept telling you we’d do it when you were older, assuming you’d be older”)—while interrupting the praise with sticky pleas for forgiveness.

  “None of this was your fault,” he said. “I’m the reason you’re not here anymore. I’m the reason you and me and your mother are no longer together. I’ll never forgive myself for losing you so early in life. Every day I wish I could tell you how much I love you and miss you.”

  His devastation hosed through the hole in the barn. Drenched in his remorse, I regretted the cruelty I’d shown him, then regretted that regret, because Randy should never have acted with such callous stupidity—over a flu shot! I regretted only that his daughter had died so young, that his wife had suffered such an indelible grief. I wished Randy did not have this story to tell. As he spoke, my mind drifted past his contrition, and I imagined his face slumbering off to expose new faces beneath: Blake’s face, Lucas Devry’s. When Randy said, “Please forgive me for all I have done,” I saw Blake speaking these words. I heard Lucas Devry saying, I’m sorry, so sorry; I never should’ve acted so reprehensibly.

  Randy bowed forward. He tapped his forehead on the floor. He was himself again: “Please. Please. Please. Please. Please.”

  Dyson leaned so close his lips hovered above Randy’s head. I expected a kiss, or for him to lift Randy’s hands to his heart, grant him the release he desired. Dyson shook his head, though, as if Randy were meat beginning to spoil. He stood.

  The men rose up from the benches. Absolution has to be earned, they chanted in unison. Absolution has to be earned. Absolution has to be earned.

  Dyson exited the stage. The men whistled. Randy dissolved into the fetal position.

  * * *

  I didn’t plan on returning to the barn. Something about my presence felt voyeuristic and intrusive. Dyson didn’t invite me for a reason. On a rational level, I understood the men deserved to work through their traumas under controlled and protective conditions. They deserved to share unwatched. However, the next evening, after Dyson left for the barn, I became increasingly frantic and curious about which man would tell his story that night. “Perhaps it’s even more irrational,” I said to Barney, “for me to remain in the cabin. Who knows what these men have done? Why privilege their safety over mine? Shouldn’t I be made aware of their transgressions?”

  Barney licked his left paw in agreement.

  * * *

  At the barn, Dyson played Gerry:

  Gerry held down a stable career as head of IT for an elementary school on the outskirts of Bakersfield. “Over nearly three decades,” he said, “I saw centuries’ worth of innovations. From fixing scriggly intercoms and laserdisc players to teaching the teachers—you heard that right—to scan worksheets using their phones.” The job made him feel important and necessary. He loved marching through hallways knowing someone waited on him, loved the teachers’ pleading tones, and, more than anything else, he loved solving problems for students. The children cheered whenever he came into class. He remembered their names—the Michaels and Jorges and Jennys and Vanessas and Jadens—and their favorite subjects, the sports they played, their dreams of becoming firefighters or doctors or superheroes or surfers. He gave the children dollars out of his wallet when they needed money for lunch. Not only his favorites. Gerry—a father of none who’d wanted kids since he was a kid—considered himself a surrogate father to these children, an extra father, the one who cared for them when their true parents could not.

  At the start of his twenty-ninth year, the district hired a new principal. “Some young skank out of a coastal poindexter college” brought on to lead The 2024 Initiative—a euphemism for “changing everything in the school that already worked.” She arrived ready to cut extraneous costs and revitalize its pitiful reputation. She dressed sharply, spoke precisely; her nails were lacquered in the school’s colors (Bakersfield Blue and Burgundy).

  Shortly after her arrival, Gerry was summoned to her office to fix a glitch locking her out of her email. She took h
er lunch break as he worked. “I trust this will be ready by the time I return, she told me. Nobody’d ever been more condescending.” Gerry fixed the problem immediately but hung around skimming her emails. He forwarded himself a thread labeled Technical Options. As part of The 2024 Initiative, the district planned to hire outside contractors to run the IT Department. Gerry would no longer serve as a surrogate father for students who needed him.

  He told none of his colleagues about what he’d learned. Instead, he sent the superintendent an anonymous email claiming he had been verbally harassed by the new principal. He received no response. So he sent feistier emails accusing the principal of further transgressions: theft, sexual misconduct, tardiness, slovenliness, aggressive behavior toward students, toward animals, toward the flag in the courtyard. Over ten days, two dozen emails were sent, all from separate email accounts. All from his home computer.

  On a Saturday morning, as Gerry refreshed his inbox, anxious for a statement announcing the principal’s termination, the Bakersfield PD kicked in his door. The principal—who wanted to avoid a scandal early in her tenure—dropped charges on the condition Gerry never again set foot on school grounds.

  I assumed Dyson would play the role of the principal—the one harmed by Gerry—but he wore burgundy shorts and a blue mesh football jersey, standing in for all Bakersfield students.

  “I let you down,” Gerry said from his knees. “In trying to protect you I put you at risk. I left you all alone at that school with that woman. Can you ever forgive me?”

  Dyson seemed to consider it. Then he stood.

  Absolution has to be earned, chanted the men.

  Beneath the rapturous cheers of the men was the trickle of Gerry weeping into his hands.

  * * *

  The men stood shoulder to shoulder as Hughie Mintz threw a football to Dyson. Clouds barged across a beach-water sky. A midday shower had left the grass dewy, prone to mud. “Throw me a diver,” Dyson would say, and Hughie would place the ball just outside of his reach, forcing him to leap for a difficult catch. A few men caught me watching from the edge of the woods—if Dyson noticed he didn’t let on. Three times in a row the ball sailed through his arms. On the fourth throw, however, he thudded against the ground with the ball pressed to his chest. He rolled onto his back and waved his muddy arm in the air.

