The Atmospherians

by Alex McElroy

  “Starve the men woke,” I said, joking.

  “You get it,” he said, with no hint of humor.

  Across from the shelves was a full kitchen: sink and stovetop, oven and fridge. A holdover from the failed summer camp. Floral oven mitts hung off hooks nailed on the wall. My eyes followed the fence up to the ceiling. It resembled a giant fishing net from this angle: bound to collapse and trap us beneath it. “Pretty murdery barn,” I said, hoping for pushback.

  “Any place can be murdery under the wrong conditions.” He had a bad habit of saying such things: the worst possible things. Often, these comments were made in jest—but hearing this now put me on edge.

  I checked my phone again. No service, no sign of service returning. “These men you’re bringing here—”

  “We’re bringing here.”

  “What if they form a horde?”

  “Do you think I’d bring men here who might horde?”

  “Any man can horde.”

  “You act like I’d put you in danger.”

  “Am I in danger?” I asked. “Are the men dangerous?”

  “Sasha: Name one thing in the world that isn’t in any way dangerous. You know I’d never hurt you—obviously—but for an ant under my foot I’m a threat. Does that make me dangerous? Your ex, he seemed to think you were dangerous for his career. Not to mention those men outside your apartment. But to me you’re the kindest soul in the world. I’ve never known anyone better than you. In order to really help anyone, Sasha—in order to make the changes we need to make in the world, to really transform how people think—we need to toss this idea of danger. Danger is conditional. And until we accept that, we’re gonna keep condemning harmless and innocent people for arbitrary mistakes.”

  This was his way of saying that the men were dangerous.

  * * *

  We shared a cedar, green-shuttered cabin twenty minutes by foot from the clearing. Decades ago, Dyson’s grandfather had picked this cabin out of a catalogue, and it had aged like something never expected to last very long. Its wood had taken on a warped, graying quality that reminded me of beach sand in the winter. A curvy porch jutted out from the front like the bottom lip of an underbit mouth. Crouched before the door was a Creamsicle cat. It clutched what looked like an old woman’s wig in its mouth.

  “Is that for me?” Dyson asked the cat in a deep, dumb voice. “Did Barney get me a present?” He stroked the cat’s back. A baby bunny escaped from its mouth and limp-sprinted into the forest. Dyson lifted the cat into his arms, rocked it like a baby, scratched behind its ears.

  “So you’re a cat person now,” I said. I’d never known him to even talk about pets.

  “I’m a Barney person,” he said sweetly. “Sasha, meet Barney. Barney, meet Sasha.”

  I stretched to pet him. He clawed the back of my hand and broke skin. I cursed at the cat, flicking blood on my shirt as I shook the pain out.

  “Bad! Bad!” Dyson said to Barney. To me: “He isn’t normally like this.”

  At the kitchen sink, I soaped the wound so intensely I nearly depleted the entire bar.

  “Somebody’s tummy must be crummy,” Dyson sang. He set a plastic cup of live grass—dirt and all—on the floor. The cat gnawed off a few stalks, then promptly gagged it all up. “He likes to settle his stomach after eating outside,” Dyson said. “That’s probably why he went after you. He wasn’t feeling right.”

  “He went after me because he’s tired of grass.”

  “Barney was living here before us,” Dyson said. “This is more his property than ours, Sasha, and we need to show him respect.” He wiped up the vomit using a dish sponge.

  There were no interior walls in the cabin; a thin blue rug in the living room marked a divide from the kitchen. The kitchen table was latched upright against the wall. Its underside served as a chalkboard. Dyson had marked it with squiggles that looked like DNA strands. In the living room, a cream-colored love seat sat across from a wooden trunk—four mugs of dreggy coffee rested atop. Yellow legal pad sheets covered in looping script were push-pinned into the walls. I read what appeared to be names: Randy Dent, Peter Minston, Gerry Simpatico.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “It’s small. It’s barely a flick of dust. And this is where I expect two people to live? Yikes. I hear you.” I hadn’t been thinking this until he said it. “But we need to practice economy and restraint if we’re going to pass these ideas on to the men. We can’t prioritize our comforts over theirs. That’s how cults fall apart.”

