by Adam Nemett
Haley caught herself on this rant and looked at David, who was beaming. He loved seeing her like this. She was strong again. Respected. Respectable. Powerful. A powerhouse.
She smiled and smoked and said, “It was nice of you to transform me into a superhero.”
“You transformed me first,” David said. “Have you figured out your shadow yet?”
“I don’t know what it’s called yet, but there’s a piece of me that thinks I need to be everything for everyone. It’s exhausting.”
David nodded. He understood.
“Are you still feeling it?” she said after a little while.
David couldn’t be sure exactly what she was referring to, but he said, “Yeah.”
“Me, too. I feel like Wonder Woman.”
“Where’s your Lasso of Truth?” he joked. Haley pantomimed her best cowgirl impression and swung an invisible lasso. David pulled his arms to his sides, pretending to be nabbed.
“There,” she said. “Now you have to tell me some truth.”
“Um, my hands are cold?”
“Here, you pansy,” she said, turning her back to him. “Put your hands in these pockets.” And lo and behold, she backed into him and let him slip his hands into László’s blazer, curling his fingers around hers. They were warm, and David was embarrassed at how cold and clammy his must have felt, but she didn’t say anything about it. Her spine pressed into his chest. He pressed back.
“Wow,” she said. “Your heart is beating really hard.”
“See what you do to me?” As the smoke from Haley’s cigarette curled around her head, David allowed his nose to subtly burrow into her new white locks. “You have. Really. Nice. Hair.” He knew this was lame but meant it so completely. “It’s like cake icing. I want to eat it,” he said.
“Go ahead.” She turned, made a poker face. “Let’s do this.”
She bent downward slightly, letting her eyes come to the tops of themselves. It was time.
Go. Go. Go! XplO!
He closed his eyes and bowed down and leaned in and did not see that she had just lifted her cigarette to her lips to take a drag, and when David’s mouth met the burning cherry of her Camel Light and he yelped and jolted backward, he thought maybe Haley Roth was so damned powerful that she’d sent fire through his face. But no. He was the dog that had pressed his luck too far and come upon the business end of an electric fence, reminding him to stay in his fucking place.
“Ow,” David said.
As he nursed his upper lip, Haley said, “You are such a numbskull.” She grabbed David by the back of the neck and said, “C’mere.” And she kissed him. And it was a good kiss, the way you know it’s a good kiss for both of you. She took his mouth inside hers, sucking his lips, and though he’d burned himself like an idiot and could barely feel it, she was kissing him. She was kissing him.
“Get on your back,” she whispered.
Huh?
She dragged him to the edge of the yard, into the pachysandra, underneath a cypress tree, and pushed him to the ground. Her white hair hung around him. She unfastened the buttons of her naval frock and David took the cue and clawed off his tie and dress shirt.
She climbed on top of him, as she had in Prospect Gardens. This time her thighs clutched the sides of his waist. Her ass grinded down on him and he worried he was about to cum, but a wave ran through him like he’d just eaten a gorgeous piece of fruit, and all he knew was that she was there and awake and he was ready and oh my god this is happening right now.
“Are you sure this is okay?” David asked. “I thought you said nobody’s having sex tonight.”
“You’re a good guy,” she said. “But you need to be bad now or I’ll lose my fucking mind.”
With her pants at her thighs, she pulled her underwear to the side, unearthing the mound of blond hair he’d seen once before. She pulled out his cock from his pants, stroked it deftly, and guided it inside of her, and holy shit. The cold weather was no match for his craving. She rode him fast. David tried to slow them down, but she was going for broke, sprinting to the finish, so he reached to his sides and gripped the ground and tried his best to hold on. For the first time, David heard Haley’s moan, her particular moan he’d missed those other terrible unconscious times, something guttural and surprised, and then she pressed her palms to the sides of his head and her moans stopped. For a moment David thought something was wrong, that he’d hurt her, or that she’d just seen a ghost or something, but then he saw her mouth open, eyes wide, breath held, face red, red, red, thighs shaking, twitching, and it was too much to bear.
