Brady quoted Albert Camus, who said, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

He also quoted a famous psychiatrist named Raymond Katz, who stated flatly, “Every human being is born with the suicide gene.” Brady did not bother to add the second part of Katz’s statement, because he felt it took some of the drama out of it: “In most of us, it remains dormant.”

In the ten years between his graduation from high school and that disabling moment in the Mingo Auditorium, Brady’s fascination with suicide—including his own, always seen as part of some grand and historic gesture—continued.

This seed has now, against all the odds, fully blossomed.

He will be the Jim Jones of the twenty-first century.

18

Forty miles north of the city, he can wait no longer. Brady pulls into a rest area on I-47, kills the laboring engine of Z-Boy’s Malibu, and powers up Babineau’s laptop. There’s no WiFi here, as there is at some rest areas, but thanks to Big Momma Verizon, there’s a cell tower not four miles away, standing tall against the thickening clouds. Using Babineau’s MacBook Air, he can go anywhere he wants and never have to leave this nearly deserted parking lot. He thinks (and not for the first time) that a touch of telekinesis is nothing compared to the power of the Internet. He’s sure thousands of suicides have incubated in the potent soup of its social media sites, where the trolls run free and the bullying goes on endlessly. That’s real mind over matter.

He’s not able to type as fast as he’d like to—the damp air pushing in with the coming storm has worsened the arthritis in Babineau’s fingers—but eventually the laptop is mated to the high-powered gear back in Freddi Linklatter’s computer room. He won’t have to stay mated to it for long. He clicks on a hidden file he placed on the laptop during one of his previous visits inside Babineau’s head.

OPEN LINK TO ZEETHEEND? Y N

He centers the cursor on Y, hits the return key, then waits. The worry-circle goes around and around and around. Just as he’s begun to wonder if something has gone wrong, the laptop flashes the message he’s been waiting for:

ZEETHEEND IS NOW ACTIVE

Good. Zeetheend is just a little icing on the cake. He has been able to disseminate only a limited number of Zappits—and a significant portion of his shipment was defective, for Christ’s sake—but teenagers are herd creatures, and herd creatures are in mental and emotional lockstep. It’s why fish school and bees swarm. It’s why the swallows come back each year to Capistrano. In human behavior, it’s why “the wave” goes around at football and baseball stadiums, and why individuals will lose themselves in a crowd simply because the crowd is there.