The Atmospherians

by Alex McElroy

  The highway was congested. Dyson downshifted. “What’s that about?”

  “You know Randy,” I said.

  “That’s why I’m asking.” It sounded like an accusation. Though I wasn’t sure against whom. He cranked the wheel to the right. We’d reached our exit.

  * * *

  The cashier at the theater sat behind two inches of bulletproof glass. She removed her mouth from the straw of a bucket-sized soda and spoke into a microphone. “Will your group need special assistance?” she asked, then sniffed dramatically, smelling us. Hygiene was no longer an important aspect of Atmospherian living. I’d let my own legs get mossy and dark.

  The men sat cross-legged at the foot of an escalator. They wore their tracksuits.

  “They’re more than capable,” Dyson said.

  “We like to avoid preventable incidents.”

  “They’re just men,” I added, as if this cleared anything up. “Just regular men.”

  She slid our tickets through a slit in the glass.

  We joined the men at the escalator. Dyson said, “You’re here to work. You might laugh a little, you might get excited, might cheer, but our goal is analysis. The movie we’ve chosen is Just Us starring Mark Wahlberg and Jeremy Renner as two cops driven by vengeance.”

  “I knew it!” Randy shouted.

  “Go, Cornhuskers!”

  Others muttered mild oomphs of excitement.

  “This isn’t a pleasure cruise,” Dyson said. “You will not watch this film. You will use the cognitive thinking skills Sasha and I have taught you to critique the ethical, ideological, and aesthetic failures of the movie.”

  The men blinked at Dyson.

  “What he means by ethical, ideological, and aesthetic,” said Lawrence Footbridge, “is what are the good and bad qualities of the film.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” said Dyson.

  Lawrence winked at him. “Guys like us need to water it down.”

  Dyson sighed, clapped once. “Here are your tickets,” he said. “And Sasha will give you the notepads.”

  In my haste to pack snacks, I’d forgotten the notepads. I troubled the cashier for paper. The closest things they carried were coloring books. “I’ll need fourteen of them, please.”

  She said, “Coloring books are only available in our birthday packages.”

  Peter agreed to say that he was turning thirty-three today. We paid an extra hundred dollars for the privilege of coloring books, child-sized popcorns, party hats, and sixty minutes of access to a small green room between the bathrooms.

  The vast purple-walled lobby was dense with employees’ boredom. They stared at their phones, picked their noses, and flicked. On the walls were murals of grotesquely painted celebrities walking the red carpet. I hadn’t been in the world since the Hertz Shirts fiasco, and, fearing the worst, I shielded my face with my hand, worried some stray man who used to protest outside my apartment might cross through the lobby.

  In the movie, friends were killed, women were threatened with rape, a Mob boss died in a firefight, and, bloodied and limping, Wahlberg and Renner professed their mutual respect for each other—despite their highly emphasized differences in personality. One other person sat in the theater: a man the same age as our men. Dyson invited him to Peter’s birthday party.

  “I don’t know you,” he said.

  “I’m sure you’d fit in,” Dyson said.

  “You seem like some kind of cult,” the man said.

  “That’s exactly what we are,” said Dyson. “Started by me and run by me. Dyson Layne.”

  The man hurried away without looking back.

  I slowed from the head of the line to the middle until Peter and I walked next to each other. I pressed my elbow into his. A few days had passed since we’d last had sex, and I imagined dragging him into the bathroom for something quick. “Happy Birthday,” I said. “Wanna bail on your party?”

  Peter shifted his elbow away from mine. Without looking at me, he said, “I don’t think you like me.”

  “I like you so much,” I said.

  “You like having sex with me.”

  “Because that’s what we have,” I said. “That’s who we are.”

  Peter paused at the top of the ramp and turned toward me. He flashed what was, perhaps, the most condescending smile I had ever received in my life, far worse than anything from Cassandra or Sy Cunningham or any number of elite influencers. The smile reopened something scabbed over inside me. I had never felt so alone.

