by Adam Nemett
“That’s not what I said, asshole. I said before any of this happened that I kind of hooked up with her once and that she had a lot of pubic hair and phenomenal teeth. That’s all I said.”
“Give me the campus directory,” he barked. “I’m gonna call Haley fucking Roth, Cap’n Cunt, and tell her she needs to drop the charges.”
“Dude,” David said.
“That’s completely illegal,” claimed Esteban. “You’re talking coercion, obstruction of justice. You’d absolutely get arrested, too, no question.”
“Jesus,” said Owen, pointing to David with a nod of his head. “Here we’ve got a Jew in the room and it’s the gay Mexican who knows all the legal shit.”
“I’m prelaw,” Esteban said, “and I’m Dominican, you fuck.”
“She might not be lying,” David muttered.
“What?” barked Owen. “What did you say?”
And David said, “Nothing.”
“What an asshole,” Owen muttered. David couldn’t be sure whom he was referring to.
On page 2 of the Princetonian the next day was another noteworthy column, a public statement from university president Diane Graynor, linking sexual assault to campus binge drinking. It talked of a crackdown on alcoholism, a task force, radical approaches, statistics, et cetera. The upshot was an end of the salad days. Eating clubs would go dry for an indefinite period. Stricter suspensions and fees were meted out for intoxicated students. There would be a re-visioning of the blind eye. And, of course (as David learned from a brief but forceful email from Graynor herself), it meant the end of PDS. Take down the website. Put the pistols in their portmanteaus. Pack it in.
Since Bob was now gone from campus, it also meant Haley Roth received the brunt of the blame for the new, strict partying policy. Students speculated, calling her a liar behind her back. And to her face. Haley became the campus villain, the destroyer of fun. David heard guys speak her name with disgust. Even girls distanced themselves, not wanting to be labeled as man-haters, killjoys. All who openly came to Haley’s defense were dragged into screaming matches or else met with silent disdain. Haley went into hiding. Meanwhile, the story was told and retold.
Cap’n Cunt’s infamy grew.
For David’s crew, it meant they weren’t going to be friends anymore. One of their own was gone, a very dishonorable discharge. It was time to disband, exit friendships quietly, and start over. Esteban checked out entirely. A distance grew between Owen and David. They were now roommates in name only, their schedules and time in the room growing ever more staggered.
Just before Halloween, Owen had lost his heart, his dignity, and his Catholic virginity to a cruel senior residential adviser playing Fuck-a-Freshman before buckling down to write her thesis. They’d gone on a few dates. Then she popped his sacred cherry and promptly threw his clothes from her third-floor window, placing him nude and sweating in her hallway like a pair of wet sneakers. David thought Owen was over it, but after Halloween, Owen Bic-ed his head clean. He threw himself scalp-first into many extracurriculars. He got ordained in the campus Agape Christian Fellowship, then quit, then joined again, then quit again and began waking up at four A.M. to train for a vaguely nonexistent marathon along the wooded trails of the nearby Institute for Advanced Study.
And for David, it meant awareness. If we are forever judged on our performance in clutch moments, he’d missed the big shot. Each moment since, he was missing the big shot. His silence was his failure. David began to understand why the gods never saw fit to bestow real superpowers upon him. He clearly wouldn’t know what to do with them.
Guilt and remorse metamorphosed into anger. He kept replaying Halloween in his head. Each daydream brought some new regret, but also some new justification or self-acquittal or fury. He hated himself, but he’d grow mad at Boo Berry and Honey Smacks for abandoning Haley. Shouldn’t they have taken better care of their friend? And didn’t someone see Bob and Haley walking off together and wonder why poor Cap’n Crunch was so obliterated? Wasn’t that enough to cause concern, to spur action? Was being a cockblock worse than being a coward? Or was it really Haley’s fault for drinking that spiked absinthe without being sure what substances Bob had mixed into it?
