by Adam Nemett
“Virgins!”
The USV faces off against the other side. Haley wonders if maybe those toxic men arrayed against them have their own double-headed Januses, just like she and David do.
Facing one way are the cops, who are not playing dress-up and do not appreciate the USV very much at all. They wear black uniforms they call blue and carry functional utility belts with actual tools of protection, apprehension, detection, and violence. They still have the haircuts they made them get when they enlisted. This is what they trained for. To protect and serve the community.
They were meant to be heroes.
Facing the other way is a different Janus face, begging for a fight. Maybe these are the guys who were not focused or stable enough to become cops, so instead they found alienated brethren on the internet and formed themselves a militia. This is the moment to show these Ivy League fucks who’ve had every privilege, every resource, every gentle parental push in the right direction, rather than a pounding shove down the stairs, and still they’ve chosen to squander it. This is the wrong kind of freedom that threatens the right kind of freedom. And it must be stopped. So they will stop it.
Because they, too, were always meant to be heroes.
They advance.
Black boots enter the mud and rain of the courtyard, soiling themselves.
Peacemaker raises both arms, fists clenched, like a superhero about to take flight.
His voice caroms off the echoing stone, and the others chant with him:
BOOM… . . BAP… BOOM-BAP… BOOM… . . . BAP… BOOM-BAP…
From the sidelines, David and Haley watch the USV march toward cop shields and militia torches. And for a moment, David and Haley both believe peace is possible and that this thing they are doing is too big to fail. The skies will open and an angora blanket of hope will billow down and cradle them all. Along with the rain, there will be revelation.
Haley points to the sky. She spots a deus ex machina coming toward them! David sees it, too. It is small and blinking. Propellers buzzing, some kind of alien craft, maybe. It opens. And some billowing cloud issues forth over dozens of torches, dispersing down onto their would-be attackers.
For a moment, they believe that peace blanket has come to save them.
But it is actually a dragon, breathing deathfire.
Or, no, it’s just a small remote-controlled drone, the thesis of one of their heroes, no doubt, Junior Pez or maybe Mind Boggle. Their drone is dropping flammable kerosene spray onto the Nazi torchbearers. Not a direct hit, but flames engulf a pack of them, and the screams go up as they roll in the mud or sprint wildly in full retreat. The ones spared by the fire run to the police, pointing fingers at the USV, at the sky, at anything to be blamed, demanding arrests and retribution. As the Nazis lick their wounds, the cops advance.
So this is it. The two sides rush at each other. The melee is on.
This is David’s cue. He’s got a predetermined spot by the chapel wall, behind some bushes. His home base where he won’t be beaten or arrested—only corralled later—all according to his deal with Colonel Blue.
“Come with me,” he says to Haley. “To the bushes!”
“No, are you crazy?!” she screams. “We have to stay all together, zeroed in.”
“Trust me! You and I, we keep going.”
She is too confused to fight him.
She sprints with him to the outskirts of this spectacle and slips or keels over backward, splashing the mud, making a mess of her clothes. David joins her down there.
Sludge makes a good traitor’s costume. A full-body mask.
He protects her, laying his body atop hers as he watches the scrum commence in the middle of the field, too busy and muddy to know who is who anymore. They are all mud.
Finally, a grave still point. David stares up at the sky, stuck mid-snow-angel. The Big Bang is happening again, constantly, up there in space, down here inside him. A billion revolutions every second. Every cell in transition. Perfect blissful constant conversion forever…
Tonggg. They hear it in their ears, in their brains.
They are still stuck to the ground when the tent comes down and the media moves in. Haley pulls out her cell phone to film, to have some objective record she can return to when the psychedelics wear off. She sees pocket universes of USVers locked in the same act, the same rhythm. It’s like watching a clock, inner gears moving at different speeds but all ultimately working in harmony. This group sprays yellow puffs of mace. That group squirts milk at burning eyes. A group of masked heroes abandons its work at the stone pillar and wields its circular saws overhead like crazed horror movie villains.
