They talked for over an hour. Near the end, after they’d been sitting in silence for a while, Burns said quietly, “Do you know what Christ died of?”

Rivers looked surprised, but answered readily enough. “Suffocation. Ultimately the position makes it impossible to go on inflating the lungs. A terrible death.”



“That’s what I find so horrifying. Somebody had to imagine that death. I mean, just in order to invent it as a method of execution. You know that thing in the Bible? ‘The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth’? I used to wonder why pick on that? Why his imagination? But it’s absolutely right.”

—Regeneration