We Can Save Us All Read online

  WE

  CAN

  SAVE

  US

  ALL

  WE

  CAN

  SAVE

  US

  ALL

  A NOVEL

  ADAM NEMETT

  AN UNNAMED PRESS BOOK

  Copyright © 2018 Adam Nemett

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected]. Published in North America by the Unnamed Press.

  www.unnamedpress.com

  Unnamed Press, and the colophon, are registered trademarks of Unnamed Media LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Nemett, Adam, author.

  We can save us all : a novel / by Adam Nemett.

  Description: Los Angeles : Unnamed Press, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018021901 (print) | LCCN 2018023933 (ebook)

  ISBN 9781944700775 | ISBN 9781944700768 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Classification: LCC PS3564.E47989 (ebook)

  LCC PS3564.E47989 W4 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.54--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021901

  Designed & typeset by Jaya Nicely

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  This book is for my kids, and for all the young people whose timeless mission is to remake an inherited world.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  I Am Another Yourself

  Part One

  Chapter 1: Precipitation

  Chapter 2: Halloween

  Chapter 3: Incubation

  Chapter 4: The Big Bang

  Part Two

  Chapter 5: January

  Chapter 6: February

  Chapter 7: March

  Chapter 8: April

  Chapter 9: May

  Chapter 10: June

  Part Three

  Chapter 11: Commencement

  Chapter 12: The Satya Yuga

  EVIL SUPERMAN:

  “Well I hope you don’t expect me to save you, because I don’t do that anymore.”

  LORELEI:

  “Don’t worry about me. I’m long past savin’…”

  —Superman III

  The Ten Assured Futures of the USV

  1. You will see the clock ticking.

  2. You will discover your powers and weaknesses.

  3. You are not mild-mannered.

  4. You are not a nerd.

  5. You are not entitled.

  6. You are not yet free.

  7. You will evolve or perish.

  8. You will keep your mask on. Our mystery is our power.

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

  10. We can save us all.

  WE

  CAN

  SAVE

  US

  ALL

  I AM ANOTHER YOURSELF

  Even Hitler was on meth. Google it. Every morning, Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Theo Morell, entered his bedroom to administer charisma intravenously: a cocktail injection of methamphetamines and morphine, plus cocaine eye drops. Adolf never asked what was in the needle and Theo never offered the secret. He simply upped the dosage until Hitler succumbed to something like Parkinson’s, something like addiction, and drowned in his own sea.

  For the record, David Fuffman never assumed Mathias Blue was real—real meaning unenhanced, unadulterated—only that Mathias’s was an evolved consciousness. Though David would likely fail to comprehend the extent of Mathias’s genius, he’d be among the tawdry heroes who faked greatness, who sat at the feet of Mathias’s being and came to class. David only and infinitely believed in him. And now the power is going off and the light is leaving them, maybe forever. The tide is coming in.

  They claim it’ll be the biggest flood since Noah. David envisions a giant blue wave, an emblematic tsunami ripped from a Japanese woodcut, its many crests crashing and bouncing back like a cavalry charge, galloping hooves beneath gaunt horsemen. Something quick. But here on campus, from the roof of Spinoza Field House, David thinks it looks more like a bathtub slowly filling. He can see the swell on the horizon.

  The sky is not falling; the ground is just rising up to meet it.

  Toward the end of his freshman fall semester, whenever campus flooded, David would put on rubber boots and his grandpa László’s blazer and explore campus. He’d lost most of his friends—or was “in between” friends—and these solitary treks offered David the kind of escape he once found in reading, reimagining Princeton as a book he could bind and annotate with pithy insights. It was after the snows of midterms that he sloshed his way to the Institute for Advanced Study—a think tank once inhabited by Einstein and Oppenheimer—which led to the infamous Institute Woods, where upperclassmen went to smoke things or burn things or grope things.

  The grass was crispy. David loved being the first of the morning to crunch the blades, navigating treacherous goose shit. Up ahead, the institute grounds were littered with metallic forms from minimalist schools of sculpture, spread like sentries around a man-made pond. He spotted a middle-aged couple walking their Labradoodle by the edge of the Institute Woods. David smiled and waved as he tramped silently past them. The woods smelled like tea. David imagined Einstein traversing these paths, thinking great things, hoping one of them might save the world.

  Up ahead the trail became a footbridge arcing across Stony Brook—larger than a stream but smaller than a river. Melting sleeves of ice had formed on branches overnight, and the morning thaw made for a wily current below. Beside the brook was a tower of flagstones, the kind you’d find in a garden path.

  And then David saw Mathias Blue for the first time.

  Maybe six feet four inches on flat feet, Mathias emerged from that water wearing a purple surfer’s wetsuit, moving so slowly as to be almost invisible, sun blinking off his bald head. His whole body looked like the inside of a lip. Written across the chest of his wetsuit in melting yellow font it said: MUTANT.

