QUAKER’S ONLY LIVING blood relative was his mother, Evelina. Quaker was the younger of two boys. His older brother Herbert died of a heroin overdose when Quaker was eight. Quaker found Herbert lying on the floor of the bedroom they shared, a tourniquet around his biceps, a needle hanging out of his arm. He dialed the operator and said his brother was asleep and wouldn’t wake up. EMT workers found him next to the body, saying, Open your eyes, Herbie. Please open your eyes.

Evelina had heard the news that we were going to have a hearing. She called me. She said, I apologize for bothering you, sir. I know you are a busy man. I told her that she wasn’t bothering me. She said, I need to do what I can to help Henry. My manager said he can give me the week off so I can come to Houston. Is that what I should do, sir? She lives in Temple, a four-hour-drive away, and works as a cashier at a grocery store. I told her she didn’t need to do anything and there was no reason for her to come to Houston. I tried to explain that the hearing was going to involve technical legal issues. I promised I would call her every day to let her know how things were going. She said, You do believe that Henry is innocent, don’t you, sir?

I decided to stop at the pool on the way home and go for a swim. I had an hour before Lincoln’s last t-ball practice of the year. It was four o’clock. The pool was empty. I tried to count my laps, but I kept losing track. I couldn’t stop the number 4 from appearing in my brain. They were scrolling across my retina on a film reel that counts down from ten until the movie begins, but every frame had the number 4, and it didn’t stop. 4, 4, 4, 4, 4. It was in black-and-white. The color part of my brain had malfunctioned. I wondered what it would be like to see the world without color, like a dog. I realized I knew already from old TV. Perry Mason was black-and-white. So was Leave It to Beaver. Wally and the Beav. If the older brother is a delinquent, does the younger brother have a chance? Then another 4 appeared, and I lost the thread of my thought. I looked at my watch and decided to swim for twenty minutes. I proposed to Katya on February 4. She and I walked with Winona over to the park where we had had our second date, a picnic lunch. I unhooked Winona from her leash and she stood next to me, leaning against my legs, wanting to be even closer, not understanding the physical limits on proximity. Katya and I sat on a bench and I opened a bottle of champagne I had in my backpack. I told her she was the most amazing person I had ever met and would she marry me. Saying that meant more than her answer. To me, the moment was more magical even than the day we got married, because it was just us. Had I forgotten all that when we settled on the same date for Quaker’s execution, or did I have some unwarranted faith that we’d survive that day?

I looked at my watch. I’d been swimming more than half an hour. I pulled myself out of the pool. My heart was racing like a newborn’s. Wasn’t it Rousseau who loved mankind and hated man? That’s me. I do not want my clients to be executed, and I can’t stand them. Why can’t I help somebody who didn’t kill someone?

Before I left my office that afternoon I decided we would do nothing to try to stave off the execution of Ronnie O’Neill. He’ll be the first person executed after the new year—on January 12, if all goes according to the state’s plan. We can’t help everyone, and we’re focused on Quaker.

All decisions to do nothing are hard. This one was especially so. O’Neill is mad. Murderers are often sociopaths, but most of them are not crazy. Not so with O’Neill. He heard voices telling him to kill his ex-wife. He’d been sent to a mental hospital fourteen times. When the cops came to arrest him after the murder, they knew his name. O’Neill shouted to them through the window that he would be right out and surrender himself. They waited. O’Neill took a shower, dressed himself in a suit and tie, walked out the front door, and lay facedown in the grass until the police came over and cuffed him. At the trial, the judge let O’Neill fire his lawyers and represent himself. The judge knew one thing: You don’t lose any votes greasing the rails for murderers. O’Neill wore a purple cowboy outfit to court, complete with boots, chaps, and spurs. His Mexican sombrero hung from a string that circled his neck like a choker. He had a toy pistol in a holster on his hip. He issued subpoenas to Pope John Paul II, Anne Bancroft, and John F. Kennedy, Jr. He rambled like a lunatic while the judge dozed at his bench. The jury spent less than fifteen minutes deliberating before sentencing him to death. The judge appointed a new lawyer to handle the appeal. Then he let O’Neill fire that lawyer, too. O’Neill filed no appeal. He wrote a letter to the judge asking for a speedy execution date, and the judge obliged. I went to see him on death row to ask whether he wanted to reinstate his appeal. O’Neill leaned close to the window and whispered into the phone, No worries, sir. Their chemicals can’t kill me. They will make me invisible and I will walk out of here. I will put you on my witness list if you would like so you can see the miracle for yourself. Jesus has arranged it all. I’ll be preaching the good gospel by the coming dawn. I asked him again whether he wanted me to do something. He said, Don’t you dare. Then he said, And forgive me for saying this, sir, but if you try, I will be forced to strike you mute. Heed my admonition, sir. I implore you. I thanked him for coming out to see me. He held a finger to his lips and winked at me.

Jerome is the office conscience. He asked what we were going to do for O’Neill. He was holding half a fresh baguette, the only food he would eat all day. I noticed how thin his arms are.

So that I wouldn’t have to look him in the eye, I looked at the wall chart that shows the workloads of the lawyers in my office. No one has time to try to save O’Neill’s life. I said, Nothing. We’re not going to do anything. We don’t have any more capacity, and besides, O’Neill doesn’t want our help.

He opened his eyes wide and stared at me for a moment. He looked like he was rehearsing what to say. Then he turned and walked out without saying a word.

LINCOLN WAS WAITING in the driveway for me as I pulled up to the house. I changed clothes and we got on the tandem bike and rode to practice. The professional coaches were trying to teach the kids to field grounders. Lincoln was playing second base. The coach hit him a soft ground ball, and it rolled between his legs into right field. The shortstop, Alexander, came over to Lincoln and pushed him in his chest. Lincoln said, Hey, why’d you do that? On the way home, after practice, Lincoln said, Alexander is mean. He pushed me for no reason. I told Lincoln that some kids are like that. He asked me why. I said I wasn’t sure.

Here’s a bet I’d be willing to wager: Alexander is going to be a bully. He’s going to spend time in detention. He’ll get in some fights. But he’s a middle-class kid with middle-class parents living in a brick house in a nice neighborhood where people walk their dogs and kids ride their bikes in the middle of the street. He’ll never murder anyone. I’d bet my life.

We stopped at the grocery store on the way home. Lincoln wanted a slice of pizza. I asked the butcher for an organic chicken, which I planned to roast with olive oil, lemon, and lots of garlic. Lincoln said, Please don’t buy a chicken, Dada. When he was four, Lincoln loved chicken nuggets. One day he asked where they came from. I told him. He asked, Do they have to kill the chicken? When I told him that they did, he said, Then I’m not going to eat them anymore. It’s not nice to kill little chickens. He hadn’t eaten meat or fowl since. He has a Hindu friend at school. At a restaurant last week, when the waitress asked him whether he wanted a grilled cheese or a cheeseburger, he said, I have to have a grill cheese. Vijay and I are vegetarians. And I would also like some lemonade, please. And carrot cake for dessert.

When Katya was pregnant and the obstetrician told us we were going to have a boy, I knew I would love my son. Parenthood is just one cliché after another. What I didn’t know was that I would admire him.

I said, Amigo, I sure do admire you. But I like meat.

He said, Well, you shouldn’t. The animals didn’t do anything mean to you, did they?

That night, after Lincoln went to sleep, I told Katya about my conversation with Evelina. She drank some wine and said, You can’t save everyone, you know. She peeled the wishbone out from the piece of chicken she was eating. Here, she said, break this with Lincoln in the morning.

The next day, before he went to school, Lincoln and I broke the wishbone. Again he got the bigger piece. He said, Do you want to know what I wished?

I said, Sure, amigo, but you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.

He said, I know. But I don’t mind. I wished that I die at the same time as you and Mama, so that way, none of us ever has to be alone.

I’m sure there’s a good way to answer that, but I don’t know precisely what it is.

OUR PARALEGAL BUZZED ME the next morning and told me Ezekiel Green was on the line. Death-row inmates cannot make phone calls. They can talk with their lawyers, but only by prearrangement. I asked her whether she was sure. She said, That’s what he said.

Green said, I can’t talk long, but I heard about your hearing. You need to bench-warrant me up there so I can help.

A bench warrant is an order a judge signs to have an inmate transported to the courthouse. I said, How are you calling me?

He said, Cell phone, man. Don’t worry, it’s all cool.

I didn’t want to know what kind of favors Green was trading with a guard to be able to call me on a cell phone. I said, I don’t think the judge is going to hear from any witnesses. But I’ll let you know. And if you call me again, I’ll tell the warden.

Green said, Merry Christmas, counselor, and he broke the connection.

WINTER IS MY FAVORITE time at the beach. Every year, Katya and I drive down to Galveston a day or two before Christmas and stay until after the first of the year. We have the beach to ourselves. We go on long walks, read, watch the waves, and drink margaritas on the deck. I was going to cancel this year, but Quaker was going to get executed anyway, so why bother?

The day before Christmas Lincoln wanted to practice riding his bike on the beach. When he hit the soft sand, his front tire started to wobble. He squeezed the front brake and went flying over the handlebars. His face hit the sand. He cut his cheek, right below his left eye, and his forehead. He bit through his lip. Blood was streaming down his face and he was crying. I told him falling is normal and he should get back on the bike. He was crying harder. When he gets older, he is going to encounter bad people. He needs to be able to defeat them, or at least avoid being hurt by them. I said, Get back on the bike, amigo, or we are going to take it back to the store. A woman walking down the beach looked at me oddly, but I was not screaming. I wasn’t. Lincoln was sobbing so hard he was shaking.

Just then, Katya came running up to us, and Lincoln wrapped his arms around her. While she stroked his hair, I told her what happened. She said to me in a stage whisper, Can I walk home with him?

I said, Fine. It might have been closer to a hiss.

When O’Neill was twenty-one years old, he rode a kid’s tricycle through his neighborhood. I’ve seen photographs. He looked like a circus clown. He wasn’t doing it to be funny. He played with kids who were six years old. The neighbors thought he was simpleminded but harmless. They were half right.

I pushed Lincoln’s bike for a while, then picked it up and carried it the rest of the way home. The dog usually ran ahead of me, attacked some waves, chased some gulls, and waited for me to catch up. This day she was walking ten yards behind me, like she was embarrassed. Another hall-of-fame parenting day.

Lincoln ate some soup and went to sleep. Katya said, Do you want to go back to Houston? I told her no. She said, Okay. But Lincoln and I will understand if you change your mind. She read until she fell asleep on the couch. I carried her to bed and put Lincoln in bed next to her. I carried a bottle of bourbon out onto the deck and listened to the ocean that was too dark to see. At three I crawled into bed. At five I got up and started to work on my outline for the Quaker hearing. My phone buzzed. I had gotten a text message. It said, Quaker needs to see you. It was signed EG.

At eight I called Jerome, who is also the office ethicist, and asked him whether I needed to report Green to the warden. I was pretty sure it was illegal for death-row inmates to have access to cell phones, meaning I knew a crime was being committed. Green was not my client, so I did not have any duty of loyalty toward him. Jerome said, Don’t you think we need to keep Green warm in case he really knows something about Quaker? I asked Jerome to set up a meeting for me to see Quaker on December 30. He said, One other thing. I went ahead and wrote up something for O’Neill. I’m going to e-mail it to you. I’d like to get it filed the day after Christmas, so can you look at it today?

I said, I thought we decided not to do anything for O’Neill.

Jerome said, Actually, you decided that. But you said that it was based on nobody’s having time. I couldn’t sleep last night so I had eight hours to write the motion. I didn’t think you’d care what I did on my time.

I told him I would look at it right away.

There’s nothing quite like being the boss.

FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, I did not turn on my computer or check my voice mail. I was completely focused on trying to avoid being a terrible dad.

My dreams were not so forgiving. The night before I was going to drive to the prison, I dreamed that Katya, Lincoln, the dog, and I were hiking up at Guardsman Pass. It was late November. A dusting of snow covered the steel-hard ground. Deep in the forest, we drank soup from a thermos and ate saltine crackers and chocolate. When we got back to the truck I asked Katya where Lincoln had run to. She said she thought I had him. Winona was running back and forth, nose to the ground, agitated. There was less than an hour of daylight left. Katya and Winona took off to retrace our steps. Just then Henry Quaker came out of the woods, carrying Lincoln on his back. Winona started to bark, a sound of joy. Lincoln was saying, Hooray for Henry, Hooray for Henry.

Maybe we don’t love our son more than you love yours, but I’m certain we love him more than my clients’ parents loved theirs. Henry might have been an exception.

At dawn on the thirtieth I went for a run with the dog. When I got back I wrote a note for Katya and Lincoln saying I’d be home in time for dinner. I drove off to see Quaker.

I TOLD QUAKER that his mom had called me. He asked whether that was why I was there on the day before New Year’s Eve. I told him about the message from Green. He said, The only time I talk to the guy is to say, What’s up? I didn’t tell him nothing about my case.

