We Can Save Us All

by Adam Nemett

  “Obviously,” Mathias answered. “But do I have your permission to get in the water with you? I’m going to suggest that I join you on your journey, for various reasons, not least of all so that you’re totally clear that I wouldn’t give you a drug I wouldn’t take myself. We’ll be on equal planes.”

  She cleared this internally and nodded. “Makes sense.”

  “And we should say again: this is just a stepping-stone, a means to an end. This isn’t the whole point of the USV, just to do drugs or—”

  “I get it,” Haley said. “Let’s just see how she flies.”

  Mathias kicked off his shoes and pulled out his cell phone, keys, wallet. “Do you like music?” he asked.

  “That’s a stupid question,” she said.

  “This is one of ours,” Mathias said. “Golden Echo’s music, made with neural synthesizers that use machine learning to combine sounds from different—”

  “Whatever, is it chill?”

  “It’s chill.”

  He pressed Play. Quiet, clean bass faded up from his tinny iPhone speaker, followed by the subtle wash of cymbals. Mathias grabbed three folded white towels off a stack by the chaise longue and carried these down the stairs as subtle whirlpools of purple paint curled off his body onto the skin of the water. “It’s quite warm,” he said, and motioned for David to get in also. So David did.

  “This is Infrared,” said Mathias.

  “Business-Man,” David corrected. Haley smiled. “That’s my name. From now on.”

  Mathias shrugged. “Okay then, this is Business-Man, and he will be our shaman—a rope tied from this world to the other. In other words, he’ll be sober and will protect us both. Won’t he?”

  Mathias tied one of the towels around David’s neck like a cape.

  “I am Ultraviolet.” Mathias smiled. “And though I will be equally shitrocked in about sixty seconds, I, too, will do my best to keep you safe.” He tied a towel around his own neck.

  Haley shook out her hands, like an Olympic diver stepping to the edge of a platform, and glided down the submerged stairs, gingerly tracing the railing with a single finger. As her white jeans hit the water, she looked down to make sure they weren’t turning translucent (they weren’t). She took one more step, then jumped back with a start, as if some snake had just swam by. She shook her head in disbelief and laughed, then shoved a hand in her pocket to pull out the two pills. She’d been one step away from submerging her waist, dunking the pills, and ruining the whole thing.

  “That would’ve been a massive buzzkill,” she said, and held the pills aloft as she waded over to Mathias and David. She looked David in the eyes and smiled nervously. He tried not to think about how amazing she was. He tried to stay stoic and professional and mentally monastic—aware of the weight of the moment and the asexuality he was to be maintaining.

  But she was just so lovely.

  Mathias tied a towel cape around her neck. She passed him a gelcap and the other she held to her lips. “We’ll figure out your superhero name soon enough,” he said. “But here’s your cape.”

  “Repeat this chant,” David whispered. “Kisszapill… Kezapel… Kezapel…”

  They synced their chant to Fu’s music, some kind of digital snareflute going rat-a-tat.

  Ke-za-pel. Ke-za-pel.

  Mathias smiled at Haley, her face awkward with self-consciousness, but dropping into the music nonetheless. He said, “You’re safe with us. You’ll stay safe. Swear on my brother’s grave.”

  Before she could blink, Mathias opened his mouth and pointed under his tongue. He tilted his head back, cracked open the gelcap, and poured the contents into that pool of membrane.

  “It’ll come on fast and feel like forever,” he said, swirling it. “But I promise, it will end.”

  She followed. Her eyes went wide. Either the trip had already begun, or it was fear.

  “Are you afraid?” David whispered.

  “No,” Haley said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Were you afraid before?”

  “Before when?”

  “Good.”

  And it was good. Or he hoped it was good. He assumed it would be good. He assumed the scent of chlorine was being overtaken by that synthetic smell of garbage bags. That crinkling sound of them breaking through the membrane. But he had no way of knowing where they were or how it was, whether Haley was experiencing that sensation he’d felt that first time: of being saturated and charged and filled by Mathias. They were gone elsewhere together now, and it was just David, a sober fetter bobbing beside them in the water, making sure they kept afloat as together they plunged down deeper and deeper and deeper into this secret well. He tried to focus on Echo’s music…

  David listened to a whistle, the loneliest and loveliest human instrument. It joined that bass drone and the snare grew. He closed his eyes, tried to zero in.