  “We’re not living in sheds,” I said.

  “I’d feel terrible if I made you live in a shed. It wouldn’t be right—after all you’ve been through these last couple months.” He slipped into the bathroom and returned with a bandage, flattened it over the wound on my hand. “I’ve taken care of you, by the way. Don’t think I’d let you go wanting. Everything you need’s in the bathroom. Toothbrush, toothpaste, soaps, and all that.” He leaned close. “I even got you covered for when you get your, um…”

  “What size did you get?”

  He reddened. “We can always get more.”

  “I’m joking,” I said.

  “I know you’re joking,” he said. “But don’t think I’m one of those men who don’t know about that. I know there are different sizes. So if you need a different size you can just tell me. Like I said: I’m not one of those men.”

  “You mean like the men coming here,” I teased.

  “Let me show you the best part of the property.” He led me outside to an oblong pond tucked behind the cabin. The surrounding trees reflected in the surface as if bowing down for a drink. “It’s almost too pretty to swim in,” he said. “It’s so pristine.”

  I’d fractured my skull diving into a pool as a child, and the trauma made me wary of water. Nearly twenty years had passed since I’d last been swimming. This pond didn’t seem worth breaking the streak. I heaved a stone in the water, senselessly petulant.

  Dyson undressed to his boxers. Ribs ringed out around his heart, though daily laps in the pond had thickened his shoulders. It was as if his body had been assembled from leftover parts: the muscular shoulders stacked over a sunken stomach, his cable-thin legs lashing down from inside his boxers. The blue tinge of his skin made me worry. He was unhealthy. And I knew he’d never admit it.

  I told him I wasn’t in the mood to swim.

  “Just a quick dip,” he said. “The water’s too perfect to stay on the shore.”

  “Don’t be one of those men.”

  “I’m trying to help you relax,” he said, in a tone of righteous confusion. He waved without looking, then entered the pond.

  I dunked my feet in the cool sludge of the water. The birds sang. Wind rustled the branches. Cassandra would have loved this place—I’m sitting inside of a painting, I imagined her saying. Blake skated through my mind, too. I was reminded of a woodsy sexcation we’d taken shortly before we broke up, back when I assumed a future for us. I took a photo of the trees reflected in the pond, then a photo of the forest, then one of Dyson, one of me, though I deleted that one. For a second, I had service—two bars, enough to let in a flood of threatening messages—but it vanished before I could post the photos. Maybe Dyson was right: I ought to treat my time here like a detox. I ran my unbandaged hand through the water.

  Dyson’s body sliced through the center of the pond like a scalpel splitting a stomach.

  six

  DYSON AND I shared the only bed in the cabin—a plastic queen mattress jammed in a loft above the kitchen. He kicked in his sleep, grumbled through jagged arguments, repeatedly climbed downstairs to hose the toilet. Unenthusiastically, I swallowed a sleeping pill around two in the morning—I hated taking medicine—but my relief was pure and immediate and I woke to the sound of Dyson beating eggs with a fork in a bowl.

  The morning was cool and smoky and sharpened by chattering birds. As he cooked, I sat on the porch flipping through a dog-eared book called The Mask Behind the Mask. His
script danced up the margins. Mostly Amazing! and So true! but sometimes he crammed paragraph-length responses down the sides of a page. I held the book close to my face, angled sideways, upside-down, trying to decode his cramped, illegible notes.

  Dyson stepped outside without me noticing. “McGinley’s a genius,” he said.

  I flinched, dropped the book.

  “He says the problem isn’t that everyone is wearing a mask but that we’re wearing two masks. One for the world and one for ourselves. Imagine coming up with an idea like that?”

  “It seems pretty obvious,” I said.

  “Maybe to someone as brilliant as you.”

  “I’m more interested in your notes.”

  “I don’t want you seeing how stupid I am.” He swapped the book for a plate: a hulking omelet with avocado fanned overtop, cayenne-seasoned potatoes, a petite cup of blackberries. He stepped inside the cabin for a French press, two mugs, and a pitcher of milk. “It’s almond milk,” he said as he poured it into my mug. “I know your program didn’t allow dairy.”

