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

Go bug Dyson, he answered. He always put up with your shit.

Go exploit our relationship to boost your career, I texted. Followed by three middle-finger emojis.

Dyson: my oldest and steadiest friend. He of unconditional love, he who would assure me that everything was fine, he who would tell my boss and Blake and Cassandra and the men on the sidewalk all to go jump off a cliff. But it seemed like cheating to call him—I wanted to earn encouragement, for someone who no longer liked me to lift me out of the dirt. Once it became clear that no such person would emerge, I dialed Dyson’s number. He didn’t answer. I called him again and again and again and again and again and again.

Say it loud! Say it clear! Sasha is not welcome here!

That afternoon, four new protestors relieved the men and stood near my window. I watched this afternoon crew watching me, and I hoped that they might show signs of exhaustion or boredom. But they chanted with the vigor of the rested.

When not watching them I watched myself: I tracked my follower count. I had plummeted to the high hundreds over two weeks; with every refresh, twenty more followers would vanish. “Good riddance,” I said, as if they were stowaways heaved off a boat, as if I wouldn’t have begged them to come back.

I texted Dyson. I emailed him. I DMed him. I tagged him. I called his childhood home, but a new family’s child picked up. “Why won’t he answer my calls?” I asked the child. The child handed the phone to his parents.

Say it loud! Say it clear! Sasha is not welcome here!

The thought of fleeing my apartment flitted into my head and then out. There was nowhere to go. My parents were out of my life. I had no siblings. So I stayed put. Peering out my windows, buzzing in deliverymen who left my food in the stairwell—as I’d instructed—burning through savings, watching daytime TV, waiting for the world to forget me, for the men outside to disperse.

Late one morning in April, two months after the first men had arrived, an eviction notice was slid under my door. My presence was causing undue stress to the other tenants. They had grown tired of the protestors. The restraining orders I filed never bore out—because I didn’t even know the men’s names. The super called the police, but the protestors knew their rights: the sidewalks were public; the men never obstructed pedestrian traffic. And they knew the police. In fact, some of them probably were police, trading shifts at the precinct for shifts at my building, badges tucked in their jeans.

My neighbors’ distress didn’t surprise me. This was New Jersey, after all, home to the insecure and impressionable. Jersey was a land of lacking, the slow-footed little sibling to Manhattan: always never enough. My neighbors were tame, small-hearted gentrifiers who cared deeply about property value. Middle-aged men protesting their building eroded the image they had sought to cultivate and present. I was lucky I’d been able to stay as long as I had.

Say it loud! Say it clear! Sasha is not welcome here!

“You won!” I yelled at my window.

Say it loud! Say it clear! Sasha is not welcome here!

Someone knocked on my door. I tightened my arms over my chest. “Who is it?” I asked, too softly for the knocker to hear. Another knock: faster, heavier. I imagined thick-wristed movers lugging my stuff to a dumpster. Or worse: the protestors had entered the building, and now they would drag me by my feet through the halls. The knocking intensified to pounding, then unbearable beating.

I flung open the door. “Take everything! I don’t deserve any of it!” After two months alone, resentment and fear had made me prone to exclamations of woe.

On the other side of the door was a flame, and beneath it a single pink candle, beneath the candle a carnival cupcake, and beneath the cupcake two cupped hands. It was Dyson.

“Happy Twenty-Ninth,” he said. More than a year had passed since we’d seen each other—dinner, two Christmases ago—and his slenderness startled me. Veins terrained his arms. His neck was like a delicate branch. Under his familiar freckles, his cheeks appeared melon-balled, milky. Between his teeth pistoned peppermint gum so potent it made my nose tingle. His brown hair was buzzed to the scalp—so unlike the precisely styled, expensive haircuts he had worn in L.A.—which gave him a farm-boyish beauty, haunted, naïve. He wore a thick white T-shirt, dark jeans, no belt, and black Pumas—a picture of contrived effortlessness.

He was the last person I wanted to see, and the only person I wanted to see.

I licked my fingers, then snuffed the flame of the candle with them. “You’re two days late.”

“So you’re not inviting me in.”

I hammered a fist on his chest. “I’ll invite you in when you answer my calls.”

“Let me in and I’ll explain.”

“Explain what? That you’re done with me? Like everyone else? I already know that, Dyson. You’ve made that perfectly clear.”

He set the cupcake down in the hallway, laid his hands on my shoulders. “Oh, Sasha,” he said. It had been months since I’d heard my name spoken with tenderness. His hands slipped from my shoulders to my back and I wrapped my arms around him, ran a finger up the mountain range of his spine. The last person I had hugged was Cassandra—a good-bye hug before I taped an interview—and I’d spent the intervening months despondent over her refusal to see me. As I held Dyson and was held by him, my animosity loosened and fell like a towel to the floor.

I tidied the apartment: gathering clamshell to-go boxes stacked into a tower, dusty clusters of hair, sticky forks strewn over the floor. There was a smell, too, though I couldn’t smell it. Dyson described it as socky. Later, he told me he had nearly buckled from sadness upon seeing my situation. Perhaps