  Peter continued into the lobby by himself. Randy shouldered up behind me. “Yikes,” he said. “Ever heard of the Bechdel test? Wahlberg could learn a lot from us. You’d fix that man in a day. You’re the real deal. A pro. You’re going places.” He launched his hands into the air as if they were a rocket blasting off. “Straight to the top.”

  “Are you implying something?” I asked.

  “Always so tense,” he said. “Mellow out. We’re here to have fun.”

  In the green room, we wore pointy party hats and sang “Happy Birthday” to Peter. Hand dryers and flushes thundered through the walls. The employees delivered a round blue cake, flat as a dish. It tasted of chilled feet.

  The men read from their coloring books:

  Explicit violence

  Gratuitous cussing

  Simplistic revenge narrative

  Reductive female characters

  Whore/Madonna dichotomy

  Men’s worth determined by possessions

  Men’s worth determined by pain

  Violence as the sole means of communication and bonding

  Dyson nodded at me with knowing pride. I couldn’t help but nod back. I wanted to pat every man on the head, to express admiration, disbelief—condescension. Peter sat at the far end of the table. Blue frosting smudged his lips. He played the role of the birthday boy with equal parts cheer and embarrassment and self-absorption. The room seemed to levitate in collective joy. The men were softening—and I was softening, against my best intentions. For two months, I’d worked to prevent myself from seeing these men. I’d had no interest in sitting with their pain. After all, they showed no interest in sitting with mine. But weeks of seeing them weep and beg before Dyson had eroded the cement barrier I built up between us. Randy was not the only man who now seemed pitiable and explicable to me. They all were. And, for the first time since I’d arrived, the men seemed happy, and their happiness made me happy and happy for them, because they finally weren’t wrenching with pain or anger. They were the most human they’d been. Perhaps they had been this way the entire time, only I was just now beginning to see it. Instead of eleven men sitting before me, I saw the children they had been, the innocence at their cores, and I hated seeing this part of them, because if I could see it in them then I could have seen it in anyone, including in Blake, in Cassandra, in Lucas Devry. Seeing this side of the men was like wiping the steam off a fogged bathroom mirror. For a second, there would be perfect clarity, only for the steam to immediately return. I could have continued palming the steam away from the glass. I could have allowed myself this empathy, this softness, but it scared me. It is always easier—safer—to look away.

  * * *

  We walked across the parking lot still wearing our party hats, scrapes of frosting stuck under our fingernails, laughing at a joke that Gerry had cracked. Dyson, at the front of the group, held up his right arm when he saw the bus. The men clambered into one another. Three of the bus’s tires were slashed. Every window was shattered. Dicks of varying sizes were spray-painted across both sides.

  “Hooligans,” said Lawrence Footbridge. “Rats with too much time on their dirty hands.”

  “They can’t do this to us,” said Gerry.

  I doubt the broken windows or tires or dicks upset Dyson. This was, after all, the kind of attention he’d been waiting for: any attention. What upset him, I suspect, was that over where the men had stenciled The Atmospherians someone had painted Fuck Sasha.

  The bus w
as parked at the outer edge of the lot, dragged across a half-dozen spaces, with no cars anywhere near. Whoever did this had long ago driven away. Dyson stood quietly as the other men threatened and griped. His fists were clenched. He breathed shallowly, dramatically.

  “It’s just a few tires,” I said to him. “We’ll drive back slowly.”

  “This happens every time,” he muttered.

  I knew immediately what he meant but asked him nonetheless.

  “It happens every time,” he said again.

  “Not in our house,” said Hughie. “This doesn’t happen in our house.”

  “Shut up, Hughie!” I said. To Dyson: “Let’s just get out of here.”

  “It happens every time,” he whispered. He had decided something, and nothing I said would change that. He stepped out farther in front of the men and gestured toward the bus. “It appears there has been a misunderstanding.”

  “We understand perfectly what happened,” Randy said. “We’re under attack.”

