The Atmospherians

by Alex McElroy

  The crowd stomped and whistled and wept. Fists pumped. Hats were thrown in the air. My name was chanted. Roger pulled me in for a side hug. “You gotta love her,” he said.

  I hurried out of the ballroom. Investors gave me thumbs-up as I passed. Some leaned out of their chairs to stretch for high fives, and, unthinkingly, I tapped my hand against theirs.

  Even in my apartment, I could hear the audience cheering. I vomited in the kitchen sink, longing for every atom inside me to dissolve into nothing.

  Dyson had left me a voicemail during the speech. I listened to it on speaker as I rinsed out my mouth. His voice was a fractured whisper:

  Life must be amazing at DAM. Things are different here. The nights are sour. I’ve tried something new in the days—something I’ve always wanted to try. But the men haven’t adjusted. Randy says hi. Gerry says hi. The doctor says hi. Everyone says it. You know I didn’t want you to leave, but I understood. But now, we need you to return. I’m sorry. I know you won’t and you can’t. You shouldn’t. I don’t expect you to return. Why should you return? But you were this place. I mean we were this place. Mostly it was you. It was us. And I miss having our—

  A loud crack interrupted him. Fuck, he said. Twigs snapped as he sprinted through the woods, the phone full of his breathing. The voicemail ended.

  Champagne and adrenaline swelled my heart with sentimentality. The pleading need in his voice made me want to return to him. I wanted what I always wanted from Dyson: for him to need me to save him, to show him how to live. Dyson never wanted to hurt me—unlike Cassandra. I knew he hadn’t wanted to hurt Peter, either. Dyson wasn’t a killer. He wasn’t cruel. He was beleaguered by grief and incompetence—and he needed me. More than Roger needed me, more than Cassandra, more than Blake, more than my clients ever had.

  I loaded clothes and soaps into a suitcase. The closest exit was on the other side of the ballroom. Applause reverberated through the building as I dragged my suitcase through the halls. Curious, I peeked inside the ballroom. The guests were watching Mistake Tent recordings.

  I continued to the kitchen. Cater-waiters huddled around a tub of bussed plates stuffing leftovers into their pockets and aprons and mouths.

  “We’re allowed to do this,” said a redheaded woman. Sauce spotted her chin.

  “What size do you wear?” I asked her.

  “If you’re calling me fat,” she said, “I’m no bigger than you.”

  “I’ve got a suitcase full of designer clothes for you if you drive me to the airport.”

  “Prove it,” she said.

  I unzipped my suitcase. She picked through the dresses, nodded approval. “You’re the woman from the video,” she said.

  “Does that mean you won’t drive me?” I asked.

  “That means we better go out the back,” she said. And I followed her.

  thirty-five

  GROCERIES WERE STACKED across the back seat of Dyson’s car. He quivered with nervous energy, rapping the wheel and grimacing. Decades of stress had seized his face since I’d last seen him: gray hairs weaved through his eyebrows, and his neck was chicken-like, wrinkled.

  The past week had made claims to my youth and dignity. I spent a significant chunk of the flight—which I’d charged to a credit card Roger provided—stretching my face in the bathroom, fending off impatient knocks by responding, I’m shitting. My cheeks always appeared greasy and crinkled in those mirrors, a prank of the light, but they were even greasier, even more crinkled, on this trip. Blackheads peppered my nose; bumpy irritations clustered under my eyes. I plucked gray hairs from my scalp. I blamed Roger for these developments. Then I blamed grief. Finally: Dyson. I remained in the bathroom until the flight attendants forced me out for landing.

  “How was your… DAM?” Dyson asked in the car.

  “Thank you for picking me up,” I said, diplomatic and stern. I wished I could be grateful for Dyson, but that seemed impossible now. “I’m not here because I want to be here.”

  “I read an article about it,” he said. “Something about your speech making investors drop out. They don’t want to be associated with DAM. They’re delaying the launch. They might never launch. What the hell did you say to them?”

