Yes, perhaps Wheeler would have declined to speak on that famous last day: he would have scorned setting out his case and overwhelming the weary Judge with his carefully honed arguments and a list of his most notable deeds or with his entire history since birth, he would have scorned asking for or expecting justice or a mercy that he would doubtless find offensive, had he lived and died in a time when the majority of people still believed in such a day. Perhaps he would have preferred to avail himself of the Miranda law applied to anyone arrested in America (it was once recited to me, albeit imperfectly), I mean to create it avant la lettre and, of course, give it a different name in the midst of that great dance, so that its benefits or disadvantages would not, in any case, have spread beyond the living (although, on that day, I realised, there would be no one living, and everything would be apres la lettre). Wheeler might have kept silent and thus saved the Judge a drink or two, or half a pipe of opium, leaving him, instead, the task of ordering and recounting, after all, he had seen everything and heard everything, why bother telling him your story and enduring the inevitable shame and effort, it would be a waste of time even though there would be no time or only a kind of absurd time that would have a beginning but no end. And had he been questioned, or if the Judge had urged him to defend himself or make some kind of allegation – 'What have you got to say to that, Peter Rylands and Peter Wheeler of Christchurch in New Zealand?' – he would not even have answered 'Nothing', but would have remained silent, avoiding until the very end any careless talk, even his own and even when surrounded by it, because that would be the supreme day of careless talk and imprudent conversation, of loquacity and verbiage and full-scale confessions, a day made for reproaches and total justifications, of accusations and defences, excuses, appeals, furious denials and biased testimonies, for the odd bit of naive perjury and much telling of tales ('I didn't want to, I had nothing to do with it', 'You can search me if you like', 'It wasn't me', 'I only did it under duress', 'They put a gun to my head, I had to do it', 'It was his fault, her fault, their fault, everybody's fault but mine'); the ideal day to offload all those infinite deaths and to blame them on someone else. Yes, perhaps Wheeler would have refused to participate in that worldwide wittering, and decided not to play any trump card in that unequal game: 'Keep quiet and don't say a word, not even to save yourself. Put your tongue away, hide it, swallow it even if it chokes you, pretend the cat's got it. Keep quiet, and save yourself.’