“Were there men in the fantasies?”

“No. Well, sometimes there were men present. Sometimes the fantasy was a party, all our friends, and people would take off their clothes, and it would be sort of a free-for-all.”

“Would you have liked to transform that fantasy into reality?”

“If you knew the people,” he says, “you’d know how inconceivable that is. It was hard enough to make them act like that in my own mind.”

“And you never had sex with another man in these fantasies?”

He shakes his head. “There was nothing like that. The closest was sharing a woman with another man.”

“And you never did that outside of the world of your imagination?”

“No, of course not.”

“Never suggested it to your wife?”

“Jesus, no. I wouldn’t have wanted to do it, but in fantasy it was exciting.”

“Any children in those fantasies?”

“None.”

“Neither girls nor boys?”

“No.”

“Any violence? Any rape, any torture?”

“No.”

“Any forcing a woman to do something she didn’t want to do?”

“Never. They didn’t have to be forced. They all wanted to do everything. That’s one way you could tell it was a fantasy.”

They join in laughter, perhaps more than the line calls for.

He says, “Preston? Have you been listening to yourself? It’s inconceivable that you could have done what they said you did.”

“I’d always known as much, but—well, I’m relieved, Arne. You had me worried there, or perhaps I should say that I had myself worried.” He manages a smile. “Of course the bad news,” he says, “is that the day after tomorrow they’re still going to give me the needle.”

“It’ll be around noon,” Applewhite says. “I always assumed midnight. I mean all my life, when I thought of executions, which wasn’t something I thought about often, I must say, I thought they happened in the middle of the night. Somebody throws a switch and lights go dim all over the state. I must have seen a movie at an impressionable age. And I seem to remember newsreel footage outside a penitentiary, with one crowd there to protest the death penalty and another bunch having tailgate parties to celebrate that some poor bastard’s getting the shock of his life. You can’t have parties like that in the middle of the day. You need a dark sky so everyone can get a good view of the fireworks.”

The words are bitter, the tone lacking in affect. Interesting.

“The judge who sentenced me never said anything about the time, just the date. The particulars are up to the warden, and I guess Humphries doesn’t want to keep anybody up late.”

“Have they told you what to expect?”

“More than once. They don’t want any surprises. They’ll come here sometime between eleven and eleven-thirty to collect me. They’ll walk me to the chamber and strap me to the gurney. There’ll be a physician in attendance, among others, and there’ll be some spectators on the other side of a glass wall. I’m not sure what the purpose of the glass wall is. Not soundproofing, because there’s going to be a microphone, so they can hear my last words. I get to make a speech. I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to say.”

“Whatever you want.”

“Maybe I’ll stand mute. ‘Mr. Chairman, Alabama passes.’ On the other hand, why miss a chance to deliver a message? I could come out for national health insurance. Or against capital punishment, except that I’m not so sure I’m against it.”

“Oh?”

“I never was, before all this happened. And if I did what they say I did, then I ought to pay with my life. And if I didn’t, and there was no death penalty, well, I could spend the rest of my life in a cell that’s noisier and a lot less comfortable than this one, roundly despised by people I wouldn’t want to associate with in the first place. I’d probably be killed in prison, like Jeffrey Dahmer.”

“The people behind the glass wall,” he prompts.

“Some reporters, I suppose. And relatives of the victims, looking to see justice done, looking for closure. I remember what some of them said during the penalty phase of the trial, and my immediate response was to hate them, but hell, how can I blame them for hating me? They don’t know I didn’t do it.”

“No.”

“If they get some relief from my death, some of that blessed commodity they call closure, well, then I could say my death won’t be entirely in vain. Except it will.”

“Any other witnesses?”

Applewhite shakes his head. “Not that I know of. They told me I could invite somebody. Isn’t that rich? I tried to think who would possibly welcome an invitation like that, and if there is such a person, how could I stand to be in the same room with him? My parents are long gone—and thank God for that, incidentally—and even if my wife had stuck by me, even if I was getting regular visits with my kids, would I want their last sight of me to be with a needle in my arm?”

“Still, it strikes me as an awful time to be alone.”

“My lawyer offered to come. I guess that comes under the heading of professional noblesse oblige, something you have to do at the end of one of your less successful cases. I told him I didn’t want him there and he had to work hard not to look relieved.”

Come on, he urges silently. What are you waiting for?

“Arne? Do you think—”

“Of course,” he says. “I’m honored to be chosen.”

