It is a terrible conundrum.

There is but one way out, it seems to me, as I ride: to die at my own hand, thus retaining my honor.

Then one of the pursuing braves pulls up beside me. Having stepped over from where he formerly stood. There beside the quaking Untermeyers. He rides beside me now, gun hanging loosely in his hand at his side.

I reach down, snatch the gun away.

It is so easy.

“Hey, hey,” he says, and tries to take it back. But I am an officer, the Bravest Man, and the adrenaline of flight is still in me.

And I now have his gun in my hand.

Why not use it?

To save my dear friends the Untermeyers, surrounded back on Last Stand Hill, at the point of death, over near Podium?

I move the gun to the head of the brave. The sun overhead is a dust-dimmed orb. Up there with the two familiar fire sprinklers. The prairie grass sways. Among the folding chairs. From the hill upon which my dear friends are about to die, I sense them urging me to fire, and save them.

I fire.

The brave falls. The second brave dismounts, rushes to the side of the first. He too must die, if I am to save my friends. I shoot, he falls. His feet are crossed, there in his yellow sneakers. Her feet. Her feet, in her yellow sneakers, are crossed. As she dies.

The Singers’ Song changes, from Singing to screaming.

The first brave, still moving, gestures for me to come down near his mouth.

I do so.

For, though an enemy, he is, like me, a warrior, a man of action.

“Who were you?” he says, in perfect, unaccented English. “Before this? You were somebody. Did you have a wife? Kids? Check the notebook. These people? Not your friends. They have used you and will continue to use and degrade you and thousands of others like you until somebody stops them.”

Wife? Kids?

I engage my mind with the fiercest, most honest focus.

And find nothing.

“No,” I say. “No wife, no kids. And I think I would remember that.”

“You wouldn’t,” he says. “You absolutely would not. And that’s the worst thing these bastards have done to you.”

Then dies.

A wife? That is funny. If I had a wife, would I not at least be able to recall her name? Recall the way she moved? Moved around our—our neat yellow house? In the willows, at the end of a dusty lane? Out the side window of which one could glimpse two leaning green chicken coops that always seemed to be conferring with one another, there in the willow-dappled—­

Good God, I recall with a jolt of astonishment: I do have a wife. I do! Back in Michigan. Grace Berard. And children: Grace Aileen Harrington, daughter. Harry Berard Harrington, son. Of Clinton. Clinton, Michigan. Sweet Lord, what have I done? Why have I come here? To this village?