  As Mathias climbed from the brook onto muddy snow, his gaze was steady, aimed through David to somewhere far behind. Each foot was clad in black neoprene surfing boots, the reptilian big toe separated from the rest. His gait was absurdly slow, deliberately rising and then rolling each boot onto the ground as if leaving a precise ink print. It took a full minute for him to go ten feet.

  What was happening? David felt like he should keep walking forward, but he didn’t know whether he should walk at a normal speed or conform to the thick pace of this oddball. He decided to defer to the man in purple and proceeded in slo-mo. It felt strange at first, the slowness, David’s body craving speed and motion against the cold. But soon he dropped into something of a rhythm, finding balance in each flamingo stance between steps. They were a reverse duel, pacing inward.

  Once he got close enough, David whispered, “Are you a mime?”

  “Yes, shh. You’re forcing me to break character.”

  “A mime in a wetsuit.”

  “I’m a river mime.”

  A jogger in a pink running outfit bounced over the footbridge and shushed past them.

  The guy in purple whispered, “Man, she’s fast.”

  With that, he headed slowly toward the chest-high pile of flagstones. He introduced himself as Mathias Blue—first and last name—lifted a massive stone slab from the pile, muscles pulsing against the wetsuit, and began a slow pivot back towa
rd the water.

  “Pick up a rock and hop in if you wanna keep talking,” Mathias said.

  “Um.”

  “Warmer than it looks.”

  There was no way David was getting his grandfather’s jacket wet. He clomped to the center of the bridge. Looking down into the water, he almost understood what Mathias was doing. In the center of the river, he’d built a tube of stones, like a hollow castle turret, about five feet in diameter. It was tall enough that the top layer of stone extruded from the water. Mathias reentered the stream and placed another brick on his wall.

  “Looks like Andy Goldsworthy, the sculptor,” David called down, remembering one of his parents’ coffee-table art books.

  “One thing you should know about me,” Mathias replied, eyes still focused on his tower, “is that I’m extremely derivative.”

  From his perch on the bridge David scanned the forest. A few hundred yards downstream, he spotted three others mimicking Mathias’s meditative walk, phantoms drifting through the trees. Disciples, clearly. David felt this should probably explain something, but he wasn’t sure what.

  “Are you like a performance artist?”

  “Actually, I’m trying to build a hot tub,” he said, “but I haven’t figured out how I’m gonna get good bubbles.”

  “You could make it into a little still pool instead,” David offered.

  “I like where your head’s at. Stillness amid the rapids. Very Zen. But I’m afraid I’m wedded to the idea of hot bubbles.”

  David didn’t know what to think. He wasn’t sure if this Mathias Blue was funny or brilliant or an idiot. He obviously had some engineering acumen and a whole stockpile of will. Perhaps a bit too much time on his hands.

  And just then, as Mathias rotated a slab into position, part of his wall began to cave in.

  “LOOK OUT!” David screamed.

  Mathias seemed unfazed. He pressed his weight down hard on the rock to lock it in place and the wall held, for the moment, with Mathias leaning into it.

  “Listen,” Mathias said, “I know you don’t want to get that jacket wet, but I’m wondering if you’d mind bringing me a few rocks to balance this thing out. It’s gonna fall if I take my weight off.”

  “The water must be freezing.”

  “It’s purifying.”

  David pointed downstream at the phantoms and said, “Can’t one of your friends do it?”

  Mathias looked up at David. “Do this for me and you’ll be my new best friend,” he said.

  So, okay. David tore off László’s jacket, his sweater and jeans and socks and shoes, and piled them next to a tree and ran to the pile of stone and grabbed two slabs and eased into the river and Jesus fucking Christ. The air temperature was warm enough, but the river was biting cold. The shock hit David hard, and the stones got heavier with each wet trudge to Mathias’s tower. His toes sunk into the riverbed. There was no whitewater, but the current was strong. When he reached the hot tub, David poised the slabs over the back of Mathias’s pressing palm. Mathias said, “Now!” and removed his hand as David dropped the flagstones into place.

  They froze. Waited for the fragile tower to collapse. But it stayed strong.

  “You saved the day,” Mathias told him, eyes shiny and thankful.

  “Great. I’m a hero to site-specific sculptors everywhere. Can I get out now?”

  “Wait,” Mathias said, “would you like to see the tiniest two ducks ever?”

  Mathias grabbed David’s arms and turned him around to direct his gaze to the water’s edge. They were the tiniest two ducks ever. David knew nothing about duck gestation, but he couldn’t imagine what these animals were doing here, at the end of fall. They looked fresh from the egg. Furry things, heads like peanuts, no larger than a human thumb. They swam with the current, side by side, peanut heads darting. One in the lead and the other huddled carefully into her sister’s cotton-ball flank. Two small miracles.

  David wondered if they’d survive.

  “Do you think they’re brothers?” asked Mathias.

  “Fuck, it’s cold,” David said. “Seriously, how are you doing this, even with the wetsuit?”

  And then Mathias pulled a pill from god knows where.

  “This’ll fix the cold,” he said. “Open up and lift your tongue and don’t be afraid.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’ll come on fast and feel like forever. But I promise, it will end.”

