. . .
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.
– 11 –
. . . but that isn’t who this story is about.
Tom is rising now. He is ascending. He is a self-reinforcing process; an evolutionary engine; he is climbing towards the omega plateau, towards the point without limitations, where he may coil his dreams around the naked Earth and decide all fates —
But this story isn’t about Tom.
– 12 –
As for Edmund, he has eaten the sacredness of death.
If you wrote it all out as a little list of ingredients —
* The footfalls of a cat
* The arms of a four-armed ape
* The spittle of a bird
* The sacredness of death
* The torment of the willing
* The bearing witness to the wrongness
* and the tape that binds an emu
* and the perseverance of hope
— you’d see that he’s making pretty good progress, as Gulleys go, against the chain that binds his wolf. A bit of eating an impossible thing here, a bit of luck with a swarm of scissors happening to attack the world and rattle down a chimney and cut a key bit of tape there, and hey presto, he’s on his way!
Which is pretty scary, I guess. I mean, that wolf (I hear), it’s going to eat the world.
But it also kind of goes to show you that this story isn’t about Edmund, either.
I mean, we haven’t even seen a four-armed ape.
. . .
Oh, he isn’t Mr. Enemy yet, of course.
Jeremiah Clean hasn’t cleaned him yet. He’s still the antichrist. He’s still named Linus and just a boy.
And he’s afraid.
Right down to the bones of him, he’s afraid. Right down to the marrow. Down to the littlest bits of particle that flicker about inside those bones — afraid.
Only, the cleaning man had got his brother Tom. The cleaning man had hurt him.
So Linus, he went back.
. . .
He went back to that company. He’d tossed his angry hair. He’d tried his best to be cool, and terrifying, all awesome and the antichrist, and to make them tell him the story of the cleaning man.
But there wasn’t any cleaning man. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t there, and it turned out that all the records had been scrubbed.
. . .
Linus Evans didn’t find the cleaning man.
He found agents of the joint U.S. government-Papacy anti-antichrist squad, or JÜSGPAAS, lying in wait for him instead.
. . .
They’ve had him for quite a few months now. They’ve bound him up in silvered chains.
That’s not —
I mean, that’s not supposed to be a cliffhanger. I don’t expect you to think that they’ll hold him long. He’s Linus Friedman Evans. He’s Mr. Enemy, or anyway, he will be. They are only JÜSGPAAS, and they are . . . not up to the challenge that he presents.
I don’t expect that I’ll even bother telling you how exactly he gets free.
That’s not what’s important. Not his imprisonment, not his breaking free.
What’s important is just —
. . .
It didn’t matter that he was being brave and good. It wouldn’t have even mattered if he’d been being bad.
They took him, when he went to find the cleaning man; they took him, two to each arm and three to his body, and they carried him away.
He hadn’t even gotten around yet to actually doing anything wrong.
. . .
I guess . . .
I mean, I think it’s that nobody’d ever told them the Doom Team motto. You know? Nobody’d ever taken the time to say, “Hey, guys! Guys! JÜSGPAAS! He doesn’t have to be captured and tortured and locked away in an institution for antichrists just because some people think his very existence is inherently wrong!”
I don’t think that anyone had ever said.
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