Flashback

“Except he’s resisting taking the other meds that have helped reduce the number and intensity of flashbacks.”

They arrived at the locked unit, where Nick tapped them in.

“What bothers me,” René said, “is what happens if Louis gets stuck in a flashback and can’t come out, or doesn’t want to.”

Nick nodded grimly. “That would be a problem. But that’s not why I called you. Have you seen the recent patient census?”

“No.”

Nick walked her to a small sitting room down the hall from the Activities Center. “It’s another thing the president didn’t see the other day.” He opened the door.

There were three residents sitting in wheelchairs before a television set playing on low volume. Two of them René knew—women in their eighties who were in advanced stages of dementia. The third woman René did not at first recognize. She moved closer, and for a protracted moment fixed herself on the woman’s face. Then recognition hit René like a fist.

Clara Devine.

Over the six months at McLean’s Hospital her body had atrophied to the point where she was bound to a wheelchair. She did not look up when René and Nick entered, as did the other women. Instead, she stared blankly at the television, her eyes clotted with fog.

“They brought her back two days ago,” Nick explained. “McLean’s decided that she was no longer a danger to others or herself.”

That was evident, for Clara looked like a pathetic effigy of the once-feisty woman who had eavesdropped on the nursing staff and tapped her way out of the unit. “My God,” René whispered.

“Of course, she was taken off Memorine right after the murder. Then about two months later the plaque had begun to return.”

The aide held a cup of water with a straw to Clara’s lips, talking softly to her. But Clara didn’t respond. She was clearly incapable of speech and the ability to feed herself. Her skin hung on her frame like a too-loose seat cover. From her appearance, she didn’t appear to have much time to go before she was bedridden. Then it would be a matter of weeks before she’d forget how to eat or before her heart or kidneys failed or her lungs filled with fluid.

“Her sister had asked that the staff not take any extraordinary measures.”

Clara’s reversal was kept quiet. But there would be no legal repercussions since in the fine print of the consent forms was a clause exonerating the clinical team, researchers, home and pharmaceutical company, et al., from the possible return of the disease. Clara Devine was the only patient to have been withdrawn, and given the extreme circumstances, her sister and legal guardian had raised no complaint. And since she had been removed from Memorine, her existence was simply a brief countdown to her death.

They left the room, and Nick walked René to the door. “They did an MRI on her before they sent her back,” Nick said. “The plaque’s all back. She’s a mess.”

“Oh, no!”

“That’s the bitch of it: Once a subject is on the stuff we can’t withdraw them or the dementia returns.”

“Which means that if the flashbacks become problematic, taking them off Memorine isn’t an option.”

“Not without renewed deterioration.”

“But nearly everything we use to combat the seizures only dulls them.”

“The lesser of two evils. But I do have some good news,” Nick said. “Jack Koryan woke up.”

JACK KORYAN.

When René left, Nick sat alone in his office and from his window watched René cross the parking lot. She looked so lovely as she made her way. A beautiful and bright young woman. He could still hear her gasp of delight at the news, tears of joy filling her eyes.

His eyes fell to a copy of the report of Dr. Heller’s interview with Jack Koryan. He fingered open some of the pages that held Jack’s answers to standard questions that determined his basic cognitive functionality: Where were you born? Where did you go to school? Name the president of the United States. What state is this? What is your mother’s maiden name?

It was that last one that fixed his attention.

What is your mother’s maiden name?

And from the opaque, still water well of past time, it rose up like a phosphorescent bubble expanding all the way until it broke the surface with a blink.

What were the chances—maybe one in a million?

Or maybe not.

He watched René pull out of the lot. In a couple of days she would visit Jack Koryan, driven by all the best sentiments—photographic positives of what would drive him.

45

“I REMEMBER YOU,” JACK SAID. “Weren’t we once husband and wife?”

Beth nodded. “I’m sorry, Jack,” she said with a choke. “I waited and waited, but you didn’t wake up and …”

“Nothing to be sorry about. You didn’t know.” He patted her hand. “I’m just glad you didn’t have them pull the plug.” He could hear the false brightness in his voice.

“They said they didn’t think you’d ever recover.”

“Forget it. I would have done the same thing.” That wasn’t true, but what the hell difference did it make? He remembered their marriage was headed for the shoals anyway. The coma had spared him all the anguish.

Beth wiped her eyes with a wad of tissues.

“You’re still the best-looking woman I’ve seen in six months.”

“Very funny,” she said, half laughing and half crying.

Jack stroked her hair lightly, and his mind flooded with memories. Although he had been told of all the time that had passed, it still seemed like just the other day he had last seen Beth, and overnight she had got divorced and remarried.

But Beth looked older: Her face was fuller than he recalled. She still looked good, dressed handsomely in smart gray slacks and black blazer, a pearl necklace lighting up her neck. He recalled none of the outfit and tried to repress the thought of her posing for her new husband as she would with him in the dressing rooms of Saks or Potpourri or their bedroom. The diamond on her finger was the size of a small olive. But on her other hand she wore an emerald ring he had given her for Valentine’s Day, 1998—presented over dinner at Aujourd’hui at the Four Seasons Hotel. In an arrangement with the maitre d’ it was delivered as her dessert under a silver dome. He remembered speculating on his reaction had the man swapped the ring for a wedge of cheesecake.

Five days ago Nurse Marcy Falco had telephoned Beth in Texas with the good news. She arrived last night. For the reunion Falco and the therapist sat Jack in a wheelchair with a new pair of New Balance running shoes.

“How are the feet?”

“Okay, but they’re going back to school.”

Jack had been scheduled for intensive physical therapy, which he welcomed, since he couldn’t believe how weak he was. According to Marcy, he weighed 127 pounds—a loss of a quarter of his body weight. Yet, just last week he had bench-pressed ten reps of 175 pounds at the gym with Vince. Just last week—six months ago.

“So, who’s the lucky guy?”

“His name is George King. He’s a great guy, and I know you’d like him.”

“I’m sure,” he said, and tasted acid. It was impossible to get his mind around the fact that what seemed so fresh—his marriage to Beth, who for seven years had been a fundamental condition of his being—had been cleanly snipped away. He felt like some sci-fi character who takes a star-drive trip to the next solar system only to return a few weeks later to an earth that had aged by fifty years. Suddenly it was the future.

“I just wish I hadn’t let you go alone,” she whimpered. Then in a sudden gush: “Why the hell did you have to take a damn swim in the dark … and all those jellyfish around? Huh? What was the point?”

“It wasn’t dark, and the water was warm, and I didn’t see the jellyfish until I got out to the rock. And my cell phone was in my pants.” He smiled, but she did not smile back. A prickly silence fell between them. He had gone alone as a private thing—to connect to a lost artifact of himself—something Beth couldn’t understand. “I barely remember what happened.” Dark water. Swimming like hell. Stroboscopic flashes of lightning. Aunt Nancy.

Don’t rub. Don’t rub.

She was standing on the beach frantically waving me in. Then she disappeared. Then she was back. Or someone else. Last-ditch hallucinations before the curtain dropped.

“All I remember was swimming to shore. Next, I’m in this bed.” He pulled up his sleeves with his fingers. Faint white scars striped his arm.

“You can barely see them. And they’ll fade.”

“Not that.” He raised his arms. “They look like starched swan necks.”

“In six months you’ll be Popeye again.”

“Until then, Olive Oyl in drag.”

She smiled. “At least you haven’t lost your sense of humor.”

“Speaking of which, who’s paying for all this?”

“It’s all taken care of,” Beth said and explained that when Jack went into the coma she petitioned the court to be his guardian and promptly hired a Medicaid attorney who devised complicated strategies to preserve some assets and convert others to defray the cost of his hospitalization and nursing care. When Beth sold the house, she had put away half in a trust fund, which would co-pay with Medicaid for continued care, the excess of which would be available to him were he to wake up.

“Vince says he’s going to help find a place for you. And when you’re ready to leave, I’ll come back and help you settle in. So don’t worry about that. You’re going to have plenty of support.”

Jack nodded. But she had her own life, and once she left he didn’t expect to see her again.

Beth checked her watch. “I’ve got to go.” The nurses had given them only a few minutes, and his next PT session would begin shortly.

“You can come and visit us. Really. We’ve got plenty of room. I wish you would when … you know … you’re able to. It’s only five hours by plane … really.” She made a helpless gesture with her hands to apologize for crying. “I’m sorry.”

Jack nodded and felt his throat thicken. “Have a nice life,” he whispered.

“Don’t be so dramatic,” she snapped. “This isn’t good-bye.”

“‘Course not.” In the familiar cast of her eyes, Jack could see that Beth had decided that seeing him again would only make matters worse. And she was right.

She got up and put her arms gently around him. As best he could, he raised his arms around her shoulders, and he closed his eyes for an infinite moment. The aroma of White Linen filled his head as a hundred images flickered in his mind.

“Get well soon,” she said, and broke their hold. “Vince will be by tomorrow.”

She started to leave, then stopped. “By the way, does the name Mookie mean anything to you?”

“Who?”

“Mookie?”

“They got you doing memory tests on me, too?” He’d had three already, a fourth later today or tomorrow. Mookie. The name was like a small node sending up microwaves of recognition, but he couldn’t catch them. “I don’t know.”

“It’s not important.” She started toward the door again. “Oh, I almost forgot : You’re famous.” And she pulled out of her bag a newspaper clipping and laid it on his chest. She hesitated again.

“Go! You’re going to miss your plane.”

She nodded and left.

And Jack watched her pass through the door and listened to her heels against the tile receding down the hall, and for a long moment he stared at the space that she had occupied—a void, a negative space sucking at his soul—thinking from his perch of grief that his old life was over.

The article was from yesterday’s Boston Globe.

JELLYFISH COMA VICTIM RECOVERS AFTER SIX MONTHSA 33-year-old Carleton man who had spent nearly two hundred days in a “persistent vegetative state” recently regained consciousness at the Greendale Rehabilitation Center in Cabot, Mass.The case has been described as “absolutely extraordinary.” A former English teacher from Carleton Preparatory Academy, Jack Koryan slipped into a coma after nearly drowning six months ago in Buck’s Cove on Homer’s Island off the Massachusetts coast, where he was stung by rare and toxic jellyfish. According to experts, the tropical creatures were apparently attracted to the unusually warm coastal waters at that time … . Miraculously, Koryan survived the attack and has spent most of the last year in the Greendale nursing home, unresponsive to all contact in spite of the constant stimulation efforts from the nursing staff.Specialists comment that most patients spend only two to four weeks in a true coma. Contrary to expectations, Koryan is not cognitively impaired. In fact, his mental abilities are “extraordinary,” according to his doctors … .

Mookie. The word was like a deep itch that stayed with him for the rest of the afternoon.

46

ALL HE GAVE THEM WAS HIS NAME, rank, and serial number. That’s all he was supposed to give them. Name, rank, and serial number … Louis Martinetti. Corporal. US41349538.

And in the snap of a salute, Louis was back in the Red Tent—as the older POWs called it because that was your color when they got through with you. Red. As in bloody-pulp red.

The Red Tent. And Louis was going through it all over again.

He didn’t know why or how, because that was not where he wanted to be, but on the mission that Captain Mike Vigna had promised him. The special. Operation Buster. Instead he ended up again in the Red Tent. And by now he had lost count—not that it mattered—because it was like a closed loop—a Möbius strip of horror.

Louis was scared—so scared his bowels let loose. So scared that he wished they’d just shoot him in the brain and get it over with. He knew shit, but that wouldn’t stop them from what passed for sports with these godless Commie savages.

He remembered from the last time—from all the last times: no needles, no pliers, no electric prods that had been rumored. And not just him.

It was a large tent, and bound by arms and legs to a wooden armchair in the middle of the dirt floor was Fuzzy Swenson, stripped to his waist. His face was a mess of bruises, and thick strings of blood dripped to his lap from his mouth and nose. His hand kept twitching against the ropes as if trying to wipe himself. When he recognized Louis, Fuzzy moaned and vaguely nodded. He tried to say something, but one of the soldiers shouted him down.

There were five of them—two uniformed NK regulars, an older officer, and Colonel Chop Chop, who stood in the corner shadows and watched as the soldiers placed Louis in a chair facing Fuzzy. With the colonel in civilian clothes, with a shaved head and tinted glasses, was Gregor Lysenko, whom Intelligence had identified as his Russian advisor and had nicknamed Black-hawk. Chop Chop and Blackhawk. Like the comic book. What a fucking joke.

The soldiers bound Louis’s arms to a second wooden chair. They also put his helmet between his legs, binding them at the knee so he couldn’t release it. He told himself it was to catch his puke when they got down to business.

While they set him up, Blackhawk said something to Chop Chop in what sounded like Russian. The colonel nodded and in a smooth, even voice he spoke a command in Korean to one of his soldiers, not taking his eyes off Louis. An older soldier translated in broken English.

They wanted information about troop deployment. Louis said he didn’t know anything about troop deployment.

He and other men of his platoon had been captured four days earlier when they got separated from King Company by a firefight with NKPA units in central Korea. All Louis knew was that they were part of a combat team assigned to defend a sector north of Wonju. But he had no idea where his company had advanced or what the deployment plans were. He also had no idea what other combat, artillery, or tank units were to be attached. That was not the kind of information that Command shared with grunts.

The colonel listened without response to the translation of Louis’s words. Then he said something soft and terse, and the baby-faced soldier backhanded Louis hard enough to cause his nose to leak blood and snot into the helmet. Was that what it was for? Couldn’t be. This was a torture tent.

The interrogation resumed, questions pelting him like stones: What heavy equipment did they have with them? What other battalion units were they joining up with? How many men? When was the next airdrop of the 187th?

“I swear,” Louis mumbled, “I don’t know nothing.” It was all he could say. It was the truth. He knew nothing. Nor did Fuzzy or the other guys in the platoon. Their mission was to proceed toward a ridge to the east of Wonju. They were not regrouping or reconnoitering with another company. They were just advancing and trying to save their asses.

But the soldier continued, demanding to know master battle plans, refusing Louis’s explanation that he knew nothing, that he was just following the leader like Fuzzy and the others.

When the soldier wasn’t satisfied, he put on a glove and swatted Louis again, but this time not very hard. And that made Louis suspicious that they were saving him for bigger things. They were.

The same line of questioning went on for several minutes until Colonel Chop Chop appeared to grow weary of Louis’s insistence. He mumbled something to the Russian, who responded with a burst of words. Chop Chop immediately conveyed the message to the baby-faced corporal, who gave Louis a look that sent a bolt of electricity through him. The soldier stepped between Louis and Fuzzy and removed a knife from a holster on his hip—a long, wickedly sharp looking blade that flickered in Louis’s face and made his heart nearly rupture. The soldier looked at Louis with that flat, inscrutable expression, then in a lightning move that Louis later thought was well rehearsed, he grabbed one of Fuzzy Swenson’s ears and sliced it off.

Fuzzy screamed as blood spurted from the side of his head. Still without expression the soldier dropped the severed ear into Louis’s helmet. It struck with an obscene plunk.

By reflex Louis tried to shake the helmet free. But the soldier whacked Louis in the face to remain still.

Louis looked down at the thing. It was horrible—just the bloodied rim of the ear, a gaping hole for the canal opening still attached to Fuzzy’s head. “Please,” Louis begged. “I don’t know anything. Please. Please.”

Fuzzy whimpered and bobbed his head, his hands jerking against the ropes to cup the pain, stop the blood. But he had been tightly bound, and his hands twitched like injured animals.

The interrogator shouted at him to explain the kind of armaments in his company.

Louis looked at the hideous severed ear. Make something up, he told himself. Make something up. Anything, or they’re going to cut Fuzzy into pieces and fill the fucking helmet.

He glanced at Chop Chop, who stood in the corner with the Russian studying Louis through those fucking half-moon black gook eyes—bright with pleasure. The bald Russian beside him looking like a warhead.

Louis began to mumble, trying to compose his mind to come up with something that sounded like military plans. The colonel said something and the translator shouted for Louis to speak up. But all he could do was mumble dissociated words—southeast corridor light armament northwest Howitzers reconnaissance … 17th Infantry Regiment …

But before he could cobble together something that made sense, the knife man pulled Fuzzy’s head up by the other ear and sliced it off.

Louis screamed. But Fuzzy only let out a gasp, since he was already half gone from the beating and loss of blood. His head flopped from side to side as if trying to free itself of the pain, his hands jerking fitfully. The soldier dropped the second ear into Louis’s helmet.

Louis looked at the officer. “I beg you, please, no more. Leave him alone. He didn’t do anything. He doesn’t know anything. I don’t know anything.”

God, help me come up with something, anything, just to stop these fuckers.

Louis mumbled something about a battalion of two hundred men with armored personal carriers and Howitzers coming from the east toward Wonju. He made stuff up and let it come, scraps of stuff he knew and stuff he just created in the moment. Anything.

The translator passed that on to Chop Chop, who responded. The translator then lowered his face to Louis’s and screamed: “No good. You lie. You lie!”

“No, it’s the truth. I swear.”

The Russian grunted something, and the colonel tipped his head at the soldier. He raised Fuzzy’s face and jabbed the point of the knife into his left eye, and with a flourish he scooped out the bloody mass and dropped it in the helmet.

Louis felt his gorge rise in his throat. But he held, barely able to register Fuzzy’s whimpering and pathetic attempt to free his bound hands to stop the flow of blood and ocular fluid. He closed his eyes and screamed so hard for them to stop that he hoped his brain would short-circuit-that he’d just pass out. Maybe shock himself out of this horrible nightmare place and wake him up on the other side of the globe where he belonged.

But none of that happened.

He was still in the Red Tent, bound to his chair with the bloodied head of Fuzzy across from him, his ears and gory eyeball sitting in the helmet between Louis’s legs and the Russian muttering more shit to Chop Chop. Louis tried to mouth pleas of mercy but Chop Chop grunted something, and the knife man jabbed out Fuzzy’s other eye and dropped the bloody thing onto the pile.

