We Can Save Us All

by Adam Nemett

  “I know,” David hissed. “They just said that.” David was trying to listen to Jor-El explain how human beings could be great—because of their capacity for good—if only Superman could show them the way. But Dad continued, his beard scratching David’s cheek.

  “I took his picture once, you know. The one hanging over my desk.”

  “Superman?”

  “No, Marlon Brando. Superman’s dad, Jor-El. The guy talking. He was pretty old, and—”

  David watched Superman remember himself as a younger man, discovering his powers, running crazy fast through all that corn. He held his breath as Superman snatched that flaming plane out of midair and set it down gently in the middle of a baseball diamond, the most American thing possible. And he fought back tears as Superman saw his home of Krypton bursting into flames, transforming this Kal-El into the last man of a dead world.

  “And don’t worry,” Dad said. “Planets don’t really explode like that. It’s just special effects.”

  “Shh,” David said. “We’re missing the point of everything.”

  David remembered the Christopher Reeve version where Lois Lane perished in an earthquake, and Superman flies faster and faster around Earth, reversing its spin, reversing time, erasing his beloved’s death. Those old special effects were pretty bad, and by comparison Superman Returns was magic on screen, a spectacle like he’d never seen. David sat shell-shocked through half the credits—wow—until Dad said it was time to leave that dark mystical theater. On the ride home, David tried to ask questions about Lex Luthor and the annihilation of Krypton, but his dad kept coming back to the scene where Brando explains Superman’s origins.

  “It’s nice when dads tell stories to their sons like that, huh? Like when I tell you stories.”

  “Did your dad tell stories?”

  David’s dad thought for a moment, then signaled left and cut someone off.

  “Grandpa would tell me that a fish jumped in his car window, and I’d tell my friends at school and they’d laugh at me for making stuff up.” Dad snorted, chewing a hunk of ice from his movie theater soda cup. “My father wasn’t really a storyteller so much as a liar.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Your grandpa László is dead. You know that.”

  “Like Jor-El.”

  “Mmm, not like Jor-El.”

  “Do you still talk to each other like Superman and Jor-El?”

  “Nope.”

  “How come?”

  “I guess he’s busy,” Dad said. Then he grew suddenly concerned. “I’m not too busy for you, am I buddy? I’m around and my time is free enough, you’d say? Because, you know, I’ll always be here for you, whatever you need, even when you get older and too cool for me, I’ll still be around. Even if for some reason I wasn’t around in person, you can always call, or even just close your eyes and pretend to talk to me and I’d be right there.”

  “Like Jor-El!” David said, getting it now. “He was a great actor, right, Dad?”

  Gil Fuffman smiled. “When Brando was younger he was in an acting class and the teacher told everyone to act like chickens. So everyone’s clucking around, pecking at the floor. Then the teacher goes, ‘Okay, now pretend there’s a nuclear bomb headed right for the henhouse!’”

  “What’s a nucular—”

  “A big, big bomb. So everyone in the class starts going crazy, all these chickens running in circles, squawking like mad, like ‘Ah, it’s the end of the world!’ Except for Brando. He squats down, pretends to lay an egg, and then goes about his business, slowly clucking and pecking at the floor.”

  David was confused. “Why? I thought you just said he was a great actor.”

  “Well, he was acting like a chicken,” Dad said. “What do chickens know about bombs?”

  v.

  David was still drawing a blank. He had kind of an idea for his Egg thesis, but it seemed silly to focus on that with all the work that had to be done in the house to keep them warm and fed. Or maybe, with the world in shambles, his thesis was more important than anything?

  Mathias funded Lee’s chemicals because sure. From antibiotics to painkillers to recreational drugs, pharmaceuticals were a solid investment, a potential postapocalyptic gold mine.

  Fu told David his dream was to figure out how to make robots play improvisational music, thus opening the possibility for AI to create art and maybe have a soul and be responsible sentient beings, and if you believed in reincarnation and the transmigration of souls, as he did, it was basically engineering our collective evolution. Pie-in-the-sky stuff. But during the blackout he shifted gears and focused on his ham radio project. Basic communication. More immediately practical.

