We Can Save Us All

by Adam Nemett

  In the netting of the far goal, a witch poured the absinthe, dropping sugar cubes into each Solo cup, turning the potion milky white. David had personally organized the keg delivery. The absinthe was a surprise. Owen and Esteban headed toward the kegs on the bleachers, but Bob grabbed David by the batcowl and dragged him toward the absinthe, saying, “Let’s celebrate our creation, Dave.”

  Our?

  David replied, “I don’t really do hallucinogens.”

  “Forget that Van Gogh swirly shit,” Bob said. “Absinthe won’t make you trip. It’s like very potent alcohol. I tried it last weekend. Dude, do you know what happened to me?”

  “No, what happened?”

  “No, see, I’m asking you,” he said. “I have zero recollection. All I know is that I woke up wearing blue snow pants, a wifebeater, and a bowler hat!” They both laughed. Bob put his arm around David. Suddenly, they were totally comfortable. The best of friends. It felt pretty okay.

  The absinthe witch beckoned them with long, warty fingers, fondling her bottle. “Catch the Green Fairy, my pretties,” she cackled. Bob knocked David a cheers, and they bottomsed up. It tasted like frozen licorice and David wanted a chaser, but there was none in sight. Beside them, three retro cereal brand mascots—sorority sisters, David guessed—lifted their masks and tilted the absinthe into their hidden faces. When everyone finished, Bob snaked over and put his arm around one of them, gripping her against his naked chest with the crook of his elbow. She was dressed and labeled as CAP’N CRUNCH. Tight white yoga pants, a deep blue V-neck, a blue kerchief tied round her neck and down her back like a tiny cape, and a mask depicting the elder helmsman of breakfast. The other girls had BOO BERRY and HONEY SMACKS written across their shirts. David couldn’t help but stare at their chests.

  “Any of you ladies dueling?” asked Bob. “Because we are. We invented this thing. I’m El Oso Terrible. That’s Davy Gravy.”

  “David Fuffman,” clarified David. He was feeling superconfident, but as he bowed slightly in salutation, the point of his bat-ear jabbed Honey Smacks in her mask.

  “Whoa! I totally emailed you to sign up my friends!” said Boo Berry. “I pictured you taller.”

  “So did I,” David sniffed.

  “Mr. Fuffman, this is NBC News,” said the Cap’n Crunch girl, shoving an invisible microphone in his face. “You’ve launched the Princeton Dueling Society. Tell us, how do you feel?”

  “Um, like getting wasted?” he replied into her fist, kind of confused.

  “Excellent. And tell us, to reach this level, have you ever taken performance enhancers?”

  “Plead the Fifth?”

  “Excellent. And tell us, are you still diddling that mousy, flat-chested Pikesville chick?”

  As Cap’n Crunch held her fist in David’s face, his eyes instinctively dropped to her breasts, to the Sharpie’d C and H lettering delightfully warping along the contours of her V-neck.

  “Haley?” He smiled. Slowly, Cap’n Crunch lifted her mask to reveal the familiar face. He’d assumed they would meet up immediately after arriving at Princeton, but tonight was actually the first time he’d seen her on campus. Haley Roth, the Racketeer, laughed and told David he had a nice costume. He said the same about hers, and they agreed that classes were okay and the weather was lousy and that it was great to see each other.

  “I can’t totally fucking believe I haven’t run into you sooner,” she said. “Ships in the night!”

  “Yeah! Rowboats in the morning!” David replied. Like an idiot.

  Boo and Honey whispered something, winked, and just like that they ran off, leaving Haley to catch up with David and fend for herself in Bob’s elbow. Before David could say anything else stupid, Bob interrupted to ask how they knew each other.

  “Same town,” she said. “Different school.”

  “You guys used to bang and stuff?” he asked.

  “Dude,” said David.

  “Nope, he never touched me,” said Haley. “I wasn’t his type.”

  “Well, we kinda did hook up once,” David offered sheepishly, then immediately regretted it.

  “Did we?” She shrugged and put her mask back on. “Who remembers?”

  He was taken aback and about to offer details, but he held his coked-up tongue.

  “O Cap’n! my Cap’n!” Bob belted, suddenly shoving his own microphone in her face. “Tell us, on a scale of one to ten, how much would you like to take a shower with Batman later tonight?”

