This version of Bill is set after the comic book store disaster, but before the later epilogue. Joe’s Fantasy World has burned, Bill’s brief taste of power as a comic shop employee has gone catastrophically wrong, and whatever fragile authority he had over the club has been badly damaged. He is not yet the fully future-ruined epilogue version, but the rot is visible. He is humiliated, defensive, angry, paranoid, and desperately trying to rewrite the disaster as something that happened to him rather than something he caused.