through thirteen. The Harvard Lampoon thanks you for your understanding.When Billy finally came to, the battlefield looked much different. Gone were the gathering armies and vaguely operatic underscoring. Tired-looking men in black headphones and worn-out sweatshirts were taking down the lights as dead bodies helped each other up and headed for the craft services table. One such gruesomely slaughtered young Moblin was struggling mightily to lift up our wobbit’s leg and sweating so much in the process that the gash on his forehead was beginning to melt off.
“Victory after all, I suppose!” Billy said, trying to piece together what was going on. “Well, it seems a very gloomy business.”
“Whoa!” said the Moblin, jumping back in surprise. “Sorry, man, I totally thought you were a prop.”
“It’s me, Billy Bagboy, companion of Aaron Sorkinshield!”
“I was just looking for my phone.”
“I have had a nasty knock on the head, I think. But I have a helm and a hard skull. All the same I feel sick, and my legs are like straw.”
“Right . . . okay. Do you think you could call it? It’s on vibrate, which I know is a total pain in the ass right now, but honestly, who wants to hear a ringtone anymore? I mean, it’s 2013.”I
Billy was getting more and more confused by the moment, and he decided he did not much like this dead Moblin. He swallowed the phone he had been chewing on and went to find a more familiar face. As he walked he saw many strange things. A Little Person was making out with an elf in the bushes, and two trolls were trying to sneak away as many swords and pieces of armor as possible so that they could sell them online to other sad little trolls at home. The Philadelphia Eagles were all gathered around Brian Westbrook’s laptop watching Orange Is the New Black, and an energetic, unshaven New Zealander was hunched over a copy of The Silmarillion trying to figure out how many movies he could split it up into.
Finally, Billy began to find himself in more normal territory. Lights snapped on and camera angles shifted so that the Little People once again appeared little and women and minorities once again did not appear in positions of power or meaningful agency. Finally he came upon Dumbledalf outside a tent in Fail, and everything clicked back into the right kind of complete nonsense.
“Dementia! Dementia!” cried Dumbledalf, smacking Billy across the face with a dead pigeon.
“It’s just me!” said Billy.
That clarified things for Dumbledalf, and a smile broke out across the old man’s face as he recognized Billy and ran to embrace him. He was a very great wizard and an even better hugger, and even now it is the only time in all of Widdle Wearth lore that anyone has successfully wrapped their arms completely around a wobbit. Legend has it that Billy’s heart grew three sizes that day, which was a full size larger than the two sizes Billy’s heart grew every other day.
“The Boy Who Is Alive,” exclaimed Dumbledalf. “That’s so much better than what I was calling you before: The Boy Who Was Here a Few Minutes Ago, What’s His Name, The One with the Thing on His Face.”
Billy told Dumbledalf that he was glad to see him too, and inquired as to the rest of their party. At this, Dumbledalf grew suddenly serious. He put his pants back on and led Billy into the tent. There lay Aaron Sorkinshield, paler than Billy had ever seen him. During the battle he had eaten some strange mushrooms, and, mistaking a battalion of especially old, white trolls for angry Republicans, had thrown himself off the Mountain with Zero Friends. He had hit rock bottom, bounced a few times, and landed next to a pool of self-reflection. Now all his various bags of writing powders and inspiration rocks lay open and empty on the floor around him. He trembled in his bed with his eyes closed. When Billy entered, he opened them and smiled faintly.
“Farewell, good wobbit,” he said. “I go now to the halls of sobriety, to sit beside my brothers in suffering in a little circle until the world is renewed, or at least until twenty-six days have passed. I wish to part in friendship from you, and also I will soon be required to make amends. So let me say this: there is more in you of good than you know, and I don’t just mean all the Mr. Goodbars I know you stole from my pack. If more of us valued food above hoarded gold and fancy clothing and social standing and the ability to stand or walk or live past middle age, it would be a merrier world.”II
“Thank you, Aaron Sorkinshield,” said Billy, tears welling up in his eyes. The silence was a little awkward since the orchestra had gone home. Sorkinshield took his hand and the two travelers smiled at each other. Then Sorkinshield cleared his throat.
“And . . .” he prompted.
“And?”
The Little Person gestured to himself meaningfully. Billy laughed, glad to see that his friend had not changed too much.
“And I am sorry to see you go,” he said. “With or without your powder and your rocks and your occasionally redundant tropes, you are a truly great writer. As far as Little People go, you may be the biggest.”
