Tommy is spending the day at grandma’s house. Grandma’s house is a soporific drug, it soothes him for about eight hours, at which point the boredom becomes overwhelming and he starts pressuring his parents to drive home.
Mom is trying to pass information about her garden through grandma’s hearing aid, but Tommy has grown used to the high-volume shriek required, and is lost in his reverie. Today’s reverie concerns Candace, a short, large-breasted blond girl that sits a few tables over in his math class. It seems unfair that any sixteen year old should have tits like that. A travesty that any boy might be allowed anywhere near them. Pearls before swine. She’s "Candy" to Tommy. He wonders if anyone else calls her Candy. He doesn’t know. He barely knows anything except he wants to fuck her. And he knows he never will in this life. So he snaps his fingers every time he imagines that hypothetical fuck. Today he imagines fucking her right in the classroom – an empty classroom, that’s kinky enough. Just him and Candy. What a scene that would be. Such a great fantasy he decides to move it up in the queue. Right to the top. He snaps his fingers again to signify that this wish should be number one. A fine one to start with after death. He’ll thank himself later.
As the conversational drone continues he feels himself growing very erect in his pants. The thin fabric is not concealing the boner very well so it’s time to leave the room. He brought his super nintendo with him today so he’ll plug it into the TV in grandma’s room and play some games.
He shuts the door, plugs in the AC adapter, screws the RF switch into the antique wood-framed television, and bands of static resolve into the brightly-colored splash screen of Super Mario Kart. He selects a race from the Mushroom Cup using Bowser, as always. But his skills are failing him. He keeps crashing into pipes and skidding into the dirt. He kicks out his foot in frustration, knocking over a pile of Danielle Steele novels. He realizes he can’t get Candace out of his mind. He knows what he must do. Combine the two.
Lately, he’s taken to using Mario Kart as a divinational tool, like the I Ching. He much prefers the video game to that ancient Chinese book. The course of many races have proven to be fairly accurate metaphors for the future, fractal resonance from the seeds of the game. He worships the gods of chaos which he calls Fractons. Fractons are what he has to deal with in this crazy world, on this unwinnable level, so far from the light, only able to glimpse the shaft. Here, Fractons rule, and he connects to them with Mario Kart. They’re a plural divinity – another manifestation of the catalog god that will grant his fingersnapping wishes. But the Fractons are of this world.
He selects a new race from Flower Cup, this time as Mario, since Mario represents his sexual prowess, his virile avatar. Mario is Player One, red and ready for action.
As the first course, Chocolate Island 1, fades into view, Tommy recalls a conversation from his math class, overheard near the beginning of the semester. Candace was describing to a friend (tall black-haired Samantha, pretty fine herself but not Candy-level) a piano recital she’d been to. She was raving about the pianist whose name Tommy forgot. She seemed awestruck by the virtuosity and beauty of the playing. Tommy could see the appreciation in Candy’s intelligent eyes, that split second glance he dared steal. It felt like a key, a key to Candace, an impossible connection – an impression! But he’d quit playing four years ago and was barely any good back then. Maybe he could start again though. Would it be worth trying? Getting back on that punishing arpeggio regime?
Now is the time for casting. The Mario-casting. This race, Chocolate Island 1, will determine whether he’ll be able to develop his technique to the point where he can impress Candace. Enough to make her his girlfriend. That alone would be enough, forget sex. That would blow his fucking mind.
The race gets off to a good start. He jumps to the lead, then gets a mushroom powerup which he uses right before a jump, soaring straight over a barrier and a mud pit. He imagines his angle of approach for his first kiss with Candy. He slams into a pipe. He imagines sinking his hand into her thick blond hair. He navigates around the pipe only to get bogged down in a mud slick. He imagines how firm Candy’s breasts will feel through her shirt. Donkey Kong roars past putting him in second place. Then the Princess passes putting him in third!
Damn fucking hyper-responsive Mario! Tommy thinks. I can’t steer with this prick, I’m used to Bowser!
Yoshi passes, putting Mario in fourth place. Mario has good acceleration but Tommy is still not used to the increased steering sensitivity and turns too early, slamming into a wall. Now he’s in last place. He hopes for a decent powerup that will again launch him ahead of the pack, but when he passes over the question boxes, all he gets is a useless banana peel. Lap five arrives much too soon, and although he manages to climb in rank, he only finishes fourth place.
