What does it all add up to, then, if it doesn’t balance, Herschel finally asks me. 1 corpse, Henry, I say; 1 corpse, small or large, + 1 corpse, fat or thin, = 2 corpses for the greedy crows, but who knows how many beaks two bodies will support? 1 person who climbs calmly to the top of that blood-slick heap + another person who climbs up + still another who does so = 3 who did it. Those acts add, Hershey. Apples add. Ammo expended. Miles regained. Lengths of gauze. Burlaps packed with hair. 3, 13, 30 crawled up. And these same 3 probably pushed and shoved in the meat market and wouldn’t stay in the queue. These 13 doubtless divided their village with vicious gossip. These 30 believed that gypsies lie, steal horses and money and bedclothes and children, and keep in one socket an evil eye. Thai’s what doesn’t add, Henry. Up or down, it doesn’t add. Put a single green bean alongside another, and we have that neutral dull green sum again, but what if one of them comes From a fairy tale? Gray-haired granny was, in peaceful life, a tyrannical bitch, a dry lay, a devoted friend and Catholic, a rotten cook, a splendid seamstress (at which she made her living, and the living of her alcoholic husband); she was a grumbling gardener, a lover of dogs, and a stealer of sweets. The machine gunner is a nice young lad from Bebenhausen where he delivered groceries on his bicycle to stay-at-homes and shut-ins. The kid with the whip, on the other hand, has a record as long as your favorite sausage. He really loves squinting at these naked and defenseless girls, and he has dreams of lying doggo in the pile and fucking every hole he can get his cock in as the gun goes herrattattat above him and he goes harumpumpump below him until dirtfall when he’ll creep away out of the bodies he’s buggered covered with blood as though he’d been in a battle. He’s the one at his trial who’ll say to the court:

As a Christian and a boy I read through the passage which relates how the Lord at last rallied his strength and reached for the whip to drive the usurers, that brood of adders and otters, out of the temple! Profoundly moved after two thousand years, I recognize the tremendous import of Our Führer’s right to save the world from the Jewish poison.

And no one will realize he’s simply quoting the Führer. The good go bad, and the bad get worse. That’s the vulgar formula, Hersch, so take your pick of the culls, the spoiled, the bruised. If we were leaves, Herschel, I sort of said, and there were only one wind, why then we might predict the path of our blowing; but we live in a world of whirling air just as Anaximenes concluded, a world of whiff’s, puffs, breaths, zephyrs, breezes, hurricanes, monsoons, and mistrals; and if they all died away suddenly, and we were Sargasso’d in a sea of circumstance, then one small draft through a winter window might drive us at our destiny like a nail.