“Dr. Kevorkian has just unstrapped me from the gurney after yet another controlled near-death experience. I was lucky enough on this trip to interview none other than the late Adolf Hitler.I was gratified to learn that he now feels remorse for any actions of his, however indirectly, which might have had anything to do with the violent deaths suffered by thirty-five million people during World War II. He and his mistress Eva Braun, of course, were among those casualties, along with four million other Germans, six million Jews, eighteen million members of the Soviet Union, and so on.I paid my dues along with everybody else,” he said.It is his hope that a modest monument, possibly a stone cross, since he was a Christian, will be erected somewhere in his memory, possibly on the grounds of the United Nations headquarters in New York. It should be incised, he said, with his name and dates 1889-1945. Underneath should be a two-word sentence in German: “Entschuldigen Sie.”Roughly translated into English, this comes out, “I Beg Your Pardon,” or “Excuse Me.”

“What, indeed, is a New Yorker? Is he Jew or Irish? Is he English or German? Is he Russian or Polish? He may be something of all these, and yet he is wholly none of them. Something has been added to him which he had not had before. he is endowed with a briskness and an invention often alien to his blood. He is quicker in his movement, less trammeled in his judgement...The change he undergoes is unmistakeable, New York, indeed, resembles a magic cauldron. Those who are cast into it are born again.”

“A million possible endearments ran through his head. But he said, “Help.”

“One lone butterfly flapped his wings somewhere in the vicinity of my spleen. He was probably a scout. No doubt six million other butterflies were hot on his heels, if butterflies even have heels.”

“That’s crazy,” Gabriel said. “We must be seventy million years in the past.”“Nearly a hundred and twenty-five million,” Ohin said. “It seems far, but time is really interrelational. Every moment is just as far from every other.“Right,” Gabriel said. “Of course. That makes perfect sense.” Sema was right. He was at a breaking point. And he broke right past it. His eyes rolled up in his head and he passed out, falling back into the mattress of the bed.”

“Mom said, "His spirit is there," and that made me really angry. I told her, "Dad didn't have a spirit! He had cells!" "His memory is there." "His memory is here," I said, pointing at my head. "Dad had a spirit," she said, like she was rewinding a bit in our conversation. I told her, "He had cells, and now they're on rooftops, and in the river, and in the lungs of millions of people around New York, who breathe him every time they speak!”