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

What I knew about sensitive men I learned from Blake Dayes. I met him after a fundraiser for K.L.I.C.K., an organization that paired underprivileged children with digital cameras. Cassandra brought me along as her plus one. This was six months before my appearance on Wake Up! America, six months before Lucas Devry’s death. Cassandra’s meditation practice wasn’t any more popular than ABANDON—she had three thousand fewer followers, actually—but she knew powerful people in powerful places who threw powerful parties to honor their power. She reveled in wielding her influence for me. “It’s absolutely crucial,” she said, “that people with privilege use it to advance the careers of people like you.”

She drifted away from me as soon as we entered the party. I was approached by Sy Cunningham, an acclaimed podcaster who had recently completed a month-long silent retreat in a derelict boathouse. “I developed a profound admiration for my pulse,” he told me. I got the sense he isolated himself only to later tell people about it. We stood amid a crowd of bright, beautiful people with cocktails cooling our hands. Sy wore a tuxedo the color of matcha. Product weighed down his curly black hair. A mole poked out of his lip and it took everything in me not to touch it.

“Have you listened to Sylence?” he asked.

“You’re that Sy?” I said, like I didn’t already know. People like Sy preferred to reveal their identities, like superheroes peeling off masks for the public.

Sylence consisted of sixty minutes of silence—plus two segments from sponsors—and on rare occasions, it was rumored, Sy could be heard breathing into the mic. His most committed listeners argued for the authenticity of these moments with the enthusiastic paranoia of alien abductees. Syphers, they called themselves.

Sy placed his empty glass on a passing tray. “These parties are such an illusion,” he said. I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to sleep with me or I was trying to sleep with him. “They don’t mean anything. Never have. I don’t know what keeps bringing me back.” His words dripped with the cultivated weariness of familiarity. He’d been born on the Upper East Side, the only son of a hedge fund manager and a hedge fund manager’s wife. He’d been raised in parties thrown by people who hated parties. His indifference was a brand on his back, proof he belonged among those who spoke the language of strategic confessions and origin stories.

Where I grew up, weariness and indifference arrived in the form of soul-bruising lethargy, in phrases like What can ya do? Indifference resulted from being treated indifferently. At events like this, talking to people like Sy, I felt as if I were crossing a rickety wooden bridge, clutching the frayed rope handles, stepping over rotted slats in the bridge, and waiting to plummet into the canyon beneath. But the topic of weariness bored me, and, when our conversation lulled, I asked a question I loved asking strangers: “What’s your least favorite city?”

“Party questions,” he scoffed, then excused himself. The bridge cracked under my feet.

On a white steel stage at the front of the room, an acoustic guitarist tapped the mic. He was tall and conventionally pretty, like an old church, with long maple hair pulled back in a ponytail. His posture was as stiff as a telephone pole. “I’m Blake Dayes,” he said. “And I have one question for everyone here: What have you done for love today?”

Instead of listening to him sing, I wondered what I had done for love that day, wondered what Blake had done, always returning to him, the center of gravity in the room. After three songs, he disappeared into an unmarked door in the corner. The crowd gave him a bewildered ovation.

Claire Lance, the founder of K.L.I.C.K., stepped onstage. She was as trim and sharp as her name and wore her platinum hair in a bob cut with a saber. Her appearance had the permanence of a mountain. She lived outside of time, outside of judgment. In addition to K.L.I.C.K., she’d founded dozens of orphanages in sub-Saharan Africa so stylish and modern—the orphans dressed immaculately—that no one criticized her for having a white savior complex.

“Thank you for coming tonight,” she said. “Your generous donations this evening will help put cameras into the hands of over five hundred malnourished children.” As everyone clapped, I surveyed the crowd for Blake, convinced he was the only interesting person at the party. “When I started K.L.I.C.K., I never dreamed of a day like today. We have done so much for these children. But the fight must continue until all underprivileged children have access to documentation.” More clapping. “This evening, it is my profound honor to unveil the First Annual K.L.I.C.K. Silent Auction, sponsored by Sylence: The Podcast. Soon, you will have an opportunity to bid on photos taken by actual K.L.I.C.K. children.” Purple drapes were drawn back from the wall behind her to reveal a grid of framed photos.

The photographs were familiar to me, with their dim living room lighting, the cabinets full of bulk off-brand junk food, the tables cluttered with colorful bills, the harried mothers on couches clutching their feet, the fathers dunking their heads in their gnarled hands, the dismantled automobiles on cinder blocks in overgrown yards, the carved-open Sheetrock in half-remodeled bedrooms, empty change jars in kitchens, inflatable mattresses deflated on living room floors. The photos reminded me of the apartments I’d shared with my parents before they split up; I saw in these houses the houses of aunts and uncles who lived in the impoverished wake of shuttered factories in Pennsylvania, aunts and uncles and cousins I hated to visit out of an unspoken fear their misfortune might infect me. Though I knew enough to feel embarrassed of my upbringing—at least, compared to the other guests here—I never considered myself poor. My parents were just well-off enough to fear the shame that poverty carried.