Louis closed his eyes against the sight, against the groans rattling out of Fuzzy’s throat, against the sight of his poor ruined head.

But they wouldn’t let him. The soldier sliced off four of Fuzzy’s fingers, one by one, and deposited them in the helmet. Then the thumb. Then they began on the other hand.

When Fuzzy appeared to have passed out, Chop gave the final order. The soldier jabbed Louis on the chin with the point of the knife, and in a flash, as his eyes snapped open, the bastard forced back Fuzzy’s head and slashed his throat.

That was all Louis remembered of the Red Tent, because they unbound him and hustled him out to the pen with the other prisoners.

Later that evening, as the sun dropped over the mountains, they brought him and nine other men from first platoon to a low bridge over some river. A detail of soldiers pulled them out of the trucks and lined them up shoulder-to-shoulder against the low rail of the bridge, maybe twenty feet above the water. In the distance Louis could see dark, rolling hills. He focused on a star just above the hills—maybe Venus or Mars, it made no difference—and he thought of Marie Carbone on the other side of the world—his high school sweetheart, the girl he had planned to marry when he got back to the States—and how she had no idea that at this very moment as she was waking up in her parents’ home in Wethersfield, Connecticut, he was being lined up over some godforsaken river to be shot dead.

Louis heard the metal snap as the machine gunners locked the belt of fifty-caliber shells into the magazine.

He heard the whimpers of the men staggering in terror beside him, knowing that this was their death.

He heard the alien syllables of Colonel Chop Chop’s command to fire.

And with his last breath of air bulbed in his throat, Louis heard the moment explode with a ratcheting insistence that propelled him backward over the side and into the water.

By reflex, he held his breath and waited to pass into death.

But he did not pass into death. As he plunged deep into the chilled black water, he was stunned that he had not been hit. Amazingly, he was alive.

He continued holding his breath and let the current take him. Because his feet were loosely bound, he could make dolphin kicks. And when he could no longer hold his breath, he surfaced, took a gulp of air, and resubmerged, his back to the bridge where, if any soldiers saw him, they’d think he was just one of the corpses bobbing on the surface.

Three days later and half starved, Louis flagged an American spotter plane, and in hours a squad of GIs from Baker Company found him. For nearly two days he slept in the infirmary tent. And for the next fifty years he worked to get those Red Tent images out of his head.

But now they were back with brutal insistence.

47

JACK SHOOK HIMSELF AWAKE. ANOTHER BAD dream.

He could not remember what exactly it was about, and he was grateful—just vague images of misshapen creatures and screams and other nasty sounds he couldn’t identify.

Jack blinked around the room, taking in the shapes in the dim night-light as the dream dissipated.

Greendale. His room at Greendale Rehab.

The window with the broken Venetian blinds. The digital clock on the TV. 5:17. Muddy gray light seeped through the slats. Dawn light. He had been asleep since yesterday afternoon when the doctor was in with her test questions—when he had another spell.

Threw yourself a whopper, Jackie boy. Lousy dreams, loony conniptions. Hell, the coma’s looking pretty good.

The wall mirror above the bureau. The IV stand. The heart monitors on the rolling console beside the bed. His bed with the baby-blue spread, side bars to prevent him from falling out if he had a seizure. His rebirth crib.

He looked out the window into the predawn gray. How the world had changed, he thought. How he had changed since a bunch of jellyfish burned a hole in his tape.

In a matter of minutes the outside light grew brighter. The blinds hung at a funny angle, like a gull with a broken wing.

He could smell the ocean. That probably explained why in the dream he sensed being at the sea. Subtle fishy scents from the window had crossed with a dim recall of the jellyfish attack. Crank that through your squeeze box and that explained why he could still dimly make out a dead, bloodied animal near the water—maybe a beached porpoise or harbor seal that had gotten chopped up by some nitwit on jet skis.

(Blood. So much blood. And battered flesh. So vague.)

Which sometimes happened in Buck’s Cove.

Whatever, it was a bad dream that had left his johnny wet and his brain tender. Yet what stayed with him for the rest of the morning was how real it felt. While he couldn’t locate any narrative thread to connect the scraps, his mind felt raw with afterimages that made him feel that he’d not been dreaming but had just returned from a scene of brutal horror.

And what gnawed at his mind like an osprey was that he had woken up with his thumb in his mouth.

LATER THAT MORNING NURSE MARCY BROUGHT him back to the PT room where the therapist had him stand for several minutes at the parallel bars. Then they had him lie on the floor pads, moving his legs and arms in different positions. After several minutes of that, they sat him in a wheelchair and worked on exercising his wrists, arms, and neck.

For his upper body they had him do free weights. The last time in the gym he was doing three sets of ten at thirty pounds, and his arms looked like hams. Now he was working out on five pounds, and his biceps looked like walnuts.

This went on twice a day every day. By the end of the first week he was able to move ten feet on the parallel bars, a major victory culminating in his going solo with a walker. To celebrate, Jack asked if someone could run down to the video store and rent him a copy of The Awakening.

While his body began to strengthen, Jack read newspapers and magazines to catch up on what he had missed.

But God! How the world had darkened while he slept. America was still at war with insurgents in Iraq, where suicide bombings were a daily event. The Middle East was still a powder keg, with Israelis and Palestinians still locked in bloody retaliations. We still had troops in Afghanistan. Massacres were occurring in Africa. Christ! Maybe nothing had changed. Six months, and the world was no better off than when he had slipped into a coma.

On the bright side, Red Sox fans were talking about their boys pulling it off again this year. And on that happy possibility, Jack dozed off.

48

“HEY, PAL, WHAT’S WITH THE Rip Van Winkle stunt?”

Jack opened his eyes. “Where the hell you been?”

“Where the hell you been?” Vince chuckled and took Jack’s hand in his.

Vince Hammond stood at Jack’s bedside wearing a black long-sleeve polo and with a big, exuberant boyish face. His hair was shorter than Jack had remembered and spiked with gel, making him look even younger, probably still getting himself carded in bars. But what struck Jack was the difference in their geometry. Against the light flooding through the window Vince looked as if he’d spent the missing months on a Cybex machine. His neck looked like a hydrant, and his shirtsleeves resembled tubes of grapefruits. He had not let the constant exposure to haute cuisine get the best of him. By contrast, Jack felt like a beef jerky.

“How come you’re not fat and bald?”

“I’m working on it,” Vince said, and squeezed a beer wing. “You’re looking a hell of a lot better than you did six months ago.”

“Hard to look worse, I hear.”

“Yeah, you were something of a mess.”

Jack raised the hand mirror the nurses had given him. “And now I’m the Shroud of Turin.”

Vince laughed and pulled up a chair. “The important thing is how you’re feeling.”

“Like a whoopee cushion for all the gas.”

“What are they feeding you?”

“White stuff.” Jack nodded at the tray of half-eaten mashed potatoes and tapioca pudding.

“When you get your teeth back, some red and green.” Vince held up a shiny red bag with the Yesterdays logo. “There’s a freezer down the hall.”

Jack looked at the bag, which almost looked like patent leather, Yesterdays in art deco gold letters. “Nice understated doggie bag.”

Vince frowned at the size. “Yeah, maybe our portions are too big.”

“I hear you’re doing well.”

Vince pulled a menu from the bag. “We’re doing well.”

He handed Jack the menu, a handsomely designed folder of just two pages, instead of the kind of multipage folios that confused your appetite. Desserts on the back side with the list of boutique beers.

“I’ll have the calimari with polenta salad and seafood risotto.”

“Look, when they let you out, you’re gonna be just fine, eating like a king, I’ll make sure. Another thing, I know some real estate people who’ll find you a nice place. And when you’re up for it, you’ve got a job at the restaurant. So when are they going to let you out?”

“Thanks to you, about six weeks.” The nurses had told him how Vince had come in several times a week to help exercise Jack’s legs and arms, confident that he would come out of it and wanting to make sure he’d wake up “ready to trot.” In two weeks the therapist said he’d graduate to a walker, eventually to a cane. But it was uncertain if he’d have a permanent limp.

“You could be our host, so you don’t have to walk much.”

Jack smiled. “Sounds fine.”

Vince and Jack had been friends since junior year in high school—twenty years of sharing hopes, fears, kid fun, many laughs, some defeats, some painful wisdom, and the kind of closeness that exceeded brotherhood. They both went to Northeastern University, where Jack got his degree in English and Vince in criminal justice because he wanted to be a cop. Four years ago, he got shot by a felon during an arrest and spent two months in a hospital—an experience that made him promise his wife no more police work. So he quit the force, and after some small odd jobs on disability, he saved enough money for him and Jack to begin plans on their restaurant.

“Beth came by.”

“I heard.”

“She’s remarried.” He knew Vince knew but he had to give it official pronouncement.

“I’m really sorry about that.”

“Yeah.” The syllable stuck in this throat.

“But think of it as you turning a new page.”

“More like a new book.”

“Whatever, it beats the alternative. The nurses say your recall is something.”

“So I’m told.”

“But you’re feeling okay?”

“Except for the weird spells.”

“Spells?”

“Like … I don’t know. Like I’m having memory flashes of stuff from my past. Some crazy stuff, some good stuff—when I was a kid with my aunt and uncle, at the beach, in the backyard, teachers, first girlfriends.”

“We all should have such spells.”

“Just that they’re so real. I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “It’s more like I’m reliving them.”

“I can think of a few nights I’d like to relive.”

Jack nodded, but that wasn’t what he meant. His brain felt spongy with painkillers and he squished around for the right words. “Sometimes they’re so vivid I can’t tell if it’s memory or if I’m in some kind of replay.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“I feel like that guy in The Dead Zone who has flashes of the future, except I have flashes of the past. Dumb stuff—like taking pony rides at the Mohawk Trail. Playing kickball in the third grade. Christmas Day when I got my first bike. But they don’t feel like dreams.”

“I don’t see what the problem is. You’ve got a vivid memory.”

“I’m telling you, it’s not like memory. It’s just like … just like I’m there—feeling things, hearing stuff, smelling things. My heart races.” He looked away, frustrated at the limitations of his words. “Vince, I’m reexperiencing events that I once lived.”

Vince nodded as he took it all in.

“Christ, now you think I’m looney tunes.”

“No, I get it.”

But he didn’t. How could he?

“I have dreams all the time, and when I wake up I can swear I was there, someplace else. Everybody does.”

“Except I’m not asleep.”

“You’re not?”

“I could be outside in the sun, but when I look around I’m someplace else—on a beach or in the middle of a thunderstorm, lightning crashing all around me. Yet it’s clear blue and I feel the sun on my face, but inside it’s storming.”

Vince nodded to cover his concern. “Some kind of daydreams. I get those.”

No, you don’t, Jack thought. Nobody who’s right in his head or not on psychedelics gets these. Even with the mushrooms he had tried in college, Jack always knew he was tripping, his anchor self always lurking in the sidelines or flying the thermals just above the Disney pyrotechnics playing across his synapses. But part of him was always in the audience. But this was different, and Vince didn’t have a clue. Nor did Jack.

“What do the doctors say? It could be your medication needs adjusting or something.”

“They give me some antiseizure stuff that just makes me sleepy, and I’ve logged enough of that.”

“Ask them for something else.”

“Yeah.”

They chatted more until Jack felt himself turn drowsy. Vince said he’d be back in a few days, and Jack thanked him for coming around. Before he left, Vince gave Jack an MP3 digital player with several of his favorite artists downloaded. “It also records.”

Jack thanked him. Maybe the music would help him sleep.

What Jack did not tell Vince was how he dreaded sleeping on his own—without lorazepam or clonazepam or Naprosyn or Tegretol or whatever the hell it was to knock the teeth out of his dreams. No, not the pony rides or schoolyard romps with boyhood chums or lusty moments with Latitia Cole in Erica Hughes’s rec room—but the dark, twisted images that were slightly out of focus and just wouldn’t stick to his consciousness when he awoke but whose aftereffects left him flayed with anxiety. And as hard as he tried, he could not summon details.

It had crossed his mind that maybe those damn jellies had spot-fried his brain, leaving little lesions that put him just this side of sane—and maybe the lesions were spreading. And wasn’t that what all the neuropsycho tests were trying to determine—that maybe all of him didn’t come back?

The flash images, the voices in his head, the spells of naked fright. He had said nothing to the docs because he knew that would only prolong his convalescence. And in spite of the fine professional treatment, even after a week he wanted out. He wanted to be someplace other than in this recovery room, this nursing home, away from drip bags and stethoscopes, beeping monitors, and institutional green walls. But more than that, he wanted to be out of his head, because it was like being locked in a room lousy with ghosts.

That’s some mouse.

He looked out the window, and from behind the unbroken blue sky he heard thunder.

Shit! It came back to him like a tic. Thunder and lightning on a cloudless day.

He buzzed the nurse for something to sleep on, and Marcy came and gave him a white pill that he gobbled. down. And when he was alone again, he turned his head away from the sunshine and the rainstorm raging in his pillow, and he pressed his eyes shut and thought of Beth eight years ago and put her on the moon-washed beach with a sultry breeze and her arms pulling him to her, the heat of her breast lighting his heart.

And he closed his eyes and waited for the Xanax to seep through his brain like sap and douse the lights.

49

Darien, Connecticut

“DID YOU EVER DO IT?”

“Did I ever do what?” Rodney Blake felt his insides clench as he darkly sensed what his cousin Nora was asking him.

“Oh, come on, Rod, you know what I mean, a good-looking boy like you. Did you ever screw a girl?”

The words passed through him like sparks. Even though it was 1946 he had never heard a girl speak of such matters or use such language. But, then again, most girls were not his cousin Nora, who lived in the sticks of Pennsylvania with farm animals. Besides, she was fourteen, and older than most girls her age, and a year older than him.

“Not really.”

“Well, you musta made out with girls.”

“Yeah, sure, of course,” he lied. He’d never even had a girlfriend. Only kissed a girl in Spin the Bottle, and that was a dry peck in front of other kids.

They were silent for a few minutes. They were lying in his backyard looking at the stars. They had asked their parents if they could sleep in the tents that night—one for her and one for him, even though either tent could hold two people. But parents said it wasn’t proper to share a tent, a boy and girl at their age, even cousins. So they lay on the blanket between the tents. The glow of his family’s house through the bushes gave them light so he could see Nora studying him.

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t? How come?”

“I just don’t,” Nora said. “You must jerk off.”

(Did girls really talk this way? Or just Nora?)

Another numbing moment as he tried to conjure up the right response. If he sounded shocked, he’d look namby-pamby, to use his mother’s term. Yet to admit he had done that was mortifying, especially to a girl who was also his first cousin. Father Cardarelli, who had taught him catechism and who had given Rodney his missal with the red leather cover and the prayerful inscription, had warned that “abusing oneself” was a sin in God’s eyes but not as bad as doing “it”—which was “mortal” and punishable by eternal damnation, which meant something like those old paintings of demons carving people with long, evil knives.

In truth, Rodney had played with himself but only experienced pre-orgasmic sensations, which still scared him even though they felt good. It happened in bed one night while he was dozing off and his hand started diddling on it own. But it wasn’t a real one because he stopped himself short when he felt something big was about to happen, something he only vaguely knew about—a barrier he just wasn’t supposed to cross. Except some fluid rose up, probably what the kids called “jizz”—a sticky stuff like egg white that dried on his fingers and sent him to the bathroom to scrub away with soap.

“Sure.”

“Then you’re not ascared of going blind, which is what Jerry says will happen, but I think is bulltticky, because every boy I know’s got eyes like a damn hawk.”

Rodney didn’t know how to respond, but it didn’t make any difference because the next thing he knew, Nora had rolled up to his side. And before he could say anything, her hand slid down his front and came to rest on his privates.

“Wha-wha-what’re you doin’?” In spite of himself, he felt himself harden.

“Shhh.”

And she began to rhythmically move her hand up and down across his erection that she had flattened against his belly. Then she slipped her hand into his pants as if she’d done this a dozen times before. Which shocked him. She was only fourteen but so advanced—probably what happened to girls from Pennsylvania where they know about animal husbandry and stuff.

But pecking at his conscience was what Father Cardarelli had said about sex with family members—and what the devil does to those who do that.

Rodney gasped for air as Nora pulled him out of his pants and began stroking him oh so gently. He tried to stop her but he couldn’t, and he groaned and moaned with devilish pleasure until he thought he’d explode. But she knew what she was doing and stopped just in time.

Then he felt her take his hand and place it on her crotch. He had never touched a girl. He didn’t even know what girls looked like down there. Some of the kids had made crude pencil drawings of huge holes with dark scribbly wreaths of hair, but that did nothing for him. And all the art books in the library showed big fat women with puffy blanks. And medical textbooks only had disgusting diagrams of the insides.

Nora unzipped her bottoms and made him slip his hand inside.

Rodney nearly passed out. My God! All the hair, and she’s wet, and slippery and deep, like a gash—just like Buddy Peterson said.

She rubbed up against him, and before he knew it he was pulling her pants down. And she let him. But when he tried to roll on top of her, she pushed him off. “Uh-uh. Just this,” she whispered. And she continued stroking him.

Maybe it was some deep animal instinct that powered him or all the things that Buddy and Wade and the older boys had told him, but he pushed Nora’s hands back and rolled on top of her, poking her privates with himself, keeping his knees spread so her legs would stay open. Magically he felt himself slip inside her as if guided by all the forces of evolution—and something broke in his mind.

This was it. THIS WAS IT. The epicenter of all adult secrets, all the snickers, the crude pencil drawings, the movies, the jokes, the dirty words. In a stupendous moment of epiphany Rodney connected himself to every other human being on the planet and human being who ever lived, right back to Adam and Eve.