I’d driven four hours to see a client who did not need to see me.

I asked Quaker whether he wanted anything to eat. He said, They got beer in those machines? He smiled. He said, You know, I was planning on going to see Dorris on the day the police came to get me.

I had avoided asking Quaker what had happened between him and Dorris, but I felt like I had to. It was like listening to a fairy tale. He had gone to a basketball game with her when he was in ninth grade, and that night when he got home he told his mama that he had met the woman he was going to marry. He said to me, This is corny, man, but the first time I talked to her, I felt like I’d known her forever. I knew we belonged together.

Nicole, the guard, came over. She asked Henry how he was doing. I would have sworn she winked at him. She told me Happy New Year and walked away. I looked at Quaker. He shrugged.

Quaker said, Was it love at first sight for you?

I said, I thought love was only true in fairy tales.

He said, Then for someone else but not for me. I love that song. Did you know that Neil Diamond wrote it for the Monkees?

I hadn’t known that. I said, Seriously?

He said, Yeah. Some famous jazz critic, first time he heard Bill Evans, thought the guy was a lounge player. Can you imagine that? Bill Evans?

I had heard that. I said, There’s a certain kind of talent that you have to learn to appreciate.

He said, The flip side of belonging together the way we did is that Dorris needed me, needed me a lot. She was one of those girls who needed to talk and talk. I didn’t have to say nothing, just so long as I was listening, you know? And she liked to be touched. Holding hands, neck rubs. Didn’t matter what. She wanted me to be close to her.

There was a fly buzzing around inside the cage where he was sitting. It landed on his hand. He didn’t try to kill it, just shooed it away.

He said, She needed intimacy. He stressed the word, like maybe I didn’t know what it meant.

He said, After the fire, I couldn’t give her what she needed. I tried. I really did.

His eyes lost focus, like he was seeing the scene. He continued, One time I had this dream that my hands got cut off, but I didn’t even know it till I sat down at the piano in church and couldn’t play. I looked and they were just stubs. I felt all them people in the pews watching me. That’s what it was like. I was trying, but what I needed was gone.

He did not need any reassurance from me. I don’t even know if he needed me to listen, but I wanted to. He told me about the morning it happened: He was fixing breakfast for Daniel and Charisse. Standing at the stove, wooden spoon in hand, he saw he was no longer what she needed. It was a vision, not a thought, and it did not come gradually, but instead overwhelmed him, suddenly, unexpectedly, and completely. He said, It reminded me of the story in the Bible about Esau, Jacob’s twin brother, how he’s born fully developed. It was like being in a fun house at a carnival. Nothing looked familiar. He wasn’t sure which of the kids asked him to put sausage in the eggs, or whether they wanted butter on their toast.

He said, It was sort of like losing my memory, except I remembered enough to know I was losing it. Isn’t that strange?

When he told her he was missing the parts that made them right for each other, Dorris said she could wait it out, wait until he was back to normal again, however long it took. But the way he was was the way he was going to be. He knew it. He fantasized about driving off into the desert, or swimming out into the ocean, and just surrendering. He said, God has a plan for us all. I was ready for Him to take me so He could take care of my family. I asked him why he hadn’t. He looked at me with what I thought was surprise, but it might have been pity. He said, The kids, man. I had two kids. The Lord will provide bread, but He doesn’t go to ball games or swim meets. Just ’cause I was no good for Dorris didn’t mean Daniel and Charisse would be better off with no dad.

One minute I felt like we were connecting. The next I felt impossible distance. I got up to go to the bathroom. I splashed water on my face and looked in the stainless-steel mirror at the dark circles under my eyes. There was no trash can for my paper towel. I flipped it into the toilet and flushed it away. I felt an overwhelming urge to go home. When I came out an inmate I had not met was wildly waving me over. I picked up the phone. He said, You know me? I shook my head. He said, I’m Greg Whitaker. Come see me, okay? I didn’t kill nobody. I was there, but I didn’t pull the trigger. Can you please come see me? I told him I’d try and I put down the phone. Whitaker? I knew something about the case but I couldn’t think of it. My brain felt thick.

I walked back over to Quaker. He was reading. I said, What did you tell your lawyer about the insurance?

Everything about him felt so sincere, so completely honest. I wanted him to lie to me. I wanted him to give me a reason not to believe a word he said. He said, Oh, the insurance. I wondered when you were gonna ask. That was the agent’s idea. I was just planning on getting insurance for the cars. She told me that it’s a good way to save money. I told Dorris about it. She said to go on ahead. We had two children. We needed to save for college. So I bought it. I kinda thought it was a waste of money, but they just took it out of my paycheck.

He said, Do you have life insurance? I told him I didn’t. He said, See, that’s what I’m saying. Smart dudes like you don’t buy it. Why should I?

We sat silently for a while. Then he said, How come you ain’t asked about the blood? I shrugged. Please, I thought, tell me a fucking lie. He said, If it was really Danny’s, it must have been from one of his nosebleeds. He had ’em all the time.

It hadn’t really occurred to me that the blood might not be Daniel’s. I asked him whether he had told his lawyer about the nosebleeds. He said, ’Course I did. Told the police, too.

I told him the next time I would see him would be at the hearing and asked if he needed anything in the meantime. He said, I could use some more books. I’m reading this dude named Tim O’Brien. He’s got books about Vietnam. They resonate with me.

I said, Resonate?

He grinned and said, I got plenty of time in here to get educated.

I told him I’d send him some books, and I stood up to leave. He hesitated, I saw it, but then he put his hand on the glass to say good-bye.

IT’S NOT FASHIONABLE to believe in truth, but what can I say? There’s good and bad, right and wrong, true and false. My conversation with Quaker left me dizzy. It was gray outside. The drizzle felt like pricks of ice. I hallucinated. I saw Quaker swirling in black water, his white jumpsuit like the middle of an Oreo. Have you heard of the Coriolis force? The mathematics are complicated (Google Laplace’s tidal equations if you want to see for yourself), but that’s not what I was struggling with. It was something else. Coriolis is true, but the belief that it influences which way the water spins on its way down the toilet is false. And it remains false even if a million people, a billion, think it’s true. It doesn’t matter which direction he was spinning. Here’s what I was thinking: Either way, he’s dead.

In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien says, A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. He’s right, and the more important thing is that he is not disagreeing with me. A jury of middle-class white people spent a week looking at a sullen unshaved black man and listening to a passionate prosecutor while the black man’s lawyer slept, and there were three dead bodies, and two of them were children, and when you see pictures of a dead child, especially one who’s been shot, you need to know who did it, believe me you do. They believed her version: a true story that never happened.

But just because you believe in black-and-white doesn’t mean that you can’t also believe in gray, because even though something that is true cannot be a lie, and even though a lie can never be true, not everything that is true is equally true. Happening truth is not false; it is just less true than story truth.

Happening truth just is; story truth needs a teller. That’s what law is. The facts matter, but the story matters more. The problem we faced is Quaker’s story had already lost, and the only truth that mattered now was the one that I didn’t have the facts to tell.

LINCOLN’S MIDDLE NAME is Peter, after Katya’s dad. Peter died from metastatic melanoma when he was sixty, a month before our second wedding anniversary. Katya’s mom has never even thought of remarrying. She believes in soul mates. Her husband was her life.

I envied their relationship. Katya feared it. She didn’t want her world to end if I died prematurely, or if I woke up one day and walked off to be alone with myself. She set up a page on Facebook and collected a couple hundred friends. She started competing in Latin ballroom dance.

It seemed to me like she was nurturing a parallel life in case ours ended too soon. I told her that. She said I was being ridiculous, but I noticed that she didn’t deny it.

One night she and some of the dancers from her studio went out for sushi and then club-hopping. At midnight she called to say she was on the way home. The club was fifteen minutes away. Half an hour later, she still wasn’t home. I called her cell phone and went straight to voice mail. I sat in the upstairs reading area of our house, a Cormac McCarthy novel open on my lap, and stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the street she’d have to come down. Ten minutes later I called her cell phone for the second time, and again five minutes after that, then a fourth time. At one fifteen she answered.

Where the fuck are you?

What’s the matter with you? Janet lost her keys. I’ve been trying to help her find them.

I said, You told me you were coming home more than an hour ago.

She said, Since when do you worry about me? I thought you’d be asleep. You’re always asleep when I come home late.

The truth of that observation jolted me. I said, I don’t think you can draw any inferences from the fact I fall asleep early sometimes.

She said, That’s true.

I tried to figure out whether I was mad or worried. I’ve heard that anger is never the first emotional reaction. Maybe I was worried and then mad. Or maybe jealous and then mad. If I’m going to need her, shouldn’t she need me, too?

BEFORE KATYA AND I were married, while she was still practicing law, we had plans to go to her law firm’s annual meeting in New York. Our flight left Friday morning. On Thursday I went to the prison to see Moises Ramirez. Ramirez was scheduled to be executed the following week. He was not our client. He had written me five letters in three days, begging for help.

When he came into the cage he was wearing horn-rimmed glasses and had peach fuzz on his chin. He looked like the character who played Michael J. Fox’s father in the first Back to the Future movie. He had a tattoo on his left forearm that said Clara. I had no idea what he had done. I was there to tell him there was nothing I could do.

I said, I talked to your lawyers and told them I was going to come talk to you.

He said, I ain’t heard nothing from my lawyers in like five years. They don’t live in Texas no more, do they?

In fact, his lawyers had left the state. But I was surprised they had not even written him. I asked, Who told you about your execution date?

First time I heard about it was when the major called me into his office. That was a month ago.

I looked down at my notebook. I wrote the word Scared. He said, I been writing my pen pals. Cheryl, she lives in West Virginia, wrote me back and gave me your address. I just need some kind of help, man. I want y’all to represent me. My pen pals can get y’all some money.

I said, The problem isn’t money. The problem is that it is really too late to file anything else.

His lower lip quivered. I thought, Please don’t start crying.

That morning the Supreme Court had decided a case having to do with the obligations of lawyers appointed to represent death-row inmates in federal court. In my office we had started constructing an argument based on the new case we thought might buy some more time for a few of our clients. I did not want to waste it on Ramirez.

I said, The Supreme Court decided a case today that we might be able to use to get you a stay.

He said, What’s that?

I said, A stay means you won’t get executed next week.

He said, No. I know. But then what? Does it mean I get another month or something?

I said, At this point, the only goal is to get you a stay. If you don’t get executed next Wednesday, then we can try to figure out what else to do.

The phrase blank stare was invented to describe the look he was giving me. I could not tell whether he did not understand what I was saying, or whether he did not like what I was saying. I said, I’m not going to file anything unless you want me to.

He said, I want you to do anything you can.

I said, Okay, but let me explain how it will work before you decide that.

I went through the normal speech, telling him that we would probably lose, and that we would not know we had lost until twenty minutes before six, and that I would call him and he would not have a chance to prepare or tell anyone good-bye.

He said, I ain’t got nobody I have to say good-bye.

Okay. But you still won’t have much time to get ready.

So you don’t think I’ll get me a stay?

I said, I think there is at most a one percent chance you’ll get a stay.

What’s that?

What’s a stay?

No. A one. What did you say?

I said there is no more than a one percent chance we’ll win.

He said, Yeah, that. What is it? Like out of a hundred?

I said, Percent? Yes. It’s like there are a hundred Ping-Pong balls. One chance we will win. Ninety-nine chances we will lose.

He said, Okay. Yeah. I want you to.

That night I told Katya about the visit. She knew what was coming. I said I couldn’t go to New York. She said, For somebody who claims he doesn’t want people depending on him you sure create a lot of dependency.

I said, I know it won’t make any difference, but I think it helps him to know someone is out there trying to help him. Katya didn’t say anything. I said, I think the worst thing is to feel completely alone in the universe.

Katya was mad I was not going to go to New York. She said, I get that.

LINCOLN AND KATYA were watching SpongeBob SquarePants when I got back to the beach. Lincoln ran over and hugged me. I pretended that he knocked me down and we rolled around on the floor, me tickling him, until he begged me to stop. Katya said, How did it go?

I said, Quaker asked me whether when I met you it was love at first sight.

She laughed. She said, Did you lie and say yes?

I said, If I had said yes it wouldn’t have been a lie. It just took me several years to realize it.

She said, Right.

Lincoln said, What’s love at first sight? Katya explained that it is when two people know as soon as they meet each other that they want to be with each other forever. Lincoln said, That’s impossible.

Katya looked at me and smiled. She said, He’s definitely your son.

ON THE WESTERN TIP of Galveston Island, where the Gulf of Mexico meets the bay, only the ignorant stray far from shore. The vicious swirling currents pull overconfident swimmers out to the open seas and drown a dozen unsuspecting fishermen a year. I got into my kayak and floated into it. Underneath it’s a maelstrom, but from on top of the water, where I intended to stay, it seemed peaceful and calm. The Buddhist river runners I used to know would say that the secret was never to fight the river. I was willing to go wherever the tides wanted to put me.

