We Can Save Us All

by Adam Nemett

  In the sunroom, with a healthy crowd gathered around him, was “Pop-N-Lock Popinjay,” a break-dancer sporting an Afro and a top hat (he’d recently started an after-school hip-hop dance class for kids in Newark).

  The androgynous kid huddled in the corner by the laptop and laser jet, wearing a purple crushed velvet jumpsuit, was a superhero named “Prints,” whose thesis was about building a hard copy archive, printing out thousands of pertinent pages of the internet before it inevitably ceased to work and they had to resort to paper. He focused on the most postapocalyptically relevant sites—prepper/DIY tutorials, Wikipedia entries, how-to guides, medical texts, the Great Books series—and was on the short list of practically minded superheroes whom David was grooming to join him in the operational corps of the USV.

  In fact, he began working with Prints to create the USV’s Living Library, a ten-volume series of massive binders, constantly updated and organized around food (animal and vegetable), drink (water and booze), fire (for heat and community building), construction (for land and floodwater), medical (herbal and chemical), machines, security, communications, culture, and power (finite and renewable). Compressed print-on-demand versions of the library—plus The Superhero’s Journey—were driven and hand-delivered to all known USV chapters, ensuring the whole survival network was aligned.

  The full Living Library resided in the basement of Fred’s House and would be one of the key things saved and transported in the event of emergency exodus. They also downloaded billions of bytes of YouTube videos to local hard drives and even rented an old 16mm film camera from the Princeton video department’s equipment cage (they’d never returned it) to capture physical footage of the most important online videos—first aid and such—so they could always pass these reels through a hand-crank projector if the future got truly desperate.

  Blink. The trio of women leaders, bounding through The Egg.

  They often traveled as a pack, discussing the particulars of new recruits: Nyla/Sergeant Drill judging their overall training progress; Zoe/SuperVisor asking after their physical well-being; Britt/It Girl communicating their mental health. They swung through the kitchen, deep in conversation, all busyness, barely giving David a nod.

  David looked back to LAX Luthor. “Why do you look familiar?”

  “We were in Problem of Evil together. I thought you were nuts. All that Zoroastrianism stuff.”

  “Oh.”

  “But Ultraviolet helped me see,” LAX continued. “You’re a transformative figure.” He shook David’s hand. The microwave mercifully beeped and David removed his puff pastry.

  With every new Big Bang initiate they had a new believer—one who’d seen the End with his or her own psychedelic eyes and could now think of nothing else but how to prepare for it.

  David knew he might not be able to stem the tide of Ultraviolet’s June 6 doomsday date, but national USV expansion seemed the obvious next step to prepare as many kids as possible for it. Per their volume on communications, they’d divided the country into five distinct regions and created a hub-and-spoke distribution model—the USV home office would disseminate information to each region hub, via radio or physical travel, and the hubs would communicate to their local USV chapters. They accounted for sea-level rise and future flooding, and David admittedly got a little nostalgic and romantic when it came to picking the college towns that served as region heads, selecting campus-based chapters with a history of activism. The world was crumbling around them, but here in The Egg was a countrywide ecosystem solidifying, coming together.

  And so it was at about this time that David was forced to ask himself the question that all the articles were asking: Was the USV a cult? Is this what David had accidentally started? He told himself it was a social movement, practical with a slight overtone of spirituality. This was his work, his ultimate circus. And it was the positive thing he was doing, the thing they were all doing, to keep fear at bay and distract themselves from that annoying, nonstop ticking of the world’s clock. Maybe this is just a phase, he thought. We’re past denial but not yet arrived at acceptance. We’re busying ourselves to leave a final mark while there’s still time. We’re still too far away from the End. It’s not real yet. Maybe in another month or two it would be time for bucket-list craziness. For goodbyes. For now, this was his job.