While his cousin Nora struggled to stop him in time, to get him off her, to muffle her protests before their parents heard, Rodney exploded inside her.

When it was over, she was gathering her clothes and swearing at him under her breath as she tried to wipe away his jizz, saying how oh-my-God she could get pregnant.

The next several minutes passed in a blur. Nora disappeared into her tent and he lay there, feeling the chilled air, his sperm crusting on his skin.

Then he was walking across the lawn toward the house, guided by the light and the radio station that played old-time tunes:

Way down by the stream … How sweet it will seem …

Once more just to dream in the moonlight …

But he wasn’t naked anymore, or chilled. Instead he was dressed in pants and the striped sweater that Edna had given him for his seventieth birthday a few years ago. Before he passed into the kitchen, he stopped in the living room and removed from the bookshelves the red leather-bound book, its pages now flaky with age. Father Cardarelli’s signature still looked fresh.

“Uncle Rod, is that you down there?” Edna asked.

Edna.

He said nothing as he made his way to the cellar door.

“I’m in the bathroom. I’ll be right down. Don’t forget to take your medicine. The white pills.”

Rodney opened the cellar door He could hear the familiar creaking of the stairs as he made his way down.

He moved to the workbench with the tools neatly lined up on the pegboard, the wrenches ranging from tiny to large plumber items, the same with the screwdrivers and pliers and coping saws. Even the knives—from small carving blades to a steel hunting knife that Nora gave him for Christmas a long time ago. Nora whom they disowned and who took her own life before she turned twenty.

Nora, mother of his daughter, Edna. Secret Edna. Edna who was born far away and whose father nobody knew. Nobody except Rodney.

“Uncle Rod,” Edna called from upstairs. “You fell asleep in the backyard. Did the radio wake you? You looked so cute on the blanket beside the tent.”

He laid the missal on the bench. Forgive me, dear God. He undid his belt.

“I’ll get your pills.”

He pulled his pants down.

“But tonight you belong to me. Just to little ol’ me …”

“The white ones.”

He removed himself.

Upstairs water ran from the kitchen faucet into a glass.

Rodney removed his old hunting knife, still shiny and razor-honed the way he left it the other day.

“You were talking to yourself out there.” Footsteps crossed the kitchen floor to the cellar door at the head of the stairs.

“I know with the dawn that you will be gone …”

Rodney gripped himself tightly.

“But tonight you belong to me … Just to little ol’ me!”

And with his right hand he slashed.

50

JACK WAS IN HIS WHEELCHAIR IN the picnic area listening to Stevie Ray Vaughn on his MP3 when the woman named René Ballard approached him from across the patio.

She was young—in her twenties—very attractive and with a clean, varnished look. She was not in a nurse’s smock or an aide’s green uniform but a beige pants suit and white shirt. She walked toward him with graceful purpose, promising to be better company than Joe McNamara, who had to be taken inside a few minutes ago because he had some kind of spell.

She also looked vaguely familiar—like a face from beneath layers of film.

Because it was a warm day, Jack had rolled outside to put some color back in his face, which looked like mayonnaise. He had his magazines, still trying to fill the hole. After maybe twenty minutes, Joe came up to him asking if he knew where Father O’Connor was. Assuming that Joe was expecting a visit from the family priest, Jack suggested that he ask one of the nurses. Apparently that didn’t register, since Joe cocked his head at Jack like a beagle. Then his eyes saucered and he slipped to his knees, crossed himself, and began to blubber a confession. “Father, forgive me, forgive me, I … I … Ooooowheeeo oooooh … I blinded him in the eye. Lenny Schmidt. I blinded him, and he wasn’t doing anything, just standing there in front of Leone’s, but I just wanted to scare him, that’s all, just scare him, and I didn’t think it would hit him in the face really, Father, I didn’t, just scare him, hit him on the shoulder or something, but not the eye, I swear to God.” One of the aides caught sight of the scene and tried to get Joe to snap out of it. But he was too far gone and started swearing and swinging wildly. Before other aides arrived, Joe asked Jack for forgiveness. As the aides came to haul him off, Jack made the sign of the cross and said he forgave him, reducing Joe to sobs of gratitude. The aides carried him back into his room and shot him up with something to let him sleep off his penance.

Jack didn’t know what had clicked in the guy’s head—maybe it was Jack’s black T-shirt or his saint-gaunt face. But for a brief moment Jack was Father O’Connor. And that wasn’t the first weird episode here. Because it was a mixed population, younger rehab patients and elderly dementia victims shared common areas. And the staff encouraged mingling just to help those Alzheimer’s residents who weren’t that far gone yet. Jack enjoyed talking with them, finding little personality pilot lights still glowing. But some of them would click off to another place all of a sudden, like Mr. Monks at the table over there with the puzzles and the CD headphones. Most of yesterday he spent do-wopping around the ward to Gene Vincent—a seventeen-year-old inside an old guy’s skin. Or Marty Lubeck, who for two hours yesterday sang, “Defer, defer, I’m the Lord High Executioner” to the aquarium fish, his face frozen with that same weird intensity, eyes beaded down on some seventh-grade memory. Or Noreen Hoolihan in the rocker over there having a full-fledged conversation about her grandmother with a pot of geraniums.

“Good morning, Mr. Koryan. My name is René Ballard. I’m the consulting pharmacist here, and I’m wondering if I can talk to you a bit.”

Her hand was cool and smooth like taffy closing on his fingers. Jack pretended to examine his calendar. “Well, I’m running a tight schedule, but I think I can squeeze you in.”

She chuckled. “Thanks,” she said, and pulled up a plastic chair.

She had lively blue-gray eyes that pulled you in when she smiled. Her hair was chestnut brown and held back with a clasp fashioned out of some lacy material resembling a rose. She wore gold hoop earrings and a thin gold necklace. Her long fingers curled around a gold pen under a notebook. The woman emanated an intelligent, self-possessed nature, and Jack wondered what she looked like in an evening gown. He wondered what she looked like in a bikini. He also wondered about his interest.

“The nurses say that you’re improving remarkably well.”

“Rest home food will do that.”

“You mean it’s that good?”

“No, that bad, so you want to heal fast and go home.”

She had a laugh like wind chimes that should have settled the low-grade anxiety beginning to nibble at his brain. “I can’t say that I blame you. And from all reports, that won’t be too long, given how well you’re doing. I remember when they brought you in.”

“Sorry that slipped my mind.”

She smiled. “Your wife and friends told me a lot about you.”

“Former wife.”

She nodded. “Yes, I heard. I’m very sorry about that.”

As they chatted, Jack could not repress the mounting unease that had nothing to do with nursing home food or being stuck in a wheelchair surrounded by demented geriatrics. It was this woman—this lovely, shiny young woman with her sincere big eyes and perfect teeth and kiss-me lips—who made him painfully aware of the white-stick legs showing from his pants and birdcage chest and the long empty lane ahead of him. Just the other day he was a creature of satisfaction and desire, and he had a life.

“Dr. Heller showed me your memory tests. She’s not seen anything like it before. Your recall is at the far end of the curve.”

“The universe loves a balance.”

Her manner was guarded as she let a couple of seconds elapse before responding. “The PT people here are the best around. I’m sure in a few months you’ll be a hundred percent better and back to living your life.”

He smiled. “If there’s a God.” She opened her notebook and he could see a list of questions she had written. “I have a funny feeling you’re not here to check my meds.”

“Actually, I’d like to ask you about your memory, if that’s all right.”

“You’re the fourth person this week.” Her pupils dilated as she waited for his response. He could have lost himself in those eyes.

“You mean you’re tested out.”

“Mazes, picture tests, digit recall, word recall, blocks, card tests, and every time I turn around somebody asks me to repeat what they said. I’m beginning to feel like an echo chamber.”

She laughed. “None of that, I promise. But you’re right: I’m not here about your medication although if you have any questions or problems, I hope you let me know.”

“Since you mentioned it. I know it sounds like a bad punch line, but I’m having problems sleeping.”

“You’re not getting enough?”

“Not deep enough. I want to sleep without dreaming. Just a blank.”

“You’re having bad dreams?”

“Yes.” He didn’t want to elaborate.

She wrote something down for the nurses. And he nodded a thank-you to this lovely, inaccessible woman who would give him something not to dream. She slipped her notepad into the clip and looked at him to say it was business time.

“Let me explain. In addition to my consulting role, I’m part of a research project for a local pharmaceutical company that’s conducting clinical trials of a drug for Alzheimer’s disease. You might have seen it on the news or read about it.”

He had. “Some kind of breakthrough cure.”

“Yes, it’s called Memorine. In fact, several of the residents here are enrolled in the trials.”

“You mean I’ve got Alzheimer’s, too?”

“Hardly,” she laughed. “But, coincidentally, the jellyfish that attacked you contains a toxin that affects memory.”

“I’ve got more than I can use.”

“So I’ve heard, but that’s not what I mean.”

Me, either.

“So, I’m wondering if I could ask you a few questions about your memory.”

“Why?”

“Because we’ve discovered a similarity between your neurological activity and that of patients on the drug. While you were in a coma, the doctors ran some MRI scans on your brain to check for problems—tumors, lesions, or any other abnormalities. Thankfully, there were none. But the images showed that areas associated with memory have experienced enhanced activity, and I’d like to ask you about the kinds of things that are coming back to you.”

“What’s the connection to me?”

“Just that several test patients are experiencing some unusually deep recall. I’m just wondering if you’ve had anything like this—you know, memories of early experiences.” She hesitated a moment as he stared at her without expression. “Flashbacks.”

Flashbacks. She’d given it a name. And Jack felt his pulse rate spasm. Yes, he thought. “No,” he said.

Her eyebrow shot up like a polygraph needle. “Really?”

“No flashbacks.”

He could not determine if she looked disappointed or incredulous. Maybe something in his face gave him away, because she settled back in her chair and studied him. Then after a moment she said, “May I ask, then, why you want something to let you sleep without dreams?”

“That’s not the same thing, is it?”

“Neurologically the activity is coincident.”

If you tell her yes, she’ll poke you with questions until you’re a damn dartboard—which means they’ll never let you out; in fact, they’ll make you some kind of adjunct study for that drug they’re pushing. “What can I tell you? No flashbacks.”

Nice mouse. Big mouse.

Die, goddamn it.

Her eyes hardened. She didn’t believe him. “I see, then it’s just a coincidence—the images and the fact that on several occasions you called for your mother, actually sounded as if you were having a conversation with her.”

“My mother?”

“One of the nurses caught it on tape.”

The initial hospitality lost its warmth. Nice ploy: Send in a clever female with sunny good looks and knockdown charm to coo him into submission, and you got yourself that grant and a fat bonus.

But right behind that thought another muscled it’s way up: Sour. You’re a damn self-pitying sour old man before your time. Which is why you belong in this geriatric terrarium.

“You mean you’ve never talked in your sleep before? Talked to a dead relative or friend?” he asked.

“Yes, of course.”

He could hear the caution in her voice. “Given all the medication they were pumping into me, I’m surprised I wasn’t chatting with Cleopatra.”

“That may be true, but what made these episodes different was your voice. You sounded like a child, which suggests that you were reliving some deep-past experience. So I’m wondering if you’re aware of these flashbacks—if you’ve had them while awake, if you can tell us what you’re experiencing when they occur.”

She held him with those big eyes—beseeched him to tell her what they both knew was the truth: That he had flashbacks, that he talked to dead people, that he had been to places he hadn’t thought of in years, relived moment-to-moment interludes that he didn’t want to return from—splendid little kid-fun vignettes. Also the dark other stuff that came back to him in quickfire snaps that left him quaking in horror.

“What we’d like is to determine the kinds of activity your brain undergoes during certain conditions of recall. In other words, conduct some functional MRI tests.” She went on to explain.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you, Ms. Ballard.”

Her body slumped as she made a polite nod of resignation. “Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you.” She stood up, holding her leather-bound clipboard and all her questions to her chest. “I’ll talk with Dr. Heller about adjusting your medications to help you sleep better.”

And while you’re at it, he thought, maybe you and your neuro pals could climb into my head and tell me what the hell is squatting in the closet—what that friggin’ ooga-booga thing is staked out in the shadows and watching through the slit. The thing with the big sharp head. That’s what I’d really appreciate. Something from that script pad of yours that would nail shut that damn door.

“Thank you.”

She opened her shoulder bag and pulled out a business card and laid it on the table. “Should there be any changes,” she said, and thanked him.

He watched her leave, cutting a rippling wake across the ether of the patio—admiring and hating her pert little gabardined bottom and long legs and bobbing chestnut hair as she made her way into the building and through the lot for her cute little BMW to drive to her cute little condo where later in the day she’d crack open a cute little pinot noir with her cute little geek stud …

To hell with you, René Ballard.

To hell with you, Beth King.

Suddenly he felt like crying.

To hell with you, Jack Koryan.

Shit! He closed his eyes and wished they’d fuse shut.

51

Boston, Massachusetts

“MR. REYNOLDS, YOU PUT YOUR CLOTHES BACK on or I’m going to tell my daddy!”

The little elderly woman shook her finger at the large naked man with his arms spread.

A few feet away, two college women who were admiring the bronze sculpture near the entrance of the Museum of Fine Arts turned around. The black woman in the Northeastern University baseball cap looked at her white companion and started to snicker.

But the elderly woman with the flowered dress and large shopping bag was not joking. She snapped her head at the young black woman and squinted. Then her expression opened up. “There you are, Lucy Goosey! Where’s my Jello?”

“Beg pardon?”

“You were supposed to be watching him and not running off to Patty’s house.” Her mouth began to tremble. “Now he’s missing.”

“Lady, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Mary gave the black woman a sharp look and stamped her foot. She then turned to the young white woman. “My mother’s going to wring her neck when she finds out. She wasn’t supposed to let him out without the leash. Now he’s lost, and it’s going to be dark soon.”

The black woman studied the little elderly woman in the blue flowered housedress and floppy canvas hat. Her legs looked swollen, like bologna rounds pressed into dirty white walking shoes. “I’m sorry, lady, but I think you’re confused.”

“I know what you said to Barbara Chin. Miss DuPont told me. I don’t care if I don’t go to your party.” And she stuck out her tongue.

“What party?” the white woman asked. “What’s she talking about?”

The old lady snapped her face toward her then dropped her eyes to the small granite pedestal with the bronze plaque: “Appeal to the Great Spirit, Cyrus Edwin Dallin, 1909.”

“What are you talking about? That’s not Jello. That’s the Murphy’s dog, Boris. Jello’s yellow and nice—not like him.” And she kicked at the stone.

“Oh, boy!” the white woman said. Then to her friend she whispered, “She’s got a medical bracelet.”

Mary looked up at the black woman again. “You’re always doing ten things at once.” Then she snapped her head up at the statue. “What’s Mr. Reynolds doing here? It’s not his backyard. And I wish he’d put his clothes on.”

The black woman made a move to read the bracelet, but the elderly woman snapped her hand away and squinted at the band as if it were a watch. “It’s almost five o’clock. My daddy’s going to be home soon, and when he does he’s going to call your parents for this.” Then her voice broke. “He’s still a little puppy,” she said, looking nowhere. “Mommy and Daddy gave him to me for my birthday.”

The black woman made big eyes at her classmate to say the woman was totally delusional. “I’m sure you’ll find Jello. But can you tell us your name?”

A passing trolley train squealed against the tracks, and the elderly woman squinted toward the street. “Lady, can you tell us your name?” the white girl asked, a little louder.

But the old woman paid no attention. Her eyes were transfixed on the MBTA train on the far track moving down Huntington toward the Northeastern stop.

“Ma’am, can you tell me where you live?”

“Seventh.”

“Seventh what?”

“I got him for my seventh birthday, dummy.” She shook her head. “Lucy, you were there, and Patty, too. Okay for you if I’m not invited. I wouldn’t go even if I was. So there!” Then her expression sharpened. “And since when have you been black?”

The black woman’s eyebrows shot up. “Pretty long,” she said and pulled a cell phone out of her bag. The elderly woman looked at the thing and gasped.

“It’s only a cell phone, for God’s sake.”

Blinking, the old woman stared at the device. And while the black woman punched numbers, her white companion leaned down toward the elderly woman. “Can you tell me your name?”

“Jello, you know that.”

“No, your name, not your puppy’s.”

The old woman looked around at the traffic grinding down Huntington. They were at a crosswalk to the MBTA Green Line stop at the nearby corner. The traffic was thick and people were waiting for the oncoming train. While she glared across the avenue, distracted by whatever she was taking in, the white student stooped down and read the bracelet. “Mary Curley.”

The black woman nodded. “I’d like to report a missing person,” she said into the phone. “I mean we found her. We’re in front of the Museum of Fine Arts on Huntington. Yeah. She’s an elderly woman who’s definitely confused. She’s got some kind of medical alert bracelet on. Her name’s Mary Curley; it says ‘I am an Alzheimer’s Patient.’”

Before the young woman could read the address on the back, Mary yanked her arm free. “Jello?” She reached into the giant Gap bag and pulled out a red mangled slipper. “Here’s Mister Slippy. Come on, good boy.”

Both women looked behind them, but there was no dog in sight.

“I mean, like she’s spaced out,” the black woman told the dispatcher. “She’s talking to statues and trees like she’s Mr. Magoo.”

“Mary, where do you live?”

But Mary just glared at the street.

“Jello,” the white woman said, to break her attention.

Mary snapped her head at her. “Where?”

The girl took Mary’s shoulders and stuck her face into hers. “Where do you live?” she asked, punching out each syllable.

Mary glanced at the museum with its four Doric columns and massive granite portico above huge bronze doors. “Four fifty-two Franklin Avenue.” She sang that out in perfect little-girl rhyme.

