The Atmospherians

by Alex McElroy

  “Randy,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so angry.”

  “I should talk to them.” He stood but tumbled back down.

  “Do you want to end up like Barney?”

  “I never should’ve let it get so bad.”

  “We need to escape, Dyson. Tonight.”

  “If we escape they’ll find us eventually.”

  “They’ll kill you if we stay,” I said. I didn’t know how else to convince him to leave.

  “Not just me,” he said. “They’re gonna kill both of us.”

  “That’s why we need to get moving,” I said. “I’ll pack our bags.”

  “I loved them. I really did love them. I do. Still.” He let his head sink to his chest. “They really want me dead?”

  I squeezed next to him on the couch. “That’s the impression I got from Randy.”

  “Then we need to beat them to it,” he said.

  I flinched away. “We can’t possibly kill them,” I said. “We’re not murderers.”

  “No.” He lifted his face so his eyes were level with mine, our noses nearly touching. He knitted his fingers in mine. “We need to kill me.”

  thirty-seven

  “REMEMBER LUCAS DEVRY,” said Dyson.

  “Don’t make me,” I said.

  Dyson and I were digging a grave for Barney behind the cabin. Sweat dripped from our elbows, made mud of our dirt-crusted palms.

  “I mean how people treated him after he died,” said Dyson. “Everyone who hated him made him a martyr. The same thing will happen to me. Our men are sentimental. If they think I’m dead, they’ll forgive me. They’ll saint me. They’re not the type to speak ill of the dead.”

  The plan to fake Dyson’s death assumed the men were still furious at him. I could’ve told him what Randy had told me: he and the others wanted to reconcile. In a perfect world, we might have made such an arrangement with the men. In a perfect world, I would not have needed to exaggerate the extent of their anger. I didn’t lie to Dyson, exactly. I didn’t manipulate him. Simply: I saw past the men’s surface emotions. Randy didn’t want to make peace with Dyson. The sheds were burning. The bus tires were slashed. Barney was dead. They couldn’t hold a civil conversation with the man who’d stolen their money. Dyson had trapped them in the woods. He let Art Flemings arrest Leon and beat him. He left Peter to die. He left Benjamin, Kevin, and David to die. He made a ritual of refusing their pleas for forgiveness. I knew what would happen if Dyson begged them for mercy. Our men may have been sentimental, but they were not the type to forget.

  “As for The Atmosphere,” he said. He placed the shoebox containing Barney into the earth. “I want you to promise me you’ll keep it running.”

  “I’ll take it as far as I can,” I assured him. I couldn’t imagine The Atmosphere lasting more than a week once he left. “We’ll implement routine expressions of deference to our fallen, benevolent leader. L. Ron Hubbard. Joseph Smith. Dyson Layne.”

  “I’ll need a shrine,” he said.

  I laughed. He didn’t.

  “Sure,” I told him. “We’ll make you a shrine—something classy.”

  “It needs to be gaudy,” he said. “Repulsively gaudy.”

  As we worked, we imagined the cheesiest possible shrines: Dyson riding a horse, Dyson riding two horses, Dyson meditating on top of a cloud, Dyson kneeling to spoon-feed bran flakes to a middle-aged man. His death was harder to imagine. That evening, we burned through a dozen candles—Dyson believed they aided his thinking—as we traded ideas for his death.

  “Maybe you get attacked by a mugger,” I said.

  “What mugger?” he said. “In the woods? We’d need too much blood, anyway. What about a car accident? We’ll drive the hatchback off the highway.”

  “You’ll need a body,” I said.

  “Maybe we drive it into the ocean. Maybe my body gets eaten by sharks.” His ideas were less practical than mine. They were more attention-grabbing, riskier.

  He proposed heart failure on the bathroom floor. “I’ve been—as you know. And people have—” He stuck out his tongue, clenched his eyes closed. “In the past from it. Let’s say you find me in the bathroom already dead. The men would believe it.”

  “And your body?”

  “I’ll slow down my breathing. Play dead. Daniel Day-Lewis could do it for hours.”

  I nodded as if seriously considering the idea.

