To Thome’s great disappointment, his father reappears in the camera’s picture. He’s crawling across the carpet on a dog leash. Thome could watch this pathetic spectacle for hours. People never come up with anything original. Rubbing your bell end with chili pepper or hanging from a chandelier by your cock. Though surely those things are already being done somewhere. Anything that people in their excessive simplicity can get themselves into exists—somewhere. Thome had discovered a dating app where heterosexual men in total ignorance of the parameters of female arousal upload only photos of their foreskins. That’s reducing things to the basics. Who needs faces, bodies, thoughts anymore? Who needs people? And especially so many of them, who stuff themselves, shit, drive motorcars, and above all they: want something. Want more. The populace is divided into those who try to consume and fuck their way out of despair and the new people.

Whenever Thome thinks about his theory of the new people, a group he counts himself among, he gets sexual. Used to. His lust has disappeared of late. Is that how you say it? Do you say “lust”? You say “making love” when you mean intercourse, and “lust” when it’s just about a discharge. Thome stands in front of the mirror, a Colani mirror. Piece of shit. Thanks to his new mother’s tastes, the house looks like a chill-out lounge at an insurance company.

Thome pictures himself spiking a sterling silver candlestick into his skull, sees the hole in his head, splinters of bone, there’s the brain, as suspected, nothing special. Thome still doesn’t know whether it would have been worse to have spent the last years of his youth at home instead of at boarding school.

The years at boarding school—

As a result of his mildly masochist proclivities, he thinks of them often, they sort of blend together like one continuous humiliation.

That consisted of pulled-down pants, groups of boys who went silent when he drew near. And super glue, with which his foreskin had been sealed shut, soap in his mouth, feces in his mouth, and shame. Because he’s homosexual. Or probably asexual.

Back to the present day.

Thome blames professional overload for his lack of sexual interest. The excitement of forming the world anew in digital form is greater than anything his sexual organs can generate. It’s a glorious time. Right now. For boys.