The black woman nodded, and into the phone said, “I don’t know. Maybe she escaped from a nursing home. No, I don’t know how she got here, and I don’t think she does, either. She thinks she’s lost her dog. Yeah. And you better come fast … . Yeah, she’s wearing a dress and sneakers and holding a shopping bag. The Gap.”

Mary glanced back at the spot she had been glaring at—someplace beyond the line of cars, busses, and trucks that inched down Huntington.

“How did you get here, Mary?” the white woman asked.

Suddenly Mary jerked out of her trance. “There’s my baby,” she said in that little-girl voice. “Jellooooo? He’s in his house. Where he was all the time.”

The white girl took Mary’s arm as she started toward the street, when suddenly Mary turned on her and bit her wrist.

“Shit, lady!” the girl shouted. “Jesus! It’s bleeding,” she said to her friend, who was still on the cell phone.

Mary shot into the street. Some inner-lane cars screeched to a standstill, and she just made it to the outer lane. But because the cars had stopped bumper to bumper, the college women could not catch Mary, who seemed not to notice the traffic or even the close call as a delivery van screeched to a halt just inches from broadsiding her. It was as if she were following a beam of awareness within a landscape that had nothing to do with the outer world.

“I see you,” she squealed with delight, and scurried through the traffic. “I see you, my baby.”

“Jenny, stop her!” the black woman shouted.

Jenny ran into the street, but neither she nor her friend nor any of the people on the sidewalk could stop Mary Curley because the traffic had made a tight chain of cars for half a block. Without distraction, she moved to the stopped train as if powered by some invisible force. From across the street, Jenny, still holding her bleeding wrist, shouted to her, “Mary, stop.”

But Mary did not stop, nor did she hear Jenny or her friend with the cell phone or the people in their vehicles or the last ca-ching of the money falling into the collection machine or the train’s doors closing behind the last passengers. Mary had dropped to her knees so she could look into the doghouse.

“No, Mary! Noooo!”

Jenny and her friend were scrambling over the hoods of the stopped cars screaming at Mary to stop.

But Mary was down now and crawling under the massive coupling that connected the two Green Line cars. “There’s my good boy.”

52

An elderly woman from Brookline killed herself yesterday by crawling under the wheels of an MBTA train in Boston …But authorities are still baffled how the seventy-eight-year-old woman suffering dementia had managed to find her way to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts three miles from her home.According to her daughter, Mary Curley had been furloughed from Broadview Nursing Home in Cobbsville. Somehow she had managed to slip out of her Brookline home and found her way to the museum.According to witnesses at the scene, Mrs. Curley appeared to be delusional and did not realize she had crawled under the Green Line train … .

IT WAS THE FOURTH FLASHBACK-RELATED DEATH. This had to stop, Nick thought and clicked off the radio.

He pulled into the parking lot of Broadview Nursing Home, thinking that maybe Peter Habib was right—that this was a flawed drug that should be tabled.

He parked and made his way inside, where he stood in the lobby waiting for his party to arrive. Also burning like an ember in the forepart of his brain was the report about Jack Koryan. It was as if he had been raised from the dead, and with impossible recall—with an incandescent hippocampus that might harbor stuff that could turn things topsy-turvy.

My God!

Nick shook the dark possibilities from his mind as he watched the GEM group march up the front walk from the parking lot for the two P.M. meeting. This was not going to be good.

Gavin Moy was in the lead, his bulldog face preceding him like the grille of a Mack truck. He was dressed in an olive green sport coat, and with the dark glasses he looked like a military commander striding his way toward the front. Flanking him was Jordan Carr, moving in steady cadence like Moy’s shadow in the afternoon sun, and behind them marched Mark Thompson, the GEM Tech medical director, and Mort Coleman, chief legal officer for the company.

Nick met them at the door, then led them across the lobby, a spacious and well-lit area newly furnished with padded chairs and sofas upholstered in bright floral patterns and clustered around coffee tables and large floor plants discretely arranged for attraction and privacy, giving the room the feel of an upscale country inn. And, like the rest of the wing, all provided by the generous grant money of GEM Tech, according to a plaque hanging in the entranceway.

They took the elevator to the second floor and passed through the security doors leading into the Alzheimer’s unit. Although Jordan Carr had worked on the ward in the early days of the trials, he had been back only a few times since Nick had taken over the site. And he was here because Gavin, with his penchant for corporate hierarchy, had named Carr assistant principal investigator of the trials.

This was Gavin’s second visit to the home since the GEM-sponsored renovations. But it was not why he and his entourage were here. For the benefit of the others, Nick walked them through the ward for a quick overview before they got down to business.

The new dayroom, nearly twice the size of the original, was a skylighted cheerful area set up with clusters of chairs and tables, a wide-screen television set, and bookcases with a surround-sound system that was currently playing some soothing, innocuous instrumental CD music meant to keep patients calm. A whole collection of easy-listening and memory-lane CDs filled the shelves—from The Fabulous Fifties and Favorite Irish Ballads to collections of Perry Como, Johnny Mathis, Nat King Cole, and the big bands. Safe, soft nostalgia.

The unit was now fully air-conditioned and equipped with an elaborating lighting as well as a fail-safe security system, ceiling-mounted cameras at the elevators and all exits. No more repeats of Clara Devine.

Nick could feel Moy’s restlessness as they made their way through the ward. But Nick kept up the pace and the tour-guide chatter not out of perversity but to humanize the issue for Moy and his suits—and to show where GEM’s grant money had gone.

Nick flicked a wall switch twice, turning on a primary then a secondary bank of fluorescence. “Double lighting because afternoons are stressful,” he explained. “The sun goes down, and they get agitated. It doesn’t always work, but it helps.”

A few elderly women were in chairs, some talking to each other, some talking to themselves. One woman in green sweatpants and white sneakers sat in a wheelchair holding a doll. One man paced by the rear windows, looking outside and muttering to himself. A few others shuffled on wheeled walkers.

Of the forty-eight patients on the ward, more than half were on Memorine. Because the trial was designed to be a single blind study, patients did not know if they were receiving the active drug or a placebo. And great care had been taken that the placebo tablet looked like the active medication. The reason, of course, was to prevent patients from acting differently because they knew they were taking an experimental drug. Although some medical staff knew who was in the control group, the participants were randomly assigned; and all effects observed—beneficial and troublesome—were documented then analyzed with cold, hard statistics. Even for those staffers who did not know which subjects were on Memorine and which were not, the distinction became progressively apparent over the months, especially since some of the more recovered patients, particularly those with no other morbidities or physical infirmities, were beginning to wonder why they were still in a nursing home.

Nick showed them a few sample rooms. The interiors were neat and cozily appointed in soothing pastels. Most had three beds, some two; a few were singles. Stuffed animals were bunched on the pillows in some of the women’s rooms. The walls and bureau tops held personal belongings—toiletries, religious statues, bowling trophies, war medals, and photos of the patients and family members from earlier times. One man had Red Sox banners and an autographed photo of Ted Williams. Most photographs had labels naming those in the pictures, including the patients themselves. Many residents not receiving Memorine forgot who they were.

Around the beds in one room were crayon drawings, some saying, “I love you, Gramma.” There was also a sheet with a poem, “To Aunt Wanda.” On the wall beside one bed was a cracked black-and-white photo of the patient as a little girl in pants and floppy hat posing with a pony. The name on the label was “Margaret, age 9.” She was the woman outside in the dayroom with the rubber doll in her arms.

“She’s a real gabber, this one,” Nick said. “Born in Ireland and can tell you lots of good tales from her childhood.”

“Is she one of ours?” asked Moy.

“Yes,” Nick said. “Three years ago she couldn’t recall the last four decades of her life, including the death of her husband and daughter. But you’ll be happy to know that she’s coming back.”

Moy nodded with pleasure, the smile relaxing his scowl.

“What’s interesting,” Nick added, “is that she recalls her early days like they were yesterday.”

They left the room. As in most homes, the nursing staff had made every effort to individualize the patients. So outside of each room was a computer-printed biography of the residents.

Margaret O’Bannion was born in Ireland on January 30, 1921, and retired as a history teacher at Arlington High School. She enjoys her family and activities. She has 3 children and 7 grandchildren. She has a great sense of humor and enjoys rock-and-roll music and playing cards.

The next room’s bio read:

Herbert Quinn was born in Lawrence, Mass., and worked in the mills as a young man. He is a very proud grandfather and likes to sing and socialize.

The door of the next room, a single, was closed, apparently because the patient was taking a nap. Outside of it was this bio:

Louis Martinetti was born in Portland, Maine, but lived much of his life in Woburn, Mass. He’s a decorated soldier from the Korean War. He has a wife, Marie, a daughter, Christine, and a grandson, Steven. He likes oldies music, history, and baseball, and he enjoys playing cards and watching movies.

Nick led them into one of the large activities rooms where eight patients sat at a table as a recreational therapist instructed them in cutting and pasting pictures onto construction paper. “Hi, ladies,” Nick said, as they entered. “Hope we’re not disturbing you. I’m just showing my friends what a lovely place you have here.”

“How are you girls doing today?” Moy asked. He walked up to the table smiling and inspected their artwork.

“Fine,” two women said in unison.

Some others just nodded. One woman squinted at Moy and muttered something. Nick flicked the switch to double the lighting. “Oh, he’s adorable,” she said, nodding at Gavin Moy. “He looks just like my Jimmy without his hair.”

“Jimmy’s my cat’s name,” another woman piped up.

“That’s not a cat’s name, Jimmy.” She made a face and turned toward Gavin Moy. “What’s your name?”

Before Moy could answer, the other declared, “Yul Brenner. He’s Yul Brenner.”

“Yul Brenner?” another said, her eyes squinting at Moy. “Nahhh, go on. That’s not Yul Brenner.” Then she scowled at him, when suddenly her eyes widened. “Oh, oh. Omigod, it’s Yul Brenner!” and she burst into snickers.

“No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is—”

“Thank you very much, ladies,” Moy began. “I’m flattered, but—”

Sudden shouting behind them cut off Moy. Nick shot outside.

Margaret, the woman in a wheelchair, was sobbing uncontrollably as a nurse and two aides at her side tried to comfort her. “He’s not breathing,” she blubbered. “He’s not breathing.”

“Who’s not breathing?” Moy asked. “Who she talking about?”

“He’s dead!” Margaret cried. “He’s dead.” And she began to wail.

“The doll,” Nick said.

Lucille, one of the nurses, moved over to Margaret. “He’s not dead, Margaret,” she said, and put her hands out to take the doll. “I just think he’s just sound asleep.” Then, as everybody watched, she gently pried the doll out of the woman’s clutch and laid it on the floor where she began to stroke the doll’s chest as if performing CPR.

“Look, he’s beginning to breathe,” one of the aides said. And the others, like a Greek chorus, agreed. “Oh, yeah. He’s breathing again.”

Lucille continued rubbing the doll for a few more seconds, then handed it back to Margaret. “There you go, little guy. He was just in a deep sleep, but he’s fine now.”

The others cheered quietly, as through huge eyes Margaret reexamined the doll for a second. Then she kissed it on the head and pressed it to her chest as if nothing had happened.

“Very good,” Moy said. And he gave a thumbs-up sign to the nurse.

“Something about fighting fire with fire,” Nick whispered.

“We’ve had several dress rehearsals,” Lucille said.

Nick was about to tell Moy that Margaret had lost an infant child decades ago, when somebody shouted, “It’s a goddamn doll.”

Louis Martinetti.

He had stepped out of his room in a bathrobe and pajamas. “Just a stupid doll, anyone can see that. She’s nuts. She does this five times a day. You can’t even get any sleep around here.” Then he shouted, “I want out of here!”

One of the aides went over to Louis in an effort to console him. “Oh, Louis, poor Louis, were you asleep?” Yolanda asked. “We’re sorry.”

“Goddamn loony bin in here,” Louis continued. “Take that thing away from her. She’s only going to do it again.”

Margaret scowled at Louis, clutching the doll to her chest, trying to block its eyes against the bad man.

“It makes her feel good,” Lucille explained.

“Thing’s made of rubber,” Louis said. Then to Margaret he yelled, “Rubber. It can’t be dead, right?”

Margaret began to whimper and sway with the doll clutched to her breast.

“Oh, forget it,” Louis said. “Just don’t get so damn noisy next time.” Then he rubbed his face in exasperation. “I want out of here,” and he glared at Nick. “I don’t belong here and you know that. I’m all better.”

He started back to his room when his eyes fell on the men with Nick. Instantly Louis froze. His eyes filled his glasses as he glowered at them. “Uh, uh, uh!” he muttered.

“Louis, what’s the problem?”

Suddenly he became very agitated, muttering to himself and cowering. “Louis, calm down. What’s wrong?” The nurse tried to take his arm but he yanked free, then began to chop at his forehead with his right hand.

“What the hell’s he doing?” Moy asked.

Louis looked possessed, standing there in a slight crouch with his eyes bulging while muttering nonsense syllables—“koppy choppy tu san ingee jop jop”—all the while chopping the side of his forehead.

“Louis, calm down,” Nick said. He tried to take his hand, but Louis jumped away. “Come on, Louis. Everything’s okay. Nothing to be afraid of.”

Louis glowered at them, and for a moment he looked as if he were about to attack. Then he seemed to realize something. “Buster,” he muttered.

“What’s that?” Nick replied. But Louis shook his head, then let out a howl and bolted back into his room, slamming the door.

“Louis! Louis!” Lucille called through the door. “What’s the matter? Everything’s okay.” She opened the door, but Louis shouted for her to leave the room.

“What’s his problem?” Moy asked.

Nick shook his head. “Something spooked him.”

“He was looking at us,” Jordan said.

“But who knows what he saw.” Nick moved to Louis’s door and tapped. “Louis, it’s Dr. Nick. May I come in?”

No answer.

“Louis, I think Margaret’s okay now, and you can take your nap. But you seem pretty upset. Maybe you can tell me what the problem is.” None of the patient rooms had locks, but instead of pushing his way in, Nick decided on giving Louis an option to open up and explain what had spooked him. Nick tapped again. “Louis, may I come in?”

Nothing.

Nick whispered to Lucille to get some meds, and he tapped once more. “Louis, I’m going to come in if that’s okay. Then we can talk about it.” He opened the door.

Louis’s single was empty. The windows were closed and still intact. The bed was flat. Nick opened the door to the toilet and pulled back the shower curtain. No Louis.

On the small bureau sat familiar photos of a younger Louis posed with other GIs in Korea. On the floor, probably tossed off when Louis got out of bed, were two CD cases, The Real Johnnie Ray—Greatest Hits, and Peggy Lee’s Is That All There Is? But nothing looked out of place.

“Louis, I know you’re here,” Nick said to the closed closet door. “There’s nothing to be upset about. Those gentlemen with me are my friends.” He tapped the door. “Louis, it’s Dr. Nick. I think it’s a good idea if you came out so we can talk about what’s bothering you.”

Nothing.

“Then I’m going to open the door.”

Nick opened the door. Louis was there all right, but he was crouched down among his slippers and shoes and a suitcase.

“Hi, Louis. It might be more comfortable if you came out into the room.”

Louis looked terrified. He mumbled something incoherent, but after a few moments Nick coaxed him into standing up.

But then Louis spotted Jordan, Moy, and the others behind Nick. His pupils dilated and he began to jabber nonsense syllables again, his voice rising in a ululating pitch. “I swear I don’t know nothing. Please.”

“I think it’s best if you waited outside,” Nick said to the others. Then to Louis, “It’s okay, Louis. Everything’s all right. No one’s going to hurt you. You can come out now.”

Jordan, Moy, and the rest began backing into the dayroom. But before they disappeared, Jordan looked back.

Louis Martinetti was standing in the closet dressed in army fatigues, combat boots, and fatigue cap. Although it was too small for him, his shirt was adorned with ribbons, a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart. A set of metal dog tags hung around his neck. In his left hand he held a furled umbrella.

Louis muttered something to Nick.

“What did he say?” Moy asked.

“His name, rank, and serial number.”

53

“HE HAD A FLASHBACK.”

“A what?” asked Coleman.

Nick had filed several reports to GEM Tech scientists with cc’s to Gavin Moy about the seizures. But apparently Coleman had not been informed. “A flashback seizure,” Nick said after they had settled in the conference room. “It’s what I called you about. We have a problem.”

The nurses had given Louis Martinetti an injection of Haldol and put him back to bed. Nick put his hands on a stack of notebooks of cumulative data on the trials. “As we all know, the majority of test patients have experienced reversals of their pathology and are enjoying increased functionality and lucidity—a success level as defined by the company’s end-point objectives. But for some patients the turnaround works too well.”

Moy looked at him nonplussed. “What do you mean ‘too well’?”

“By stimulating the growth of new neuron formations in the hippocampus, memory functions are regained.”

“We know how it works,” Moy snapped.

“Of course, but over the last several weeks, we’ve noticed some disturbing side effects that we need to address. For a number of patients the compound dislodges them from the objective present and sends them into flashback modes. In short, they relive long-forgotten experiences.”

“That’s impossible,” Moy growled. “Our brains aren’t like some Blockbuster video collection, for God’s sake.”

“True, but Louis out there has been experiencing some kind of throwback to his Korean War days. In his mind he’s twenty years old and with his buddies in Korea.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Moy said. And his medical director nodded agreement.

“But that’s what we just witnessed,” Nick continued. “And it’s what I think happened with Mary Curley. From police reports, the woman was clearly delusional, thinking she was a child again looking for her puppy. And she crawled under the trolley. In her mind she was back six decades. Like Louis Martinetti, she was locked into continuous dissociative experiences.”

Nick glanced at Jordan, whose face looked like red camouflage. The episode with Louis Martinetti had clearly upset him. Or maybe it was the way Moy was glaring at him. Jordan knew about these problems, of course. He had experienced similar episodes at his own trial site. So had the other investigators. “Luckily, nobody raised the question of a connection between Memorine and Mary’s suicide.”

