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—Okay, the newspaper, tell us about the newspaper.

—When I was ten I started a newspaper. It was called the Hammurabi Gazette.

—After the famous legal code.

—No. My cat was named Hammurabi. The paper was devoted to coverage of his life.

—You never told me you had a cat.

—Yeah, I had one.

—Go on.

—There were feature articles about Hammurabi and his daily life. Pictures too. My brother wrote a monthly crossword made up of the nicknames we had for Hamm. There was a sports page as well. We set up a miniature Olympiad for him and photographed him knocking over little hurdles. My father photocopied the paper at his office. Relatives in Canada subscribed to it.

—So you got into philosophy from a publishing angle?

—No, wait, you have to listen.

—Okay, okay.

—In the barn there was a room. No, Al, I said I don’t take milk. The barn was old. It was rotting. My parents didn’t like me to play there, but I did. In the floor of the room there was a small trapdoor that opened onto the stables. They used to throw the hay down through it. I was angry at Billy Hallihan. He had deflated the tires of my bicycle the day before at school and laughed as I pumped them up again. I asked him over to play in the barn. I knew he’d come because the barn was cool. The barn was falling apart. Before he came I opened the trapdoor. The door swung downward. I covered the square hole with paper. Old copies of the Hammurabi Gazette, stapled together. My plan was that I would stand on the far side of the room. When Billy entered I would say, “Come over here, I have something to show you.” He would walk across the room, step onto the paper, and his leg would go through the hole. My sense was that his entire body would not go through it. That he would just be hurt and embarrassed. I put the paper over the hole and went back outside to ride my bike until he arrived. When I saw him coming across the yard, I hurried back into the barn. The paper was gone. I walked up to the hole. I looked down. In the stable below there was an old rusting sit-down lawn mower that my brother and I had taken half to pieces. I had removed the plastic knob from the gearshift. That’s where Hammurabi had landed. On the spike of that metal stick that I had uncovered, falling through the trap I had laid with my paper devoted to him. Hamm had carried a copy of the Gazette down with him, and it too was impaled.

—Jesus Christ.

—Yes. The image is not so different. He died for my sins.

—You never told me this, Kyle. So this eventually led to what?

—Kant. Rawls. Moral theory of one kind or another.

—And you studied that in college.

—Yeah.

—And now you work at the bakery, right?

—No, I left there a couple weeks ago. Somebody stole a bread slicer, they pegged it on me.

—So what are you doing?

—I work at a cemetery. I’m a groundsman, I prepare the graves.

—Get outta here! You’re a grave digger!

—They don’t call them that anymore. Just like they don’t call bank tellers bank tellers. But yeah, that’s what I am.

—Where?

—Out in Bradford, that little cemetery behind Saint Mary’s.

—You’re kidding me! Is this a temporary thing?

—I don’t know. I don’t know how I would know. The future is a mystery to me.

—I’m so glad you came, Kyle, I’m in the process of developing this new way to map human experience, the research here is part of it, interviewing people. I want to figure out the relationship between the desire for theoretical knowledge and certain kinds of despair. This cat stuff is very interesting in that regard.

—Is your dad better since he got out?

—Wonderful. Just wonderful.

—I never had the same energy you did, Dan.

—Don’t be silly, don’t be silly, this is all extremely interesting.

—It’s strange being out in Bradford again. Something peaceful about it, though. You could come out and visit me sometime, if you needed somewhere to go.

—Sure, sure. Al, what are you doing?

—Shhhh. Listen. There’s someone at the door.

—Who is it, Al?

—I don’t know. I think it’s the super.

4. Interview with Wendell Lippman

—Daniel Markham conducting interview number three, June 16th,