There’s a chunk of time during which the background noise of the deli swells to fill the space between them. Michael’s speechless. It’s bizarre for him to hear what sounds like his own name—just ‘Ginsberg,’ the way he’s addressed at work—read in such a context. It makes him sad: the honesty of the mistake, the cruelty of war, the disappointment of a genius being fallible just like everyone else, and his identity layered over the top of it all.
“I’ve never understood war,” he says eventually. “War or killing or any of that stuff.”