On the morning of Monday, June 22nd, 2026, a twenty-five-year-old philosophy student from Lethbridge, Alberta, checked into the Hilton Garden Inn in the Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood of Montreal, put a rifle through an upper-floor window, and opened fire on the building across the street. He was aiming at the sixth floor, where the staff of a company called Aylo were at work. Aylo owns Pornhub. He had driven the better part of a continent to shoot at the back office of an internet pornography company.

By the time it ended, roughly three hours later, three people were dead. The shooter, killed by responding officers. Constable Mohamed Lamine Benredouane, thirty-four, of the Montreal police. And Michel Mizrahi, sixty-eight, a passerby who had the bad luck to be near a building he had nothing to do with. A second officer, a woman, was shot and seriously wounded. The city sheltered in place through the afternoon. The police chief called it a tragedy, and the provincial security minister was careful to add that it was not being treated as terrorism.¹ The CN Tower now dims for the first five minutes of every hour, for the constable.

His name was Seth Scott Hatfield, and on the surface he was about as unremarkable as a person can be. He was on his university’s Dean’s Honour List. The social media that investigators dug up within a day was the ordinary sediment of a certain kind of young man’s interior: a Metallica record, the cover of Kill ‘Em All; a still of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho holding an axe; a saved playlist of videos from a former Infowars host. And he left a document. One hundred and four pages, written over the preceding weeks and finished about a fortnight before he died, ending on a line borrowed, knowingly, from that same Metallica record: Be unflinching, go forth, and KILL THEM ALL.

That document is the subject of this essay, and it comes with a difficulty worth stating plainly. It did not circulate the way the man’s name did. A handful of outlets obtained a copy; most declined to publish it, which was the right decision. So what reached the public was a summary, and the summary slotted neatly into a folder most people already keep: incel, misogynist, an entitled young man who could not get what he wanted and killed people over it. That summary is not wrong. It is simply too small to be useful. “He hated women” can account for a shove in a bar. It cannot account for a hundred footnoted pages, a continental drive, and a target chosen for what its occupants represent rather than for anything they personally did. And it cannot account for the recurrence, the fact that men who never met, who never read one another, keep building roughly the same worldview from scratch and arriving at roughly the same act. To understand any of that, you have to set the folder aside and look at what he actually believed.

Three passes, then. First his world as he built it, laid out on its own terms until it coheres the way it cohered for him. Then where it comes apart. Then the part that is harder to be rid of, because under the strangeness there is something true, and the true thing is not only about him.

The world he built

The first surprise is its register. Most documents of this kind are tantrums, and read like them. This one is a work of theory, footnoted and patient, with a structure borrowed from political philosophy and a citation apparatus that runs from Spinoza and Hobbes to Marx and Bukharin. It opens, in fact, on a footnote, a line from Spinoza about how it is part of the author’s happiness to lend a helping hand so that others might understand as he does. A few sentences later it quotes Donne, “no man is an island, entire of itself,” attached to a remark about how nothing in nature exists in isolation. It is a strange epigraph for a text whose deepest and least-spoken subject is its author’s own isolation.

The argument itself is Marxist, and it is not a costume. He read the books and absorbed the method. He works from base and superstructure, the idea that a society’s economic arrangements are the foundation and its laws, morals, and ideals are the structure built on top to serve that foundation. He treats liberalism’s favourite words, freedom and equality and autonomy, as instruments rather than facts, and he regards the public quarrel between left and right as a managed performance that never reaches the economic base underneath. A great many people who would want nothing to do with this man hold exactly these views.

Onto that frame he fastens a claim about biology. Everything else runs off this one, so take it slowly. Males and females, he argues, pursue opposite reproductive strategies; the male tends toward breadth, the female toward selection. He names the tension between these two drives the “contradiction of the imperatives,” and he positions it precisely where Marx positioned the contradiction between economic forces, as the deep antagonism that the rest of the system grows out of. Left to itself, he says, this contradiction is savage: a few dominant men win most of the reproduction and most men lose. Civilization’s great correction was monogamy, which he treats not as a moral rule but as infrastructure, a cultural and legal mechanism that rationed access and gave the ordinary man a wife, a family, and therefore a stake in the order around him. Monogamy, in this telling, was the dam that held the flood.