From her silent seizing, she exploded, and so did he, waves pouring from him.
There in the dirt, in the yard, in the garden, in the grasses, covered in leaves and digging at roots with their fingers, David caught his breath. It had happened. With her. This was real.
They’d be together now, superheroes flying through the air.
They’d be the wind that made the trees shed their leaves, and they’d be the leaves falling to the ground, and they’d be the ground soaking it all up. They’d gather them all, forever.
She crumpled and then rolled onto her side, so they were both staring at the sky.
“Sorry,” David finally said, pulling himself together. “If that was too quick, I mean.”
“Don’t be,” she said, totally unfazed. “We both came, didn’t we? Although I’m admittedly an easy cum. I’m like a bumpy-bus-ride cum. Still, you have a supernice cock.”
David played a furious lick of air guitar. She laughed at him.
“Seriously, don’t apologize. It’s been a while for me, too, obvi. Have you fucked anyone at school since breaking up with that Madeline chick? I only ask because we didn’t use a condom just now and I usually do,” she said, “but I basically know where you’ve been, don’t I? And I got tested after Halloween so I know I’m clean. And, also, the world’s going to end, so…”
“Um, I never actually had sex with Maddy,” David admitted.
First a shock of fear, and then a slow smile crept across her face.
“Oh wow. Oh my god. Did I just pop Business-Man’s cherry?”
He nodded yes.
“Oh god! And here your first time is on top of a bunch of weeds and fucking flagstones!”
“It was perfect.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“A perfect night.”
She smiled. “You brought me back tonight,” she said. “In more than one way.”
She smooched his chin. For the first time maybe ever, David felt like the exact kind of superhero he wanted to be.
“Don’t mention it,” he said. “It’s the least I could do after fucking up on Halloween.”
Stop.
“What are you talking about?”
“Talking… what?” he babbled, like a guilty, guilty man.
Stop, stupid. Stay still. Maybe you’ll turn invisible and XplO into nothing.
“How did you fuck up on Halloween?”
“Nothing. I…” Well… shit. “I saw him. I saw Bob. And you.”
She went speechless.
“I tried to help,” David babbled. “I swear. I shot at him with my paintball gun but I missed.”
Her arms crossed. She began nodding very slowly. “You shot at him. With your paintball gun.”
David realized it was the single stupidest thing to say.
“He kicked the shit out of me. I didn’t know what to do. He was too strong.”
“Yeah, David! I know he was too strong that night. But if you saw? If you knew!” She started tearing up and whispered, “Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
“But I told you, see, that night—”
“The next day?! The next week?! Why didn’t you EVER say anything?!”
He was suddenly scorching hot.
“Oh my god,” she continued, holding her head in her hands now. “I fucking remember now. By the soccer goal. I saw you. I talked to you, David. You were there when he gave me
—”
“Well, why did you let him do that to you?!” David fired back. “What, you just take any drug someone puts in front of you, drink any cup of whatever, without asking what’s in it?”
“Wow. You think I’m some high school whore.” She deflated. “Don’t you get it?”
David stopped. He did get it. But she explained it anyway:
“David… I’m Cap’n Cunt now.”
And with that, she tore off László’s jacket and punched David square in his burned lip.
“You’re a weak man,” she said, and stormed inside.
That night could have been a triumph. A victory for youth. The night that the famed Britt Childress, Nyla White, and Zoe Olivares joined the USV and transformed The Egg from a glorified frat house into a fullblown revolutionary commune. The night David came into his own power and Haley Roth came into hers. The night he became a man.
But that night was the first night of many, many others to follow that Haley Roth sought refuge in the basement bedroom of Mathias Blue, just steps away from David’s door.
v.
David had watched her run for the basement and decided to give her some space. He spent thirty minutes walking contemplative laps around Woosamonsa, racked by the powerful emotional pendulum swing between reveling in his loss of virginity to a woman he objectively loved and reviling himself for how badly he’d fucked things up. Once he got cold enough he went inside and tiptoed downstairs, mistakenly believing a long, apologetic conversation might smooth things over. He crept to Mathias’s bedroom door. It was closed. But he could make out muffled voices.