  “This is a test,” said Dyson. “A test of all the progress you men have made over the last two months. Yes, we have been attacked and ridiculed by cowards who won’t show their faces. That is clear. But our response should not be as cowardly and destructive as their actions were toward us. Remember: The sun doesn’t stop shining when the soil is bad. The sun shines no matter how unlikely something will grow.”

  “Touchdown!”

  “That’s why we will spend the rest of the afternoon recruiting outside the movie theater. Clearly, the people who caused this damage are hurting and ignorant. They don’t know how wrong they are about us. And the only way to prevent similar events from occurring in the future is to educate those who would seek to do us harm.”

  I was just as confused as the men were. We had never discussed recruiting, had never come close to practicing. The men had no idea where to begin.

  “It’s simple,” Dyson told them. “Walk up to a man who it appears might benefit from our operation and tell him this: ‘Hi, I’m… your name… and I’m a member of The Atmosphere, a transformative community for men founded and led by Dyson Layne. Dyson, a former actor and current visionary, has created a foolproof system for helping men achieve the lives they deserve.’ The rest is simple. Just tell them how I’ve helped you change your life. Any questions?”

  Gerry raised his hand. “Should we mention Sasha?”

  Dyson turned toward me, addressing everyone. “Should we mention you, Sasha?”

  I flashed the most fuck off smile I could muster. “This is Dyson’s project,” I told the men. “He deserves all recognition.”

  “There you have it,” said Dyson. “Let’s get working.” He clapped twice to send them on.

  As I watched the men walk away, a heaviness spread through my stomach. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to participate, and I told Dyson as much.

  “I didn’t expect you to,” he said.

  “No one’s ready for this.”

  “There’s only one way to be ready.”

  “I would much rather have everyone think this was yours. Do you know how painful it is to step outside and see the same anger I had to face outside my apartment?”

  “That’s why I’m trying to clear your name.”

  “Do you know how painful it is when you ignore everything I’m telling you? It’s not my fault I’m here, getting credit. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it. But you act like I’ve stolen something from you.”

  “You did steal something from me,” he said. “You stole my story to start ABANDON. Or did you think I never watched your videos?”

  I chewed my cheek, stalling, ashamed. Dyson placed the keys in my hand and jogged to the men. On the bus, I wiped glass shards from one of the three-seaters near the back and lay down, hoping to nap.

  * * *

  My eyes couldn’t have been closed for ten minutes when I heard Dyson screaming, “Start the bus! Start the fucking bus!” Outside, the men were racing in my direction, their baggy track pants sinking past their hips as they ran. I was groggy and slow, and Dyson was on the bus, demanding the keys from me, before I stepped out of my seat.

  “What’s happening?” I asked

  “Man horde,” said Randy. Gerry, Dr. Mapplethorpe, Hughie, William, Mack, and Lawrence followed him onto the bus.

  Dyson started the engine. He shut the bus door.

  “What about the others?” I asked.

  “They’re up there,” said Dr. Mapplethorpe. He pointed to the roof of the movie theater, which was under construction. Our men joined the hired construction crew; they were tossing scraps of building material into a chute feeding into a dumpster.

  Dyson shifted into drive.

  Our men quit tossing trash in the chute.

  “They’ll snap out of it, Dyson. We should go grab them.”

  The bus lurched forward.

  “Turn around!” I shouted. I ran up to the front. “I’ll talk to them. We can talk to them. Sometimes they snap out of it.”

  “They don’t anymore,” he said.

  The bus continued driving. The men and I congregated on the left side of the bus, on separate three-seaters, kneeling in the bite of broken glass, eyes fixed on the roof of the theater, where Peter, Benjamin, Kevin, and David stepped to the edge.

  Peter went first.

  thirty

  A headline would appear the following day: Man Horde Sufferers Die After Leaping from the Roof of Movie Theater. There was a photo—but I didn’t look. All four were classified as John Does.

  thirty-one

  “No one could’ve known that would happen,” said Dyson. We were sitting side by side in the cabin. It was the first thing either of us had said to the other since leaving the bus.

  “I’ve been telling you this would happen since we got here,” I said.

