We Can Save Us All

by Adam Nemett

  The fountain outside of Lewis Arts Complex had become a harbor for canoes and kayaks, and some enterprising or drunk students were staging a raucous water-joust, tipping each other over amid rebel yells.

  They’d consolidated students into upper-campus housing, the rooms on the higher floors. Courtyards were now strung with a labyrinthine cat’s cradle of clotheslines stretching between dorms, with waterlogged and abandoned laundry hanging like tattered prayer flags. Feeling sentimental and curious, David jogged toward Blair Arch, spotting an encircled crowd in the tunnel underneath. At first he thought they were just huddled under cover to get out of the rain, but they were watching some kind of whooping activity, and it sounded like a Brazilian capoeira demonstration, the kind of multicultural offering once commonplace on campus, but as he got closer and pushed through the pile, David realized it was just two assholes fighting.

  Finally, David arrived at Alexander Hall. It sat on a small hill and was therefore serving as a common meeting place for numerous classes and administrative offices. The auditorium inside, once accustomed to singular events like orchestra performances or poetry readings by Nobel laureates, was packed to the brim, the seating sectioned off with masking tape and poster board into loosely delineated classes. Candles illuminated each space. David thought it looked cool at first, a kind of teeming Socratic arena, but the cacophony was intense, and soon David hustled to find the drop-off box marked PEN COMPETITION so he could be on his way.

  There were only six other submissions in the box, so David knew he had a decent shot. How many kids would jump through such hoops? There was no secretary or department head overseeing the submission, but David hoped it would get to the competition’s lead judge, Professor Zhou.

  On his way out of the auditorium, he spotted a sign for the Environmental Studies 215 course in which he was enrolled, about ten students clustered around an exhausted-looking woman with glasses and flyaway hairs pouring out of a ponytail. She was lecturing on the topic of resilience.

  “Of course, Frankl writes that trauma,” she read aloud from her notes, “a particularly difficult situation, is what ‘gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself.’ Who disagrees?”

  David found a dry seat and sat down to be a student.

  iii.

  The red was thick and dark on his hands like slasher-movie blood when David’s parents called The Egg on their recently installed landline. Tiny hairs littered the kitchen sink. Remnants from his latest head-shave. He’d just finished dyeing his Mohawk again, but at a glance you’d think he’d slaughtered a lamb. David Fuffman: Demon Barber of Woosamonsa Court.

  The power had been off for three days and David’s cell phone was dead. When he rinsed a palm and lifted the kitchen receiver, his parents were there crying, “Hi, honey!” in unison. Squinting at himself in the mirror, half bald and slathered in crimson goo, David thought, That’s so wrong: I am a badass vigilante. I am dirty, raw, and radical. I am nobody’s honey.

  “We haven’t talked since my birthday!” yelped Mom. David vaguely remembered the evening in early March. He’d called just before midnight to wish her things.

  “How about this Time Crisis!” said Mom. “I read about your friend in the newspaper.”

  They were excited, albeit concerned, about the USV. They knew their son was at the center of it. Maybe, in the same way that David was focusing on the USV to distract him from the reality that lay ahead, his parents were focusing on David, their own work in progress, to distract themselves from the same impending fear.

  “Hey,” David said absently to his mother. “Can I talk to Beth?”

  When his little sister got on the phone, at first David thought Beth was crying or had a cold, but then he realized her voice had simply changed since they’d last spoken. It had been that long.

  “Heya, kiddo, how’s your bluegrass mandolin working out?” David asked her.

  “I play old-time music, not bluegrass,” she said. “They’re completely different things.”

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “C’mon.”

  “You told me I could come visit you at college,” she said. “But you never invited me.”

  “Beth, see, you’re still really young and it’s a little too dangerous for you here right now.”

  She sighed long into the receiver. “Yeah, well, I’m twelve now. Almost a teenager. And you didn’t call.” She dropped the phone and the line went quiet, muffled voices in the distance.

