Tommy is ten, on a ten-speed. He’s tearing down the steepest road in town. Somewhere between eighth and seventh street, he converts to a new mindstate, actually an old one he hasn’t known in years. He might as well be back under the chestnut tree. It’s spiritual authority, useful for anything, even biking down a slope. It makes a good thing great, almost too great to bear, certainly witness to. It’s a wonderful tool, why did he leave it in the shed for so long? He sleeps through the sect services because they don’t understand about the inner light, they’re looking in the wrong places. He’s heard of a faith that calls itself “The Church of the Inner Light” but it sounds like a contradiction in terms.
The seventh street transition starts with a tingling chill in his head which bursts into a full-body shiver like all his nerves are spontaneously spiking electric icicles. It’s a wonderful feeling, immediately opening rusty doors in every brainlobe. He remembers. He’s got a name for the light now. He calls it "heaven". He salvaged the word from Christianity’s wreckage.
Heaven is getting more sophisticated. He’s creating after-death real estate in his head, starting from the simple principle that you get to do whatever you like best… forever. It’s a thrilling concept and one that seems aesthetically true, which is the most compelling form of truth, inseparable from the light. Soon after deciding on this cosmological axiom however, he realizes with some dismay that he’ll probably be an old man when he dies, and he’ll only like boring stuff like doing crossword puzzles and sailing yachts and Grandpa George type stuff, a hellish itinerary for eternity. It would be unthinkable to damn himself to this lame hereafter.
Soon he invents the fingersnapping amendment – the breakthrough of the cosmological constitution: whenever he thinks of a wonderful activity that is beyond his ability to do in this restrictive reality, he snaps his fingers as a physical manifestation of his wish. These wishes will be catalogued by God who will store them up and save them until he gets to heaven, where he will have an eternity of fun things to do, ten thousand narrative paths to bliss that he had, in his wisdom, asked God for early in life, when his notions of fun were most finely honed.
Each fingersnapping wish is, in essence, a prayer to God. And they’re reasonable requests. He’s not asking the Lord to move mountains or make changes to his physical environment. He’s just asking to remember all the things he wants to do in this charged time and have them available after death. This also explains why God saved him from the cough syrup. If he’d died at age four, he’d never have come up with the fingersnapping revelation and would be doomed to an eternity of boring babyish bliss which couldn’t possibly be real bliss anyway, just some paradoxical nirvana and that’s no fun. No, no mashed-apricot Disney delirium for him. He wants his afterlife filled with concrete joys like being two hundred feet tall and trashing a city Godzilla-style or hitting the game-winning homerun of the world series in the bottom of the ninth. In space! In a cylindrical solar-powered baseball colony on the threshold of interstellar war, where the game decides the fates of millions!
Tommy considers himself a connoisseur of fun. No one seems to understand how to cultivate the obviously supreme ideals of fun he houses in his head, fun being formulated as coolness times energy, and the unabashed expression thereof. So his purpose in life seems obvious. It’s to acquire enough life experience to make educated decisions about what a perfectly structured afterlife will be. He thinks he’s about there already.
He’s accustomed to the word "afterlife" but it doesn’t seem a fitting term to describe what will be the meat of existence. The forever time. Forever… such a dizzying concept, even moreso than the rush of reckless riding stunts. The combination is a nauseous carnival ecstasy. He snakes through a stretch of gravel with a slight wobble and careens past a stop sign. A car is heading up the road in the opposite lane.
What if he crashed into it, he wonders? He shuts his eyes and rehearses death in his head as he does often these days: A spectacular collision, a gory interruption, BAM! Brains spill out the skull – fade out – fade in… Reunion with… what? Suddenly the comforting thought-jaunt blunders into virgin territory. An ancient homeland? Whatever it is, it’s not part of the plan and it’s not inner-light illuminated. There is something there, outside the shaft. The image of a clown exiled from mirth and dwelling in the sewers, a sick unfunny clown who took the joke too far, a razor-sharp logical end and a sarcastic cackle. What do you really want, asks a voice from nowhere, everywhere. An association of clean, sterile torment, respirators to prop up painful breath and retrograde life. A hospital drone and transparent plastic suffocation. Where does this come from? Does he want to know?
No, he tells himself, get that out of your head. It’s part of that subversion that’s been popping up a lot lately when the chill of beauty rips through his body and thoughts turn to heavenly concerns. It offers nothing, it’s a blank bastard - probably a churchy relic, he thinks with anger. Black, squirming guilt with no reason. He doesn’t need a devil. He opens his eyes again to make sure he’s not about to swerve into the car. Turns out it’s long gone and he’s passed another stop sign.
He feels like he won this round with the clown but there may be others ahead. Each encounter seems more intense than the last. How long can he hold himself together in the face of this dogged opponent? Not long, he thinks. Maybe the light will save him. It did once, he seems to recall. Hazily. So much more to think about. So many real sensorial riches to string together and add to the light’s aggregate.
Sunday school seems to pale in comparison to his imagination.
***
When Jimmy was six he got a job hauling bricks.