No, it was Bob’s fault. David knew that. Bob was the one on trial. But that’s the thing. The investigation was under way—teammates and professors were being called in as character witnesses—and David realized his own eyes could provide accurate and damning testimony.
But he was too scared to speak up.
And so David was a bad guy.
The next Friday on the phone with his parents he admitted he was losing it, burning out.
“Remember how Superman crushed coal into diamonds?” Mom said. Yeah, he remembered. Superman III. “Well, you’re creating a diamond soul. And the only way is through intense pressure!”
Dad put it a different way. “You think they have these problems in Afghanistan? Sure, it’s tough. You’re at Princeton, for chrissakes. You were expecting, what, a footbath?”
Sometimes there’s nothing wrong but the world, David wanted to say.
“Tell us what you’re learning,” asked David’s father.
“Scheide is German for vagina,” David said.
— Ø —
from: [email protected]
to: [email protected]
date: November 12, 2021
subject: Help Please
Dear Professor Hague,
I am a freshman in your REL 202 class, The Problem of Evil. With the final paper, I’m stuck on the subtleties of Pascal’s Wager and William James (super reading list, by the way) and on how to rationalize their views with my own current state. I can understand an unmerciful or indifferent God who sees the plight of his children but does nothing to alleviate their pain, but my freshman existence feels closer to this view: that God wants to do good but doesn’t have enough time to be everywhere at once.
Basically, what I’m saying is that I would very much appreciate an extension on the midterm. And more deeply, I’m asking for help, as I am presently struggling with concerns greater than just my paper. Surely you were once a freshman like me, with your own questions about the world, and I would greatly appreciate the benefit of your wisdom and experience. Please write back. Thank you in advance.
—David
The professor replied:
No problem. You can turn it in next Monday. Write with purpose. —BH
— Ø —
November 13 was registration day for the spring term. For most, classes began taking a backseat to more pressing concerns like war and natural disasters. Surprising himself, David signed up for two courses in the religion department, plus Environmental Studies 215: Risk, Rescue, and Resilience. His only economics course was Entrepreneurial Leadership, typically reserved for upperclassmen (he’d sent a persuasive email). On the way back from the registrar’s office, he bought three reading list books and was distractedly skimming them when he reached the door to his dorm room and found it uncharacteristically locked.
This was weird. For one, he’d barely seen Owen for about a week, and David assumed he’d been pulling long nights at SCISM or else doing top secret ERA war prep stuff—moving battalion pieces across table-sized maps, sharpening knives against whetstones, strutting in slow motion against backdrops of flames, kissing his dog tags, so why on earth would Owen deign to slum it with regular folk in Forbes? Second, their room was up three flights of stairs, last room on the hall, and a significant number of urinary close calls had led Owen and David to a no-top-lock policy. They had a special signal—Mardi Gras beads hanging on the door handle—that meant, Go away, I’m with somebody and/or yanking it. Today, no beads.
David pumped a fist on the door and called his roommate’s name.
“Dude, if you’re rubbing one out, please expedite.” Nobody answered. Finally, David dug around in the second-smallest pocket of his backpack, deep down next to a disfigured Nutri-Grain bar he didn’t know he still h
ad, until he found his key ring.
The room was full of steam. The shower was on. Its sound was steady, void of the intermittent splashings that mean someone’s moving in there.
David called Owen’s name again: “Dude?”
Nothing. It was the middle of the day. David did a quick mental inventory of the bathroom. There were pipes over the shower, probably sturdy enough to hang from. And Owen owned an old-fashioned shaving kit, a gift from his grandfather, the kind where you can remove the razor blade. David set his backpack down and opened the bathroom door.
Peeking out from the bottom of the shower curtain were the soles of Owen’s bare feet. David walked through the shower fog, and softly this time, he said, “Dude?”
When David pushed back the curtain, Owen was slumped on the shower floor, back stacked into a corner, his chin against his chest. His legs were splayed and his wrists rested against his hairy thighs, framing his belly and withered penis, palms curled up and opened as if in meditation.
David scanned his wrists for blood.