  “I’ve been practicing,” he said. He lay chest down on the floor. His breaths welled up through his back; his nostrils flared. After a few minutes, he jumped to a stand. “Could you tell?”

  “That was amazing,” I lied. If Dyson had to die, it seemed only fair to let him die believing in his undeniable talent. But I worried the men would see through the performance. Despite my anger—over Peter, over the money, over just about everything else at The Atmosphere—I couldn’t shake my guilt-ridden impulse to protect him. The night I found him draped over the toilet, in the dorm bathroom, Dyson had become my responsibility. He had no one else to keep him safe. And I hated myself for already failing him once. “But once the men find your body,” I said, “no matter how good you are at playing dead, they’ll want to bury you.”

  “We’ll build an underground breathing device. A series of tubes or something.” He made a wavelike gesture with his arm. “You’ll send in water and food. A few days later you dig me out, fill up the grave.” He wanted desperately to prove himself as an actor one final time.

  But if the men noticed him breathing? If they dropped him, caused him to shriek in agony? How might they react if the scheme fell apart? Heart failure was too risky, I decided. Our ideas grew progressively worse as the day dragged on. Eventually Dyson—frustrated and blocked, groggy after eating another package of cookies—passed out on the couch.

  I walked where I always walked: in the sliver of service. An afternoon chill lifted the hair on my arms. My phone lit up with messages from Roger and from reporters and, of course, from Cassandra. “You’re the reason I’m here!” I yelled at my phone in a moment of tremendous self-pity. I strangled the phone. I flung it into the water, as if I were starring in a movie, but it wasn’t a movie and I needed my phone and I sprinted into the pond, spurred by regret. The phone hadn’t traveled far. Water bubbled behind the screen. I tossed it back to the shore and kept swimming.

  I had given up swimming after my father moved to Florida. This had begun as a self-imposed punishment—appropriate, I believed—but over time swimming had become something I just didn’t do, like smoking, or painting my nails. But as I paddled deeper into the pond, that day, I was struck by a surreal sensation of being nine years old again, as if only two weeks rather than decades had passed since the incident at the Hensey house. My body refused to acknowledge the passing years. It tried to convince me I was a child again. It hadn’t known this motion—my arms arcing forward, legs slither-kicking—since childhood, and my body had every reason to believe I still was a child, and for brief slices of time I was able to let it convince me of this before my mind interrupted. No! I wasn’t nine, I was twenty-nine, and what would happen to that child couldn’t be changed—Lucas Devry and Blake Dayes and Peter Minston and Cassandra Hanson had already glided through my life like biplanes crop-dusting fields.

  Dyson, too, would soon glide out of my life. We agreed to never communicate after his disappearance. It was safer that way. But I hated to imagine the empty shape of that life, and I redirected my attention back on the problem we’d been facing all day: how Dyson would die. I bobbed in the center of the pond and ducked beneath the surface. As I gazed into the endless murk underwater, it occurred to me what needed to happen. I sprung through the surface. The pond widened like the unhinging jaws of a snake.

  * * *

  We scripted Dyson’s drowning that evening. Rather, we scripted my reaction. He wouldn’t need to perform for the men or police or whoever might later ask me what happened to him. He only needed to swim to the shore, grab his duffel bag, hit
ch a ride on the road, and vanish forever.

  I, however, had to dive into the pond wearing my clothes. I had to shriek. I had to see him slip under; I had to see him never come up. We debated whether I should remain in the water long enough for my fingertips to shrivel. We decided I must. I must dive in wearing my shoes to prove the urgency of the situation. I must appear to do everything I could to save him. In the cabin, I practiced shouting for Dyson and weeping, rehearsed my story of desperation and grief.

  “You’ll need to be convincing,” he told me. “Even when you’re in the water. If you can convince yourself, you can convince everyone else. Be ready for the men to follow your shouts to the pond. They might see you trying to save me—they need to believe you’re trying to save me.”

  His condescension exhausted me. “I’ve been saving you from things all my life,” I snapped. “I more than anyone know how to do it.”