I saw a couple of dorsal fins. I thought the dolphins had come over to play, then I saw that there was only one fin, not two, and that it was a shark. It was only six feet long, which is long enough when you’re floating in a plastic seven-foot boat in the middle of the ocean. A school of jellyfish, thousands of them, streamed toward my boat, then fanned out along its length, half reaching toward the bow, half toward the stern, forming a torus, and rejoining into a line on the other side. It was cold, a hard wind blowing in from the north, the second day of the new year, and at 3:00 p.m., the sun was already low in the western sky. Four pelicans flew in a line, nose to tail, not a foot above the surf. I watched them until they were a dot. Looking south toward Cuba, I saw nothing, not a boat, not a rig, not a man, just the horizon, and a sliver of moon. The tide pushed me a mile to the east, where the waves began lapping, easing me to the shore. An hour later I was aground. I laced on my shoes and jogged back up the beach, through the soft sand, to my truck. By the time I got back to our cabin, Katya and Lincoln were back from shopping, and my mind was washed. Lincoln asked whether we could go build a sand castle before dinner, and I said sure.

Katya and I sat on the deck and ate fried trout while Lincoln watched TV and ate buttered spaghetti. When I was ten, my brother Mark, who was then eight, decided to be a vegetarian. We had a housekeeper named Evelina, just like Quaker’s mom. The second day of Mark’s vegetarianism, she made pepper steak, his favorite, stirring thinly sliced flank steak in a cast-iron skillet with just a tad of oil, some garlic, a tablespoon of freshly ground peppercorns, and sliced jalapeños. Mark ate two servings. We shared a room. That night, as we were going to sleep, he said, If I’m going to be a vegetarian, I’m not going to be able to eat some things I really like. I told him that was true. He nodded like he had had a great insight then told me good night. He did not eat meat again for more than fifteen years.

Katya said, Where did you go? I told her I was thinking about how Henry’s mom had the same name as a woman who used to cook for us. She said, I think this case is officially under your skin. I told her she might be right. We decided that she and Lincoln and the dog would come back to Galveston in a month, while I would be occupied with the Quaker hearing, so that I did not drive them crazy, and vice versa. We told Lincoln the next day on the drive back to Houston.

He said, But it won’t be fun without Dada. I told him that he and Mama would have plenty of fun. He said, I know. It will still be pretty good, but not great. He spread his hands two feet apart. He said, If this is great… Then he held his hands two inches apart and said,… and if this is terrible… He held his hands about six inches apart and said, Going to Galveston without Dada will be this good. Katya leaned over and kissed him on the head. He said, Dada, I’m hungry.

We stopped for ice cream. Walking back to the truck, Lincoln noticed the tape measure next to the door. He asked why it was there. I told him that if the place got robbed, and police asked the clerk how tall the thief was, she wouldn’t need to guess. Lincoln asked why someone would steal, and I said that there are some bad people in the world. He said, But maybe he just needs money to eat. I said that might be possible. Lincoln said, Besides, if he’s bad, Dada, he might shoot the person. I told him that was true. He said, Remember when Mia pulled my hair? I told him yes, I did. He said, I still don’t understand why some people are bad. I just don’t get it.

LINCOLN STARTED GETTING night terrors when he was almost two. He would start to cry softly, and it would grow, crescendo-like, until he was screaming. His eyes would be closed. Katya or I would lift him from his bed, and he would be limp and tense, back and forth, eyes shut, shrieking. We would pace, turn on the lights, talk to him loudly. Minutes would go by, sometimes five, sometimes ten. He would finally stop without ever waking, and in the morning recall nothing.

I knew these terrors were not my fault, and that they were. They started the night that Julius Anthony died. Anthony lived on death row for twenty-two years. He and two of his gang buddies shot an elderly woman for her Cadillac when Anthony was nineteen. His friends fired the shots. Anthony only drove the car, but the others were two years younger and not yet old enough to be executed for the crimes, so Anthony was the only one sentenced to die. On death row he grew up. By the time he died, he was not remotely the same person he had been. Six guards wrote letters, pleading with the governor to spare his life. They said they supported the death penalty, but not for Anthony. He was a peacekeeper, they wrote; he had intervened in fights and saved guards’ lives. He had counseled other inmates. He was not a risk to anyone and he caused others not to be risks as well. The governor turned them down, issuing a boilerplate statement the day of the execution that said the jury had spoken. The chaplain told me that it took prison officials forty-five minutes of poking to get the needle inserted into a vein. One of the guards on the tie-down team was crying. Anthony told him not to worry, that everything would be okay, the inmate consoling the executioner. After the execution, the victim’s son and I found ourselves standing next to one another outside the execution chamber, a rare social blunder by prison officials. He put his arm around me and leaned his head on my shoulder. A reporter called me on my cell phone while I was driving home to ask me how it felt. I told him to hold on for a moment. I put the phone down on the passenger seat, and left it there for the two-hour drive back to Houston.

When I got home that night Katya was sitting in the rocking chair in Lincoln’s room listening to her iPod. She stood up and hugged me, and we watched him together, his arm wrapped tightly around a teddy bear. We went downstairs and I poured us a drink. An hour later, Lincoln was wailing.

AS I PULLED onto the freeway after our stop for ice cream on the drive home from Galveston, I saw a flash of lightning out of my right eye. I asked Katya whether she had seen it. She said no, and then I saw it again. A window shade came down, and just like that, the top half of my vision was gone. I said, Uh-oh. Lincoln asked me what was wrong. I told him nothing. I asked Katya to drive. She heard something in my voice and didn’t ask why. When we got out of the car to change seats, I told her I couldn’t see out of my right eye. I called my neighbor, an eye surgeon, and he told me to come over as soon as we got back to town.

I walked next door to Charlie’s house. He looked at me and drove us to his office. He dilated my eyes and told me that my retina was torn into the macula, and he wanted to operate on me the next day. He explained that the retina is the layer across the back of the eyeball that serves as the film for the eye. Images go from the retina to the optic nerve to the brain. I needed to have the retina repaired, or I would be blind. He said, I told you to stop boxing. I reminded him I had quit sparring more than ten years earlier. He said, Hmmm.

I asked about the recovery time and Charlie said I would not be able to do any work for a week, maybe two, perhaps as long as three. I told him there was no way I could put things off for that long. He said, The alternative is that you go blind. I asked him what were the percentages of that. He said, Of going blind with an unrepaired retina that is torn into the macula? I nodded. He said, One hundred percent.

I said, Well, I guess that’s that.

After he drove us home I told Katya. The surgery would take around two hours. I found my will and my living will, telling doctors not to take heroic measures to save me. I called the office and talked to Jerome to let him know what was going on. I asked him whether he could call the judge’s clerk to see about the possibility of putting off the hearing for a week or two. The next morning, Katya and I dropped Lincoln at a friend’s house and she drove me to the hospital. At nine the anesthesiologist said I would begin to feel woozy in a minute or two. The last thoughts I had were: If I die, I wonder if Quaker will get a stay. Then: If I die, I’ll have stumbled onto a guilt-free way of not doing this anymore.

Three hours later I woke up in the recovery room feeling like I’d eaten a bale of cotton. Katya and Lincoln were there, reading Narnia. Lincoln said, Look, Mama. Dada’s awake. I smiled and tried to drink some water. It spilled out of my mouth. My tongue felt like wax paper. Lincoln said, Look what I brought. He held up a wishbone. Nana gave it to me. Let’s break it, okay? He got the bigger piece, again.

I said, Amigo, are you cheating when we break these things?

He said, No, Dada, I am not. Do you want to know my wish? I nodded. He said, My wish is that you get to help the person you are trying to help.

THIS IS A LITTLE KNOWN FACT, but I invented books on tape. When I was in college, I said to myself, I should open a business renting out books on cassette tapes. It was my best idea, surpassing even my idea for a single serving of ground coffee that could be brewed in a bag like tea, for that fresh-brewed taste on camping trips. I also invented the idea of a computer in a car, with local maps programmed in, that could give you directions. I was going to put them in rental cars. Unfortunately, I took no steps in any of these instances other than having the idea, which apparently many other people had as well.

My grandmother was an avid reader. She went blind before there was such a thing as books on tape. She lost her vision when she was eighty-four and died when she was eighty-eight. She had cancer in her sinus that required radiation. The doctor told her she might lose her vision in the eye next to the sinus with the tumor. The doctor didn’t say anything about losing the vision in the other eye. I wanted to sue. If I had been eighty-four and the doctor told me I would be blind, I’d take my chances with the cancer.

Death-penalty lawyers have a peculiar definition of victory. I already said that when my clients die of AIDS on death row, I count those deaths as victories. But it doesn’t stop there. One of my clients was supposed to be executed on July 1. We got a stay on June 30, so he did not get executed until August 1. Another month of life in a sixty-square-foot cage. But he was breathing. That’s a victory. When you lose most of the wars, you start seeing successes in individual battles as victories. In the free world, as my clients call it, definitions are different.

When I asked Charlie about the risks of the surgery, he told me I could lose my vision anyway. I said, I can’t work if I can’t see. He said that I’d learn to read Braille. I have a seven-year-old son and a wife I love. That seemed like a victory in my world.

Everybody sent me books on tape. I listened to the first book, written and read by David Sedaris. For five minutes I laughed out loud. Then I could not stop thinking about never being able to read again. Instead of hearing what he was saying, I was hearing him reading, and being reminded with every word that I could not read to myself. I did not listen to any more of the tapes.

FOR A WEEK I worked with my eyes closed. Though I wouldn’t want to stay that way, I have to say that my piano playing got much better, and my thinking was less clouded. Katya drove me to the office in the morning after dropping Lincoln at school, and I would lie on my couch and talk to Jerome, Gary, and Kassie about the case. Kassie felt sure Green was involved. She said, Woman’s instincts. Trust me here.

It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her. Green was who I didn’t trust. When I was in elementary school, my brothers and I would dial a random number and tell whoever answered not to pick up their phone for the next hour because the electric company was working on the line, and if they answered the phone, whoever was calling would get a severe shock. We’d wait ten minutes and dial the number again. Someone usually answered, and when they did, we’d scream like we’d been electrocuted. People torture others because it’s fun, or because they don’t have anything else to do, or because they’re on death row, and they’re angry and cold, and they aim to inflict as much pain as they can on the outside world before they get removed from it.

Two years earlier, a chaplain on death row started reading scripture to my clients. They began asking me to waive their appeals. The chaplain told them if they repented, Jesus would forgive them, but if they fought, they would burn in hell. In his universe, pursuing legal appeals was a form of fighting. By appealing, they were refusing to take responsibility for what they had done. Two times is a coincidence, three makes a conspiracy. After my fourth client wrote instructing me to waive his appeals, I drove to the chaplain’s small house in Huntsville and sat in a rocking chair on the front porch, waiting for him to get home. I’m not a Christian, and if I were, I wouldn’t be a good one. My capacity for turning the other cheek is shallow. I introduced myself and told him that if he spent another nanosecond with any of my clients, he’d learn for himself the ins and outs of litigation. He looked at me with what I first thought was incomprehension but later decided might have been sorrow, like I didn’t know salvation when it was sharing my clothes.

Then again, even though I didn’t want my clients surrendering their appeals, I had to admire the guy. He had gotten through to these men in a way no one had before. Sure, he had probably threatened them with eternal damnation, but still. I do believe he really did care about them. Almost all my clients should have been taken out of their homes when they were children. They weren’t. Nobody had any interest in them until, as a result of nobody’s having any interest in them, they became menaces, at which point society did become interested, if only to kill them. The chaplain had found a pressure point that could have saved lives, if someone had cared enough to find it sooner.

But there are a resolute handful who spurn saving. They make shanks from their dinner trays and they spit on the guards. They save their feces to use as projectiles. They make a game of breaking rules. Their objective is to die without breaking themselves. When Breaker Morant was marched before the firing squad, he told the bishop who had come to pray for him that he was a pagan, and he screamed at his executioners, Shoot straight, ya bloody bastards. Green was less literate, but just as incorrigible. The chaplain I threatened would never had gotten through to him.

Kassie had shown a picture of Green to Sandra Blue, the Quakers’ neighbor. Blue told Kassie she had never seen him before, but Kassie wasn’t sure. She decided to bluff. She paid Green a visit and told him that the Quakers’ neighbor had recognized him. He squinted at her and shook his head. He told Kassie that if I didn’t come up to see him, he was taking his secrets to the grave. Before she left he said, Sit there a few more minutes for me will you, and he dropped his hand into his lap.

She said, I swear, it’s the last time I go talk to him. But you need to go see him. The scumbag knows something. I’m sure of it.