With these words, a little of Sorkinshield’s self-important color returned to his cheeks, and he closed his eyes again and lay back down on the bed, already dreaming of the awards and accolades this scene would receive. Billy patted him on the head, took away the potion Dumbledalf was making out of Sorkinshield’s remaining mushrooms, and left the tent.
All that had happened after he was stunned, Billy learned later, but it brought him more confusion than clarity, as Dumbledalf kept mixing it up with another battle in which he had lost his weasel in a dusty hollow. Still, he managed to piece together a rough sketch of what went on:
Even with the Eagles and the Ravens running a nearly flawless passing game, the Little People and the Elves and the Humans found themselves outnumbered by the Moblins and the wargis and those forty-five other armies that had eventually joined in. That was when Björn appeared—no one knew how or from where, but it was hardly the first deus ex machina they had dealt with and certainly wouldn’t be the last. Whatever machine gave birth to this golden god, though, they were thankful for it, for Björn was in full Swede mode. His music was even catchier than Billy remembered, and he danced and fought with yet wilder abandon.
Björn found Sorkinshield crumpled up and tripping out at the pool of self-reflection, and his pain struck a chord with the Swede just as the Elvisking was striking a powerful blues chord in the field below. He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach—that it makes no sense. And when that happens, happiness is never spontaneous again. It is artificial and, even then, bought at the price of an obstinate estrangement from oneself and one’s history.III He carried his fallen friend to the tent by the Old Rimrock and rejoined the fight with even greater fury and disillusionment.
Meanwhile, the Army Battle of the Forty-Nine Warring Kings and One Warring Queen had grown as confounding as one might expect. The five newly arrived kings seemed far more interested in gratuitous nudity and elaborate exposition than actually resolving anything, and it didn’t help their chances in battle when they froze after every hour and called it a cliffhanger. The Moblins became rather fascinated with this, and more and more of them gave up fighting to see how the Game of Musical Chairs would play out. Then, after a particularly bloody cliffhanger, the kings stopped and looked at one another, embarrassed. None of them had actually read the books, so no one knew what was going to happen next. The Moblins solved this problem by killing them all and taking G. R. R. Marauding prisoner, forcing him to write in more death scenes until they were satisfied.
From there, things only descended into further chaos. Kiwi was killed by deforestation and invasive mammalian predators, and Fili was killed by an arrow through his face. C. S. Losing put his faith in God, Richard Nixon put Puff’s treasure into a slush fund, and Hitler passive-aggressively threw paper airplanes at anyone who passed by his secret Hitler hole. J. K. Rousing became fed up with the lack of gender parity and exited, leaving only a casual vacancy where once you could have heard her cuckoo calling. At one point, the whole affair seemed like it was running out of steam, with Bain and Bard the Batman exchanging only halfhearted punches in the stomach and L. Ron and Elvisking exchanging secrets on how to make massive amounts of white people go insane. Then Kendrick Valar, a godlike creature with the flow of a thousand rivers and the beats of a thousand thunders, descended from the heavens. He delivered a single, perfect verse, then ascended once again, having single-handedly reignited the battle below him and made all YOLOs seem rather silly.
The Moblins and their allies fought valiantly, but in the end they were no match for the fact that the good guys always win. The treasure of Oscars and Emmys and Golden Globes was split up evenly between Billy and Dumbledalf and all the remaining Little People—except Drawlin and Ballin, who were left with one People’s Choice Award to share. Drawlin argued that this was because they had not been forceful enough in claiming the treasure, while Ballin countered that they were facing a history of treasurelessness combined with insidious flaws in the treasure-distribution system. Meanwhile, Whorey, Slorey, and Kourtney posed with their new bling, Beefer and Buffer melted theirs into solid gold barbells, Loin and Groin gave very sincere acceptance speeches, and Doc died of consumption.
