The notion suddenly excited him but, alas, he knew it was just a fleeting fantasy. I don"t have the guts, he knew all too well. It would be all he could do just to blow his head off all alone.

Candice and the boy sauntered off. Had they seen him through the window? Was she giggling? Now that she"d aced her trig and algebra, what did she need Walter for? Colin was right, he knew. She"s a cruel blond bimbo, and I"m the sucker...

He got up and raced for the bathroom, stomach convulsing. He banged through the door, stumbling, then toppled to his knees-quite conveniently in front of the toilet into which he vomited up those first two bites of chili dog. It wasn"t much, just a quick projectile burst and then his stomach was empty again. But he felt as though he was throwing up more from his heart than from his stomach.

Dizzy, he stood up, wiped sweat off his brow with the short sleeve of his very nerdy parrot-green-and-white-striped shirt. He flushed the toilet, taking deep breaths. Did everyone on the brink of suicide suffer such preludes? Again, it didn"t seem fair, nothing did. A boy"s last night on earth should be tranquil, low-key, even a little transcendent.

He leaned against the wobbly wall of the toilet stall. Much graffiti besmirched the shiny gray paint, but this was a college so the more intellectually elevated scribblings did not surprise him.... FULL OF SOUND AND FURY ... SIGNIFYING NOTHING, someone quoted Macbeth. IF FLUID FLOWS HORIZONTALLY, PRESSURE DECREASES WHILE VELOCITY INCREASES. Bernoulli"s Theorem! Walter thought. He knew it at a glance. He stooped to read some other things some people had scrawled. They"re poems, he realized. Then he stalled. I hope they"re nice poems, he thought. On the last night of his life? He"d be grateful for some nice, happy poems, like Carl Sandburg or Robert Frost...

My blood sifts through ashes;

all my muses are dead,

and your smile puts Glock 17 to my head.

Walter blanched. He read the next one.

There"s no reason left to wonder,

no reason left to care.

Why don"t you put your head in the noose

and kick out the f.u.c.kin" chair?

Frost or Sandburg probably didn"t write these! He staggered out of the stall. Some nice poems! His mind ticked like a bomb. Just go back to the dorm and do it, he advised himself. Just do it. Don"t be a p.u.s.s.y anymore. Do it. For some reason, however, he thought back to the evil dream, the pretty girl named No-name. When he"d asked her if he should do it, she"d simply replied "I can"t advise you." But she"d also said something else, hadn"t she? I"m a presage. The future isn"t mutable. Certainly she was nothing but a symbol of his sleeping, subconscious mind, yet it seemed that she already knew what would happen. Walter, now, thought he knew too.

"I"m going back to the dorm now," he said to the echoing bathroom, "and I"m going to do it."

"No," a voice told him, but it was more akin to a hiss than a voice. "Don"t, Walter. Please don"t do it."

"Why?" he answered the absurd voice.

"Because you"ll offend your providence."

The voice was coming from the toilet. Walter merely shrugged, unalarmed. This seemed appropriate too: that he should lose his mind as his suicide approached. It was the same toilet he"d just flushed his vomit down in. What have we here? he wondered half-heartedly. He looked down.

There was a face in the toilet, looking up at him through the water. A woman. Had someone actually cut her head off and put it in there? No, it wasn"t deep enough. The face lacked dimensionality; it was an image, like a reflection.

"Don"t end your life, Walter," the face in the toilet told him.

Walter shrugged. What more proof did he need of insanity? This must be some pre-suicide stress syndrome. He was seeing things.

The woman"s face was pretty-in a way. Pretty, that is, if you overlooked the pus-yellow skin, bloodred eyes, vampire fangs, and the horns jutting from her elegant forehead. She smiled, blinking at him.

"If you kill yourself, you"ll be missing out," the devil-woman told him. "Aren"t you tired of missing out on things? Aren"t you tired of everyone else having the fun but never you?"

Hallucination or not, Walter had no choice but to answer, "Yes. I"m so tired of that ..." More thoughts of Candice. Everyone gets her but me...

Walter spun around at the sound of the bathroom door opening. It opened slowly, on its own, like the automatic doors you sometimes saw at public restrooms for people in wheelchairs. Only this wasn"t an automatic door.