  We tumbled easily into fights that final day. I bit my fork a few times at dinner, accidentally, but a bad habit that Dyson had grown to resent. “I’ll be happy to never hear that again,” he said. I sniffed dramatically and waved my hand in front of my nose. “I’m lucky I’ll never smell your B.O.,” I said, though he never smelled very bad. We didn’t fight out of anger. We commented on those things—my fork biting, his B.O.—because soon we would want each other back, even the flaws, and fighting helped convince us we needed to part. It was psychological warfare: not against each other but for each other.

  Thinking about our separate futures made my insides shrivel with grief. I had lost people in death—grandparents, pets—but never knew loss stripped of its closure. The closest I’d come was my father—though I knew if he died, someone would tell me. If Dyson died, I would never find out. If he became ill, I would never visit him in the hospital. If he was depressed, tired, looking to vent, we would never discuss it. He would exist for me the way most people alive existed for me: present but unknown. The agony guaranteed by this future seemed reason enough to come clean about the men’s desire to talk—but I believed they would hurt Dyson, or hurt me, if they encountered each other. I was the only one in the camp—including the men—who truly understood how dangerous the men were.

  * * *

  July seventh. The day of the drowning. As Dyson prepared for his death—packing a duffel bag, transferring what little money remained to a personal bank account—I tried to lead the men through a normal morning routine.

  They waited for me outside the barn wearing their exercise clothes.

  “Let’s only do one lap today,” I said.

  “So we’re not gonna talk about this?” Randy said. He swept his arm toward the destruction: the charred remains of the sheds; The Crucible, razed, its mirror shards catching sun in the grass; the mudded, dug-up garden. “We have demands to discuss.”

  The men nodded and clapped. A false show of support.

  I whistled. I twirled my index finger to start the jog. The men followed me around the clearing. I saw no point in making them do crunches or stretch. At breakfast, I knocked the bran flakes to the floor and stared at the mess with my mouth open. Gerry swept up the flakes.

  * * *

  Dyson waited on the shore of the pond wearing his swim shorts. Goggles hung around his neck. A duffel bag full of fresh clothes sat at the side of the pond closest to the road. “I never imagined I’d say good-bye to you and mean it,” he said.

  “Me, neither,” I said. I asked if he was sure about this.

  “I’m only sure if you’re sure,” he said.

  I told myself I was sure. I told him I was sure.

  We hugged for what felt like hours. I ran a hand down the left side of his face, my fingers skimming the well of his cheek. I wish I would’ve looked at him longer. I wish I would’ve touched his hair—finally long enough for a tug. I wish I would’ve brushed against his pockets. Maybe I would’ve felt stones, or whatever he’d used to weigh himself down. But we were already behind schedule. Dyson stretched his goggles over his eyes.

  “So long,” he said.

  My stomach lurched as he stepped into the water. I reached my spot on the far side of the pond before he swam to the center. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. He was supposed to swim faster. But I took a pained comfort in the idea of him slowed down from weeping over our separation. I cried against the trunk of a tree. Dyson finally made it to the center. He lifted one arm. I waved back. He bobbed on the surface. He sucked in deeply—his mouth stretched to a canyon before clapping shut. I watched him collect his breaths. I watched him tread water. I watched him go under and started my timer.

  At twenty seconds, I screamed, a signal for him to come to the surface. I screamed even louder at thirty seconds. Somehow even louder at forty. I kept screaming—screaming his name, screaming, “Come up; come up; please come up!”—through fifty seconds, one minute, two minutes. And then I was in the water, paddling against the weight of my clothes. I dived under where Dyson had gone under, flailing and scraping for his body, plunging as deep as I could, though when I opened my eyes I could only see murkiness.

  The men followed my screams to the pond. “He didn’t come up!” I yelled.

  Randy and Dr. Mapplethorpe dragged my kicking body out of the water. “It’s too late,” they said. “There’s no point in you dying, too.” The men draped me in layers of tracksuit jackets.

  I watched the pond for hours—part of me will always be watching the pond—waiting for a hand to reach out of the water, for a head to dart up hunting air, for waves rippling out from the center, for Dyson to crawl to the shore, pondweeds hanging like tassels out of his mouth.

  But it was only us on the shore. Only me and the men.

