We Can Save Us All

by Adam Nemett

  “Are you okay?” David asked. Just then, the vending machine’s lights and electronics went black, the power gone again. And they didn’t know it yet, but this time, the power wouldn’t return.

  “I think I’m just hungry,” Mathias said. Then he reached for the fire extinguisher on the wall and handed it to David. Another koan.

  It happened quickly. Without thinking, David smashed the red canister through the vending machine window. It exploded into jagged plastic slivers. Mathias picked out a few bags of chips, some gum, a Snickers. David stole both the cookies and the nuts. They agreed: it was time.

  — Ø —

  She was sitting on the edge of the tub when David walked in on Haley in the bathroom. In one hand was a length of cord twisted around itself. In the other was some metal implement catching candlelight.

  His heart shook.

  “Christ, Haley, is that a fucking noose? What are you—”

  “Chill your bones, Business-Man.” The metal was a pair of nail clippers—she was working on her toenails—and she held up her knot, shook it out, which David now saw wasn’t a noose but something more benign—Mickey Mouse ears surrounding a lovely figure eight.

  “Handcuff knot,” she said, then undid the rope and started over. “You make two identical loops, lay them on top of each other like a Venn diagram or like tying a clove hitch, then pull each loop through the other until it looks like a butterfly. Like this. You can put an arm or ankle through each loop and apply traction to the tag end, like this, and the little twisty bobcat pretzel in the center cinches up. But if you cross up and pull back on these two outliers, like this, it adjusts out and loosens, like a Chinese finger trap. Voilà.”

  She looked up at him with those eyes.

  “Bondage 101,” David said. “As taught by Cap’n Cunt.”

  David felt himself stirring. He stepped close. She exhaled, resting her head on his thigh.

  “It’s funny, everyone loves Wonder Woman so much, like she’s this feminist icon, and I guess she is, but she was also created by a dirty old polygamist guy with a bondage fetish. In all the early comic books she’s always bound or shackled, just another sexy gal tied to the railroad tracks.”

  Just then she moaned, put a hand to her belly. She burped. The moment passed.

  David wasn’t sure whether chronostrictesis was accelerating her baby’s growth or slowing it down. She looked calm, resigned. Small tasks were becoming more difficult, though. David told her the plan, that he and Mathias were aligned on heading back to campus in the morning.

  “That sounds exhausting,” she said. “I’m having trouble managing basic grooming tasks.”

  So David offered to cut her toenails. She smiled, handed him the clippers. He wondered how long it might take to collect enough nail clippings to build a Norse ship.

  David got down on one knee in front of her. He wanted to propose.

  “Haley?” Clip.

  “Cap’n Cunt, if you please.” Clip-clip.

  “I have a question to ask you.” Clip.

  “Ask away.” Clip.

  “Would you like to take a shower with me?”

  “Mmm,” she said. “I’d give that idea a solid nine and a half.”

  David put down the clippers. He reached past her and turned the faucet, afraid she might change her mind if they didn’t just get in there. When he peeked outside the door, Mathias had his back to the bathroom, tweaking wires and tubes on Fu’s ham radio machine. The rest of them were on the bed gathered around a single cell phone. A video was saying something about the supercell, the flood, the End. The twenty-four-hour news cycle had identified its final all-encompassing story.

  “I have to warn you,” Haley whispered, “my nipples are getting rawther huge these days.”

  He locked the door and they climbed into the water. David got down to his knees again, soaping her toes, her ankles, her knees, her thighs—all the places that would soon be hard for her to reach. Her skin grew slick under his hands. He kissed her belly button, on the cusp of becoming an outtie. Her nipples were, indeed, very large. When he stood up she backed into him and took his cock in her hand. David put his hand between her legs, too, wrapping his arm around her gorgeous belly. And though there was water everywhere, when he reached that different sort of wetness below it was like swimming for the first time. She craned her neck back, resting her head on his shoulder, and she cried or moaned, he couldn’t be sure.

  But then they heard thunderous slams against the bathroom door and were sure the SWAT or FBI had come to collect them. They said silent prayers. Held each other tight.

