Who is this author, this narrator of death and life’s curse? Who is this third man, this holy brother? This hermetic hermano; is he also provocateur and profiteer, prophesier and peace-sayer, sophist and slayer by word—and is he himself not just one letter short of his brothers long knife and shortener life thereby? Not my brother’s keeper, for he too is a man not for the keeping but for his labor. The ground will keep him now, and he will poison my work, my consumption, and I too will be kept in the keep. As above, so below said the shepherd to his sheep. Kill the clean one, may he poison us slow, in our blind violence we all lie low.