Jerome had gone back to Bud Lomax’s house with a video camera. He sat in his car drinking coffee from six in the morning until he heard the TV through an open window at a quarter past ten. He knocked, and Lomax came to the door in his underwear. I watched the video. Lomax was unshaved but coherent. He was also believable. He looked at the camera and said, I don’t believe that Henry Quaker killed my sister. I lied on him at his trial. I did it because that detective threatened me. He told me I had enough drugs in my house to spend the rest of my life in prison. I didn’t want to spend no time in prison. I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.

Gary had filed a motion requesting that we be allowed to retest some of the evidence in the case. When the court said we could, the prosecutor and I agreed that Melissa Harmon would take the samples to the lab. She called. She said, Two of the blood drops are too degraded to be useful. I’m waiting on results for the other four. Kimberly Crist thinks there is no doubt whatsover that the blood was dripping from a person or from an object that was moving from the woman toward the children.

Crist was the chief scientist at the lab. I did not welcome her opinion, especially the no doubt whatsoever language. But scientists are often wrong, even if they are never uncertain. I was not ready to give up on my theory, which of course was actually just a hope, until the remaining blood drops had been typed.

I said, If the blood belongs to one or both of the kids, she did it. If it belongs to her, the likely scenario is that she was shot first, and the killer went into the other room and then shot the kids. I’m not giving up on murder-suicide until we know whose DNA is in the blood.

Melissa said, The problem with your theory is that she couldn’t have shot herself without a gun, but there was no gun.

I said, Maybe there was. There had to be. Why else test her hands?

I’m not sure.

I said, Would you be willing to talk to Wyatt?

Wyatt was the investigating detective. She said, Sure. Why not? It’s your money.

I told the others about the call. Then I asked Gary to set up a trip to the prison for me to see Green and Quaker. I sat up and said, I’m walking next door to Treebeard’s. Anyone want anything to eat? Gary said he’d go for me. I said, No, I want to go. I need to walk. I’ll be back in ten minutes with shrimp étouffée and butter cake for everyone.

I stood at the counter while the servers filled quart containers with étouffée, gumbo, and rice. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around. It was Judge Truesdale. She looked at my eye.

Good God, what on earth happened to you? She touched my right cheek.

You should see the other guy, I said.

The server handed me my food. She said, I’m eating over there by myself. Sit with me for a minute. I followed her to her table. She said, This is off the record, okay?

I am pretty sure that off-the-record conversations with a judge who is presiding in a case that I have pending in her courtroom is not okay.

I said, Sure.

She said, Signing a death warrant makes things real to me. When the jury comes back and I announce a death sentence, I feel like a spectator. But when I sign the warrant… Her voice trailed off. She said, Quaker’s jury was out for a long time. We thought they were going to acquit him.

I said, Why are you telling me this, Judge?

She said, I’m not exactly sure.

Then she said, In a hundred years, people are going to look back, and they are going to wonder what on earth we were doing. She drank some tea.

I said, I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.

She said, Take care of that eye.

RICHARD FEYNMAN KEPT a list of the things he didn’t know. I’ve often wondered how much you have to know to know what you don’t know. I could make a list of things I want to know but don’t, but it would depress me. I myself don’t understand just about everything, a detail of which I’m reminded whenever I go to death row, especially when I go on Fridays. I was there to see Green, and to say hello to Quaker.

I pulled into the Exxon a couple of miles down the road from the prison. Inside, changing $10 bills for fists full of quarters, were three twenty-something-year-old women from France. A tall redhead, Monique, recognized me, said hello, and introduced me to her friends. They were in Texas to visit murderers. Monique was there to visit her husband, a Honduran who, along with three other drug dealers, had raped and murdered two high-school students who made a disastrously wrong turn down a dead-end street on the day that the older girl got her driver’s license. The Honduran testified at his trial and said the murder was a mistake. He probably meant to say unplanned, in that it is hard to characterize as a mistake a murder that is accomplished by stabbing the victims thirteen times. I was less unforgiving before I became a dad. Monique met the guy after he arrived on death row. A year, four visits, and sixteen letters later, they got married by proxy. She had never touched him, and wouldn’t, until he was dead.

I know two dozen murderers whose European wives fly over to see them three or four times a year, staying at cheap hotels near the prison and surviving on fast food and vending machines. The prison doesn’t allow visitors to bring in reading material, so the women sit and twiddle their thumbs for an hour waiting for guards to bring out their spouses, then hold a grimy phone to their ears and talk to their mates through the Plexiglas for four hours more. They do not want to be U.S. citizens, so it might not be love, but it isn’t expediency, either.

Monique asked me who I was going to see. I told her, and she told me that Green’s wife was with him at that very moment. I had not known that Green had a wife. Monique told me her name was Destiny. She was Irish. I thought to myself, Who names their kid Destiny? Then I thought, How drunk would a woman have to be to get married to a guy who beat his previous wife to death?

Monique and her friends followed me to the prison. Outside the prison gates on Fridays, the parking lot is like a carnival. Vans and RVs and pickup trucks with campers fill all the visitor spaces. Because death row has visiting hours on Saturdays, families can see their loved ones two days in a row without missing two days of work. Wives come to see their husbands. Mothers and fathers come to see their sons. Sons and daughters come to see their dads. Death row on Fridays is living proof of how many families murderers ruin.

Before buzzing me through the gate, the guard reminded me that I could not wear sunglasses inside. I took them off so she could see my eye, the white of which was still the color of a fine chianti, three weeks after my surgery. She said, I think I’ll let you wear them today, counselor.

Inside, Monique introduced me to Destiny. She couldn’t have been much more than five feet tall, but she weighed, I would estimate, close to 300 pounds. Green weighed maybe 120. He was eating fried pork rinds and drinking a Pepsi. Destiny looked up at me when I walked over but didn’t say a word. I said, Nice to meet you. She bit off a fingernail. Her skin was the color of liquid paper. She had put on lipstick, red as a candied apple. Half her ass fit on the folding metal chair. I picked up the other phone and told Green I’d talk to him in an attorney booth when he and his wife were finished visiting.

She said, I’m planning on being here all day, sweets. I told her that the prison would only let her visit for two more hours.

Green said, Introduce yourself to my new lawyer, Destiny. Then he winked at me.

I went and sat in the attorney booth and waited for the guards to bring Green in.

Death row has two types of attorney booths. One is a full-contact room. In this room, lawyers sit across a table from their clients. If you want to, you can shake your client’s manacled hand or pat him on the shoulder. The room is usually used for psychological or psychiatric examinations. Next to it is the other kind of booth, a six-foot-by-four-foot box, that’s divided down the middle by a concrete wall with a reinforced Plexiglas window. There’s a padlocked mail slot that can be used to pass papers back and forth. You have to use a phone to converse. When they enter their half of the cage, inmates meticulously wipe off the mouth and ear pieces of the receiver with their white cloth jumpsuits. Death-row inmates are often obsessed with germs.

The main difference between an attorney area and a regular visiting cubicle is that, like those old-fashioned corner telephone booths, the attorney space is fully enclosed. The idea is to intimate the idea of privacy, and to prevent guards and others in the visiting area from hearing the conversation. Prison officials surreptitiously record visits between inmates and their nonlawyer visitors. They are not supposed to record attorney visits, but I wouldn’t bet that they don’t.

Green and I were conversing in a noncontact booth.

While he was squatting on his haunches, waiting for the guard to reach through a slot in the door and remove his handcuffs, Green said, What happened to you? I had forgotten how bad my eye looked. I told him nothing. Over the years I’ve had three or four clients I was actually fond of. Johnny Martinez was one of them. Green said, Did you know that Johnny Martinez and me were tight?

Death-row inmates live alone, sleep alone, shower alone. Once when I was in graduate school, I performed an experiment to see how long I could go without speaking another word to another human being. I made it eight days. I couldn’t go to restaurants, and the grocery store was tough. At fast-food restaurants I would hold up fingers to place my order and nod when the worker handed me my food and thanked me. It’s harder than you might think for a hardwired social animal to live without any human interaction. But death row hasn’t always been that way. Until the late 1990s, death-row inmates could work outside their cells, in the prison laundry, for example, or fabricating license plates. They also had group exercise, so inmates could play basketball or handball, or lift weights together. Martinez was gay. For the gay inmates, or the temporarily gay, the old death row afforded social opportunities, so to speak. The implementation of total isolation was hard on Martinez. He told me, after the new regulations were put in place, that he never dreamed of escaping; he dreamed of being touched by a human being who wasn’t a guard. I said, Yeah, Johnny, but the guys who aren’t guards are murderers.

He said, Not all of them.

I said, I know. I was kidding.

He said, What do you dream about? I often didn’t know what to say when Martinez asked me questions. I was useless to him as a lawyer. His case had been screwed up beyond repair by his previous attorneys. I told him that the first time we met. He didn’t care. He wanted me to be his father, and his friend. I didn’t want to be his friend just so I could feel better about the fact that, as his lawyer, I wasn’t going to be able to save him. So I didn’t say anything.

Johnny said, You do dream, right? He looked at me like I knew the answers to the big questions. I wrote a note on my pad so I had an excuse to look down. He twisted his head, trying to read it. He smiled. He said, I guess you can’t dream if you don’t sleep. Do you ever sleep?

When Quaker asked me that same question years later, he sounded curious. When Johnny asked, the question felt intimate. I didn’t answer. He said, I bet you don’t.

He said, I’d like to sleep, but it’s loud up on level two.

Death row has three levels. Level 1 is where the well-behaved inmates live. Level 3 is for the troublemakers. Level 2 is in between. If Johnny was on level 2, he’d been doing something disruptive. That made no sense to me. He was meek and obedient. I said, What did you do to get moved?

He rubbed his face twice. His right thumb stroking one cheek two times, his other four fingers caressing the other. He had a wisp of scattered facial hair, like a teenager just starting to shave. He said, I wouldn’t shave when the captain told me to. I asked him why not. He said, I’m not allowed to shave during Ramadan.

Johnny was raised a Catholic. He’d been an altar boy. His parish priest told me that he wanted to do whatever he could to help Johnny get off death row. He had already written the Pope, requesting papal intervention. I said, You’re Catholic, aren’t you?

He said, Not anymore. I’m Muslim now.

I said, Since when?

He smiled. It’s who I am, Señor Abogado, he said to me.

I felt a piece of the wall crumble, and I said, I think you’re the first Muslim I’ve met named Martinez. What does your family think? He tilted back his head and laughed. He seemed almost happy.

That was the image of him I tried to hold on to.

Green said, You remember Martinez, right? He told me you’re a heretic.

Martinez did use to call me a heretic. He teased me. I had conversations with him that weren’t about his case or the law. We talked about religion. I said it was bad, along with nationalism, the most regressive force in human society. He shook his head, respectful but adamant. He told me I might find myself praying every day if I was where he was. I told him he might be right, but that would just prove that I’m a hypocrite, not that I’m wrong. It was a running theme for us. If Green knew that Martinez called me a heretic, Martinez must have told him. But I didn’t see Martinez and Green as friends.

I sat and waited. He said, Destiny doesn’t trust you. I thought to myself, Destiny doesn’t trust me? You’ve got to be kidding. She is a curious collection of DNA. She romanticizes murderers. She was attracted to you when the only thing she knew about you is that you’re a murderer who beat your wife to death in front of your son. You might be something besides that—although I am not yet convinced—but Destiny didn’t know that when she got your name and photograph and mailing address off an abolitionist Web site and decided to write you some sappy lovesick letter. So if Destiny doesn’t trust me, partner, tell her the feeling’s mutual.

My interior rant apparently amused me. I smirked. Green said, What’s funny? I shook my head.

He said, So let’s get to it. My wife is waiting. I took a pad out of my briefcase and licked the eraser on my pencil. But I didn’t write anything down. There was no way I could forget what Green told me.

HE SAID, HENRY QUAKER didn’t kill no one. I asked him how he knew that. He said, I told that girl who works for you that Ruben did it. I just didn’t exactly tell her how I know it. I know he killed that family, ’cause I paid him to.

Green was not the first person to tell me he had gotten away with murder. I’ve had several clients over the years who, as their executions became imminent, made all sorts of exaggerated claims. Billy Vickers went to his death taking credit for at least a dozen murders. Henry Lee Lucas claimed hundreds. The inaptly named Angel Resendiz, known to law-enforcement officials as the railway killer, rode the train from Kentucky to Texas to California and back again, killing as many as fifteen people, he said. Were these inmates clearing their consciences or trying to be memorable? My vote was for option two. I said nothing. Green said, What? You don’t believe me? Go talk to Cantu. Tell him you know about the gun he left there.

He bit off a fingernail and said to me, Bring any change today, counselor?

Shit, I forgot again.

He spit the nail into his palm and looked at it. I said, You shouldn’t have told Destiny that I’m your lawyer. I can’t be your lawyer. There’s a conflict of interest.