  Mathias, meanwhile, knew carpentry and cars and kept dangling that tease about teaching liquor distillation, even though David never saw a still, only the by-product. Mathias knew these things, but more important, he understood time. And time was becoming everything.

  At first it was probably an imperceptible shift, they said, a few tenths of a millisecond every year. After Mott, studies were showing they were losing a minute every week. A solid cadre of fancy-sounding scientist-pundits—folks other than Mott with all their credibility still intact—all concurred on calculating that the so-called Time Crisis would hit absolute zero, the Null Point, on June 6, give or take a couple days. None of them could agree on what that meant.

  “Mott still doesn’t get it,” Mathias said on day eight trapped in The Egg, more to himself than to the room. “His hypothesis is still based on the presumption that the hypersphere is a funnel, but that implies there’s nothing at the bottom, and we just go down the tubes into nothingness. But actually? It doesn’t end at the Null Point. The shape is more like an inner tube. Here, picture a bagel!” This was how he talked. Science was his thing. Theoretical physics.

  David still didn’t get it. He chalked up the phenomenon to a misplaced decimal point. A cosmic anomaly. A false alarm. And yet, he pictured those graphs from biology class. The fat horizontal bars chronicling billions of years from the Big Bang to the amoebas, slimming down to hair-thin slices—births of human interaction, industry, internet, the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Evolution is always collapsing. December might bring whole new leaps. Who knew how long January would be? The blink of an eye? Before David spent his parents’ modest savings and took on a mountain of student loan debt for Ivy League tuition, he wondered if chronostrictesis meant the end of the future for which his parents had endlessly prepared him. He hoped he was doing okay by them.

  “Dude!” said Mathias.

  Blink. David snapped back.

  “I said picture a bagel,” Mathias barked. “Are you picturing a bagel?”

  David pictured a bagel.

  Mathias instructed: “With your finger, trace a spiral down the inside of the hole. Now, imagine you don’t just fall through the hole. You stick to the bagel. Each time we pass through the proverbial bagel hole, a new era of humanity emerges. The next species is called Homo luminous.”

  “Is that Light Man?”

  “No,” he corrected. “Light Men. Which means there will be many of us.”

  “Luminosity would be super helpful right now,” David said, noting the darkness. Owen was working on ways to harvest sustainable energy, at least enough to power some lightbulbs and a space heater. David was pulling for him. They could see their breath down there.

  The temperature was actually becoming a serious problem. László’s blazer helped with the cold, but more layers limited mobility. So David went to his new basement bedroom and grabbed a red fleece blanket from the bed. He tied it around his neck and let it drape down his back, so he could move freely or warmly bundle himself as needed.

  “Good idea,” said the others, and soon all five of them were wearing their blankets.

  Blankets make good capes, David thought. And amid the blackout, a lightbulb went on.

  — Ø —

  from: dfuffman@princeton.edu

  to: hr78546@prince
ton.edu

  date: December 21, 2021

  subject: Rocky Road

  hey haley,

  no idea if you have power. you didn’t respond about your housing plans, but I wanted to get in touch about a project I’m working on at The Egg. I need an illustrator. If I provide written descriptions (see attached) could you translate these into images?

  lemme know,

  DF

  — Ø —

  But seriously, David wondered out loud, where was the government in all of this?

  “What?” said Lee. “You want them to swoop in on snowmobiles, delivering soup?”

  David thought about this. “Yes, actually.”

  Or something. Wasn’t that the point of ERA? Who saves the day when everyone needs saving?

  “That’s the danger of being in the spread-out suburbs,” said Mathias, clipping his toenails.

  Mathias was the one who picked the suburbs. During last year’s tuition strikes, he found himself on the front lines of student activism—at first just a fuck you to his dad. “Then the cops broke my arm, burned my eyes,” he said. “So I stopped going to class and started educating myself.”

