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

INSTRUCTIONS

1 Remove your clothes.

2 Think nothing bad about the body you see.

Blair laughed at the stupidity of the instructions. Footsteps grew louder in the hallway. He covered his mouth, but his throat seized. Coughs cluttered his breaths until he was bent over, hacking into his hands. A pair of sneakers appeared beneath the door. It opened. Sasha stood over him. She wore a loose blue dress and black tights. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail. She held his inhaler. She knelt beside him and brought the air to his lips.

Sasha and Randy walked Blair to her office: a frigid concrete room in the basement. Round patterned rugs covered the floor. The office was long rather than wide. Near the entrance were couches, a Zen garden, a fountain shaped like a beehive. Framed articles promoting The Atmosphere hung on one of the long walls, across from a bank of video screens displaying every angle of The Atmosphere.

Blair stared at the screens, rigid with awe and terror.

“It’s my job to pay attention,” said Sasha. “If it’s bothering you.” She thumbed her phone. The screens switched to a clip of the ocean lapping the shores. “That better?”

The waves made him even more uneasy. They eliminated the world beyond this room. But he nodded nonetheless. His powerlessness seemed immense here. He wanted to leave more than he wanted the story about Dyson. There was no story here. Nothing worth dying for. He would apologize to Sasha. He’d promise to not publish anything. He’d never tell anyone he had come here—so long as she let him go.

Her desk hulked at the back of the room. She sat down, directed Blair to one of the two chairs facing her. Randy sat in the other. On her desk were framed photos of her and Dyson together, at least ten years old. Photos of them in college and high school. Young, beaming.

“Perhaps it’s best if you left,” Sasha said, to Randy.

“He’s a hothead,” he replied.

Blair coughed out a laugh, gelatinous from exhaustion.

“He’s less of a threat to me than I am to him.” Sasha smiled at Blair.

Randy saluted her from the door, then stepped into the hallway.

“Sometimes I just wanna…” She gritted her coffee-stained teeth. “You know people like him? Always there. Puppy dogs. Yap-yap-yap.” She made a dog mouth with her hand.

Blair said, “I don’t think I’ve—”

“Hold that thought.” She entered a room behind her desk and emerged a few minutes later wearing sweatpants and a billowy gray T-shirt smudged at the collar. She had rinsed off her makeup. Her face was cratered with pale scars on her forehead and cheeks. Her hair hung loose, in frayed strands. Bluish bags deepened her eyes. Yet her eyes, themselves, had a disquieting intensity that never seemed to lose focus on Blair. “You must be spent,” she said. “Of course you are. You’ve been through so much today—not even a full day—so much trouble.”

“I didn’t mean to cause trouble.”

“Who does?” she said. “We so rarely mean any harm, but at the end of the day, we look back at a field of scorched earth. Friends, lovers, coworkers, siblings—everyone caught in the fire.” She snapped her fingers. “Do you know about me, Blair? What I’ve done?”

He knew she’d been a lifestyle coach—he knew about the man she bullied into killing himself, the preacher, the father of three. “I know what you did to Dyson.”

“Dyson comes later. I have a lot to say about him. But for now, I need a coffee. You?”

His hands were already trembling. But he said, “That sounds great.”

She called Randy. “Two coffees. One black and one…”

“Cream and two sugars.”

She grimaced. “One with cream and two sugars. Thank you.” She hung up. “You know that’ll kill you, right? Sugars and creams. Fifty calories here, there—they add up over time.”

“Don’t try to make me feel bad.”

“I’d never do such a thing.”

“I saw what you make them do… how they… in the food court.”

She shook her head. “Disgusting. A terrible habit. I want our men to be healthy. Eating disorders? That’s not healthy. It’s a holdover from Dyson—you know about Dyson, right?”

“What about him?”

“He’d always felt terrible about his body—and he did terrible things to it, things like you saw in the food court. Randy thinks it’s an homage to him. But Randy’s a fool. That’s why I keep him around. Keep your enemies close? Sure. But keep your fools even closer, right at the top where they can’t get into trouble.”

Randy knocked.

Sasha slipped on a white cashmere sweater she kept in a drawer and inched her chair deeper into the desk, to conceal her sweats. She punched a code into her phone. The door slid up.

Randy carried in two steaming mugs. He seemed like a docile pet, now, nothing like the Randy that Blair had feared in the chamber. “You’re fine in here?” he asked.

“Splendid,” she said, dramatizing her annoyance. “I was just telling Blair about Dyson.”

“His death was a tragedy,” Randy said.

“So unexpected,” said Sasha. She sounded genuinely hurt; her voice even cracked. She thanked Randy in a tone of get out. He got out.

She reached into her desk for a bottle of whiskey and poured a few glugs into her mug.

“The Atmosphere’s dry,” said Blair.

“What’s the point of leading a cult if there aren’t any perks?”

“I knew you were a cult,” he said proudly, as if he’d tricked her into the confession.

She pretended to gasp. “Blair,” she said. “Of course we’re a cult. We’ve been a cult from the start. That was Dyson’s vision for this place. Embrace the cult qualities. Reclaim the word. Hell: you wouldn’t be here if we weren’t a cult.” She shook the whiskey bottle.

He stretched his mug to her. The first sip of liquor blitzed his empty stomach, yet emboldened him. “I’m here because I received a letter.”

“Be more specific, Blair. That’s what I’m always telling the men: Be. Specific. They hide in the ams and the abs and the eves: ambiguity, abstractions, evasions.”

“The letter said you covered up Dyson’s