  — Ø —

  Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Blink.

  And there’s the sound of a lonely piano.

  That’s the feeling of clean sheets.

  Wow.

  David remembered his last time in a hospital, back in the fall semester toward the end of his post-Halloween breakdown, just before Thanksgiving break. He’d popped up from a dreamless sleep and immediately decided it was time to go. There was no need to call anyone.

  Escaping from University Medical Center was easier than you’d think, David recalled. Just keep walking calmly and don’t make eye contact. In no time, you’re wandering down Witherspoon Street, past the ordered rows of bodies at Princeton Cemetery, toward the familiar yuppie bustle of Nassau Street, back to school.

  He’d tried to piece back the puzzle of what had happened the day he got officially kicked out of Forbes housing. Tried to focus. Yes, he remembered now: DO NOT DRINK ALCOHOL WHILE TAKING THIS MEDICATION. He’d taken Owen’s Zeronal, then gone to Haley’s room to offer some pathetic apology, and then he’d sprinted across campus and ended up projectile vomiting and passing out near the pond of the Institute for Advanced Study. Some Good Samaritan must’ve called the police or ambulance to come collect this idiot freshman before he got frostbite. Thank god.

  One thing was clear, he’d stop drinking. There was no magic left for him to discover in beer or bourbon. It was his kryptonite. Zeronal and DMT, that’s where it was at. Without booze, he could fly. David had escaped from University Medical Center and arrived back at Forbes with a new sense of purpose, a lightness and freedom that came with making one of those adult decisions to put away childish things. He felt ecstatic.

  When David reached his dorm room doorway, two cops—not the beige campus security guards but actual midnight-blue police—were sifting through the wreckage. Esteban was there, pointing like some museum docent.

  David’s room was a shitshow.

  The first thing he noticed was the smell. He’d been living in his own stink since Owen vacated, and furniture sat diagonally in the center of the room. A few hundred books were collapsed on the floor, and the phrase BOOGER CATAPULT was scrawled on the wall in tomato ketchup.

  The cops looked kind of amused.

  “We thought someone was dead in here,” said Esteban.

  “Son, you can’t just up and walk out of a hospital,” said the larger cop.

  “I didn’t!” David implored.

  The cop wiggled a finger at David. “You’ve got a bunch of those suction cup sensors still attached to your chest. The wires are hanging out the bottom of your shirt.”

  How embarrassing. The cops put their hands on David’s arms, told him it was time to go.

  Up till then, he’d never had what people refer to as an out-of-body experience. They seemed to occur only in hospital birthing rooms, sports arenas, churches, DMT rituals.

  David’s happened in a dormitory hallway. While he was sober.

  Like a cell at the moment of conception, David’s body split in two. While David kept walking down that hallway with the policemen, one foot in front of the other, another David stayed
just outside his dorm room door, pinned to the spot, watching his twin drift into the distance. Flanked by cops, the back of his brother danced. Neck fuzz. Broad shoulders. Skinny waist. Calves.

  He heard the whisper of a countdown.

  Ten.

  Part of him tracked down the hallway, past the open doors of his hall mates, their heads and shoulders leaning out into the corridor and forming for David a soft gauntlet of sorrowful eyes.

  Nine.

  Some reached out to give his shoulder a loving squeeze. Some recoiled into their rooms.

  Eight.

  Goodbye, construction-paper names I will never remember.

  Seven.

  Goodbye, Whitney Garfunkle. I will forever fear the wrath of your nonconsensual skateboard.

  Six.

  Goodbye, Esteban. You are prelaw. You are Dominican. You are a good man.

  Five.

  As David reached the bank of elevators and turned around for a last farewell, it was not the audience of students that caught his eye, but the boy at the end of the hallway, waving.

  Four.

  Look at you. So fragile down there in the distance. Shrink any smaller, and you’ll vanish to nothing.

  Three.

  Goodbye, dignity. This is what failing at adulthood feels like.

  Two.