“And there isn’t one,” Moy said.

The party line. Nick opened a file folder. “And they’re not just anomalies here. Maurico Rucci, who’s PI at the Providence trial site, reports similar problems. So does Peter Habib in Plymouth. He’s got a resident who refuses to change out of a party dress she’s worn around the clock for several days, and she becomes violent when aides try to make her. Apparently the dress was like one she had worn to her high school prom. And every time she has it on, she would hold full conversations with old classmates. It’s bizarre.”

“I don’t believe it,” Moy declared. And the others nodded.

“Another patient in the study from Schenectady was caught at the last minute trying to drown his three-year-old grandson in a sink.”

“What?”

“The mother stopped him in time. Later he said he thought the little boy was a fox. Then we learned he was raised on a chicken farm. He was trying to appease his dead abusive father, he said. This was not a violent person. Nor was Mary Curley suicidal.”

“Dr. Mavros, how do you know these anomalies weren’t the results of neuropsychiatric problems?”

“Because none of the placebo patients have flashback seizures. Look, I’m telling you that what we are seeing are intrinsically significant side effects that must be addressed.”

Thompson asked, “Any idea what these flashbacks are rooted in, Doctor?”

“No, but my guess is abnormal brain plasticity. Some people might be genetically susceptible to psychomotor seizures. Or it could be demographic. Whatever, we need to make a thorough dose-response profile of the population, since the numbers are high.”

“How high?”

“Thirty percent, maybe more.”

Throughout the exchange, Jordan remained quiet. But now he seemed to rise in his chair. “I beg to differ,” he said. “I’ve seen several reports, and these flashbacks are simply isolated cases that are clearly the result of the prior dementia and not Memorine.”

Nick nodded. “That was my suspicion, too, but when I withdrew patients from the drugs, the episodes disappeared. Unfortunately, that presents an even worse problem, as you know. Withdraw them too long, and the plaque returns.”

“So what are you recommending?” Moy asked.

“That we try to create a demographic profile while determining proper dosages and treatments. But we’ll need more time—maybe a year or two.”

Gavin’s face looked as if it had turned to brick. “We don’t have a year or two. The first weekend in June you, I, and every GEM Tech trial clinician are scheduled to meet at Bryce Canyon, Utah, to work out the final details of the application to the FDA. It has to be submitted by midmonth for a year-end market release. And you know that.”

Jordan cut in. “Nick, we’re talking about people who’ve suffered years of brain deterioration. And we all know that connections of the different areas lose control and get repatterned, resulting in different behavioral aberrations. With all due respect, dementia patients have adverse episodes—flashbacks, if you wish—but they’re caused by the rerepatterning from the original damage. In short, it’s the pathology, not the pill.”

“Then that’s something we better determine before we rush to the FDA.”

“Any idea what sets off these flashbacks?” Thompson asked.

“From what I’ve observed, external stimuli—odors, loud sounds, something somebody says, flashing lights. Almost anything can bring them on, in fact. Depending on the flashbacks, the experiences can be traumatic or delightful. Mr. Martinetti had clearly experienced trauma. So did Clara Devine and others, including one of Peter Habib’s patients, a Rodney Blake, who bled to death after he castrated himself for God knows what reason. Mary Hurley’s was just the opposite, and it killed her horribly.”

“And what do you do to stop them?”

“Dilantin, some of the other antiseizure medications. Heavy doses of antianxiety and antipsychotic drugs have been necessary also.”

“And how would you characterize the majority of these flashbacks?”

“For the most part pleasurable.”

“Is that a problem?”

“It is if they’re addicted.”

Thompson’s face screwed up. “Pardon me?”

“Many want to go back to their past,” Nick continued. “For them the present is a dull reality—like Dorothy returning from Oz to black-and-white Kansas. And they know that it’s Memorine that will get them to return.”

“You’re talking dependency.”

“Big time. And if they can’t get their flashback fix, some of them will try to bring themselves back by whatever means.”

“Such as what?”

“For Mary Curley, it was returning to a place where her parents had taken her—the Museum of Fine Arts. When her daughter brought her home, she somehow managed to make her way. But this was not your typical aimless dementia wandering. This was marked by purpose and destination. Others employ queer little rituals to trigger the flashbacks—like what you saw out there with Louis’s hand movements.”

“You mean hitting himself in the head?”

“He wasn’t hitting himself. He was saluting.”

“Saluting?”

“Yes, but on some weird fast-forward. It’s how he induces a flashback.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Moy said.

“I’m not kidding. Some subjects set off events by stimulating different sensory zones—rubbing parts of their bodies, pacing, bouncing on one foot. Or they play nursery rhymes and Christmas carols on their CD players. Whatever sends them back.”

“But Gavin’s right,” Thompson said. “Past experiences aren’t stored intact in the brain.”

“Yes. True memory is a matter of flashbulb recollections. With these patients, there are just more flashbulbs and a strong autosuggestive component, allowing them to create the illusion of being back when.”

“That guy was acting normal one minute, then he snapped.”

“Yes, and something set him off.”

“I am not happy about this,” Moy growled. “We’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars in years of studies examining the efficacy and tolerability of Memorine with two dozen test groups and hundreds of patients, and consistently across all the damn scales the drug improved cognition—in some cases a hundred percent compared to placebos—and with no deterioration in global functioning and behavior. And now we have these goddamn flashbacks or whatever the Christ they are.”

Nick was aware that GEM’s marketing plan was to send scores of sales reps to physicians and health care people across the country to encourage use of Memorine once it hit the markets. According to Gavin Moy, that program alone was costing the company forty million dollars. Adding to the rush was the fact that FDA director George Orman-Witt was retiring at the end of the year, and his replacement might not be as sympathetic with flashback reports and could ask for a complete review. So they were playing Beat the Clock.

Mort Coleman, GEM’s legal counsel, turned to Nick. “So, what do you suggest?”

“I suggest that we do an internal review of all clinical data and try to determine the correlation between these flashbacks and patient profiles—demographics, ethnicity, environment, genetic markers, medical profiles, and any other possible parameters. If something comes out of it, perhaps we can determine if certain patients should be excluded from use of the drug.”

“That could take months, maybe years.”

Nick heard the edge of panic in Coleman’s voice. “It may also save lives and beat lawsuits. We rush this to market before it’s ready and we could end up with the greatest medical flop since thalidomide.”

“And if we don’t, it might be the greatest medical crime against humanity,” Thompson declared.

“Then maybe you should speak to some family members,” Nick said.

“What does that mean?” Moy asked.

“At Webster Smith Rehab in Maine,” Nick explained, “an eighty-two-year-old male lies in his bed all night talking to kids at the YMCA camp he went to as boy—I mean full, coherent conversations about canoeing, rope swinging, et cetera to people who aren’t there. He had his wife bring in mosquito netting, and he’s got it draped over his bed like he’s back camping. Most of the time he doesn’t acknowledge her presence and it’s driving her crazy because Memorine has brought back a son instead of a husband.”

“He’s suffering other problems.”

“You saw what happened to Louis Martinetti out there.”

“I saw a demented patient banging himself in the head.”

“Even if there are these flashbacks,” Thompson said, “what’s the problem with patients reliving parts of their childhood every so often? It’s better than sitting in front of a television like a turnip.”

“Then maybe you should come with me.” Nick opened the door and led them down the hall to another room. “We’re still waiting for the family to claim her belongings, so the place hasn’t been changed over yet. But this is the single that Mary Curley occupied for the last year.” Nick swung open the door.

The interior was a mausoleum to little girlhood. The walls were draped with posters of kittens and puppies and cartoon decals. The bed was covered with applique floral bedspread patches in pinks and yellows, and the pillow was stacked with stuffed animals and Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls. Pasted on the headboard were large floral letters in pink spelling out “Mary.” Beside the bed was a nightstand with a pink lamp whose shade had cartoon figures of bees and bluebirds and a framed black-and-white photograph of a puppy with a label “Jello.” On the bureau were ceramic figurines of ballerinas and puppies as well as a grouping of the Cowardly Lion, Tin Man, and Scarecrow. Beside the bed was a pink rocking chair whose back was a carved heart with the hand-painted inscription: “Time out to think about the things you do!” In the corner was a large plastic pumpkin structured as an armoire with shelves lined with small dolls.

“Jesus!” Moy muttered.

“She wanted to be a little girl again,” Nick said, “And in her mind she was.”

“Where did all this stuff come from?” Coleman asked.

“Family members. As she became more functional, she began to demand mementos from her childhood. But since most of them were long gone, relatives brought all this stuff, which made her want more. The problem was that she’d sit in here for hours playing.”

From a bureau drawer Nick removed a small black-and-white photo of a little girl beside a man in a suit. They were standing in front of a statue of an Indian seated bareback on a horse with arms extended. “According to relatives, the MFA was a favorite place her parents took her to as a child. She liked the mummies.”

Then Nick picked up a throw rug in the shape of a yellow puppy. On the floor were crisscross lines where tape had been applied. “Her nephew did that.”

“What is it?” Jordan asked.

“A hopscotch grid,” Moy said.

“It was,” Nick said. “And she was pretty spry for her age. You would hear her singing and trying to hop about. We peeled the tape off when she took a fall.”

Jordan looked rattled. “But if she was happy, what’s the problem?”

“If Mary was your mother and you didn’t mind her playing with dolls and doing hopscotch, that wouldn’t be a problem. But if she’s doing it all day long, you may yearn for Alzheimer’s.

“The other thing is that she’d turn violent when it was time to take her antiseizure pills because she knew what they did. But it was the little blue pill that brought back her childhood.”

Nick held up a folder with a small stack of letters from family members. “These are requests from family members to withdraw their relatives from Memorine. Mary’s daughter had threatened legal action if we refused. We complied, but not soon enough.”

“So you recommend we ask for an extension to work out these problems.”

“Yes.”

“We have a strategy meeting in June. We’ll work it out,” Moy said, and left the room. The others followed through the door. In the corridor Moy stayed back until he and Nick were alone. “You really believe they’re remembering that far back?”

“Yes. We’re rewiring areas in their hippocampus that’s sending them back.”

“How far?”

“Mary Curley’s daughter says she recalled events in the Ohio house where she was born—where they lived before the family moved east.”

“And how long ago was that?”

“Seventy-five years.”

Moy’s face appeared to shift slightly.

“She was less than three years old.”

Moy held Nick’s gaze for a moment until Nick felt something pass between them. Then Moy turned on his heel and left.

54

FIVE, SIX, SEVEN MORE DAYS PASSED, and Jack added another nine, twelve, and fourteen minutes to the time he could walk unassisted. Every day he made mincing little steps of progress.

According to the doctors, he had sustained no impairment to his thinking and reasoning skills, nor would he need speech therapy. So the rehab team focused on making him physically stronger and getting him to walk again. Thus his day was blocked out in sessions with the whirlpool, foot hydrotherapy, the rehab gym, and the physical therapist who had him keep active four or more hours a day.

His progress was considered remarkable by the staff, the result of his own determination to get back on his feet and out on his own. And they would hoot and high-five him and praise his strength of will. His recovery had pushed the envelope.

But it was more than strength of will and muscular reconditioning. Jack wanted out of Greendale. Call it bad karma or superstition or sour psychic residue. But the place was buggy with nightmares and bad flashes—so much so that he began to dread sleep for fear of being assaulted by grade-B horror flick snips. The nurses gave him different drugs that sometimes helped.

But the good news was that Vince had located a place to lease—a small Cape cottage he could have for the next nine months. And it was in Carleton, Jack’s hometown.

That was also the bad news, for it was near the old neighborhood where he and Beth had shared their home.

“HI, JACK. THIS IS DR. NICHOLAS MAVROS.”

A squarish middle-aged man with thick gray hair stood next to Marcy. In a black sport shirt and chinos, he didn’t look like a doctor—maybe because it was Saturday or because the docs here didn’t dress in white. The man had a wide, toothy smile and dark eyes that were hidden behind thick Coke-bottle glasses.

“Dr. Mavros assisted Dr. Heller when you were first brought to MGH.”

Mavros’s hand was meaty and cool. “Good to finally meet you awake. How you doing?”

“Better.”

“Good, good. You’re quite the Comeback Kid.” Mavros smiled broadly. “The PT reports say you’re progressing marvelously. And there’s no evidence of any neurological damage. In fact, quite the contrary. The memory centers of your brain are very active. Which is the most important thing, right?”

Jack nodded. Dr. Mavros’s large opaque eyes bore down on him. And though it was barely perceptible, Jack felt his innards tighten.

“You’re a medical wonder. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to run a functional MRI on you someday.”

Jack was not interested in more tests, and made a noncommittal nod.

“Do you recall anything about the actual accident—swimming, the jellyfish attack?”

“Not really. Just jumping into the water, some vague image of jellyfish, then I’m here.”

Mavros nodded woefully. “They got you pretty good.”

“I don’t recommend it.”

“I’ll say.” Mavros smiled brightly. Almost too brightly, as if trying to slide into the next question without notice. “And just out of curiosity, what were you doing out there on Homer’s Island? Seems like a rather remote place to be.”

“We used to rent a place out there.”

“We?”

“My family.”

“Your family … ,” Mavros repeated, leaving an inviting gap for Jack to fill in.

“A vacation rental.”

“I see. Were you staying there at the time of the jellyfish attack?”

Outside thunder cracked. Jack had already tired of the line of questioning. “Just wanted to see the old place.”

“I see.”

But it was clear that the good doctor didn’t see.

“Do you remember how old you were when you first started going out there?”

Jack shook his head. “I was a baby.”

“Do you remember the name of your first-grade teacher?”

“My first-grade teacher? I already had memory tests.”

“Just checking.” And Mavros flashed a thousand-watt smile.

“Miss Van Zandt.”

The doctor jotted that down on his pad, and Jack wondered how he’d check for accuracy.

“What were your adoptive parents’ names?”

Jack told him.

“Do your remember your biological parents?”

“No. My father died when I was six months old, my mother when I was two.”

“So you don’t remember them.”

Jack felt himself slump. “No.”

The doctor looked at his notepad. “The nurses say that you’ve complained of bad dreams, which is consistent with the reports while you were in the coma. Do you remember anything about those dreams—any specifics?”

“Nothing very clear.”

“Can you characterize them in any way?”

“Disturbing.”

“Disturbing?”

“Violent. Images of someone getting hurt.” Jack felt his heart rate notch upward.

“Can you see who it is? Who’s involved, or how they’re—”

Jack cut him off. “No, and I’d rather end the questions, if you don’t mind. I’m very tired.”

“Of course. I understand, and I’m sorry about this.” Then his face brightened again. “But thank you. And you should know that we’re delighted with your progress.”

Jack nodded. He was drowsy all of a sudden, as if he’d been drugged.

Before the doctor left he said, “I hope I didn’t upset you with my queries. It’s just a routine thing, you understand.”

“No problem.” Jack closed his eyes.

“Just one more, if you don’t mind. One of those standard memory test things.”

Jack opened his eyes.

“Your biological mother. What was her maiden name?”

“Sarkisian.”

Mavros looked at him for a protracted moment. Then he nodded.

But he did not ask to spell it, nor did he write it down on his pad. He just stared at Jack without expression, then thanked him and left the room, leaving Jack thinking that this was the third person in a week who wanted to know his mother’s maiden name.

55

“WE HAVE A PROBLEM,” MARK THOMPSON announced.

Of the thirteen chairs around the huge shiny cherrywood conference table in the boardroom of GEM Tech, six were occupied. Five men and one woman: Gavin Moy; legal counsel Mortimer Coleman; marketing director Marilyn Pierce; medical director Mark Thompson; principal investigator for the clinical sites in Connecticut Zachary Mello; and Jordan Carr. Conspicuously absent was Dr. Nicholas Mavros.

“Peter Habib has gotten Nick thinking there’s a causality between these so-called flashback seizures and Memorine. Since the suicide-ruled death of one of his patients, he is asking for an immediate review of clinical protocol.”

“Even before Utah?” Moy asked.

“Even before Utah.”

“What about Nick?”

“He’s more open-minded but he’s susceptible. Apparently Peter has forwarded him data.”

“Wasn’t it Peter who first raised a flag?”

“Yes. And now he wants to alert the agency.”

“What about Nick?”

“I think he’s willing to wait until Utah. But the point is that he’s losing his proper vision on this project,” Thompson continued. “And frankly that makes him something of a liability for this trial and this organization.”

“If you’re suggesting we replace him as chief PI, that’s not going to happen,” Gavin Moy declared. “That’ll only invite the press to ask why, raising the kind of speculations we don’t need.”

Mort Coleman agreed. “Axing Nick because we don’t like his position on the drug’s efficacy is not the way to go. He’s an iconic figure in the medical community and is identified with these trials and GEM Tech. That would be counterproductive.”

Marilyn Pierce cut in. “Not to mention how the FDA would react once Nick began talking to the press about his termination. That’s not a viable option.”

“But there is a viable option,” Moy said. “Hiring an independent clinical research organization. Not only is that the most legitimate way to go, but I’m betting it’ll get Nick to come around.”

“Come around to what?”

“To stop suggesting that we ask the FDA for a friggin’ two-year extension.”

“Christ, is that what he’s doing?”

“Yes.” Moy poured himself some coffee from the decanter. “So what we do is consult an expert clinical research organization. We submit them all the clinical data, have them go through each case report, put them on spreadsheets, blah blah blah, and determine any problems and if so whether they fall within the projected end points of the target population blah blah blah.”

“But that could still take months,” Jordan said.

“Not if we make it worth their while,” Moy said. “But Nick’s right. It’s better safe than sorry.”

Coleman agreed. “We don’t want to explode onto the market only to discover that we’ve got a billion dollars’ worth of lawsuits dogging us like with Fen-Phen or Vioxx or those rotavirus vaccines that got yanked.”