It drifted open.

Then a girl walked in, a pretty girl college girt-not as pretty as Candice, of course, but... she wasn"t bad. Shapely, brunet, tight blue jeans and a hackneyed FLORIDA IS FOR LOVERS t-shirt. But she seemed to be struggling against something, as though someone unseen were pulling her back as she tried to move forward. Or perhaps it was the other way around, someone unseen was pushing her forward as she tried to move back and get away. Walter had never seen her before.

"Who are you?" Walter asked.

Her face pinched up. She whipped her head back and forth, eyes squeezed shut, teeth grinding. Yes, she was struggling against some force that Walter couldn"t see. But what?

"You-you can"t-can"t-kill yourself!" she blurted.

"Why?"

"They-they-they"re making me say it!"

Just once, Walter thought, why can"t I have a normal day like everybody else?

"I"m-I"m-I"m ... being machinated by Convulsionary Satanic nuns!" she blurted next and then began to move forward more, still struggling against something. Eventually she pinned him into the corner. Walter could only stare back at her.

"Don"t-don"t kill yourself. Here-here-here you have no power, but-but, over thuh-thuh-there you"ll have everything!"

"Everything? Like what?" he asked.

"Pow-pow-power!"

"I don"t want power," Walter told her, having no idea what she was talking about.

"Ruh-ruh-riches untold!"

"I don"t want riches."

"Luh-luh-love!"

Walter paused on that one.

"Yes, Walter," the voice from the toilet added. "Love. I know a place where love will finally find you. Love like you could never imagine. Have you ever had that, Walter?"

He thought of Candice. "No."

"Don"t kill yourself and you can finally have what you deserve. It"s a place where no one will laugh at you."

More from the twitching girl in the Florida shirt: "Yuh-yuh-you won"t be a duh-duh-dork anymore."

The Toilet Devil: "You will be truly loved."

What did it matter? I"m having a conversation with hallucinations because I"m crazy. But at least it was an interesting conversation. Walter liked the subject matter.

"Where?" he asked.

Florida Shirt continued to twitch against whatever force was manipulating her. "The Meff-meff-meff-issssssssssssssss ssss-topolis!"

"Trust us, Walter," the girl in the toilet added before he could question anything.

Trust? "Why? I trusted Candice and look what happened ? She just used me. Girls just use me. I"m a nerd. That"s the way it"s always been."

"Do as we say and you"ll be a king," the Toilet Devil said.

Florida Shirt shivered in front of him. Now Walter could actually detect a trace of that unseen ent.i.ty that was manipulating her: a misshaped ghost standing right behind her, its fat hands upraised as surreal puppet strings descended down to the girl, to make her do or say whatever it wanted. "Yuh-yuh you could be the most powerful mmmmmman in hiss-hiss-history. But not if you kuh-kuh-kill yourself."

Then the ghost behind the girl vanished like smoke, and the girl collapsed to the floor. She looked up, shock in her eyes. "Where am I? What am I doing here!" She jumped up and ran away.

"Walter?" The Toilet Devil again. She had a soft, s.e.xy voice.

"What?" Walter asked.

"Your destiny awaits."

Walter"s own shadow began to lengthen across the floor even as Walter remained perfectly still. The shapes of ink-blot arms extended, long black-ribbon fingers sliding up the wall which faced Walter.

One finger began to write a final graffiti, like black magic marker, only this wasn"t ink, this was pure shadow.

The shadow wrote this on the wall: ETHEREAN! EMBRACE YOUR DESTINY!.

When Walter got back to his dorm room, it was close to midnight. He was surprisingly unconfused. Hallucinations were common among the mentally ill, and what else could explain his current condition? He was suicidal. He was pathologically depressed. It messed with your brain chemistry, made you see things that weren"t really there, and hear words that weren"t actually being spoken. My brain"s not working right, he acknowledged. It was that simple.

But what should he do? Take the advice of a bunch of hallucinations? Or follow his heart?

The dorm seemed silent as a morgue. He could hear his heart beating, and it beat louder when he looked at the shotgun still propped barrel up in the corner. Something nagged his eye from across the room: a framed picture of Candice. He gazed back as if in a dream. She"s so gorgeous...