  V.

  our mission

  The Atmosphere began with a simple observation: men are behaving badly. For thousands of years, men placed themselves at the center of society. Their chase for power, attention, and wealth resulted in massive global disasters. Something needed to happen. Men had to be better. What was needed was a community where men could challenge themselves to step out of the spotlight and into the background—to provide the “atmosphere,” like extras in a movie.

  At age twenty-nine, Dyson Layne left his promising career as a film and TV actor to team up with his lifelong friend, Sasha Marcus. Together, they started The Atmosphere: a supportive and secluded environment for men to learn strategies to undergo emotional, aesthetic, interpersonal, and professional transformation. Good things happen when men evolve—good things for everyone!

  Dyson and Sasha started The Atmosphere on fifteen acres of farmland in southern New Jersey. The first class of Atmospherians were tested by food scarcity, man hordes, and tragedy. Late that summer, Dyson drowned during his morning swim. Sasha refused to give up on their vision, however, and five years later the Atmospherian lifestyle is practiced officially in over two hundred nations. Its training has helped resolve pervasive problems many men face, including hostility, envy, loneliness, philandering, cat calling, inconsiderateness, alcoholism, homelessness, sexual misconduct, sexual deviousness, sexual inadequacy, athletic nostalgia, unemployment, paranoia, misogyny, hording, dyspepsia, and political ambition. Since The Atmosphere’s founding, such miraculous things have happened:

  Workplace sexual misconduct claims have declined by 87 percent.

  Male suicide rates have declined by 79 percent.

  Male unemployment has fallen to 1.8 percent.

  The man horde epidemic has been eliminated.

  In our New Jersey headquarters, a revitalized three-story shopping mall, Atmospherians are taught to recognize and communicate emotions through proprietary psychological exercises. They receive job training in call centers, coding labs, and a carpentry warehouse, where members produce our renowned Tiny House kits (available on our website). Each Atmospherian receives an individualized meal program developed personally by a company algorithm. We guarantee the most responsible and discreet treatment available. Past and current Atmospherians include actors, fi
remen, senators, dictators, judges, presidents, athletes, doctors, sons, brothers, and dads. Nearly 97 percent of Atmospherians choose to continue living in an on-site facility after completing the program. If you or a man in your life is struggling to keep up with our rapidly changing society, there is no treatment more effective, convenient, or safe.

  The Atmosphere: where men become human.

  thirty-eight

  THE MALL SPRAWLED over the parking lot. A ring of evergreens framed its asphalt, and beyond the trees was the highway, through which sounded the gurgle of engines and exhaust. The clouds lowered a thick gray tarp over the sky. Rows of pigeons smeared the ledges of the mall’s roof; across the exterior walls, CULT and SCAMMERS and FUCK OFF and MAN KILLERS and SLUT were spray-painted in grand, manic script—besides hundreds of other words and images that Blair couldn’t identify. Economy cars clustered near the entrance. Far too few for the thousands of men in the building, he thought, as he followed his driver to the entrance.

  Blair was thirty-two years old, a decade younger than his driver. He was lanky and freckled, with dull brown eyes and a beard the length of his hair—both of which he buzzed in his bathroom every three weeks. He coughed a tickle out of his throat, took a puff from his inhaler.

  The driver said, “There’s a pharmaceutical plant half a mile north. They do a controlled release this time every day.” He gagged dramatically. “You can really taste it.”

  “It’s nothing,” Blair said.

  “Sasha takes care of us. That’s why we stay indoors,” the driver said.

  “I’m excited to meet her,” Blair said.

  The driver found this funny. “Let’s get inside.”

  Three years earlier, Sasha Marcus had lobbied the state to fund The Atmosphere’s move to this site. It required a spacious, controlled environment, she argued, to ensure their clients the most responsible treatment. The Atmosphere performed a public good, after all. Many members had families, friends, jobs, outside of The Atmosphere. They had every reason to leave—though very few did—and Blair suspected they were forced to stay. He didn’t plan to be there any longer than two days. One weekend with a cult was plenty of time to take a few photos, record conversations, to corner Sasha and demand she tell him how Dyson had actually died.