  “Please don’t pretend you haven’t already watched it.”

  “I understand completely if you don’t want to talk,” he said. “I couldn’t understand more. And I respect that. I know you need privacy. I know you’re furious at me. You have every right to be angry. You need your silence. I get it. But there are some things—since you’re coming back—some things I should warn you about.”

  I drooped my head into the seat belt as I listened along.

  The men had become paranoid after the other men’s deaths, and my sudden absence only made them angrier, more suspicious. One evening, as Dyson prepared the Family Dinner, the men had charged through the fence and raided the pantry. They ate together—excluding Dyson—in one of the sheds. No one Emptied Out. They dug up Peter’s vegetable garden the following morning—for sport, it seemed, just to cause trouble—and set fire to three of the sheds before slashing the bus tires, including the spares. Dyson had hidden in the cabin the last three days, living off aging cabbage-and-vinegar slaw and wafers, and Barney’s company.

  Now the scent of charred wood seeped through the windows as we entered into camp. Flames engulfed a fourth shed, splashing light over the grass, though none of the men appeared in the light. Dyson parked close to the path that led to the cabin. He cut the engine. “Dyyyyyyssssoooon!” the men bellowed. “Dyson, what have you brought us?”

  “Grab as much as you can.” He nodded at the back seat. “And run.”

  We sprinted to the cabin with bags of junk food bulked in our arms. The lights inside were lit. We unloaded the food in the kitchen. We checked the bathroom and closet for men. We checked inside the trunk and under the sink. We barricaded the couch against the door.

  Dyson whistled for Barney. “Don’t be scared,” he said. His voice was tippy with fear. He shook a bag of treats, but the cat didn’t come. He shoved the couch aside, hollered Barney’s name from the porch. “Barney boy, come get your dinner!”

  I climbed upstairs for a change of clothes. The bed had been crisply made—comforter tucked beneath the mattress, pillows square at the head—and in the center lay Barney, a pair of flies looping above his body. I covered my nose and mouth to keep from gagging.

  Dyson came back inside. “Barney baby!” he yelled. “I owe you a scratch on the head.”

  “I found him,” I said.

  Dyson remained in the loft with Barney for nearly an hour. I huddled on the couch with my knees to my chest, listening for agonized wailing, waiting for Dyson to curse out the men—even my dislike of Barney couldn’t keep me from crying. Dyson’s silence only heightened my pain. He climbed downstairs with Barney cradled in one arm. Bloody fur stuck to his T-shirt. He washed the cat in the sink, his face as blank as a sheet of steel. Afterward, he toweled Barney dry at the kitchen table, humming a tune and shivering. His grief tugged a loose thread of my anger, unraveled it all. I had never seen him so genuinely hurting.

  He joined me on the couch and placed Barney between us.

  I scooted away until I was practically curled over the armrest. “Say something,” I said. “You’re freaking me out.”

  He retrieved an unopened bottle of rum from inside the trunk and drank from it. I drank from the bottle after he passed it to me. It was cheap rum, difficult to keep from spitting out.

  He drank again and said, “They’re going to kill us.”

  “They should leave if they hate you so much.”

  “They can’t leave,” he said. “Not yet.”

  “They can’t possibly be so loyal to you.”

  “It’s not about loyalty,” he said. “It’s about money.” Before The Atmosphere started, when Dyson collected enrollment fees from the men, they each paid as much as they could—for most, it wasn’t much, but it was all they had, often th
eir entire savings or the sum they received from selling a house. Their money had funded The Atmosphere. “The building materials, the food, their clothes. I didn’t have the cash to pay for that on my own.”

  “You couldn’t have spent that much on this place.”

  “I didn’t spend it all on The Atmosphere,” he said.

  “Then pay them back,” I said. The solution couldn’t be any more obvious.

  “I invested it.”

  “In what?”

  “In you,” he said.