  “Dude,” said David. He understood Bob was maybe trying to help, but… dude.

  “I don’t know,” Haley said. “Solid six and a half?”

  “Second question,” Bob whispered, pulling from his pocket that vial, his little buddy. “On a scale of one to ten, how much would you like to do some liquid Ecstasy tonight? No strings attached.”

  “Perfect ten.” She smiled. Bob turned his back and asked the Absinthe Witch for two refills. Just two. Bob emptied the vial into Haley’s cup and they swallowed their shots. David saw her shudder and scan for a chaser.

  “Jesus, it tastes like Windex,” she moaned. Bob let her go for a moment, and, sensing her chance to get away, she pretended to spot her other cereal sisters, offered a half-assed goodbye to David, and ran off.

  David felt cheated. As they walked back into the crowd, Bob took him by the shoulders again. He lifted off his mask, leaned in, and whispered, “Trust me, you didn’t want any of that.”

  And at the time David thought he was just being nice, comforting him with a plenty-of-fish-in-the-sea platitude in response to Haley’s apparent rejection. But that’s not what Bob meant.

  iii.

  “Lads and lasses!” Esteban belted. “On this most hallowed of eves, we conform to Russian-style rules. Seconds shall inspect weaponry. Principals must state the nature of the offense. Stand back-to-back. Take ten paces. Turn. Fire. Three shots only. We are not, after all, barbarians…”

  David had tapped Esteban, a theater nerd, as the emcee. Affecting a foppish British accent and with a top hat tilted most rakishly, he swung his rapier cane and called orders into the night.

  “Mortality of wounds shall be judged in a civilized fashion, and honor shall be bestowed or forfeited accordingly.” Then he dropped the accent and said, “Okay, let’s do this fucker!”

  Near midfield, a wide dueling circle formed, stretching out to the foot of the bleachers and the line of oak trees. Handles of booze got passed around. The hooting and hollering and wagering heated up. David abstained from more absinthe but got drunker on beer. The first duel—two roommates, Tommy O’Leary and Yan Shen, battled over the time-honored stereotype of Irish vs. Asian penis size. Incredibly, both duelists hit their below-the-belt targets; it was ruled a draw. Then, in a gorgeous display of marksmanship, Count Chocula knocked off the Trix Rabbit with a resounding single shot to the forehead. A heated bout between a red Republican elephant vs. a blue Democratic ass ended when the donkey mortally wounded his counterpart with a neon-yellow splotch to the chest, which felt like an orgasmically satisfying victory to most of the yipping crowd.

  Things were going great. And then it was David’s turn to duel.

  He babbled to Owen, his second, “In the time of the ancients, before the human brain evolved, broke into its warring bicameral hemispheres, mated with itself, and begat consciousness, there was only the spirit and the vessel.”

  “Oh yeah?” Owen smiled, walking his nicely plastered roommate to the center of the circle.

  “A human couldn’t act of his own volition. It had no I. It could only be imbued with a spirit, with a tendency toward war or love or music or compassion, like Ares entering a human warrior right before battle. Dressed in suits of flesh, the gods found agency. I read that in a book.”

  “Neat,” Owen said as David burped in his face. “Well, now you must evolve or perish.”

  Bob and David swayed back-to-back in the center of the circle. David heard Esteban’s voice: “It’s well nigh past midnight, gentleperson
s, and this duel marks our last of this hallowed eve!”

  A whoop of approval. The onlookers were drunk, entertained. It had been a successful night. David spotted Haley in the crowd, the sailor-girl’s arm sprawled across Honey Smacks’s shoulders. Whatever Bob had dropped in her drink, Haley was in fine form.

  The barker continued. “In the blue wrestling mask and chiseled chest, I give you the swarthy, the excessively tall, the linchpin of our varsity soccer team… Roberrrrto Badalamenti!”

  “El Oso Terrible, motherfucker!” Another whoop. It hadn’t occurred to David that they were dueling on the soccer field, Bob’s home turf. Was David already at a disadvantage?

  “And in the overly elaborate costume, I give you the daddy of the Dueling Society…”

  “I’m Batman,” David rasped through the stuffy mask, trying to sound like Batman.

