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

Dyson angled his ear in our direction.

I held one finger over my mouth. Two weeks earlier, I might’ve cursed out Randy for threatening me, but I was taking a different approach. I was above Randy, now, and not only in the arbitrary rankings of The Atmosphere. Seeing him at his most vulnerable, pitted within his deepest regrets as he begged Dyson for forgiveness, made Randy pitiable and explicable. It is difficult to despise someone once you’ve seen them at their weakest. Randy’s threats were less expressions of malice than of confusion and pain. His pain was no greater than mine—I would never put his above mine—but it existed, it shaped him, and knowing this let me see him and treat him the way I might treat a child: Patiently. Patronizingly.

Mark Wahlberg, I mouthed to Randy.

His eyes bulged into balloons. “He’s one of the greats,” he whispered. “Maybe the greatest.” He danced back to his seat. There was no danger of him telling the others. He relished being the only one to know.

The highway was congested. Dyson downshifted. “What’s that about?”

“You know Randy,” I said.

“That’s why I’m asking.” It sounded like an accusation. Though I wasn’t sure against whom. He cranked the wheel to the right. We’d reached our exit.

The cashier at the theater sat behind two inches of bulletproof glass. She removed her mouth from the straw of a bucket-sized soda and spoke into a microphone. “Will your group need special assistance?” she asked, then sniffed dramatically, smelling us. Hygiene was no longer an important aspect of Atmospherian living. I’d let my own legs get mossy and dark.

The men sat cross-legged at the foot of an escalator. They wore their tracksuits.

“They’re more than capable,” Dyson said.

“We like to avoid preventable incidents.”

“They’re just men,” I added, as if this cleared anything up. “Just regular men.”

She slid our tickets through a slit in the glass.

We joined the men at the escalator. Dyson said, “You’re here to work. You might laugh a little, you might get excited, might cheer, but our goal is analysis. The movie we’ve chosen is Just Us starring Mark Wahlberg and Jeremy Renner as two cops driven by vengeance.”

“I knew it!” Randy shouted.

“Go, Cornhuskers!”

Others muttered mild oomphs of excitement.

“This isn’t a pleasure cruise,” Dyson said. “You will not watch this film. You will use the cognitive thinking skills Sasha and I have taught you to critique the ethical, ideological, and aesthetic failures of the movie.”

The men blinked at Dyson.

“What he means by ethical, ideological, and aesthetic,” said Lawrence Footbridge, “is what are the good and bad qualities of the film.”

“That’s not what I mean,” said Dyson.

Lawrence winked at him. “Guys like us need to water it down.”

Dyson sighed, clapped once. “Here are your tickets,” he said. “And Sasha will give you the notepads.”

In my haste to pack snacks, I’d forgotten the notepads. I troubled the cashier for paper. The closest things they carried were coloring books. “I’ll need fourteen of them, please.”

She said, “Coloring books are only available in our birthday packages.”

Peter agreed to say that he was turning thirty-three today. We paid an extra hundred dollars for the privilege of coloring books, child-sized popcorns, party hats, and sixty minutes of access to a small green room between the bathrooms.

The vast purple-walled lobby was dense with employees’ boredom. They stared at their phones, picked their noses, and flicked. On the walls were murals of grotesquely painted celebrities walking the red carpet. I hadn’t been in the world since the Hertz Shirts fiasco, and, fearing the worst, I shielded my face with my hand, worried some stray man who used to protest outside my apartment might cross through the lobby.

In the movie, friends were killed, women were threatened with rape, a Mob boss died in a firefight, and, bloodied and limping, Wahlberg and Renner professed their mutual respect for each other—despite their highly emphasized differences in personality. One other person sat in the theater: a man the same age as our men. Dyson invited him to Peter’s birthday party.

“I don’t know you,” he said.

“I’m sure you’d fit in,” Dyson said.

“You seem like some kind of cult,” the man said.

“That’s exactly what we are,” said Dyson. “Started by me and run by me. Dyson Layne.”

The man hurried away without looking back.

I slowed from the head of the line to the middle until Peter and I walked next to each other. I pressed my elbow into his. A few days had passed since we’d last had sex, and I imagined dragging him into the bathroom for something quick. “Happy Birthday,” I said. “Wanna bail on your party?”

Peter shifted his elbow away from mine. Without looking at me, he said, “I don’t think you like me.”

“I like you so much,” I said.

“You like having sex with me.”

“Because that’s what we have,” I said. “That’s who we are.”

Peter paused at the top of the ramp and turned toward me. He flashed what was, perhaps, the most condescending smile I had ever received in my life, far worse than anything from Cassandra or Sy Cunningham or any number of elite influencers. The smile reopened something scabbed over inside me. I had never felt so alone.

Peter continued into the lobby by himself. Randy shouldered up behind me. “Yikes,” he said. “Ever heard of the Bechdel test? Wahlberg could learn a lot from us. You’d fix that man in a day. You’re the real deal. A pro. You’re going places.” He launched his hands into the air as if they were a rocket blasting off. “Straight to the top.”

“Are you implying something?” I asked.

“Always so tense,” he said. “Mellow out. We’re here to have fun.”

In the green room, we wore pointy party hats and sang “Happy Birthday” to Peter. Hand dryers and flushes thundered through the walls. The employees delivered a round blue cake, flat as a dish. It tasted of chilled feet.

The men read from their coloring books:

Explicit violence

Gratuitous cussing

Simplistic revenge narrative

Reductive female characters

Whore/Madonna dichotomy

Men’s worth determined by possessions

Men’s worth determined