"Fuck!" he yells, then winces because his parents will surely hear through the thin walls.
Fourth place! For a Mario Kart master! Fourth place is surely not good enough for Candy. Surely not good enough to do justice to Beethoven’s Fourteenth Sonata. Negative motherfucking outcome, no Candy. No wait. He got fourth place so he’s still advancing to the next round. Technically that’s not a "loss". This first race can’t decide it, he tells himself, he usually goes through a whole cup to decide an important issue. On to the next course.
Ghost Valley 2 goes well for Tommy’s Mario. An easy victory. But Donut Plains 2 is a disaster. The damned bouncing moles attach themselves to him and slow him down on two occasions. The winding course wreaks havoc on his hypersensitive steering. Too many turns, too many fuck ups. He ranks out. Angrily he hits the retry button and finishes a mediocre third place. But that’s Donut Plains 2 with Mario for you. The next race will be better.
He zooms into first place right away in Bowser’s Castle and stays there for the next four laps but then careens off a jump into the lava on the final lap, recovering to a pathetic fourth place. Cursing Mario, he sees that in the overall standing, he’s only six points behind Donkey Kong and three points behind the Princess. If he can take them both out in the final lap with a turtle shell or something, he can cause them to rank out and still achieve victory, albeit with a low score. So impressing Candy will be a hard battle of course, those fucking arpeggios will take months, maybe years of practice, but he’ll fucking do it, just you watch. He’ll do it with Mario.
Mario Circuit 3, a tricky course to win with Mario. Almost as tricky as playing the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata with his stubby fingers. He’s in first place by the middle of the second lap and holding. He’s racing aggressively, lapping the last place racer and nailing the seventh placer with a green shell. He’s well ahead by the fourth lap. Then he runs into a fireball thrown by Bowser, the seventh placer he lapped, spinning out. Donkey Kong is roaring up behind him, eating away his lead.
Oh right! he thinks, I’ve got to take out Donkey Kong and the Princess to win! Luckily he’s got a red shell, a guided missile. He lets both racers pass him, then he opens fire on the Princess, scoring a direct hit and causing her to spin out. He passes her and rides over the question boxes ahead, hoping desperately for a useful powerup with which to kill Donkey Kong. He gets a green shell which can be lethal, but only with perfect marksmanship, since it isn’t guided. Final stretch of the final lap, Donkey Kong ahead, only once chance. He lines the big ape in his sights. Fires. HITS! Donkey Kong spins out, Mario is going to pass. Donkey Kong is accelerating again but Mario has the momentum. He’s about to take the lead.
Then he stops cold, spins out.
"What the fuck?!" Tommy says. It was a banana peel. Donkey Kong dropped a banana peel right before starting off again. Dropped it right over a yellow question box so it couldn’t be seen. And now he’s nearly at the finish line. Mario tries to catch up but he can’t. Donkey Kong wins the race.
"Godfuckingdamnit!" Tommy shouts, no longer caring who hears.
The princess takes second. Yoshi takes third. Mario finally crosses the line, taking fourth place. Tommy sits angrily through the victory ceremony. Smug Donkey Kong stands at the top of the podium. It’s Jim. Sneaky Jim, finding use for a banana peel. Jim wins Candy. Didn’t he see him talking to her once? He’ll have her. It’s as inexorable as a red guided turtle shell finding its mark. Jim’s fucking landmine. He’s laughing all the way to the bank.
Tommy shuts off the super nintendo in disgust. There’s nothing to be done. He kicks at the toppled pile of Danielle Steele novels, scattering them over the floor. Then he sees a thin square book propped against the shelf. A children’s book. He picks it up. There’s a red anthropomorphic boat sailing down a stream with a benevolent owl looking down. SCUFFY the tugboat is the title. Tommy’s eyes tear up. It is bar none the cutest image he’s ever seen in his life. Scuffy has adorable black pupils in large vertical eyes, glinting sunlight at the tops of their ovals. Under the innocent eyes are wrinkles denoted by single curves which make Scuffy look like an old baby. Above the eyes is a heavy brow of confused determination. Scuffy sails into the unknown. If rural tugboats had personalities this is exactly how they’d manifest visually. At the top: "a little golden book", at the bottom: "copyrighted material".
