I gave him what he had asked, names and places and dates. He stayed, as the hours wore on. At my request, a chess set was brought in and we played three games. One win, one loss, and one draw. A fair reflection, I thought, of the result from our other game.

We ate a simple lunch of cheese and onion sandwiches. I, to my surprise, had a fair appetite.

And then, sooner than I thought possible, two o’clock was approaching.

“Do you propose to stay to the end?” I asked.

He nodded. “Unless you have an objection.”

“No prayers, then. No last-minute attempts to save my soul.”

“I cannot save another’s soul. Only the person can do so.”

It was the closest he had come to priest talk, and a good thing, too. He seemed resigned to the fact that I was not about to discuss the logic of my choice of victims.

“We must soon be going,” Diaz continued. He gestured toward the door of my room, where a face was visible at the grille. “It will be better if you leave this room voluntarily, and are able to walk without assistance or coercion.”

“Certainly.”

I was, in fact, preternaturally calm. In retrospect, a sense of the unreality of events had surely overtaken me. Who can accept the idea, viscerally rather than intellectually, that this is to be the last conscious half hour ever, in a universe destined to endure for tens of billions of years? Carmelo Diaz had promised to do his best on my behalf, but I put no stock in his success — either intellectually or viscerally.

We walked, side by side but far from alone. All the way along the corridor, with its dull gray walls and infrequent locked doors of bright blue, others paced before and behind us.

No one spoke. The whole building was as quiet within as it would be without. Judicial sleep, which killed no one until they expired of natural causes, had ended the long rhetoric about capital punishment. No one would be outside, chanting their scripted slogans.