“Keep going,” he heard Mathias say. “Faster.”
Inside, in response, Haley sounded breathy. David was seconds away from either busting through the door like a ferocious Kool-Aid Man or else slinking to his bedroom, broken like Charlie Brown, assuming they were fucking in there. But then David realized what was happening.
“Over and over,” Mathias whispered. “Don’t think too much.”
“It’s hard to remember,” said Haley. “It’s faded. Tell me again.”
“Once there lived a little girl who was afraid of nothing at all,” said Mathias. “Everyone knew she would grow up to be a good and important woman who would take on the world and never be afraid of anyone or anything. Then, one night, something scared her. And each night after, just before bedtime, the girl got scared, again and again, until she was no longer merely afraid of the thing that scared her. She was haunted by it. You remember the first movie that scared you, Haley?”
“Monster House,” she said. “That demonic haunted mansion that devours kids—”
“The little girl was haunted until one day her father brought her paper and crayons and said, ‘Draw it.’ At first she couldn’t draw the monster house in her mind. It was too terrifying. But soon she began drawing it, again and again. The monster house grew less frightening, more silly. One day, the girl looked down at her paper, and staring back at her was just… a harmless little house…”
David heard Haley scribbling in there. He sat down quietly against the outside of Mathias’s door, straining to hear her: crying quiet and pretty at first, then loud and ugly, then sniffling, then laughing, breathing, exhale, exhale. Mathias went quiet. For a while Haley was silent, too, and David soon felt like the three of them had slipped into some kind of linked meditative state, though he was fairly certain they had no idea he was there outside. All David could hear were the marks she was making on paper, a soft Morse code language defined by long, whittled strokes and the brisk, sandpaper rhythms of something being shaded in. He eventually heard a body rise from bedsprings.
“What’s that one?” Mathias said.
“Nyla’s daytime ensemble. I could see it during her Big Bang. Cotton gabardine lace-up camo jacket, army-style, plus camo twill hot pants. A leather-canvas tool belt covered in metal washers. She’ll need to find her persona, but as a placeholder I’m calling her ‘Sergeant Drill,’ and hey, do you have any camo stuff in here? Because I’d like to rip off a swatch and make this a proper collection board like we’re a haute couture atelier, Maison du Cap’n Cunt, and also, hey, while you’re at it, can I snag just one more Zeronal, s’il vous plaît?”
“Have as many as you want, dear,” he said. “You’re on a roll.”
“Check this one.” She turned a page so loudly it almost ripped. “Zoe Olivares is our medical ‘SuperVisor,’ so she’s got a teal rayon scrubs-pant-suit with matching belt, plus an ivory lab coat with gathered pleating, see, and this insane surgical mask—might be too much, but fuck it…
“And Britt is the ‘It Girl.’ Ideally I’d put her in a kind of electronic unitard made of flexible HD displays, something we could shift constantly like that shit they wear in Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, but with budget an issue, I may need to design her like fourteen different looks out of lightweight jersey fabric so she can tote them around easily.”
“Budget ain’t an issue, dearest,” Mathias said. “Don’t stifle. Keep going.”
“Do you have more paper?” she asked, pen sounds growing louder. “Graph paper, ideally?”
“Bien sûr,” Mathias said.
It happened quickly. A loud pounce inside the room, and David lifted his head away from the doorframe and recoiled from the bedroom just as the door flung open, Mathias standing there bare-chested, the entryway ajar, and Haley seated at his desk. She was wearing one of those creepy gray masks from earlier in the evening. Just then, Haley glanced out the door at David. She was too deep into her Zeronal-fueled genius to remember her rage, but before returning to her work, she casually dropped a phrase that would haunt David till the end of time.
From behind her blank, mouthless mask: “When a woman loses her mystery, she is finished forever.”
7
March
i.