***
Jimmy is a child with a name that ends in Y. This is because a parent thought it suited his youthful state. He’s part of a large minority of such children. He doesn’t care too much for the Y, or the extra M for that matter, but he’s too reserved to get it changed.
The workers seem to revel in the Y as they tousle his blond hair and send him on a brick hauling run. "Could you wheel this load to the south side of the complex please Jimmy?" They find it adorable that he insists on helping with his father’s engineering firm and its endless projects. Brick hauling was a task he specifically singled out. No one knows what the appeal is but they found a small barrow to suit him. His hands are steady and his stamina keeps him at it for hours. He comes in after school and on Saturdays. When he’s not hauling bricks he likes to survey the frame of the building-in-progress. He likes to see things go up.
He used to come in to work with his father but the big man is at the office most of the time now, so he shows up early with the chief and pours coffee for the crew. He takes home a wage comparable to the official hires. Nobody knows what he spends it on. Toys? Candy?
***
"Want some licorice?" asks Tommy.
"No thanks," Jimmy says.
Tommy’s got twenty strands, ten red, ten black. He bought them at the corner store, the only place that sells the kind he likes. He’s riding with his friend Jimmy in the Salekin Construction company car. They’re on their way to the downtown site where an arena is being built from the wreckage of old tenements. They should make it down there by six thirty. The sun might be up by then.
"Do you really need all that candy?" asks Mr. Salekin from the front seat.
"Yeah," Tommy says, and bites into the ends of two sticks at once. "Hey, I bet you could buy like a million sticks of licorice with all the money you have," he says to Jimmy.
Jimmy smiles. "More like a billion, probably. But I’d rather invest it."
Mr. Salekin chuckles. Tommy doesn’t bother to ask what investing is. He asked once before but Jimmy seemed uninterested in shedding any light on the subject. It’s outer light stuff if it’s light at all. It sure seems to light up Jimmy’s mind though. He’s a money kid. Tommy’s a candy kid – he goes straight to the source. Forget the middling money changing.
***
The sky is an overcast purple, filtered sunrise buried below the buildings of the downtown core. Saul Kirklin, the long haired painter, has shown up early. He’s been waiting for them. He’s got a tall, high-strung looking co-worker with him. Saul strides up to Mr. Salekin who appears ready for anything.
"I just came here today to tell you I’m quitting and I’m going to sue you into the fuckin’ poorhouse," Saul says. He’s shifting his considerable weight from one foot to the other like he’s in a boxing match, just shy of hopping. Not hopping mad, Tommy thinks. Pretty close though.
"Don’t use those words in front of my boy," Salekin says. His voice is a stern sigh which reminds Tommy of a crime boss he saw on TV once.
"I could give a shit about your kid."
Tommy can no longer keeps his eyes on the exchange. He lowers his head and studies the tracks heavy machines have made in the mud. He finds it uncomfortable hearing adults swear. All the grown-ups in his life are calm authoritarians with strict standards of verbal civility. Swearing is for petty little rebels like him and his school friends. Unrestrained language in this context is weird and scary – it heralds chaos and crumbling. Jimmy has just gained another five or six cool points with Tommy for handling this environment on a daily basis.
"Go ahead and make a scene if you want," says Mr. Salekin, "but you’re embarrassing yourself. You have no case, do you realize that? There is a certain way things work. We can’t rearrange the whole system for your personal benefit. Do you think you’re playing Sim City?"
Jimmy starts giggling. Saul seems taken aback, like he didn’t expect the owner of the company to defend himself. Tommy is less scared now. Equilibrium seems to be snapping back. Mr. Salekin will take care of things as he always does.
"What the fuck are you going on about? I don’t play games," Saul says. His friend is squinting at Mr. Salekin and his earlybird entourage.
"You’re wasting your time, he doesn’t care," says the thick-necked Chief, returning from the coffee maker. "You might as well explain gravity to a squirrel monkey."
Saul is about to storm off but his friend turns his squint to Jimmy and makes a connection. "You know what?" he says in a shrill voice. "That little twerp ratted us out. He was asking all sorts of questions about the union!"
Jimmy says nothing but stares back hard.
"You’re both fired, get out of here!" the Chief growls.
The former employees put on their best smirks and take their exit. Saul stops to turn around and flip them off. His friend quickly follows suit with a fuck off stance, then they storm across the mudfield to the temporary parking lot. A minute later, a car engine starts and struggles to a piteous idle with sick high-pitched overtones. They sound like the whimpers of a fallen squirrel monkey, fucked over by gravity. The car speeds away leaving the site in eerie calm.
"I knew they were trouble" says Jimmy.
Tommy has to ask. "What was that about?" He doesn’t feel it’s his place but damned if he’s going to be out of this loop.
"Disgruntled workers," Mr. Salekin explains. "We’ve had to weed some out. Things’ve been running pretty smooth on the project until last week."
Tommy turns to Jimmy. "He said you… ratted him out?"
Jimmy leaks a smile.
"Saul was the agitator," Mr. Salekin says. "Jim was able to infiltrate the group and single him out. Break the faceless collective into pieces. In situations like these we need a leader to make an example of. Jim was able to get him for us. Did it of his own initiative too. That’s my boy."