  “I took every precaution.”

  “I told you not to recruit at the mall. We should’ve just driven back.”

  “Most of the men hording these days are recidivists. I made sure none of the men had horded before. I asked them all to their faces.”

  I didn’t feel guilty for hiding Peter’s secret. I was angry at Dyson, instead, for making the men return to the theater. This wouldn’t have happened if he had driven us back to the camp. “How are you not grieving?” I asked. “Aren’t these men your men?”

  “One of them must have been lying to me.”

  “It’s not about lying, Dyson. It’s about your reckless behavior and your obsessive drive for attention.”

  “We’re doing this to help other people,” he said.

  “You got four people killed today.”

  “Because one of them—at least one of them, probably more—was lying to me. I told you from the beginning that cults were founded on honesty.”

  “Just say it, Dyson: I got four people killed today.”

  “If I say it then you have to say it.”

  “I got four people killed today,” I said. It was easy for me to say. I didn’t believe it.

  “Not that,” he said.

  “Then what?”

  “Use your superpower, Sasha. Decode what I’m trying to tell you, since I’ve never once said what I actually mean.”

  “I’m not gonna say it.”

  “I’ll go first,” he said. “I killed four men today.”

  “I have no reason to say it,” I said.

  “I killed four men today. Your turn.”

  “Dyson.”

  “Your turn.”

  I couldn’t say it because I believed it. Despite my resentment, despite my righteousness, despite insisting on my innocence, I had believed it for months.

  “You can’t move forward if you hide from your past.”

  “Fuck your meaningless mantras,” I said.

  “I killed four men today,” he said.

  “You’re trying to hurt me.”

  “What about you? What have you done?”

  I needed to say it because I believed. “P
lease don’t make me,” I said.

  “You can’t move forward if you hide from your past.”

  “I did it,” I said. “I killed Lucas Devry.”

  thirty-two

  ROGER HANDSWERTH ARRANGED for a car to pick me up.

  “Don’t you need an address?” I asked.

  “We already know where you are.”

  Dyson begged me to stay. “What does DAM even make?” he asked. “Who are they?”

  “They’re people who’d never leave anyone for dead,” I said. Though I couldn’t be sure. I knew so little about DAM, only that Cassandra thought I should work with them and that Roger believed he needed me, that he planned to double my rates.

  I spent my final night fretting on Peter’s old cot, sleepless with grief and guilt. The men lined up to wish me good-bye in the morning. We hugged chastely, one by one down the row, as a black town car idled behind me in the grass. Dyson didn’t show. I doubted I’d see him again. But he texted me on the drive: a fusillade of remorse. I deleted every text.

  * * *

  At the San Francisco airport, a bull-chested man in a pinstriped suit held a tablet with MARCUS blinking onscreen. “That’s me,” I said.

  “Place your hand on the screen,” he said. The tablet scanned my fingerprints, glowing red and heating before flashing green in approval. A TSA agent walked us to a rooftop helipad. The man in the suit handed me earmuffs. He wished me good luck.

  The ease with which Roger Handswerth conducted my travel made me feel like a dignitary. I’d never known anyone capable of wielding such power—Claire Lance had come closest, but her influence seemed so pedestrian compared to Roger’s. Flying over lush Douglas firs en route to DAM’s headquarters made me ache for the pines at The Atmosphere, for Peter. Dyson popped into my head. I flung him away.

  A glass building sprawled, spiderlike, at the foot of a mountain. Eight annexes snaked out from a bulbous Epcot-style globe at the center. The chopper landed at the tip of one of the spider legs. The helipad was painted as a silver shield: the DAM insignia. The blades halted. Sound returned to my ears. I listened for glass cracking, braced myself to plummet through the ceiling. The pilot slid open the door. The air smelled like a lumberyard—like pine—and a single hawk circled overhead in a white sky. Below me, DAM employees sat at long oak tables typing on laptops. I felt omniscient hovering over them. A few of them waved hello, and I flinched in embarrassment for assuming they couldn’t see me.