  I thanked him for remembering.

  There had always been something doting about Dyson, a motherly impulse toward self-sacrifice at once flattering and distressing. During our senior year of high school, he hosted what he called “Family Dinners” for me and his drama club friends on Friday nights. His father had died that summer. His mother was still stunted with grief. She spent her Fridays pacing in her bedroom as she listened to audiobooks about crystal reincarnation. Her footsteps slapped through the thin ceiling of the dining room. The drama club kids called her “Bertha,” after the madwoman in the attic in Wide Sargasso Sea, which we’d recently read in AP English.

  Dyson prepared the meals alone in the kitchen, listening to music through headphones as the drama club kids and I hung out in the dining room drinking cocktails. The others always arrived late, grinning at jokes they’d chiseled out in the car but wouldn’t repeat in the house. I suspect they found these dinners ridiculous and attended only for the chance to drink where it was condoned. Although Dyson hosted and cooked, the dinners could not have succeeded without my normalizing presence. During cocktail hour, I worked to convince the others this was a regular Friday night party, however eccentric, and not Dyson’s attempt to fill the crater his father’s death had left in his family.

  Before eating, he liked to make a “toast to the family.” He would stand and tap his glass with a knife, then say something like, “Your mother and I love having you here,” his tone uncannily taut between jest and sincerity, before naming specific things he appreciated about us. We applauded his toasts out of respect for his grief and out of our own selfish desires to eat the food he prepared—food that Dyson never ate out of fear of putting on weight.

  Though provincial by birth, we all considered ourselves the most cultured teenagers in our town, the ones refined enough to be embarrassed by our provincialism and desperate for more civilized lives. We listened to NPR in our cars and drove forty minutes for sushi—though we ate only California rolls. We memorized the dates of exhibits at the Tate Modern and Louvre and wistfully regretted missing them. We wished we had money to go see the new show in the city, the one reviewed in the Times. We considered taking up smoking. We considered snorting cocaine. We watched films in translation and argued over what they meant and agreed they didn’t mean anything: that was the point! We longed for ennui and weariness, but what we felt was a deep, gullible passion for anywhere else splashing inside us like a puppy in a pool.

  Dyson’s dinners offered outlets for these urges. Neglectful parenting had made him an adventurous cook. He ripped recipes from sophisticated international cookbooks, bought spices online to make dishes we couldn’t pronounce. His beef filets were served luxuriously rare, flooded with blood and peppered to perfection; he caramelized cauliflower in the broiler, shaved pistachio dust overtop; on an icy Friday in November, he made a kimchi stew so spicy we glugged a whole gallon of milk to lessen the burn, though we found the burning sensation nourishing and traditional, so we returned our spoons to the bowl; he slathered rich, delicate cream sauces over linguine and pillows of chicken, parsley fanned at the edge. We paired the dishes with appropriate wines (purchased by Dyson’s mother) and drank just enough to get tipsy, like sophisticated adults, discussing one-act plays the drama kids longed to perform. Joining Dyson’s fantasy family was a worthwhile price to escape from the families we had.

  The omelet he made for me, that first morning at The Atmosphere, was simple but delicately fluffy, the peppers, onions, and spinach not a smidge overcooked. I ate in a daze of hunger without realizing he didn’t have an omelet of his own. I apologized for not waiting.

  “I have mine,” he said. Slim wafers were stacked on a napkin on his side of the table. “In the mornings, I try to stay light. It helps me think.” He dunked a wafer in coffee and brought the dripping disk to his mouth.

  * * *

  Later that morning, during Dyson’s daily swim, I hunted for service deep in the woods. I told myself I was taking a forest bath to empty my mind—and I would tell Dyson this, too. I wanted to make my body permeable, to blend with the branches and soil and birdsong and sun until I dissolved into my surroundings, past and present and future.