Dissent in the Age of Flibberflibbergaboobieism
By Nina Samaras, The Atlantic
March 11, 2022
Last week I asked Mathias Blue if he would let me spend a day at his house in Pennington, New Jersey, and initiate me into a secret society known as the Unnamed Supersquadron of Vigilantes (USV). He agreed to grant me access and observation privileges only—adding that it wasn’t “his house” but rather “The Egg”—and promised if my impetus were to turn spiritual rather than journalistic, an invitation to train might be extended. He passed the phone to a charming associate calling herself It Girl, who told me where and how to meet the world’s newest and realest superhero.
Blue is the recognized ringleader of the USV, a flamboyant troupe of student activists who undergo a rigorous training regimen to support their drug-fueled, flash-mob spectacles. It sounds silly, until one recalls the secret societies of centuries ago, which helped birth modern science, democracy, and religion and which counted Voltaire, Ben Franklin, and George Washington as members. Until recently, Mathias Blue was an enrolled undergraduate at Princeton University. While many in the USV—including several top officers—were arrested and hit with yearlong suspensions for their transgressive activities in late February, Blue was singled out as the figurehead and fully expelled. He’s now a full-time oracle, a magnet for confused youth who line up outside his bedroom door to hear their futures.
When I arrive at The Egg I expect theatrics. It’s a geodesic dome, for starters. Stationed on the front lawn of this literal suburban bubble are a nineteen-year-old boy—introducing himself as “Peacemaker”—and his burly team of ex-athlete bouncer types. The USV’s security detail eschews the sunglasses-and-shotgun goon routine. The key to proper security, Peacemaker explains, is neutralizing rather than escalating threats. Indeed, the group has the support of Pennington’s mayor, Martin Rosse, and interfaces pleasantly with local law enforcement (state authorities are growing less patient, and the USV is on the FBI’s radar). Peacemaker leads me to the front door, holding it open for me.
Once inside, an intense young woman (Sergeant Drill) takes over, rippling through
The Egg in a black tank top and crew cut, camo pants, circular sunglasses, and an indecipherable clipboard. She is in charge of keeping the training schedules straight, molding an ever-growing influx of naive wannabes into a stream of worthy superheroes. I struggle to keep up as she leads me to the kitchen.
“After our Big Bang initiation,” she explains, “paradigms get shifted. It takes a few days for my kids to complete the conversion from student to superhero.” She allows me to glance at their self-published training manual, entitled The Superhero’s Journey, which guides initiates through ascending levels of:
1) physical improvement (lifting weights, yoga, home improvement projects),
2) intellectual action (researching and developing a useful “thesis” project),
3) emotional understanding (exercises in interpersonal connection), and
4) spiritual self-evolution (contemplative awareness practices such as meditation).
The Egg is now a full-time training facility, initiating dozens each day with fresh superhero “personas,” costumes, and transformed outlooks on what they believe are their dwindling days on Earth. One of the nerve centers of The Egg is the costuming workshop, located in what was once the home’s master bedroom and managed by a heroine who goes by the handle “Cap’n Cunt.” The room is lined with fashion boards, fabric swatches, and a mini-sweatshop of workers. Cap’n Cunt is the couturier: examining models, bunching or pinning fabrics, calling out direction to a team of assistants led by her right-hand hero (Stockman). It’s prolific work. During spring break alone, more than five hundred new members joined, including dozens of non-Princeton students, a tenured professor of philosophy, and someone’s mom.
Next, I’m received by a dynamic duo: the spandexed blonde with whom I spoke on the phone is a bubbly PR rep (It Girl) and her cohort in surgeon’s scrubs and a stethoscope is the resident medical expert (SuperVisor!—she sings her name the way you’d sing Su-per-man!). Both are giftedly type A. It Girl talks incessantly as they lead me down a frightening set of basement stairs. They are taking me to their leader.
I’m met by a reasonably normal-looking guy, all of twenty years old, in a purple hooded sweatshirt. Blue has boyish good looks—the beginnings of a blond beard over a chiseled chin, a pair of eyes that shift from the sparkly softness of a poet to the piercing gaze of a soldier. I stare at his face and wonder if it might contain a zeitgeist. He removes his shades and shakes my hand—a perfect gentleman.