His central historical claim is that capitalism broke the dam, and broke it for profit. Bringing women into the workforce doubled the available labour and opened a vast new consumer market, which was simply good business. Feminism, in his account, was the lever the system used to pry women loose from economic dependence on ordinary men, freeing them to pursue the older biological preference without constraint. That unconstrained pursuit is what he calls “hypergamy,” women selecting upward toward the most desirable men, and dating apps and social media are the accelerant, since they let any woman see and reach the top tier of men in her city in an afternoon. The dam is gone and the flood has returned, and he calls the resulting world the “hypergamy state.” He sorts it into three groups: at the top, the men he calls the “favoured,” the tall and the handsome, who receive everything; then women, who receive intimacy more or less on demand; and at the bottom, the majority, whom he calls the “dispossessed,” ordinary men who receive nothing, or who receive scraps inside transactions with women who do not actually want them.

Grant him what he gets right, because some of it is simply correct. Male loneliness is a real and measured phenomenon with real consequences, and the research connecting isolation to early death is well-established.² Physical attractiveness does buy better treatment, and the advantage begins in infancy, in how adults respond to beautiful babies.³ Dating apps do appear to have produced a more lopsided market.⁴ Capitalism does reshape intimate life in pursuit of revenue. A man can do something monstrous and still have read several of his instruments accurately, and an account that denies this in order to feel safe gives up the only ground from which he can actually be answered.

But the diagnosis is only the dry half of the book. Somewhere past the middle, presented as if it were a transition between chapters, the document does something most political tracts never do. It stops arguing and begins to describe a cosmos. This is the part that gives the manifesto its character, and it reads less like theory than like a vision.

He divides the whole of reality into two regions with nothing between them. There is the sphere of light, which belongs to women and to favoured men, and there is the outer darkness, which belongs to the dispossessed. Watch what the sphere of light becomes when he stops abstracting and starts to picture it. First come the named goods, blissfulness and harmony and meaning and love. Then the image arrives, and the image is an orgy: a sphere “roiling and pulsating with carnal elation,” “the rubbing of warm flesh upon warm flesh,” echoing with “the joyous, involuntary moaning of delighted lovers.” Read closely, it is not really a description of happiness, and not even really a description of sex. It is a description of sex heard through a wall. Every detail is thermal or auditory, warmth and moaning and laughter, the things you would register if you were on the other side of the drywall and could not see in. He is describing, with considerable precision, what a party sounds like from the hallway.

The outer darkness, by contrast, is “darkness, perturbation, strife, abandonment, meaninglessness, isolation, and the absence of love,” and its inhabitants are “neither alive nor dead, but exist as immiserated, shattered, decaying, and nearly inert bodies, drifting about slowly in the empty blackness.” The word to mark is “inert,” because it is the most exact word in the document and he reaches it without seeming to know what he has found. He does not say he is sad. He says he is inert: present, but weightless, a body whose disappearance would alter nothing. And the particular torment he keeps returning to is not the deprivation itself but the sight of it. The dispossessed, he writes, are “continually subjected to the torturous experience of watching” the people in the light enjoy, and sometimes mock, the love the dispossessed will never have. The pain is in the spectacle. Not hunger, but hunger in front of a window where other people are eating, on a screen, at all hours, for free. That observation is sharp, and it points straight at the mechanism, the phone in his hand that carried both the pornography and the weddings, before he turns away from it into theology.

Then love itself is named, and the way he names it quietly settles everything that comes after. He calls it “the highest and purest of all metaphysical forces.” Not a feeling, and not something that happens between two particular people, but a force, a kind of substance, like heat or light, that a person can be “cruelly cut off from.” Almost no one who has actually been loved would describe it this way, because in lived experience love is a relation, contingent and fragile and freely given, that occurs or fails to occur depending on a great many things. The distinction matters because a substance can be distributed, and a distributed thing can be distributed unfairly, and the people who hold it then become not lucky but beneficiaries of an unjust allocation, the kind of thing that can be corrected by force. That single reclassification is the pivot the entire weapon turns on, and it is easy to read past.

What follows is, structurally, a conversion narrative. Into the darkness where the dead drift, he writes, comes “another kind of force, something that is not love, but is also very powerful,” an intelligence that lives in the dark, observes, and perceives “some hidden potential within all of those who lie broken.” This intelligence, which is his name for his own awakening, offers the broken “new life,” and asks only that they accept the offer. Those who accept have their “formerly rotted” bodies remade into something “enhanced, sleek, and lurid,” carrying “a peculiar kind of strength that can not be broken by conventional weapons.⁵” The adjectives are telling, because they are aesthetic rather than military. The dispossessed body, the wrong height and the wrong face that were the source of every humiliation, is not merely strengthened; it is made beautiful, and made invulnerable to precisely the things that break it now. This is the oldest heresy in the Western tradition, reassembled apparently from scratch: a false light that is secretly a prison, a true power hidden in the dark, a sleeper woken by a messenger, a spark of the divine trapped in the wrong flesh and finally set loose. He was a philosophy student. He would have met the shape of it in Plato’s cave, and seems never to have noticed he was living inside it.