Jimmy’s smile widens to an "aw-shucks" grin.
"Example of?" Tommy asks, feeling dumb.
"Well we didn’t have to do much in this case. A little provocation did the trick."
Salekin’s speech is smooth and assured. Sedating. This disturbs Tommy because it reminds him of the blank. But it seems to make things work. It’s the voice of competence. Everything seems to tick in time to its syllables. He feels power by association. He’s with the winning team. He can venture another question, the team will educate him. "What’s a union?"
"Employees getting together to try and screw my dad out of money," Jimmy answers.
"That sucks," Tommy says.
Salekin lets out a hearty laugh and says: "Jim you’ve helped out a lot, more than I would have asked of you. How’d you like to attend an executive meeting with me?"
"Sure dad," Jimmy says like he’s ringing up a sale.
Several cars pull into the lot behind them and less-agitated employees converge on the site. Jimmy is talking quietly with one who towers over him. Tommy tries to hear the conversation but he can’t make it out. He wanders off to the sloping edge of the mud field where most of the interesting construction detritus lies. If Jimmy is busy he can have fun by himself. He’s been collecting materials. He picks up a straight length of metal pipe, admiring the sheen and his distorted reflection. He likes to come up with names for things, forget the conventions. What would he call this metal? Reflectium. Yeah.
"Tom, don’t play with that stuff," Jimmy calls, jerking him out of his reverie. "Some of the pipe ends have got a toxic sealant on them - plus we’re having to use leftover materials because of…" Tommy tunes out. He drops the pipe back on the mud, then catches the end of Jimmy’s casual rebuke: "…supply and people have been just taking stuff."
"Fine, whatever," Tommy calls back and swallows hard. Last week he’d taken home several lengths of pipe to adorn his treefort. Jimmy drifts away and gets to brick hauling, occasionally breaking for other tasks. Tommy walks circuits around the site, waiting for something. He doesn’t know what. Everyone’s busy. He can make out no conversation but a general air of rough talk as the activity buzzes about. Every now and then Jimmy pops into sight, moving with purpose, the fixture of the force. Whatever Tommy’s waiting for, it doesn’t seem to be coming. If he can’t even grab himself a pipe or two he might as well go home. He’s got better ways to spend the weekend.
***
The third movement arpeggios are not going smoothly no matter how many times he repeats them. He’s got the pattern in his head but the wrong notes somehow continue to fall under his fingers. He’s hit the wall again, the technical wall, virtuosos thriving at the top, amateur splatter crusting on the concrete cliff. He tries to bootstrap himself to pianistic proficiency by trying a two-handed quadruple octave C sharp harmonic minor scale. The plastic keys are unforgiving, his claws will not acclimatize to the cursed instrument. His teacher is going to lecture him about this. But that’s not for three days and the sun is shining so who cares?
Tommy’s had enough Beethoven for today, maybe forever. His imagination seems better served by speculating on heaven’s ever-growing real estate market. He leaves the sonata pages on the music stand, bathed in sunlight, and leaves his bedroom, heading for the kitchen’s back door. His parents are out visiting friends, thus unable to enforce piano practice, and they wouldn’t know a well executed C sharp minor scale from a poorly played D major arpeggio anyway. And he has that yardwork to do on top of the increasingly lame piano regimen. He knows he’s more likely to get berated for shrugging off the yardwork than abandoning the music. Is rote learning really music making anyway? Only in the most technical sense, Tommy decides. And that’s what Glenn Gould and player pianos are for.
He was planning on straining through the Beethoven ten times, then playing some X-Men on his game box and leaving the yard chores for tomorrow, but having a dull practice session frame a radiant spring day has compelled him to head outside, something he rarely does post-Nintendo, and he feels he should complete at least one of his chores if he’s not going to do his laps around the sonata. Anyway, he’d rather water the garden and plant some sod beside the brick path than play another note.
Tommy leaves the house, pulls the sod-heaped wheelbarrow out of the shed, and gets to work. Thoughts wander as he labors at a leisurely pace. He realizes that today is typical of his increasing inclination to abandon intellectually-challenging chores for simple physical work. At least he knows how to pack sod. The mysteries of wielding a commanding arpeggio with stubby-fingered hands seem too much trouble to bother with. He’d rather seize on the bird-in-the-hand of five dollars an hour than the bird-in-the-bush of a career playing piano, an unfortunate instrumental commitment. Five is a pretty good wage for chores he wasn’t getting paid to do at all last year, he thinks. It’s not Jimmy money, but Jimmy’s on some other plane of reality so it’s stupid to make the comparison. Besides, he’s not making any money practicing piano and he sure didn’t make anything being trotted out to stuffy recitals to take his place in the line up of kids and their botched bagatelles.
He still dreams of wowing the crowds with blistering renditions of hard-core repertoire but it’s sweeter to dream than play an arpeggio thirty times in a row and have the thirtieth try sound as good as the first if not worse. That’s rather sour. His friends says he’s got to be a rebel and take risks but he’s not the lottery playing type – let the suckers blow their allowance money on that. If he’s going to rebel, he’ll do it by opting out of the status-seeking game.