  His standoff with the riot cops ended up on YouTube. This would have been around the same time David Fuffman reached regional notoriety by placing his palms upon a Hyundai.

  “Yes, I googled you,” Mathias admitted. “Like I said: I am another yourself. In Lak’ech—”

  David responded, “Ala K’in.”

  Their breath clouds met in the middle and hung there.

  — Ø —

  A minute of cranking yielded two minutes of laptop time, five minutes of phone, or ten minutes of flashlight. That was life during the blizzard: furious cranking, then a dwindling to darkness.

  Finally, after sitting in his phone’s outbox for like nine hours, the email sent. David stupidly assumed Haley might get it immediately and respond even more immediately, with gusto. But her response time lagged. Two more days passed, and David tried to reassure himself that maybe her technology and connectivity were also a crapshoot, that she was equally stranded. David’s email became a message in a bottle, thrown to sea. He realized his odds were not good.

  He still had her number, from back when he occasionally texted her for drugs in high school, but his run-in at the grocery store had been by chance, and he’d already reached out over social media and it would be weird if he texted her now, wouldn’t it, regardless of the email but especially after the email and no response. He clicked her name in his phone, still listed as “The Racketeer,” embarrassingly. He changed it to “Haley Roth.” Literally the least he could do.

  In reality she’d received the email just fine. She was always planning to respond. She just hadn’t been ready yet. She was thinking.

  A few times, she came close to texting him. She had his number saved from high school, too. But this time, she saw that little series of dots on his side of the screen, the ones that meant he was in the process of writing something, thinking about her, right this second.

  She’d caught him in the act. Or maybe he’d caught her?

  Either way, she decided to beat him to the punch.

  “I get it,” Haley texted him, blowing up his functioning phone. “It’s like a social network?”

  “No, it’s real!” David texted back, after a suitable amount of time. “It’s more an autonomous system of economic, social, and spiritual self-improvement tools to help us survive a major catastrophe,” he clarified. “Or at least prepare for it.”

  “Sure, swell,” she wrote. “But you only have engineers so far. Chemical, mechanical, electrical. If it’s Armageddon you’ll need food and water specialists, obvi. And doctors, defenders, other good guys.”

  “Good point.”

  “So who’s the bad guy? The villain?”

  David was having trouble figuring this one out. He’d hoped she wouldn’t ask yet.

  “The president, obviously, but maybe China, too? Or the military-industrial complex? Man vs. society? Or climate change and environmental collapse as a whole? Man vs. nature?”

  “Not the president, but you need a singular symbol or figurehead,” she wrote. “Some character to embody whatever you’re fighting against. In order to recruit for this you need anti-this.”

  “I’ll keep thinking,” he wrote after a bit.

  “I’ll start drawing,” she wrote back immediately.

  But Haley had tough associations with costuming.

  She remembered part of Halloween night, or maybe it was the morning, waking up on the edge of Poe Field. She’d staggered back across all that strewn detritus of seasonal plastic—the cracked tiaras, lopped-off pirate hooks, lone surgeon gloves, and Batman gauntlets—entire costumes ripped to shreds and half buried in the festering muck—feeling what had happened to her.

  She told her roommate immediately that she’d been raped. Poor Jessica was tragically immature when it came to these kinds of things—Haley wondered if she’d ever kissed anyone—and once referred to second base as “the whole breastfeeding thing.” So telling Jessica was almost like telling no one, an awful admission yelled down a well.

  Visual details came back to Haley in horrifying flashes. Blink. His chest, hairless. Blink. His mask, a blue lucha libre thing with silver flames around the eyes. It didn’t take long to piece it together. To ask around and be sure who it was. Haley took two days, and then came forward. After that was the blur of politically correct administration meetings and empty apologies and lawyers and not-exactly-lawyers and things to sign and tricks to hide her growing rage.

  She wondered if David could understand her feelings about masks. Maybe he was just as oblivious as her roommate? Or maybe he was all too aware. Maybe he was giving her this assignment as a rogue, uninvited form of exposure therapy. Regardless, she went for it.