The remade man then performs the act the whole book exists to justify. He attacks the sphere of light, and finds in the attack “a powerful and cosmic kind of pleasure,” carrying out “the hallowed task of attacking, penetrating, and destroying the worthless hypergamous sphere,” enjoying it “with just as much eagerness as those of the sphere did when they were enjoying their one-sided sex.” The pleasure of the violence is set equal, in his own words, to the pleasure of the sex he was refused. Not offered as a consolation for it, but presented as its equivalent. And the verb he chooses without seeming to choose it is “penetrating.” In his imagination the revolution is a consummation, the act standing in for the one that was never available to him.

The end state, notably, is not light. Once the violence is finished, he writes, “some vague semblance of balance and harmony” can return to the cosmos “in its new state of divine darkness.” The dispossessed do not enter the sphere. The sphere is put out, and the dark that remains is renamed divine. The aim was never to join the party; it was to end the party, so that no one could have what he could not. And the word “vague” carries a quiet weight, because even inside his own fantasy he cannot bring himself to promise that the future will be good. He can only promise that it will be dark. The darkness is concrete to him. He has lived there; he knows exactly how it feels. Flourishing is abstract and far away precisely because he has never once been inside the sphere to learn its texture. The void is the thing he knows.

Everything operational in the book hangs from that vision. He sketches a future society to turn the cosmology into a state. Abolish private property, nationalize industry, and then, the section he plainly relishes, engineer women back into dependence by quietly replacing their jobs with robots until there is no female workforce left, so that, as he puts it, “the female will simply need marriage in order to live, just as she once did; and thus she will engage in monogamy willingly.” Abolish private cars, which let women drive across town to favoured men. Bring the whole of the internet under state surveillance. Enforce all of it through a secret police he calls the “extraordinary branch,” whose agents wear deliberately demonic uniforms so that each one resembles “some kind of partially immaterial being that has temporarily appeared on earth from the other side,” and who are eventually to be cybernetically augmented into “morally incorruptible, fearless, endlessly intelligent, martially unmatched” guardians who never age and live for “hundreds of years.” The final pages drop the theory entirely and become a direct address to other dispossessed men, ending on the most exposed sentence in the document: “The girl who was supposed to be your girlfriend was taken from you a long time ago, sodomized out of reality. Nothing is going to bring her back.” And then the instruction to arm themselves and go.

That is the world, as plainly as I can set it down. It holds together, in its way. The question is where it stops.

III. Where it breaks down

The structure fails at a single joint, and he was too invested in it to feel it give.

He borrowed Marx’s grammar and mistook it for Marx’s mechanism. In Marx, exploitation is not a figure of speech; it has a working part, surplus value. The worker produces more value than he is paid, the difference is appropriated, and a real and traceable transfer of wealth occurs from one class to another. Something the worker made is removed from him. The question that empties out Hatfield’s whole system is just this: in his world, what is transferred? What does the favoured man take from the dispossessed man? Nothing, because intimacy is not a thing that can be moved from one person to another. The favoured man does not hold more love because the common man holds less. He holds it because women want him. The dispossessed man is not producing a good that is being stolen; he is excluded from a good that was never his and was never anyone’s to assign him by right. The “contradiction of the imperatives” is real as a pattern. It is not exploitation, because nothing is extracted. Two systems can look identical from a distance and operate on entirely different principles, and the medicine for one will do nothing for the other. His entire program is the wrong medicine, prescribed off a resemblance.

The reclassification of love is the original wound in the argument, and once you see it you can see what it was for. Only a substance can be redistributed. If love is a relation, it has to be freely given, which means it might never be given to you, and that possibility is the one thing the hundred and four pages are built to keep from saying directly. So he converts the relation into a resource and lifts it to the level of the cosmos, because a resource can be seized by revolution and a relation cannot. The move is not careless thinking. It is the thing a person does when a particular sentence, she might simply not want me, and no one did anything wrong, is heavier than he can lift. He would rather rebuild human civilization than hold that sentence, and the manifesto is a measure of exactly how much he would rather.