We are this mechanical wonder, David thinks. This machine.
Cells look uniform from far away, but magnify further and you see all the ganglia and pock marks that shape an organism.
We are a machine in beast mode.
Haley sees the barricade break. Superheroes swarm the police, jumping on their backs and biting their legs like bratty toddlers. Cops are wary at first, scared of accidentally clubbing a senator’s son, and they focus on their normal targets—the women, the smaller statured, the people of color. But soon, tuxedoed kids are bleeding. Skulls cracking. Peacemaker has procured a long pole. He swings it in an arc around him, cutting a wide circular berth. No one wants to fuck with that.
David darts his head around and spots Ultraviolet behind a wall of protectors—There he is! What the fuck?—waving a Ø flag until Nyla and a pack of bodyguards swarm and shuttle him away.
But Golden Echo stays. He is a triumph. He jumps from his pulpit and hops on his Yamaha, driving doughnuts around Peacemaker’s nucleus, around the makeshift barricade, round and round he goes, wheels kicking up a spray of soil, engraving a brown circle into the lawn.
Cops chase him, but they’re hopeless. They’re on foot. There’s too much mud. The USV is too coordinated, or too reckless and frightening, completely in and completely fucking out of control. When the tear gas comes, the kids are ready for it. They have giant fans and gas masks galore to scatter the smoke and survive it. Some throw up or lose motor control, but the vinegar helps. For every USVer who goes down, there are plenty more to fill the void.
But everyone whoops for Echo. He is a rock star. He is Golden.
He dodges more cops on his dirt bike as they try to cut off his path. An officer in a Dodge Challenger pulls onto the McCosh lawn, trying to scatter this pack of wild animals. It skids and turns, headed back for another pass. David sees headlights pointed at him now and burrows into the mud. He closes his eyes and listens. In his ears, a heartbeat.
Tik… . . . . . . ta-ka…
Tick… Tock…
Tick.
Tock.
But when David opens his eyes, the headlights are even closer.
Unless they turn, these wheels will bear down on David and Haley and run them over deep into the ground. He sees it happening, but thinks, We are ready to make this sacrifice, to give ourselves to the mud and the wheels and the rain and the brothers and sisters around us and the USV movement on high. We are ready to be killed by cops and sent to the annals of student protest, the newest heroic martyrs for a growing youth tide that will never subside, never shrink, only grow bigger and bigger and bigger until the End. The Luminous Ones are the next wave, and the Normals primed for extinction can’t do a thing to stop this sea. We are ready. We are pelicans.
But then another set of wheels cuts through the headlights. A silhouetted motorcycle flies in front of David’s eyes. The police car tries to bail. Its wheels swerve. Now, with the high beams out of his eyes, David sees everything. He snaps his head back to the moment and watches it unfold.
He sees Golden Echo drive right into the car’s path.
Mud flies.
Another day.
Metal crunches metal.
Another night.
And now Golden Echo, he is soaring, body bereft of bike.
Fu is soaring, arms outstretched in front of him, and when his body slams i
nto the stone wall of the chapel and hits the ground in a heap of twisted leather limbs, David sees it a thousand times, a body in its last dance, a superhero flying through the air.
10
JUNE
i.
For a day, it is big news. An ambulance scattering color into the sepia courtyard. The USV exploding in all directions, cloaked by the crash. Peacemaker dragging away It Girl, who’s begging to stay and sob to the cops, her limbs flailing into space. Her Fu Schroeder is gone.
Neck broken.
Dead on impact.
The key camera shot, though, the one that plays over and over on social media and the twenty-four-hour news cycle, is of the exact spot where Fu’s helmet struck the chapel’s stone wall. A grisly gash is carved into a stone relief of the Princeton University crest.
It’s a shield with Latin words: DEI SUB NUMINE VIGET.
