Vernon God Little

Next, a girl with a clipboard arrives and makes me sign a waiver for my final statement. I'm going out quietly, just like Lasalle. I ask her one special favor in return. She calls a producer to check it out, then says it's okay. I can take my shirt off for the Event. She leads the pastor, the officers, and me down a bright hallway to the execution chamber. My knees go weak with the kind of swooniness you get from hospital smells; the pastor even takes hold of my arm when I hear the tune playing down the hall.

' Galveston

, oh Galves-ton – I am so afraid of dying…'

We pass the broadcast control room, and guess what: they must've licensed the TV weather theme for the show. I hate that theme. I close my ears until we reach this simple white room with a window along one wall, and theater-like seats beyond.

'Before I dry the tears she's crying…'

I take off my shirt. My skin is mostly healed now, from my art project. Tattooed in big blue letters across my chest are the words 'Me ves y sufres'

- 'See me and suffer.' A medical orderly helps me climb onto the gurney, which is kind of person-shaped, like the hole left after a cartoon character crashes through a wall. I catch a glimpse of Jonesy in a room at the back. He must be manning the governor's phone. The governor is the only man who can stop this now. He'd need some damn convincing evidence to do that. Jonesy just turns away when he sees me. He doesn't stand near the phone.

Guards secure me to the gurney using thick cowhide straps with metal buckles, then the orderly raises a vein in my arm, and gives me a tiny shot, of anesthetic I guess. He fixes a long needle onto a tube that runs through the wall from the back room. I look away as he slides the needle into my vein. After a moment, cool solution begins to flow.

An usherette appears behind the glass that separates me from the witness area, and people start filing into their seats. Fragile Mrs Speltz is the only person I recognize. Aside from the wave of sadness I get from her haunted eyes, I actually feel relieved that she's the highlight of the witness area. Nothing in there suggests I'll be missing any parties when I'm gone. Then, just as I'm thinking that, the darnedest thing happens: a tall, beautiful young woman in a pale blue suit squeezes along the back row to her seat, kindling my groin out of retirement. Even the guards turn to watch as she sits, modestly tugging down the hem of her skirt. Then she looks at me. It's Ella Bouchard. Boy did her equipment arrive. Bluebonnet eyes call to me through the glass.

'Sailing' starts to play now, because when Fate opens up, it opens up with both barrels. I try to swallow, but my mouth is woody. A terminal learning comes to me: that for all the sirens, game-show buzzers, and drum-rolls of life, it is the nature of men to die quietly. I mean, what kind of life was that

? - a bunch of movies, and people talking about movies, and shows about people talking about movies. Still, I guess I asked for it. By being negative, destructive. I remember once calling my daddy to collect me from a place, but was sad when he came because I'd since grown to love the place. Death takes me like that.

I feel an itch around the needle, and close my eyes. Voices in the chamber soften, and I feel myself slipping away, up and over the gurney, into a reverie. I look down on myself, but instead of panic, instead of sudden death, I float out of the chamber, and over the landscape outside, where my senses are filled with the scent of lawn-clippings. I'm transported, clear as day, back home to Beulah Drive. There's Mrs Porter's, and there's my front yard. It's today, it's right now. The mantis pumpjack beats with my soul as a black Mercedes-Benz sweeps into my driveway. Mrs Lechuga's drape twitches. Mom ain't home this evening, which is unusual. She's eating out with Pam. I watch Lally climb out of the car. Bless the motherfucker to hell. Bless his bones smashed and stuffed through the ligaments of his puking fucked eyes, bless his mouth to suck me off, take my bile so it kills him dead to a place where he stays conscious and fucken broken and cold, shivering fucken worms and slime from organs that pop and fucken waste as I laugh.

He seems excited by the want I granted. I know the question of the second firearm always plagued him. He lets himself into the house through the kitchen, and moves to my bedroom closet, where he finds the shoebox containing the padlock key, just like I told him. Next to it lays a bottle of ginseng. You can't even see the LSD pearls I stuffed in it all those moons ago. He smiles, and picks it up.