This left only Dumbledalf and Billy, who was now very eager to get home. The Gram side of him had begun to get worn out, and the Bagboy side of him reminded him that he had probably missed at least one shift at the store. The pair briefly considered going back the way they’d come, through dozens of dangers and thousands of miles, and months and months of character development. But their newly acquired treasure was heavy and they were both a little drunk.IV They decided to take the high-speed rail instead.V
As they boarded the convenient and reasonably priced bullet train from Fail to Wobbottabad, Billy waved good-bye to all the strange and wonderful people he had met. Richard Nixon flashed him a V for “victory” and Whorey flashed him her V for “professional reasons.” He was sad to leave every one of them, except Ballin and Drawlin, who still made him feel the uncomfortable obligation to examine his personal shortcomings and societal responsibilities. As he raced back home at an average speed of 180 mph (290 km/h), he saw all the hills and valleys he had passed through on his journey. He saw the river where he and the Little People had—well, never mind, he passed that too quickly. But up here was where he heroically—nope, missed it. Darn it, that was a really cool—oh! Oh! Right here! That was the thing with the spi—nope, gone. At least as they drew near to Livinwell, he knew he would be able to hear one last song of convenient plot summary from the beautiful Celebritologists living there:
The dra—
And then at last Billy was home, convinced by the train’s efficiency, if not its narrative function. He and Dumbledalf, who had spent the better part of the ride sketching pictures of Billy posing naked with horses, now stepped off the platform and into Wobbottabad, where the shapes of the land and trees were as well-known to him as the arrhythmic beats of his heart. Coming to the beginning of the town-wide downhill slope (one of the proudest and only accomplishments in the history of wobbit urban planning), he stopped suddenly and said:
Franchises go ever ever on,
Over-budget and under-seen,
Through sequels that are quickly gone,
And prequels that never should have been;
And filmmakers who work on an epic scale
(As to old habits they resort)
Forget they’re adapting a children’s tale,
That was all the better for being short.
Yes, franchises go ever ever on,
Over-budget and under-seen,
As cameras sweep from dusk to dawn,
And fanboys drool over every scene;
Yet before you adapt every chapter and letter,
One word of advice you’d be wise to keep:
A child may very well imagine something better,
Once your saga sends him off to sleep.
Dumbledalf looked over at him. “My dear Hairy!” he said. “Something is the matter with you! You are not the wobbit that you once were.”
Billy smiled slightly, but was already regretting speaking the rhymes instead of singing them. He turned to face his wizard friend.
“Never mind,” retracted Dumbledalf. “I was just looking at you from behind.”
And so they made their way through town, past the McDonald’s and the McDonald’s Express, past the McCafé and the old folks home, which had been converted into a Super McDonald’s after all the old folks started dying young from eating too much McDonald’s. Then they came right to Billy’s door—or at least where the door should have been.
“That’s odd,” said Billy. “I don’t remember eating that.” He rolled into his home, only to find that there was not much home left to roll into. There was only an empty hole, robbed of all Billy’s refrigerators and mini refrigerators and meat lockers and mini-meat lockers. Everything was gone, down to the smallest crumb, and Billy knew exactly where he kept all his crumbs. The only thing of note left in the whole hole was a note:
You take my livelihood, I take your life. That’s the burgling way, buddy, and I don’t care if you like it!
Your well-qualified burglar neighbor,
Craig
P.S. For tax reasons, I’ve attached a list of everything I took. I’m a burglar, not an inconveniencer!
As Billy read through Craig’s list, which also contained some strange offers for “adult services,” he reflected on just how little he’d lost compared to how much he had gained. Specifically, he had lost a lot of mostly expired foodstuffs and gained an incredible amount of priceless treasure. This cheered Billy immensely, for he had not yet learned that universal truth which the Notorious J. R. R. put so well.VI
It turned out, though, that Billy had lost a lot more than just material goods. He had lost his reputation. It was as though no one remembered how respectable he used to be, because that was exactly the case: three generations of wobbits had come and passed while Billy was getting regular exercise.
Still, Billy found that he didn’t much care. People’s opinions of you only matter as much as the people who have them, and wobbits were best known for taking up a lot of matter and mattering very little. So Billy used a part of his treasure to buy some of the fancy organic food he had tasted at Livinwell, and the rest of it he spent on a treadmill, so that he could spend every day walking and talking and pretending he was back on another quest without ever leaving the safety of his uncluttered hole. And though few other wobbits believed any of his tales, all of which seemed cardiovascularly inconceivable, he remained very happy to the end of his days, and those were extraordinarily long.
One autumn evening some years afterward, Billy was sitting in his study, formerly his swallowing cubicle, and writing his memoirs, which he was thinking of calling There and Bored Again: A Book You Should Buy for Everyone You Know. Just then there was a knock at his newly installed, unsalted rice-cake door. It was Dumbledalf, and, in preparation for an epilogue, he had brought unconvincing old-man makeup and two children he insisted belonged to Billy, though they were actually just Loin and Groin.