“The school motto translates as ‘Under God’s Protection They Flourish,’” says the CBS anchor. She uses the phrase “tragic irony.” David stares at Mathias, a different revelation in mind:
He sees everything. Mathias is for real. A prophet. David finally fully believes.
And he almost ruined it all.
Then the news switches to weather. There are typhoons in Texas.
— Ø —
They spread themselves around the pews, trying not to cluster or draw attention.
The reverend Dr. Anthony East addressed the university chapel, and the USV mourned through all the usual turns of phrase: “It fills my heart with sadness.” “A bright future.” “A lesser community without his presence.”
But the good reverend understood his audience. He thought he understood.
He chose his Scripture carefully:
“‘Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good,’” he quoted. “Romans, chapter twelve, verse twenty-one. Twelve: twenty-one. I do not think it’s an accident that these numbers are a palindrome. A mirror image. For in every action, in every human being, there is possibility for evil and potential for good. Some claim evil is always on the verge of triumph. That there are demons everywhere, and good souls must attempt to walk the narrow moral line between two massive walls of treachery.
“I do not hesitate to call the death of Fu Schroeder ‘tragic.’ In examining the events surrounding Fu’s demise, however, I do hesitate to call his death ‘accidental’ or ‘senseless’ or ‘heroic,’ as others have. Those of us who watched those frightening and heartbreaking events transpire on Livestream are aware that Fu Schroeder was a member of an underground organization linked to domestic terrorism and public acts of disruption and that he was instrumental and highly visible in the activities of May 20.
“I do not say this to trample a young man’s memory or to provoke animosity toward those boys and girls of the USV who are undoubtedly in attendance here today. I assure you, the police presence you see within and outside the chapel walls is strictly for peacekeeping. No arrests will be made in this time and place of mourning. You are safe in your grief.
“I will not speculate on the USV’s spiritual merit—Christ himself was seen by many in his time as a dangerous cult leader—but I would be remiss not to ask students lucky enough to escape real harm to take note of this truth: despite the trendy seduction of the USV, the organization fosters recklessness. Death is no passing fad. I encourage students to move forward with appropriate levels of trepidation and to choose life instead. And let us say, amen.”
— Ø —
But they were not safe in their grief. Not at all.
While the mourners crowded the chapel, standing room only, evil attacked.
The Egg went up in flames.
Fire was a lot like grief, Haley decided, in that there are different sorts of fire. There was the kind that started small, almost a secret, little embers kissing a sisal rug, maybe, turning the fibers brown, then black, then that hint of orange that catches a breeze, spreads slowly, and the smell is what tips you off, sends you sprinting to stamp it out and say, Wow. That was close. But then there are also the fierce explosions. They boom out of nowhere. They’re hard, maybe impossible, to fight. You just have to let them run their course. Fu’s death was like this.
Haley had sat in that pew, having found an empty spot next to her old roommate Jessica. She hadn’t seen or talked to Jessica since just before winter break, but there was something so familiar about her in that moment. A neutral space. A thigh she could press hers against and cry. There was no small talk—no talk at all, actually—but as Haley’s body rocked with sobs, nauseous dread coursing through her body, Jessica’s hand on her back felt like a perfect piece of protection. Haley peeked around her hanging hair and spotted David standing behind one of those tall candles marking the outer aisle of the church. He was looking at her, too. She felt so unbelievably, endlessly guilty, wondering if this fire would ever go out. Fu had saved them, her and David. He’d given everything for them, and she was entirely sure they did not deserve it. They’d been cowering on the outskirts of that skirmish as their brothers and sisters took flagpole stabs to their necks, mace to their eyes, boots to their backs—so many twisted into the mud and hogtied with plastic cuffs. They’d hidden. They were too goddamn high to do anything else. And, as if to make that point completely clear, for the rest of their lives, Fu had given himself to them. He was the ultimate hero, would always be so. She looked up at the pastor, waxing on.
Fuck that, she thought.
