In the big square bedroom where he’s slept for the past sixty-five years, the cold stethoscope is uncomfortable on the Judge’s naked chest. Dr. Lucius Peabody and Chlory and Jake, two Black enslaved peoples, are in the room with him. When Dr. Peabody removes the stethoscope, the Black woman’s eyes roll back in her head and she screams. He shouts at her to stop, and then asks Jake, the Black man, and Dr. Peabody to stop her but they don’t seem to hear him. The Judge flings the covers off of him and hurries out of the house, and is surprised to find himself fully dressed when he gets outside. He navigates a large crowd and talks to a young man watching an entrance who says he’s waiting for his fiance who he was supposed to marry at noon. When the Judge asks what happened, the young man says that he was driving fast and a child ran into the road so he had to turn sharply. The Judge is confused and looks towards the entrance everyone is staring at. The man asks the Judge if he is waiting for his wife and he says he is sad he has to wait so long for his young fiance to join him. The Judge says that he came here to escape someone and not to find anyone except for his son who died when he was 10 years old. 

The man tells him to look for his son at the entrance. The Judge laughs but stops when he realizes he’s not joking. He asks the man for a match but he has none and the Judge walks away and finds Mothershed. He tells Mothershed he’s trying to understand if this afterlife is real and says they would have never imagined that this would be their reality when they’d sat around in his office discussing Voltaire and Ingersoll. He asks Mothershed for a match but he also doesn’t have one, revealing a pistol when he searches his pockets. Mothershed, an atheist, tells him he committed suicide with the pistol to escape the preachers. The Judge, who is agnostic, says he wants to speak to some of the great philosophers they used to read directly about the afterlife and he asks Ingersoll if he accepts the reality of the afterlife, turning his unlit cigarette in between his fingers. He shows the philosopher a picture of his son and tells him how he was a Republican-elected official in a Democratic stronghold and how his one surprisingly intellectual companion for the past fifteen years has been Mothershed, an almost-illiterate atheist. Ingersoll tells him to go seek his son but the Judge doesn’t move and the cigarette drops to the ground. The Judge grows upset when Ingersoll refuses to answer his question about what is real and if he has been deceived by the great thinker he’s leaned on for so much of his life. Ingersoll instructs him to follow a woman carrying a baby who just passed them on the road. The Judge rises and says he doesn’t believe the man is Robert Ingersoll.

The Judge finds the child sitting at the woman’s feet on the road and sees that it’s surrounded by tiny leaden effigies of Roman soldiers in various stages of dismemberment. He sees small scars in the intercepts on the child and when the child sweeps flat the remaining figures a fourth scar emerges and he begins to cry. The woman shushes the child and when the Judge asks if he is sick she says he’s just tired of his toys. She says a wealthy, old man who has lived here for a long time gave her child these toys. The scars, she tells him, come from other children who hadn’t meant to hurt the baby. The Judge shows the mother a photo of his son and she recognizes him as Howard and says she sees him every day, riding past on the pony from the picture. She tells him to wait on the road and they are sure to see him eventually, but the Judge says that the pony would have long been dead by now and that he’d better move along. He goes back to Ingersoll and tells him that if he is able to touch and see his son again it will mean that he hasn’t lost him and if he hasn’t lost him then he never had a son because he is who he is through bereavement. His entire life has been defined by loss and if he never actually lost anything then his identity is a lie. He runs back to his house and lies in bed again and tells the gentlemen of the jury to proceed.