But was she smiling at him, or laughing?

What have I got? he asked himself, plopping his b.u.t.t down on the bed. I"ve got a major suicidal compulsion, but I"ve also got hallucinations telling me not to kill myself, which means, one way or another, I"ve got a serious psychiatric problem. I"ve got a genius I.Q. but I"ve also got a dorky, pencil-neck geck body to go along with it, plus I"ve got no personality and no social ac.u.men, and on top of all that, I"ve got the girl of my dreams who thinks I"m the biggest joke in the world. He rubbed his hands together in the concession. That"s it. That"s all I"ve got.

Oh, plus one other thing. A brand-new shotgun.

Walter, as a bona fide genius in the field of multiple sciences, tended to be an objective thinker. Philosophy wasn"t his bag, in other words, but math and the hard sciences were. He believed in good and evil, as concrete ideas, and he believed that people should strive to be good. He also believed that he had strived to be good during his eighteen-year life. But that"s pretty much where his belief systems stopped. He didn"t believe in G.o.d, nor in the Devil. He didn"t believe there was a Heaven or h.e.l.l, and to him, the concept of sin was an abstraction founded in cultural mythology. It wasn"t science, therefore it wasn"t real.

He knew, though, that suicide was universally considered a sin, a grievous sin, and for some reason-perhaps a subconscious instinct of self-preservation-which was actually a biological, not a spiritual, activity-he wondered ... He just wondered.

What if I"m wrong? What if I kill myself and I go to h.e.l.l?

Then his eyes drifted back up to Candice"s picture and he realized, I"m already there.

Walter got up. He took his last iron supplement, and his multi-vitamin. He might as well have all his RDA"s, right? He went to the radio, to switch on some music. There should be something in the background as he ended his frustrated, unfulfilled failure of a life. Being the smartest person on campus meant nothing. What good was knowledge when all it got him was exploitation?

The radio fizzed on. He didn"t fiddle with the diat-anything would do ... or so he thought. A pulsating drum-beat and a squawky voice. What was this?

The singer was saying, over and over again: "This is what you want, this is what you get..." Over and over again.

He must"ve accidently put on the campus alternative station. Walter frowned and sat back down on the bed. He wasn"t even inspired enough-minutes from his death-to go back over and change it. It was easier to just complain.

"This is what you want, this is what you get," the singer warbled on.

What IS this? he thought. Didn"t people listen to hip good music anymore? Walter typically grooved to Abba, Air Supply, and Neil Diamond-the truly cla.s.sic examples of music as an art form. His favorite alb.u.m, of all time, was the Baywatch soundtrack. But then he remembered, as the discordant voice and rhythms nagged on: "This is what you want, this is what you get..."

Weren"t those same words on the guy"s t-shirt? The guy who got killed on the circle yesterday ... The dead man with the broken neck, who"d also said "Embrace your destiny"?

Walter uttered a very rare profanity: "This is f.u.c.ked up."

I want to kill myself, but hallucinations and a dead guy don"t...

Yes. It was f.u.c.ked up.

Now he got up and walked to the corner. He picked up the shotgun. It was an attractive weapon-if weapons could be attractive-in its black anodized finish and shiny stock. But Walter knew plasma physics and mathematical theory, he didn"t know shotguns. At least Florida was an easy state to buy guns in; it was as easy as buying a candy bar. He"d taken a cab into Tampa because they had the most gun shops in the phone book. And the tall handsome bearded guy in the shop had been all too happy to not only sell Walter a serviceable shotgun but he"d also explained everything Walter would need to know. Showed him how to load the magazine, how to rack a round into the chamber, how to deactivate the safety. What a nice man. But then a pertinent question was raised: "What kind of ammunition will you be needing?"

Walter had read in a novel once something about "pumpkin-b.a.l.l.s" or "deer-slugs"-essentially just a single, large steel ball inside the cartridge. It just seemed the logical choice.

"Pumpkin-b.a.l.l.s!" Walter cheerily replied.

The shop keeper popped a questioning brow, then chuckled : "Whatever turns you on, but about the only thing those are good for are shooting bears and committing suicide."