100

Each of these people is a pit. Together, they are a cavern. A cavern of smells and all the horror the bad smells mean. He keeps the song in his head and joins the smell, plunges himself down into the cavern. The cavern and everything about it, except possibly for the smell, which is the offshoot of it -- everything into which he plunges himself -- is human. And, as he has already discovered, everything about the place is life. It is not for him to judge, he realizes, what is good and what is bad about the place. His gut says it is bad -- and was is this it? Always that question: what is the it? There is something that is his to judge, of course -- this business of execution -- but this is not really his, either, now, is it? Something inside him, something inside that mental voice that can sing the four, the five, the six and more voices of the round and keep track of them all -- something inside him, inside that voice twitches. He has been given something to judge, and he has been given it apart from his own will. Against his will, he has been elected to a position as chair of the committee, and part of that position involves choosing committee members to execute. The sense of right and wrong, he still has. And yet, another sense of right and wrong has been overlaid. Thesis Antithesis ... Yields? And against his will? Any of it? He isn't crippled or hog-tied, as a grandmother, long long ago used to say. None of this has been against his will, he decides. Except maybe for being here, wherever, in the first place. And if this is against his will, for sure, he might not ever know. What is the point, he wonders, of asking whether something is by his will or against his will?