The contradiction underneath it is philosophical, and it sits on the most important page in the book. Marx was a materialist, and Hatfield insists that he is one too; the opening chapter is a long and earnest derivation of mind from matter, with Hobbes in the footnotes. Yet the moment he needs love to be seizable, he calls it the highest of all metaphysical forces. That is not materialism but its opposite, introduced exactly where materialism would have cost him his conclusion. A consistent materialist has to treat love as something that emerges from particular conditions, a process that either occurs or does not, rather than a substance handed down from a central store. But a process cannot be expropriated, and an unexpropriable love makes the revolution incoherent, so the self-declared materialist quietly reaches for the metaphysical and never registers the reversal.

The determinism then turns and consumes the program. His bleakest and most-quoted claim is that male desirability is fixed at birth, that what decides a man’s fate is, in his phrase, “the length of the bones in your legs, and the shape of the bones in your face.” Accept that, and organizing becomes pointless. No one can unionize for height or strike for a jawline. If the hierarchy is written in bone, no revolution rearranges it, and the call to collective uprising is answering a problem its author has just declared permanent. The same broken hinge appears in every document of this kind: nothing can be done, and therefore everything must be done. The analysis predicts the failure of the program in the same breath that proposes it.

The utopia, looked at directly, is the wound wearing a uniform. The “revival of monogamy” is a plan to remove every option a woman has until marriage to an ordinary man is the only thing between her and starvation, at which point she chooses it “willingly,” a word doing the work of a threat. The secret police in their demon costumes, the augmented and ageless guardians who cannot be broken, are a precise inversion of how he describes himself throughout, as weak and broken and decaying and inert. What he has drawn is not a political order but a body he could have survived inside, expanded to the scale of a state. And the detail that settles the reading is a small one. Among the objections he raises and dismisses is the obvious one, that if he cannot find a woman, technology is already producing lifelike substitutes. He refuses it, and the refusal gives him away, because it means the problem was never the sex. A machine would supply the act and change nothing, since what he actually needs is to be wanted by someone for whom no substitute would do. He will automate a real woman’s entire economic life to force her into his bed, and reject a machine in that same bed, because some part of him understands that the whole point was to be irreplaceable to another person, and the machine is proof that he is not.

And then there is the distance between the man he imagined and the thing he did. He flattered himself that his violence would be surgical, reaching only the guilty and never the innocent. Then he set up across the street from an office, and one of the people he killed was Michel Mizrahi, sixty-eight, who matched no category in his careful taxonomy and was simply nearby. The image of selective, righteous, surgical terror is the same story every campaign of revolutionary terror has told itself since the guillotine, that the dead are not people with interior lives but architects of suffering whose removal is a kind of hygiene. It was untrue in 1793 and it was untrue from a hotel window in 2026, and a sixty-eight-year-old man is dead either way.

IV. The wound underneath

It would be comfortable to stop here. We have the man, and we have the demolition; the misogynist wrote a broken book and did a terrible thing, and that is the end of it. But stopping here is the move that quietly guarantees the next one, because everything above is an autopsy of his answer, and the answer was wrong, while the question underneath it was real. That question is not only his.

Strip away the cosmology and the Marx and the body count, and what remains at the bottom of the document is not a man who wanted sex. It is a man who could not bear to be fungible: replaceable, needed by no one. He told us so in the one exact word, inert. Not lonely, quite, and not celibate, quite, but removable, a person who could be subtracted from the world and leave no gap behind. That is the wound, and it presents as a problem about love only because, in this particular civilization, love happens to be the last lit window in a sealed room, so its absence comes to feel like the absence of everything.

The mechanism is worth following, because “loneliness epidemic” is a label with no machinery in it. A person can endure almost any hardship if he is needed, woven into some arrangement where his removal would actually break something. For most of history that was simply the condition of an ordinary man’s life. The blacksmith the village could not replace, the soldier the line required, the father whose wages the family ate, the son the farm could not do without. Not necessarily loved, but necessary. And the central achievement of modern affluence, by design rather than by accident, was the steady dissolution of exactly those arrangements. The wage economy bought out what the family needed a man for. The welfare state bought out what the village needed him for. Between the market and the state, nearly everyone is now provided for, which means nearly no one is structurally necessary to anyone. We experience this as freedom, and we are right to, because for the most part it is. It is also the quiet retirement of every reason a person used to be required by another.

