The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Vol. 2: Empire Decayed

What you do with your time alive defines you, Reader, but hear me, I beg you, when I say that you are not done being defined.

It's funny, isn't it? While we were distracted by the silly scraps that make up human history, you and I became eternal, impervious to rot, infinity itself.

What you do with your time alive defines you, Reader, but hear me, I beg you, when I say that you are not done being defined. Go out; break things. Go further; repair them. Break hundreds of hearts. Have thousands of children. Discover awe in a tangle of weeds; find delight in the pattern of a roll of mass-produced paper towels; live, Reader, live; live as hard as I died, and only then I will be happy.

I am, I believe, a young man on whom a grand joke is being played, fated to live one century, perhaps a second, perhaps a third, only to be scrubbed and rescrubbed from the record, to exit, if I ever do, as if I'd never existed at all.

If nothing else, books are conversations from beyond the grave. Am I anything at all, Reader, besides this manuscript you hold?

Amerika's story is always going to be yours. White. Male. Probably rich. You're Rome and we all know what happened to Rome. Empire gets too big, empire falls.

I marched along, foot after foot, imagining my own autopsy. It would look much like America's; flesh that had turned too quickly for someone so young and now emulsified at the brink of spoil.

We are one miracle inter-linked with another, and another, and another, entire heavens located upon this single page as well as inside the fingertip that turns it.