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

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