Tommy feels his anger melt away. He doesn’t care about Candace anymore, Jim is irrelevant. He wants to sail with Scuffy, he wants to wrap his arms around Scuffy’s hull, a spring morning embrace. He snaps his fingers. He catalogs the transcendental cuteness for future use. Somehow it will happen but probably not for a while. He will have to endure the sight of beautiful girls who call him "disgusting" to his face, and junior executives who mock his spirituality. He will have to endure this for years and years.
But he’s recognized the right details at the right time. The sacredness of Scuffy. So his life is not a waste. There’ll be other details to peg. There’s nothing more important than sacredity and what’s sacred is what he deems sacred. No all-encompassing cop-outs like the native Indians indulge in. Losing at Mario Kart was not sacred. That will be purged with his biological husk when it goes under the ground. But Scuffy will be a collector’s item. A nice little slice of 1995, to be combined with other slices in ways he hasn’t yet conceived, sublime juxtapositions that will engineer happiness on a transcendent level. Cuteness times coolness times energy to the power of whatever awaits to be discovered. Cataloged. And fuck Jimmy, how could that asshole ever understand? Let him bust up some more unions and take over his dad’s company, fucking business nerd – he’ll never understand.
So much sacredity. Tommy feels it, a gestalt, oozing out of every overlapping neurological pattern. Now he knows what’s coming. The blank. It always seems to hit him after an overload of sacredity. It’s going to feel sick. It’s going to taint everything. It does. How can he fill it? He ate all the licorice he bought for the car ride to Grandma’s house so that’s not an option. The blank feels unusually specific in this case, unusual for being a form of emptiness. It’s a pattern of emptiness. Carved into a pattern of substance. The substance of fingersnapping. It’s like the fingersnapping pattern needs something. A fingersnap!
Somehow he knows what he has to do. This is the dawn of fingersnapping in a way. The day he snaps his fingers to sanctify the fingersnapping. He must encase fingersnapping itself in the fingersnapping scheme, the regime at the end of this dirty biological Mario-Kart course. He thinks: I fingersnap that fingersnapping shall be a reality. He snaps his fingers. And the blank is gone. All it took was a little meta-stasis.
***
Math class, 1996. Tommy has discovered a novel way to avoid working on math problems. Composing. He never did bother to work on his piano technique. Mario Kart confirmed that he’d fail. But he’s getting a kick out of attempting to write music using notation and nothing else. He’s filling up staff paper with the few musical symbols he knows, humming softly what he thinks he’s writing. Around him, students have their textbooks open to page fifty-three where thirty algebra problems demand to be solved.
Candace is in some other class this year but seventeen-year-old Samantha is looking hotter than ever. Tommy occasionally sneaks a look behind him when his peripherals confirm that her head is turned away. He wants to see her breasts bulging inside her white tee-shirt, but his glances must be frustratingly fleeting. He confirms that the contours are deliciously round, then turns back to his staff paper and pencils in a flurry of sixteenth notes, an arpeggio he could never play. Hopefully it’ll harmonize with the bass octaves he wrote a minute ago. Hard to tell with just his head, he’s no Mozart. He thinks maybe he could write a masterpiece though. He finished first place in Special Cup while thinking about his compositional ambitions, but it was a strange race. If he pursued-
"Hey, Satan boy," someone says. Tommy snaps around. "Can I borrow your calculator? I forgot mine."
It’s Scott, Tommy recognizes, a ridiculously tall, thick-limbed kid. Rumour has it he’s nineteen years old because he failed a grade once or twice. He’s partial to the Satan-related insults, but he throws them out as a matter of course, with a malice so casual it’s barely detectable. He seems to expect Tommy to take it in stride. Why not, interaction between Tommy and the student body usually involves some form of belittlement. Like Tommy doesn’t realize he’s servant class.
"My calculator?"
"Yes, your cal-cu-la-tor," Scott repeats in exaggerated slowness, casually annoyed.
Tommy stares ahead with blazing eyes, rage rising. He can’t think of what to say. Scott speaks again: "well c-
"No. You can’t." Tommy’s voice is grave. Murderous. He can feel the violence chemically sloshing around in his skull. There’s no stopping it.
"Why not?"
"Because you’re an asshole," Tommy states like he’s solving an equation.
