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

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 her 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