The Senators father, however, served in an infantry battalion composed entirely of young Americans of Japanese extraction, which became our most decorated
unit taking part in the Italian Campaign during, again, the Finale Rack.
So I asked my lawyer to find out from the Ambassador if Hiroshi had left a note, and if there had been an autopsy performed to determine whether or not the deceased had ingested some foreign substance that might have made hara-kiri easier. I dont know whether to call this friendship or morbid curiosity.
The answer came back that there was no note, and that there had been no autopsy, since the cause of death was so horribly obvious. There was this detail: A little girl who didnt know him was the first person of any age or sex to see what he had chosen to do to himself.
She ran and told her mama.
Back when we were neighbors, I asked the Warden why he never left this valley, why he didnt get away from the prison and me and the ignorant young guards and the bells across the lake and all the rest of it. He had years of leave time he had never used.
He said, I would only meet more people.¨
You dont like any kind of people?¨ I said. We were talking in a sort of joshing mode, so I could ask him that.
I wish I had been born a bird instead,¨ he said. I wish we had all been born birds instead.¨
He never killed anybody and had the sex life of a calf kept alive for its veal alone.
I have lived more vividly, and I promised to tell at the end of this book the number I would like engraved on my tombstone, a number that represents both my 100-percent-legal military kills and my adulteries.
If people hear of the number at the end and its double
significance, some will turn to the end to learn the number in order to decide that it is too small or too big or just about right or whatever without reading the book. But I have devised a lock to thwart them. I have concealed its oddly shaped key in a problem that only those who have read the whole book will have no trouble solving.
So:
Take the year Eugene Debs died.
Subtract the title of the science fiction movie based on a novel by Arthur C. Clarke which I saw twice in Vietnam. Do not panic. This will give you a negative number, but Arabs in olden times taught us how to deal with such.
Add the year of Hitlers birth. There! Everything is nice and positive again. If you have done everything right so far, you should have the year in which Napoleon was banished to Elba and the metronome was invented, neither event, however, discussed in this book.
Add the gestation period of an opossum expressed in days. That isnt in the book, either, so I make you a gift of it. The number is 12. That will bring you to the year in which Thomas Jefferson, the former slave owner, died and James Fenimore Cooper published The Last of the Mohicans, which wasnt set in this valley but might as well have been.
Divide by the square root of 4.
Subtract 100 times 9.
Add the greatest number of children known to have come from the womb of just 1 woman, and there you are, by gosh.
Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesnt mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.
END