He doesn’t turn to see Scott’s reaction. He wants to write some more music, use this rage and righteous comeback to perfect his composition. He squeezes his pencil tight. But he’s bracing himself because he knows it’s not over.
"No wonder nobody likes you," Scott says with mock sorrow. Tommy sees him smile in peripheral, then lean over to whisper something to a friend. There is laughter somewhere. Tommy turns and sees that the whisper has spread all the way to Samantha, tits out eternally. She laughs, then shoots Tommy a condescending look while he’s caught fixated on her chest. Tommy’s dick hardens as his eyes blaze brighter. It’s so wrong. He stares at the centre of the room, right through the teacher’s torso but Samantha’s image from the waste up is burned into his brain, as vivid as the mind’s eye can manage. Her long black hair. Her smirk. Her knockers, puncturing that white sleeveless shirt. Her fucking smirk, that makes him hardest of all. Her contempt. It’s so wrong but how else could it be? Before he can stop himself he snaps his fingers. Because he sees Samantha and Candace together. In this room, the classroom, the math room. With these people, even "satan-boy" Scott. Candace and Samantha smiling, smug, sweet like expensive perfume, like bling luxury, like red sports cars, sweet as they call him names, tease his cock, laugh at his little life in the corner, his inappropriate erection, Tommy who would never discuss anything sexual with anyone, Scott leading the male chorus to counterpoint that sweet laughing contempt, a whole choir, soprano nymphs of sexy cruelty, tenor muscles, enforcement of reality.
So fucking wrong. And so fucking hot, thermostat through the roof. Tommy starts to sweat. He snaps his fingers again. Here, now, imagine, Candace, Samantha, Scott watching, everybody watching, grabbing, grabbing Samantha, nevermind Candy, throwing her onto the desk, the chorus turned to gasps, Tommy animal, sex organ full in abandon, monster cock, monster defiler, monster attacking the beautiful slut, no mercy, gratification, ripping open her shirt, small boy with raw power seizing the tall girl like a rag doll, human doll, whimpering, crying as he yanks down her jeans and panties in one violent motion, forces himself into her, lubricated by pure lust, precumming in her cunt, titties free for his hands as the thrusting begins, monster seed anti-Christ Fracton to spurt deep into her, fuck fuck FUCK… Then his imagination takes control of him, has Candy pry his frail weasel body off her, has Scott knock him to the floor with an uppercut, thick-limbed fucker with knuckles the size of golf balls, monster Tommy on the floor, frail monster with a massive erection, naked loser lust sprung from the pelvis, army of righteously angry students surrounding. Tommy knows what’s coming. Jayson, another bad boy pulls out his pocket knife, impossibly long and sharp. Scott plants his palm on Tommy’s forehead while Jayson kneels down with the knife, grabs his penis and slices it off in one brutal motion. Blood fountains up from the severed sex organ, Tommy feels the end of lust, the end of life, every fingersnapping wish draining out of him with blood, between his balls, the end, the blank.
The blank is bloody, covered with blood. The finger-snapping circuit is gone, empty, profound emptiness, dark chill. There is no fingersnapping. The images fade, the teacher’s torso returns, hideous, meaningless. Something compels Tommy to stand up, just as the room’s intercom sounds:
Tom Lewis, report to Mr. Anderson’s office please. Tom Lewis.
Strange coincidence. The predictable insults waft up from every corner of the room. Tommy’s name seems a rally point for the pogrom. Anderson is the guidance counselor. Tommy thinks it must be about all the school days he skipped. Ironic that he wants Tommy to skip class to discuss it. But that’s fine with him, since this classroom stimuli is obviously driving him insane. Somehow he lost the fingersnapping thread and it’s freaking him out. The blank has never been this strong before.
He eagerly heads toward the back door. Then he remembers that he doesn’t know where Mr. Anderson’s office is. He’s still sweating, heart pounding, feeling faint. He’s on the edge. He swivels his head toward the teacher and asks: "Where’s Mr. Anderson’s office?"
Jayson, sitting next to the door, snickers loudly and the boy beside him mutters: "What a dork."
"Mr. Anderson’s office is right in the main office complex," Mr. Ford says with a roll of his eyes. "On the second floor," he adds. More snickers.
"Know where that is?" asks Jayson.