  There was a small snuffed fire near the shore of the pond. We’d roasted marshmallows last night, and my hair still smelled maddeningly of woodsmoke. Dyson had downed an unusual number of marshmallows, nearly a full bag, often without even roasting them, stuffing his mouth like a science experiment—but, as I suspected, a mound of spit-out marshmallows was piled in the dirt. My chest tightened with guilt. I kicked leaves over the mound, covered it fully. Marshmallows are pure sugar, I assured myself. Dyson’s doing what’s right for his body.

  At the edge of the woods, the tree line loosened, cars zippered past on the road. A carnival of notifications flashed on my phone: photos of American-flag-painted Uzis and half-erect cocks and fully erect cocks and my body teetering from the loop of a noose made from an American flag and my face painted like a clown and my face inside a large bowl of blood and messages reading U suk and die and fuck yourself with a fire. Plus an ocean of voicemails promising to kill everyone I had ever loved if I didn’t kill myself first.

  No familiar names interrupted the clutter of threats. Even after three months of silence, I remained fastened to the hope that someone would apologize to me: Cassandra or Blake, preferably, but I would’ve settled for a former subscriber. Yes, I had Dyson, the one person who had come looking for me, and though I was grateful for his support, it didn’t compare to Cassandra’s future remorse. I continued scanning the messages for familiar names despite how frightened the messages made me feel, because not reading meant resigning myself to the silence. Resignation, I told my clients, is a terminal illness. It spares nothing once it invades.

  A man’s voice called, “Hello!” He was too far away to see clearly.

  I wore only running shorts and a loose gray sweatshirt. The closest thing to a weapon I had was my phone. I ducked behind a tree and clenched my phone like a rock, ready to fling it.

  The man crunched out of a thicket of trees holding a rifle over his head. He wore corduroy pants and a red windbreaker. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I’m not looking for trouble. This is a peace-seeking mission.” He had a pale, panicked face, his hair tucked under a mucked white cap. He extended his hand for a shake; the rifle remained in his left. “Art Flemings, chief of the fire crew in Johnsonburg, town comptroller, and deputy treasurer.”

  I did not take his hand.

  “I’m a good guy, is what I’m saying.”

  “You’re on my property,” I said.

  “Aggression is nobody’s friend,” he said.

  “You’re holding a gun.”

  “Because I’m a good guy.” He set the gun in the dirt. “That better?”

  I nodded.

  “Someone reported a fire out here yesterday. When people smell fire we need to inspect it. That’s t
he job of the law.”

  “Must’ve been someone else’s fire,” I said.

  “If you’re in trouble, you can tell me.” He took a step closer.

  “Why would I tell you?”

  “Because I took an oath.” He put his hand over his heart. “Is anyone with you?”

  “Me!” Dyson jogged up from behind, shirtless, with water dripping from his basketball shorts. He put an arm around my shoulder. I wrapped one across his bare waist, instinctively looking for comfort before I drew it away. “You’re Art, right? I’m Dyson Layne. We met at the community center a few months back.”

  Art cautiously shook his hand. “I’m a little fuzzy,” he said.

  “We didn’t say much—I’m not sure I even gave you my name.”

  I assumed the two men had never actually met—Dyson was skilled at contriving stories like this—and I liked sitting front row at a show Art didn’t know he was in.

  “Can I ask what you’re doing out here?”

  “Art, I love that you asked. I’d like nothing better than to tell you. Transparency is my middle name. Capital T-R-A-N-S-P-A-R-E-N-C-Y.” He patted Art on the shoulder. Art stiffened. “We’re neighbors after all. Art: my friend and I are spending some quality time in a cabin to escape metropolitan living.”

  “You’re from the city?” Art said city like it was a curse word.

  “We grew up in a town a lot like Johnsonburg.” He named our hometown. Art claimed to know it. “But for the last ten years, I’ve been stuck in L.A. My friend is here out of Hoboken.” Dyson inhaled deeply, nostrils flaring like parachutes. “Now we’re leaving those cities behind. We’re doing a detox.”

  “Johnsonburg’s the place to do it,” said Art.

  “My grandparents left me this land a few years ago,” Dyson said. “And I’m kicking myself for waiting so long to get out here.”

  Art wanted to know if it was just us camping.

  “You might see a few more of us around in the coming weeks. I explained it all when we met. She and I run a business.”