  Oh fuck. He’d missed her birthday. He felt like such a shit. Hurting Beth was just too evil.

  What was happening with him?

  “You should have called,” Mom confirmed when she got back on the phone. “But she’ll understand about not visiting. Sometimes… you’re just too young to be exposed to certain things.”

  “So… it’s March 30,” Dad interjected. And at first David thought he was again highlighting the fact that it had been weeks since their last call—an eternity in Fuffman time—but then his father clarified: “We’re worried about your, uh, plan. For tomorrow. The Day of the Hero?”

  “Oh,” David said. Out the window it was still raining like mad. A group gathered round a reliquary mound of stolen clocks. They might’ve been praying, who knows.

  This is so right, David thought. Our Manifest Destiny.

  “We’re concerned about the possibility of expulsion,” his father said. “Or jail, by the way, mister. That letter from the president seemed serious and—”

  “Don’t worry,” David snapped. “I’m protected.”

  “Protected how?”

  “I’m the secret king.”

  After a pause, David’s mother began speaking again—something about balancing the responsibility of the adult with the freedom of the child—but David wasn’t listening. He was staring at a tiny head-shaving worming its way into one of the phone’s mouthpiece holes. Using a dry knuckle, he pressed the hair all the way in, until it disappeared down there.

  This will be your new home, little hair, forever and ever.

  “We’re just concerned that instead of studying you’re spending so much time—”

  “Look,” David said, growing bold. “The work I’m doing with the USV is going to serve me better in whatever future than meaningless tests and grades ever will. This is the best way I can use my God-given gifts and my work ethic to do something real and important and create an organized container that might just save some lives and—”

  “But are you really safe?” Mom asked.

  “What is safe?! There’s a war on, for chrissakes, and the campus is flooded and—”

  “We have half a damn roof right now,” Dad said. “We realize nobody’s safe from weather. What your mother is asking is whether you’re doing anything illegal, David. Your altruistic intentions are well and good, but if you wind up in jail? Not a very fun place to ride out a storm, buddy.”

  “If things ever go back to normal, I’m making connections,” David lied. “I’m organizing, impressing people, being an important person. That’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it? For me to be important? Well, now I’m important. I’m the chief, kept separate from the action on the ground.”

  “Wow, you must be important,” said Mom. “Better than getting dragged off by your hair.”

  “So don’t worry. I’m doing exactly what I should be doing right now. And if you’re so worried,” David continued. “You should come up here and join us.”

  “Yeah, right,” scoffed his father.

  “Bring your camera, Dad. We could use the coverage. Something waterproof in case they use fire hoses again. Mom, you, too. Help us rally people like it’s the Women’s Marches all over again.”

  They were silent for a moment. Their own personal tonggg.

  And then Mom asked, “Do we need costumes?”

  iv.

  David had to order the telephone booth special from a rec-room supply catalog. Up in the Frist Campus Cent
er, he stood at a bay window, wearing his three-piece suit and wireless headset mic. He stared down at the old-time phone booth on the Princeton campus, his arms crossed, like a foreman surveying his factory floor. He was Business-Man.

  Mentally, he did a quick accounting. The telephone booth had cost $1,560 plus tax. Typically chump change for Mathias, but lately funds were running low. The USV’s primary expenses were the three mortgages, Lee’s chemicals, costuming, food, and printing/marketing costs, in that order, and had grown to about $26,000 over the past month. That left a $4,000 monthly budget to plan the USV’s intermittent public spectacles, since the revenue from pharmaceutical sales, Mathias’s trust, and membership dues had generally exceeded costs.

  But over the last two weeks, expenses had overtaken revenues, and David was reasonably sure it was Mathias’s own side projects that had sent them into the red. Maybe this was just the nature of growth, a slow and steady expansion, a little here, a little there, until pennies equaled thousands. Like climate change—an incremental creep of degrees, too slow and subtle to notice when you’re right there in it—the old yarn about the frog in the pot, water temperature rising from tepid to boiling, and the little amphibian doesn’t realize he’s being cooked alive. David resolved to recruit more quants—econ and math majors—and do a full audit, just as soon as time allowed.