Tommy is frozen again. The rage is sloshing inside his head, even more of it, sloshing around in that blank tank and his fingers feel meaningless, nails cut. He can’t snap his way out of this one, that’s too weak, it won’t do. And he cut his fingernails yesterday, why did he do that? He can’t even cut himself and pretend it’s someone else. These people cut his dick off. Every one of them. They cut his dick off every day. He can’t leave now, the blank must be filled. But how? Fingersnapping feels empty. He must fight reality with reality, it’s the only way. To fill.
Being frozen in place, he’s drawing attention from the class.
"Damn, who smells like poo, is that him?" asks Jayson’s friend. The laughter networks out into the class. The rage sloshes, overflows, it feels like it’s flowing through his veins and arteries, is it adrenaline? He’s never felt so much of it at once. Many eyes are on him now. It’s coming to a head.
"Don’t worry, you’ll be happy in heaven one day," someone snarks, someone he doesn’t know. But he must have been there in the English room the day Jim publicly demolished his arguments for the inner light. Samantha’s friend chimes in: "He can wear his shit-stained underwear and stare at girl’s boobs all day long on cloud nine."
Uproarious laughter at this zinger. The teacher says nothing. Tommy is shaking. About to leave, but – no. This isn’t finished yet. A creepy calm settles over him. He’s made a decision. He walks slowly back to his desk drawing more stares.
People have asked him why he carries a gym bag to class. It’s clearly overkill for a few textbooks. But it’s just the right size for the punishing stick. The punishing stick dates back to last winter when kids from the junior high across town walking home the opposite way took to throwing snowballs at him after school. After a month the indignity had exceeded tolerable levels.
"Stop throwing snowballs at me," Tommy remembers turning back and saying to the gang.
"I didn’t. It fell off the lamppost," laughed the kid in the red coat.
"I said stop it. I’m going to be armed next time."
"OhHOHO," red coat said, laughing.
"I’ll fucking cut your throat," Tommy said. "Don’t fuck with me."
"You wanna fuckin fight?" red coat sneered.
"I fight on my own terms. No one else’s. Stay out of my way."
"So scared," red coat’s friends taunted.
Tommy turned back.
"Yeah, just walk away," someone jeered.
Tommy walked away, nauseas, shaking, feeling empty except for one thought: going home and creating his weapon. He arrived home, grabbed a kitchen knife and sunk it halfway through the back of a wooden chair (his parents were pissed when they discovered the gash). But this didn’t come close to relieving the rage. He stormed into his room, grabbed the long piece of scrap wood he used to prop open the heat vent, and wrote "punishing stick" on the side with a black marker. But it needed something else. He opened his closet to look for the jar of super-sized nails he’d bought when he was building his tree fort so many years ago. The long ones were still there, the hammer beside the jar. He pounded one into the end of the stick. It stuck out three inches on the other side. Tommy examined his weapon, then pounded two more nails above the first, one on each side of the board. The end of the punishing stick now sported a triangle of spikes.
After the creation of the punishing stick he started carrying a gym bag to school. But he also started walking home a different way because he didn’t really want to use it. The punishing stick now lies at the bottom of Tommy’s gym bag, beside his books. He grabs it without hesitation. He picks it up and holds it with both hands. The onlookers don’t know what to make of it. Tommy’s eyes scan the room. He feels the dreadful momentum of the situation in every cell. No going back now, course is set.
"Tommy, what the hell- " Mr. Ford says, but Tommy won’t let him finish. Jayson is the chief bastard but it was Samantha’s bitch girlfriend that set him off with that hideous joke about heaven. She will be the first, and only if necessary. Tommy walks slowly down the aisle toward the center of class and Samantha’s table, holding the punishing stick low in his right hand and slapping it into his left repeatedly. The class is frozen in shock. This is reality and reality is not a place for heroes. Tommy stands beside Samantha’s friend, a small brown-haired girl with modelesque hair. Words cut into his head like he’s diving through a windshield in a loop {shit-stained heaven dork what a shit-stained is that him no wonder nobody happy in heaven likes you know where that is shit-stained boobs} He raises the stick, trembling.
"What are you doing?" the girl asks, also trembling. Tommy stares straight into her eyes {girly-boy heaven is for losers shit-stained is that him?we use people satan-boy no wonder nobody likes what a dork he can wear his shit-stained}
"You don’t care, you don’t care, you don’t care," Tommy breathes barely audible and, channeling years of rage, drives the punishing stick down towards her head, the cumshot. The left-most nail plunges into her pretty hair, tearing out a clump. The stick slams into the table, nails poking far out the other end. The splintering thud is deafening. Everyone jumps, pretty-hair screams, commotion and cursing begins, several seats empty.