He’s up late Wednesday night watching pay-per-view porn on the motel set. Even in the Bible Belt, money calls the tune. A man’s home is his castle, even if it’s a cubicle rented for the night, and within its confines you can do as you please, as long as you’re willing to pay $6.95 for each XXX-rated feature.

The films don’t arouse him. Pornography almost never does. But nevertheless it diverts him. Not the plots, such as they are. To those he pays no attention. The dialogue is a nuisance, and he’d mute the sound if it didn’t mean losing other sounds as well—the background music, the sound effects of a zipper being lowered, a vibrator humming, a slap.

He watches it all, takes it all in, and lets his mind wander at will. There’s a glass of Scotch on the table beside him, and he takes a sip from time to time. There’s still a little left in the glass, diluted by the now-melted ice cubes, when the last film ends. He pours it down the sink and goes to bed.

Thursday he spends several hours in Applewhite’s cell. Their ritual handshake has by now become an embrace. Applewhite, in a reminiscent mood, talks at length about his childhood. It’s interesting enough, for all that it’s predictably ordinary.

There are interruptions. A doctor is admitted to the cell, carrying an ordinary bathroom scale, on which he duly weighs Applewhite, the weight jotted down in his notebook.

“So that he can calibrate the right dose,” Applewhite says after the man has left. “Though wouldn’t you think they’d just err on the side of caution and give everybody three or four times the lethal dose? What are they trying to do, save a few dollars on chemicals?”

“They want to maintain the illusion of scientific method.”

“That must be it. Or else they’re making sure they get a gurney stout enough so it won’t buckle under me. You know, they’d save themselves a lot of trouble and expense if they made it possible for a man to kill himself. You could braid a rope out of strips of bed linen, but what would you hang it from?”

“Would you kill yourself if you could?”

“I think about it. I read a book years ago, a thriller, and in it a man, I think he was Chinese, killed himself by swallowing his tongue. Do you suppose it’s possible?”

“I have no idea.”

“Neither have I. I was going to try it but…”

“But what, Preston?”

“I didn’t have the nerve. I was afraid it might work.”

“I can have whatever I want for dinner tonight. Within reason, they said. You know, I’ve had no trouble eating whatever’s on the tray. But now that they’re giving me a choice I don’t know what to ask for.”

“Whatever you want.”

“The guard slipped me a wink, told me he could probably bring me a drink if I wanted. I haven’t had a drink since they arrested me. I don’t think I want one now. You know what I think I’ll have?”

“What?”

“Ice cream. Not for dessert. A whole meal of ice cream.”

“With sauce and toppings?”

“No, just plain vanilla ice cream, but a lot of it. Cool, you know? And sweet, but not too sweet. Vanilla ice cream, that’s what I’ll have.”

“Do you ever think about the real killer?”

“I used to. That was the only way I could be exonerated, if they were to find him. But they weren’t looking for him, and why should they? All the evidence pointed to me.”

“It must have been maddening.”

“It was exactly that. It was driving me mad. Because it wasn’t just coincidence. Someone had to have gone to great length to plant evidence implicating me. I couldn’t think of anyone who would have had reason to hate me that way. I didn’t have many close friends, but I didn’t have any enemies, either. None that I knew of.”

“He not only framed you, but he killed three innocent boys in a horrible fashion.”

“That’s it—it’s not as though he embezzled money from a company and cooked the books to implicate a coworker. You could understand something like that, there’s a rational underpinning to it. But this guy would have had to be a sociopath or a psychopath, whatever the right term is, and he’d also have to have been fixated on me, on blaming me for it. I must sound paranoid, talking about this faceless enemy, but somebody must have done all of this, and that would make him an enemy, and I can’t put a face on him.”

“He won’t be able to stop.”

“How’s that?”

“He must have taken pleasure in the killing,” he explains. “Destroying you was part of his plan, obviously, but he killed those boys the way he did because he’s a sick bastard. He’ll do it again, one way or another, and sooner or later he’ll get caught. He might wind up confessing to all his crimes, that type often turns boastful once he’s caught. So the day may come when you’re exonerated after all.”

“It’ll be too late to do me any good.”

“I’m afraid that’s true.”

“But maybe the Willises will find out where their kid’s buried. I suppose that’s something.”

And, “Arne? Is there something on your mind?”

“There is, actually.”

“Oh?”

“There’s something I haven’t told you, and I honestly don’t know whether or not to mention it. Hell. Now I more or less have to, don’t I?”