“Come in! Come in!” said Billy, who rarely got visitors now that he had put in a flight of stairs where the rolling path used to be. They sat down around the only dining room table and fell to talking of their times together. Billy asked how things were going in the lands of the Mountain with Zero Friends, which they told him had gotten a lot more popular ever since wobal warming had melted all the silly-looking snow off its head. Bard the Batman had rebuilt the town of Fail as a gritty, critically acclaimed metropolis, and Richard Nixon had finally been run out of Rake-town after he was discovered secretly spying on the beloved Rake. Ballin had been elected the new master of Rake-town, and, though adored by the majority, he was bitterly opposed by a group of Ents calling themselves the Tree Party. He even faced a good deal of criticism from Drawlin, who viewed his election as a sign of progress, but also a potential excuse for certain Tree Partiers’ claim they were living in a postracial society.
“And Hermione has gotten really, really hot,” added Dumbledalf. “What about you, Hairy? How have you passed your indiscriminate amount of time?”
Billy described all the ways in which his life had changed. He could now change his shirt without any assistance, and even buy new shirts without having to shop in the bedsheets section. He was able to hop short distances into the air and catch a ball without having to catch his breath. But talking to Dumbledalf made Billy realize how much he had missed companionship, however senile. Maybe what had made him so happy in the wake of his YOLO was not the loss of so much weight, but the gaining of so many friends. After all, when you step on the scales of life, that’s the only number that really matters. People with no friends go to hell.
“I just don’t feel like I fit in here anymore,” Billy sighed. “I even lost my job at the grocery store—I can no longer call myself a Bagboy!”
At this, the last remaining twinkle in Dumbledalf’s eye did its little dance.
“My dear Hairy,” he said. “If you don’t fit in here, we’ll just take you somewhere else! Never underestimate people’s capacity to adjust. Take me, for example: I died halfway through this book and they just replaced me with another old white guy!”VII
So Dumbledalf led Billy across The Street and over The Bump and into another town that Billy had somehow never noticed before. It looked almost exactly like Wobbottabad, but all of its references were outdated and all of its jokes were better respected. It was almost as though it had been inexplicably reissued from the late 1960s, in the hopes that people might buy it again, or buy it for the first time and be really confused.
“Welcome to Bag Eye,” announced Dumbledalf. “Home of the boggies!”
Billy looked around, enchanted by the strange sights and sounds all about him. And there was Puff! The fierce dragon reared its head in a lonely corner to the tune of a controversial electric guitar, sniffing one more chance at friendship.
Alas, there was still one thing bothering our good wobbit.
“What shall I call myself?” he asked. “I’m not a Bagboy anymore, and all my heroism has left me feeling far from a Billy.”
There it was. The moment. Loin and Groin reached deep within themselves, into the most hallowed recesses of their sophomoric minds. They took a deep, sensual breath. Then time stood still and fate finally relieved itself all over everybody:
“Dildo Bugger,” they said in unison, and then they died, with stupid, idiotic smiles plastered across their stupid, idiotic faces.
And so the newly christened Dildo prepared to start his new life in the town of Bag Eye. He turned to the wizard who had given him so much while making so little sense.
“Thank you, Dumbledalf.” He smiled. “I don’t know how I’ll ever repay—ow!”
“Sorry,” said Dumbledalf sheepishly, removing the sword from Dildo’s leg. “I was so sure you were a Horcrux.”
I 2014 if you were given this book as a Christmas present and let it fester for six days before peeling open the cover.
II Would it? Book circles and prison reading groups, discuss. This might be an especially instructive question for those on death row—that last meal is coming up, boys!
III This moral brought to you by Philip Roth and Pepsi-Cola. Pepsi: Come Alive! You’re in the Pepsi Generation.
IV Dumbledalf had recently introduced Billy to his favorite cocktail: a pint of beer with a stick of butter thrown in. Unsurprisingly, Billy was an immediate fan.
V The high-speed rail was an environmentally friendly, economically viable investment made by the Humans at the dawning of the Third Age. It was courageously approved via ballot proposition and bond measure, despite the opposition of Sauron Musk, Dark CEO of the Hyper Doom.
VI Mo’ Money, Mo’ Ringwraiths.
VII Now’s a good time to announce that the role of Dumbledalf, normally played by American sweetheart Regis Philbin, will instead be played by Sir Michael Gambon riding on the shoulders of Sir Ian McKellan for chapters through thirteen. The Harvard Lampoon thanks you for your understanding.