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

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.

“Randy,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so angry.”

“I should talk to them.” He stood but tumbled back down.

“Do you want to end up like Barney?”

“I never should’ve let it get so bad.”

“We need to escape, Dyson. Tonight.”

“If we escape they’ll find us eventually.”

“They’ll kill you if we stay,” I said. I didn’t know how else to convince him to leave.

“Not just me,” he said. “They’re gonna kill both of us.”

“That’s why we need to get moving,” I said. “I’ll pack our bags.”

“I loved them. I really did love them. I do. Still.” He let his head sink to his chest. “They really want me dead?”

I squeezed next to him on the couch. “That’s the impression I got from Randy.”

“Then we need to beat them to it,” he said.

I flinched away. “We can’t possibly kill them,” I said. “We’re not murderers.”

“No.” He lifted his face so his eyes were level with mine, our noses nearly touching. He knitted his fingers in mine. “We need to kill me.”

thirty-seven

“REMEMBER LUCAS DEVRY,” said Dyson.

“Don’t make me,” I said.

Dyson and I were digging a grave for Barney behind the cabin. Sweat dripped from our elbows, made mud of our dirt-crusted palms.

“I mean how people treated him after he died,” said Dyson. “Everyone who hated him made him a martyr. The same thing will happen to me. Our men are sentimental. If they think I’m dead, they’ll forgive me. They’ll saint me. They’re not the type to speak ill of the dead.”

The plan to fake Dyson’s death assumed the men were still furious at him. I could’ve told him what Randy had told me: he and the others wanted to reconcile. In a perfect world, we might have made such an arrangement with the men. In a perfect world, I would not have needed to exaggerate the extent of their anger. I didn’t lie to Dyson, exactly. I didn’t manipulate him. Simply: I saw past the men’s surface emotions. Randy didn’t want to make peace with Dyson. The sheds were burning. The bus tires were slashed. Barney was dead. They couldn’t hold a civil conversation with the man who’d stolen their money. Dyson had trapped them in the woods. He let Art Flemings arrest Leon and beat him. He left Peter to die. He left Benjamin, Kevin, and David to die. He made a ritual of refusing their pleas for forgiveness. I knew what would happen if Dyson begged them for mercy. Our men may have been sentimental, but they were not the type to forget.

“As for The Atmosphere,” he said. He placed the shoebox containing Barney into the earth. “I want you to promise me you’ll keep it running.”

“I’ll take it as far as I can,” I assured him. I couldn’t imagine The Atmosphere lasting more than a week once he left. “We’ll implement routine expressions of deference to our fallen, benevolent leader. L. Ron Hubbard. Joseph Smith. Dyson Layne.”

“I’ll need a shrine,” he said.

I laughed. He didn’t.

“Sure,” I told him. “We’ll make you a shrine—something classy.”

“It needs to be gaudy,” he said. “Repulsively gaudy.”

As we worked, we imagined the cheesiest possible shrines: Dyson riding a horse, Dyson riding two horses, Dyson meditating on top of a cloud, Dyson kneeling to spoon-feed bran flakes to a middle-aged man. His death was harder to imagine. That evening, we burned through a dozen candles—Dyson believed they aided his thinking—as we traded ideas for his death.

“Maybe you get attacked by a mugger,” I said.

“What mugger?” he said. “In the woods? We’d need too much blood, anyway. What about a car accident? We’ll drive the hatchback off the highway.”

“You’ll need a body,” I said.

“Maybe we drive it into the ocean. Maybe my body gets eaten by sharks.” His ideas were less practical than mine. They were more attention-grabbing, riskier.

He proposed heart failure on the bathroom floor. “I’ve been—as you know. And people have—” He stuck out his tongue, clenched his eyes closed. “In the past from it. Let’s say you find me in the bathroom already dead. The men would believe it.”

“And your body?”

“I’ll slow down my breathing. Play dead. Daniel Day-Lewis could do it for hours.”

I nodded as if seriously considering the idea.

“I’ve been practicing,” he said. He lay chest down on the floor. His breaths welled up through his back; his nostrils flared. After a few minutes, he jumped to a stand. “Could you tell?”

“That was amazing,” I lied. If Dyson had to die, it seemed only fair to let him die believing in his undeniable talent. But I worried the men would see through the performance. Despite my anger—over Peter, over the money, over just about everything else at The Atmosphere—I couldn’t shake my guilt-ridden impulse to protect him. The night I found him draped over the toilet, in the dorm bathroom, Dyson had become my responsibility. He had no one else to keep him safe. And I hated myself for already failing him once. “But once the men find your body,” I said, “no matter how good you are at playing dead, they’ll want to bury you.”

“We’ll build an underground breathing device. A series of tubes or something.” He made a wavelike gesture with his arm. “You’ll send in water and food. A few days later you dig me out, fill up the grave.” He wanted desperately to prove himself as an actor one final time.

But if the men noticed him breathing? If they dropped him, caused him to shriek in agony? How might they react if the scheme fell apart? Heart failure was too risky, I decided. Our ideas grew progressively worse as the day dragged on. Eventually Dyson—frustrated and blocked, groggy after eating another package of cookies—passed out on the couch.

I walked where I always walked: in the sliver of service.