by Adam Nemett
David wasn’t sure whether to help them clean or quickly leave the scene of his crime.
“I’m on my way home”—Haley turned—“if you want to re-up now, I’m lousy with product.”
He’d glanced at his mess and said, “Haley Roth, I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth.”
— Ø —
Back in high school, she’d shuttle David and his then girlfriend Madeline up to her room to conduct business. “Welcome to Waffle House, what’ll it be?” Haley might say as David and Maddy entered to make an after-school purchase. She always had an opening quip like this. Once it was “Good afternoon! How may I recharge your superpowers?” which David liked very much. Haley would sit on her bedspread, pink and white striped like an after-dinner mint. He remembered her carpeting was mottled with a few stiff patches—maybe dried semen? He’d tried not to look.
This time, she asked David to wait in the kitchen, which he understood. After showering, she came downstairs wiggling a Ziploc bag of weed and a pill bottle in one hand, the other behind her back.
She said, “You’re into superheroes, yeah? Or used to be? Your whole getup?”
It’s true. In high school, David still thought of himself as a superhero that had yet to realize the fullness of his magic. As a weird affectation, David always wore László’s blazer: his cape. A ubiquitous blue hoodie was his cowl. His hair and beard and glasses composed his mask. He’d even bought a belt off Etsy, a handsome black leather thing with a secret compartment in the buckle where David kept his Adderall. His utility belt. He’d toned it down since.
David admitted he was indeed still into superheroes, but you know, not in a weird way.
“Would you like to see my very favorite superhero book in the whole world?” she asked.
The question surprised him. He guessed the thing behind her back was some obscure graphic novel, but instead Haley introduced him to Eloise—she of New York’s Plaza Hotel.
Haley snorted with delight even at the opening sentence: “I am Eloise I am six.”
Paging through it at the kitchen table, Haley guided David along Eloise’s madcap exploits through the hotel. The little heroine ripples with confidence, outwitting doormen, telling white lies to old ladies, stealing trinkets from the gift shop, pouring pitchers of water down the mail chute. She uses zero punctuation. She likes things and she hates things.
Eloise likes dandelions and her mother’s lawyer likes martinis.
“She’s marvelous,” said Haley. “I used to dream of owning a hotel once I turned six. Ooh! And see how she always says ‘rawther’ instead of ‘rather.’ She is rawther brilliant.”
Haley was especially fond of Eloise’s particular brand of metaphorical repurposing.
“Look.” She pointed. “‘Kleenex makes a very good hat.’”
David glanced back up to find Haley wearing a cardboard tissue box on her head. She looked like a pirate captain.
“And I love how she’s always sticking her belly out. That’s all I want, really. To be the kind of girl who can stick her belly out like that and have it be okay.”
David caught Haley squeezing handfuls of her taut stomach flesh underneath the table. And she saw his face, saw how he almost pitied her recently changing body. Haley considered how men like David—aware enough of her situation but hardly original—assumed she was working out and dropping weight because of some vendetta, some reflexive need to reclaim her body. But Haley was doing it because she was good at it. She’d always had endurance, she could run long. Sometimes she’d look around the gym and see elephantine middle-aged men huffing and puffing up stairs to nowhere. Haley would note her own minimal sweat, hardly darkening the top of her neckline, and she’d be secretly proud of this, like it was a vital skill to conserve one’s own water.
“If I were a superhero,” Haley said, “my power would be getting really tiny so I could hide or wiggle out of small spaces. That’s a good skill for our pre-apocalyptic times: not taking up too much space. What would your superpower be?”
He considered lying, but his real answer had been the same forever.
“Visibility,” David said.
“Invisibility?”
“No,” he said. “The opposite.”
“It’s honest,” she said, after thinking a moment. “It’s very you.”
David liked Haley. He liked that she had some inkling of what he used to be, what he could be again, and felt he understood the same thing about her—that she wasn’t permanently damaged. She was simply unrealized. In some way, maybe this was projection. He, too, was special yet hidden, wasn’t he? A real mensch? But David felt jealous that Mathias had been the one to speak up and wondered how he’d known, and what else did he know?
