The Atmospherians by Alex McElroy (reading fiction .TXT) 📗

was the first to do as I asked—perhaps out of some residual impulse to please coaches. He rocketed his pencil into his palm and shouted, “Touchdown!” Leon followed Hughie’s lead, though he shouted, “Hoo-rah!” as the point entered his skin. Dr. Mapplethorpe ground his pencil in, yowling and shuddering.

The pain he brought on himself was more intense than I anticipated. Unconsciously, I winced at the sight of blood in his palm. The men noticed this and seemed pleased by my reaction. My tenderness excited them—here was proof that I could be rattled, proof they could disturb me by hurting themselves. Soon all of them were digging their pencils into their palms, twisting the points deeper and shrieking.

“Softer!” I shouted. It was hard to hear me through their screams.

Blood ran over their wrists. They grunted with serious hurt, trying to prove—I couldn’t tell what. That they could handle more pain than I had anticipated? That they would happily sacrifice themselves if it meant hurting me?

“Snap your pencils in half if you haven’t yet broken the point.”

They poked themselves with the jagged wooden heads. They grinned feverishly, prepared to continue for hours, days. I was disgusted with them, but even more so I was angry at myself, gummy with guilt for proposing this plan. I had already watched too much of this. I fled into the woods. The men cheered my retreat.

I couldn’t return to the cabin—not without an explanation. This is exactly what we’re trying to prevent, Dyson would say. We didn’t bring these men here to hurt them. For a short while, I hid behind a tree watching Dyson swim, taking comfort in the choppy rhythm his arms made in the water. Deeper into the forest, I crossed brooks, heaved heavy stones, petted lichen, punted a mushroom, stared into the eyes of a fawn. When dusk shrouded the forest I returned to the cabin, knowing Dyson would be giving the lecture by then.

The cabin was a cage. I paced from toilet to couch, glancing out the porthole window over the sink every time I passed. I rinsed my hands. Dried them. Rinsed them again. I wiped the kitchen table. I flipped through Dyson’s movies, but nothing appealed to me. Each task distracted me from thinking about the enraged lecture I feared he was giving the men: the gasoline poured over their burning sense of injustice. Barney trailed me through the cabin yowling for attention. I lifted him into my lap and scratched behind his ears, under his chin, and eventually the consistency of his purring settled my nerves.

The alone time freed me to drain the hot spot and check my email. There were fewer threats than normal—only two emails after a few days offline—and I was excited to find a message from Roger Handswerth. Cassandra told me you’re an independent thinker, he wrote. I thought you might want to research DAM on your own. He linked to a bright web page where DAM appeared in black block letters. Beneath it: Defense Against Mistakes. Beneath that: A Roger Handswerth Project. The Investors page described DAM as a “Revolutionary Web Browser Extension That Guarantees Users Preventative Atonement.”

DAM planned to launch in three months.

I searched for photos of Roger online, hoping to attach a body to the emails. The person I found was a tall, enthusiastic-looking Black man who wore clear glasses and tailored suits. The more I searched, however, the fewer results appeared, even when I restarted the search. Soon the only photos remaining were too hazy to discern his features, zoomed to a pixelated porridge, but those, too, began disappearing—poof—and I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t hallucinated them.

Dyson’s footsteps crunched through the forest. I slapped my laptop shut and turned off the lights, scrambled upstairs, and slipped beneath the covers. I breathed deeply and loudly as if I were sleeping. He unlaced his shoes at the door. “Sasha,” he said, his tone unnerving and patient. I’d never had any reason to fear Dyson, not once in my life, but as he repeated my name, louder each time, I imagined shrinking my body small enough to hide among the skin flakes and mites in our sheets.

“I saw the lights shut off from outside,” he said. “I know you’re awake.” The rope ladder groaned under his weight. He crouched at the foot of the bed, shaking my leg. “Sasha, we need to talk about this. Whatever you did. Because—Jesus. I would never force them to… it sounds so… the way they described it… Sasha… you showed them how foolish it is to chase pain, how abundantly absurd to think pain brings you anything other than pain. They spent their lives indoctrinated by that mind-set. No pain no gain. When the truth is: no pain no pain. I’ve been stressing that to them for months and you made it so obvious to them in one afternoon. Sasha—your mind. Your techniques. You’re—How else can I say it? You’re brilliant.”

I opened my eyes.

eighteen

JOB TRAINING CONSISTED of Dyson reading from PDF summaries of For Dummies books on subjects of the men’s choosing, including but not limited to Video Editing and Web Design and Graphic Design and Carpeting and Embalming and Air Conditioner Installation and Air Conditioner Removal and Professional Blogging and Entrepreneurial Elocution and Chinese and Spanish and French and Husbandry (Bovine) and Husbandry (Poultry) and the most popular subject: Acquiring Wealth in the Digital Age.

nineteen

MY RELATIONSHIP HISTORY was littered with jelly-brained lunks: men who quoted Joe Rogan at dinner, who blew their savings on collectible knives, men who brewed IPAs in their best friends’ basements, who proposed marriage at basketball games and would fight anyone who didn’t think the first Lethal Weapon was a classic. I fucked them because I liked predictable men, the guarded and repressed. Sensitive men couldn’t be trusted; they assumed their sensitivity made them special, deserving of praise. Most sensitive men were, at their cores, narcissists who constructed elaborate expectations for how relationships were