  What else was there to do?

  — Ø —

  Haley had mentioned Mathias back at the Giant supermarket in Pikesville, David knew they knew each other, and he’d been waiting to see if Mathias ever brought her up. Finally, two days before Christmas, when the two of them were digging through the kitchen trash to see what might be salvageable, David broached the subject, told him she was helping with his thesis.

  “You mean Cap’n Cunt?” Mathias asked.

  “Yeah, ha! Exactly! She told me she knew you.”

  “Are you friends with her?”

  “Yeah, we kinda hooked up in high school and—”

  “If you’re her friend, why would you reinforce that nickname, David?”

  “What?”

  “Why not tell me she’s a really nice person and that I shouldn’t ever call her that?”

  David was taken aback. Immediately embarrassed. He didn’t mean anything by it, just…

  “Yeah, I know her,” said Mathias. “Excellent roundhouse kick. You find your thesis yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Try to elevate,” he said. “Halloween was basic, safe. Didn’t work out so well, did it?”

  David fell asleep with this on his mind. He slept fitfully. Dreams of stapled cats. Rape and mutilation. Your worst nightmare. Mutants descend. The Mutant Leader promises: We are damned.

  But wait. Searchlights in the night sky. Yellow and black.

  Brilliantly pathological. Fierce survivor. Pure warrior. The Batman.

  David woke in the middle of the night, went to the kitchen, ate the last piece of Martin’s donated Batman cake. He swallowed the fast, cheap, sugary energy. He wondered how long it’d last.

  4

  The Big Bang

  i.

  A few hours after Owen had vacated their dorm room, David took Zeronal for the first time. With Owen gone, the room was now all David’s. But the commotion surrounding Owen’s recent exit meant that if David had any inclinations toward suicide or nervous breakdown, he’d have to shelve them for the remainder of freshman year. Once roommate A loses it, roommate B can’t very well follow suit. Better to be alive an
d miserable than dead and derivative.

  CAUTION: FEDERAL LAW PROHIBITS THE TRANSFER OF THIS DRUG TO ANY PERSON OTHER THAN THE PATIENT FOR WHOM IT WAS PRESCRIBED.

  Of course, David would absolutely not take these Zeronal pills, these things that played such havoc with his roommate’s mental state and sense of identity and ability to shower properly. He would return them to SCISM. Or flush ’em.

  DO NOT DRINK ALCOHOL WHILE TAKING THIS MEDICATION.

  David googled “amygdala hijacking,” that weird term Owen had mentioned during his move-out, which turned out to be awesome. The example: a guy walking along a canal sees a woman staring at the water, intense fear on her face. Without knowing why, the man dives into the water, clothes on. Only then does he realize the woman had been staring at a little girl who’d fallen into the canal and was drowning. The man swims to her, drags her to shore.

  A positive hijacking. Pure gut. The will to save.

  Owen’s final tease repeated itself over and over in David’s brain: These prepare you to fly.

  TO OPEN, HOLD TAB DOWN & TURN.

  They were smooth purple capsules, black code on the side. Inside, a bunch of teeny white beads. David considered their chemical majesty. So small, and so much potential. Little eggs waiting to hatch.

  David took the pills for two days, to no discernible effect. He noticed a piqued interest in schoolwork, a renewed appetite for reading. But not much else.

  And then.

  David’s regimen of Zeronal left much of the next few days an amnesiac blur. Amid his blackout David remembered buying provisions from the Wawa. Apples. Gummy salamanders. Easy Cheese. He remembered trying to cook things on his hotplate. He remembered becoming jealous of his air ducts and water pipes, how they carried heat, water, everything vital, and you turn a knob and warmth magically shoots from the wall! Amazing! He spent hours balancing on the arms of a desk chair, prying out little boogers wedged between the crown molding and ceiling, sifting through them like a prospector searching for gold. How did they get up here? Where is the booger catapult?

  Mercifully, after days and nights of this nonsense, Owen called.