The Atmospherians by Alex McElroy (reading fiction .TXT) 📗

bar’s darkest and stiffest booth, Blake unloaded his life on me like dirt into a grave: he told me about his unwed hippy parents and his twin older sisters and the freight train that passed behind his childhood home in rural Wisconsin—he used to sit on his roof watching the train pass, imagining himself riding it into a larger, exciting world “where I could be who I wanted to be.” It was the cheesiest thing I ever fell for.

It was my turn to spill. I told him about feeling mortified by the photos at K.L.I.C.K.

“I’m never working for K.L.I.C.K. again,” he said. “In solidarity with you.”

“You barely know me,” I said. It occurred to me he hadn’t even asked for my name yet.

“That’s because names are chains to the people we aren’t,” he said. “I wish I could throw Blake Dayes in the river. Every time I say Blake you think of every Blake you’ve known before me. I’m not those Blakes, but those Blakes shoulder in alongside me. I say we abolish permanent names. Everyone we meet should assign us a name of their choosing.”

I was charmed by his enthusiasm. With a laugh, I asked, “What would you call me?”

He leaned over the table and took my hands in his, circled his thumbs in my palms. “This is tough because, as you said, I hardly know you. I don’t even know where you’re from. But based on our evening so far—and what an amazing evening—I think I’d call you… Sasha.”

“Shut up.” I yanked my hands free. “You had to have known.”

He swore he didn’t—and he maintained this through the end of the relationship, committed to fabricating a profound sense of insight and mystery. In time, I would find his stubbornness obstructive; like a skyscraper blocking the sun. But that evening, I felt the first splash of attraction. I wanted him; I wanted him to want me back.

Later that night, on the steps of my building, he gave me a syrupy kiss at once passionate and reserved. He seemed above the kiss, as if I weren’t worth a fully committed make out. I invited him inside, planning to sleep with him and move on.

“Not yet,” he said.

“You’re assuming a lot,” I said, feeling stung. I hadn’t been refused like this in years.

“It’s not an assumption.” He spun on his heels and skipped into the lamplit night.

The next morning, he sent me a link to his first album, Dayes and Days, a plaintive four-track EP about former lovers and sunsets. My fascination with Blake lunged toward love with every repeated listen. Love came easily to me. Normally, I tried lovers on like dresses. But Blake was different. Something about him clawed into me—he didn’t want me. And I found myself frustrated by every text that wasn’t from him, angry at every hour apart.

He became my boyfriend. I, his girlfriend. And as his girlfriend I discovered that, more than a girlfriend, he wanted an audience. He not only absorbed me into that role; he made me feel special for filling it. He praised himself constantly, quoted his lyrics in conversation, often in support of something I had said, and after meals we would amble through the streets as he tested out lyrics, singing softly enough so only I heard. These walks gave me the feeling of slipping inside the world’s most fragile glass box, a box, I believed, he had created solely for me.

Around him, I tended to blend. It’s like this with men who imagine futures for themselves. They arrive driving a car. Get in, they say. I wanted to see where it took me. Not because I wasn’t ambitious. ABANDON thrived over the course of our relationship, becoming more popular than I had ever predicted, and I wanted it to grow even bigger—yet the future we envisioned was his. It left little room for what I wanted, and I loved him enough to pretend this wasn’t a problem. At his shows, I stood near the bar—as if I were Dyson in an ad for Blake’s life—excited that the man at the center of everyone’s attention would come home with me. I let this dynamic continue because I believed I knew the person no one else knew: the vulnerable person hidden inside the musician perched on tipping stools.

What I loved about loving a performer was believing they never truly performed in front of me. I believed in two intertwined but separate Blakes: Blake Dayes the musician conflicted with the authentic Blake I loved. The Blake I loved offstage was goofy and weepy, prone to puns, sensitive to fluorescent lighting, a fan of obstacle-based game shows, an eager and talentless cook, an unglum lover. A human. And around him, I freed my true self: giggly and gullible, a lounger, insecure, a late sleeper who woke to bedsheets wet by sweat, ticklish, cold-toed, an unintentional killer of plants, pessimistic, exhausted, alone. What a pleasure to know someone so secretly. I assumed he felt the same way about me.

In the final month of our relationship—though I didn’t know it was the final month then—Blake surprised me by booking us a posh cabin on the outskirts of my hometown. “I want to see where you’re from,” he told me. I assured him there was nothing to see. “Then show me nothing.” He wanted to spend the weekend with me alone—not with “my fans”—so we left our phones in the city.

Ditching my phone and the people inside it meant confronting the feelings I normally buried through work. Driving along the winding country roads to my hometown felt like riding a tongue into a mouth: This trip would end with both of us swallowed, dissolved in the belly of my childhood. Blake crooned cartoonishly to mock the top 40 hits on the radio. He considered these musicians beneath him, sellouts, but his envy was so obvious to me, and I felt closer to him—and distracted from my dread—by seeing into the feelings he’d never admit to.

By the