He nodded, put the nail back on his tongue and moved it around in his mouth. He looked over my shoulder and nodded his head toward my left. I turned around, but there was nobody there. When I looked back at him, he was grinning.

He said, They taping this conversation? I told him they weren’t supposed to listen in on lawyers, but that they might be doing it anyway. He said, Uh-huh. I waited for him to go on. I wanted to look at my watch, but fought it off, like not scratching an itch.

I thought to myself, He could be playing with me. If he is, I want to say nothing and seem uninterested. Then I thought, Or he could be telling the truth. If he is, I need to say nothing and figure out what to ask him. So I sat there, head swimming, saying nothing.

He said, Cantu is a dumb fuck. He killed the wrong person.

His story was not incredible. I’m not saying I believed him. I’m just saying he had hooked me. According to Green, Cantu sold drugs for him and occasionally threatened people who owed Green money. Green said that Cantu had claimed to have killed two dealers who stole from him, but Green did not know their names or whether it was true. He said that a woman named Tricia Cummings had been selling Ecstasy for him in a mixed neighborhood of blacks and Chicanos. She had been stealing from him. He didn’t say how he knew that, and I didn’t ask. He paused, like the rest would be obvious to me. I said, And?

He said, So I paid Cantu to kill her.

Cantu killed the wrong person. Green realized it as soon as Cantu told him that he also had to kill two kids because they saw him after he had killed the woman. Green didn’t think Cummings had any kids and he knew she lived alone. He said he’d been to her house and slept with her, though he didn’t say it quite like that.

If Green was telling the truth, Dorris Quaker died because she lived exactly two blocks east of someone who had been stealing from Green, and her kids had died because they were there, too.

His story made just enough sense for me to believe it. He said, You don’t have to believe me. Ain’t you the big DNA expert? I bet Cantu’s DNA was all over the place.

I tried to think what evidence police had recovered that might have Cantu’s DNA on it. The police report said that Dorris had been lying down or asleep when she was shot. There was no evidence she had struggled with anyone. So Cantu’s skin wouldn’t be under her fingernails. And unless Cantu had been injured, he wouldn’t have left any blood. I doubted he pulled a beer out of the fridge when he was done, so I didn’t expect to find his saliva on a beer bottle. Green said, Plus, Cantu’s a talker. He probably told his old lady that he did it. I asked Green the name of Cantu’s girlfriend. He said, I don’t know, man. I don’t even know if he has a girl. I’m just saying that if he does, he probably told her.

This conversation was becoming worthless to me. Then Green said, He left a gun there, like he was gonna trick the cops into thinking the bitch killed herself. Dumb fuck didn’t leave the gun he used ’cause he said it was a good-luck charm. Left a piece he said was cold. What a dumb fuckin’ Mexican.

I could feel myself losing the battle to beat back my need to believe him. I modified my goal. Instead of aspiring to nonchalance, I’d settle for exterior serenity. I said, And why are you telling me this now?

His face flexed and his lips made an O, like a fish in a tank breathing at the surface. I thought to myself, Be still. I was aiming for blankness. I didn’t want Green to know what I was thinking before I knew myself. He said, What? You don’t believe me?

I said, Thanks for the help, Green. I’ll look into it.

He said, It’s ’cause I like Quaker. He’s next door to my house. I hear him reading words in there I don’t understand, like it ain’t even English. He might be going loco. His eye twitched into what I’m pretty sure was an involuntary wink. He said, You need me to sign something? I’ll sign it.

I told him I’d talk to his lawyer and get back to him. He said, Come on, man. You know I ain’t got that kind of time. I want you as my lawyer. My court-appointed lawyer’s a piece of shit. His face changed and he suddenly looked angry. He said, Fuck this, man. He looked over my shoulder. I turned around. Destiny had gone. He said, Tell the guard I’m ready to go back to my house. I told him that I would. He said, And don’t forget money next time.

WHEN I WAS in third grade, I stayed in the classroom to finish the book I was reading while everyone else lined up to go to the bathroom. Twenty minutes later, I had to go. I asked Mrs. Pittman for permission, and she told me I should have gone when the rest of the class did. I told her it was an emergency. She said that maybe next time I would not insist on playing by my own rules. I sat down at my desk and relieved myself through my pants. Half an hour later, the principal came in to check on our class. She walked around the room, looking over our shoulders at whatever we were working on. She got to my desk, paused, and then went and whispered something to Mrs. Pittman. Mrs. Pittman grabbed me roughly by my elbow, and practically carried me to an empty desk next to Tommy Petite. He asked why I was there, and I told him there was something the matter with my chair. I looked back at my desk. There was a puddle of yellow under my seat.

That night after dinner I told my dad what had happened. He said, Sometimes it can be easy to confuse relief with revenge. Do you understand what I mean?

No, I don’t think so.

He said, You need to make sure before you do anything that you can live with the consequences.

I said, I get it.

Green stood up to wait for the guards. I saw a stain of wetness around his crotch. I shook my head. I was looking forward to telling Kassie.

I GOT UP TO STRETCH my legs and clear my head while the guards took Green out and brought Quaker in. The door to the unisex bathroom swung open and Destiny walked out. She waved to Green as the guards were taking him away, then walked over to me, suddenly friendly. She said, Do you think Zeke will get his stay?

I thought to myself, Zeke? She calls him Zeke?

She was waiting for an answer. I hadn’t known that Green already had an execution date, or whether his lawyer was fighting it. Had Green kept from me the fact that he had a date on purpose, or did he just assume that I already knew? It had to be the latter. My office keeps track of all executions. His name was probably on a document lost on my desk. He would assume that I knew before he had that his execution had been scheduled. But that didn’t answer my primary question: Was his claim of responsibility just a ploy to get a stay? He had to have figured that I would want a stay for him so I could help Quaker with whatever he knew, and he was right about that. He was proving to be a skilled manipulator, and I was feeling good about myself for disliking him from the get-go. I needed to know when the date was, but I didn’t want to ask her.

I said, I hope so. I’m guessing that he will. She stuck out her hand and I shook it. She held on a little too long then spun around like a fashion model and wordlessly walked away.

QUAKER WAS JOKING with the guards when they brought him into the visiting booth. I read a story about a cop who investigated serial killings. He would spend hours and hours interviewing notorious serial killers, getting close to them, revealing secrets in order to be trusted, and they would reward him by reporting the details of their crimes—grisly, horrific details, details that would keep me awake for a week, maybe forever. But the cop couldn’t be a cop if he was like that. The cop told the author that he put these conversations in a compartment of his brain and locked them away immediately, so that by the time he got out to his car, he was thinking about which Mexican restaurant he’d go to for lunch. Were Quaker’s jailers like that? Would they be able to wall off their relationship with him and numbly escort him to the gurney? I knew their numbers and addresses, and I was going to have to find out. It might not help, but it definitely wouldn’t hurt, for the guards to say that they thought Quaker was innocent, for them at least to say that he shouldn’t die.

He rubbed his wrists where they had been cuffed. He leaned toward me and looked at my eye. Man, he said, you look like ET.

I said, You know a guy on the row named Ezekiel Green?

He said, I know of him.

I said, What do you know?

Why’s it matter?

I’m just curious.

He said, The guys in here who ain’t too bright think he’s like a prophet or something.

Yeah.

The other guys think he’s insane.

I said, Which group are you in?

He smiled. Hey, I’m no genius like you, but I’m on your side of the bell curve.

I said, So you think he’s insane.

He said, It’s just based on what I heard. Like I said, I ain’t never had much of a conversation with the guy. He’s next to me on the pod, and I hear him talking on the phone and shit, and he doesn’t seem crazy. The words make sense, you know what I mean? I nodded. Quaker said, Why you wanna know?

I said, He just told me who murdered Dorris and your kids. He said it was a case of mistaken identity.

ON THE WAY back to my office I called Katya. She asked, What did he say?

I told her that his mouth literally fell open. His chest sagged, his chin jutted forward, and his lower jaw just fell. I thought it was just a figure of speech. But it was an actual physical reaction. His jaw really dropped. He started to say something, I think his lips actually moved, but no sound came out. Then he rubbed his eyes, using the knuckles on his index fingers. Finally he said, Why?

I didn’t know whether he was asking me why Green had told me, or whether it was a more Job-like question. I told him everything Green had said, including about hearing Quaker talking to himself in a foreign language. My voice was flat, like maybe I believed him, maybe I didn’t. Quaker said, It ain’t no foreign language. I got a book of Wallace Stevens poems and I read them out loud. I don’t know what half the words mean but I like the way they sound.

He started crying. The only reason I could tell at first was that his chest was heaving, like he was out of breath from sprinting. Then I saw the tears. He kept saying, My poor babies, my poor babies, my love. Over and over. I didn’t know what to say. I just sat there.

He said, After the explosion, my company sent me to someplace near New Braunfels. The shrink said I had PTSD. But you already know that, right? It was like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. You seen that movie? All these old people walking around. They were mostly German, I think. I couldn’t understand nothing they were saying. Anyway, one night I was sitting on the balcony smoking some weed and thinking about how I could just disappear in that town, it’s beautiful there, maybe walk off into the mountains, and nobody would ever miss me. You ever feel like that? That you could die and no one would even know? They’d probably look for me for a while, but they’d stop eventually. Then it was like Dorris and Danny and Charisse was standing there. I could feel ’em there, actually feel ’em. They’d miss me. It saved me to be thinking that. I swear to God it did. I wanted to watch Danny and Charisse graduate, be a grandpa, get old with Dorris.

Katya said, He didn’t do it, you know. I don’t know whether Green was telling you the truth, but your client didn’t kill his family.

I said, I know. I am sorry to say that I know that.

TWO MORNINGS LATER Lincoln came into our room at five. I was still sleeping. He said, Dada, can I get up now?

I said, Linco, it’s Sunday. I want to sleep a little longer. He said he wasn’t tired. I told him he could stay up if he’d go with me for a run when it got light.

He said, But Dada, I’m too big for the stroller thing, and it’s too far for me to ride my bike.

He had me there, so I got up, got dressed, and went out while it was still night, just the dog and me, and told Linco not to bother his mama unless it was an emergency.

From the time Lincoln could hold his head up until he was five, I would take him with me in the stroller when I would go jogging on weekends. I hate jogging. When I’m swimming or rowing, my mind wanders, and solutions to problems come to me, at least sometimes. When I’m jogging, all I’m thinking about is finishing. Jogging with Lincoln changed all that. I would tell him stories before he could talk, and listen to his stories later. He and Winona and I would run around a mile-and-a-half loop. We’d usually run three laps, and I wouldn’t even notice how much my knees were hurting. Some days, when I felt fresh and it wasn’t too hot, I’d say to Lincoln, as we were finishing up lap number three, Hey, amigo, how about another circle today?

One morning he asked, Dada, why do you like running so much?

I said, Actually, Linco, I hate running. But I like hanging out with you.

He said, But you can hang out with me at the house.

I said, Yeah, that’s true, but I want to hang out with you for a lot more years, and if I jog, I think I’ll have more years with you.

He said, Okay, then. Let’s run one more loop. But faster this time, okay? I’d sprint for as long as I could manage, and he’d say, Wheeeee.

He and Katya would be leaving for the beach later that day. I had the Quaker hearing coming up, a looming execution date for O’Neill, and the possibility that Green would get executed before I could learn whether he was lying or telling the truth, or whether he knew any more truth, or, for that matter, any truth at all, that could help me. I felt myself sinking. There was nothing I could do about anything. Three people were going to die in a month because I was completely out of ideas. I thought to myself, I should have gone rowing.

KATYA HAS A CHILDHOOD FRIEND who grew up to be an artist you’ve probably heard of. They’re like college roommates. They talk and text and e-mail every day. Sometimes I’m jealous of their closeness. I don’t have any friends like that, except Katya and Lincoln, and the dog. Ten years ago, we were in New York at my law-school reunion, and the artist invited us to dinner at her fancy apartment. Katya had told her that I like to cook. Almost as soon as we were introduced, the artist asked me to make a pitcher of martinis, and after I mixed them and poured three glasses, she told me how to light the grill, where the salad ingredients were, and that she liked her steak so rare that it would still moo. (I did not hold this against her; Katya likes hers the same way.) The two of them went one way, carrying their glasses and the pitcher, and I stayed in the kitchen, looking for the tools I needed to make dinner. By the time I brought the food to the living room, where we ate off a coffee table while sitting on the floor and watching America’s Next Top Model, Katya and the artist were drunk as skunks.

I mention the point about inebriation solely for the sake of lending credibility to what I am about to say: This artist is a detestable human being. My experience is that drunk people don’t lie, and in her drunken state, she was racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, narcissistic, and altogether unlikable. Twenty years before, while she was involved in a relationship with two other people (who might or might not have known about one another), she got pregnant by a third—well, at least she thinks it was the third. You might consider it a sign of redemption that she agreed to marry the probable father, except that she started cheating again a month after their kid was born.

