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

fists clenched in sympathy, the aggravated yawns when performances flagged, the incantatory Absolution has to be earned as the teller wept before Dyson. Watching the audience, I saw grief and tenderness course through the viewers, and, in this way, a little slug of sympathy slipped into my heart, marking its trail. Had someone been watching me watching the men watching the performance, they would have seen me unconsciously softening. Pity, I would have called it, but it wasn’t pity. It was something far scarier and more destabilizing, something I would never let myself name so long as I needed to feel superior to their pain.

How was Mack March supposed to know the dog was sleeping under the car? He was late for work—he couldn’t be late again. Would his kids rather have a house than a dog? How was he supposed to know his kids were watching him leave from their bedroom windows? How was he supposed to know the kids would return to that morning—if not the sight the sound, the yowling and barks, the crunching—for decades to come?

Benjamin Tire begged his daughter to forgive him for the affair he had with her mother—his mistress—and for calling her psycho when she told him she was his daughter.

Reconciliation taught the men—and me—a valuable lesson: forgiveness could not be obtained through pain or time or public pleas for contrition. It required work—the sort of work I put in every day. Absolution has to be earned. I treated the phrase like a mantra. I whispered it to myself during particularly difficult PIEs sessions or meals, in moments when I craved comfort and validation. I was the model of proper contrition. And if I had not been forgiven for my mistakes, the men had no right to jump me in line.

What an intoxicatingly cruel way to think, I realize now. There are consequences for treating forgiveness like a rare and finite resource.

William Gremb didn’t even know that word could be seen as offensive. It was just a description. A loving description of skin color. Delivered with admiration and care. How could you bar someone from the ashram over one word? What happened to forgiveness? What happened to meta? What happened to letting go—accepting people where they were?

Dr. Mapplethorpe Lang apologized to Christina Lane, whose mother, Susan Lane, died while driving to work during a hurricane. It was entirely Dr. Mapplethorpe’s decision to keep the office open. All the others in the region had closed for the storm.

“Scalloped potatoes were my father’s favorite,” said Dyson as he lowered the serving tray to the center of the table for Family Dinner. There would be no Emptying Out that evening.

What was she even doing in his office, Lawrence Footbridge still wondered, if she wasn’t attracted to him? Why else would a student take time out of her busy schedule to come see him? Why else would she act so intensely professional other than to conceal her true feelings?

Kevin Sweston’s daughters seemed like alien creatures, too friendly to be human, too abundantly blond. They made him uneasy—the same way their mother made him uneasy—with their tiny fingers and sizable questions. Rather than work to know them better, he hung out in his garage, stayed in the bar until close, assuming their mother could carry the parenting on her own—a burden he imposed on his wife, a burden his daughters never forgot as they grew older.

Even if Dyson didn’t know how to ride a bike—and I was sure that he knew—a grass clearing was no place to learn. But still the men clustered around him, holding the handlebars to steady him, palming both shoulders, Gerry’s hand on the flat of his back, pushing Dyson until he was confident enough to shout, “Let me go!” The men scattered butterfly-like. They cupped their hands over their mouths: I’m so proud of you, Dyson! He pedaled in wobbly circles.

Hughie Mintz didn’t know what he had done wrong. Did his son not like him boxing his ears? Should he never have told the boy’s girlfriends that the boy had wet his bed through seventh grade? And a little bit more into eighth? Maybe he shouldn’t have clapped him awake on Saturday mornings for agility drills—but his boy was too slow. He’d get embarrassed on the court. Maybe he shouldn’t have shouted so furiously at his son’s basketball games. But didn’t he want to feel his father’s love at the games? Maybe he never should’ve told the boy, Love is something you earn from a father, not something you’re given. A joke! Couldn’t the boy take a joke? What he knew for sure is he never should’ve been the one to teach the boy to throw a football. He should’ve known the boy couldn’t throw a spiral. What did he think would happen? Maybe he shouldn’t have shushed him at dinner—or maybe the boy should’ve made that lay-up. A fast break for Christ’s sake! Wide open! Maybe he should’ve let the kid have a fish. A fish never hurt anybody. The fish was the issue. He apologized for the fish. “I’m sorry I never let you get that fish,” Hughie Mintz said from his knees. “Sorrier than you’ll ever know.”

For months I’d wondered what Dyson hoped to gain from The Atmosphere. I assumed he wanted what he had promised me: power, redemption, and, most important, fame. If we succeeded, his face would appear on every screen in the world. Far more attention than he received as an actor.

It was an easy equation:

Change men → Change the world → Get famous

But he wanted something deeper than fame. He could have brought these men anywhere—finances allowing—yet he dragged them to property owned by his father’s parents, he chose to train them and feed them in a barn built by his father, he ran them through Physical Training echoing what his father demanded of him, he made them perform ridiculous shows of contrition—futile shows of