. . .
The third time he brings the dream-wroth upon himself.
He starves himself. He thirsts himself. He spends four days, which is at least three and a half days too much, roaming the cemetery of the hats. At the end of it he is delirious; chanting songs that make no sense and giggling at shadows, he tumbles suddenly through into a crisp clarity of vision, works in a fury, and when he has done he has not the faintest idea of what it is that he has done, but it has changed him.
After that he does not need such measures any longer.
After that he does not need to suffocate, or drown, or starve himself. He need only wear the hat to produce that pitch of desperate attention, now woven together with rather than actively preceding the joy and the insight it attends.
And now and again he fears he has doomed himself; that the process of refinement he has chosen will reveal itself to be an endless turning-inwards rather than a looking-out. That he is sealing himself with his particular evolution into the world of his own conceptions rather than opening himself to the great vistas that spread beyond — as if the price of perfecting his vision were that he must wear a blindfold; of perfecting his hearing, that he must fill his ears with a dread black jam; as if the price of unfolding his dreams, to better look upon them, would be to bind them all down and deaden them under the weight of his lifeless hat.
Such concepts, he decides, are futile; he does his best to scrub them out.
. . .
He cannot stop.
Tom cannot stop.
The better the hats he has made, the better the hats he can make. The better the hats he can make, the better the hats he must.
Soon he is something more than human.
Now the dream is always with him, it is always possessing him, it is running through him like the storm.
The seventeenth hat is visibly magic.
It is still a corpse-hat. It is still cold and still and pieces of the dead — but there is more to it than that. There is something in it that would attract the notice of Hans, were Hans alive. There is something that makes crowds part when the orphan Tom walks by.
It is not just the stench.
It is the power.
. . .
“Thomas,” says Mr. Loggins, “you must stop.”
He is a dull and lumpy man. He is not ready for this. He is a school counselor, but he has earned his diploma in school counseling from a scenic diploma mill in the Stropshire Hills.
It has not prepared him for Thomas Friedman and his hats.
. . .
“I cannot stop,” says Tom. He tilts his head arrogantly to the side. “I have yet to make the crowning hat.”
“Your parents are worried about you,” says Mr. Loggins. “The principal is worried about you. Quite frankly, so am I.”
“Once,” says Tom softly, looking at his hands, “I was bullied. Did you know that?”
. . .
Tom looks up.
“I was insecure,” he says. “Because I had lost myself. I was shy and meek and human, and it shone from me. The bullies said, ‘look, there! That boy is human. He doesn’t have even the tiniest bit of parasitic serpent DNA. I bet the scrolls of Lemuria don’t even talk about him! Let’s beat him up, because we can!’”
This statement is not accurate. Tom is dramatizing the speech of the bullies for effect.
“But now,” says Tom, “they do not. First I became too uncool even to bully — not just human, but less than human. They became afraid to beat up stinking Tom in his stinking dead hats, lest something of my shame rub off. Now I have risen in their estimation; they see this hat and an occult tremor shivers through them: they fear to trouble me, and make haste to clear my path. I have lost nothing and gained much, Mr. Loggins; wherefore should you be concerned?”
Mr. Loggins is listening to the sound of the words and not the substance.
He asks with some concern: “Are you being bullied, Thomas?”
Tom gives him a withering look.
. . .
Then the look in Tom’s eyes softens.
“You must know it too,” he says, “mustn’t you?”
“Pardon?”
“There is a fire in you, isn’t there, Mr. Loggins? An unfinished destiny? Something that was set aside for you, but which you were never strong enough to reach? Something you were for but —
“What’s the point? No, better to abandon dreams. Better to settle for a life without purpose than to grasp without success at dreams. You set it all aside, you drowned the little fires in you, you could not weave them together into a flame, and now —
. . .
“Now, to look at you, you must have a bustling, portly wife, and a limping dog; two drooling babies, Mr. Loggins, or one, or three; a fine collection of bottle-caps, is it? And second-place trophies in bowling? Cricket, maybe? Golf? And you wonder, where did your life go, Mr. Loggins? Where did the magic go? Is this really how it was all supposed to be? You wonder, when did you die, Mr. Loggins? When did some janitor scrub out the flame in you and leave only some great lump to lay around behind?”
“What?” says Mr. Loggins. “My wife, I, my dog —”
Mr. Loggins glares at him.
“If you’ve been reading my files, Mr. Thomas —”
. . .
“I’m sure you’re a good man,” says Tom. “I’m sure. But have you ever stopped to dare to notice that life is hard? Have you ever met a problem that you can’t solve, Mr. Loggins, and said, ‘I will solve it anyway?’”
His voice slips into pride, hubris, gloat, for a moment: “— because I have, but — ah, ah, but that’s not the point —”
. . .
Gentler, “Or do you just hide, Mr. Loggins, and do your best, and give a dopey look, and hope that if you fail somebody else will come along and make it right? What do you think will happen here, Mr. Loggins, if you cannot help me? Somebody else will solve it, won’t they? The system will step in, won’t it? The Agency? It’s all right to give up on me, isn’t it, Mr. Loggins? I’m just an ex-ophidian planet-inheritor in a wicked hat. You don’t have to care. Only —”
Tom hesitates.
“— only I think that perhaps I am obliged to care about you.”
. . .
Mr. Loggins has been reddening, his fists gone tight with anger, but Tom has stumbled onto Mr. Loggins’ counseling script and there he momentarily finds his ground.
“This isn’t about me, Tom,” he says.
But:
“Of course it’s about you,” says Tom. He is on his feet now. His face is practically glowing with the dream-wroth. “It’s always been about people like you. How could I have been so blind?
. . .
“It’s never been for me,” Tom realizes. “I am just the vehicle, I am just the medium. Oh, Tom. Oh, Tom. That’s your old hubris coming back, that is. I actually thought it was for me. Haha. Ha ha!”
Mr. Loggins opens his mouth but Tom silences him with a voice like a whip of sound.
“I am given to the world, Mr. Loggins, for people like you, to save those who haven’t dared to dream, and maybe because they couldn’t.”
. . .
Tom steps forward. He rests his hand on Mr. Loggins’ desk. His voice is strangely pleading.
“It’s not your fault, Mr. Loggins. It’s not wrong of you to be a lump. I don’t want you to think that that’s your fault. It’s just that nobody’s ever made a hat for you. Nobody’s ever infected your DNA with parasitic serpent DNA. Nobody’s ever given you a destiny. It’s not that you’ve failed to transcend humanity. It’s just, you’ve never gotten your chance.”
“This is you projecting,” blusters Mr. Loggins, “is what it is.”
. . .
“You’ve been so broken,” says Tom. “Did anybody ever even write an awful Lemurian prophecy about you? Do you even understand what it is like to make a hat? To do science? To make something amazing out of purpose and out of will? Has anyone ever even given you that much, Mr. Loggins, a chance to be amazing, a chance to be part of something, a chance to —
“It’s the best,” Tom says, interrupting himself, as if he were saying: please understand me.
. . .
“Hasn’t that been stolen from you? Can you really go through your life without the fire, Mr. Loggins? Can you really live asleep?”
It is too much. Mr. Loggins is on his feet. “We are off the topic, and get back from my desk, you little scat!”
Tom Friedman smiles sleepily:
“Here,” he says.
He takes the hat by the brim. He lifts it off. He casually drops it on Mr. Loggins’ head.
“Straighten up, Mr. Loggins,” he smiles. “See the one thing. Become one thing. Wake up.”
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