  “Touchdown!” Hughie shouted.

  * * *

  What I saw through the hole in the barn was an entirely different performance from what the men saw from inside. For me, the audience was part of the performance, just as compelling as Dyson and the other actors, as compelling as the man on the chair telling his story. No story is ever a story alone. I learned this watching bootleg movies with Dyson. Stories are never realized through their telling but through the reactions they elicit. As a child, I obsessed over the shrieks and laughter and crying of the theatergoers accidentally caught on camera. And as an adult, watching through the hole in the barn, I obsessed over fists clenched in sympathy, the aggravated yawns when performances flagged, the incantatory Absolution has to be earned as the teller wept before Dyson. Watching the audience, I saw grief and tenderness course through the viewers, and, in this way, a little slug of sympathy slipped into my heart, marking its trail. Had someone been watching me watching the men watching the performance, they would have seen me unconsciously softening. Pity, I would have called it, but it wasn’t pity. It was something far scarier and more destabilizing, something I would never let myself name so long as I needed to feel superior to their pain.

  * * *

  How was Mack March supposed to know the dog was sleeping under the car? He was late for work—he couldn’t be late again. Would his kids rather have a house than a dog? How was he supposed to know his kids were watching him leave from their bedroom windows? How was he supposed to know the kids would return to that morning—if not the sight the sound, the yowling and barks, the crunching—for decades to come?

  * * *

  Benjamin Tire begged his daughter to forgive him for the affair he had with her mother—his mistress—and for calling her psycho when she told him she was his daughter.

  * * *

  Reconciliation taught the men—and me—a valuable lesson: forgiveness could not be obtained through pain or time or public pleas for contrition. It required work—the sort of work I put in every day. Absolution has to be earned. I treated the phrase like a mantra. I whispered it to myself during particularly difficult PIEs sessions or meals, in moments when I craved comfort and validation. I was the model of proper contrition. And if I had not been forgiven for my mistakes, the men had no right to jump me in line.

  What an intoxicatingly cruel way to think, I realize now. There are consequences for treating forgiveness like a rare and finite resource.

  * * *

  William Gremb didn’t even know that word could be seen as offensive. It was just a description. A loving description of skin color. Delivered with admiration and care. How could you bar someone from the ashram over one word? What happened to forgiveness? What happened to meta? What happened to letting go—accepting people where they were?

  * * *

  Dr. Mapplethorpe Lang apologized to Christina Lane, whose mother, Susan Lane, died while driving to work during a hurricane. It was entirely Dr. Mapplethorpe’s decision to keep the office open. All the others in the region had closed for the storm.

  * * *

  “Scalloped potatoes were my father’s favorite,” said Dyson as he lowered the serving tray to the center of the table for Family Dinner. There would be no Emptying Out that evening.

  * * *

  What was she even doing in his office, Lawrence Footbridge still wondered, if she wasn’t attracted to him? Why else would a student take time out of her busy schedule to come see him? Why else would she act so intensely professional other than to conceal her true feelings?

  * * *

  Kevin Sweston’s daughters seemed like alien creatures, too friendly to be human, too abundantly blond. They made him uneasy—the same way their mother made him uneasy—with their tiny fingers and sizable questions. Rather than work to know them better, he hung out in his garage, stayed in the bar until close, assuming their mother could carry the parenting on her own—a burden he imposed on his wife, a burden his daughters never forgot as they grew older.

  * * *

  Even if Dyson didn’t know how to ride a bike—and I was sure that he knew—a grass clearing was no place to learn. But still the men clustered around him, holding the handlebars to steady him, palming both shoulders, Gerry’s hand on the flat of his back, pushing Dyson until he was confident enough to shout, “Let me go!” The men scattered butterfly-like. They cupped their hands over their mouths: I’m so proud of you, Dyson! He pedaled in wobbly circles.

  * * *

  Hughie Mintz didn’t know what he had done wrong. Did his son not like him boxing his ears? Should he never have told the boy’s girlfriends that the boy had wet his bed through seventh grade? And a little bit more into eighth? Maybe he shouldn’t have clapped him awake on Saturday mornings for agility drills—but his boy was too slow. He’d get embarrassed on the court. Maybe he shouldn’t have shouted so furiously at his son’s basketball games. But didn’t he want to feel his father’s love at the games? Maybe he never should’ve told the boy, Love is something you earn from a father, not something you’re given. A joke! Couldn’t the boy take a joke? What he knew for sure is he never should’ve been the one to teach the boy to throw a football. He should’ve known the boy couldn’t throw a spiral. What did he think would happen? Maybe he shouldn’t have shushed him at dinner—or maybe the boy should’ve made that lay-up. A fast break for Christ’s sake! Wide open! Maybe he should’ve let the kid have a fish. A fish never hurt anybody. The fish was the issue. He apologized for the fish. “I’m sorry I never let you get that fish,” Hughie Mintz said from his knees. “Sorrier than you’ll ever know.”

  * * *

  For months I’d wondered what
Dyson hoped to gain from The Atmosphere. I assumed he wanted what he had promised me: power, redemption, and, most important, fame. If we succeeded, his face would appear on every screen in the world. Far more attention than he received as an actor.

  It was an easy equation:

  Change men → Change the world → Get famous

  But he wanted something deeper than fame. He could have brought these men anywhere—finances allowing—yet he dragged them to property owned by his father’s parents, he chose to train them and feed them in a barn built by his father, he ran them through Physical Training echoing what his father demanded of him, he made them perform ridiculous shows of contrition—futile shows of contrition. I was a smart and intuitive person. Dyson and I had been friends for most of my life. It should not have taken me months to figure this out.