He’s had passion for the piano, wild uncontrollable energy with a clownish lunacy, sometimes downright scary, that can express the inner light in its idiomatic rightness, but now it seems that it can’t be contained within an eighty-eight-key instrument or any configuration of strings and reeds. The passion is more true and intense reflected in the grass and leaves and patterns of bark on smooth rippled birch to counterpoint the gnarled gnosis of fruit trees. This is where the light collects. By the time it’s so removed from the source as to take the form of something as oblique as a Beethoven sonata, it’s barely worth acknowledging. And yet the yard stimuli delicately arrange associations that matter, synthetic offsets of organic precursors. Like the concert fantasies – from stately pine to solo piano mastery. The connection is twisted but pianos are made of wood – trees, in their ecological origin, being lumber for the intricacies of mind-dipped reveries that take place in concert halls and clubs, what Tommy thinks of as the elite concrescence of nature, foliage compressed to its dense musical destiny through metal frames and ivory keys and thundering octaves and resonating strings. He appreciates something that can generate a good fantasy.
Tommy screws the hose into the tap by the tomato plants, untangles the length of it, and connects the other end to a sprinkler in the center of the garden. His thoughts turn to heaven again and that earthly mechanism of heaven, the finger snap. He feels guilt about the Beethoven sonata pages discarded above the keyboard but he can amend the gap here and now by snapping his fingers, which he does, in a deliberate gesture set against the purpling spring sky. He needn’t be a slave to the admitted righteousness of the concert pianist ambitions – this pale life will never be able to flesh them out anyway. He must wait until the flesh is gone. Leave the ambitions to compost in the garden. He will cultivate a concert fantasy, an underdog journey, something unexpected. Scriabin, hardcore repertoire, give the crowd what they didn’t know they wanted, high art, reflecting the supreme textures of nature. He knows what his mind is good for. The inner light is as bright as ever but increasingly pitted against inexplicable spots of blank.
He’s found a useful strategy for coping with the blank lately, a focus which is not hard to maintain. His thoughts turn to the girl who sits next to him in homeroom class. Seventh grade has brought with it a whole-hearted focus on the opposite sex. He’s somewhat disgusted by the hormone driven fixation but he’ll grudgingly acknowledge it’s a form of righteousness, even if it’s one he feels more slave to than master of.
He must snap his fingers again because there’s something to save for later, something that would be a shame to forget. Forget Playboy, forget Hustler, forgot the club-hopping lust-freakos. He’s got the best fantasies and ideals, the ones generated by people and arranged by him through his divine filter’s high definition texturizer. There’s nothing finer than texture, bark, the pores of Margaret’s soft skin, wisps of girl hair barely there, curly blond locks and small lithe body, a modest dress that cloaks kinky secrets. Tommy notes with a sigh that she’s probably a bitch like so many of them have proven to be but her worth is sublime skin for him to stuff, fill in what’s blighted and lacking, reverse the bitchy polarities and realize the essence of Margaret, perfect name for a face, a face for him to inflate to fully-fleshed-out external penetrable beauty beyond the shaft, beyond the door, beyond the bitch in this life to the possibilities tailored for him by him, marked by his mind. Margaret is marked, assumed bitch factor rendered null and void, fed to the blank, something for the bastard to chew on so his mind won’t self-cannibalize. The times they could have, would have, THE time, the neverending time, stuttering trajectories of lusty love looping in on itself. He would be understood, he would understand her, she would be understandable, integral with a feminine raison d’etre he can’t comprehend pre-heaven. No, it’s all preview now, the time of acquiring.
***
"Son, are you telling me you believe that the universe is a big automated machine set up to take care of your every whim after death? I suggest again that you do as I asked and take up your Bible. Start with the Old Testament."
Tommy doesn’t discuss cosmological matters with his parents anymore.
***
He’s growing his security claws again. He threw the nail clippers away to make a point. He doesn’t play piano anymore. He snapped the melodies and harmonies away for future reference.
He grows security claws because people make fun of his fingernails and he takes pride in that. It means he’s on the right track. And he feels good with claws, sharp on the sides, naturally. They’re a physical and spiritual tool, a ceremonial weapon and orange peeler. He doesn’t have a lot anymore. His friends are in different circles, concentric circles, while he’s in some overlaying square, angular and anxious. He doesn’t really have friends anymore and he doesn’t have cool. He’s been stripped of his cool credentials in increasingly strained dealings with social groups. He must be well into the negative numbers now. But there is a beauty to the negativity. And he has his body to fall back on, his unconventional aesthetic, his hair, his stare, his deadly fingers. He’s more, at his core, than they’ll ever be, enamored with branded superficialities. He snaps his fingers every once in a while to remind himself of the ways in which this clawed core can manifest. He doesn’t have to slice up the locker harasser for stealing his gym shoes and tossing them across the hall. So much more civilized to consign vengeance to the afterlife. Snap.
He feels secure in his claws. Nobody better get too close because then finger snapping won’t satisfy. He’ll have to be here and now and carnivorous.
