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

An afternoon chill lifted the hair on my arms. My phone lit up with messages from Roger and from reporters and, of course, from Cassandra. “You’re the reason I’m here!” I yelled at my phone in a moment of tremendous self-pity. I strangled the phone. I flung it into the water, as if I were starring in a movie, but it wasn’t a movie and I needed my phone and I sprinted into the pond, spurred by regret. The phone hadn’t traveled far. Water bubbled behind the screen. I tossed it back to the shore and kept swimming.

I had given up swimming after my father moved to Florida. This had begun as a self-imposed punishment—appropriate, I believed—but over time swimming had become something I just didn’t do, like smoking, or painting my nails. But as I paddled deeper into the pond, that day, I was struck by a surreal sensation of being nine years old again, as if only two weeks rather than decades had passed since the incident at the Hensey house. My body refused to acknowledge the passing years. It tried to convince me I was a child again. It hadn’t known this motion—my arms arcing forward, legs slither-kicking—since childhood, and my body had every reason to believe I still was a child, and for brief slices of time I was able to let it convince me of this before my mind interrupted. No! I wasn’t nine, I was twenty-nine, and what would happen to that child couldn’t be changed—Lucas Devry and Blake Dayes and Peter Minston and Cassandra Hanson had already glided through my life like biplanes crop-dusting fields.

Dyson, too, would soon glide out of my life. We agreed to never communicate after his disappearance. It was safer that way. But I hated to imagine the empty shape of that life, and I redirected my attention back on the problem we’d been facing all day: how Dyson would die. I bobbed in the center of the pond and ducked beneath the surface. As I gazed into the endless murk underwater, it occurred to me what needed to happen. I sprung through the surface. The pond widened like the unhinging jaws of a snake.

We scripted Dyson’s drowning that evening. Rather, we scripted my reaction. He wouldn’t need to perform for the men or police or whoever might later ask me what happened to him. He only needed to swim to the shore, grab his duffel bag, hitch a ride on the road, and vanish forever.

I, however, had to dive into the pond wearing my clothes. I had to shriek. I had to see him slip under; I had to see him never come up. We debated whether I should remain in the water long enough for my fingertips to shrivel. We decided I must. I must dive in wearing my shoes to prove the urgency of the situation. I must appear to do everything I could to save him. In the cabin, I practiced shouting for Dyson and weeping, rehearsed my story of desperation and grief.

“You’ll need to be convincing,” he told me. “Even when you’re in the water. If you can convince yourself, you can convince everyone else. Be ready for the men to follow your shouts to the pond. They might see you trying to save me—they need to believe you’re trying to save me.”

His condescension exhausted me. “I’ve been saving you from things all my life,” I snapped. “I more than anyone know how to do it.”

We tumbled easily into fights that final day. I bit my fork a few times at dinner, accidentally, but a bad habit that Dyson had grown to resent. “I’ll be happy to never hear that again,” he said. I sniffed dramatically and waved my hand in front of my nose. “I’m lucky I’ll never smell your B.O.,” I said, though he never smelled very bad. We didn’t fight out of anger. We commented on those things—my fork biting, his B.O.—because soon we would want each other back, even the flaws, and fighting helped convince us we needed to part. It was psychological warfare: not against each other but for each other.

Thinking about our separate futures made my insides shrivel with grief. I had lost people in death—grandparents, pets—but never knew loss stripped of its closure. The closest I’d come was my father—though I knew if he died, someone would tell me. If Dyson died, I would never find out. If he became ill, I would never visit him in the hospital. If he was depressed, tired, looking to vent, we would never discuss it. He would exist for me the way most people alive existed for me: present but unknown. The agony guaranteed by this future seemed reason enough to come clean about the men’s desire to talk—but I believed they would hurt Dyson, or hurt me, if they encountered each other. I was the only one in the camp—including the men—who truly understood how dangerous the men were.

July seventh. The day of the drowning. As Dyson prepared for his death—packing a duffel bag, transferring what little money remained to a personal bank account—I tried to lead the men through a normal morning routine.

They waited for me outside the barn wearing their exercise clothes.

“Let’s only do one lap today,” I said.

“So we’re not gonna talk about this?” Randy said. He swept his arm toward the destruction: the charred remains of the sheds; The Crucible, razed, its mirror shards catching sun in the grass; the mudded, dug-up garden. “We have demands to discuss.”

The men nodded and clapped. A false show of support.

I whistled. I twirled my index finger to start the jog. The men followed me around the clearing. I saw no point in making them do crunches or stretch. At breakfast, I knocked the bran flakes to the floor and stared at the mess with my mouth open. Gerry swept up the flakes.

Dyson waited on the shore of the pond wearing his swim shorts. Goggles hung