“And what if this CRO determines there’s a … correlation?” Jordan could hardly word that possibility.

“If that’s the case, then we have to determine that segment of the population for whom these side effects can’t be eliminated. But, at least, usage of the drug can be screened and made available only to people not susceptible, who meet specific eligibility criteria—or under conditions where the benefits may outweigh the risks. That’s what warning labels are for.”

“Even in the worst-case scenario, say thirty percent are risk cases, seventy percent of the market is still blockbuster proportions.”

“I think the CRO option makes sense,” Jordan said. And the others agreed.

Moy named the Klander Group, a New York organization GEM had used in the past. Moy also was good friends with Allen Klander. All agreed. “Good, that settles it,” Moy said.

Before they headed for lunch, Jordan pulled something out of his briefcase. “I assume you’re aware of this news item.” He handed Moy a photocopy of the Boston Globe article as well as copies to the others. The headline read: “Jellyfish Coma Victim Recovers After Nearly Seven Months.”

A 33-year-old Carleton man who had spent six months in a “persistent vegetative state” recently regained consciousness at the Greendale Rehabilitation Center in Cabot, Mass … .

“Is this a problem?” asked Marilyn Pierce.

“Is what a problem?”

“The article goes on to say that the guy returned from the coma with memory powers that baffle his doctors. Some sharp-eyed neuro-pharm person from another lab might find a connection to the Solakankji jellyfish and scramble to come up with a competing compound for treating dementia, you know, tweak the molecule a little and get their own patent.”

“Hardly,” Coleman said. “We’ve got the patent for the parent compound, plus patents on sixteen molecular ‘for use’ variations. Nobody else is even close, unless they’ve got a variant synthesis we haven’t thought of.”

Coleman was right. Those patents represented proprietary as well as legal rights to scientific property. For another company to develop a competing compound, it would have to be an ingenious and unforeseen molecular variation that also demonstrated pharmacological uses in combating Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia—a process of biochemical identification, extensive three-phase testing of animals and humans, and the implementation and organization of the R&D required to launch a decade-long process. Even if some little-known lab could secretly put together a competing drug, there’d be a leak—if nothing else, word filtering down from the FDA, one of the many Alzheimer’s associations, or employees in the very tight and incestuous pharmaceutical industry.

“Someone would have to make a connection between the jellyfish and the guy’s enhanced memory,” said Thompson. “And there’s no way anybody would. You just have a miraculous recovery. And sometimes that happens.”

“Not a problem.” And Moy slipped the article into his folder.

But Jordan thought that he detected a lingering concern in Gavin’s face.

Whatever, they would take the CRO route. And if all went well, they’d go to market before anybody else. Thanks to marketing, Memorine was not just a household term already; it had become to the needy an incantation.

GAVIN MOY SAT ALONE AT THE head of the table after the others had left. From outside he could hear the sounds of jets on their approach to Logan Airport over Boston Harbor.

His eye fell on the newspaper article again.

Jack Koryan.

It sounded French or maybe even Irish (like one of his neighbors at Bayside, a guy whose face was the map of County Cork—named Kevin Lorian). Maybe even Israeli—à la Moshe Dayan. Possibly Arabic, a variation of Koran. Whatever, the guy had been sent into a coma for nearly seven months.

Moy had wondered at the odds of a casual tourist on Homer’s Island getting stung by Solakandji. Those things don’t come around but once in a blue moon—could be decades between occurrences. An absolute rarity.

But who was this Jack Koryan? And what the hell was he doing out there taking a swim with a storm brewing?

A simple statistical coincidence. Nothing more, nothing less.

Maybe Mark Thompson was right. Maybe the real problem was Nick Mavros.

56

IT WAS DUMB, BUT JACK STILL went.

Another three weeks would pass before he was released from Greendale; and he had circled the day in red on his calendar. But on occasion an aide would take him for a field trip to a local park or mall where he could exercise his legs. Of course, the aide was always at his side with a medical kit—the football, as Jack called it.

But that Friday morning, Jack convinced the aide, Andre LeVal, to swing by his old place in Carleton where he and Beth used to live. He also convinced Andre to let him stroll up Hutchinson Road by himself while Andre kept an eye on him from his parked car. Andre saw no problem and let Jack out.

It had been a long time.

Jack made his way with the cane, moving along as if he were crossing a minefield, taking little mincing steps not because of his legs but because if he didn’t sneak up on the place it might come at him too hard. So he stopped across the street, under the maple in front of the Helms’s place. Tom and Marilyn both worked, so they wouldn’t catch him, come out, and ask him in for coffee and a good cry.

He looked at the house and waited for a reaction. But there was none, probably because the anticipation had all but anesthetized him.

The place looked the same—white colonial, green shutters, sloping lawn, low stone wall, azaleas and boxwood bushes that he had planted. The paint looked brighter than he remembered. The flower garden was still there, blazing with daffodils. Beth had sent away for hundreds of bulbs one year, and for several hours they planted them all, getting goofy on the dirt and sweat.

Jack thought about crossing the street, but there was no sidewalk, which did not make for casual strolling, especially with a cane. So he stood under the tree, hoping no cars would come by and wonder if he was some kind of stalker.

You don’t live here anymore, Jackie Boy. That was pre-coma you.

He moved down the street.

Why are you doing this, asshole? The last thing you need is a good-old-days fix. Only going to make you more miserable.

Niggling thoughts, and he shook them away. Just this once.

Bullshit.

Jack’s mind was a fugue. He had not been here in months, and this was coming to terms with that. Reality test, turning point, sayonara—your basic parting shot.

The lawn was a brilliant green, looking better than he remembered it. But it always did look greener in April before summer turned it New England brown. The house looked the same, but the setting looked reshuffled. At the top of the lawn sat the pink dogwood he had planted the spring they moved in. It had been pruned, and the shrubs looked taller—or maybe it was his imagination. At the side of the house was a child’s riding toy fashioned after a train engine. A kid or kids lived there now. He and Beth had wanted to fill the place with babies—three or four of them. Whatever, somebody else’s tree, somebody else’s shrubs. Somebody else’s kids.

Jack felt disoriented from the double vision. To a major portion of his brain, this was his house. He and Beth had lived there just a few weeks ago. Now people with unknown names filled the rooms with their voices, there furniture, their kids, their own I-wish-I may-I-wish-I-mights. Different voices hummed the walls, warmed the bed. Same stage, different cast.

Suddenly a fierce sadness sliced through him like a sickle. This was what grief was like—grief for the loss of it all: for his Beth, his world, the old Jack. Sure, he was alive, but was that really better than the alternative?

Shit! Just what he didn’t want was to get locked into yearning for what no longer was. He needed to rise above the swirling muck of anger and self-pity. This wasn’t a matter of getting on with his life since there was no life to get on with. It was a matter of your basic makeover. Renewal. Renascence: Jack Koryan II.

About the past and that place across the street, he just wanted to forget. But, man, it was hard, and there were times like this when he envied the Greendale old guys their forgetting. He’d kill to go blank, erase the palimpsest of his old soul and get an all-new impression.

He started up the street and glanced at the house again …

One big fucking mistake, pal! Go back to Andre and get out of here.

And he was hit with a recollection so vivid that for a moment he nearly lost his balance.

It was November: He was standing high on a ladder cleaning the gutters. Beth appeared in the bedroom window right next to where he was scooping out the leaf mash. She had just gotten out of the shower and was toweling off when she spotted him and tapped the window. He peered within to see her flash him a full Monty, a sly cartoon grin on her face. “Hey, Ladderman, want to climb this?” He made a huge stupid face. “Uh, climb what, ma’am?” She closed the towel across herself and opened it again in an exaggerated stripper flash and jiggled her breasts at him. “This, nitwit.” “Ah just do gutters.” She rolled her eyes. “Well, have I got a gutter for you!” she said, and snapped her pelvis at him. “Oh, okay, if you say so,” and he gave her a look of moronic complicity. Beth cracked up, and Jack was down the ladder in a wink and up the stairs and into the bedroom before she could settle in their bed. “Shower first,” she said. And he did. And they did. And it was wonderful.

He headed back down the street toward Andre’s Toyota, repeating just what a bad idea this was. He should have just gone to the North Shore Mall instead. Andre was reading a newspaper.

Jack got in the car. “Okay, let’s go.”

“Nobody home?”

“Nobody home.”

As Andre pulled away, Jack felt the tug of the house at number 12 for one last little peek—for auld lang syne. He glanced through the window, gazing at the house through a mist, too distracted by the receding visions to notice the black SUV following them.

57

PETER HABIB TURNED HIS BRIGHT RED Harley onto Ocean Drive and cranked the throttle. At one in the morning there were no other vehicles on the road.

Peter did this whenever he couldn’t sleep. Instead of tossing around in his sheets, he’d take his candy-apple-and-chrome stallion for a spin.

And this was one of those glorious early spring nights when the sea air was laced with sultry hints of summer yet still cool and moist and requiring a leather jacket.

He loved this drive because there were several strips where the houses and trees gave way to open vistas of beach. His favorite was a straightaway strip for about a mile with no obstacles between him and the ocean save for a concrete breakwater barrier erected a few nor’easters back.

Rising among scraps of clouds was a three-quarter tangerine moon that blazed across the black expanse of water and set the sky in motion. It was one of those nights when Peter felt privileged to be alive.

He whipped along the winding course of Ocean Drive, feeling that he could do this all night long, except that the Massachusetts coastline would not allow endless oceanside cruising. Maybe after the trials were over, he’d head for California—growl up the Pacific Coast Highway from Los Angeles up through Big Sur. And why not? He could afford an early retirement. And his wife wouldn’t mind if he and one of his biker friends did a guy thing. Might even take the hogs across country. The other option was flying out and renting bikes in L.A. Or buy them and have them shipped back. Whatever. He was making great money.

Ahead the road opened up to the straightaway, and his heart throttled up.

Amazing. Not another car on the road, and there was the endless Atlantic and that splendid moon you could almost pick out of the sky with your fingers.

Peter pushed the bike to about forty. He liked the way the roar of his engine echoed off the barrier as he whipped through the scene, the moon to his right over the water. He throttled up.

But it wasn’t the only light. Out of his left eye he saw something in his mirror. The moon. But reflecting off something else.

He checked his right mirror, but it happened all so fast that he did not process that a large black vehicle had closed in behind him. Or that its headlights were off. Or that it had come up on him at full speed, the only indication being the moon glancing off its windshield in his mirrors.

Peter also did not have time to process how the driver of the vehicle could have missed the bright taillights of his Harley. All he knew was that the large dark mass suddenly closed on his left flank pressing him into the strip of barriers.

By reflex, Peter braked. And the moment exploded into a void.

58

“HE DIED INSTANTLY,” NICK SAID.

“That’s terrible.” René had met the man only a few times, but she felt as if she had lost an old ally. And Nick was devastated.

“The police say that he lost control of the bike and hit a concrete breakwater.”

“He was such a nice man.”

“And a first-rate clinician. It’s a real loss.” He was also the one vocal ally Nick had in his effort to postpone the FDA application of Memorine.

According to Nick, Peter had been cremated and a memorial service would be held in a few weeks.

They were walking on a trail through conservation land about two miles off the South Border Road exit of Route 93. It was where Nick would hike to get in shape for the Utah trip in June. Most of the trails were through tall oaks, although the land climbed to huge glacial outcroppings of granite from the top of which one could see the skyline of Boston.

They continued in silence for several minutes. The cool breeze felt good, a relief from the confines of nursing homes and an opportunity to deal with their sadness. In a couple of hours they had to be back at Broadview to consult with the Martinetti women. Louis was protesting that he wanted to go home.

“The other news is that GEM’s decided to hire an independent clinical research organization to go through all the data and come up with recommendations.”

“To what end?”

“GEM’s mandated to explain any problems with the trials to the FDA, so they’ll try to determine if the flashbacks are the result of the drug or the disease. It’s what Peter was pressing for.”

“But we can tell them that.”

“Except they don’t want to hear our argument.”

“I thought once the Zuchowsky affair was resolved, they’d stop putting their heads in the sand.”

“The Zuchowsky affair cost them a million dollars. This could cost them five hundred times that.”

Nick had been working out here and on a home treadmill, so he cut up the trail like a mountain goat, René right behind him. “Any idea which CRO?”

“No. Some gerontology specialists.”

“And what about flashback cases?”

“We continue fine-tuning dosages and noting behavior changes. Any problems we continue to treat with antiseizure drugs, antipsychotics, sedatives.”

Two other clinical PIs had bowed out of the trials in disagreement with GEM Tech’s pressure tactics and had been replaced by GEM-approved physicians. And now Peter Habib was dead. “Are we the only ones who think they’re rushing a faulty drug to market?”

“I think Brian Rich and Paul Nadeau agree, and possibly Jordan Carr. He may be coming around. Unfortunately, that’s up against a powerful flood of appeals by AD groups to get it to market by Christmas, no matter what.”

“But a CRO review could take months.”

“If pushed, they could review the data in a week. They’ve also got to have it done for Utah. That’s seven weeks from now.”

“So there’s a deadline.”

“Absolutely. Meanwhile, we box up all case report forms, records, whatever, including all files on CDs, and continue the trials.”

They came to a clearing and climbed the granite boulders to the top, where they had a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view. Nick sat down on a rock and took a deep breath.

“You okay?”

He smiled and let out his breath. “Just a little dizzy.”

René handed him a water bottle from her day pack. “How long have you been having these spells?”

“Since I’ve been thirty pounds overweight.” He guzzled some water and stood up. “I’m fine.”

Toward the east the skyline of Boston shimmered in the milky blue mist. Nick took his camera out of his backpack and snapped off a few shots—of the local rocks, the Boston skyline, and René.

“The Utah conference is just an hour’s drive from Bryce Canyon. Imagine the views.”

“I take it the FDA knows nothing about these flashback problems.”

“Not officially, even though that was what Peter was pushing for,” Nick said. He snapped another two shots. “Nor will they unless that’s in the report by the CRO.”

“And if the CRO concludes that the problem is drug-related?”

Nick shrugged. “Then we go back to the drawing boards—determine where the problem is—dosages, interactions with other medications or other diseases, population demographics—whatever it takes. We’ve done nothing about determining a correlation. Maybe Italian Americans or Eastern European Jews are susceptible to such seizures. Or people with a particular genetic signature. Or those patients with high blood pressure. We just don’t know why some have flashbacks and others don’t, but we’d better determine that before the stuff hits the market.”

“And if this CRO concludes that the flashbacks are not drug related?”

“It goes to market.”

What bothered René was how GEM Tech reps were categorically dismissing the flashbacks as anomalies unrelated to the drug. Even Mary Curley’s death was ruled an unintentional suicide as the result of advanced dementia. The same with a man from Connecticut named Rodney Blake who had cut off his own genitals.

“Meanwhile, we continue feeding hope to victims and caregivers.”

“And isn’t that a shame.”

59

“I DON’T WANT HIM HOME LIKE THIS. He’s not right yet, I’m telling you. He’s not right.”

René and Nick were back at Broadview with Marie Martinetti and her daughter, Christine. Louis was insisting on being released from the home and had called a lawyer.

“The tests say he’s improved nearly fifty percent,” Christine said.

“Yeah, but he’s worse.”

Mrs. Martinetti was in her seventies and ailing with arthritis, and Louis was still strong and more active than ever. And given his cognitive improvements, Louis had outgrown the nursing home. That fact made this a circumstance that nursing homes had never before had to confront—not since Memorine. And René could feel Nick struggle with the dilemma.

“Well, you’re free to sign a release for him if you choose to bring him home,” he explained.

“That’s what I’m saying. I can’t handle him the way he is.” Marie looked pleadingly at René. “It’s that Memorine. You gotta take him off it. It’s making him crazy.”

Christine’s face was drawn in dismay. “Mom,” she began.

“Mom, nothing. You don’t know the half of it. You got to take him off it.”

“Mrs. Martinetti, we really can’t do that,” Nick said woefully.

“What do you mean you can’t do that? Of course you can do that.”

“If we withdraw Louis from the drug the disease will come back.”

Mrs. Martinetti glared at Nick as if he had just spit something up. “What?”

“That’s the problem with this medication, I’m afraid.”

“What’s the problem? What are you saying?” She shot René a frantic look for an explanation she could accept.

But Christine cut in. “Mom, they’re saying that the plaque will grow back. That he’ll get Alzheimer’s again if he’s taken off it.”

“What?” Mrs. Martinetti looked back at Nick. “You didn’t know about this?”

“It never occurred in the early phases of the trials with lab animals. No reversal of any kind. Even in the second phase using humans we didn’t see any evidence of a reversal.”

Nick was correct. René had scanned some of the reports from GEM and outside protocol test labs, and nothing in the data had indicated that withdrawal from Memorine in any dosage caused animals or healthy non-demented humans to develop the amyloid plaque. Not until Clara Devine was returned from McLean’s.

“It was completely unforeseen,” Nick said. “I explained to Christine the other day. I’m very sorry.”

“Sorry? But they said this was a miracle cure.” Then the realization set in and her face crumbled. “Oh, my God.”

“But, Mom, he can still take it,” Christine began. “He’s still recovering.”

But Mrs. Martinetti disregarded her. “So, what does that mean? Louis will have these flashbacks the rest of his life—go back someplace in the junior high gym or in the army? Sweet Mother of God, what are you telling me?”

“Mom, please. It’s better than him just wasting away.”

Her head snapped at her daughter. “No, it not better! It scares me, he goes off like that, talking to dead people, getting all scared he’s got to watch them cut out Fuzzy Swenson’s eyes, that Colonel Chop Chop bastard.”

“Colonel Chop Chop?” Nick asked.

