Being infinitely resourceful, Brad had found the best solution available to him: a sixty- or seventy-year-old UV tanning lamp, which consisted mostly of a badly damaged power cable with numerous bits of exposed metal he figured would electrocute him at some point, a base, a timer dial, and then a metal housing, holding a bulb which consisted, as far as he could tell, of nothing more than a giant gobbet of mercury with a couple of electrodes in a blown-glass bulb. Unlike modern, commercial, mercury-vapor bulbs, this was like a test tube with some mercury in it. When switched on, you stared directly into the ionized mercury itself. From his own research, Brad knew this to be (from a health standpoint) an idea of particularly ill merit.

When you fired the thing up, it'd flicker and make odd noises for a bit (not to mention stinking strongly of ozone), and then, finally, the sealed glass tube would begin to glow with this intense, deep blue light. It had a neon look to it – you could actually see the line of mercury plasma within the tube where it formed. You couldn't stare directly into it – not due to brightness…more because there was just something intrinsically wrongwith it, something some part of your mind picked up on and shied away from.

The makers of this device, even way back in the ’30s or ’40s, had realized its danger. The built-in timer went to fifteen minutes, meaning that you weren't supposed to have it shine directly on your skin for any longer than that. Brad also knew, intellectually, that sending electricity straight through mercury resulted in all sorts of ultraviolet goodness – UVA, UVB, and every other flavor. He was pretty sure that was the case, anyhow.

The literature online mostly said that mercury-vapor lamps are so dangerous that it is essential they never be operated with their anti-UV protection broken. There was no mention of a bulb like the one his lamp used – a bulb deliberately made without any sort of UV filter whatsoever. So, he did make one small allowance for safety when he operated the lamp – he wore goggles.

This moment, this long, drawn-out moment of dark, deep depression, had led to the need for one of his "self-rotisserie" times, as he liked to call them. In a way, this reaction was almost healthy. It was, in its own way, an attempt at self-improvement.

Brad took his lamp and shifted it so it was shining towards his face. Lately, he'd begun to have deep red creases around his nose, and chunks of skin had begun falling off above his eyebrows. He pulled his UV-proof swim goggles from the desk drawer and wrapped them around his head. The sight, he knew, lent little to his dignity. But if you wanted to talk dignity, you shouldn't talk about it with someone who, once a week, picked up his office chair, shook it vigorously, and watched several ounces of skin fall to the floor.

Brad wrenched the dial at the base of the lamp vigorously to the right. By going all the way to the fifteen-minute mark, he had discovered that the timer stopped working altogether, and you could leave the lamp on for as long as you saw fit.

Brad began to cook. He disliked the knowledge that his goggles would give him funny little white patches around each eye, but he disliked the notion of radiation-induced blindness even more, so he cooked with his swim goggles in place.

There was no smell of roasted flesh, or even any sensation whatsoever; still, he liked to imagine himself in some sort of vast microwave oven. Or, perhaps, in some gamma-ray exposure room, the rebellious parts of his body being vaporized for their sins. He felt a momentary sense of unease, not being sure just where, precisely, one went to get bombarded with gamma radiation to treat, say, cancer. Or how that process worked. Being able to properly visualize it would've made the symbolic imagining so much more satisfying. Probably.

What Brad really wanted to do was get to his scalp. If he were the Germans, it was his French Resistance. Protected by pounds of unruly brown hair, light simply couldn't penetrate.

Frequently, as his way of trying to overcome this protection, Brad would set up the light on a table directly behind his desk and then leave it on all day. This was difficult, though, as he always worried that the UV rays might reflect from the screen of his computer…so he wasn't comfortable pulling this particular trick without wearing his goggles.

That meant wearing his goggles all day, and it pretty much guaranteed someone would walk in and see him in his helpless, absurd state. They seldom said anything. They didn't need to.

It was like when you tried to surreptitiously wipe away a tiny booger with your finger, and you somehow came away with one of those glistening, six-inch, snot draperies. Nobody needed to say anything. Nobody needed to point and stare. The indignity of it all was so great, so self-evident, so mortifying, that it simply existed as its own out-of-body moment of shame. One of those memories you instantly tried to repress, knowing full well that it would be seared as deeply into your mind as your first orgasm, your first beer, and your first car accident.

So, for now, Brad took the more temporary approach to self-immolation: shining the light directly on his face, and giving himself a self-imposed deadline of thirty minutes for the process.

A side benefit of the entire contraption, with its unearthly light and his own bug-eyed appearance, was that it very effectively distracted from whatever he happened to be doing on the computer when someone walked into his office. So, while he cooked, Brad felt both entitled (due to the crushing depression) and safe in firing up his copy of Civilization. While the skin cells died, so would the peace-loving French, provided he could develop armor technology in time.

The Frogs already had railroads, so he had a feeling this particular game might need to be abandoned and a new one started in its place. The vicious moment of cruelty when one sent a unit of armor up against, say, a spearman…that was what Brad lived for. Without it, the game became more like a job.

He already had one of those. He didn't need a second one to half-assedly handle. Civilization was just like life in one very crucial way: it was all about where you started out. Well, life was kinda that way. It helped to start out with some lucky breaks, and to not run into bullies before you could fight back. Brad was the sort of player who always turned barbarians off.

