My dear Maria,

It seems my time on this Earth is nearly over now. Not much more than one more day, unless — but it is no good hanging and hoping on unless. They have made their minds up now, and the Governor— well, he's been willing enough to see an end to more lives, and probably more innocent lives at that, than even they say I have. You believe— don't you?— like I believe and God knows, that I never killed nobody. Not those poor boys and nobody else neither. Why would I do that thing? I never had no reason. Maybe sometimes you have doubted, I don't blame you if you have, sometimes it has all made me doubt myself. Like maybe I done something so terrible my brain just point-blank refuses to store it in the memory bank. Other times, most times, I KNOW that I am INNOCENT of those horrible crimes they say I done. So I can go to God in peace now. If they IS a God. Well, I guess I shall know that one for sure soon enough now. Soon enough. Well, if they IS a God like we all believe, I don't know why He lets this thing happen, but I do know He blesses you for trying to help me. As I bless you. Well, my dear, this will be my last letter and my last chance to THANK YOU and my last to say Good Bye. Maybe one day we will meet again in a Better Place . I know you will see me tomorrow, see me off I mean, and I thank you for that too because I know it will not be easy for you. But believe me it will help me to know they is at least SOMEONE there who BELIEVES in me. So even if you could not save my Body, you must know what comfort and help you have brought my Soul. I cannot say I will remember it always because I do not know what remembering will be after tomorrow. So, my dear, be brave and take care and do not forget me when I am gone. I cannot say Forever Yours, but I can say Yours Truly

Michael

"My God, I can't believe you framed this thing."

Steve read through again the words under the glass.

"This is something you want to be reminded of?"

Maria, coming out of the bedroom, fiddling a hairgrip open with her teeth, saw what he was looking at and paused. "Oh hell, yeah," she said, fixing the grip absently above her ear. "It's good for the soul to be reminded of one's failures."

"So it was a failure? Looks like he thought you were good for his soul too. So maybe you were winners all round."

"Oh, Steve, please. I watched the poor guy die, for Chrissakes. So yes, it was a failure. My failure, the state's failure, the Administration's failure, the goddamn country's failure."

"Was he innocent?"

"I believe so, yes. But even if he wasn't."

"But to put this on the wall." His fingernails tapped the glass. "It's like a trophy."

"I didn't kill him. I tried to keep him alive. And failed. So no, it's not a trophy. Now can we change the subject?"

"Sure. Where'd you want to eat?"

In the restaurant, between the steak and the sweet, Steve suddenly said: "It's not a trophy. It's more like an icon. Like it's a religious thing. Cult of the dead. Maria communes with the soul she saved."

Maria, not wanting this conversation now but somehow trapped into it, snapped back glumly: "I didn't save him. Not him or his soul."

"It's like having a shrunken head in a glass case. A collector's prized possession."

"No it's not. It's a letter. From someone I knew and cared about."

"Cared about, not cared for, that's interesting."

"I hardly knew him, but I knew him enough to care."

"Not for who he was but for what he was. You didn't care for Michael the person, you cared about Michael the condemned man."

"It's better than not caring at all."

"Oh, absolutely. The state cared enough to kill him."

Maria watched Steve dip his spoon in creme brulee. Looking up, he said: "Of course it's all ritual. The requirement of the law. A human sacrifice."

"The sacrifice was all Michael's," said Maria.

"Not all," said Steve, warming to his subject. "If you really look at the ritual, Michael, as the sacrificial lamb, is almost incidental. What you must look at is the presiding priest, the elders of the temple. And who offers up the sacrifice."

"Dammit, Steve, he was a man. A man."

"Yes, he was. A man sacrificed on the altar of the law. So who offered up the sacrifice?"

She sat looking at him, examining his face, trying to make out his seriousness, running through memories of her own, trying once again to shut some of them out, deciding how to answer, whether to answer. Eventually she said, still looking at him, this man she only just knew, maybe no better than the dead man, Michael, she had met only through a glass partition: "We did. All of us. The state. The people."

Steve said: "The Lord giveth, and the State taketh away." Quoting her, giving back her own words. Words that had been her own thought once, before they became a slogan, something to use instead of thought, something to save you from thinking. An offering to close the subject.

In bed with Steve, sweaty and tousled in the hot night, Maria lay between dream and memory. In the frame on the wall she saw Michael's face; not just his face, but his whole head, three-dimensional, not holographic but a display in a museum-case. She saw him just as she had last seen him, the look in his eyes, tender and gentle, just a little pleading maybe, seeming to look right at her, making eye contact for the final time even though she knew that this time the glass was one-way. And then the blindfold, and the head-restraint. And then the little puff of smoke, like the soul leaving his body from the top of his head.