  David didn’t anticipate a sudden painless flash on June 6 vaporizing them all. What if it happened a week earlier or later? Either way, this was a slower, less concrete demise, like Barbie, like Claire. The world had an invisible degenerative disease, impossible to touch; a villain that didn’t fight fair. You couldn’t just crack your knuckles, wind up, and take a swing at it, or imprison it in some Phantom Zone and send it spinning back into outer space like General Zod. Chronostrictesis was cancer. Luke Hemia cometh. They could only control what they could control and then wait and be wide-awake, unafraid. Hope it might not end after all.

  David felt proud of the growing nuisance he’d caused. But he couldn’t help but feel ill prepared to handle all these new recruits. Newbies were close to David’s heart, but the League of Nine he’d grown to love like blood. David thought they were the smartest, strongest, most vibrant people he’d ever known. He felt honored to count them as contemporaries and comrades.

  Fu/Golden Echo kept everyone fed and kept everything fun. His music was shared and became well known across the USV network. Despite serious plans and seriouser consequences, David wanted to make sure they didn’t fall into the trap of losing their sense of humor, as these social movements tended to do, so Echo kept the music coming. And Britt/It Girl, their would-be psych major, counseled and listened to them all. Especially Fu, who was her favorite to flirt with. She spoke a mile a minute, touching his shoulder often, and though Fu never said much in return, after an onslaught of attention he’d pull David aside and whisper something like “That was like the best conversation with a girl I’ve ever had…” David wanted to kiss him on the head, because Fu was the best, and Fu was falling in love, and this was a wonderful thing to watch, but then David would realize it might actually work out for him. David’s own jealousy would take hold. As Fu stopped wearing his headphones altogether, David began wearing his infrared goggles around the house so he didn’t have to make eye contact. Heading outside he—

  Tonggg!

  Tonggg!

  …

  …

  Outside, The Egg’s backyard initially resembled a quilt of tents surrounding a central ceremonial clearing. But Sergeant Drill had since put her carpentry and construction know-how to use, working with teams to build three tin-roofed structures: The Shed was for woodworking and fabrication. The Studio was for writers, designers, video editors—anyone Ultraviolet referred to as the “quiet creatives.” And The Shack was for music, liquor distilling, and general after-hours carrying on.

  Late at night, the toast repeatedly rang out from The Shack: “To evil!”

  Many new initiates now lived back there in tents full-time, and when he wasn’t cooking in the basement, Dr. Ugs used the central clearing to facilitate Big Bangs, working with a few former acidheads to shepherd kids through the experience. Otherwise, Dr. Ugs stayed solo in his basement lab, making magic beans, always tweaking the recipe. Like David’s, Lee’s was a solitary existence.

  “Ever feel self-marooned down here?” David once asked Lee, watching him titrate something into something else. “Like Thoreau at Walden Pond?”

  “Stop talking like that,” Lee said. “Thoreau was an anarchist. If he’d lived in the days of chemical terrorism, he’d have been the fucking Unabomber. Both smart, ugly bearded dudes, living in cabins. Thoreau burns down the forest and Kaczynski mails anthrax to civil servants. It’s just fucking time and media that says one is a hero and the other a villain. Makes it hard for me to know whether Dr. Ugs is what I should be striving for, or whether my shadow is the real fucking ideal.”

  Lee’s shadow character was called, very plainly, Mrs. Ruth Popkin. His mom’s name. She was
a lonely alcoholic who popped pills until she popped too many and her heart stopped.

  “I revived her,” Lee remembered. “But her brain was never as good.”

  “So then you saved her. You’re a hero.”

  “I did it more for me than for her, though. It was ultimately a selfish action. Sometimes I think it might be better to let something die. Like it’s unnatural to stop the inevitable. Maybe God knows that, too. Maybe he’s fucking pissed at us for meddling with the order of things. It’s humanity’s turn to die and we’re trying to revive our species, but maybe it’s better to just let go.”

  David supposed he had a point. But he wasn’t about to concede anything to Lee, not ever. In the basement of The Egg, hatching new and nobler spectacles, David tried to regain the good.

  Haley and Mathias, too, stayed downstairs most of the time. They’d probably prefer to have emerged more often, but—on David’s insistence—they paid only twice-daily visits upstairs. The growing status of Mathias Blue and Haley Roth—King Shit and Queen Bee—demanded they ration their appearances, doling them out sparingly like Christmas gifts to orphan children.