Then Owen picked his head up. His eyes met David’s. Two flushed stripes ran down his face where tears had left their mark. Owen looked back to the floor.
“I’m sorry,” Owen whispered. “It just feels better down here.”
He pulled himself up, sloshed past David, and climbed naked into his top bunk without drying himself. David turned off the shower and took a merciful piss, spending it strategizing. David was no stranger to heartbreak, but he had little experience consoling massive dudes. He tiptoed to the bunk bed. Owen was huddled under the covers, already darkened with his moisture. Only his bare wet scalp stuck out.
“I wanted to go through it with her,” Owen mumbled into his mattress. “Girls are evil.”
“Well. You know. So are men,” David said, thinking of himself.
“But it’s different. Girls pretend like they’re not evil, and by the time you figure it out they’ve already ripped your heart out and shat on it. At least we’re honest about what we’re like.”
What were men like? David thought back to the TV dads of his formative years. The Peter Griffins and Phil Dunphys. He thought of what they were like.
“I guess we’re just supposed to be stupid,” David said. “And it’s tough, because we’re not.”
“You’re not,” Owen said. “I’m a fucking idiot.”
David stared at Owen’s head, the recently shaved flesh pale like a plucked chicken. He stared at thin lumps of veins and arteries pulsing softly.
“Neither of us are idiots,” David said. “We’re just… I don’t know. Breakable?”
Owen sniffed once. “I’m not,” he said. “I’m no snowflake.”
“That’s right!” agreed David. “You’re a fucking soldier!”
And then Owen’s body began hiccupping under the covers. He sobbed into his arms, scalp turning red. David reached out his hand and placed it on Owen’s bald head, lightly tapping the hard bone of his skull and the cold, soft skin that covered it.
“I’m sorry I said all that terrible shit to you and to Esteban and that stuff about Haley. That was pure evil, I’m sorry,” Owen sniveled. “There’s evil, and there’s war, and there’s disaster. You know where it is?” He poked his head from under the covers. He pointed downward.
“The first floor?” David asked.
“Underground!” Owen hissed. “And up there”—he raised his eyes—“in the actual sky.”
Owen looked beyond David, his eyes filled with fear, like there was some monster sneaking up on them. His face disappeared again beneath the covers.
Owen was beyond David’s abilities.
“Dude, should I call someone?” David offered.
“Probably,” Owen said. “You should call everyone.”
Owen didn’t want to be a soldier. The next day, he went down to the ROTC office and quit. They implored—wouldn’t he rather join the ERA and lend a hand? He told them that there was no time to help anyone, that the Time Crisis was real. Everything was too late. There was work to be done right here and now.
Owen left school.
He packed his things and David helped truck them downstairs to his parents’ car and tried to talk to them like everything was normal. David assured them Owen never got violent, suicidal. He was just confused. He missed the people who knew him. Owen doesn’t need more school right now, David thought. He’s learned enough for one semester.
David was surprised to learn that Owen wasn’t moving back home, but to a friend’s house in nearby Pennington. His parents claimed it’d be good for him, that he always did well in smaller settings, that he was committed to finishing out the semester. This was all for the best.
As he said goodbye, David thought Owen looked marginally better. Still worried, but with some kind of resigned peace, like a parent watching a child put something into its mouth that probably won’t hurt all that much. As David gave his roommate a solid bro-hug, Owen palmed him an orange plastic bottle. They were pills. His Zeronal.
“Here, take one capsule every day,” he whispered. “They’ll keep you sane in an insane time.”
“Well, kind of,” offered David. “They also kind of made you flip out, didn’t they?”
Owen shook his head. “They’re the perfect merger of impulse and rationality. An amygdala hijacking. There’s no fight or flight. There’s just…” He tapped the pill vial and said, very plainly, “These prepare you to fly.”
And with that, Owen and his family were gone. And though he didn’t realize it yet, David was holding in his hand the drug that would define a revolution and catalyze his heroes.
iv.
