. . .
His pupils are vastly dilated. He is not sane. He has been breathing the vapors of the hats, and grief, and his own frustration. He is in dream-wroth now, in coherence-hunger, like a scientist obsessed with a half-glimpsed equation, a snake that is trying to fold itself into being, a poet sifting through their words. He is caught up in an avarice for sense; and finds it.
That is the trick of it. He has seen a true thing. He has chased the patterns of it, and found the edge of something magical.
He is a lens, and he shall make a lens; he shall refine himself through his own perceptions; take the thing in him that sees the world, turn it back on itself, see itself through itself, and onwards until the ending of the world; he will dream of dreams, and he will take his dreams and he will wear them like a hat.
He has seen something like what the old Tom might have seen.
He hunts the lowlands and the highlands of the hats.
. . .
It is bad to cut the heart from a bearskin hat. They are sacred! But he does it. He takes the core of it, turns it inside out, lets something — intangible, almost, like the sensibilities of a bear — rattle out to fill his hand.
It is bad to divide the peaches from the pears of a Carmen Miranda hat.
That hat will suffer forever, Tom!
Oh, Tom Friedman! It is bad!
Does he do this awful thing? report
. . .
He scours the graveyard. He takes the felt. He takes the fruit. But most of all he catches hold of the hat cemetery’s soul. He drags it in all its fierce reluctant unholiness towards incarnation. He bends it down, and he makes an enemy of it; or, well, more of a hat, really.
A . . . a something.
A lump of awkward black felt, covered all in the mucilage of dead hats; a rotten, filthy head-lump, to go atop his peak, to make squeamish those who look at him and slick up his lanky hair.
But around it, though —
Around it, spiraling, twining, pressing in against the darkness of it: a flicker of argent flame.
. . .
Tom staggers out of the hat cemetery like some awful warlock, or at least, cosplayer warlock; he wears ordinary clothes, for the most part, but they are tattered and covered in the threads and remnants of dead hats; he resembles a grave-robber with that layer of filth upon him, and atop him is an extraordinary thing.
What does it do for him?
Nothing.
No. Not nothing. Not quite. It does . . . a bit.
It is scarcely enough to refine him. It is a lump of dead hat-flesh. It is no work of genius, only the passing dream-wroth of a mediocre milliner — but it is not without some power.
He can feel it tuning him.
He closes his eyes and the weight of it on his temples, the spiral of power around it, the presence of death, the death of hats — he can feel his thoughts responding to it. It is tuning him. It is refining him, only a little, but it is refining him.
Where his thoughts flow in harmony with the science adventurer, the hat embellishes them; where he falls into discord with himself and his childhood dreams, the hat suffocates and drowns his mind.
. . .
Too much of the time it is the latter.
Too much of the time he is as a boy who is drowning, too much of the time the hat is swallowing him, sending him back to the darkness of suffocation, making him weep in fear and his body hunger to cast off the hat, but it is helping him.
Now and then, from time to time, a fire will light in him; Tom will align with Tom; he will align with himself, and the hat will acknowledge it, and in the darkness of one who wears an ill-fitting graveyard hat that slips down occasionally over one’s eyes, there is a momentary flame.
– 9 –
If you feed food then it won’t go bad.
It balances the entropy out!
If you put dead hats on a milliner’s boy — well, that is and it isn’t the same.
– 10 –
There are days when it seems like it is all an illusion.
After a while, Tom takes off the hat. It has not really changed him. The next few attempts do even less.
It is not until he slips while walking in the hat cemetery — plunges suddenly under the surface, falls into a hypersaturated morass and almost drowns there, choking and retching as he flounders until his hand comes up against a sturdy shelf of fedora and hardhat that allows him to scramble back up onto galea firma — that the dream-wroth takes him a second time.
. . .
Back then he needs that.
Back then he requires that moment of absolute fear, that humming airlessness in his limbs and lungs, to awaken him to his purpose. Back then it is only when the ego of Tom Friedman has slipped from him and there is only a fire clinging to its desire to live and, maybe, a bit of a future hat in him longing to be born —
It is only then that he can see it, truly see it, truly understand.
There is a difference, however.
. . .
This second vision is stronger. It is more potent. It is a full fire in him and the hat he makes is better than any hat he had even imagined theretofore. He takes armfuls of . . . pieces . . . home with him and he works to an inspired and sharp-edged design.
It is as if he is cutting the topmost layer from reality as he works, revealing something stranger that lies beneath. The hat that he finishes does not seem quite made of the stuff he built it from; it is more lustrous, warmer, both more splendid and further wrong.
. . .
Mr. Gulley sends a woman by to clean Tom’s house biweekly. The first time she sees the hat she leaves the room; he can hear her in the bathroom.
She is vomiting.
Later, she speaks to him in low, quiet tones; concerned; distressed; unwilling to work for him if such a hat is being worn. He smiles and frowns at her discomfort; he honors her concerns and will lock away the corpse-hat when she comes by for cleaning; but he pays no real attention to her words.
. . .
His guidance counselor, Mr. Loggins, is jovial and condescending. Tom does not even pretend to care.
. . .
It could still be Tom’s imagination even then. It could still be that he has done nothing more than take the stuff of dead hats, cut and fold it into new shapes, and stick it on his head.
Everything else could be the vapors of the hat cemetery and the mercury in his home.
It is ambiguous.
The world equivocates.
Did he pour magic from a bearskin hat into his naked hand, or just rip up some old bits of cloth?
Does he refine himself towards perfection, towards being one thing, towards being a pure thing? Does he tease up the fire of himself, wind it through the magic of a hat, make it a lens for the fire of himself, to straighten and purify his thoughts? Or is he merely full of the hatter-wroth, full of the sickness and the arrogance of those who spend too much time in the company of hats?
. . .
The dream-light in him is the littlest of magic flames. It is no power worth the harnessing. He is no Hans. He is no Eldri. He is not worthy to make a hat to lens the sacred fire. He is only Thomas Friedman. He isn’t even a serpent-boy.
All that was in him, all the magic and destiny and sacrifice that was in him, was barely enough to make that first lump of hat for a lonely mortal, to give him an ugly bit of trash and ruination to wear on his head and share a tiny, elliptical glimpse of the direction of his fate.
Only —
The better the hat he makes, the better the hat he can make.
It is an accelerating phenomenon. It is a self-reinforcing phenomenon. He is as a snake that folds itself into being in the ocean’s deeps. He is like a wolf pulling itself out of a stone. He is like a storm that sees itself and folds itself down into being nithrid or a mannequin articulating into the shape of a living boy.
He is caught up by the future of him. He sees the one path that is his future. In showing itself to him, it hooks him; it drags him down along that path.
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