  David didn’t have time to think, to say no, but right then he would have shot heroin into his eyeball if someone told him it’d help with the cold. Mathias cracked the capsule’s chalky contents directly under David’s tongue, behind his bottom teeth. Almost immediately, David felt it working.

  “The Mayans have this special greeting,” Mathias said. “In Lak’ech: I am another yourself.”

  A wave of physical heat. Something heady, too.

  “And then you respond Ala K’in, which means ‘And I am you.’ It’s a perfect saying.”

  As long as they were talking religious nonsense, David said, “There’s this Buddhist quote, I think: ‘When you realize how perfect everything is, you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.’”

  “Hey, new best friend,” Mathias said, “the sky is nothing to be laughed at.”

  David saw Mathias staring through him, his gaze still focused on the distance, but he felt the drug working, coming on. Zero to 98.6 in three seconds.

  “‘Sometimes… when the ice was covered with shallow puddles,’” David quoted. “‘I saw a double shadow of myself, one standing on the head of the other.’ That’s from Thoreau, which is actually pronounced like the word ‘thorough,’ but it sounds so pompous to say it like that and—hey, what’s happening?”

  “I promise, David. This will end. You will come back. Don’t be afraid.”

  Mathias’s soaring form began to shrink, but his eyes grew larger, alien, blacker. David felt fingers under his tongue where Mathias had dumped the pill. Then he felt a hand pressing into his mouth, then a wrist, then an entire arm and shoulder, and finally Mathias’s head, all pouring down David’s throat, his face coming unhinged like a python feeding, and his vision was gone, but he could still feel the rest of this foreign body shimmying its way in: Mathias’s chest, his waist, his thighs, his neoprene reptilian feet—all diving into David. And then he was gone, the Mathiasness charging and saturating David’s marrow like fingers stretching into an empty glove.

  PART ONE

  1

  PRECIPITATION

  i.

  In December, David returned from exile back to Princeton, a complex feat of space-time navigation. The yearning for independence was strong, so he refused to rely on family for rides, opting instead for buses and trains. On his passage from Baltimore to Jersey, David marveled at the synchronization his travel demanded, mostly unseen. On the surface it was just a few short hours and a weird cheeseburger on Amtrak’s Northeast Regional, but he knew invisible machinations were making it all happen behind the scenes. The technology, the communication. The steel and strength.

  Trains, he’d read, birthed our modern universal time standard. Before interstate rails, each town had its own notion of noon, its own clocks, its own sun in the sky. From this chaos, they created a single, agreed-upon schedule. Humans once rooted in the animist present moment powered their way to a temporal iron godhead, or maybe a holy trinity of Early, Late, and On Time.

  Time had been on David’s mind, specifically the specter of chronostrictesis. It was increasingly dominating his news feed. Sure, the storms had gotten worse, stronger, more frequent, and he knew dozens of kids from college and high school whose houses got annihilated and who’d left school to help their parents deal with the fallout. David recognized that it was his youth and privilege and dumb luck that left the Time Crisis as the dominant freak-out in his world.

  He’d lasted almost a semester at school before they forced him to vacate the dorms. Housing Services agreed to hold David’s stuff in s
torage through mid-December, but today was the day, time was up. When David arrived back on campus, having completed his trip from Princeton Junction, it was freakishly quiet in Forbes Hall, the dorm cleared out for winter break. He wanted to move out when people were gone, so he wouldn’t have to explain himself. Housing was kind enough to provide a hand truck, so David loaded up his wine boxes full of books and wheeled this sad stack of cardboard out with the rest of his belongings to Visitors’ Parking. There, he’d wait for his ride to Mathias’s place off-campus.

  He rolled past a lone soul on the lawn—Tolu, a kid from the second floor, reading a Newtonian physics textbook propped atop a bike rack. Tolu was from Lagos and among the many international students who’d stayed on campus through winter break rather than risk leaving the country and being denied reentry.

  “Sorry they are making you go,” Tolu said to David, removing his knit cap as if offering condolences.

  “I have a plan,” David said awkwardly, embarrassed, realizing everyone probably knew about why they were making him go. “Don’t have to go home, but I can’t stay here, right?”

  “I suppose my problem is the opposite,” said Tolu.

  He wondered if Tolu had a car, if he enjoyed trains.

  Waiting by his tower of boxes, thankful it was only flurrying for a change, David again considered time. His own past, present, and future: there’d been his first embattled semester, but that was past. Now, winter break was the alive, present moment, full of potential. And laid before him, he hoped, was Mathias, who could hack the future.

  He’d been home through Thanksgiving, sticking around for two more weeks to get his head straight. He tried hanging out back in Pikesville with his parents and sister and old high school crew home from school, but it was impossible, he had to be back here, doing something, before the world got any worse. When David had classes it was easy to ignore, but his trigger had been that viral video clip—an interview on Fox News with one J. Stuart Mott, Princeton professor of astrophysics, go figure. Mott was a sixty-something black man with salt-and-pepper temples. He was an odd duck, slightly unhinged. Initially, the host questioned him for his knowledge of weather patterns.