Off and on: one week there, the next nowhere to be seen, that’s how my dead began, out of control, every other Sunday then two in a row, catching me unawares in the strangest of places: lying at bus stops, on curbs, in parks, hanging from bridges and traffic lights, floating down the Mapocho, they were scattered all over Santiago those Sunday stiffs, weekly or bimonthly corpses which I totted up methodically, and the tally rose like foamy scum, like rage and lava it rose, till I twigged that adding them up was really the problem, because it makes no sense for the number to rise when we all know that the dead fall, they blame us, they drag us down, like this stiff I found slung out on the pavement just today, a solitary corpse waiting patiently for me to come by, and it just so happened that I was strolling down Bustamante, looking for a dive to have a beer and ride out the heat, this sticky heat that melts even the coldest calculations, so that’s what I’m doing, gasping for a watering hole to cool off at, when on the corner of Rancagua I spot one of my pesky dead, all alone and still warm, still deciding whether to stay in this life or head into the next one, there he is, waiting for me in a hat and woollen coat, as if death lived in perpetual winter and he’d dressed for the occasion, right there with his head lolling, so I rush over to get a proper look at his eyes, bend down and lift his chin to catch him, to inspect him, to own him, and that’s when I realise he has no eyes, no, just a pair of thick eyelids hiding him, eyelids like walls, like hoods, like wire fences, and I’m shaken up but I take a deep breath and I pull myself together, breathe out, crouch down and lick my thumb, wet it from top to bottom and hold it up to his face, and I gently raise his stiff eyelid, slowly draw back the curtain to spy on him, surround him, to subtract him, yeah, but a horrible fear pecks at my chest, a paralysing dread, cos his eye’s swamped with a liquid that’s not blue, or green, or brown, the eye peering back at me is black, a stagnant pool, a pupil that the night has clouded over, and I plunge to the depths of that socket and see myself, crystal clear, in the man’s dark iris: drowned, defeated, broken in that watery tomb, but at least then I grasp the urgency, cos this corpse is a warning sign, a hint, a get-a-move-on, I see my face buried in his, my own eyes staring back at me from his sockets, and finally it clicks that I have to knuckle down, shake a leg if I’m going to get to zero, yeah, and just as I’m calming down and getting ready, just as I take out my pad to make a note of him, there, in the distance, is that unbearable wailing, the ambulance accelerating furiously, hurrying me as I subtract him, because adding them up is a big mistake, yeah, counting up is not the answer: how can I square the number of dead and the number of graves? how will I work out how many are born and how many remain? how can I reconcile the death toll with the actual sum of the dead? by deducting, tearing apart, rending bodies, that’s it, by using this apocalyptic maths to finally, once and for all, wake up on that last day, grit my teeth and subtract them: sixteen million three hundred and forty-one thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight, minus three thousand and something, minus the one hundred and nineteen, minus one.