“I don’t think it’s bad to want to make a mark,” he said. “Isn’t that why you’re an artist?”
“I want to make things,” Haley replied, “but not for fame and fortune.”
“I just don’t want to be a nothing.” Trying to act cool, he added, “Call it ambition. Drive.”
“Pride?” she offered. “Vanity? Lust?”
David smiled. He stared at Haley Roth’s arms, her skinny arms, as she closed Eloise.
“That was you at my dorm room, right?” Haley asked, still staring at the book’s cover. “You came by last week. I almost forgot with all the other… That was you, right?”
He went cold. Nodded. Tried not to say or do anything else stupid.
“When we were in the supermarket just now, when I wrote my email on the glass? You looked how you looked through my peephole that day. Total déjà fucking vu.”
David laughed awkwardly. Was she testing him? He wanted to tell her everything.
“It’s a shame no one else on campus believed me,” she said. “They hate me.”
He really wanted to tell her. But all he said was “Maybe no one will remember next year.”
They heard a car pull up outside. Her dad, probably. “See you back at school,” she said. His cue to leave. But as she closed the door after him, she added, “I’ll meet you there, by the rowboats.”
He’d agreed to this, as if it were a real plan.
— Ø —
Blink. Upon exiting Pennington Quality Market, David now faced a white swell of sideways snow, close to a foot already on the ground. How long had he been in there? There’d be no way to part this sea of stuck cars. Why did he not wear his good boots? Did he even own good boots?
He loaded up and the van started, mercifully, robustly, and David felt more okay about his chances of making it back to The Egg alive, with toilet paper. As he pulled through the obstacles of the parking lot, he spotted what appeared to be a snow blower, but then realized it was a Toyota Prius kicking up a jet stream of sleet from beneath its helplessly spinning back tires. David drove over.
The driver was an older guy. Nice suit, peacoat. He had a manicured silver haircut parted like a politician’s or former NFL head coach Jimmy Johnson’s, a perfect seam between slabs of marble. David registered the fact that he’d hoped it would be a woman—an exotic, handicapped beauty with eighteen kids, maybe, and blind—badly in need of saving. But he also recognized the inherent sketchiness of offering a stranded woman a ride in a van. This dude in distress, he’d do.
“Sir, do you need a jump?” David asked.
“The engine’s fine,” the guy said. “It’s the rest of the car that’s not going anywhere.”
They negotiated. The guy, Martin, lived nearby, so David instructed him to ditch his car and load his stuff into the MaxMobile, and soon they were on their way. Martin stayed huddled in back, trying to prevent all the groceries from spilling and rolling around the empty cargo van.
“I froze in there,” Martin said. His face was between the front seats near David’s arm.
“It was pretty cold,” David agreed.
“No.” He shook his head. “I mean I froze, I blew it. My wife’s sick and I was supposed to be picking up her prescriptions, plus a cake for my dau
ghter’s birthday, but then when I realized the weather was serious… I don’t know. I got caught in the middle somehow. Look at this…”
He pulled open one of his own bags, revealing a Transformers-decorated sheet cake.
“That’s nice,” David offered. “Your daughter is into Transformers?”
“See, that’s the thing,” Martin said. “I bought about twelve cakes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know! The prescriptions took so long! I was worried they’d run out and didn’t want to go far from the pharmacy. The bakery was right there. Everyone was stocking up! Then I got flustered and instead of getting—I don’t even remember; what the hell else was I supposed to get?—I just kept grabbing cakes from the fuckin’ bakery.” He hung his head. “My wife’s gonna die.”
The guy was genuinely panicked now, mortified at his own ineptitude.
“But another way to look at it,” David said, “is that you’re going home with twelve cakes!”
“I just said that. I’ve already admitted it.”
“You think your daughter cares about first aid kits and propane? Your wife might be pissed, but to your kid? You’ll be a hero! Twelve cakes!”