  They’d rise from the cellar together, unhurried and regal, and then they’d break apart, separately surveying their kingdom. Mathias sauntered slowly but rarely stayed still. Sometimes he’d shake hands and make small talk like a good politician; other times he’d evade all contact, teasing everyone with his very presence and returning downstairs without doing much of anything (this was all carefully orchestrated). But if you were lucky enough to stand beside him as the chime went tonggg, spending a full minute in his energy field, it was like you’d just won a game of musical chairs.

  Haley was more generous. She always looked like she’d just awoken from some delicious nap. David would watch from the patio, smoking, as she moved through the house, crouching down and offering design advice to a girl sewing sequins onto a costume. She was royalty passing through an elementary school classroom, bestowing blessings. He tried not to stare.

  The only time she lost her cool was when some unwitting freshman donned a Mexican wrestling mask as part of his persona. Haley kicked him in the chin and clawed her fingers through his eyeholes as she ripped the mask off his stupid head and threw it in the woodstove. That made the USV’s one and only dress code violation fairly clear for all would-be initiates. Haley had power.

  It would’ve been easier to exist in the basement without the ecstasies of David’s two loves intermittently finding his ear. And honestly? It’s not like they were assholes about it. Mathias knew he’d hurt him and did his best to assure David he was still the favorite, the most important person in the house, the true leader, the secret king. And Haley? David liked to think she cared enough not to rub his face in it on purpose. Theirs was simply Olympic-caliber intercourse. They did it four, six times a day. Whenever the chime tonggged, David tried not to listen to them catching their breaths.

  Except once. He could hear Haley whispering something breathy to Mathias, something like a chant. Creeping out of his own bedroom across the basement concrete, David saw their drywall shifting with each thrust. He stepped up to Mathias’s door and pressed his ear against the frame. And he couldn’t be sure, but he could swear Haley was grunting, “Please quench me.”

  Good god.

  Why couldn’t he hate them? It was hard to blame them for being the perfectly marketable power couple. But David—nay, Business-Man—wasn’t he kind of famous, too? Didn’t he deserve some recognition? So with Mathias and Haley always banging their brains out, David took it upon himself to get seduced, letting young ladies prey on his celebrity and insecurity.

  Once, while in the garage taking inventory of a truckload of wholesale fabric, David got cornered by two opportunistic heroines. As he was leaning over the bolts of material, they flanked him from behind. The short one pressed her breasts against David’s elbow, subtly at first, and then not so subtly. The other was at least a foot taller than David, jet-black hair pulled into a ponytail, and engulfed him with long, muscular limbs. He didn’t recognize her at first.

  “You’re a little workhorse, aren’t you?” said the tall one, massaging his neck. She wore a sumptuous Druid-like cloak rimmed in animal fur. “Do you remember me? From Forbes?”

  “First-Floor Allie!” said David, taken aback.

  “I’m Skyfox now,” she said. “And this is Honey Mustard.”

  Honey wore yellow yoga pants and a tank top covered in mustardy puffy paint. She wasted no time, her hands already coasting along David’s belt buckle. “I’m sweet and spicy,” she said.

  David turned his eyes back up to the towering Skyfox, who was running her fingers through David’s Mohawk, tickling his bare scalp. “You never could remember my name,” he reminded her.

  “Well, I know who you are now, Business-Man,” she said. “Can we get into it, or what?”

  Honey Mustard had removed his belt and was working on the button of his shorts.

  “That’s quite an offer,” David said. “But communal living is not simply about open, um, pleasures of the flesh. What I’m doing here is bigger, purer. I see the clock ticking. You’re discovering your powers, giving something to the world as it faces collapse, receiving grace from—”

  “We’re going to receive you in our pretty little mouths,” said Honey Mustard.

