I know what the drunken father feels like who beats his wife and children every night, the indifferent passer-by, filled with habitual disgust for the beggar, the adult man thrusting his fingers into a little girl, the pilot dropping a bomb on a hospital, the fanatic in a suicide belt who blows himself to pieces, the trafficker in human beings and shoddy boats for refugees, the corrupt police officer, the dictator, the national guardsman, the murderer, the thief—they are all our neighbours on the stairwell. I’m all of them. Thousands of bulletproof faces with the look of collective farm cattle who delight in their existence, buying cars, drinking cocktails in clubs, and sunbathing in deckchairs, while nearby other people are becoming death statistics.

This will continue so long as no one cares. Until the bombs start falling on our cities. Until the surf beneath the feet of vacationers begins to wash ashore the swollen corpses of drowned children who tried to cross the sea in order to have a future. Until the brainless bastards, like sellers of baklava and boiled shrimp, start walking along the beaches of resorts and shooting the red from sunburns, a public bloated with fat from the Kalashnikov rifles that it itself sold them.

So don’t be so quick to point fingers at me. Yes, I’m a murderer. A murderer with suicidal tendencies, dark, pitiful, bursting with cruelty, but I’m just a reflection of the world in which we live, and when you look at me, you’re looking at the whole of humanity. Vile. Trying to kill itself, dying from tumours and boils. A pack of fucking murderers. That’s who we are. And me. I’m at the top of this mountain of shit. (Underlined to the point of making a hole in the paper.) I’m worse than them. I’m antireality. I’m evil. A monster. I’m a mad dog. But I’m telling the truth. I have the right not to listen to my own conscience, knowing that I’ve got nothing left to live for. I have the right to be cruel to my executioner. Evil blooms beneath my feet and burns up in my fury. Now I know for sure: love will not save anyone. Nothing can overcome this vileness, this fear, except me. Hour forty-five. The pain has spread evenly throughout the body, memory clears up. My field of vision expands. What a blessing and what a curse to be able to forget. Life looks after equilibrium of the spirit, erasing from memory all of the recollections that are too bright or too dark.

It seems like I killed three people in Catania, but I’m not sure. I’m not sure that they died, and I’m not sure they existed.

We’re silent almost the whole way to the airport. A hot palm with a cut from a knife. A cheek scraped against asphalt. A red dress.

“What terminal?”

“F.”

“Are you messing with me? That terminal doesn’t exist.”