Cape Boy No Longer Interested in Capes

In the spring of 2001, Kaitlin B. Heller ’05 was standing in front of Massachusetts Hall amid a sea of living wage campaign protesters when she spotted a shadowy figure, cloaked in a black cape, cane in hand, lurking around the fringes of the crowd.

Heller decided to pursue him. The man either didn’t hear or chose not to hear her calling him. He kept walking, fast enough that Heller had to run to catch up. His name was Warren M. Tusk ’05, known to many at the time as Cape Boy.

Tusk and Heller later became members of the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association (HRSFA), a social group united by a love of science fiction, gaming and contrarian pranks. Since her freshman year, Heller, now chair of HRSFA, has learned how little attachment the cloak has to the boy.

“There’s not much to be said about the cloak,” says Tusk, who will graduate in June at age 20. “I wore it a great deal freshman year. I still wear cloaks now. But somehow it seems less rewarding.”

Though cloak dry cleaning bills remain a headache, Tusk has more important things on his mind. Like: God. This is something Heller has learned through HRSFA. One of the group’s favorite annual events is the Hunt, a fall fete where members take off their clothes, paint themselves blue and chase down a (consenting) freshman—known as the “stag”—in a parody of a Celtic hunting ritual.

While Tusk identifies with the counter-culture philosophy of HRSFA, his theological side sometimes objects to what he calls the “pagan” nature of rituals like the Hunt.

This comes out in his interview with FM, when he says he doesn’t want to talk about capes or HRSFA. His senior thesis, he says, is much more interesting.

A treatise on magical practices in Talmudic Babylonia focusing on the Late Antiquity period, Tusk’s thesis strives toward a more theological understanding of the way religion works among actual people-—in this case, Talmudic Babylonians, he says. In the grander sense, Tusk is trying to set an academic precedent. Rather than begin with doubt, all scientific inquiry should accept the existence of God as a basic premise of its research. For instance, particle physicists should use what they discover about the universe to help them better understand God.

Only a few of Tusk’s friends are willing to discuss his quiet obsession with religion.

Heller remembers a time when she and Tusk were on an arts retreat and, out of nowhere, Tusk announced he was going to go “speak with the elements.” He left the group, approached the edge of a cliff and began waving his cane in the air.

His live-in girlfriend, Elisabeth H. Cohen ’06, believes there is a link between Tusk’s passion for theology and his penchant for the bizarre.

“Both arise from an interest in playing with ideas,” she says. “He’s a maker, somebody who tinkers with things, and makes things that are improbable and interesting and beautiful.”