  It took me a second to understand what he meant. Once I did, though, I screamed into my hands. “Give me that,” I said. I took a long pull from the bottle, three full glugs, like a pirate.

  “DAM seemed like it would thrive for decades,” he said. “Especially with you working there. They had a link to invest on their website. A bad sign, now that I think about it. They must’ve been starved for funding. But it seemed legitimate. I figured I’d recoup the enrollment money in no time, either to pay the men back or keep The Atmosphere running.” He rubbed Barney’s belly as he spoke. “This is why you’re the visionary. Between us: you’re the one who can lead. I thought I had it in me, but now it’s obvious that I don’t.”

  “I refuse to feel bad for you,” I said.

  “I just wanted to help them. I wanted to love them and they murdered my cat.” He scratched behind Barney’s ears.

  I swiped his hand away. “You’re gonna catch something,” I said.

  “And now they’re coming for us. They’ll kill us because of me.”

  “Self-pity won’t help anything,” I said. Though I was swimming in self-pity and loathing. I wanted to punish myself for lashing out at the investors. I should’ve quietly slipped out the back. I should’ve never returned to the camp—but I needed to be here. Dyson needed me here. He could never untangle himself from this mess on his own.

  Most of us want to be more than who we are. We want to exceed our conditioning. Dyson wanted this for himself and for the Atmospherians, for them to evolve into kinder, gentler men, men untroubled by rage. For years, I tried to obtain this for myself. ABANDON was founded on the belief that women should ignore the toxic impulse toward self-hatred and sacrifice. Women deserved to be more than who we were told to become. Yet here I was, correcting the blunders of men, correcting those very men, and finding in this an unsettling sense of purpose and drive. Perhaps this is because I loved Dyson. I still felt responsible for his heart attack when we were in college, though none of that was my fault. I still cared for the sad boy who invited me to his house to watch bootleg movies. Perhaps if he had been anyone else—if Dyson had been some other man, some man off the street, had he been Blake Dayes, or Randy, had he been Lucas Devry—I would have left him to fend for himself. I like to believe this is true.

  Dyson grabbed a package of Oreos off the floor. “We’ll give them what’s left of the money,” he said as he mashed a small stack of cookies into his mouth. “I’ll pay back the difference in time.” Two more cookies. “And they return to their lives.” Three more. “And you return to yours and never have to see me again.”

  “They sold their houses,” I told him. “They have nothing left but this life.”

  “They can have the property.”

  “You’ll be lucky if they don’t sue you.”

  “I can’t believe I did this.”

  “You were trying to help them,” I said. I needed to calm him down, for his safety and mine. “You were trying to help me.”

  “I mean this.” He kicked the empty Oreo tray. “I haven’t eaten junk for years—and now… a whole package. I can feel it inside me, Sasha. I feel so disgusting—so stupid and fat.” We raced to the bathroom and I reached the toilet before him, sat on the lid.

  “You really want me to suffer?”

  “I want you to sit with this feeling,” I said. “No matter how much it hurts.”

  He grabbed a bottle of melatonin from the medicine cabinet and shook it. There couldn’t have been more than five pills inside. He swallowed them all and unloaded a stuttering cough, hand planted over his heart, as if auditioning for a soap opera.

  “You don’t get to sleep through this,” I said. I trailed him to the living room and slapped his face to keep him awake. “You don’t get to leave me alone with the men anymore.”

  “You’re so much stronger than me,” he mumbled. He stretched out on the couch with Barney clutched to his chest. No one had ever been more dramatic. “I’ll be with you shortly, my baby,” he said to the cat. “This life wasn’t made for creatures like us.”

  “The pills won’t even kill you!” I shouted.

  He dissolved into slumber.

  thirty-six

  I CRACKED OPEN the door.

  “Welcome back,” Randy said from the porch. His tracksuit sleeves were rolled to his biceps. His hair was slicked to the left with canola oil. He reeked of fire and meat.

  Dyson snored on the couch. I joined Randy outside and shut the door behind me.

  “We left you a present upstairs.” He flashed a teeth-gritted snarl meant to intimidate me.

  It worked how he wanted it to. But I covered my mouth to hide my fear. “Very threatening, Randy. I see you men haven’t learned anything since you got here.”

  He chewed his cheek and tilted back on his heels. “Tell Dyson we need our money back.”

  “What do you plan to do with it?”

  “I’d give it to charity. A charity for unfortunate women. The most unfortunate women I can imagine.” He mimed a hat tip. “To prove to you how much I’ve learned from your lessons.”

  “You entrusted your money to Dyson. You entrusted it to The Atmosphere. A group that I manage on a day-to-day basis. Therefore, you entrusted it to me, and what I want to know, Randy, is why you deserve the money more than the group?”

  “I need to start a new life.”

  “You’re not ready for that. This whole thing—”

  “What thing?”

  “This thing with murdering an innocent cat, blackmailing me, setting fire to sheds, and threatening Dyson. You’re no helpless victim. You chose to join this community, and now you want out because you regret the choices you made. Well, that’s bullshit, Randy. You need to live with your decisions. That’s what’s wrong with all of you here. You’ve never had to deal with the consequences of your decisions. But that changes today.”

  Randy stood there breathing at me like a dog on a chain. Dyson’s snoring grew louder. I felt more alone than ever here. All these trees, all the leaves and lichen and stones, and not one thing could protect me. I folded my hands together and smiled impatiently. Condescension seemed like my most potent defense.

  “Dyson used to be there for us,” he said.

  “Heartbreaking.”

  “He used to listen, and now he’s so wrapped in his plans to expand.”

  “Would you rather The Atmosphere fall apart?”

  “I’d rather he gives us what he promised us: jobs, financial support.”

  “Go apply for a job. Surely you’re a better candidate now.”

  His voice deepened with importance. “Dyson used to be there for us.”

  “You’ve told me,” I said. “Now tell me how you plan to move forward. Do you plan to pity yourself and wish the world were kinder to you? Do you plan to moan about your broken relationship with Dyson? You’ve been here over four months. You’ve been participating in therapy for nearly a year, yet you have shown minimal emotional growth.”

  “You’re a bully,” he said. “You’re bullying me just like you bullied that man.”

  “What a waste of potential.” I stared through him. The wind bent the branches of trees at his back. Each second of silence seemed to signal I had done something wrong, that Randy, tonguing his cheek and bunching his fists, was preparing to lunge for my neck.

  When he came for me, though, he came crumpled and slumped. He wept into my shoulder, desperate for touch. “This has been so much harder than I expecte
d.”

  I eased him away from me. “Let it out,” I muttered. “Let it out.”

  He wiped his eyes. “I want things to go back to normal.”

  “Those days are over—you need to accept that.”

  “We want the old Dyson back.”

  Dyson stirred on the couch, calling my name.

  I leaned close to Randy. “Listen, I understand completely. I miss the old Dyson, too. We do need him back. And I’m going to do everything I can to restore him to his previous form. But I need you to take control of the camp.”

  Randy asked if Dyson was inside.

  I snapped for his attention. “Can you do that?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think I can do that.”

  “You think you can or you can?”

  “I can. Absolutely,” he said. “You’ve made the right choice.” He saluted me and scrambled into the forest.

  Dyson called for me again. I remained on the porch wondering what to tell him. Randy didn’t really want the old Dyson back—despite what he said. He wanted to skip backwards in time and start over. The old Dyson only existed in Randy’s sentimental memories. If the two men sat down together—even with the intention to work everything out—it could only end in disappointment. More likely, in tragedy.

  I entered the cabin planning to tell Dyson we needed to run.

  He sat up with one arm draped over the back of the couch for support. “You were talking to someone,” he mumbled. His words were heavy with sleep.