David could still remember the first time he saw Superman. Smack dab on the comic book cover. Ripping open a bland button-down shirt, exposing his insignia. That same giant S over the title. The Man of Steel #1. Behind him, a doomed planet bursts with blue flames, popping like a firework.
David was five, curled into the couch beside his mom, getting lost in the folds of her kaftan. They watched Smallville, his mom’s favorite show. Season 7, episode 18. The plot of this one was about Jor-El showing his son what the world would’ve been like if he’d never existed or come to Earth, a superhero version of It’s a Wonderful Life. David glanced from the television to the comic book in his lap, then back again. He couldn’t understand why this TV Man of Steel looked so different from the illustrated one. He demanded an explanation.
“Well, see, superheroes never die.” Eileen Fuffman pointed at the TV, at his hero sweeping Lois Lane off her feet. “This Superman is named Tom Welling, and there’s another Superman in the movies named Brandon or Ansel, I think, and back when I was a little girl, Superman was named Christopher, and before him was a Superman named George Reeves. And someday? Maybe Superman will be you. David Fuffman!”
David was doomed from the start.
As a kid, he trained endlessly to take Superman’s place once this latest incarnation passed on to whatever afterlife is afforded alien sons of Krypton. His first exercise was climbing up the floor: lying facedown, David clawed hand over hand across the living room, pulling his stomach along that scratchy sky-blue carpet, pretending it was vertical—a steep, jagged cliff face covered in ice and monsters. Invisible obstacles occasionally impeded his progress. Grunting and straining to maintain his grip, he’d dangle from two uncertain fingertips, stuck halfway between the den and kitchen. He spent entire days like this, facedown on the carpet, scaling Floor Mountain.
When his little sister was an infant, he let her climb, too.
“Hang on tight. We’ll climb to Disneyland,” he’d say, as little Beth dutifully pawed the shag. If David could not yet be a superhero, at least he could be her Sherpa.
Once he’d mastered climbing the floor, David trained himself to fly. He executed flips off his parents’ wooden headboard, using the mattress as a trampoline and landing pad—jump, bounce, flip, land. Repeat. But the first time David’s mother saw him somersaulting through the air and onto hi
s back, her screams put a stop to his training.
“It’s for your own good,” she said. “You’re going to kill yourself.”
She crossed her arms and made David cross his heart and promise never to fly again.
But prophecy is something he always took seriously, and after Mom divined that David was next in line for Superman’s throne, David did his homework. He ran through the greatest hits: Netflix sent DVDs of the 1980s Christopher Reeve stuff; his parents pulled up choppy episodes of vintage animated Super Friends on YouTube; Mom kept including David in her weekly Smallville sessions, and they even tried a few episodes of Lois & Clark, which David didn’t care for.
Once he was up to speed, David begged his dad to take him to Superman Returns, the one from a couple years ago, the one with the Superman named Brandon. It’d be his first live-action movie in a real theater. David was thrilled at the idea that, ever since that god-awful Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, the Man of Steel had been gone for nearly twenty years, an eternity of a hiatus, like he’d never really existed or come to Earth. But now, here he was again! Returning!
Dad found an art house screening an all-day series of recent superhero flicks, and Gil and Eileen agreed that The Incredible Hulk, Hancock, Iron Man, The Dark Knight, and Watchmen would be far too intense for young David. But Superman Returns? It was doable.
The theater was huge. Nearly empty. Initially, the scale and sound were scary, and Gil Fuffman talked his son through it.
“Why’s Lex Luthor so mean?” David asked.
“Because he’s too smart for his own good,” Dad explained. But then Dad wouldn’t shut up. He kept whispering asides, his breath hot and buttery in David’s ear. He was quick to cover his son’s eyes, to assure him all blood was ketchup. He loved it when Superman’s dead father appeared.
“See, that’s the Fortress of Solitude, and all the books and scientific facts from dozens of other worlds is contained in those crystals,” David’s dad whispered, “and now the ghost of Superman’s father is helping him understand it all!”