His body language softened. Together they rode in mostly silence. Martin directed David to his place on 88 North Main Street, and David said he was just off South Main on Woosamonsa, and Martin asked if David knew Fred Shuster on Woosamonsa, and David said he knew Fred, that Fred was the best. Otherwise, Martin stayed quiet and let David focus on the white roads.
When David dropped off Martin, he offered to donate a bag of his own rations—batteries and other essentials that might help the man avoid the doghouse—and the guy traded David a cake in return. Martin departed, saying, “Hey, I appreciate it. For sure.” That was that.
And see, that’s the problem with saving an adult male. He barely admits to it.
There’s simply no substitute for a damsel in distress, David thought, but the MaxMobile screeching against the side of a parked car jolted him back to the snow-covered roads. Again, he’d been lost in thought. Focus, man!
Rather than stop and assess the damage, he decided to keep going. He’d done one good deed today, driving Martin home, which would cancel out this bad one. He was even with the world. The world was even with itself, a blank slate, perfect and pure. Plus, he had to keep going.
C’mon, just a straight shot down Main Street to Woosamonsa. Up ahead was a street sign that looked semicorrect, but David had to open the driver’s-side door and squint in order to discern that this was the cul-de-sac he was looking for.
He made the turn, and from the whiteness came the specter of The Egg, a whale momentarily cresting. David tried to swing the ass of the MaxMobile around to back into the driveway, but he took the turn too fast and he felt the vehicle careen onto its passenger-side wheels and very nearly topple completely. But the van came to rest. David backed up carefully, and in the rearview the garage door rose and a team of parka-ed housemates swarmed the van like a Nordic pit crew. They chucked the stuff inside, and David tried to help, but he tripped and came to rest like a snow angel on the concrete floor. He watched the garage door clink down, metal meeting snow, north meeting south. It would be eleven days before they left The Egg again.
iii.
“Question on why you bought a Batman sheet cake,” said Lee, sifting through the groceries.
David rose from the garage floor. Before he could explain, Owen emerged from a parka.
“Airplane!” Owen shouted.
“Yeah!” said David. He had no idea what this meant, but he was unimaginably happy to see Owen again.
His first face-to-face with Owen Surber, Jr., had been on Princeton move-in day, although Owen had arrived a week earlier for ROTC orientation. Opening the threshold of room 331, David had found this massive gentleman sitting cross-legged in the center of their shared residence. Arrayed around him were shrink-wrapped packages, maybe a hundred beige things strewn across the threadbare carpet: Chicken in Thai Sauce, Chocolate Pudding, The HooAH! Bar. Some packages were open, and Owen was spooning himself what might have been powdered hot cocoa mix. He looked like a fat kid gathering candy from a busted piñata.
For move-in day, his little sister, Beth, had wanted to wear her Batgirl costume, a tasteful black leotard with yellow insignia, covering wrists to ankles, plus a shin-length skirt and cape. She was eleven years old, on the outer edge of being able to pull this off, and her figuring was she’d be a walking conversation starter. Other freshmen would remember him and say, You’re Batgirl’s brother. And he had to admit: it wasn’t a half bad idea. But ultimately, David felt embarrassed and nixed the idea, and they settled on her wearing a Wonder Woman T-shirt as a compromise.
“Yo!” Owen had pointed to David’s piles of stuff. “You’ve got a lot of effing books, man!”
It was true. David had brought an insane number of books to school. Maybe a dozen wine boxes full. The multitude of reading material seemed a foreign concept to Owen, who looked equally strange to David in a khaki camo uniform, black boots, and a thick-billed patrol cap.
“Yo!” David countered. “You’ve got a lot of effing… what are these things, exactly?”
Owen did a little hop and hup-to, then scanned the floor, realizing his mess.
“Sarge gave us these MREs today. I’m testing them out.” He held out a hand to shake. “So you’re David the businessman!” David had mentioned via email his plan to major in economics.
“Well, my parents want me to be a writer.” David shrugged. “Thoreau once wrote that authors, ‘more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.’ But I don’t know, it seems to me that corporate leaders probably play a greater role in shaping the world these days, right?”
