Each morning, Roger Haskins began his day with five sharpened Ticonderoga Number 2 HB Soft yellow pencils lined up from tallest to shortest just to the right of center about halfway up his desk.

            This is not to say Roger Haskins was particularly anal, or at least not more so than your average high school geography teacher. Not at all. This was just one of the many mind games he entertained himself with each of the unending 160 days he had to spend in Inferno facing face pimply-faced brats he thought were as motivated as slugs on a typical Omaha 90-degree summer afternoon with 9,000 percent humidity and as inherently intelligent as rejects from a “Far Side” cartoon.

He would rather have been traveling, of course, something he was more adept at. Something he’d dreamed of his entire life. Maps on the wall. Exotic and erotic dreams of far-away island paradises with hot and cold running rum and babes. Only he’d spent his college years majoring in bacchanalia and debauchery, in which he’d become an honor’s student. Summa Cum Laude. Valedictorian.

            As a consequence, Roger was forced to accept a teaching position at his former high school, and 18 years later, he’s rotating the pencil selection on his desk and slowly losing his marbles.

            So, he traveled in his mind. And stomach. At lunch. Coffees of the world, pastas by continent, fish of the Great Oceans. Nuts of the Americas. This year? Chile peppers of the world, from their origins in Southern Brazil and eventually to the American Southwest, consuming chilies up the Scoville Scale at his desk each day for lunch, until he was in Jamaica in the early-1500s scarfing down a Scotch Bonnet at around 250,000 Scoville Units, around 40 times hotter than a typical, lightweight jalapeno.

            But his goal, the end of his journey, was the tantalizing Pepper X, “The Hottest Pepper” in the world, according to Guinness World Records, at 2,693,000 Scovilles, which he saved for after the last class of the year, his last batch of pencils worn to nubs, pages from his roll book and lesson plans ripped from their folders and tossed in the trash.

            The halls empty, Roger Haskins opened his lunch tote and pulled out his culinary end-of-the-year reward and leaned over his desk and greedily chomped into an X and began the now-familiar process of near hyperventilation, sucking air in and out, desperately trying to catch his breath, willing, urging, begging God to finally allow him to inhale once again. A simple inhale. But he was used to this. Ghost Peppers, at a million Scovilles, had become almost like M&Ms to him by the last weeks of the semester. Well, not really. But he liked to pretend they were. When, in reality, he’d shit his pants on the way to the teacher’s bathroom the first time he’d had one at lunch.

            But one breath. Please.

            Until at last he reached Dante’s exotic and erotic Paradiso.