The Atmospherians by Alex McElroy (digital ebook reader txt) 📕

the trunk. Inside were all the movies in which he appeared, dozens of them. He put on a biblical thriller called Stranger in the Manger and paused it during a scene at a crowded church service. “Do you see me?” he asked. He’d done this the previous night, too, midway through a horror movie called Brain Drain. I hadn’t seen him last night and I did not see him now, but he had been so hurt when I failed to spot him last night that I lied to him, said, “There you are,” hoping to settle back into the movie.

“Point to me,” he said.

“Let’s just keep watching.”

“If you see me, where am I?”

“Right there.” I rested my thumb over a pew on the top left corner of the screen.

Dyson chewed his inner cheek.

“Just show me,” I said, making my exasperation clear.

He curled forward, hit play. “You got it right.”

twelve

THE NEXT MORNING, as Dyson prepared the sheds for the men’s arrival, I strolled deeper into the woods with my phone. The light was milky and the air cool and I wanted away from the claustrophobia of the cabin. On the far side of the pond, inside a one-foot box of perfect signal—where I had spoken to Cassandra—my phone lit up with an unfamiliar chime. A California phone number had left me a voicemail overnight. The transcription preview appeared nonthreatening, even friendly. I risked listening:

Hi, this message is for Sasha Marcus. I’m Roger Handswerth; I’m calling on behalf of DAM. D-A-M. Cassandra Hanson recommended we contact you for a marketing opportunity with our company, and we would be very interested in talking to you about our team. We’d love to bring you to campus for a visit. Please give me a call back when you can.

I listened a second and third time and tried to shoo away the delight of being wanted. By the fifth listen, though, I felt drenched in Cassandra’s pity and deleted the message.

I dreamed Lucas Devry and I sat across from each other at his kitchen table. I knew the surroundings from his video: striped blue wallpaper, family pictures hanging askew, a cross, the plastic tablecloth patterned with flowers. He wore the same dingy white button-down shirt he’d worn in his suicide video. His handgun lay on the table next to a paper plate draped in slices of ham. “You made me do this, Sasha,” he said.

I clutched a mug of coffee in both hands but couldn’t lift it to my lips. Thousands of people had crammed into his dining room. They held phones over their faces so their eyes and mouths didn’t show. They snapped photos. They took videos. They snorted, chortled, gasped, stomped their feet on the floor as Lucas Devry delivered his speech.

“This is your fault,” he said.

I tried to dissuade him—though my words came out as panicky grunts. The people surrounding us tightened around the table. They dragged my chair backwards. They leaned closer to Lucas Devry as I was swept to the back of the crowd.

“You want a beautiful world?” He lifted the handgun to his mouth. The dream veered into memory. “Here is your beautiful world.” He thunked forward onto his plate. From the back of his head flowed a fountain of rose petals—red roses, white, pink, yellow, and purple. Everyone in the room—even me—grabbed at the rose petals as if they were currency. But every petal we touched transformed into a roach. We continued grabbing nonetheless, until the entire room was in motion, roaches crawling over the table and floor, climbing the walls, sneaking into our mouths and under the lids of our eyes.

I woke up alone to the sound of gagging rising out of the bathroom. Dyson, I could’ve said. Are you okay? I could’ve climbed down the ladder and laid a hand on his back, could’ve told him to stop, told him he did not need to do this. He was not, after all, sick, not sick in the conventional way, and knowing this made me sticky with guilt. It hurt to listen to him. I popped a melatonin and plugged my ears, told myself he was simply nervous about the men arriving tomorrow.

All day the next day we rehearsed the arrival. We practiced our lines and a range of facial expressions, tested out different tones to take when we spoke. After walking through our “blocking”—Dyson’s word—we built a small, lopsided trough behind the barn that the men could use as a urinal. Dyson punched a hole into one end. We worked in relative silence, trading words only to give each other directions. I could have broken our silence to ask about the gagging. Instead, I shoveled beneath the hole in the trough, creating a divot for the runoff to flow. When I finished, we rehearsed the arrival again, repeating every action, every word, every breath and gesture, until it was too dark to see.

II.

the seasons of hunger

IMAGINE A FATHER. Imagine the father is firm-fleshed and grim, gripping a steering wheel as he drives to work at two in the morning. Imagine the father has been called in on a weekend—to the pharmaceutical plant where he sweeps floors and changes lightbulbs five nights a week—to fix a steam-leaking pipe, a leak that could wait until Monday. Imagine the father has made this hour-long drive thousands of times. Imagine he is accustomed to working nights, accustomed to being called in, and really shouldn’t be any more tired than the normal person. Imagine the father is not tired in the heavy-lidded physical way but tired in ways that don’t have names. Imagine tiredness as a characteristic. Imagine tiredness as an outfit the father cannot unzip. Imagine a father so angry for having to wear this outfit every day of his life. He spends his rare hours at home taking out his anger by lifting weights in a basement. Imagine a father so unaccustomed to love that