Passing by the staircase crowd on the way to biology class, Tommy swears he hears something said about unions and possibly busting. He knows Jimmy is nearby, telling his tales. He can’t successfully tune out because Jimmy is a painfully compelling peripheral. He tries to avoid the Jimmy vibes rippling through the milling masses but absorbs them anyway. Jimmy’s gained a strange form of stardom Tommy never would have dreamed existed: he’s a nerd with respect. It’s no paradigm shift but a niche that belongs to Jimmy alone. No one knows what to call it but everyone knows it exists.
As Tommy approaches the staircase loungers he catches a glimpse. Jimmy looks back – there is a moment of mutual recognition quickly followed by mutual aversion and the pretense by both of never having seen each other. This happens when they pass in the hall. It’s awkward for Tommy but he doesn’t know how Jimmy feels if he feels anything at all.
Tommy hurries past the crowd, catching bits of the argument between Jimmy and a couple of boys. Seems there are questions floating around about Jimmy’s manliness or manual labouring ability. Tommy catches the old cliché: "never worked a day in your life".
"Hey, I was hauling bricks when I was six," Tommy hears Jimmy say in his unmistakably clear tone.
Somebody responds: "Ah, is that when your mom was thirty-six and went back to turning tricks?" There is laughter and a chorus of "ooohs".
"No, that was when you were sucking on your uncles’ pixie sticks," Jimmy counters and the crowd guffaws.
"Sticks?" someone asks.
"It’s plural – two uncles."
Tommy cracks a smile in spite of himself. It creaks on his face. He used to be at ground zero, part of the laughing chorus, a side role but better than exile.
"I don’t have any fuckin’ uncles so fuck you," the original taunter says and there is a hushed murmur. Somebody’s in trouble. The offender doesn’t know whether the retribution will be goons or a sudden drop in status. One thing Tommy knows about Jimmy is that he’s a master of intangibles.
Not Jimmy anymore, he reminds himself. Tommy has defiantly kept the Y at the end of his name, refusing to adopt the "mature" Tom. He was born Tommy and he’ll die Tommy, as ridiculous as it sounds. It’s his Y. An extension, like his claws. Jimmy is no longer Jimmy. He’s Jim and everybody knows it. It’s also known that he’ll whack anyone who refers to him by his childhood title. Mob movies are popular here. What does "whack" mean in this case? Tommy doesn’t know. He doesn’t care to speculate either.
Further down the hall is the marketplace, the morning CD trade where money is exchanged for digital items of all varieties: music, movies, TV, pornography, software, console emulators, and computer games. Jimmy’s vendors line the halls. There is no competition, it was muscled out long ago, back in the chaotic days of tenth grade. Things seems to run more smoothly now. Tommy sighs as a vender approaches, crowding him against the wall before he can escape the market and make it to class.
"Hey dude, you into games? We got the new batch in today. Six CD set, or we can burn you tailor mades. Cash up front for that."
"No, not interested."
"Bullshit man, I know you, you’re into all that Satan stuff. Hey we got metal albums, full clean rips."
"Don’t know where you get your information but you ought to bug somebody else."
"How bout some acid, you like to trip?"
"I thought Jimmy didn’t deal drugs."
"Hey who says this has anything to do with Jim?" the vendor says, suddenly looking nervous and flighty. Tommy uses the kid’s consternation to make his escape but a hand grabs his jacket from behind and tugs violently. Adrenaline floods in. Will he have to use his claws, oh, he doesn’t want to use his claws, why’d it have to come to this?
"Hey, if you say anything to Jim about this," the vendor threatens, looking more frightened than menacing. There is no inner light to save Tommy, only this political hyper-reality, mortared with the blank. He can use the blank here, although he’s loathe to ally himself with the bastard. Nevertheless, he blanks himself. Stares through the vendor until he sees no vendor. But he can’t get out of the blank. Until someone bumps into him, someone who’s not the vendor. A big girl who storms off with a snort of protest. The blank is being filled in and he’s claustrophobic in the crowd. The bio-lab will be more spacious. He turns around and continues on to the classroom.
His mind’s on games though, and all the hot new titles he could have if he was willing to part with a few bucks. But he’d rather be a sucker and pay ridiculous retail prices for electronic entertainment than deal with Jimmy’s mafia and the high school realpolitik. It does hurt to be a sucker though. His ego throbs like a half-sucked dick.
***
Jim Salekin sits in the back of the English room under the flickering fluorescent light. He’s quiet, hunched over his table, programming his calculator. Tommy’s in the front, penciling geometric designs into a looseleaf margin. It’s all been downhill for him since he fell out of Jim’s circle but he can still make graphite do his bidding. The tentacles of blank, casual, a causal malevolence that surround his lost friend unfurl, curl quietly, flank him, reach to the front of the room where he sits. They put words in the mouth of an arbitrary drone nearby. A quick and nasty takedown line: "Hey girly boy."
