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“What does that son of a bitch want?” Schwartz said to himself.

“I wish you’d stop cussing around me.”

Schwartz made a distracted noise.

“I mean it,” Lloyd said. “It’s offensive.”

Schwartz made another noise. He had gathered his lips together into a pucker with his fingers, and he looked at the floor as he paced.

“Especially cussing on the sheriff.” When Schwartz didn’t answer, Lloyd said, “Are you hearing me? Don’t cuss on the sheriff.”

“I don’t know what kind of game he’s trying to play.” Schwartz did not stop or raise his eyes from the floor. “But I would guess he’s trying to trick some kind of confession out of you.”

“Sheriff don’t play no games with me,” Lloyd said. “He don’t have no tricks. You’re the one with all the tricks.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“Sheriff’s the one tryin’ to help me get right.”

“Sheriff’s the one tryin’ to help you get dead,” Schwartz said, mimicking Lloyd.

“Okay, man.” Lloyd stood up and pushed his chair away. It squealed on the floor, and Schwartz stopped. Lloyd saw that his own fists were clenched. He hesitated.

“What are you gonna do, Lloyd? Beat me up? Go ahead. I’ve been expecting this.”

“You think I’m stupid,” Lloyd said. “ And all them tests is to make me look pitiful and incompetent. What do you think that’s done to my trying to get right?”

“What do you think that means, Lloyd — ‘getting right’?” Schwartz moved close to him. He stared straight at Lloyd as he spoke. “It means giving up.”

That night, and for the days and nights to come, Lloyd turned over in his mind all he had seen and heard. What he had known before was like some foreign language that now he couldn’t understand. The worlds of Schwartz and the sheriff, of man and God, of what was in the law and what was in the fields, began to blur, and yet between them grew a chasm in which he hung suspended. He tried to remember what had happened in the places Blanchard had said he’d been, but he couldn’t. He could not make them connect the way the sheriff had said all the people in all those dots on the map did. An indifference grew around him, a thin glass glazing that separated him from the rest of humankind.

The sheriff led him down the hallway to the white room without a word or a look, and left him with Schwartz. The hearing was the next day. Lloyd felt as though he were about to take another test. He had fought with Schwartz, tooth and nail over the sheriff’s proposal, and in the end had gotten his way by threatening to fire him. After Lloyd sat down across the table from him, Schwartz explained that he and the sheriff had struck a deaclass="underline" the sheriff had agreed that he would not testify about his “competency exam,” as he called it, on the condition that he not have to reveal to Schwartz beforehand what it was going to be about.

“I don’t like this,” Schwartz said, pacing, clicking the top of a ballpoint pen so that it made a tick-tick sound, like a clock. He sat down again, his elbows on the table and his hands joined as though in prayer, and brought his face close to Lloyd’s.

“I want to tell you the truest thing I’ve ever seen, Lloyd. I’ve seen a man executed. When you are executed in Texas, you are taken to a powder-blue room. This is the death chamber, where the warden, a physician, and a minister will stand around the gurney. Since executions can take place in Texas only between midnight and dawn, it will have that eerie feeling of a room brightly lit in the middle of the night. Before this, in an anteroom, a guard will tell you to drop your pants. Then he will insert one rubber stopper in your penis and another in your anus, to prevent you from urinating and defecating when your muscles relax after you have died. When you are lying on the gurney, the guard will secure your arms, legs, and chest to it with leather straps. The guard will insert a needle, which is attached to an IV bag, into your left arm. Above you will be fluorescent lighting, and a microphone will hang suspended from the ceiling. The warden — I think it’s still Warden Pearson — will ask whether you have any last words. When you’re finished, three chemicals will be released into your blood: sodium thiopental, a sedative that is supposed to render you unconscious; pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant, to collapse your diaphragm and lungs; potassium chloride, a poison that will stop your heart.

“I could tell that my client could feel the poison entering his veins. I had known him for the last three of his fifteen years on death row; he was old enough to be my father. At his execution I was separated from him by a piece of meshed security glass. There was nothing I could do when he began writhing and gasping for breath. The poison — later I found out it was the potassium chloride, to stop his heart — had been injected before the thiopental. Imagine a dream in which your body has turned to lead, in which you can’t move and are sinking in water. You have the sensations given you by your nerves and understood in your brain, but you can’t do anything about them. You struggle against your own body. But really, it is unimaginable — what it is like to try to rouse your own heart.

“What if everything goes as planned? A nice, sleepy feeling — the sedative tricking your nerves — will dissolve your fear. The question is, will you want it taken away, fear being the only thing that binds you to life. Will you want to hold on to that, like the survivor of a shipwreck clinging to a barnacled plank? Will you struggle, in the end, to be afraid?”

Schwartz slumped back in his chair and began again to tick-tick the top of his pen so that it made a sound like a clock. The whiteness and silence of the room seemed to annihilate time, as though the two men could sit there waiting forever. They fell on Lloyd like a thin silting of powdered glass.

“You spend a lot of time thinkin’ about that, don’t you?” Lloyd said.

“Yes.”

“You told me that to scare me, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

Lloyd thought that Schwartz might have gotten right with himself, in his own way, by seeing what he had seen and thinking on it. But something still didn’t add up.

“How do you know I’d be afraid?” Lloyd said. “How do you know that would be the last thing I’d feel?”

“I don’t know that.” Schwartz tick-ticked the pen. “You can never know. That’s what’s terrible about death.”

“Lots of things you don’t know when you’re alive. So what’s the difference?”

Schwartz’s fingers stopped, and he stared at Lloyd as though he had seen him purely and for the first time. A knock at the door broke the brief, still moment, and Sheriff Lynch entered. He carried under his arm a stack of manila folders, which he put down on the table. Schwartz rose, studying Lloyd. He shook the sheriff’s hand when it was offered. His eyes, though, were fixed on Lloyd. The sheriff caught this, but smiled pleasantly and told Schwartz it was good to see him again.

“Lloyd,” he said, and nodded at him. He lifted a chair from the corner, put it at the head of the table, and sat.

“I think I need a little more time to consult with my client,” Schwartz said.

The sheriff pressed his fingers a few times on top of the folders. “Okay. How much time do you think you’ll need?”

“We don’t need no more time,” Lloyd said, rocking back and forth in his chair. “I’m ready.”

“I’d like to look at what you’ve got there first.”

“But that wasn’t the agreement, Mr. Schwartz.”

“Come on,” Lloyd said. “I’m ready.”

“Why don’t you listen to your client?”

Looking from Lloyd to the sheriff, Schwartz paled. He seemed pinned in place for a moment; then he took off his glasses and rubbed them on his shirt. He put them on again. Sheriff Lynch stared at the stack of folders, his fingertips resting on them like a pianist’s, his expression one of patient indulgence toward a child who was finishing a noisy tantrum. Lloyd clenched his hands between his thighs, wondering what would be revealed to him.