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

his father, fearing what might be downstairs, but he tilted his head impatiently toward the door. His mother shooed me away. The basement stank of mildew and rust. Its concrete floor chilled me through my socks, though the air was warm from his father’s exertion. Workout equipment cluttered the room: a bench press, barbells, round metal clips for tightening weights to the bar. Flimsy mirrors of various heights covered the walls, each one seemingly tilted at a unique angle. A torn futon hunched in front of a TV. Towers of VHS tapes stood on either side of the screen. They were marked with drags of masking tape. At my house, tapes had titles like Sasha Preschool Grad and Sasha 6 b-day. Here I saw titles only from popular movies.

We sat inches away from the screen. Dyson kept the sound a couple clicks above mute. I’d never watched a bootleg movie before and had trouble adjusting to the blurry picture and the heads of the viewers and their coughing and chewing. The basement door opened and his father barreled back down the steps. Dyson handed me a pair of headphones, then capped a second pair over his ears and plugged them in using a splitter. I couldn’t concentrate on the movie through the grunts of his father counting as he did crunches. At one hundred, he collapsed with a lionish growl, then stomped back up the steps. I removed my headphones and told Dyson I needed to leave. “See you tomorrow,” he said. He waved over his shoulder as I ascended the steps.

Shamanic drumming sounded from the living room. I tiptoed to the front door, gathered my things, and ran home through the woods that separated our houses. I didn’t expect to return.

But the next day, when Dyson asked if I wanted to finish the movie, I followed him off the bus, as if the decision had already been made for me. Soon I was obsessed with the illicit strangeness of his bootleg movies. Watching them meant watching two different performances. There was the movie—always at a remove no matter how deeply the cameraman zoomed to the screen. The camera never captured the entire screen, either, and these missing slivers held my attention more than the movie itself, corners of disappeared film where anything might have happened. The second performance included the heads of the audience members, the cameraman’s coughing, the sound of cellophane wrappers peeled off boxes of candy. During one movie, ushers escorted the cameraman out for recording, and every movie we watched after that was electric with tension.

My mother would never have approved of my watching movies at Dyson’s. So I never told her I went to his house. One afternoon, when she called home I wasn’t around to answer. Her punishment was severe. She confined me to our house for the summer, where I read the humidity-sticky fashion magazines she stacked under her bed. I assumed my friendship with Dyson had ended. Then one morning there was a knock on my door. By the time I opened it, Dyson was scampering toward the woods. On the doormat sat a small red box, a purple bow blossoming on its top. Inside: a movie that had opened that week.

five

DYSON PARKED IN front of a bare brown barn in the center of a clearing. Yellow-crisp grass widened out to a crown of pine trees. Their tips knifed into a stony sky. In front of the barn were two stubby sheds so lacquered and bright they reflected the sun like shields. The front of a school bus nosed out from behind the barn. A gurgling generator unloaded a warped column of smoke that rose like a worm inching into the sky. Johnsonburg—the closest town, barely a blink on the side of the road—was twenty minutes away by car. Standing in the center of the clearing, I felt the grip of isolation. Like a mouse in a fist.

The property was some of the cheapest in the state: fifteen acres scraped across the northern rim of the Pine Barrens, a dense expanse of forest home to a mythical devil, cranberry bogs, and sulfurous, inhospitable soil. The Forest Service had recently set fire to miles of trees to prevent future fires, and the air had a charred, ashy thickness that sludged my throat and made my lips flaky. The clearing had an impatient quality, like it had been waiting too long for something to exist here. I could almost hear it tapping its feet.

“My dad’s parents wanted to start a summer camp here,” Dyson said. He dragged a tube of Chap Stick over his lips, then tossed it to me.

“Not a camp for children, I hope.”

“They could never make up their minds.” His father had built the barn over one humiliatingly hot summer, and the man had always resented his parents for never making use of the property. “He used to hide bootlegs out here. CDs and movies. Unload them at local flea markets far from home.” Dyson seemed very proud of this fact.

I drifted away from the car and took a few selfies with the pines at my back, intending to post them so Cassandra might see. Nature retreat, I would comment, and thank a large cosmetics company to make her think I’d landed a sponsorship. My face was greasy and pale, the lighting was dull, and after months avoiding myself, I had trouble finding a flattering angle.

“Good luck posting those photos,” said Dyson.

“I’m not planning to post them,” I said.

“The cell service is pitiful here. That’s the best part of this place: complete isolation.”

“I have one bar.” It dropped to No Signal as soon as I spoke.

“When the men get here we’re destroying their phones. To cut back on distractions. Might be a good idea for you to destroy yours,” he said. “In the interest of fairness.”

“What about safety?”

“Think of this as a detox.”

“My safety. I don’t want to be alone here without a phone.”

He inhaled deeply, sucking