He racks his brain for a retort but there is nothing except the blank, reflecting mockery. Is more insult coming? Will he have to use his claws this time? Maybe today’s the day. But the tentacle retracts, jerks itself off to the tune of a Sugar Ray song. "Put your arms around me, baby", fuzzing out of discman headphones. Tommy’s fists clench. He digs a claw into his hand. He imagines his thumb is the taunter’s head and cuts into it with his index nail, drawing a line of blood. That’s the prick’s face caving in, he’s slicing right through the eyes, cracking the bridge of the nose, tearing into the brain. He’s going to recycle the gray matter for fertilizer like the Khmer Rogue. He doesn’t respond to the insult, it would only makes things worse.
Tommy’s hair is long. That’s why they’re calling him "girly boy", it’s the new moniker. It changes every few weeks. They’re not calling him a satanist anymore. They’ve graduated to sexual politics, an order of insult Tommy hadn’t previously imagined. He looks over at Kenneth, the boy who sits next to him at the front table, to see if this tentacle of insult has made an impression on the one student that doesn’t seem willing to join in the pogrom. Kenneth is deeply immersed in his bible. Or is he? No, it looks like fake immersion, a strategy to which Tommy can relate. Maybe Kenneth is cringing for him. Probably enjoying it too, being a relief from cringing for himself. Hard times at the loser table, you’ve got to take what you can get.
He never hears the girls being taunted for being "boyish". If they’re feminine that’s great. If they’re masculine they’re going beyond the call of duty so that’s cool too. Tough feisty fems. So they seem to have it easy. He never outright wished to be on the opposite side of the gender divide – certainly never snapped his fingers for it but the hypothetical situation does occur.
"Debate time!" says Mr. Sullivan, striding in to signal the start of class.
The students glaze back at him, resume their conversations. Kenneth turns back to his bible, Tommy thinks about the woods, Jim never looked up in the first place.
"Remember I asked you all to think of topics for today’s debate," Mr. Sullivan says. "Did anyone remember?"
Collective negative until someone says: "Ultimate fighting."
"Okay, let’s start tallying these up. We’ll take a vote and then separate you into groups. When we draw your names from the box you’ll be assigned a topic and a side."
"Can’t we choose which side to argue?" a student asks.
"No, that’s not the way debating works. The debate is the point." There are some protests. Mr. Sullivan takes a piece of chalk, divides the board into columns, and writes "ultimate fighting" in one of them. "Any others? I can suggest some if you’re lacking ideas but you’ll probably find mine boring."
"Uh, how about the WWF?" asks a hair-clogged stoner.
"What about the WWF?" Sullivan asks.
"Uh, real or fake?" Laughter.
"We already have ultimate fighting on the list, that’s close enough. We need controversy but we also need substance. I’d like to have some real issues on the board. I’d like to suggest genetic engineering." He writes this down. "Let’s have some more."
"Capital punishment," a girl says.
"Good. What else?"
Tommy’s been looking forward to the debate. He thinks he can run verbal circles around these sheep. The only problem is choosing the battle. On what ground will he lay waste to his enemies? What is significant? He puts up his hand.
"Tom?"
"How about, is there a god?"
A murmur ripples through the room. Even Jim looks up from his calculator. Tommy is surprised to find he’s stirred something up. He thinks he hears "satan" whispered somewhere, obviously in reference to himself, but he’s not sure. So hard to tell paranoia from the real thing nowadays.
“I don’t know about that one,” says Mr. Sullivan. “We want something that can be proved or at least argued decisively, not a subject that philosophers have been debating since the birth of philosophy itself.”
"Hey, that sounds cool to me," someone says.
"Yeah, let’s do philosophy," snarks another.
"Naw, what about the religious people?" a girl says. Eyes turn to Kenneth who studies his bible with spirited fakery. It’s open to the part about Christ’s gory death on Calvary. "They can’t, like, argue against their beliefs or whatever. So what if they get picked for the other side?"
Tommy groans until Jim’s voice startles him from the back. "They can play devil’s advocate," he says with just the hint of a smile. "Might be good practice for a career in the hereafter."
"Your sarcasm won’t get us anywhere," Sullivan says, then adds with a grin: "Might be good as terror tactics in a debate though. I can see you’ll be skilled in that area."
Jim doesn’t even appear to acknowledge the compliment. He shoots back: "Why should the religoids get special treatment?"
“Look, religion is a sensitive subject in this political climate. People have to be careful, especially educators.”
“If you believe there’s a god you should be prepared to defend yourself,” Jim says and a wave of nods fans out from his position at the back of the room. “They could at least be assigned to argue in favor.”
"Well let’s take a vote," the teacher says. "I promised democracy in this classroom. But I also promise I won’t force anyone to argue against their religious beliefs on this issue if it gets in the debate. That will be the only exception." He writes "is there a god" on the board under "capital punishment" and says: "Show of hands for the god question." Three quarters of the room raise their arms. Sullivan draws a checkmark beside the topic.
"Alright, we need a couple more."