  David had confronted Mathias about the financial issue: “If you want me managing all of this, we need to trust each other, and I need to know what you’re working on.”

  “Absolutely,” Mathias had said. “You drive.”

  — Ø —

  They flew across Jersey, David driving to who knows where, Mathias next to him, manic, speaking fast between short bursts of silence, gripping his axe. Christopher Walken’s backseat was filled with shovels and rakes and other implements of mass destruction. David tried not to be frightened—was there blood on that axe?—but here was Mathias, babbling about some comic book called ABC Warriors, about Joe Pineapples and Happy Shrapnel and the Volgan War, and everything was somehow related to a song by the Jam called “Going Underground.”

  They were near Kingwood, a few miles north of Rosemont. Thinking it might give him strength, David stuck his nose onto the shoulder of László’s blazer and took a deep sniff.

  “I’m wondering now about your grandfather, David, about how he died.”

  See? He did it again. David hated when Mathias pulled that psychic shit and told him so.

  “You were snorting your lapel. I figured you were summoning him. Doesn’t take a genius.”

  “He was kind of messed up at the end, I’m told,” David said.

  “Did he have some kind of addiction?”

  “Is there blood on that axe?”

  “Some,” he said.

  “Where are we going, man?”

  “We’re burying something that’s in the trunk!”

  David pulled over. “I’m not driving any farther until you tell me what’s in there.”

  Mathias swiveled his head. “Actually, this is perfect. Grab the shovels and follow me.”

  They’d arrived in the middle of nowhere. David felt even more vulnerable and wondered if maybe Mathias had brought him out here to do away with him. At first, David had been excited for this impromptu field trip with the Übermensch. But had he just chauffeured himself to his own end?

  He took a breath and joined Mathias by the trunk, where he was now buckling under the weight of an enormous duffel bag slung over his shoulder. It was just big enough to hold a human.

  Was this a dream? A joke?

  “Is this a joke?” David asked.

  “Right now,” Mathias said, “I’m serious as a German.”

  They walked through a fallow field toward a copse of trees. The only other things in sight were skeletal towers holding power lines. David followed Mathias. He kept following. Why did he keep following, exactly? Curiosity maybe? Fear? After the Big Bang, it felt like there was no other choice but to follow this shaman, the only mouse who knew the way out of the maze.

  By the woods Mathias doubled over, the duffel bag flopping to the ground with a cold thud.

  “Here is good,” he said, and reached for David to hand him a shovel. Mathias bent down to unzip the duffel. David steeled himself for dead elbows.

  When the bag opened, all David could see was red and black.

  Shiny orbs. Uniform and massive.

  David bent in for a closer look, readying for the recoil, for the smell of death.

  Inside the bag were four giant plastic eggs—two red and two black—each the size of a human torso. David reached in and touched them. They were smooth, seamless, hermetically sealed. He needed two hands to lift them an inch.

  “Are they bombs?”

  “No, man. They’re time capsules. Black are machine. Red are meat. It’s my thesis. Lee has his capsules. And I…”—he slapped the skin of a giant egg—“I have my capsules, too.”

  He kept digging while he explained:

  “Our core biological instinct is to propagate ourselves, right? We want immortality. Women want to have babies. Men want to fuck. We both really just want to create ourselves over and over again. Grab that rake and clear some leaves, will you, I can barely see the ground…”

  David let Mathias lead the conversation and did his best to follow.

  “Now, the problem is you make a baby and fifty percent of it comes from a totally different person, so you’re only really passing on half your genome. We try our best to make our children into identical versions of ourselves, but they’re just not. They become separate beings, right? And this is where all the pain comes in. On a visceral or subconscious level, parents are disappointed with their kids, because they’re ultimately not just another yourself, right? Keep raking.”