  “Listen,” she said, eyes urgent and speech quick. “I want it to be yours, I need it to be, but I don’t know. And I need to be honest because I don’t ever want to lie to you, David, okay? Okay?!”

  “Okay.”

  “And we need Mathias to think what he thinks. He’s got too much and… Wherever they’re taking us, for however long, I don’t know what will happen to him, but you and I will find—”

  Something shattered. David tried to shield her, to get in between her body and the shower curtain and the bathroom door, but the police battering ram made so much noise. David’s body, too, was about to split at the seams. The doorjamb exploded, and David prepared for the onslaught.

  But it was only Mathias.

  “Goodness!” Mathias bellowed when he saw them. Then he headed for the medicine chest. “Sorry to crap on your moment,” he said. “It’s time for my meds.”

  He uncapped, swallowed, pissed, flushed, left. A wake of detritus littered the floor.

  They breathed there together, freedom restored. David thought he might throw up.

  “I need to go lie down,” Haley said. “Wake me when the sky starts falling.”

  David turned off the water and watched the last of it whirlpool down the drain.

  — Ø —

  Blink. Start with a black hole. Float upward and there’s the thick beige doughnut surrounding it.

  Soar even higher and there’s David and little Beth, leaning over the rim of this vortex, pouring quarters into the side of a spiral wishing well. They are trying to cure cancer.

  When Beth was still tiny and David was just getting big, the family took a trip to Ocean City on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. They spent every night at the boardwalk—playing games, riding rides, eating funnel cakes, and pouring change into the plastic funnel wishing well. Load a quarter in the launch ramp and watch it spiral in ever smaller circles down the vortex, spinning so fast it blurs the eye, finally dropping and disappearing into the dark hole at the center with a satisfying plink.

  The sign said SPIRAL WISHING WELL—HELP FIGHT CHILDREN’S LEUKEMIA. So when Beth watched that first quarter go and then asked for another one and another, David couldn’t say no. He wanted to fight leukemia, too. For Claire. Forget the arcade, this funnel was clearly the appropriate receptacle for quarters. Once David was tapped out, they launched Mom and Dad’s quarters and got demoted to nickels and dimes, which didn’t roll well, but it was fun to watch them spin and fall anyway.

  “Why does it do that?” asked Beth, watching a coin whirl and vanish.

  “Because that’s how the ramp is shaped.”

  “But why doesn’t it spin the other way?”

  David was confused. “You mean, why doesn’t it spin up instead of down?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I, well, because of gravity, I guess.”

  “What’s grabbity?”

  “There’s something big underground, at the center of the Earth, that’s always pulling us downward. That’s what makes the quarters spin down. And that’s what keeps us on the ground.”

  “Is that why we can’t fly?” she asked.

  “Yes,” David said, “that’s exactly why we can’t fly.”

  Beth thought a moment. “I hate grabbity,” she said.

  “Me, too,” said David. “Grabbity sucks.”

  PART THREE

  11

  CO
MMENCEMENT

  i.

  “It’s too deep,” says Sergeant Drill, knee-deep in sludge. “Back up. To the left.”

  Business-Man is carrying a rowboat on his head. Sergeant Drill is steering, and he’s got the back end, balancing a bench seat on top of his noggin while gripping the sides. They look like one of those two-person donkey costumes. Business-Man can’t see but he knows they’re in lower campus, somewhere near the tennis courts probably, still a good few hundred yards from Spinoza. Ultraviolet is up ahead. They follow his voice. It’s hard to hear over the sound of rain beating against the hull.

  Rowboats make good umbrellas.

  “Your turn,” Sergeant Drill says.

  “Air travel,” Business-Man says.

  “Okay. I’m gonna say all of Cincinnati. Fuck that place.”

  This was the game. They each picked what they wouldn’t miss. It wasn’t wishing death on anyone or anything, not exactly. Life would simply be easier once these things didn’t exist.

  “Bicyclists,” he says.

  “Shit, all outdoor sports types,” she says. “All of Colorado.”

  “Those little fucking gnats that fly right into your eyeballs all the time,” he says.

  “The president,” she says.

  “Snow.”

  “Wind.”