I’m a libertarian. If people want to be married to lecherous spouses, let them. But my own life is too short to waste even the briefest moment with people like her, and that would be true no matter how long my life happens to be.

When we were back in Houston, and enough time had passed, I told Katya I was amazed that she could be friends with this terrible person. She said, She’s been my friend since she was eight years old, which is way before she was a terrible person. What am I supposed to do? Abandon her? There are beautiful things about her I know about that you don’t, because you are too judgmental to see them. If you have a friend, you have to take them as they are.

There’s not really anything I could say to that. I am judgmental. I’ve already admitted as much. We agreed to disagree about the artist. The next time we were in New York, I stayed at the hotel bar while Katya and she went to dinner.

I have a theory about great artists, which is that they are ordinarily awful human beings. To be a great artist, you have to be so self-centered, so indifferent to everything but your own artistic sensibility, that the whole world, including the people who love you, are just means to your end. Too bad it doesn’t work in reverse. Wouldn’t it be terrific if you could become a great writer or painter or musician by being a shitty person? And don’t write me with a list of exceptions; I am aware that there are some. All I am saying is that in general, my advice to you is that if you should meet a famous artist, do not go to her house for dinner.

But clichés are clichés for a reason, and that dark cloud too had its silver lining. Dinner at the famous artist’s house changed me as a death-penalty lawyer. Until I met her, my focus was on the law, on why some legal rule or principle meant that my client should get a new trial. I’d do exhaustive research, write a powerful legal argument, and then watch no one pay it any heed. The problem with this lawyerly approach is that nobody cares about rules or principles when they’re dealing with a murderer. The lawyer says that the Constitution was violated every which way, and the judge says, Yeah, but your client killed somebody, right? For all our so-called progress, the tribal vengefulness that we think of as limited to backward African countries is still how our legal system works. Deuteronomy trumps the Sixth Amendment every time. Prosecutors and judges kowtow to family members of murder victims who demand an eye for an eye, and the lonely lawyer declaiming about proper procedures is a shouting lunatic in the asylum whom people look at curiously and then walk on by.

Then (if I might say so myself) I had a perfectly cooked piece of grass-fed sirloin while sitting on the floor of the racist artist’s brownstone, and my entire focus changed. My clients were better people than this piece of garbage, and they even killed somebody. That was the magic moment my focus changed. My clients did a terrible, sometimes unforgivable, thing, but most of them were worth saving. It was a moral realization, not a legal epiphany. Sometimes the most immoral, detestable person you’ve ever met can teach you an ethical lesson worth knowing. That’s a lesson, too.

LINCOLN AND KATYA had gone to Galveston. They even took the dog, which was good for the three of them but bad for me, because it meant that when I talked to myself, the dog was not in the room, so I could not pretend that I wasn’t.

It was January 5. On the wall calendar in my office, I had four dates circled in red. O’Neill was scheduled to be executed in one week, on January 12. Green was scheduled to get executed three days later, on January 15. Quaker was scheduled for execution on February 4, and we had his hearing in the trial court on January 27. A typical month had three or four dates with marks-a-lot circles. It was a fairly ordinary agenda for a death-penalty lawyer in Texas.

I took two chocolate glazed donuts out of the Shipley’s box. Kassie said, Two donuts? That’s a record.

I said, Katya and Lincoln took all our food to Galveston. All I’ve got at home are oranges, coffee, ice cream, beer, peanuts, and bourbon. And I’m pacing myself.

Kassie said that she would try to locate Tricia Cummings, the woman that Green said was supposed to have been killed by Cantu. Gary was going to try to find Cantu and take another run at him. I told him that he needed to take Melissa Harmon with him. I was going to call Melissa to tell her about the story that Cantu had left a gun at the scene, and to see whether she could have a chat with Detective Wyatt.

Jerome said, What about me?

I didn’t want him doing anything that couldn’t be interrupted, because I had a feeling that O’Neill was going to cause some interruptions. I said I thought he had his hands full with O’Neill. He said there was nothing left to do but wait. I said, Fine, help Kassie track down Cummings. He looked at me like I had just asked him to rinse out the coffee mugs, but he didn’t say anything. I said, All right, fine. Can you also follow up on the blood? The lab never did call me back. He nodded and almost smiled, slightly mollified.

Melissa Harmon and I met for breakfast the next morning at the Buffalo Grille. I was eating oatmeal. She was eating chicken-fried steak and fried eggs. I said, You’re a real health freak.

She said, Steak and eggs is a classic. You want some?

I shook my head. I told her about my conversation with Green and asked her if she would be willing to talk to Wyatt about the gun. She slowly chewed a piece of meat. After she swallowed it she said, Can you think of a way for me to have that conversation without accusing him of something unethical?

I said, If I could think of that, I’d have the conversation with him myself instead of paying your exorbitant rates.

She smiled. She said, So what’s it like always representing the bad guys?

I said, I’m pretty sure that one of my guys isn’t actually bad.

GARY CALLED. He and Harmon had gone to the house where I talked to Cantu. Gary said that the house was empty. There was a mattress on the bedroom floor, half a roll of toilet paper on the bathroom floor, two slices of leftover sausage pizza in the refrigerator, and a half-gallon carton of Tropicana orange juice, two-thirds gone, on the counter. That’s it. No clothes, nothing to read, no TV or radio, no towels, no beer. Cantu was gone.

While Gary looked through the house and took inventory, Melissa talked to the neighbors. No one knew his name. No one had any idea where he’d gone. I asked Gary to take the orange juice. Maybe Cantu drank from the carton. Maybe we could get some DNA. I didn’t have any idea what good it would do us, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.

As I was hanging up, Jerome, ever the meticulous one, came into my office waving a single piece of paper. I said, What’s that? He said he had been going through the file of Quaker’s trial lawyer. It was a page from Detective Wyatt’s report. I wondered how I had missed it. Probably because I read through the file before I knew who Cantu was. Either way, it was not exactly a confidence booster. The report indicated that Wyatt had interviewed Cantu. It didn’t say why. In the report Wyatt had noted that Cantu had an alibi. But it didn’t say what the alibi was, or why Wyatt had even bothered interviewing Cantu in the first place.

Most important of all, though, the fact that the report was in the trial lawyer’s file meant that the trial lawyer had it, and that meant we could not accuse the state of withholding relevant evidence. One of our legal claims had just disappeared.

I told Jerome what Gary had learned at Cantu’s former house.

He said, That’s too bad, but it really doesn’t matter. It’s not like he was all of a sudden going to admit to killing three people.

Jerome is also the guy in the office who can be counted on to remind me that the way our lives actually work is not how death-penalty cases get portrayed on TV. I said, I’ve got a story that ain’t got no moral. He looked at me oddly. I said, You know, let the bad guy win every once in a while? His look didn’t change. I said, It’s Billy Preston, man.

Jerome has an iPod that has something like fifteen thousand songs on it. He plays guitar in a garage band. He said, Who’s that?

I shook my head. He put the piece of paper on my desk and walked out.

GREEN’S LAWYER WAS Mark Roberts, one of the smartest, most aggressive death-penalty lawyers around. When Green first wrote asking to see me, I called Roberts to make sure it was okay with him. The fact that Green didn’t like him was yet another fact that made me feel better about my first instinct. I called Roberts and told him about Green’s claim of responsibility. I knew what he would say if I asked him to allow me to get a written statement from Green. He’d say no. The reason is that he had asked the parole board to commute Green’s sentence to life in prison, and he had filed another writ with the Supreme Court. Logically and legally speaking, whether Green did or did not tell Cantu to kill Tricia Cummings had no bearing on either one of those last-ditch efforts. Realistically speaking, it mattered a lot. If there was some parole-board member who was inclined toward leniency, or if there was some Supreme Court justice who was intrigued by Mark’s legal argument, the inclination and intrigue would give way to disgust and abhorrence if Green was connected to three more murders, especially when two of them were children. I asked him anyway. He said, Green is a piece of shit. I’m tempted. But sorry, Doc, no can do. I told him thanks anyway.

In Thursday’s mail I got a handwritten statement from Green, largely repeating what he had told me in person. His execution was a week away. I called Mark again. Green was a goner. There was no chance whatsoever that he would be alive the following Friday, so I made what I believed to be a costless offer. I wanted to get Green to tell his story while hooked up to a polygraph. Polygraph evidence is inadmissible in court, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking that if his confession held up, the parole board or the governor would feel safer granting Quaker relief. I said to Roberts, Here’s what I’d like to do. I’ll have Green polygraphed tomorrow, but I won’t use the results until after he’s executed.

Roberts said, You mean if he’s executed.

I said, Yeah, that’s what I mean. If he’s executed.

Roberts said, If it’s okay with Green, it’s okay with me.

THAT AFTERNOON I rode the Metro train from my office to the medical center to have Charlie look at my eye. I was reading some papers we planned to file the next day in the O’Neill case. I did not have my new glasses yet. I was holding the pages so close to my face that they were touching my nose. A thick Hispanic woman was breast-feeding an infant. Sitting next to her was a boy who looked to be about eight. He was beautiful, part Latino and part black. I looked down at what I was reading and heard him say, Mire, Mama. His mother said, Shh. The boy said, Mama, ese hombre es ciego. I looked up. The boy was pointing at me. I gave him a smile, waved surreptitiously with two fingers, then covered my eyes with my hands and peeked over them at him. He could tell his friends that he played peek-a-boo with a blind man. He smiled back, and his mother looked at me warmly.

Charlie had told me that I would be able to go back to work forty-eight hours after the surgery, but that I would get headaches for a while. He asked how I was doing. I told him I had a splitting headache. He said, Yes. I told you that would happen. It’s perfectly normal. He had been using an instrument to look at the back of my eye, where he had reattached the retina. He pushed back from the machine he had been looking through. He said, Well, the front of the eye still looks like hamburger, but the back looks beautiful. Your retina is better now than when you were born. I told him the headaches made it hard to concentrate, and I asked him how long they would last. He said, Buy a month’s worth of aspirin.

I said, A month? Are you serious?

He said, You’ve always been an impatient SOB.

I said, Yeah, but a grateful one. I shook his hand and left.

I TOOK THE TRAIN back to my office but decided not to go back upstairs. I got in my car intending to go home. Kassie had gotten special permission from the warden to polygraph Green the next morning. I needed to spend some time thinking about what questions to ask him.

I called Jerome to talk about O’Neill. O’Neill’s execution was four days away. We had asked the state court to halt the execution on the grounds that O’Neill had descended so deeply into the darkness of madness that he was immune from execution. The court denied our motion, saying we had waited too long to raise the issue of O’Neill’s sanity. We immediately filed a petition in federal court, but it was just sitting there. Jerome asked when I thought we’d hear something. I said, I’m guessing at about five forty-five on Monday. That means we can call him when we get denied and he’ll get a whole quarter hour to get ready to die. Jerome asked me if I would have time to visit with him when I was at the prison the next day.

I said, If he’s really convinced he isn’t going to be executed, what’s the point of my telling him good-bye?

Jerome said, I promise you, the guy is crazy. I think he really is Ford incompetent. But just humor me, okay?

Jerome was referring to a case called Ford versus Wainwright. In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court said that a state cannot execute someone if the person does not know why he is in prison nor that the state is planning on killing him. The decision is an example of a lofty principle that has almost no practical application. Someone can be the most disturbed person you have ever known, yet not be Ford incompetent. Everyone has heard the story about Ricky Rector. He was a death-row inmate in Arkansas who always saved his dinner’s dessert to eat for breakfast the next day. During the 1992 presidential campaign, when Bill Clinton was still trying to secure the Democratic nomination, he flew back to Arkansas to preside over the Rector execution. After the lethal injection, the guards went to clean out Rector’s cell. They found the piece of pecan pie that Rector had requested with his final meal. Rector had put it on the table next to his cot, to save it for the breakfast he was apparently expecting to have the morning following his execution.

Convincing a judge that someone is Ford incompetent is a daunting proposition. I said, Don’t worry, Jerome. I’m kidding. I’ll let him know what to expect.

I knew a girl who used to live two blocks from me. I would see her getting the paper in the morning when I was out with the dog. She would always seem a little embarrassed to be seen in her bathrobe, but she would always pet Winona. She and her husband had triplets. An instant family, she once said to me. One evening he took the kids to watch the Astros play in their new stadium. He was driving over the Pierce elevated highway when an 18-wheeler driven by a driver who had been on the road for nineteen straight hours nudged his SUV off the road. The car fell onto the street below and burst into flames. The man and the three children burned to death. She moved out of the house, and I had not seen her since. I glanced down to break the connection on my call with Jerome. I looked up just as a woman carrying two bags of groceries was stepping off the curb. My light was green. I leaned on the horn and called her a name I’d rather not repeat. When I looked at her in the rearview mirror, I could have sworn that she was my friend, and that the look on her face was not fear, but regret.

