Appendix

I gave X away, it is true, to the one out there who is not guilty of the baffling betrayal he is accused of. I took the next choice, then, and call myself V, which could be V for Victory, V for Vendetta, V being the roman numeral of 5, the number of magic. It is the 22nd letter of the alphabet, like a Catch-22, and when you put up your fingers like that, it can mean peace. Or the other thing, if you turn it around in some places in Europe. It is not my only name, but it’s not a bad one to have to settle for. And you know I thought about W, and S, and that last one has some special meaning to me, which I cannot explain because I never knew why, exactly, that it was my favorite letter of the alphabet.

You see, though, me not being X anymore makes me the ex-X, which you can shorten to either XX or EX. And the double X thing doesn’t really suit me, because I never in my life have seen a movie that was rated XX, and it seems a little fishy because of that. And you could make up all kinds of things if you want that EX could stand for, like Excellence, or Execution, Extra, Excelsior! and Exodus.

Remember that the dream doesn’t end like you think. The best story wins. There’s the idea of ex nihilo, meaning “out of nothing”—how quaint so many people think it began like that, the story of all of us. Why is there something instead of nothing? Did you ever wonder?

If we speak of love again, I will tell you that love is so simple, we’ll never understand it. So, what if love is simpler than nothing? Lighter than nothing, quieter than silence? Maybe love is just a ghost.

And then it was nothing that came from love, because there had not been even that. Before before, outside that which can be conceived. The dream doesn’t end for a long, long time, and who is to tell how and what that will be? But as for what has been, it is nihil ex amore, nothing out of love. Wow, how did they think of that? Not just the idea of something when there was nothing, but how do you conceive of nothing when there is not even that?

Extra cool. EX