It’s a measure, I think, of “my side’s” moral disarray that Rose’s suggestions were taken seriously. I don’t know why, but my parents and the lawyers still seemed to hold the hope that I’d be judged innocent. Not only did I refuse to testify that the Butterfields were the immoral, freebooting scum my mother described them as (“Immature, subjective jackasses—even the children are immature”) but I didn’t have any desire to be judged innocent. I don’t mean to make myself sound more calculating and self-possessed than I was (it had been a month of sweating and weeping; there were teethmarks at the top of my bedsheet and a drawerful of unsendable letters), but I wanted to be punished. I knew the fire was accidental but it was not as accidental as it should have been, and I wanted some agency outside of all of us to intervene and take over the job of making me suffer for what had happened. I thought my fate in the hands of the police and the courts would drain some of the vividness from the hatred the Butterfields held toward me. With someone else to punish me, someone else to say I was bad and unfit to live with decent people, then Jade and the rest could allow themselves to drift toward the other side, my side, to stop punishing me in their hearts.

So I would not say that the Butterfields were on acid that night and I would not volunteer anecdotes about the far-flung Butterfieldian lifestyle. Ted Bowen, a lawyer very much like my father, with his sturdy amber teeth, peppermint breath, and the one long uninterrupted eyebrow growing from temple to temple, arranged for a private meeting with me. He took me to a working-class cafeteria on 53rd Street and, in a long speech that was both tender and formal, informed me of the consequences of a guilty verdict. He described juvenile detention and the humiliations I might suffer. “These are guys from the bottom of the heap, David. Simple socialist theory will tell you what that does to a person. They have nothing, they believe in nothing, and they’ll kill you for a half of a cigarette.” Then he leaned forward and gave me one of those I-wouldn’t-be-telling-you- this-if-I-didn’t-think-you-could-take-it looks. “I don’t know if you’ve heard about homosexuality.…” And with that his voice trailed off and his eyes looked so sad and so astoundingly serious that out of sheer nervousness I smiled.