This is where love came to stand in the chair that older forms of belonging used to occupy. When every other channel of being needed has been automated, marketized, or insured away, one non-fungible bond is left standing in the ordinary catalogue of a life, and that is intimate partnership, the single relation in which someone needs you in particular, where no substitute will serve, where you are not a seat that anyone could fill. Romantic love did not become more beautiful than it used to be. It became the only remaining place to matter to another person in a way that cannot be swapped out, and so it quietly inherited all the weight that used to be distributed across a dozen kinds of belonging. It is also the one such place whose door cannot be opened from your own side, because it runs entirely on someone else’s wanting. A person can will himself into competence, or strength, or employment, or learning. He cannot will himself into being wanted. Hatfield, who got almost nothing right, got this exactly right, and stated it as a grievance when it is really the whole diagnosis: “one who cannot attain such love cannot actualize his authentic self.” In a civilization that ranks nothing above romantic love, that sentence is simply true, and it describes a sealed room with a single window.

The weight of it falls hardest on young men, and not as a matter of rhetoric but as a matter of plumbing. A woman, even without a partner, retains a culturally recognized way of being irreplaceable that does not depend on being desired, only on being willing; a child cannot substitute its mother, and the culture still treats that as a real way to matter to someone. The classic male routes to necessity were mostly instrumental, a man needed for what he could provide or build or defend, and those are precisely the routes the wage economy and the welfare state were built to absorb. The relational route survived the market. The instrumental ones were automated. When necessity collapses, men lose their channel and women keep one, and that asymmetry is mechanical rather than ideological, which is why the bodies are so consistently young and male.

All of which finally makes the gun legible in a way that “he hated women” never can. A shooting is the one readily available act that converts total fungibility into total non-fungibility in about ninety seconds. The man who could have vanished without a ripple makes himself permanent, irreversible, impossible to overlook. He mattered to no one living, and now he will matter to everyone who reads the name. This is why the act is liturgical rather than strategic, why he can write plainly that his movement is nowhere near critical mass, that the revolution is not beginning, that nothing will bring her back, and proceed regardless. He is not trying to win, and he knows he cannot. He is trying, once, to become unsubtractable, and the act delivers precisely what it promises. For a few minutes on a Monday, a man who had been inert was the most load-bearing object in the country.

V. Why it persists

The strangest fact here is that it never becomes a movement.

Every other violent ideology is contagious in the ordinary way. It has scripture, authorities, a canon you inherit, martyrs whose names are handed down, a paradise you can describe to a stranger and watch them nod. This one has none of that, and it refuses to cohere. Each shooter rebuilds the entire worldview alone, in his own room, from first principles, and arrives at nearly the same place without citing the man before him. The reasons interlock. Shame makes a public identity impossible, because there is no recruiting on a banner that reads we have lost at the one thing we wanted. The determinism cancels collective action, because there is no organizing to change what you insist is written in bone. The carrier dies in the act, so the ideology never accumulates a single living elder to mentor the next arrival. The utopia is unspeakable, so the grievance can recruit while the proposed cure, said aloud, invalidates the grievance’s own moral claim. And the one constituency the movement would need in order to mean anything, women, is by construction absent and unwilling. It behaves like a strain that kills its host before it can spread, every time. This is why the Canadian state, confronted with a man who wrote a revolutionary manifesto and shot at a corporate headquarters, declined to call it terrorism. The category does not quite fit. The thing is too solitary, too self-defeating, and finally too sad.

That fact dictates the only posture toward these men that has ever stood a chance, and the posture has two parts that have to be held together. The first is that the pain is real and deserves to be taken seriously, that it is not the man’s fault, that it is the genuine wound of a removable person inside a civilization that manufactures removable people in bulk. The second is that the act is small, and stupid, and futile, a tantrum that ended three lives and accomplished none of its aims and bought him a few minutes of significance before the books closed over him as if he had never been there. Neither half works without the other. Take away the first, and contempt for the pain hands the next man straight to the only framework that ever took his pain seriously, the one with the rifle in it; this is the actual machinery by which mockery produces the next shooter instead of deterring him. Take away the second, and reverence for the act hands him a martyr. Held together, the two starve both outcomes at once, honouring the wound so that cruelty loses its monopoly on taking him seriously, and deflating the act so that the man watching is offered the picture of someone who threw his life away on a tantrum and was laughed at, rather than the picture of a dark avenging god.

The limit of that posture should be said plainly: it is prevention, not cure. It lowers the rate at which men reach the end of this road. It does nothing for the one already standing at the end of it, because by then he has stopped performing for any audience whose contempt could reach him; he is performing for an imagined congregation of awakened men who do not yet exist, and a man who has already left the room cannot be deflated. Reducing how many arrive at the rifle is a real and worthwhile thing, and it is a different problem from disarming the one already holding it. Anyone offering a single solution to both is repeating Hatfield’s own move, promising a total answer to a partial problem because the partial truth is hard to sit with.