Tommy flexes his claws. He tries to channel Machiavelli, conjure Mephistopheles. So what’s he taking? The pro side of course. After all, he is a spiritual authority. Back from the dead. He still knows about the inner light. He’ll always have that connection, whatever else they strip away, whatever cool points they revoke – true blue coolness past the shaft where light is chill radiation, radial possibility in quantum decay. The thing about the inner light is, it’s always framed as a God question. For some reason. So he’ll argue it like that. God, inner light, heaven, synonyms really. Christian noise just gets in the way. He can pare the issue down to its essence and no one will be expecting that. No one excepts the Tommy inquisition. He snaps his fingers, this time not for any fantasy but for future re-living of the sweet victory that awaits him.
The teacher is well into assigning subjects. Only now it occurs to Tommy that he may not actually be selected for the topic he suggested. Let alone get the desired side.
"Tom Lewis," Sullivan says, finally drawing his name from the box. "For the importance of personal hygiene. You’ll argue in favor." Tommy flashes red as a surge of laughter builds from scattered titters. He can’t remember anyone even suggesting that topic but when he looks to the chalkboard sure enough, there it is, in Mr. Sullivan’s script.
Hilarious – the hairy, long-nailed loser is debating the pro side of personal hygiene. How brilliant of them to pick up on the irony. It was handed to them on a platter.
"I’m not debating that," Tommy states.
"You don’t get to choose," says Mr. Sullivan.
"Forget that topic," Jim intervenes. "We don’t have enough people to cover them all. Let’s drop it and fill up the god one. I’ll take up the con side if that’s alright."
"Alright Jim," Sullivan says. "Tom, will you argue the pro side? Will that work for you?"
"Yeah, it’ll work," Tommy says, a little flustered. He feels Jim’s tentacles again but he’s not sure how they’re moving or for what purpose. He never is. He doesn’t feel he even has the capacity to conceive it. That outer light, or outer darkness perhaps (the yin side of the mountain?) is a rival to his vast imagination. It’s the concrescence of the external, the point of attraction – detraction for him, nexus for everyone else, including the teacher. Jim moves mountains from the yin side, dictates the terms of the debate. He seems eager to plunge into this theological issue. Tommy will need his security claws for this. He imagines them popping out from his fingertips, stiff, sharp, and ready for action.
"Only two names left so the last students will be in your group," Sullivan says. "Kenneth for the negative?" There is more laughter. "Oh right," Sullivan says, fixating on the student’s bible. "You can partner with Tom. "Ainsley, will you go with Jim?"
"Sure," she says.
"That’s my lil’ atheist," quips her boyfriend.
"Alright, for the rest of this class, you can use the library for research and preparation. I’ll see you all tomorrow, same English time, same English channel."
Groaning laughter. "That joke never gets old," Jim says, packing up his books.
***
Tommy knew he’d be assaulted with Nietzsche, that was predictable. What he didn’t expect was a non-Christian blitz. The easy, predictable line of attack Tommy was prepared to repel does not seem to be forthcoming. Jim is going for a full bore secular attack on religion in general and god in particular. He’s being tricky but how else would he be?
It’s a weird feeling, facing off with Jim who he hasn’t spoken to in years – who he’s hardly even looked at since their ambiguous estrangement. Weird but somehow entirely, terribly fitting, like the purpose of their old, inexplicable hookup is being revealed at last. A psyche-evaluation to inform today’s takedown.
Tommy finds himself backed into corners, somehow tricked into defending churches and the existence of blasphemy. Kenneth gives him an "amen!" and Tommy collapses in embarrassment. Kenneth is happy to be the Christian martyr in this slaughter. He’ll go down with his bible clutched tightly in hand, carrion for the legend-devouring Sugar Ray scavengers, the psycho bible-boy and his girly-boy androgifriend trashed by Jim, were you there that day?
Tommy’s wonderful rational mathematical arguments are gone, their sense evaporated. It’s like they were build from sand all along. They’re blown apart in Jim’s existential duststorm. He’s reduced to metaphysical masturbation.
"I’ve seen –" he realizes he was about to say "seen the light" which he knows will send the crowd into hysterics. Why is he playing for an audience anyway? "I’ve experienced the reality of God. I had a near death experience. There was heaven and hell. What I learned from it is that there is something beyond this life, an infinity, and it’s perfectly rational to assume that it consists of every possibility, filtered through a personal aesthetic, one that prefers joy. Substance beats absence." He’s trying to exude zen serenely but his voice betrays his unexpected mounting panic. Something huge is on the line but he can’t define it in the heat of battle if he ever could at all. He swears he can hear the clown laughing at him. He hasn’t heard the fucker in months but it’s back, louder than ever. He presses on. "Nothing in this life makes sense without heaven."
"Isn’t that anecdotal evidence?" Ainsley says, parroting Mr. Sullivan’s rundown of logical fallacies. "That doesn’t hold up in a debate."
Jimmy is letting Ainsley throw the softballs, then he launches disorienting, nimble attacks that leave Tommy flustered. Sullivan gives a nod to Jim to signal his turn for rebuttal.
"You’re obviously threatened by the idea that the universe can be reduced to things, constants and laws," Jim explains, sounding like his physics teacher Mr. Fukuyama. "You said earlier: ‘I don’t trust infinity to science’. You can’t deal with the finite so you invented a heaven for yourself. It’s what Plato predicted, more or less."
