The list had one hundred and four names. I wrote them down every night, like a penitent counting his sins. One hundred and four names, and by the time I finished the last one, I understood the joke.

The joke being: there is no difference between the executioner and the executed.

I am Henri Dupont. I am forty-one years old. I work as a physician in a small clinic in the suburbs of Paris. Or I did, before the Ministry of Public Health decided that my services were required for something called the Special Hygiene Action.

The disease was hepatitis. Not the dramatic kind—the slow, insidious kind that eats away at the liver over years, leaving the victim tired and yellow and eventually dead. The government called it a social burden. I called it what it was: a disease of the poor, the drunk, and the forgotten.

My job was simple. Identify the carriers. Eliminate the carriers. Report the eliminations as natural causes.

The first month, I was sick after every assignment. I would return to my apartment, lock the door, and sit on the floor until the nausea passed. I drank too much wine. I smoked too many cigarettes. I told myself this was the last time.

It was not.

By the third month, I had stopped being sick. By the fifth month, I had stopped thinking. By the seventh month, I was good at it.

That is the thing about evil, I have learned. It does not arrive with trumpets and fire. It arrives with a memo and a paycheck.

My liaison was Pierre Lefebvre—a cheerful, optimistic man who believed in the system the way a child believes in Santa Claus. You don't need to understand the process, Henri, he told me on our third meeting. You just need to follow the instructions.

But I am a doctor. Understanding is my job.

So I started looking.

I went to the archives on a Tuesday. The file room was in the basement of the Ministry—a windowless space that smelled of dust and old paper. I asked for the master list of carriers. The archivist, a thin woman named Isabelle, looked at me with eyes that had seen too much and said nothing. She handed me a box.

The box contained three hundred names. Not one hundred. Three hundred. People who had been marked for elimination but had not yet been eliminated.

I read the names. I read the dates. I read the classifications. And then I saw it.

My name. Henri Dupont. Age: forty-one. Classification: pending elimination. Date: three weeks from now.

I sat down on the floor of the file room and I laughed. I laughed until my ribs hurt and tears ran down my face. The joke was perfect. The joke was terrible. The joke was that I had been pushing a boulder up a hill for seven months, and at the top of the hill, someone had written my name.

Sisyphus, I said aloud. And the woman named Isabelle, who had been watching me from the doorway, said: You know Camus?

I know Camus, I said.

He was a good writer, Isabelle said. But he was wrong about one thing.

What?

Sisyphus was happy. You don't look happy, Henri.

I left the Ministry at midnight. I walked along the Seine in the rain. The water was black and cold and smelled of nothing at all. I thought about Camus's essay about Sisyphus—the man condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, only to watch it roll back down every time he reached the top.

Camus wrote that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. That the struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart.

I didn't believe him.

I walked back to my apartment. I made a cup of coffee. I sat by the window and watched the rain fall on the Seine. The streetlights reflected in the water like broken stars.

Tomorrow, I would go to work. I would see Pierre, who would ask me how my assignments were going. I would see Isabelle, who would hand me a box of names without a word. I would sign the papers and send the orders and wait for my own name to be carried away.

And tonight, I would sit here. In the dark. Watching the rain. Thinking about the man who said we must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I do not imagine him happy. I imagine him angry. I imagine him standing at the top of the hill, looking at the boulder, and deciding that tomorrow, he will not push it back up.

But tomorrow never comes. It never comes for any of us.