While at Anthroresearch

While at Anthroresearch Profane listened with half an ear to the coffee percolating; and carried on another imaginary conversation with SHROUD. By now that had become a tradition.

Remember, Profane, how it is on Route 14, souths, outside Elmira, New York? You walk on an overpass and look west and see the sun setting on a junkpile. Acres of old cars, piled up ten high in rusting tiers. A graveyard for cars. If I could die, that’s what my graveyard would look like.

“I wish you would. Look at you, masquerading like a human being. You ought to be junked. Not burned or cremated.”

Of course. Like a human being. Now remember, right after the war, the Nuremberg war trials? Remember the photographs of Auschwitz? Thousands of Jewish corpses, stacked up like those poor car-bodies. Schlemihl: It’s already started.

“Hitler did that. He was crazy.”

Hitler, Eichmann, Mengele. Fifteen years ago. Has it occurred to you there may be no more standards for crazy or sane, now that it’s started?

“What, for Christ sake?”

- Thomas Pynchon, in the novel V, p. 275 (Bantam Windstone paperback edition, 1963)