The Napoleon Club sits around a small, portable stove in a tiny studio apartment in New York city. They are waiting for water to boil, with which to make coffee. Winter is coming eventually, and they will surely freeze to death when it does, but summer might just kill them first with the heat. The one member of the club who still has a job is on the ratty, half-collapsed sofa, fighting with her laptop and the shitty wifi to log into a zoom meeting. They all moved in when the world collapsed in March, and at least some of them regret this decision.
The members of the Napoleon Club are united by their shared desire to have as little to do with modern society as possible. They are passivists, a term which they adopted from a passive aggressive twitter thread some of the members claim a great affinity with, and have spent months converting the others to by a mixture of haphazard oral arguments and undeniable material evidence. Lockdown aid has been keeping them alive but they have no idea what will happen when the aid stops, or the world restarts. One of them is a big fan of No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive by Lee Edelman, and is currently attempting to reread their copy with sweaty fingers. Insofar as they have a shared guiding principle or belief, they all enjoy the irony of the name “Napoleon Club”. The only person they plan on telling about this club is their landlord, if and when they decide to hold a rent strike.
With a sputter, the air conditioner suddenly begins working again. None of them are technical experts, but they breathe a sigh of relief. Their benefactor logs on to her zoom meeting and the other five become as quiet as they can. One of them, remembering a forgotten pastime, takes out some knitting needles. The sheer ridiculousness of knitting in August in New York encourages others to start knitting as well. Soon, the first project of the Napoleon Club is underway, a large blanket for the coming wintertime.
Before long, someone else volunteers to teach the group cooking.