  They entered the elevator and a finger pressed L«. Once more, the gunmetal doors blurred his reflection. Staring back was a brilliant swatch of white between two bigger blobs of blue. It was David between two cops, but to him it looked like something with wings.

  One.

  They elevated down.

  Zero.

  — Ø —

  Blink. David snapped back to the hospital pool, a quick splash startling him, as if waking from dream-falling. Fu’s whistle traveled all over, with banjo-ish computer bleeps plucking the background. Against this melody, a series of oscillating drones rose and fell. David didn’t know Fu could whistle like that or play the banjo—had never seen a banjo in his room and assumed he’d simply built these layers, recording himself wherever certain instruments lived, adding synthesizers and 808 drum machines and however it all worked. That sense of nostalgia that comes with good music, it came over David—the feeling reminding him of the best and worst high school nights, or maybe it was nostalgia that stretched back to the womb or to time immemorial—he grew sad and happy thinking of Fu alone with computers, a one-man band, rolling solo.

  Fu was incredibly talented. They all were. He needed a band; he deserved one. David sunk into Echo’s layers, a lush harmony now forming from three or five voices stacked atop one another. He imagined Fu making this track, starting so stark but feeling the song slowly grow around him like friends entering the room one by one, falling into conversation. Horns now. Or maybe that was a falsetto tweaked through some crazy processor. David listened to the bell curve volume, the gentle lapping of water on the plastic tub of the pool filter, almost rhythmic but not quite, but wouldn’t it be amazing if the pool around them actually fell into time, too?

  His thoughts turned to his studies, to remembrances from religion classes of his first semester. He made an inward list of gods and prophets transformed by water: Krishna was baptized in the Ganges. Some say Horus, too. Jesus was baptized by John in the Jordan. Zoroaster also was baptized, while prepping a psychedelic plant for ritual. There was Moses in the reeds, a different kind of thing. And even Superman, who never went into water per se, but that vast gulf of space his parents sent him into as Krypton exploded? Think about it, he’s basically Moses.

  Thoreau had Walden Pond. He moved there because he “wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” These were sweet intentions. David would love to claim them for himself and say that he moved to The Egg to dive deeper into the dark pond of his Self, to join a powder keg of revolution, to follow a leader whose shadow would soon follow him forever.

  But in truth, David’s motivations were much less lofty. He’d simply needed a place to live.

  Haley’s reasoning, David realized, was more profound. She was processing a horror he couldn’t imagine. So this was either the worst idea possible or the best. The Big Bang might push her deeper into trauma—a dysfunctional reaction by a girl living through a broken time of life—or…

  Or it might bring meaning to that brokenness. Paint a path out of that hole. David knew it could really go either way. Haley understood this, he figured, and she was a gambler, banking on the upside rather than worrying about the risk. He had to respect that.

  Yes, this was her decision. And she trusted him.

  So it was now his job to protect her. To deserve her trust. To earn some heroism.

  But there in the water, he felt Haley and Mathias floating away from him, farther and farther.

  He would stay put. Rolling solo. But maybe not anymore.

  They would come back soon. Any minute now.

  6

  February

  i.

  How the Unnamed Supersquadron of Vigilantes drove a critical mass to collect and launch the ballast of their lives into the flames, Business-Man couldn’t be certain. He was late. And by the time he arrived at the lawn of Nassau Hall, toting garbage bags full of masks and capes, a swarm was already bounding from the dorms, carrying boxes of belongings as if the campus were under attack and an evacuation was under way.

  A week earlier, an earthquake had hit St. Louis. Lakes sank into underground sinkholes. The Mississippi River reversed its course, just as Ultraviolet predicted.

  Business-Man could feel the heat from a quarter mile away. The USV had taken charge of the annual spring homecoming bonfire, and its leader was sending Princeton’s student body to gather obsolete and unworthy objects, return them to the bonfire, and convert them to ash once and for all. At least a thousand were present. No, two thousand! Looking at the eyes of those gathered, Business-Man saw students already under the influence of the USV’s drug. David had resolved, with Dr. Ugs, to stay sober and shepherd the situation.