  David resisted as they tried to guide him down to the pile of fabric bolts, but as they continued to whisper sweet nothings in regards to the fellating of his pecker, their vapid willingness and ulterior motives on full display, David couldn’t help but get aroused. He wasn’t comfortable, though, wasn’t used to being the coveted one, handled and groped unexpectedly. He realized this was what women must deal with constantly and how annoying and uncomfortable it must be.

  He tried to save himself.

  “It’s difficult to give myself over to this without a true connection,” David said. “You see, I’m in love, is what I’m saying, I guess, and, oh wow, and the heart wants what the heart wants, and—and I feel like I would just be taking advantage of you both, which is not fair to you, or to our moral code, because no man has a right to enforce his will, ohhhkay, so, um, were you thinking this could be the kind of thing where you both went down on me at the same time, like switching off and then maybe kissing each other, and—”

  He’d just barely begun to relax into it, letting his body sink into the rolls of fabric, Skyfox’s talented mouth now wrapped around him, in truth hoping Haley and Mathias might walk into the garage at that moment so he could make them as jealous as they’d made him. He’d barely begun to have his own fun… when the Seventh-Minute Stop and its all-pervasive tonggg rang out.

  It halted their moans and pierced the moment. At first Skyfox just froze with her head in David’s lap, his cock in her now-still mouth. It was funny at first. But a minute is a long time. Soon, David began to lose his gumption. And his hard-on. And as he grew less and less impressive, he heard the girls start to snicker, probably at the ridiculousness of the situation in general, but David took it more personally. Soon, Skyfox let his shrinking prick slip from her mouth. When the tonggg rang them back into motion, the moment was gone, and the disappointment and frustration was palpable. David slid himself back into his shorts, climbed out of the fabric mound, and bowed.

  “I hope you see: this just isn’t who I am,” he said, as if his resistance were voluntary.

  — Ø —

  David still didn’t know who he was, so he convinced himself he could be many things: a leader, a follower, a student, a teacher, a hands-dirty DIYer, an above-the-fray manager, a radical activist, a corporate suit, a caped crusader, a businessman. He could be everything.

  All the heroes, they each contained multitudes, didn’t they? Owen was a jock, invested in his own physicality and the protection of the USV, but when David asked him for an update on their basement Electrocycle power system, he responded off the top of his head, “We need 50 kilowatt-hours to power the home on a normal day w
hen the grid is up, but grid down, we can cut out HVAC entirely and focus on powering the fridge and freezers, Lee’s lab, minimal radio equipment, a few computers, and our LEDs, so with 40 watt-hours produced in each half-hour workout, times forty-eight workouts per day if we max out, times five Electrocycles, we’re looking at about 9.5 kilowatt-hours, minus fifteen percent transfer loss, so about 8 kilowatt-hours, times thirty days average, that’s about 245 kilowatt-hours per month, and added to the solar—”

  “Are we good on energy?!” David interrupted, the numbers hurting his head.

  “We’re not great. We’re good on energy,” Owen said. “For now.”

  Good for now. David knew the variables would continue to change.

  The key was constant improvisation.

  But while the USV was constantly evolving, the deadline for the PEN Startup Competition was fixed and had arrived. So David put the finishing touches on his file, printed and slipped it into a nondescript folder. He told the guys he was going to pick up more PVC for their Aquaponics system, jumped in the MaxMobile, and headed for campus.

  Arriving at Princeton, his first time there in weeks, David was unable to park close to campus. It was pouring, and portions of Washington Road were underwater or blocked off, while University Place was packed with service vehicles and work crews. Most of the nearby parking lots—the ones that were still dry enough—served as staging areas. David ultimately parked at the Institute for Advanced Study, still a quiet haven away from campus. He slid the business plan folder under his shirt to keep it semidry and hoofed it across the golf course toward Forbes.

  The course had gone to shit, obviously. The greens and fairways, un-mowed and overgrown, had transformed into a lush and fertile pasture, while the bunkers and water hazards had overflowed and mixed together into a soupy quicksand. Forbes, too, was roped off with yellow police tape, the parking lot saturated and sandbags forming an inadequate barricade around the front door. Clearly, they’d evacuated his old dorm. But David saw activity up ahead on higher ground.