I grazed her! Tommy thinks. I missed! He yanks his punishing stick back out of the table, only barely dislodging it. Several students have fled the class. Tommy twists around to see that Jayson is lunging for him. He wields the stick in a batting stance, then swings at Jayson who tries to deke out Tommy. He doesn’t twist far enough out of the way and two of Tommy’s nails connect with Jayson’s right hand. The impact is divine – both spikes stick out the other side and blood spatters on the wall behind. Jayson barks in surprise but still manages to tackle Tommy on his left flank. Tommy slams into a table and loses his grip on the punishing stick which now dangles from Jayson’s hand.
He uses both arms for leverage, gripping the edge of the table and attacking with a flying drop kick to Jayson’s stomach. Jayson tumbles backwards, out of commission, wheezing, moaning, then screaming, punishing stick still attached to his hand. Most of the remaining students have moved toward the doors and are blocking escape. Mr. Ford has stepped into the hallway and is yelling something. In his peripheral vision he can see that Scott (not Jayson, oddly enough) has pulled a knife. The situation is starting to look too much like Tommy’s recent nightmare/reverie. It’s coming true! He mustn’t let them capture him!
He makes a run for the back door but he’s body checked from the side by a burly male student, probably some hockey jock. He’s thrown into the wall. His head flashes white, then he comes to on the floor. The hockey jock is on top of him, pinning him, grabbing his arms, forcing them behind his back. They’re starting to hurt, eclipsing the pain in his spine. Tommy’s rage flares again. He’s close enough to the kid’s face, he lunges upward and bites into his nose, ripping through its soft rubbery flesh, tasting blood. The jock screams, the hold relaxes. Tommy pushes himself off, springs to his feet and reaches the door in two paces. He turns the knob and sprints out into the mostly empty hall, freaked out voices echoing behind him. Mr. Ford sounds enraged.
"Stop!" he yells. Tommy giggles. He can’t remember ever feeling so good. Some people are ahead of him, running the same way, running from him.
He tears down the hall, faster still. Some classrooms have opened their doors to see what the fuss is about. It seems incredibly surreal. Tommy wonders if he got so deep into one of his fingersnapping fantasies that he’s totally removed from reality – but the pain in his arms and back and teeth won’t allow him to believe that. He knows this is real. Gloriously real. He tastes blood.
He reaches the staircase where he once overheard Jimmy’s stories and knows this will be the last time he ever sees it. It blurs past him as he quickens his pace even further and he feels a ridiculous pang of sadness. He leaps from the third stair down, landing hard at the halfway point. He tumbles, slams into the wall, gets up, elated, takes a run, tries to leap the whole next half of the staircase laughing as he jumps. Close but no cigar, he hits the fourth stair up, slips, does a graceless cartwheel into the second floor doorway. Another bright flash, must have hit his head on something. He springs back up, launches himself at the next stairwell bounding five steps at a time, this time keeping on his feet.
Ground floor and he’s in sight of the main entrance when he sees Jim coming the other way. He stops for some reason, like he bounced off a force field, the Jim field. Jim locks eyes on him. Tommy holds his gaze, realizing that this is the first time he’s ever done that.
"You finally did it, didn’t you?" Jim says in an inscrutable tone.
"Did what?" Tommy says in an equally inscrutable, if maniacal, voice.
Jim doesn’t answer. He walks quietly past Tommy, heading for the library. Voices and footsteps grow louder from the floors above.
"Hey Jimmy!" Tommy shouts. Jim turns around. He says: "Did you just call me- "
"Yeah – Jimmy!" he says. Then flips him the bird. Then he runs at the door, slamming into the push-handle. It flies open, nearly busts its hinges and swings back with a thud. Tommy charges off into the cool spring air.
***
Tommy is halfway up the grass hill below the student parking lot when the laughter stops and the guilt floods in like corrosive acid. He doesn’t think it has anything to do with the nails he drove through Jayson’s hand or the flesh he bit off the hockey jock’s nose, although he does feel the shadow of the wrath of Jim, even as the school buildings grow smaller behind him. Jim’s empire must stretch further than that little educational institution. But the guilt is strange and complex.
