. . .
Mr. Loggins bowls Tom over and he falls on him. He scrambles along Tom to the neck; he beats Tom’s head backwards into the floor with an inescapable brutality; he seizes the back of Tom’s collar with his wrists crossed in front of Tom’s neck, leans in, and digs both wristbones of him directly into Tom’s throat.
Tom’s world goes red and raw and fuzzes over.
He can hear Mr. Loggins whispering something. He cannot make out the words. He can only hear the savage triumph of them, the rough righteousness in them, the something almost like exultation in them; then Tom’s sensibilities slip away into the dark.
At least, he thinks as he dies, at least I died human.
. . .
He does not know how much later it is when he wakes.
His heart is pounding. He is in a searing confusion, his thoughts in dizzy, darting desperation, like the blunt blundering flailing of his arms. Everything is strict and simple. He cannot muster complicated thoughts. His own name eludes him. There is only his need for breath and the aching of his neck and limbs.
. . .
The world veers and skews. He finds himself, he is a person, his leg is twisted. He pulls it straight.
There is a dead man on top of him. God.
He pushes the man off. He struggles to get out from under him. The loggins of him.
. . .
He lies sideways and he pants.
There is a hat. It is calling to his attention. His thoughts keep flowing around it, as if it glittered. He reaches for it. He has to put it back on.
He grabs it. His hands are weirdly clumsy. His fingers are stiff. He pulls the hat on.
. . .
He writhes away from dead Mr. Loggins. He huddles there, taking desperate gasps of breath. Finally his thoughts clear enough to know roughly where he is.
He staggers up. He rests his weight for a moment on a chair. The chair falls over. He falls over. His eye-bone feels broken. He remembers after a moment that you cannot actually break your eye-bones, and then that there aren’t any. He feels the bone around his eye. It is OK. Maybe it is a little bit sore.
He does not know why Mr. Loggins is dead.
. . .
He does not know why Mr. Loggins is dead.
The medical examiners will later rule it an apoplexy. They will absolve him entirely; though, hearing that, and thinking of the channels crude-carved by his hat into Mr. Loggins’ brain, Tom will be unable to absolve himself.
In the old days that wouldn’t have happened. Science adventurers with parasitic serpent DNA can do a lot of bad things, like warming the Earth and killing off humanity, but they don’t accidentally give people aneurysms when trying to help them out.
It might have stopped him.
That guilt — it might have killed the dream-wroth, struck it from him, made him hang up the hat or even burn it, and never to fulfill the destiny that he had claimed. It might have made him remember that being human can be a good thing, that being imperfect can be a good thing, that there is a certain value in not having any particular destiny to, you know, kill off the world.
Only —
He can’t stop. Not now.
He has tipped over the edge now. He can see.
. . .
For Tom Friedman as for Mr. Loggins it is already too late. He is already caught in it, already tangled into the sinister hair-net of his fate. It is already in him and within him, his child, his future, his life, his death, and his enemy: the hat that he shall make.
It looms vastly in his mind. It turns there, the vision of it. It regards him without eyes and a glint like the scissors-glint rides back and forth between them.
It lives in him.
He cannot stay at his academy; he calls on Mr. Gulley and transfers to the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth.
There, to practice, he makes a hat. And another. And another, until finally he is ready.
. . .
His roommate Stephan pesters him. His roommate Stephan taunts him. His roommate Stephan locks Tom in the bathroom, plays with his hats outside the door, makes funny voices through them, and finally, unwisely, tries one on.
After that Tom is no longer pestered; nor neither does he relent.
. . .
He tries to stop but he can’t. He tries, he rubs convulsively at his head, he flings off his hat and he locks all his materials in a steamer trunk in his closet, binds them about with hardened chains, and seals the closet behind a wall of lead, but it doesn’t stop him.
He wakes one night to find himself half-started and he cannot help but finish.
He makes himself a crowning hat.
He makes himself a kether-hat.
He makes a hat to unleash the sacred flame.
. . .
He holds up the hat. He turns it in his hands.
There is no slime from it. It is not dead. It is like dead, it is from the stuff of the dead, it is made from the ruins of dead hats, but it is not dead. It is warm and living in his hands.
Its presence caresses him with electric sensations, holy shivers, it is as if it speaks to him in some numinous and angelic tongue.
“I —” he says.
Then he closes his eyes. He lets the tears flow.
“I have made this,” he says.
. . .
The hat is in Tom’s hands. He lifts it up.
It’s not all gone. Not all the science — is this really science? Nevermind. But —
It’s not all gone.
He smiles to himself.
He puts it on.
. . .
The hat aligns him, then. It makes him one thing, then, one singular purpose.
He flows with it. He burns with it. It is as graceful in him as a dance.
He runs straight from the past to the future; he is the spear of a single destiny; he is a single creature, animated by a single light.
. . .
He is no longer Tom Friedman.
His hat has sorted him and re-sorted him. It has changed him. It has made a certain amendment and rectification to the categories of the world.
He is no longer Tom, the mortal; nor Tom, the serpent.
He crowns himself a new Tom, that day: Tom, of the House of Dreams.
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