Just a couple left. He blasts two more dark real estate offices in Tustin.

Only the boxes left, now; he throws them out on the Santa Ana Freeway, watches traffic back up behind him. Back onto the streets in Tustin, his breath catching in his throat, in ragged, hysterical sobs. Redhill Mall mocks all his efforts, even when he gets out and throws stones at its windows. They’re shatterproof and the stones bounce away. He can’t make OC go away, not with his idiot vandalism, not even by going crazy. It’s everywhere, it fills all realities, even the insane ones. Especially those. He can’t escape.

He drives home, still mindless with rage and disgust. His ap maddens him, he rushes to the bookcase and pulls it over, watches it crunch the CD system under it. He kicks the books around, but they’re too indestructible and he moves on to his computer. A hard left and the screen is cracked, maybe a knuckle too. “Stupid asshole.” He goes and gets a frying pan to complete the job. Crack! Crack! Crack! On to the disks. Each one crunched is a couple thousand pages of his utterly useless writing gone for good—thank God! Drawers of printed copy, not that much of it, and it’s easy to rip in fourths and scatter around like confetti. What else? CDs, he can frypan all his mix-and-match symphonies to plastic smithereens, reassemble the scattered pieces and finally get the random mishmash the method deserves. What else? A sketch of Hana’s, ripped in half. Orange crate labels, smashed and torn apart. The room’s beginning to look pretty good. What else?

Into the bedroom. First the video system, he can bring those cameras down and smash them to pieces. And the maps! He leaps up, catches the upper edge of one of the big Thomas Brothers maps, rips it down. It tears with a long, dry sound. The other maps come down as well, he ends up sitting in a pile of ripped map sections, tearing them into ever-smaller fragments, blinded by tears.

Suddenly he hears a car pull up and stop on the street out front. Right in front of his ap. Police? Arthur and his friends? Panic surges into Jim’s mindless rage again, and he wiggles out the little bedroom window, across the yard filled with dumpsters. It occurs to him that Arthur and his friends might want to trash his ap in revenge for his betrayal, and at the thought he doubles over laughing. Won’t they get a surprise? Meanwhile he continues through the applex, staggering, giggling madly, bent over the hard knot of his stomach.…