“Kaiser, you’re mad!”

“No, baby. You posed as a pantheist and that gave you access to Him-if He existed, which he did. He went with you to Shelby’s party and when Jason wasn’t looking, you killed Him.”

“Who the hell are Shelby and Jason?”

“What’s the difference? Life’s absurd now anyway.”

“Kaiser,” she said, suddenly trembling. “You wouldn’t turn me in?”

“Oh yes, baby. When the Supreme Being gets knocked off, somebody’s got to take the rap.”

“Oh, Kaiser, we could go away together. Just the two of us. We could forget about philosophy. Settle down and maybe get into semantics.”

“Sorry, sugar. It’s no dice.”

She was all tears now as she started lowering the shoulder straps of her peignoir and I was standing there suddenly with a naked Venus whose whole body seemed to be saying, Take me-I’m yours. A Venus whose right hand tousled my hair while her left hand had picked up a forty-five and was holding it behind my back. I let go with a slug from my thirty-eight before she could pull the trigger, and she dropped her gun and doubled over in disbelief.

“How could you, Kaiser?”

She was fading fast, but I managed to get it in, in time.

“The manifestation of the universe as a complex idea unto itself as opposed to being in or outside the true Being of itself is inherently a conceptual nothingness or Nothingness in relation to any abstract form of existing or to exist or having existed in perpetuity and not subject to laws of physicality or motion or ideas relating to non-matter or the lack of objective Being or subjective otherness.”

It was a subtle concept but I think she understood before she died.