Instead of driving home to my empty house, I drove to McElroy’s pub, bought a strong Honduran cigar, and ordered a double of Woodford Reserve, neat. I finished it and ordered another. The woman sitting two stools down from me had a plate of olives and cheese in front of her. She was drinking scotch out of a highball glass and chewing on a piece of ice. When the bartender looked at her, she pointed to her glass. I moved over next to her and said, Judge Truesdale?

She swiveled in her chair and looked at me. She was fifteen years younger than the judge. She said, Afraid not. I think you confused me with someone. She looked at the wedding band on my left hand and swiveled back around.

I said, Sorry about that. I paid my check and left.

I picked up some tacos from a taco stand but felt sick to my stomach when I got home and left them on the counter. I stood in the hot shower until the hot water ran out then got in bed to watch the nine o’clock news. Instead I fell immediately asleep and had a dream. Katya and I were in Las Vegas. I was playing terrible poker, but I couldn’t lose. From middle position I would raise with an unsuited eight-five, and three eights would come on the flop. Spectators were gathering around the table to watch, like I was a magician. I felt gleeful, and also embarrassed. I looked at my watch. Katya and I were meeting at seven to go to dinner, and it was almost eight. I cashed in my chips and rushed upstairs. Everything was okay. Katya was still in the shower. I lay down on the bed and poured myself a drink. I dozed off, and when I woke up, the shower was off and Katya was kissing my chest. I put my hands on either side of her head. Her lips felt unfamiliar. I opened my eyes and she was gone. A strange woman with her back to me was sitting naked on the edge of the bed. She turned around. Judge Truesdale said, What time will your wife be back?

The ringing phone woke me.

Lincoln said, Hi, Dada. When are you going to call to tell me good night? I looked at the clock. It was nine thirty.

I said, I thought you would already be asleep, amigo. Why are you still up?

He said, Mama and I went to a restaurant and ordered pizza and it took a really long time.

I said, Okay, amigo. I’m glad you called, but you have to go to sleep now, okay? Can I talk to Mama?

He said, Sure. Good night. I love you.

Katya got on the phone. She said, How’s everything going?

I told her I didn’t have a clue but that there was nothing I could do that weekend and that I was planning to drive down to the beach when I left the prison the next day and stay until Monday morning. She asked whether she should tell Lincoln or whether it was going to be a surprise. I said, Go ahead and tell him.

I think I was already planning to go to Galveston before the dream. But I can’t be sure. Half the things I do in life are for reasons I can’t fathom.

I STAYED UP the rest of the night thinking about how to approach Green. Claiming partial responsibility for three murders he was not suspected of would be a ridiculous long-term strategy, even if it got his life extended past Thursday. Normally, that would count in favor of his credibility. But death-row inmates live their lives in thirty-day increments. There isn’t any long-term strategy, at least for the vast majority who are not actually innocent. The focus is on avoiding the looming execution date. Everything else can wait. You solve the immediate problem, and don’t think about the next one. Or, as we say in my office, we’ll burn the distant bridges when we get to them.

Maybe I could understand Green’s motivation and assess his veracity if I could crawl inside his life, but I could not get inside his life even if I wanted to, and on top of that, I didn’t want to. He killed his son’s mother and grandmother with his bare hands. Who can relate to that? Who wants to? When I leave the prison, I can hardly wait to get in the shower and wash the death and deprivation off of me. I hire experts to tell judges what it is like to be one of my clients, and while they are talking, I try hard not to listen. My job is to keep them from being executed, not to save them, or to heal them. My job is hard enough, but at least it is possible. I’m not Don Quixote.

Understanding a broken human being in a visceral way means that you are broken, too, at least for a while. I do not want to imagine abusing my son, or imagine being abused by my father. I don’t want to think about what kind of person would commit that abuse, or what kind of person could, or what would happen to the person who received it. But you don’t get to control the thoughts that enter your mind, and I couldn’t stop myself from picturing Green as a kid Lincoln’s age. Green’s sister was a sociology professor at the University of Miami. What did someone do to him to make him a monster?

The guard at the entrance to the visitor’s lot asked me to open my hood and my trunk. There was a leash and water bowl for the dog, and the board game Candyland. This vehicle search was a new part of the routine. I got out of the car while the guard looked at the engine block. I asked him what was the purpose. He said, Looking for people who don’t belong. I chuckled at that. I said that it seemed to me that it would make more sense to search cars when they were leaving the prison, rather than when they were arriving. He didn’t laugh. No one gets my jokes.

KASSIE WAS ALREADY THERE, sitting next to Destiny, explaining to Green how everything would work once the polygraph examiner arrived. I said hello and walked over to talk to O’Neill. He was visiting with his parents. They had not seen him in six years. Thinking it was going to be their last chance to see him alive, they had driven down from Michigan and were living at a rest stop in their RV. I introduced myself. His mother hugged me. His father took my right hand in both of his and shook it. His mom said, Thank you for everything you are doing for Ronnie. I didn’t tell her that my vote at the office had been to do nothing. Instead I told her we would do what we could. I sat down to talk to O’Neill. His parents stood behind me so they could listen, too. I told them just to ask if they had any questions. O’Neill’s mom said, Thank you, sir.

O’Neill had three cans of Coke, two bags of nacho-cheese-flavored Doritos, two bags of Funions, and three Snickers bars arranged in front of him. He was making sandwiches by layering a tortilla chip, a piece of chocolate bar, a Funion, another piece of chocolate, and another Dorito. Then he’d pop the whole thing into his mouth. His head would rotate like a figure eight while he chewed. He ate a sandwich, wiped the front of his lower teeth using his tongue, then he said to me, Good day, sir. Those are my parents standing right behind you. I told him I knew, that we had met just moments before. He said, I am not sure you are understanding me, sir. Shall the potter be regarded as the clay? That the thing made should say of its maker, He did not make me? Or the thing formed say of Him who made it, He has not understanding?

I exhaled loudly and shook my head like I was clearing cobwebs. His father leaned close to me and whispered, It’s Isaiah.

I said, a little too harshly, I know that. Chapter twenty-nine. What I’m trying to figure out is the connection.

He said, Oh. I’m sorry. Well, I don’t think there is one.

O’Neill looked at his father like he’d never seen him before, his eyes blank, his pupils the size of a pinhead. I tried to make eye contact, but his gaze was off to my left, like he was examining my ear. He gave no indication that he remembered me. I felt like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. I explained that we had filed something, that we were raising a Ford claim and challenging his competency to be executed, that we probably would not hear from the courts until Monday morning, that by the time we prepared our emergency appeal to the Supreme Court and heard back from them, it would be close to 6:00 p.m. I said it all in one breath. Behind me, I heard his mother gasp.

O’Neill’s head twitched ever so slightly to the right, and he stared at my eyes. Then his gaze dropped to my chest and lingered. He said, I can see you have a good and pure heart, sir, and I thank you. But I shall not require your interventions or entreaties on my behalf. I am watched over and blessed. These men cannot do me harm. He waved his arms like a windmill. He bent over and put his ear next to a sandwich he had built, the way you lean toward someone who’s whispering. I told him I would talk to him the following week.

As I was leaving, I wrote down his dad’s cell phone number and promised him I would call as soon as I heard something from the Supreme Court. His eyes were wet. His wife was holding on to her purse strap so tightly that her knuckles were white. She said, Ask him, dear.

He took a hold of my upper arm. I could smell peanut butter and jelly on his breath. He said, We are not planning to watch it. We’ll be at the prison, but we want to stay outside in the camper. Do you think that’s all right?

Against my better judgment I said, I am not convinced it is going to happen, Mr. O’Neill. If it does, though, you and your wife should not watch.

He nodded his head up and down twice. His wife stifled a sob. I squeezed his shoulder, and I walked away.

THREE GUARDS BROUGHT Green into a room I had never been in. Two walked on either side of him, holding his arms, and one walked two steps behind. Green’s wrists were cuffed and chained to a leather belt around his waist. Because his ankles were also chained, he did not so much walk into the room as shuffle. When he walked through the door, he smiled, revealing a gold canine tooth I had not noticed before. In the center of the room was a small, square bridge table, with two folding chairs, across from one another. Against the wall were two plastic chairs, the kind you can buy for $10 at the grocery store. Kassie was with me, along with Fred Faison, the polygraph examiner. Green looked at Kassie and grinned. He nodded to me and said, This is the first time since I got here that I been in a room with people from the free world who ain’t guards. Then he turned to the guard on his left and said, Y’all gonna unchain me? The guard did not say anything. He turned around and looked at the captain. The captain also said nothing and walked out of the room.

Kassie asked Faison in a whisper whether he needed Green to be uncuffed to do the testing. Faison shrugged and said, Not really. Either way will be fine.

The captain walked back in. He said, Warden wants Green to stay chained.

Green said, That’s bullshit, man. I ain’t doing this in chains.

I asked the captain whether I could talk to Green privately. He stepped back toward the door, and motioned the other two guards over to him. Privately apparently meant they’d give me eight or ten feet of space. I stood between Green and the guards, so that my back was to them. I said, I’ve got other shit I can be doing today. To be honest, I don’t think you will pass the polygraph, and if you do, I don’t think it will matter. So I don’t really care what you decide, but will you hurry up and make a decision so I can get on with my day?

He said, You bring any change, counselor?

Kassie was standing next to me. She quickly said, I can buy you a soda.

Green kept his eyes on me and smiled. He said, A Dr. Pepper and a Sprite. He paused a beat, then said, Please.

Kassie walked out to get them. Green looked at the captain and said, I’m ready.

I sat on the edge of one of the plastic chairs, trying to decide whether I believed a word he was saying, trying to figure out whether I could use it, trying to divine his motives. Faison was staring down at his machines as he asked Green a series of questions in a robotic monotone. He had placed sensors on Green’s chest and head. A blood pressure cuff encased his left biceps. After every question, before he gave an answer, Green leaned forward and sipped from one of his drinks, alternating between the two. After half an hour, Faison stood up and walked over to me. Anything else you want me to cover? he asked. I looked at Kassie. She shrugged. I told Faison I thought we had enough. He walked back over to Green and started to remove the wires.

Green said, We done? Faison said that we were. Two guards were immediately on either side of Green, holding on to his elbows as he rose from the chair. I stood up to leave. Green looked at Kassie and said, Thanks for the sodas. To me he said, I’m trying to help you here.

LINCOLN PICKED UP the extension while I was talking to Katya. He said, Hi, Dada. Did you have a good day at the death row?

I told him it was a sad day. He said, Oh. Well, guess what? Mama and I took Winona for a walk on the beach. It was really long. And even though it’s not very hot outside, Winona got so hot that she went swimming. And there was steam coming off her. And Dada, the water is freezing. I asked him whether he would be ready for another walk when I got to the beach. He said, That would be nice.

Just as I was arriving at the cabin, at nearly five o’clock, Jerome called. He said, The judge ruled against us in O’Neill, and the clerk from the federal court of appeals called. They said that if we plan to file an appeal, it has to be there by five tomorrow.

The next day was Saturday. I asked Jerome whether he was sure that was what the clerk said. He said, I can e-mail you the order if you want me to. I told him that I’d be at the office by noon.

Upstairs, Katya was in the kitchen making cookie dough. Lincoln was licking the beater, and Katya was giving cherry-size pieces to Winona. I said, Looks like you guys will have enough energy for a superlong walk.

Lincoln said, Yippee.

I cut off the end of a cigar. When Lincoln, Winona, and I got outside, I lit it. Winona went running off ahead, chasing sand-crab smells. Lincoln said, Dada, please don’t smoke that.

I said, Amigo, I don’t smoke very many anymore, and I like how they taste, and they help me to relax. Lincoln and I were holding hands.

Winona circled back around to us. She had found a tennis ball. Her snout was covered with muddy sand. Lincoln said, Dada, if you smoke cigars you’re not going to be able to spend as much time with me.

I said, You’re a smart kid, amigo. I held the cigar until it burned itself out.

Lincoln said, Thank you, Dada.

AFTER LINCOLN WENT to bed, Katya and I sat outside on the deck with a pitcher of margaritas while the steaks were on the grill. It was cold, but not uncomfortable. The sky was clear, and we could see Orion, Taurus, and, inside the bull, the cluster of blue stars known as the Pleiades. I told her about O’Neill and that I would have to drive back to Houston first thing in the morning. She said, Do you really think the judges will be working this weekend?

I said, Of course not. This is their way of saying fuck you to us.

We sat and looked at the sky. I said, I saw O’Neill this morning. He did not remember me at all. He was randomly quoting from the Bible. At least it seemed random. His dad knew it was from Isaiah. They don’t want to watch the execution.

