This week in the saga

Wednesday morning he asks for a death sentence: a quick trial for the man from the train, and only one outcome. Six hours later, at two minutes past three, the register changes completely. A young ally — the one who spent his short career arguing with students on campuses — has been shot on a stage in Utah, and the post is four sentences long and asks the country to pray. Ninety-eight minutes after that: he is dead. Twenty-two minutes after that the flags come down to half mast until Sunday evening. That night there is an address to the nation with no words on it at all except the salutation. It is the quietest the chapter ever gets, and it lasts five days. On Monday afternoon a second boat is destroyed in the Caribbean — three men killed, the same paragraph structure as the first, the same closing warning — and the volume's two registers, the grief and the order, are being written by the same hand on the same phone.