  Superstorm Phil had arrived. Everywhere coastal, every lakeside spot, it was all flooding. Wind and rain and hail. It was enough to set off seismic sensors, with tremors felt across twenty-nine states.

  First, the dams broke. Levees, too. Fire hoses in Boise tried to edge out lava from Yellowstone, but the city was evacuated anyway, after nineteen deaths. They were prepared. Nineteen was a good number and better than expected.

  This was it: the Null Point.

  They unleashed hoses at Princeton, too, as Business-Man instructed. Plugging the drains in Spinoza Field House, they initiated the built-in system for turning a basketball court into a hockey rink. But the USV didn’t need ice. It needed fresh water. Only the hydrated survive.

  The sky is purple. The air is purple. Everyone is purple. The rains wouldn’t stop and the USVers got sick of their costumes drooping like dishrags. So they adapted, evolved. They donned their mouthless gray masks and looted Home Depots across Jersey. Along with other provisions, they stole every can of Mystical Grape latex paint. A fraction of a gallon made a cheap, formfitting superhero costume.

  From his hair to his feet, Business-Man, too, is purple. László’s blazer, his magic talisman, is gone, so he’s co-opted this new costume. Bare except for boxer briefs, his skin feels snug inside the latex. He can’t tell whether he loves or hates the feeling. The look suits Sergeant Drill, though. She’s wearing something like bike shorts, and he watches her ass muscles flex against the purple, powering through space. She looks like a medieval candle dripping wax.

  Here was Business-Man’s plan, originally.

  First, uniting their legions, they’d take Nassau Hall. They’d gather things to eat and drink. They’d support Ultraviolet and let him lead. They’d survive the storm. They’d emerge evolved.

  It didn’t happen that way.

  Nassau Hall proved simple to occupy but difficult to sustain. Too many doors and windows. Business-Man worried they’d be easy pickings for snipers and assumed cops had set up a perimeter, like in the movies. In the president’s office, they got a great photo—Ultraviolet sitting at Graynor’s wide mahogany desk, cigar in his mouth and the love of Business-Man’s life on his lap—to post and prove that the USV leaders were back on campus. When the cell towers finally shut down, the untethered feeling hit home. Some kept their phones just for the flashlight. Others needed the security blanket. Plenty of kids smashed their useless devices in cathartic panic, relying on ham radio from now on, tuning in only at the top of the hour, only every three hours, only for three minutes, to conserve power. But nobody knew whether clocks made sense anymore. When gale-force winds blew an uprooted telephone pole through a window, this was their cue to abandon Nassau Hall.

  Now, the Superdome is their ark, capacity 4,500, and the USV will fill it to the brim.

  They shoulder-press the rowboat over their heads. Fuck, it’s heavy.

  “I’ll say working out in general,” Business-Man says. “Won’t miss it, nor the impetus.”

  “Fat dudes,” Sergeant Drill counters. No judgments or retorts. Just pure, unbridled honesty.

  “The woman who makes the announcements at the Baltimore train station. I hate her face.”

  “Old people,” she says.

  “All the Real Housewives of Wherever,” he says.

  “Christians,” she says. “The self-righteous proselytizing churchy ones, at least.”

  “Loud, annoying Jews,” he says.

  “My dad,” she says, straining against the boat’s weight. “No. Yes. Yes, fuck it: my dad.”

  And it’s not that he can’t think of anything to top her admission—he can—but he can’t focus on anything besides this bulky lard-ass sonuvabitch boat. “You win,” Business-Man says.

  “Put some back into it, you pussy!” growls Sergeant Drill, shifting more firmly into her persona. Her deltoids put Business-Man’s to shame.

  “I’m trying, Sarge.” He loves it when she disciplines him like this.

  Up ahead in a low valley is Spinoza Field House. The disk-shaped stadium is their bunker, situated like a flying saucer come to rest in a crater of its own creation. Their Superdome.

  The roof has a circular skylight in its center, maybe thirty feet across. The flooding is bad around the foundation of the venue—two feet of water and only getting worse—but the valley protects the Superdome, a natural windbreak.