"Oh god," he says. "Oh god." Perhaps he should pray to the Fractons. The gods of chaos. They’re all he has left. He betrayed his fingersnapping spirituality. Betrayed it for reality. He can’t go back to school. He’s betrayed his family. Mom and Dad will be livid. He can’t go back home. He’s on his own. He’s out of society. That chapter is finished.
"Oh god," he says, tearing up. His voice is hoarse, his throat is in agony, he’s got a stitch in his side, and he’s reduced to jogging. But he’s still pushing himself to the limit. He crosses the parking lot and cuts straight through the high grass and shrub of the unkempt upper hill. Beyond that is the forested mountain slope. It’s the only place to go. The city is a vengeful mob. He’s betrayed them all. "Oh god," he moans.
It's all out in the open now. His true self. The monster. He must learn to live with it.
"Oh god, but why didn’t I kill the bitch?" he moans to himself, whacking through the bush above the parking lot. "Because I couldn’t," he answers. "I didn’t miss. I hit the table. That’s what I was aiming for. I couldn’t kill her… I’m weak." A weak monster. Never even got to be a rapist. Got out of the classroom with his teeth. He spits out a pink loogie but he still tastes blood.
Finally he crosses into the forest. He enters a skinny, rarely used path and imagines what will happen at school in his wake. "It won’t be glamorous," he reasons. "I left the punishing stick behind. I’ll be some sad disturbed fruitcake who managed to spike one poor student through the hand, then bit his way out like a rabid pants-pissing maniac. Jayson will be a hero. The youth who boldly rushed the maniac, probably stopped him from killing a bunch of kids. They’ll give him a fucking medal. And the grief counselors will tell the whole class how brave they are for surviving the ordeal. My little stunt probably won’t even make the front page of the Daily News – school shootings have more pizzazz. The kids with guns did it better. Fatalities – that’s what people want to see. I’m a C grade maniac. I’m not even going to kill myself."
Tommy walks on. The path grows steeper, the forest denser. His tears dry up. The noise of cars fades away. The heavy industry on the outskirts of town fades too and a strange calm settles over him. He doesn’t know where he’s going but he’s content to walk. Forever. Just walk away. The path feels good. Sacred even. He snaps his fingers for the path. It could lead to lost cities, fertile lands, enchanted woods. He must incorporate this path into his future itinerary. He doesn’t think of it as the heaven itinerary anymore because he doesn’t feel quite alive anymore. His former life is finished. This isn’t death exactly but… limbo maybe. The endless forest. This is the forest he’s pussyfooted around all his life. Now he’s striking deep into it.
The path eventually intersects with a high-altitude flat trail that he’s walked before, but it continues up the mountain. The flat trail leads almost right to his home at the edge of the forest but the sloped path goes in the opposite direction. He continues upward, opposite, away. He pays no mind to what he’s going to do, but he does wonder if he has anything on him. He goes through his pockets. In his left pocket there is nothing but a quarter and a bunch of lint. There is a folded piece of paper in the other. He unfolds it and sees that it’s a picture of Scuffy the Tugboat. He’d found a jpeg image of the book cover online and printed it on his dad’s inkjet many months ago. Tommy looks at the poorly printed image, a smile growing on his face. Finally he bursts out laughing. It must have been in his pocket for ages. He hadn’t got around to doing his laundry in a while so who knows how long it could’ve been there?
All he has in the world is a quarter and a picture of Scuffy. He sits down on a boulder and laughs some more. A quarter and Scuffy in the middle of the forest. And you can’t go home again. He looks at the page and tears up again.
"Oh Scuffy… You’re so pure," he says. "So innocent. I want to join you." Scuffy stares ahead, intent on his journey. "You’re in my heart." Tommy snaps his fingers to prove this. Sometimes fingersnapping wishes are non-specific. They’ll be worked out later. Some activity will be created that will perfectly embody Scuffy being in Tommy’s heart.
"We’ll have adventures together some day, Scuffy. I filled in the blank. I wounded Jayson. I gave him a dose of reality. I fought. My career as a warrior is over now. I want to sail with you Scuffy. Down the stream." Tommy giggles again, then the giggles turn to sobs. Then he stuffs the page back into his pocket and continues up the path.
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