  “No, I don’t know about that.”

  Mathias bent down and unscrewed one of his giant crimson eggs. The contents were packed tight, but he opened it enough for David to see inside. Affixed in meticulous rows were prescription bottles, Ziploc baggies, mason jars labeled in a loving hand.

  “My red capsules are filled with organic matter. That’s my hair, blood, tears… um… sweat, fingernails, skin cells, splooj, spit, I think some snot, too. This is the meat.”

  He closed it up.

  “The black capsules are inorganic matter. Twenty or thirty terabytes of digital information in each egg: the hard drives of all my computers, copies of every book and article I’ve read, every movie I’ve seen. Blueprints of every place I’ve lived. Crazy-awesome neuroimaging—aha!—compilations of my daily to-do lists from the past ten years, plus some extensive personality tests I had done in Japan. I used to track the data manually, but now you can get pretty much everything through Google’s or social media data, which becomes a closer approximation of my consciousness than anything found in my genes, so…”

  “When did you start doing this?”

  “I bury about twenty-five a year, for the last eight years. On four different continents. Each with directions on how to re-create Mathias Blues using the material provided. When the End comes and we turn to ash, something is going to take our place. The planet will survive even though humans probably won’t. With a few hundred capsules buried, whatever comes next will eventually find one of my eggs and go through the steps to re-create me, even if it’s centuries from now.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Why do we study dinosaurs? They’ll have advanced technology, either the ability to clone or else highly advanced artificial intelligence. Either way, I’m covered. They clone me with the meat or else upload the machine me into AI cyborgs.”

  “It’s like Superman,” David said. “Jor-El sent him into space when his home world was about to be destroyed. That spaceship is like a Superman time capsule.”

  Mathias let out a deep sigh. “Superman is a faggot,” he said. David felt a sting.

  “Wow,” David said, letting it all hit home. “So then you’re completely insane. You act
ually believe this is going to happen? The meat and the—”

  “No, let me back up. It’s an elaborate experiment. A piece of social theater, if you will.”

  “Yeah, I’m not sure I believe that. And I’m not sure you believe that. Burying capsules isn’t your shadow. It’s not a way of showing weakness. You’re elevating yourself. Right?”

  David turned to digging, letting his seed sink in and take root in Mathias’s ego. David knew how to play the game, too. He remembered back to his first time on DMT, in that river, with countless beings pouring out of him. Maybe they were both destined to cultivate the masses.

  Suddenly, Mathias smiled and lunged at David, who recoiled and tried to lift his shovel to protect himself from this onslaught, but then Mathias was hugging him like a brother. It was a strong, long hug. David wasn’t sure why this was happening.

  “So you won’t leave?” Mathias asked, almost shaking. “Even when it gets scary?”

  “No, dude,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.” Mathias was still squeezing David tight.

  “Promise me,” he said. “I can’t hold it all by myself. You’re my best friend.”

  David promised, but soon he found himself laughing. And he couldn’t stop. He thought of those orbs and doubled over, laughing at the ground. He reared back, cackling to the morning sky.

  “Are you laughing at me?” Mathias’s face had suddenly turned serious. “Don’t laugh at me.”

  “No, man. I… oh god! I thought you’d murdered someone! I thought it was a fucking person! In the duffel bag! Fuck! I thought your fridge was full of hacked-off body parts wrapped in plastic!”

  “No, David,” Mathias said, blank-faced. “That would be ridiculous.”

  — Ø —

  Blink. As David thought of Mathias’s capsules and his questionable theories on procreation, he considered his own mom and dad. How David was similar and how he was different from them. How had he made them proud? How had he disappointed them?

  Their latest spectacle was set, and David searched the courtyard below for his parents. Earlier that morning, after he gave them a tour of The Egg (skipping Lee’s lab, obviously), his dad and Haley hit it off, comparing cameras and spouting film theory to each other: art vs. artifice, vérité truth, the uncosmeticized human landscape.