They dispersed after the service, taking long, meandering routes back to The Egg to ensure they weren’t being followed, which gave the fire plenty of time to establish itself and spread to Fred’s House and the Pink House as well. By the time Haley arrived at Woosamonsa Court, USV members and middle-aged neighborhood allies were standing back, just watching the blaze. There was plenty of wailing, but not enough frantic motion for there to be people stuck in there. This was pure property destruction, but obviously it was more than that, too. Haley found a storm drain to puke into, having held back this bile feeling for hours now. When she was done, she could finally survey the scene clearly. Some elders laid hands on the shoulders of these newly exiled youth, like parents might. A fire truck was doing a half-assed job of spraying the conflagration, and Haley wondered what had shifted, how the USV had fallen so hard, from being darlings of Pennington to outcast pests needing to be fumigated. Superhero personas non grata. She took video with her cell phone, not knowing what else to do. Her lens captured some USVers near Main Street, peeking out from behind trees like refugees, and she spotted David among them. She went to him.
“My grandfather’s blazer is in there,” he said to her, eyes wet with tears, “turning to ash. Like, it survived revolution and exile from Hungary to Austria to America, decades of time, but I somehow let it be defeated by the Jersey suburbs. I let it happen. I destroyed it. It’s my fault.”
“They did this,” Haley said, motioning to firefighters loafing at the far end of Woosamonsa Court. David wasn’t sure whether she meant them specifically or “adults” in general.
“I love you,” David said to her. “I mean, not the way we all love each other. I mean I’m in love with you. If something happens I want to make sure you know that.” He engulfed her in his arms, or he let himself be subsumed by her hug, one or the other. He told her again that he loved her, that he wanted very much to protect her, send her away somewhere that no bad guys could find her, and at the same time he needed her to promise that she’d stay close to him, that they could be together in whatever came next. Haley held him and looked at the fire curling from the windows, wrapping around the curvature of that dome. The Egg was gone. It was going. Getting eaten away.
Even the rainstorm was no match for this inferno.
Haley stared at the flames and thought, God, why is tragedy so fucking romantic?
“I’m sorry,” he said, kissing her forehead. “I didn’t expect to fall so hard in love with you.”
“I did,” she said.
— Ø —
There were rumors. Owen heard The Egg’s wood gasifier blew up. Nyla said it was something having to do with all the kerosene-laden innovations—the Dragon Drone they’d used on the Nazis, for instance. Lee worried it was a chemical fire, some lab substance made incendiary.
But it didn’t matter what the USV thought.
When the FBI called it “arson” and found the remnants of Lee’s drug lab and the weather got even worse, the USV went into lockdown. On Mathias’s instructions, the USV issued a press release propagating the narrative that it was the government who’d set the fire. Haley read it aloud, her voice filtered through one of Fu’s machines—a last tribute—and they posted the audio online:
This is the eighth communiqué from the Unnamed Supersquadron of Vigilantes.
Your methods of subliminal and overt suppression have failed. When we followed your rules quietly, you piled on the work. When we attempted independent thought, you suspended and expelled us. When we tried to live quietly, you murdered us and burned our home. We now bow out of your game and commence to finishing our own.
The fire originated from a projectile fired from outside The Egg. The fact that none were hurt in the blaze is a miracle. Our legend will prove this preordained. The gods have chosen us as their survivors. They have opened the skies for rains to quench the fire you set. The disasters are responses to humanity’s actions and inactions. The gods are upset.
All we are are superheroes. We have succeeded in locating the best parts of ourselves and we now choose to wear these on our sleeves. This is who we are, who we wish to be. The villain is you, the scared and faceless that stand in the way of our Final Protection. Let this message be a warning: we intend to protect ourselves at all costs.
You say we are embarrassments to the great institution of Princeton, we are dangers to America’s youth. You call us irresponsible and savage. Let this message be a warning: we intend to show you just how savage we can be.
—The Unnamed Supersquadron of Vigilantes
They all needed to be alone at first. They needed time to think. Time to mourn. Time to squirrel away time, minutes, like walnuts.