Katya lifted my right hand and put it in her lap. She said, In my astronomy class, I had to calculate the age of the Pleiades. The only time I could ever do math was when it involved the stars. I asked her how old they were. She said, I don’t remember exactly. I think one hundred million years or so. If it weren’t for Lincoln, that would change my perspective on the meaning of everything.

I said, It’s funny O’Neill was quoting Isaiah. The Pleiades are mentioned in the Book of Amos. You who turn justice into wormwood, and hurl righteousness to the ground. Seems appropriate, doesn’t it.

She said, I don’t know about Amos, but the Red Hot Chili Peppers sang about them. Wanna hear?

I smiled. I’ll take a pass, gorgeous.

She said, Why don’t you take the steaks off the grill and let them rest in the kitchen for a while?

I said, That is the perfect idea.

Later, while we were still lying in bed, I told her about the polygraph examination. Green answered yes when Faison asked him whether he had personal knowledge about the deaths of the Quaker family. He answered yes when asked if Ruben Cantu killed them. He answered yes when asked whether he had paid Cantu to kill Tricia Cummings. He answered yes when asked whether Cantu told him that he had killed the wrong person. He answered yes when asked whether Cantu had left a gun at the scene in order to make it appear that Dorris Quaker had murdered her children and then committed suicide. When I finished telling her about the questions and answers, she said, And? I told her that Faison would have a complete report later, but it was his opinion that Green was being truthful on all the questions. She said, I am not going to say I told you so.

I said, Why not?

She said, Because I’m starving, and I want you to bring my steak in here to me.

AS I WAS PACKING my bag the next morning Lincoln said, Why do you have to leave today, Dada? I told him that I needed to try to help someone. He said, But it’s probably not going to work, right?

I wondered whether he had heard me say that, or deduced it himself. He said, Won’t the person die anyway? I said yes, but that I still thought I needed to help him. He said, That doesn’t make any sense. Besides, why can’t his mom or dad help him?

I said, Amigo, he doesn’t have anyone who can help him. You and I are very lucky. We have lots of people who love us and who would try to help us if we were in trouble. This man I am trying to help doesn’t have anyone. I think it’s important to try to help people who don’t have anyone. Don’t you?

He was quiet for a minute. I asked him whether everything was okay. He said, Yes, I’m just thinking. I touched his cheek. He said, Dada, I’m glad you are trying to help that person, but I still wish you were staying with Mama and me for a little while longer.

O’NEILL HAD BEEN PLACED in mental hospitals more than a dozen times, usually by his parents, a couple of times by the courts. In a layperson’s terms, he was crazy. But being crazy matters in different ways at different phases of the criminal justice system. At a trial, if a defendant is too mentally ill to aid his lawyers, then he is incompetent to stand trial, and so the government keeps him in a mental institution until he is capable of standing trial or dies, whichever comes first. If, following a trial, a jury finds that the defendant did not know the difference between right and wrong, then he is criminally insane, and he can’t be sent to prison, but he can be sent to a mental institution, until he is healed or dies, whichever comes first. If a defendant is not found insane and is sentenced to death, but he becomes crazy while on death row, then the state cannot execute him, so the person stays crazy in prison until he dies, or the state medicates him so he is not crazy anymore, and then they can kill him. Contrary to conventional mythology, being crazy is not a get-out-of-jail-free card, and life in the cuckoo’s nest isn’t all that different from life in the joint.

The problem we had in O’Neill’s case, though, is that in 1996 Congress passed a law that basically makes it impossible for death-row inmates to challenge their convictions in federal court more than one time. When O’Neill went to federal court the first time, his lawyers did not say he was incompetent to be executed, because his execution was still years away. In addition to that, he had gotten worse and worse over the years. He might not have been incompetent to be executed when he first arrived on death row, but he certainly was now. We had already been to federal court, however, and we were not being successful in persuading the courts that they should allow us to come back. We were pinning our hopes on an obscure Supreme Court case that seemed to create an exception to the law for people who were raising issues that did not previously exist. The lower federal court was not persuaded, and we did not have much confidence that the court of appeals would be persuaded, either, but if the court of appeals wanted our appeal by Saturday afternoon, that meant they would probably rule against us first thing Monday morning, and we would have all day to get to the Supreme Court.

Everyone was at the office when I got there. Most lawyers have the philosophy that they should try to win in whatever forum they happen to be. So if you are in the trial court, think about winning there, not in the court of appeals. If you are in the court of appeals, think about winning there, not in the Supreme Court. The problem with that approach for death-penalty lawyers in Texas is that the federal court of appeals with jurisdiction over our clients consists mostly of judges who are utterly unprincipled and hostile to the rule of law. They look for ways to uphold death sentences even where constitutional violations are egregious. In recent years, the court upheld a death sentence of a black inmate who was sentenced to death by an all-white jury after prosecutors systematically removed every potential juror of color from serving. It upheld the death sentence of a mentally retarded inmate after his lawyer, who was afflicted by Parkinson’s disease, neglected to point out the inmate’s IQ score. It upheld the death sentence of an inmate who was probably innocent on the ground that his lawyers had waited too long to identify the proof of innocence. It upheld the death sentence of an inmate whose lawyer had literally slept through the trial. These judges get to be judges not because they are wise, but because they are friends with their U.S. senator, or a friend of a friend. They are smart, however. That means they are very good at hiding their lawlessness inside of recondite-sounding legalese. They look for reasons to ensure that a death-row inmate will get executed, and they usually find one. And not very many people care. Do you care that the rights of some murderer were violated? Most people say that the murderer got treated better than his victim, and that pretty much sums up the attitude of the judges on the court of appeals as well.

Justices on the Supreme Court are slightly better. They could hardly be worse. But the big problem with counting on winning a victory in the Supreme Court is that the justices are so inundated with cases that they don’t have time to be sticklers for principle, even when they are so inclined. Nevertheless, even an infinitesimally small chance of victory is infinitely greater than a zero chance. I told Jerome that we should write something cursory for the court of appeals, since we knew we were going to lose, and start working on writing a powerful appeal to the Supreme Court. Gary disagreed. He reminded me that the Supreme Court had recently agreed to hear a case from Alabama called Nelson, and that the issue in Nelson was very similar to the issue we were raising in O’Neill. Maybe, he suggested, we could ask the court of appeals to postpone O’Neill’s execution until the Supreme Court decided the Nelson case. I did not think it would work, but it did make sense. I opted for sensibility over probability. We wrote an appeal pointing out that even though the court of appeals had ruled against us in other cases raising a similar issue, the court should act differently in this case in view of the Supreme Court’s obvious interest in this issue. For good measure, we reminded the court how mentally disturbed O’Neill was. We sent the appeal to the court by e-mail at a quarter to five.

SUNDAY MORNING Fred Faison called to let me know that he had dropped off his report at my office. I asked him for the Cliffs Notes version. He said, Anyone who trusts these machines will not find any deception in Mr. Green’s answers. I asked him what his report said. He said, It says that, in my opinion, Mr. Green’s claims of knowledge and responsibility for the murders of the Quaker family are truthful.

I said, So you are saying that you believe my client is innocent.

He said, I’m saying that I believe what Green said.

Two days later we had polygraphed Quaker. I had not been there. Faison said he was telling the truth, too.

Mark Roberts lived in my neighborhood. I e-mailed him and asked whether he had time to chat later that day. He called me a few minutes later and asked whether I’d had breakfast. I told him I hadn’t. He said, Let’s ride our bikes to the Breakfast Klub and talk there. Roberts had been a semiprofessional cyclist before he gave it up and went to law school. I told him I wasn’t sure he could pedal slow enough for me to keep up. He said, I just finished a seventy-miler. I was about to jump into the shower. You’ll be able to keep up.

We both ordered waffles and wings. I told him our problems. There was blood from a victim in Quaker’s car. He had life insurance on his family. He was mentally unbalanced from the fire. A gun he owned had disappeared. Cantu was gone, and it probably wouldn’t matter even if he weren’t. Unless he was on death row somewhere, so that he didn’t have anything to lose, I didn’t see him clearing his conscience to save a guy he didn’t know. Kassie had found Tricia Cummings, the woman Green had supposedly wanted Cantu to kill. She had gotten married, changed her name to Tricia Davis, had a daughter, and died of a heroin overdose. She was buried in the Fourth Ward. That pretty much left us nothing but Green’s statement.

Roberts said, How did they convict the guy with just that?

He was right, of course. Daniel had frequent nosebleeds. Quaker had told me that, and the nurse at Daniel’s school verified it. The blood meant nothing. The life insurance also proved very little. The insurance agent gave Gary a statement that she had pressured Henry to buy it when he came to see her to buy auto insurance. It hadn’t even been his idea, and either he forgot he had it or had no interest in it after the murders, because he took no steps to collect the money. I said, His lawyer was Jack Gatling. Roberts nodded and chewed on a wing.

He said, Listen, I’m sympathetic, but I think I’ve done everything I can at this point. I have a call arranged with Green for Tuesday. I’ll tell him that you and I have talked. I already said you can use his statement if he doesn’t make it to Friday, but if we catch lightning in a bottle, I don’t see how I can agree. He’ll be opening himself up to another death sentence. I’ll tell him that, and if he wants to fire me if he gets a commutation so that he can talk to you, then he can.

I asked Roberts whether it was okay with him if I tried to talk to Green one more time on Thursday. He said, You mean while he’s in the holding cell? I nodded. He said, What? You figure he’ll be like Honest Abe thirty minutes before he gets the juice?

I said, You never know.

He said, This is why I don’t want my clients to be innocent. Too much pressure.

I ate the last bite of my waffle and said, Do we have to ride back home or can we call a cab? He laughed, which I took to mean we were riding.

JEROME SPENT THE NIGHT at the office on Sunday. When I got there just after seven on Monday morning, he was asleep on my sofa. I said, Hey, Little Red Riding Hood, you want some coffee? He sat up and apologized. He washed his face and came back into my office with the appeal for the Supreme Court he had spent the night writing. It was seventy pages. I said, This is too long. We’ve got to chop it down.

He said, I know.

I said, Good thing we have eleven hours.

Considering that the court of appeals had had our petition since late Saturday afternoon, and considering that law clerks work long hours on weekends even though their judicial bosses do not, I expected that we were going to hear something from the court first thing in the morning. When neither fax nor e-mail had arrived by ten, I asked Jerome to call the clerk, just to make sure they had not sent something that hadn’t reached us. She said that the court had not yet announced a decision. Gary and Kassie went next door to pick up Vietnamese food. I sat at my computer, trying to work on the Quaker case, but I couldn’t concentrate on it, so I buzzed Jerome on the intercom and told him I’d take over editing the O’Neill appeal. He said he was almost finished, that it was down to fifty pages, exactly what is allowed. So I sat in my chair, bounced the Super Ball against the wall, and downloaded an Art Tatum song from iTunes.

Kassie walked in and said, We’re eating in the conference room. My fortune says that all great battles are lost in the middle. I think it’s Lao Tzu. Do you think middle refers to the court of appeals? She smiled.

I said, I heard it as all great wars. I thought you were going to the Vietnamese place.

She said, We did.

I said, I don’t think you can place much faith in a fortune cookie from a Vietnamese joint.

She said, I think that might be a racist comment.

At two o’clock the clerk called and told us the court had issued its opinion. They had e-mailed it to me. She asked whether I wanted a copy in the mail. I laughed. No thank you, I said. The four of us stood in a semicircle, reading the pages as they came off the printer. We had lost, but we had lost in a very surprising way. There are eighteen judges on the court of appeals, but they sit in panels of three to decide cases. The rule on the court is that once a panel decides an issue a certain way, all the judges on the court, even if they were not on that panel, are required to decide the same issue in the same way, unless the court as a whole reverses the panel decision. The panel that decided our case seemed to have agreed with Gary’s argument that they should hold the case until the Supreme Court ruled in Nelson. But, according to the judges, a previous panel had decided a similar issue already, and so our panel was not at liberty to grant us the relief we were asking for.

As I read the panel’s opinion, the judges were almost inviting us to ask the entire court to review the case. I said to the others, Does it seem to you all that they are asking us to request en banc reconsideration? We all pored over the opinion again.

Gary said, If the panel does want us to request en banc reconsideration, and we don’t, how will that look when we appeal to the Supremes?

I didn’t think our chances in the Supreme Court would be much affected one way or the other. At the same time, if we were right that the panel was nudging us to request that the full court of appeals address the issue, then maybe they had some inkling that the full court would grant our request. Otherwise, why propose a tactic that would just consume valuable time? I said, En banc reconsideration it is. We briefly discussed how to frame the argument. Gary and Kassie went with Jerome into his office, and an hour later they handed me a motion. I read it quickly, made a minor change or two, and said, File it.

Our motion for en banc reconsideration got to the court at three thirty. The clerk called us to confirm receipt. O’Neill was sitting in a van, on his way from the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, where death-row inmates are housed, to the Walls Unit in Huntsville, where they are killed. His execution was two and a half hours away.