“Some North Korean commander,” Christine said. “Chop Yong Jin, or something like that. I think he was in charge when my dad was taken prisoner. That was his nickname, Colonel Chop Chop.” She explained that he was a high-ranking Korean officer who brought a Russian advisor on military campaigns—a guy they nicknamed Blackhawk, from an old military comic book character. In the book Chop Chop was his loyal sidekick. “Dad escaped, but he saw some bad stuff he never talked about.”

“No, he didn’t escape,” Marie Martinetti cried. “They still got him. He keeps reliving them. And he talks about it and he’s back again and again, but you’re not there. I am. I am.”

“I don’t care if he has a couple of flashback things,” Christine continued. “Those were the best times of his life, when he was young and full of himself. And he’s fine in between, and he’s not hurting himself or anybody else. And maybe you can come up with something that keeps them under control.”

“But you don’t know what he’s reliving,” Marie protested. “I’ve seen him. I’m here almost every day and you’re not. It’s horrible what I seen him go through. HORRIBLE, pressing his hands to his eyes so he can’t see what they did to his friend. We’d be having a nice visit, and suddenly he’s back in the Red Tent, he calls it—the torture place in the Commie camp. You don’t know what he saw. He screams and cries …” And she broke down. “It’s horrible …”

Christine put her hand on his mother’s knee. “But I don’t want him taken off it, Mom. I don’t want to see him slip away again. I don’t.”

“But I can’t handle it. I can’t. I know what it does to him, how he gets so upset. Because in his head it’s real what he sees. I prefer him … forgetful.”

“Forgetful? You prefer him turning into a vegetable, just sitting there with dead eyes and a bag on his side? Not me! And I’m not going to let that happen to him again.”

“But you haven’t seen him suffer. That stuff’s a curse. A damn curse. I wish to God we’d never signed him up on it.” Then her voice broke into a whimper. “Oh, Sweet Mother, give me strength.”

As René listened, she uttered a silent thanksgiving that her own father had never been afflicted with such war delusions. He rarely talked about the war, so God only knows what he might have relived on Memorine.

“Mrs. Martinetti,” Nick said, “the lab is working on fine-tuning the dosages and coming up with some combination with other drugs to control these episodes. Believe me, there are a lot of very talented people working on this.”

“Well, hurry up, because I want him back the way he was.”

“In the meantime,” René said, “we’re giving him antiseizure medication that will help keep him stable.”

“But that stuff makes him dopey,” Christine said.

“I don’t care dopey,” said Mrs. Martinetti. “I’ll take him dopey. It’s better than being back in the Red Tent.”

“Well, he certainly can go home on a furlough,” Nick said to Christine. “It’s unusual for patients with Alzheimer’s, as you can imagine. But maybe some weekend soon.”

“That would be great,” Christine said, her eyes brightening.

“Then we’ll put something on the calendar.”

“But only if he had his antiseizure pills,” Mrs. Martinetti insisted. “Otherwise, he can stay here. I can’t take his torture. He was better off with Alzheimer’s.”

60

“SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, JACK.” It was Marcy.

Jack opened his eyes. He was still lying on his bed in his jeans and sneakers. After his morning walk—the forty-yard dash up and down the hall in just seven minutes—he had stretched out on his bed with the television on mute and closed caption and a copy of U.S. News and World Report across his chest. He had dozed off.

“This is Theo Rogers.” With Marcy was a man in a T-shirt that said “We Fix It.” “Mr. Rogers is going to repair your Venetian blinds.”

“Call me Theo.” The man held out a large rough hand that felt as if it could crush Jack’s like twigs.

“How you doing?”

My legs ache, I’m built like a tuning fork, I wake up in the middle of the night with visions of gory mayhem, there’s a six-point-two Richter scale quake rumbling between my ears. “Just dandy.”

Theo nodded. He looked to be in his early thirties. He was maybe fiveeight and built like a gymnast. His hair was dark and held back with elastic bands in a short ponytail, and his face was smooth and open. Either he had non-Caucasian blood or spent time in the tropics or a tanning salon, because his skin was a coffee color. Around his waist hung a tool holster with a hammer, pliers, and other tools. He opened a small stepladder.

“This won’t take long.”

Outside the window deep-bellied rumbles rolled across the sky and lightning flickered, making Jack squint.

“A bit bright for you, huh?” Theo said. “We’ll take care of that,” and he began to work on the blinds, which hung at a crazy angle in the window frame.

“I’ll leave you two guys on your own,” Marcy said. Before she left, she checked Jack’s heart and pulse and took a temperature reading. While the workman inspected the blinds, Jack closed his eyes. Through the open window he could smell the ocean.

“I read about you in the papers.”

Jack opened his eyes to see the man looking down at him from the ladder.

“Waking up after almost seven months. That’s something.”

“I guess.” Jack closed his eyes again. He was tired and didn’t want to chat.

“I never heard of jellyfish attacking people before. Musta been one hell of an experience.”

“I don’t recommend it.”

“I bet. Remember it any?”

“Not much.” Jack thought about asking Theo to let him sleep but decided that the guy meant well. Besides, the sound of the tools and the shades rattling sabotaged any nap taking. Jack closed his eyes again.

“The papers said something about your memory coming back strong. That’s great. Sometimes coma patients come back with lots of blank spots, I hear.”

Jack cracked open an eye. On the monitor some doctors were talking about that Alzheimer’s drug René Ballard had mentioned. “Experimental drug for Alzheimer’s disease,” read the caption.

Theo removed the hammer from his holster and banged the end of the screwdriver to pry loose a fixture. And Jack felt a small sensation jog through him.

“So you remember stuff before the accident pretty good, huh?”

“A little.”

“Well, that’s all that matters, if you ask me. As somebody said, ‘You are what you remember.’ Right? Same thing if your house caught fire.”

“Pardon me?”

“If your house caught fire. They took this poll, asked if your house was burning down and there’s only one thing you could save, besides your family members or pet, of course—what would it be?”

On the screen some doctors in white were being interviewed. Mass General Hospital, read the caption.

A slumping feeling. Maybe because that’s where Jack was taken after the accident.

“The family photo album.” Theo gesticulated with his hammer hand. “What nine out of ten people said. And me, too. It’s the same with memory, know what I mean?”

Jack closed his eyes. “Guess I’m pretty lucky.”

A few moments passed, then Theo started up again. “Just out of curiosity, what were you doing out there on Homer’s Island? Kind of an out-of-the-way place, you ask me.”

Jack was growing tired of the interrogation. “Bird watching.”

“Bird watching,” the man repeated. There was a long silence. Then he said, “The papers said something about you swimming. And a storm.”

Why is this guy pressing me? And why the feeling that this was going beyond idle chitchat. “It came up fast, and I hadn’t checked the weather report.”

“Got your own boat?”

“Took the water taxi.”

“So you remember stuff before the accident pretty well, huh?”

What is it with this guy? Why won’t he shut up? Why’s he playing Twenty Questions with me? “A little.”

“That’s my point: You still got what’s most important.” And he tapped the side of his head. Another long pause. “How far back do you go?”

“Pardon me?”

“How far back can you remember—like when you were a kid?”

“Not really.”

“Uh-huh. Some people say they remember when they were babies. Sign of intelligence, they say.”

Jack did not respond.

“I can’t remember before I was ten,” Theo snorted. “Guess I must be pretty dumb. How about you?”

Jack eyed the man. “No. No. Nothing.”

Suddenly things turned strange. In a protracted moment, the man became a still life, freezing in place on the ladder with the hammer raised, his mouth moving in slow motion, pulsing out queer utterances, the syllables stretched to alien phonics. As the man’s eyes bore down on Jack for a response, Jack felt something like an eel slither through his gut.

Bad feeling.

“Don’t remember stuff from when you were small? Me, neither, but I wish I did.”

Jack couldn’t speak—as if what had slithered through him shot into his brain and bored a hole in the language centers, leaving him gasping for words and quaking with an irrational sense of dread.

“Hey, you all right?”

“Mmmm.” Which was all Jack could squeeze out.

“You looked a little …”

God, what the hell is this? What’s passing through me?

His lungs caught some air and he sucked it up to his voice box. “I’m okay,” he rasped. “Little dizzy.”

“Uh-huh.” And the guy turned back to the shade.

Jack’s head was soupy and he closed his eyes as the man tapped away. Outside, the thunder was growling out to sea, the lightning flickering through Jack’s eyelids. The man hammered away, and with each smack a small seismic crack shot through Jack.

Jack opened his eyes. Something about the image of that guy on the ladder clawed at Jack’s consciousness. Something not right. But he couldn’t grasp it. Whatever, it flitted across his mind like a bird coming in to roost, then just at the last second shot away.

Jack was positive he had never seen this Theo before because the man’s face didn’t fit any memory template. Then again, Jack had not laid eyes on a lot of faces of late. Maybe all the toxins had turned sections of his brain into Swiss cheese. A reasonable explanation, except the guy would surely have said something.

So why the dark sensation? Maybe someone from a dream. And he’d had a boatload of those of late.

“You want some water or something?”

“I’m okay.” Jack could hear fear in the breathy scrape of his voice.

The man eyed him suspiciously, then nodded and went back to banging something in place, his mouth still moving.

Jesus, what’s happening to me? Jack asked himself. What the hell is going on in my head?

Without expression, the man locked hard eyes on his. “I asked you a question.”

Jack didn’t remember the question. Maybe he’d nodded off for a moment and just dreamed he had. He looked up at Theo to reply, but the sensation was back, and worse—leaving him thinking that he had lived these moments before. Some wicked déjà vu.

In an instant an inexplicable anxiety set Jack’s diaphragm in spasms. His throat constricted as if a snake were coiling around it. His forehead was a cold aspic of sweat, and his chest and neck were a flash of prickers.

Heart attack. I’m having a heart attack.

“Hey, you want me to call the nurse?”

Jack could not answer.

Shit. Worked yourself into cardiac arrest. A killer surge of self-inflicted anxiety, and you won yourself a permanent flat line.

But another thought cut across that one: No. Not a heart attack. His heart was strong, they had said, and at the moment was pounding so hard that his shirt was pulsing. No, something else. What had passed through him was a bolt of black horror.

Something about this repairman.

He wants to hurt you.

The guy glared down at him. And in Jack’s mind, he jumped off the ladder and smashed his head with that shiny ball-peen hammer.

“You having a seizure?”

A skim of panic formed over Jack like ice. Seizure. How did this repairman know about seizures?

But the other voice was back: You’re being an asshole. The guy’s perfectly friendly in his Mr. Fixit overalls and body shirt, up there on his ladder being chatty and doing his business with the blinds. And just because he’s a repairman doesn’t mean a limited vocabulary. You’ve got the problem, pal, not him.

The repairman continued to stare at Jack, the individual slats making razor-edged slashes of light and shade across his features. He look demonic, his mouth a black gash in his brown face, his features jagged. And hot black auger eyes boring through him.

Suddenly the guy climbed down, the hammer in his fist.

Oh, Jesus! God, no. No! his brain screamed. A faint squeal pressed out of a clenched larynx.

The man took no notice and came up to the bed, the hammer still in his hand. Jack let out a gasp and in a flash he saw the hammer come down on the crown of his head with a sickening crack, blood and brain matter splattering all over the bed.

Under his pillow Jack’s hand scrabbled for the nurse-call button.

“This will take care of you,” the guy said.

Jack pressed the button and closed his eyes against the blow.

Nothing.

“Here you go,” and Theo handed Jack a glass of water.

“Everything okay?” Marcy said.

Jack opened his eyes. Theo was standing over him with a glass of water, Marcy by his side. “You okay, Jack?”

Jack grunted. “Can’t sleep.” Theo went back to the blinds.

“No problem.” And she produced a pack of pills. “Theo looks about done, right?”

“Just about.” And he slipped the hammer into his holster and popped the blinds in place and pulled the strings. They were fixed. He dropped them closed to darken the room.

“Great.” Marcy gave the lorazepam to Jack.

Theo gathered his things. “You hang in there, buddy.” And he walked out of the room.

In a matter of moments, the horror had flushed from Jack’s mind.

There, asshole. There’s your crazed psychopath in farmer johns.

Jack sipped more water and closed his eyes, concentrating on the liquid flowing down his parched throat. Damn lucky the proverbial cat had your tongue, or you’d have some fancy explaining to do.

So just what was that? Jack asked himself as he lay there. Just your hot imagination—like those dreams of misshapen creatures killing people.

But that didn’t satisfy. There was something he couldn’t put his finger on. Maybe the guy looked like somebody else. Maybe someone in a movie. Maybe someone in a dream.

A dream. His mind kept on coming back to that.

Like the dream about someone sneaking in here one night and trying to squirt some bad juice into your tubes.

But the other voice was back: The guy’s just some friendly innocent you’re hanging your loonies on. Period. The meds. It’s all the crap they’re giving you, playing crazy dreams when you sleep, giving you the ooga-boogas when awake. That, or you’re losing your mind. Spent six months in the Twilight Zone and came out with half your luggage. Could be worse. Could be sleeping with the jellies.

Nothing made sense, but the incident had left him weary and yearning for oblivion. Marcy dimmed the lights, and Jack closed his eyes. He wanted to sleep for a week and wake up whole and ready to get out of here.

“You sleep tight,” she said.

Besides, Bunky, who the hell would want to kill someone who’s been in a coma for half a year?

4

61

ON APRIL 24, VINCE DROVE JACK to a rented house about two miles from the colonial he had shared with Beth.

In spite of the memories, Jack wanted to return to Carleton because he liked the town and because it was close to the Lahey Clinic where he had his physical therapy. He also wanted to be near Yesterdays, where Vince talked him into being host now that he was back on his feet. Two weeks ago he had renewed his driver’s license and would get around in rentals until he could afford a car of his own. “Maybe I’ll check the Yellow Pages for Rent-a-Wife,” he told Vince.

The place was a neat six-room Cape painted dark green, making it look like a giant Monopoly piece. Low trimmed bushes formed a border around the front, which sat on Old Mystic Road, near the Mystic Lakes and the town line of Medford, where he could buy beer since Carleton was steadfast in the virtues of its Puritan ancestors—holding dry and proud of it. The house came furnished, which was fine, since Jack harbored no sentimental attachment to what he and Beth had shared. Nor did he want to be reminded.

He and Vince spent a few hours putting things away from boxes stacked in the different rooms. And when most of it was done, Jack walked Vince to his car. “‘Thanks’ doesn’t come close.”

“It’ll do.” Vince gave him a hug. “You need anything, you call.” He got into his car, a 1992 green Mitsubishi 3000 VR4 twin turbo. Jack tapped the rear spoiler. “Does this do anything?”

“Keeps me out of the trees.” Vince started the car. “You take it easy and work on your Charlie Charm.”

Jack started hosting at the restaurant in three nights. “No reservations, fuck off! Next.”

“Perfect,” Vince said and pulled away.

As he turned on his cane, Jack noticed a black SUV with tinted windows roll down the street. He wouldn’t have noticed it except that it rolled by slowly, then sped away as Jack looked up.

A moment later, Jack forgot about the car, thinking how one of his own would be a good way to jump-start the rest of his life.

BEFORE SHE MOVED TO TEXAS, Beth had placed all of Jack’s belongings in a warehouse to be stored for five years, after which they would be donated to Goodwill were Jack still in a coma. For the next two days Jack put stuff away in bureaus, closets, and bookshelves. But several cartons of old stuff still sat in the cellar—stuff he’d long forgotten about.

A stairway through a kitchen door led to the cellar. For more than an hour he went through the boxes, which Vince had arranged in neat stacks along wall shelves. In black marker they were labeled: “Jack’s Stuff. College Notes. Books. Photos.” Beth’s printing. He ran his finger over the neat block letters, thinking that when the ink was wet Beth was his wife, he was still Jack.

Yeah, and your marriage was on the rocks.

He slit open a box. Inside was a pile of photo albums. Beth had spent days arranging the snaps chronologically in the plastic sheets. He thumbed through them—shots of him and Beth, of Vince and other college friends. One album contained pictures of trips they had taken to Jamaica on their honeymoon, to Yosemite a couple years later, visits to friends in Chattanooga and California. Also in the box was their wedding album—a padded white faux leather folder with calligraphic gold script on the cover: “Our Wedding.” He did not open it.

Another album contained some foggy and cracked pictures of his aunt Nancy and uncle Kirk before they were married. And at the very end were black-and-whites of his biological mother and father, including a wedding portrait of them from 1966. His mother, Rose, was a slender, attractive woman with a simpatico face. His father, Leo, looked like a foreign dignitary with black eyes, a long sharp nose, and a baronial mustache. He stood just a few inches taller than Rose. According to Jack’s aunt, Leo was born in the Armenian sector of Beirut, Lebanon, where he studied languages and was fluent in several. In the old-world custom of marriage arrangements, he married Rose, thereby securing American citizenship. Jack knew nothing about their marriage—whether it was a good one or not—and little else about Leo, except that his plane went down just short of the runway on his way to visiting relatives in Chicago.

Because Jack was only six months old when his father died and about two years old when his mother disappeared, he did not remember his parents, just these few photos of them. But imagination had a way of conspiring with memory, creating a reality of its own—a kind of kinescopic synthesis of stories his aunt told with these old photos.

Another shot of Rose showed her beaming at the camera with an infant swaddled in her arms. Himself. She was in the kitchen of their five-room flat in Worcester’s Armenian neighborhood just off Chandler Street. She was wearing a pullover with some lettering that he could not make out. Leo probably took the photo. As strange as it was, Jack had convinced himself that he remembered that apartment and his mother as she appeared. Which wasn’t possible. Human memory couldn’t reach back that far, he was sure, no matter what that repairman said.

Jack studied the photographs. Who were these people whose twisty genetic stuff was filed away in his cells? What had they looked like? sounded like? smelled like? Had they spoken with accents? What stories had they told? What dreams did they dream?