Sullivan beams favorably at Jim during the Plato reference but he doesn’t notice. He stays on attack: "People who are successful don’t need those pathetic fantasizations. We focus on what we have and what we can get. We don’t need to cling to theories and dogmas concerning any afterlife. Heaven is for losers."
There are some hoots of approval from the class. Tommy interrupts, bright red, stammering: "Yes! That’s exactly who heaven is for. The last shall be first and the first shall be last. You can have your oblivion if you want it. I’ve faced death, I know what my birthrite is."
"It’s Jim’s turn," Sullivan scolds.
"You’re simply betraying the fact that you can’t deal with reality," Jim says. "You’d rather tear down the elites and build castles in the sky with flimsy rationalizations than work to better yourself."
Christ, I’m trapped in an Ayn Rand novel, Tommy thinks. How’d that happen? He’s only peripherally aware of the author but he’s retching by osmosis. He’s got that "virtuous" greed and the finger-snapping drive to realize it, but it’s greed based on the immaterial, and that won’t fly with the Salekin Industry titans. Of course the class is piling on in atheistic glee while he babbles on about the inner light, trying to make them understand. Why? Why is he casting his pearls before swine?
"Success is the only objective we have," Jimmy lectures. "If you want a god, objectivity is it. When I pay attention to what is, I get things done. When you waste your time waiting for the impossible you get taken by the doers. People like you are the ones we use – servants. Someone’s got to employ you or you’re wasted flesh. It’s always been like this, it’s objectivity’s plan. Our reward is riches in the real world. Things we can use."
"Jesus said it’s easier for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle," Kenneth says, "I mean, a camel, I mean, uh, I had that backwards."
Scattered laughter.
"You won’t be laughing when you end up in hell," Kenneth tells the crowd with pathetic sincerity. Shut UP you zealous moron, Tommy screams in his head. He imagines clubbing Kenneth to death with his own bible.
"Hell is other people," Jimmy says. "Particularly Christians."
Nice setup asshole, Tommy thinks at Kenneth. There’s something loud, a noise in his head. It sounds like the clown, the crazy laugh that’s never really audible and deafening all the same. Tommy has thus far been able to dullen the razor the clown is trying to cut his mind with. Today the edge of the razer is slicing into the dark folds of hate he’s got twisted up in his neural net, spilling out contained masses of black tar in an uncontrollable flood of malice rampaging through a cross-section of cognition. The almost tangible hatred has the effect of being so real he can see its reflection, and what he hates in himself – but he will shut his mind off – he will turn the blank to his advantage – he will not think about hate. No inner light here in the blank though. Nothing is as good as he can get. Sullivan is saying something to Kenneth.
"No interrupting. You’ll get your rebuttal."
"Like it would do any good," someone wisecracks. The laughs and jeers have run together. They’re an ashen-gray secular haze swirling around the room in a hurricane cloud, a vortex to what he won’t believe in. He’s long past the point of salvage, on a trancing to the nearest convenient moment of lucidity. Someone seems to be asking him a question, is it a teacher, debater, or student? He can’t distinguish. He won’t respond.
The trance carries him through stuttering jittering stimuli, an odd conclusion to the debate that is first greeted with hilarity (that it’s been taken to this catatonic extreme), and then disquiet as the creepiness of the trancing dropout hushes the room. Tommy is back at the loser table with his notebook. Kenneth’s back with his bible. Tommy grabs a stick of graphite and adds to his drawings, occasionally flinching a dark jab through a delicately ordered arabesque when lightening strikes him from the secular stormhaze and the quality of the chunky classroom banter suddenly, momentarily takes on the flavor of being about him. What are they using him for? Can’t they keep to their oblivion if they must scorn his light?
Another stutter and he finds himself in the hall, a bad place to regain sensory awareness but the crowd seems benignly homogenized so the evil is faceless and blank, an insectile stare. Jim is there, cutting through the fog. He’ll probably always be in the crowd now, the user, editor of the source code of every word said. Every decision made. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he were to… Tommy snaps his fingers before wording out the thought but there is an image of Jim slumped against the wall in the middle of the stairwell with a bright ringed entry wound in his forehead and a vertical splash of blood behind extending five feet above. A spray of bullet holes around the sagging, shattered skull. People stand where they are, frozen. They don’t know what to do, how could the user have met this brutal real fate in the middle of it all? Their programs fail, they stand petrified. The killer has ushered in the ice age. It’s so vivid, for a minute Tommy can’t remember whether he’s alive or dead, is it real, is he re-living this wish in the afterlife?
Then he snaps back, as he tends to do, thinking: Be careful what you wish for. But he is careful, he reminds himself. He’s only serious when he snaps his fingers. He wouldn’t wish torture on Jim. Not for anything he’s done yet, anyway. But death, death is easy. He knows how easy it is.
The little finger-snapper fantasy helps sooth the pain of that ridiculous defeat in the English room. It was a silly debate anyway. He doesn’t need God, he has his fingers. He knows what will cheer him up. He’ll spend his lunch hour in the library reading Karl Marx. He’s been meaning to finish Das Kapital. It warms his heart.
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