This part concerns the unshakeable feeling one gets, one thinks, after the unthinkable and unexplainable happens—the feeling that, if this person can die, and that person can die, and this can happen and that can happen…well, then, what exactly is preventing everything from happening to this person, he around whom everything else has happened? If people are dying, why won’t he? If people are shooting people from cars, if people are tossing rocks down from overpasses, surely he will be the next victim. If people are contracting AIDS, odds are he will, too. Same with fires in homes, car accidents, plane crashes, random knifings, stray gunfire, aneurysms, spider bites, snipers, piranhas, zoo animals. It’s the confluence of the self-centeredness discussed in G), and a black sort of outlook one is handed when all rules of impossibility and propriety are thrown out. Thus, one starts to feeling that death is literally around each and every corner—and more specifically, in every elevator; even more literally, that, each and every time an elevator door opens, there will be standing, in a trench coat, a man, with a gun, who will fire one bullet, straight into him, killing him instantly and deservedly, both in keeping with his role as the object of so much wrath in general, and for his innumerable sins, both Catholic and karmic. Just as some police—particularly those they dramatize on television—might be familiar with death, and might expect it at any instant—not necessarily their own, but death generally—so does the author, possessing a naturally paranoid disposition, compounded by environmental factors that make it seem not only possible but probable that whatever there might be out there that snuffs out life is probably sniffing around for him, that his number is perennially, eternally, up, that his draft number is low, that his bingo card is hot, that he has a bull’s-eye on his chest and target on his back. It’s fun. You’ll see.
, by Dave Eggers 
