“Me, neither,” I said. I asked if he was sure about this.
“I’m only sure if you’re sure,” he said.
I told myself I was sure. I told him I was sure.
We hugged for what felt like hours. I ran a hand down the left side of his face, my fingers skimming the well of his cheek. I wish I would’ve looked at him longer. I wish I would’ve touched his hair—finally long enough for a tug. I wish I would’ve brushed against his pockets. Maybe I would’ve felt stones, or whatever he’d used to weigh himself down. But we were already behind schedule. Dyson stretched his goggles over his eyes.
“So long,” he said.
My stomach lurched as he stepped into the water. I reached my spot on the far side of the pond before he swam to the center. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. He was supposed to swim faster. But I took a pained comfort in the idea of him slowed down from weeping over our separation. I cried against the trunk of a tree. Dyson finally made it to the center. He lifted one arm. I waved back. He bobbed on the surface. He sucked in deeply—his mouth stretched to a canyon before clapping shut. I watched him collect his breaths. I watched him tread water. I watched him go under and started my timer.
At twenty seconds, I screamed, a signal for him to come to the surface. I screamed even louder at thirty seconds. Somehow even louder at forty. I kept screaming—screaming his name, screaming, “Come up; come up; please come up!”—through fifty seconds, one minute, two minutes. And then I was in the water, paddling against the weight of my clothes. I dived under where Dyson had gone under, flailing and scraping for his body, plunging as deep as I could, though when I opened my eyes I could only see murkiness.
The men followed my screams to the pond. “He didn’t come up!” I yelled.
Randy and Dr. Mapplethorpe dragged my kicking body out of the water. “It’s too late,” they said. “There’s no point in you dying, too.” The men draped me in layers of tracksuit jackets.
I watched the pond for hours—part of me will always be watching the pond—waiting for a hand to reach out of the water, for a head to dart up hunting air, for waves rippling out from the center, for Dyson to crawl to the shore, pondweeds hanging like tassels out of his mouth.
But it was only us on the shore. Only me and the men.
V.
our mission
The Atmosphere began with a simple observation: men are behaving badly. For thousands of years, men placed themselves at the center of society. Their chase for power, attention, and wealth resulted in massive global disasters. Something needed to happen. Men had to be better. What was needed was a community where men could challenge themselves to step out of the spotlight and into the background—to provide the “atmosphere,” like extras in a movie.
At age twenty-nine, Dyson Layne left his promising career as a film and TV actor to team up with his lifelong friend, Sasha Marcus. Together, they started The Atmosphere: a supportive and secluded environment for men to learn strategies to undergo emotional, aesthetic, interpersonal, and professional transformation. Good things happen when men evolve—good things for everyone!
Dyson and Sasha started The Atmosphere on fifteen acres of farmland in southern New Jersey. The first class of Atmospherians were tested by food scarcity, man hordes, and tragedy. Late that summer, Dyson drowned during his morning swim. Sasha refused to give up on their vision, however, and five years later the Atmospherian lifestyle is practiced officially in over two hundred nations. Its training has helped resolve pervasive problems many men face, including hostility, envy, loneliness, philandering, cat calling, inconsiderateness, alcoholism, homelessness, sexual misconduct, sexual deviousness, sexual inadequacy, athletic nostalgia, unemployment, paranoia, misogyny, hording, dyspepsia, and political ambition. Since The Atmosphere’s founding, such miraculous things have happened:
Workplace sexual misconduct claims have declined by 87 percent.
Male suicide rates have declined by 79 percent.
Male unemployment has fallen to 1.8 percent.
The man horde epidemic has been eliminated.
In our New Jersey headquarters, a revitalized three-story shopping mall, Atmospherians are taught to recognize and communicate emotions through proprietary psychological exercises. They receive job training in call centers, coding labs, and a carpentry warehouse, where members produce our renowned Tiny House kits (available on our website). Each Atmospherian receives an individualized meal program developed personally by a company algorithm. We guarantee the most responsible and discreet treatment available. Past and current Atmospherians include actors, firemen, senators, dictators, judges, presidents, athletes, doctors, sons, brothers, and dads. Nearly 97 percent of Atmospherians choose to continue living in an on-site facility after completing the program. If you or a man in your life is struggling to keep up with our rapidly changing society, there is no treatment more effective, convenient, or safe.
The Atmosphere: where men become human.
thirty-eight
THE MALL SPRAWLED over the parking lot. A ring of evergreens framed its asphalt, and beyond the trees was the highway, through which sounded the gurgle of engines and exhaust. The clouds lowered a thick gray tarp over the sky. Rows of pigeons smeared the ledges of the mall’s roof; across the exterior walls, CULT and SCAMMERS and FUCK OFF and MAN KILLERS and SLUT were spray-painted in grand, manic script—besides hundreds of other words and images that Blair couldn’t identify. Economy cars clustered near the entrance. Far too few for the thousands of men in the building, he thought, as he followed his driver to the entrance.
Blair was thirty-two years old, a decade younger than his driver. He was lanky and freckled, with dull brown eyes and a beard the length of his hair—both