Still, that honest bit of self-assessment kept hanging around. Lurking. Waiting for its chance. It found Brad's current situation as a lovely moment to record in perpetuity. Fat, sweaty guy, dead-end job, skin falling off in avalanches, squinting through goggles, playing a computer game on his employer's time. Truly, the heights to which he'd ascended were laudable.

Brad felt himself grow irritated. No matter how often he repeated the mantra, it grew no less true: He hadn't signed up for this crap. Life was supposed to be better than this: a college degree, a good job, maybe a long-term girlfriend, destined for marriage (although he doubted that part – surely, a talented, funny bachelor such as himself was entitled to a long line of conquests before the world would make him settle down with the perfect partner to raise his inevitable brood.)

He was a genius, after all. He was supposed to be afforded special treatment.

It would give some measure of satisfaction, were Brad able to turn that intellect he felt so proud of upon the problem of just when and where he'd gone off-track; however, heavy usage of marijuana earlier in life precluded such self-examination. He could barely remember breakfast.

The crossroads moment when his world began to unravel: that was well back in the THC spill zone. No way you'd scrub those memories clean enough to get a good read.

He was stuck, groggily fumbling in the dark, knowing he'd fallen down some unmarked well, and knowing there wasn't gonna be a way up – not a way he liked. The only way up was going to be one of those Lifetime movies he so detested…one where he spent a week slowly wasting away, drinking fouled water, ripping out his fingernails as he struggled to find purchase in the slick stone walls of the abandoned 17^th-century well. Way out in the middle of nowhere, of course, with nobody any the wiser to his presence (or absence).

He was one of the blank bits of the universe: one of those people who killed themselves in their apartments and went undiscovered until the stink got so bad neighbors called to complain. He could vanish for a week, and probably all that would happen would be some paperwork would be awaiting him upon his return, along with a stern lecture, and some missing pay due to the unpaid leave he'd "used."

Heck, a solid week or two even might be almost enough to get fired. He wasn't sure. He'd never pulled anything that long. Never had a reason to. You needed some spark – some interest, drive, motivation, place to go – before you could take off from work for a week without any legitimate reason.

Brad had no such spark. Brad had no spark at all, really. He was the proverbial wet noodle. He stuck to things, and he was rather starchy. That about summed him up.

Still, you couldn't help dreaming. Feeling particularly fat, Brad switched over to an old standby: sumo wrestler. For all of his many, many flaws, he did have pretty good footing. He rarely fell down.

When you got to it, there were two things you needed for sumo: size and good footing. Some athleticism was a plus, of course, and Brad realized that his rolls of fat didn't disguise any particular powerhouse physique. But you didn't usually need much endurance – matches ended quickly.

It wasn't like the impossible dream of bulking up to NFL lineman size. Those buggers had to move, not to mention continue to hustle for an entire game. Brad knew he'd never pull off such a feat.

But fifteen seconds of grabbing some other dude's diaper and trying to chuck him out of the sacred ring? That seemed doable. Plausible. He was a little hazy on the whole process, as far as how you broke into the business, but he still liked to think that his current path towards coronary failure and adult-onset diabetes had some silver lining, like it'd have when he was a world-famous (or Japanese-famous, anyhow) sumo grand champion.

The fantasy, like Liz earlier, was faint, though. Brad had noticed this happening a few times lately. Imagination, normally his best friend, had begun to betray him. It no longer gave him the escape he needed.

God knew the drugs weren't doing their bit, so he'd depended more and more on his own panache for fantasy. Self-delusion had become his refuge.

Now, the self-delusion had grown hazy and weak. He didn't believe it. Couldn't suspend the disbelief. Couldn't catch even a few minutes’ rest in a place where the self-criticism just shut the f–k up for five minutes.

The thing he didn't get was what the hell his mind wanted. Clearly, there was a message here. You didn't torture someone day in, day out, minute in, minute out, without there being some kind of reason. Some purpose. Some goal.

What the hell was he supposed to do?

What the hell was he not doing?

What would give him an escape?

Everything closing off, like blast doors in some sci-fi flick as the hard vacuum of space trips the emergency systems. Brad kept running the maze, but the turns grew tighter and tighter and tighter. He no longer thought there was any cheese at the end. Just a dead end somewhere. And he couldn't back out. The space was too tight. No turning around. No change.

Brad dug, easily, the appeal of suicide. It made sense. You got chased into your corner, you turned, you bared your teeth, bared your claws, tried to rip into the soft underbelly of the world, and when the world didn't care – when your claws slid off skin of steel, scales of the ancient dragon…well, you turned them inwards.

Nobody wanted to be prey, and as thinking prey, the final slight you could deliver your tormentor was to finish yourself off before he could, or it could – whatever term one might use to describe a callous God. Or simply an indifferent, scientifically motivated universe, following the grand principles and equations laid down in the milliseconds after the Big Bang. Those first few trillionths of a moment when space sublimed from a dimensionless point, and everything and everywhere and everywhen spread out to give rise to anything from a gorgeous supernova to the occasional sapient being – some happy, some sad, some just irrelevant, or somewhere in between.

Click here for Part XV.