“Get out of here so they can kill me? I’d rather be alive in here than fucking dead out there.”

“Why did you escape, then?”

“I like escaping.” He looked around and leaned slightly forward. “I’ll let you in on a little something. The fucking FBI planned it all. Hoover was going to kill that uppity nigger someplace, sometime. The government was gonna get him. You can believe that before you believe anything. Am I scaring you?”

Sill stared Ray in the eye and said, “Naw, just directing me. I’ll let you in on a little something. You’re a speck. You don’t scare me, because, as you said, you didn’t do anything. Fact is, you’re a piece of shit incapable of doing anything in this world. You couldn’t scare Martin Luther King. You couldn’t scare my father. And you can’t scare me. Die in here. Chump.”

Ray was red with anger. He lunged at Sill, but Sill didn’t move a muscle, didn’t flinch, didn’t blink. He said, “Thank you for your time. I can tell you this, America will pay. You, I don’t care about. It would be like getting mad at a bullet.”

“I killed your daddy, boy.”

“Yes, I know. I won’t take your life. That doesn’t have much value. I’m going to take your world.”

That was when John Sill resolved to be a villain.

But how to become a villain, a cultural disease, an enemy of the system? For that John Milton Bradley Sill turned to what he knew best: James Bond films.

4

There are some distinctions to draw when considering nothing or at least a sense of nothing, nihil noema. I distinguish this sense of nothing from the physical object or embodiment, from the psychological or experienced, from any mental depiction or adumbration and from any logical conception or construction. There is no corresponding idea, form, or picture of whatever it is that I am talking about. Unlike a real anvil, the denotatum of which will accelerate from a height at 9.8 m/s/s and can break up or break something upon contact, there is not much to say or imagine of nothing. In my mind, the imagined flight of the anvil is also true, true perhaps of all the noema of anvil. But of nothing (why the italics, as I am accentuating nothing or rather there is not a thing that I am accentuating), what can I say? Nothing. Fitting.

As I did every evening, I fed Trigo his second meal of the day one kibble at a time from my fingers. He enjoyed it better that way. In the mornings I let him plow his face into the feedbag I tied around his neck, but we took our time in the evenings. I would afterward read aloud to him until he fell asleep and then on until I, too, was asleep, or so I believed, but as far as I knew I continued reading aloud until waking, having either learned a little or much or, I liked to think, nothing at all.