soaked granite, how he tore at his beard under a full moon as he considered the man slumped against the wheel, his remaining eye hidden under his disheveled hair, breathing, still breathing. My father must have looked young then, as if he had reverted to childhood he never had, nestled on the back seat, the passing lamp posts waving at him with shadows as the car drove on.
I catalog because this is meaning. What can be seen, counted, pointed to, these are the only things that matter. Three hundred thousand died, but then some claim two hundred thousand, and some even say nobody at all. Better to be total, to say Those who died, died. Sometimes I think that, why not say it? Quantity does not matter, but it does, because everything is not the same, we cannot tolerate same, there is no point to same. My set of tragic deaths is more
 | | important than your set of tragic deaths. A number becomes a story, statistical significance becomes tangible priority. What about the Yangtze flood of 1975? Over two hundred thousand people wiped off the map, out of history for twenty years. But there must be a number. With a number comes responsibility, demands, You must apologize for this, you must acknowledge this, it is wrong not to be cognizant of it. And then with the crumpling and burning of a piece of paper, a miniature bonfire, I could make it all simply disappear. The universe explodes in eight hundred million years, and none of this will appeal to anyone.
Kill them all. That was the directive. The soldiers were disbelieving at first. Many blinked, many pressed hands to mouth in mime-like protest. The order from Central Command was incontrovert-ible, no hint of ambiguity, but the words had no
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