  Fuck, he immediately thought. I should have said, triumphantly, “David Fuffman!” He’d intended the moment to be his public debut, his name resounding brilliantly across the crowd, worming its way into their ears and latching on to their brains forever, so that by the time he was a senior and had fully exerted his influence, people would remember Halloween as the first time they heard about the man who was David Fuffman. But his cheeks were sticking to the rubber mask and sweat had begun to drip into his eyes, and he tried poking a gloved finger in there but that only made it worse, and dammit, he really wasn’t thinking straight.

  “Gentlemen, may you fire upon each other with honor!”

  David’s stomach sank a little. He was nervous. And so it happened that standing spine to spine with sweaty Bob Badalamenti, at the crux of this human wheel of Halloweeners, he found himself whispering to unseen deities.

  Here I am, wearing this supersuit, he prayed. Everyone’s watching. Give me some sign. Make me super.

  The dandy duel master backed away. He held his cane aloft. He screamed, “ONE!”

  Bob’s body stopped supporting David. He lunged into his initial step forward, the other foot following like a practiced wedding processional.

  “Two!” David lunged again.

  If Bob hits me, if I emerge from this duel splotched with paint, if my cape and cowl are soiled, then I’ll take it as a sign to give up this silly dream of campus superherodom. I’ll prepare myself for a career in operations and management, like the world wants me to, I promise. Something with a 401(k) bouncing on its horizon.

  “Three!”

  But if I hit Bob, and emerge unsplotched, this will be my sign that the path of heroics is long and winding. That I may still greatly influence humankind yet, the way I’ve always dreamed. That I must simply be patient.

  “Five!”

  “Five?” David yelled. “What happened to four?”

  “Whatever!” Esteban yelled back. “Seven! Eight!”

  It was on eight that David’s faith flagged: My god, I’m wearing the wrong costume, he realized. How can I make my own name when I’m in someone else’s clothes? And how can Haley not remember we hooked up?

  “Nine!”

  Shit, he thought. He tried to revise his covenant, and quickly.

  Okay, if I get hit, then… no… if he hits me first, or if we both hit, that means, wait… do we fire on ten, or do we wait for Esteban to scream “Fire”? He glanced around for Owen, his rock, but couldn’t spot him.

  “TEN!”

  David turned. He lifted his gun from his hip, straight-armed, a firm gatepost. His eyes found a Mexican wrestling mask. His finger found the trigger. His heart found a moment of silence.

  He fucking had him.

  And then David’s answer came. From above.

  It was hard to comprehend at first. Like an earthquake. A surge of typewriter clacks, the aural activity in some 1950s newsroom. A torrent of yellow spears rained down from above. David thought perhaps his visual cortex was melting and that these sparks were the by-product of a cracked bicameral brain. Too many shots of absinthe.

  Yellow splats bounced off David’s shoulders, his chest, his cowl. And then it hit David: an entire bucket of yellow paint. The pail smacked off his back and its contents latched on to his cape like a vicious octopus. He was dripping yellow. The whole circle of students was under fire! Across the field, Bob aimlessly fired his pistol into the air.

  They’d been ambushed by semiautomatic paintball technology. Someone had pulled a delicious prank. Taking cover, David pulled his own gun into his cape and tried to save his costume, beating a hasty retreat to the bushes near the side of SCISM. He dropped his gun by the bushes and hid under his cape, playing dead. When David finally poked out his pointy head, he looked up to find three ghostly shadows flitting across the roof of SCISM, their gun barrels piercing the dark sky. Bounding over that peaked horizon, they disappeared into the night.

  Paint cans hung from branches, dripping their remains like gutted animals.

  iv.

  A few kids were nursing semiserious welts, but overall, the mood was jovial. There was some cleanup, and then a movement to hit the Street to keep the party going. Delegating like a boss, David convinced two juniors (juniors!) to return the kegs for him. He couldn’t locate Bob, but he found Owen and Esteban and prepared to join them for the after-party.

  “Where’s Bob?” David asked. “Already went home with someone?”

  “What an asshole,” hissed Owen.

  “Shit,” David said when they were halfway to the Street, “I left my gun by the bushes!”

  “What an asshole,” they all chimed.

  “It’s expensive.” He saluted and jogged toward Poe, his cape undulating in the moonlight.