Owen nodded. “Yeah, you’re definitely smarter than me.”
David’s face got hot. He reminded himself to tone it the fuck down. Owen was his roommate, not an admissions officer. And just as nervous as David. He was sweaty, built like a basement oil burner. David knew Owen had played high school football in Waco, Texas—left guard and occasionally fullback for the top-ranked Midway Panthers, which was kind of a big deal—until an injury sidelined him. But this was more bulk than he’d expected.
“Sorry,” David said. “You must be Owen the, uh, the marine?!”
He saluted. “Actually, I’m Owen the army cadet.”
“I’m Beth!” yipped David’s sister, extending a hand. “The Wonder Woman!”
Since living in The Egg, Owen’s hair appeared to have grown back from its weird skinhead phase, and a short beard complemented his close-cropped black hair, which formed an attractive widow’s peak. He’d also lost weight, or turned fat into muscle, or changed somehow. He had the look of a former child star who’d survived a few rough years before pulling things back together. Owen dropped to the garage floor, faceup, and lifted his legs, positioning them near David’s hips. Fu and Mathias removed their jackets and stood beside Owen’s body as if coaxing a corpse in a séance.
“Go ahead,” Owen said from below. “Do an airplane.”
David looked back at Mathias and whispered, “This is… kinda…”
“I understand your trepidation. But this is a safe place,” Mathias replied. “Try to smile.”
“Dude bought like so much medicine,” grumbled Lee. “And I don’t see my yogurt, either.”
Dropping his jacket, David leaned forward onto Owen’s feet. They grasped hands. Owen’s palms were waxy and massive. It was oddly intimate, this thing they were doing. David used to do airplanes with Madeline, back in the day, a little post-hookup ritual they shared. He couldn’t help but taste the echo of heartache. Some stuff stays in the spine.
“Get your balance,” said Owen. “Lock your core.”
David wobbled at first.
Shifted his hips.
And then, just like that: equilibrium.
He held his arms out to the sides, fists clenched in a powerful overhead Superman
pose.
Once David was stable, the fellas each grabbed a limb and hoisted him into the air, off the platform of Owen’s feet and onto their shoulders, as if he were a pharaoh’s sedan chair. On three, they extended upward, pressing David toward the ceiling. He hung up there like track lighting, noting the garage’s piles of sporting goods and outdoor gear—football pads, whitewater raft, Super Soaker water gun, beach chairs—and they carried him like this into The Egg, flying.
The interior of The Egg was like the inside of a balloon with a magician’s giant pin sticking through it: a living room, dining room, and kitchen were clustered around a central wood-burning stove—a forest-green Norwegian Jøtul—the stovepipe rising up through the center of the ceiling. There was a sunroom toward the rear of the house, where the big screen lived. The Egg was the product of a hippieish time of American history, but it looked cleaner than any college housing David had ever seen. A distinct lack of sidewalk salvages and porch crap. There was wainscoting.
“Our sound system is nasty,” Owen claimed, “but Fu will castrate you if you max the tweeters.”
They swooped David toward the kitchen, where the sink was filled with stagnant water.
Was it clogged, David wondered, or were they just stockpiling?
“Can you smell it? Yesterday Fu was making potato latkes in here,” Lee said. “Tripped me out. Like if your Jewish ass was cooking up a wok full of fucking kimchi.”
“Ceiling fan!” David yelled, ducking. They maneuvered him under the wooden blades.
“You don’t make kimchi in a wok,” mumbled Mathias.
“That door’s the pantry,” Lee said. “And that door goes to the basement.”
“Where all the interesting stuff happens,” added Owen.
Climbing a set of stairs that hugged the inner curve of the dome, they reached the upper floor, over the garage. Here, they navigated him past a bathroom (bathtub and sink both filled; yup, they were stockpiling), plus three bedrooms. David saw Lee’s towers of chemistry books, Fu’s army of laptops and an electronic drum kit, Owen’s piles of languishing extracurricular uniforms. He liked that The Egg looked very lived in. This was a home.