  A husky dude carrying a cardboard box sliced a path into the onlookers and Business-Man followed, using him as a blocker, making his way to the epicenter. When they reached the innermost ring, the behemoth in front of him began pulling trophies and medals from his box. He unceremoniously underhanded each one into the fire. To Business-Man’s left, a girl destroyed a scrapbook filled with report cards, certificates, and acceptance letters that bore her name and proved its worth. Others had come straight from Princeton’s homecoming basketball game, and David saw spirited arena garb—Princeton sweatshirts and foam fingers—thrown into the fire, along with other school-specific kindling. Business-Man marveled as the fire grew, fifteen feet high at least, and was relieved to find a fire truck parked at the edge of the lawn.

  Who was directing this show? Scanning, Business-Man found Dr. Ugs with his long black lab coat and exterminator-like cannon; Golden Echo was perched atop a metal awning, pumping lively tunes from his Racket-Jacket (it was finally working!); and dancing on the limb of an oak tree was Ultraviolet with his purple skin and undone straitjacket, bathed in a fierce firelight, swooping his arms like an orchestra conductor, elephant-trunk sleeves fanning the flames.

  “Look up there!” spat some freshman, and Business-Man assumed he was referring to Ultraviolet on high but instead found him pointing toward a banner-like message projected onto the exterior brick of Nassau Hall. It read: RELINQUISH YOUR PAST. DIVORCE YOUR FUTURE. ZERO IN. Over this message ran a slideshow of images, including the kinds of personal memorabilia—trophies and SAT scores and such—now being bequeathed to Hephaestus. Business-Man smiled. He’d created this PowerPoint. He was the ringleader of this foolishness. This was all part of his plan.

  And it was only wave one.

  Next in the projected slideshow came a pictorial series of pills, powders, liquors, cigarettes, stalks of cannabis, et cetera, alongside the motto: CURE THE CURES THAT AIL YOU. A new wave of students soon threw in prescription bottles, thei
r tops coming loose and spurting pills like New Year’s confetti. Bottles of booze were tossed into the fire, cocktails suddenly made Molotov. Even bags of coffee grounds, the roasted aroma mixing heartily with the skunk stench of someone’s weed, lofted in amid moans of disappointment. Business-Man traipsed a slow lap along the inner ring of gatherers. He had to stay vigilant against souls in the throes of catharsis, chucking larger and sharper possessions into the hub of this emblazoned wheel.

  Business-Man grabbed Dr. Ugs for a quick aside. “Everything cool?” he asked.

  “Ready and waiting,” Ugs replied. As plastic and metal melted, the air took on a chemical potpourri. It made Business-Man light-headed, loopy. He reached into his garbage bag, put on a gray mask.

  “Does that mask block these fumes?” asked Dr. Ugs.

  “Who?” Business-Man giggled. Yes, he was definitely feeling it now.

  “Fuck, never mind.” He began backing away from the bonfire and Business-Man joined him.

  And now another wave was cresting. Another series in the slideshow. This one called for a ban on technology: UNPLUG! WE HAVE BECOME THE MACHINES OF OUR MACHINES. Laptops, printers, tablets, cell phones, even the hot plates and electric kettles of modern-day dorm living—soon these, too, were gathered and added to the harvest. Peacemaker arrived in a golf cart and unloaded ROTC uniforms, rifles, combat boots, and other military implements into the flames. Business-Man wondered why the firemen weren’t stopping this spectacle. Maybe they were high, too?

  “What a fucking waste,” said Dr. Ugs, still standing by Business-Man’s side.

  But next came a new equalizer. The projection flashed dollar signs, piles of greenbacks, fanned-out credit cards, with the slogan: YOU’VE GOT MONEY TO BURN. By this point, the students could be compelled to raze just about anything. And with modern electronic finances, Business-Man knew that any major financial strokes could be undone with a call to the credit card company the next day. Symbolic sacrifice was made nonetheless. A collective fumbling for wallets ensued.

  Perhaps a shift of wind occurred then, because suddenly Business-Man found the smoke billowing around him, choking his throat. Dr. Ugs covered his face and sprinted away, every man for himself. Hacking, Business-Man wormed his way out into the fresher air of the circle’s circumference. He regained his sight and breath. But his attention was grabbed back as the once thunderous crowd now simmered down to a murmur. Something was up.