The evil genius’s assistant comes and goes, examining my pupils, taking my pulse, my blood pressure. Water scratches at my oesophagus. Sometimes I vomit into the plastic bucket near the chair, and then he tells me that this is an expected side effect of chemotherapy. Naive. I’m vomiting because of the memories that grow sharper and clearer. Like an auditorium of pale impatient faces awaiting the speech of a dictator, like the cosmos waiting for the Big Bang, they swell, preparing to fill the void of a harried consciousness with images of devastation and cruelty.

The meaning of reality comes to me slowly: both what happened in Catania, and what is happening to all of us right now. I didn’t want to see it, but now I do. With each passing minute, more and more people turn into beasts. The screams of hatred and the crack of gunshots sound like a faint wakeup call. My hope is shattered. Fear feasts on my brain.

I tried. Honestly, I tried to fill my heart with love and beauty one last time, but cruelty, bad taste, soullessness, violence—everything that human conflicts bring—finally broke me. And it’s no longer possible to distinguish the truth from its mutilated promise. People who, until recently, have lived side by side are now enemies: it’s worth noting how, after watching TV, they’re able to hate and kill each other, how they cease to be people to you. But even more than the actions that turned these teachers, engineers, businessmen, retirees, farmers, and students into beasts, it’s the very transformation itself that’s horrifying. Horrifying in its ease. In that it’s impossible to predict this cruelty until it erupts to the surface. Everyone you know has the potential to become a heartless animal, to be deformed, at any moment, beyond recognition. The beasts inside us are waiting for the moment we fall asleep to break their chains. And it’s not the loneliness of the crippled and orphaned inhabitants of ruined cities, not the loneliness of the millions living in slums, on the verge of starvation and poverty, that terrifies me, but something much deeper, revealed by war, and a nightmarish dream in the heart, like a tin of stew opened by a rusty can opener. Fear. The fear isn’t about dying, but living on, ceasing to be a man amongst sleeping monsters, embracing his loved ones, while other families die.

I just remembered. Now I remember what happened. She tried to give me another reason to live. But it is another reason to die. She said nothing matters to me. But it’s not true. That was never true, because I know what hate and pain are, I’ve seen it all in my dream. I know what a sniper feels when he pulls the trigger and interrupts the life of dozens of generations who carried their genes and their love into the future.