  They’d been gotten good by that group of ne’er-do-wells on the roof. But to David, the night felt perfect, epic. He realized the Princeton Dueling Society could be great, and him along with it. He’d plan a follow-up, and quick! Would people recognize him at the Street tonight?

  He strolled back across Poe Field, rolling solo, playing kick the can with a crushed Milwaukee’s Best, feeling kinda special. Reaching the foot of the tree, David crouched and felt around for his gun. It was right where he’d left it, splattered with paint but otherwise in fine shape. Faintly, he smelled the acrid odor of fresh vomit. And then, twenty yards away, David saw movement.

  The path from the lawn out to the Street did not bring the crowd past the glass windows of SCISM. If it had, the entire crowd might have seen what only David saw: there on the grass, below the line of bushes, beneath a breathtaking glass backdrop, he saw a girl. She was down on all fours. White yoga pants bunched around her ankles. Blue shirt pulled up. Her smiling mask was still on, pressed into the dirt: Cap’n Crunch.

  For a second David was pleased. Kids were getting lucky at his event. A Halloween fantasy becoming a reality. Godspeed. And then the jealousy. This was Haley Roth, on the shortlist of girls he’d seen partially naked and was hoping to see again. Why had someone else gotten her?

  Then his stomach turned.

  He saw her forearms and knees were on the ground. But her balance was off. She kept drifting to one side, tilting like a rhombus.

  And her silence. The man behind her was plenty noisy, grunts exploding from his mask. But there was nothing from her. No breathy exhales. No moaning. No audible pleasure or pain, either. Considering the extraordinary force of the pounding—the loud smacks of his abs into her ass—the girl’s silence wasn’t normal.

  Something was wrong.

  The man behind her was up on his toes, his knees splayed out around her bare bottom like pasty demon wings. His grunts sounded like “Hey, hey, hey, hey…” David saw sweat on his torso, the kind of chest that didn’t need to be augmented by a molded costume.

  “Fuck off, Davy Gravy!” growled the man in the mask. “El Oso Terrible works alone!”

  He didn’t stop pumping. David didn’t know what to do. He wanted to leave, and he wanted to stay and ask a dozen questions that he didn’t know how to ask in that moment, or what the questions even were, but he wanted to confirm or
deny what he was seeing, that this person could do this, and he wanted to fight, and he didn’t want to fight, and he wanted to flash back to the warning signs or flash forward to visit punishment on the guilty, but he was stuck in that one endless present moment with nothing but paralyzing fear, and so he just stood there. And then, from above, someone aimed and fired.

  A pellet exploded on David’s forehead and yellow goop ran down his rubber nose. His head darted, searching for the source of this new firing. Looking up, he found a silhouette on the roof, saw it point the shadow of a gun barrel at him, as if tapping him on the shoulder from afar.

  David looked down at his hands: he was still holding his paintball gun. There should still be three pellets in its chamber.

  Okay, hero, if someone has bestowed you with powers, he thought, now is the time to unleash them.

  David raised the gun, aimed high at Bob’s head, waited for something to happen.

  The force of the first shot took him by surprise and his hand recoiled, sending a small projectile sailing wide right into the darkness.

  Using both hands, David steadied the stock of the gun, closed an eye, and trained the gun’s sight on Bob’s blue mask. He fired and heard the audible flick of a pellet against skin. Bob cried out as the shot stung him in the shoulder. It halted his thrusting. He looked down at his chest, dripping paint like egg yolk, and his face flew up to meet David’s. He whispered, “…the fuck?”

  David still had one shot left, and he tried to think back to every cartoon he’d ever seen, every man vs. monster scene, remembering The Dark Knight Returns when Batman fights the Mutant Leader and nearly gets his ass handed to him until Robin shows up and goes for the villain’s eyes. David looked back to the roof, hoping the silent assassin up there would heed his tacit call to arms, give him a nod, help him take down this behemoth. But the man was gone. David was alone.

  And David understood then, for a sickening second, that he was not actually a superhero.

  He was just a kid witnessing something terrible, and this would not end well for anyone.

  Bob was still staring at him, but had begun slowly pumping again, his face fixed on David’s in warning. David thought harder and came upon the plan that every David employs when facing a Goliath: aim for the sensitive parts. He’d have to hit Bob in the mouth, the jugular. Any vulnerability available. Aiming again, this time at a small black eyehole in Bob’s mask, David lined up his shot.