  Ultraviolet, their charismatic Noah, is also up ahead. He’s got his grandpa’s axe raised high. He sits Indian-style atop another overturned rowboat carried by ten USVers. Heroes stretch to place their palms on his hull, paying respects as if to a Torah coming down the aisle. Hands on a Hard Body. Business-Man blinks. Hands Across Princeton on a Rowboat for Please God Don’t Fucking Kill Us.

  He can’t help it anymore. He believes in Mathias, who sees things. In every age, when apocalypse is imminent, there are still the chosen ones, the survivors. This is the point of everything.

  We are the future, he thinks.

  Now down a quick hill, the boats pick up speed. The whooping crowd parts way, slapping their hull then curling back around it as in a ship’s wake. They all push toward the Superdome door.

  Somebody moos like a cow.

  It takes some maneuvering to get the boat inside the glass atrium entrance, but a team of USV underlings is on hand to take the heavy thing from Business-Man and Sergeant Drill. The duo high-fives, shakes out their arms. They watch a sweaty horde of USVers spirit this ship up a ramp that leads from the entrance to the arena above. It’ll join the other nine or ten dinghies pillaged from the Princeton crew team’s boathouse. Sergeant Drill is fired up, her muscles craving more. She salutes him and joins a team running canned goods to the commissary.

  Business-Man needs a breather. He hugs the wall, slowly following their boat up the ramp’s incline. It looks like the gangway to an alien craft. He reaches the crest and the cavernous rink comes into view, this temple to collegiate team sports, walls made of dark natural stone that you’d find in a wine cellar.

  Along the ceiling is a catwalk spanning the length of the building, skirting the giant circular skylight. Aside from the skylight there are no windows, which is part of why he chose this spot.

  Less glass for flying telephone poles to shatter.

  The USV crew’s been working hard in here. About a thousand of the early recruits went above and beyond to prep the space for the several thousand now arriving. For the past three days, they’ve been filling the rink with water. Powerful sprays still shoot from the four corners enclosed by sideboards. The water has by now filled the rink space and overtaken the towering hockey Plexiglas. They’ve formed a manmade lake, maybe seven feet deep and risin
g. Their reservoir for when the pipes go dry. A fleet of boats is tied off by the far scoreboard. It’s coming along nicely, according to Business-Man’s plan.

  — Ø —

  Cap’n Cunt can feel it: the quickening.

  Not just inside but all around. She sees the clock ticking, knows her powers and weaknesses. She has overcome her various selves, has always seen her way past the mild-mannered nerd, always known she was entitled, and never believed she was free. Until now.

  It is time to evolve or perish, to shore up this house.

  She powerwalks the Spinoza concourse, eyes darting, analyzing, judging. The urge for nesting is strong—that shit is no joke—and she recognizes that in a different dimension she’d be buying the type of gear she bought for her cousin Julie’s baby shower—the Bumbo and Boppy and other silly-named things—ensuring her life and space were ready for a baby. But instead of a sensible two-bedroom apartment in Park Slope, here they are in this flooded college hockey arena, provisions and preparations both a foregone conclusion and a massive uncertainty. It makes her head hurt.

  There’s only one way to ensure safety and protection against all of this.

  Cap’n Cunt knows that now. She’s seen it.

  She will zero in and emerge from the dark neck of time luminous without end.

  Cap’n Cunt steps into the arena space, looking down on this bowl filling with water. She associates arenas more with concerts than with sports. Still, when she scans the ceiling of Spinoza, it’s sports that are on display. Thick blankets hang, each ten feet tall, each boasting some serious accolade that she can’t help but find funny. PRINCETON MEN’S HOCKEY QUADRANGULAR CHAMPION 1941.

  Good for you guys! she thinks. Some eighty years later, we still pay tribute to your mighty quadrangle!

  There are other big blankets showing off single uniforms, too. One for KAZMAIER ’86 and another for BAKER ’14 with the subhead MAKE HOBEY PROUD. She’d laughed at this one initially, until she found an exhibit case in the concourse extolling the virtues of Hobey Baker. Before building Spinoza, they’d named the old hockey rink after him. He’d done lots of great football and hockey sports stuff and he’d also written for the New York Times, worked for J.P. Morgan, and been a fighter pilot in World War I, and he’d died in a plane crash. An anonymous poem on his tombstone inscription read: