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

I reminded him that I wasn’t sick. I hadn’t come here to detox—but to make Blake and Cassandra jealous. “Just because you’re not sick,” Dyson said, “doesn’t mean you couldn’t be healthier.” He smirked like he’d said something profound, then went to the barn to unload supplies. I took photos of The Atmosphere: its rugged ugliness, the gaudy sheds, the paint-chipped barn, the grass thirsty for water, the generator, sparrows looping through the sky. My service flashed in and out, never long enough to post anything. But it gave me hope there was signal somewhere on the property.

Inside the barn, lightbulbs dangled from frayed cords attached to the ceiling. Paint scent fattened the air. Plywood boards and power tools huddled in a corner—supplies to build the next round of sheds. Close to the door was a plastic picnic table “big enough to fit thirty men!” Dyson shouted. He stood on the kitchen and pantry side of the barn—behind a freshly painted black metal fence that split the room down the center. I stepped through the door in the fence. Dyson was stocking the shelves with health foods: almonds, alternative milks, seaweed sheets, gluten-free pastas, dried beans, bran flakes, and canned vegetables.

“Not much food for twelve men,” I said.

“That’s what sets us apart from all those other retreats for men, those corporate scams,” he said. “We start at the stomach. If we want to change men, we need to change how they eat. Teaching boys to eat ‘like men’ teaches them to find self-worth in consumption. They’re conditioned to consume excessively, to ignore boundaries, to pig out, to scarf down. To take without considering cost for themselves and for others. And what happens next?” He tapped his forehead. “Consumption of resources, of money, of time, and of land. Not anymore.”

“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