Menaced Assassin

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Listen to Raptor, mon vieux. Don’t take this life so seriously, you’ll never get out of it alive.

I kill. Oh, I know. You expect me to add, Therefore I am. But that is nonsense. I do not kill out of any inner compulsion to give what that fool Hemingway called the gift of death. If killing is a gift, it is a gift to the killer himself, during the ritual frenzy of the hunt. Whoever considers Proud Death a gift to a healthy animal has no imagination and is already half in love with his own finis.

I am not. I kill-without pity, compunction, emotion or moral qualms, to be sure-but not because killing obsesses me. Just because, well… it is what I do. Previously I have done other things, perhaps in future I will do other things again. But for at least a few hours more, I kill. After that…

After that, well, tonight Will Dalton plans to give a lecture. A lecture on the nature of man in hopes of exposing, no less, the roots of man’s endless violence, perhaps man’s evil, and to draw some sort of inane conclusions from it.

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