The collapsing sculpture had broken into three truncated sections. The head and the thorax had shattered, but the large oval shape of the abdomen had stayed intact and was rolling toward me. It wasn’t the idea of dying that bothered me so much as the shape of that abdomen. It looked like a larva. It was a statue of Zucotic that was killing me, not a statue of me. It wasn’t the portrait of an emperor that I was leaving to history. It was the portrait of a nothing.