The deeper reason the thing resists repair is that the obvious fixes are traps, and they should be named precisely, because real effort is being poured into each of them to little effect. You cannot build the cure by aiming it at the afflicted. Any institution whose stated purpose is to help excluded men inherits, the instant its purpose is understood, the very shame that defines them, and becomes the place a man goes to confess that he could not get the real thing. It fills with the population that confirms its low standing. The structures that actually absorb surplus men are the ones that are emphatically not about surplus men, the gym that is about the climb, the trade that is about the work, the discipline with a real lineage, where status is genuine and earned and no one at the door asks whom you are sleeping with. The historical institution that did this best, the monastery, managed it through a particular trick: its stated purpose was high, devotion to God, and the absorption of the unmarriageable was a side effect it never advertised. The cure has to decline to present itself as a cure, which is exactly why it is so rarely built on purpose, since the design brief amounts to build the thing and never say what it is for.

Underneath even that lies the hardest part. The only thing that genuinely touches fungibility is the remanufacture of necessity, the rebuilding of arrangements in which specific people are actually load-bearing for one another. And the reason no one is necessary anymore is that we spent three centuries, and a great deal of suffering, engineering necessity out, on purpose, and almost everyone experiences that engineering as liberation, because in most respects it is. You only get necessity back by giving back some of the autonomy and insulation that affluence sold us as the entire point of the project. Very few people will volunteer for that. I would not. The sealed room is comfortable, and it is the highest material achievement our species has managed, and it produces, as a byproduct, a thin and steady supply of men who hold nothing up, one of whom, every so often, works out that a rifle is the fastest route from inert to unsubtractable and drives across a country to take it.

There is a final knot here, and it is the reason this essay will not end by calling on anyone to build the thing. The very feature that holds the body count to ones and twos, the curse that keeps this from ever cohering, is the same wall that makes it unsolvable. An institution engineered to gather and organize and give purpose to unattached men is, by its nature, an institution that can be pointed. The monastic chassis that absorbed surplus men also, when someone required an army, became the Templars. Solve the cohesion problem, give these men the belonging and the structure they lack, and you have in the same motion built the one piece of infrastructure this thing has so far never possessed. The wall that keeps these men isolated and the wall that keeps them disorganized are the same wall, and it cannot be taken down to save them without also being taken down to assemble them. There may simply be no version in which you get the one without the other.

VI. The man

So return to him, with all of that in view.

Seth Hatfield was twenty-five. He was good enough at philosophy to make the Dean’s list, and broken enough to spend his last free weeks assembling a hundred-page proof that his pain was a cosmic injustice and his revenge a holy act. He could have written, in a single honest sentence, that he was lonely and could not bear being no one to anyone, and that sentence would have been true, and survivable, and shared by far more men than will ever admit to it. He could not write it. He wrote the cathedral instead, because the cathedral performs a particular exchange: it turns the pathetic into the tragic, and turns a man no one wanted into the first martyr of the dispossessed. That exchange, grandeur traded for pity, was the entire purpose of the architecture. The Marxism was the scaffolding. The grief was the load-bearing wall. The footnotes were there so that a reader would see the structure first and the wound second, or not at all.

And on the way out he arranged for the wound to be paid by people who had the thing he lacked. He shot at a building for what its workers represented to him, and he killed a thirty-four-year-old constable who came to stop him and a sixty-eight-year-old man who happened to be close by, two people who were, by every measure that counts, the opposite of fungible. Sons, probably fathers, certainly necessary to someone, and now mourned in exactly the specific and irreplaceable way that Hatfield could not believe anyone would ever mourn him. He did not abolish the sphere of light. He put two more bodies into the dark and then joined them, and changed nothing he claimed to want to change.

The darkness he called divine is only the dark of a room with one window, and a man who could not reach the window deciding that if he could not have the light, the honest thing, the balanced thing, was to put it out for everyone.

That room, though, was never only his. None of it was insane, and that is the difficulty. The chain held, link by link, back to the one thing he could not bear, which means it is not a malfunction but a structure, one that any lonely and clever person can build alone, from nothing, and many already are. Understanding it does not disarm it. The next one will not have read this, or him, and will get there anyway, by the same road, out of the same ordinary materials, in the same empty room.

Citations & Notes