For some reason, he felt a stronger affinity to his mother, whose dark almond eyes seemed to talk to him. Relatives had said that he had inherited her strong will and her bunions. She was clever and spunky, a little scooter of a woman on whom nothing in the natural world was lost. According to his aunt, she had an almost religious appreciation for the sea and would spend hours walking beaches looking for crabs, worms, and mollusks. She had a collection of shells from all over the world, some she had picked up herself, others from friends. So it was not surprising that she had studied marine biology, having won a scholarship to Tufts University, then moving into the doctoral program at Harvard. And here she was, this remarkable woman whose blood gurgled through his veins, who gave him life and dandled him on her knees—and he never knew her.

The only other photo showed her posing with other people in front of an auto parts store. They looked like colleagues since she and two others were wearing what resembled lab coats.

The album still in hand, Jack moved toward the basement window for better light. But a spike of pain shot up his left leg, throwing him off balance so that he stumbled into a shelf of laundry detergents and sent a bottle of Clorox onto the floor, the bleach draining into a puddle. Fortunately, the bottle was only partly full, so he was able to soak it up with a sponge mop, squeezing the stuff down the drain of a small sink. Yet the fumes filled his head, and he had to steady himself against the table to get the noxious odors out of his lungs.

An odd sensation rippled across his brain. It was not unpleasant, nor did it seem to affect him in any way but for a moment’s dizziness. Maybe the fast turn on his feet, he told himself. But as he started to move, he felt himself shut down for a second—a miniblackout. He braced himself against a support pole and looked around, gauging his awareness.

He knew where he was—in the basement of the Mystic Street rental, between a utility table and the washer and dryer. He was also aware of the cool cellar air, the heft of the album in his hand, the slight throbbing of his left leg, the discomfort in his shoulder and other joints—all the orthopedic white noise. He laid the photo album on a table and took a few steps.

Again that odd fugue—as if he had passed through a blank in the time-space continuum. He rested against the table and closed his eyes. He could hear himself breathing. He could hear the distant sounds of traffic. He could also hear something else: A woman’s voice. Faint, feathery faint, high, but clear enough to make out singing.

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine …”

A shard of ice passed through Jack’s heart. He snapped around, half-expecting to lay eyes on some strange female gawking at him from the shadows.

Nothing.

Boxes, storage trunks, lamps, old armoire, furnace, oil tank, small workbench, Christmas decorations, washing machine, and dryer. No demon woman. The room was empty of any other presence.

Christ, now it’s phantom voices in the daytime.

All the shit you’re on, man—all conspiring to scramble your squeeze box. He got the photo album and shuffled over to a pile of boxes and sat down. His head felt slow, as if operating on a sluggish strobe. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath to steady himself. Just a little misfiring that’ll pass, he told himself. He opened his eyes and began thumbing through the photo album again.

Then from behind him he heard the voice again: “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.”

Jack bolted straight up, the album tumbling to the floor. For a moment he stood perfectly still, his body throbbing to the fright in his blood. He took a deep breath and slowly turned to get a fix on the voice, certain that it came from the shadows by the furnace. He crossed the floor by the workbench. Who the hell would be down here, and why hide in the shadows and sing?

I’m going crazy. I can’t tell if it’s external sound or it’s inside my head.

He removed a ball-peen hammer from the pegboard. His heart took a huge surge of blood as he crossed the stairs and looked up to the light of the kitchen.

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.”

Jack let out a shuddering gasp. “Who-who’s there?”

This time he was dead certain. A woman’s voice, and not just in his head but in his ears. Real sound that still registered vibratory stimulation. Real sound: A clear, thin female voice singing. But not from the kitchen.

Someone’s down here with me.

He moved into the cellar, his fingers in a tight, cold grip on the hammer. Jack didn’t know the people who owned the house, nor did he know anything about them. The arrangements had been made by Vince, who said that personal problems had forced the couple to move out of state with their daughter. But it crossed Jack’s mind that those personal problems could mean that said woman of the house was psycho and had sneaked back home and was hanging somewhere in the shadows.

Jack moved toward some tall furniture against the far wall. “Okay, game’s up.”

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine …”

An involuntary cry fluttered up Jack’s windpipe. The woman’s voice was right on top of him. He snapped around, his hand fused to the hammer, but he could not get a direction. He dipped his head into the black gaps between the furnace and the armoire. He wished he had a flashlight. “I know you’re there. I can hear you breathing.”

Nothing.

He tapped the doors of the armoire with the hammer. “Come out, goddamn it.”

Nothing.

He raised the hammer and snapped open the door. The armoire was lined with shoe boxes, but nothing else. He walked toward the rear of the cellar. “All right, I’m calling the police.”

Nothing.

He circled back toward the laundry table.

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine …”

Jack froze. Movement. He saw movement. He was standing before the opening to a small recess that decades ago had served as a storage room for coal.

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine …”

“I see you, goddamn it,” he said to the shadows, the hammer in his fist ready to swing if some lunatic woman rushed him. “Get out here!” His heart pounded so hard he had trouble putting breath in his words.

In the coal room hung an old wooden framed mirror, resting at a tipsy angle, the glass cracked and smoky. But he could see himself clearly, his pale face, his eyes like holes in his skull, the solid-bodied silver hammer in his hand.

As he stood there contemplating his image, he heard the thin falsetto. But this time she wasn’t singing. “Ahmahn seerem anoosheeg …”

Jack let out a shudder. The voice was coming from him.

In the reflection he saw his mouth form the syllables, their sounds piercing his ears like slivers of glass. His voice. His voice. He could still feel the muscle sensations in this throat. He could hear the vibrations in his ears.

God Almighty!

A black rush of horror passed through him. He had spoken—or someone or something had spoken through him, as if from another brain. Or worse: He really was losing his mind.

What made him all the more horrified was the realization that the words he had uttered were not words he comprehended. They were a foreign language. But he was certain that the words were those of his long dead relatives and ancestors. That he had spoken Armenian.

Disbelief flooded his mind because Armenian was a language he did not know, had never learned, had never spoken. Yes, he recognized phonemes and sound patterns picked up from friends of his aunt and uncle when he was a kid. But he was no more conversant in Armenian than he was in Danish or Inuit. But he would bet his life that the words he had uttered were Armenian.

Jack turned off the light and went upstairs one step at a time, thinking that this had nothing to do with medication or blood pressure or tricks of the light and that, given the option, he preferred to think there had been a crazy woman down there and not that he was going insane.

62

JACK SAT BY THE PHONE STARING at Dr. Heller’s number and running through his head what he would tell her: That yesterday he had had a bout of auditory hallucinations—that he was in his cellar, and suddenly he began hearing a woman singing in a voice that appeared to emanate from inside his own head.

Some kind of seizures like what that pharmacist woman, René Ballard, had said the dementia patients were experiencing on that new Alzheimer’s drug. Maybe just a coincidence, maybe there was a connection. She had called them flashbacks.

Maybe that’s what was happening, except it gets worse, Doc. Oh yeah, much worse, because then I began speaking in a language I’ve never spoken before and in a voice that wasn’t my own. What do I think, Doc? That I’ve got a haunted head. And what I did was pop three Xanax tabs and fall into an eight-hour hole.

For maybe a full fifteen minutes he sat by the phone. If he told her straight out what had happened, she’d call him in immediately, set him up with neuropsychologists, psychiatrists, dementia specialists, flashback experts, whatever, then submit him to another battery of tests, put his head in the MRI hole again, wire it for bugs. But, frankly, he just didn’t want to go through all that. Besides, he had a scheduled appointment next week. He’d leave it at that.

In the meantime, he’d keep out of the cellar. Oh, yeah. In fact, he’d minimize his time in the kitchen to avoid the pull of the damn door. He’d also double his dosage of Dilantin to keep the ghosts in their coffins. Sure, he should have consulted Dr. Heller. Sure, only a fool was his own pharmacist. Sure, he could probably trigger some nasty side effects—although he had none. On the contrary, the extra hit had the effect of a pop-up stopper. For eighteen hours he was dream-free, flashback-free-not even a slice-and-dice still out of the blue.

The bad news was that because he refused to take any more sleeping pills, Jack had traded bad visions for insomnia. For the next five nights he logged no more than twenty hours of sleep, some nights getting maybe two, spending the remaining hours twisting in his sheets until dawn. He even went online and found a Web site for insomniacs that offered a list of a dozen sleep-inducing strategies: take a warm bath; listen to soft music; drink warm milk at bedtime; visualize something boring … He tried them all, but nothing worked. He just became more alert in his desperation.

He also dreaded dusk. In fact, it got so bad that when the evening news came on his heart rate increased and his mouth went dry. At about nine-thirty on the fifth night he actually felt sleep weigh heavily on his eyelids. So he slipped into the bedroom, trying not to think about how he was pretending to yield to drowsiness like most normal people. He took his medicine, resisting the temptation to down a few tabs of Xanax, turned off the lights, and got into bed.

He closed his eyes, trying to settle into his drowsiness as if he were just your average Joe—stable, relaxed, retiring after a long and exhausting day at the office. At 10:18 he was still awake and even more alert than ever. He stared at the dark ceiling, trying to pretend that he was fighting sleep, forcing his eyes to remain open until the last possible moment when he’d close them and slip into the warm well of oblivion.

But it didn’t work.

And his mind filled with the illuminated dial of the radio clock, the cable box, light strips framing the window shades from the street, sounds of the house settling, the fridge compressor kicking in, Logan jets … goddamn butterfly wings in Peru.

He got up and draped towels over the radio, then found some duct tape and sealed the shades against the window frame. The black was now total, but his brain was hot with frustration. He closed his eyes and tried not to think of the sounds of his heart clicking in his ears, hoping the white noise would lull him to sleep as with any other normal person. Except that he wasn’t like any other normal person but a man cursed to lie awake holding his breath for the subtlest decibel to pin his affliction on.

At 1:46 he was still awake.

By 2:11 his mind was a flywheel. If there was a God, he thought, he or she didn’t have a sleep problem. The cable box clock. As a light source it wasn’t intrusive, but he knew that every time he opened his eyes there was the countdown in glowing red—and as long as the digits were visible, he’d be tempted to gauge the passage of time.

Shit!

He got up and covered the cable box.

An hour later, he headed down to the kitchen for another warm glass of milk. He thought about reading a dull book or maybe catching some mindless movie on TV. But that would only stimulate his brain all the more. So he sat at the kitchen table and sipped warm milk out of a blue glass under the garish fluorescence of the circular tube on the ceiling. He closed his eyes and rested his head on his elbow, thinking about warm milk coating his stomach and magically transmitting rock-a-bye-baby signals to his brain. But that didn’t work.

Jack opened one eye. It fell on the cellar door.

The cellar.

Don’t think about it, he told himself. Then another voice cut in: Yeah, sure. Like don’t think “elephant” and suddenly there’s Dumbo flapping his ears at you.

His eye dropped to the hexagonal glass knob.

Turn me.

Click.

Pull.

He closed his eye and sipped more milk.

Come on, guy. Peek-a-boo.

His eye slitted open.

Thata boy, I see you …

The door, and just behind it a black shaft and twelve little steps down, light switch at the top. He closed his eyes again.

He got up, scraping the chair noisily against the floor, and downed the rest of the milk and rinsed out the glass. Then he turned and leaned against the sink, staring at the door. So, what’s it going to be, Jacko? Stay out of the cellar for good until your laundry rots in the machine—been five days now, still sitting in a damp twist at the bottom, never did make the dryer. Going to have to send them through again for the mildew.

He crossed the kitchen and opened the door.

So what’s the big deal?

Well, you see, the last time I did this, there was this poltergeist thing that took me over.

What are you afraid to find? Just a lot of boxes of old stuff. Maybe glug up the throat on nostalgia, but that’s an old friend by now.

He flicked on the light.

Empty stairs, no goggle-eyed zombies gaping up at him, and no ooga-booga vibes registering. Plus, a few low-sleep cobwebs aside, your head feels clear for once.

He took the steps one by one, holding on to the rail. Someplace in the front hall he had left his cane, which would have been comforting to grip at the moment. But he decided not to bother going back up.

At the bottom he turned slowly until he faced the rear wall and the armoire. Nothing.

He moved across the floor to the washing machine and put his hand on the lid, thinking that this is where the thing with the KKK hood jumps out and crushes your skull. Nothing but his clothes in a fused ring around the base of the agitator. They were still damp but they didn’t smell mildewy, so he put them into the dryer.

He limped across the old carpet and stopped in his tracks. Along the metal shelves were boxes. He didn’t know why he stopped, but as if following some radar beam his eyes fell on a single carton. He had been through all the boxes—all but this one, which still had tape across the flaps. On the side in small black letters it said “Jack’s Stuff.”

As if by remote control he went over to the shelves, his mind funneling all attention onto that parcel, that plain brown cardboard box with no commercial lettering. It was maybe eighteen inches on a side, but surprisingly light. He placed it on a table and opened the top.

Old newspapers were balled up as packing. He unfolded one double page that was discolored from long repose in the box—October 1979. He felt around under the upper layers until he hit the source of the weight. Smooth shape—soft, cloth, pliable. His fingers began to hum as they sent up crude premonitional images to his brain like a sonogram. He pulled it out.

A large tan stuffed mouse with round sausagey limbs, floppy round pink ears, a red knobbed nose, big startled cartoon eyes in white and black, a thick brown tail. Instantly every inner sensor focused on that stuffed mouse.

“Mookie.”

63

“IT’S A DAMN JOKE. KLANDER AND COMPANY gave them just what they wanted to hear: It’s the dementia, stupid.”

René had not seen Nick so upset. His face was red, as if too full of blood. The Klander Clinical Research Group report sat in a black folder on Nick’s desk.

“They hired a bunch of fancy-sounding neuro people and threw a ton of money at them and got the validation they were looking for.”

“But we gave them reams of data and documentation of the problems.”

“Yeah, and they concluded that the events were not Memorine-related but the results of the brain’s deterioration from Alzheimer’s. And they bolstered the claim that since the flashbacks are treatable with standard antipsychotic meds, the phenomenon equals demented delusions. QED.” He pushed a copy toward her. “You can read it yourself.”

René took the report and thumbed through it. There were pages of data from outside literature documenting hallucinatory behavior of AD patients. “But the evidence is overwhelming.”

“Not when the conclusion is predetermined. So instead of burying the evidence, they hire so-called neutral specialists to say the problems aren’t drug-related. Pretty clever, huh?”

“But can’t the FDA see through that?”

“No, because the FDA wants this to go to market. So does the president. He sees it as a sixty-billion-dollar savings of taxpayers’ money. So, it’s fait accompli.”

“What about the investigators at some of the other sites? I thought we had some support on this.”

“We do. Paul Nadeau wants an extension. So does Brian Rich. In fact, Nadeau reports he’s got a patient who keeps having flashbacks of finding his father hanging in the closet when he was eight years old. And Dr. Rich says one of his keeps reliving her days as a child at Dachau. And the only treatment is to dope them into a stupor.”

“God, the cure is worse than the disease.”

“Exactly, but GEM’s going to deny that.”

“So we treat the flashbacks with the usual stuff.”

Nick nodded. “And if people recede into the past, let them stay there. If they get out of hand, sedate them, and to hell with the burdens on the families.”

“I don’t believe this.” And in René’s mind she saw Louis Martinetti blanching with horror as he was suddenly transported to the Red Tent where he was forced to watch his captors do unspeakable things to his buddy, pleading for them to stop in some kind of pidgin Korean speak.

“Believe it. What we have is a fifty-billion-dollar piggy that’s going to market, no matter what—ethics and good business practice be damned. It’s the same sealed mind-set you saw with Enron and Tyco. Nobody wants to hear bad news. And if you have any or you raise ethical questions, you’re not part of the team—and don’t get the rewards.”

“But this didn’t happen on its own. Somewhere along the line somebody made a decision to compromise the truth.”

Nick nodded. “There’s an old Greek expression: ‘The fish rots from the head first.’”

In all the years she had known Nick, René had never seen him so worked up. His face was flushed and his eyes filled his glasses. He looked like another person pressed to the surface under internal heat. In the classroom he had held forth on the need for strong ethical safeguards, especially in the cloudy interface between drug companies and physicians. But the lectures were always cool and reasoned. And never had she heard him criticize colleagues or staff behind their backs. If he had a problem, he was always diplomatic and respectful, stating his differences in objective and conciliatory terms. And if someone was wrong, he always gave second chances. “We’re all allowed one mistake to learn from,” he once said. “It makes us better and stronger people.”

“So what do you think will happen in Utah?”

“I’ll lodge my protest, but I don’t expect to turn a lot of minds. As somebody said, it’s like trying to stop a train in its tracks.”

Then from the floor he lifted a large cardboard box full of Memorine marketing products—gym bags, umbrellas, hats, decals, letterhead stationery, rain ponchos, a jewelry box with a pearl necklace. He slapped down a CD. “They even have their own soundtrack—Back to Life.” As on the other items, the diamond GEM logo was prominent. Also in the box were brochures on Bermuda, Gstaad, and Italy—junkets for the principal investigators. “Hard to fight all this,” she said.

“A flawed medical miracle whose benefits exceed any risks, they claim.”

64

JACK HAD NOT BEEN IN MASS General since the days of his coma, so he remembered nothing. He made his way across the lobby to the elevators in the Lane Building and up to the eighth floor, where he found Dr. Heller’s office. He was let in to see her almost immediately.

“Every time I go down into the cellar, I get hit with bad visions. Maybe I’m cracking up.”

“You’re not cracking up, Mr. Koryan. You’re having some kind of seizures.”

“What about my muttering Armenian phrases in a woman’s voice? I don’t even know the language.”

“Did you recognize the words?”

“Not the exact translation, but they’re words of endearment you’d say to children.”

“Maybe your relatives spoke to you in Armenian and you just forgot.”

“From thirty years ago?”

“It’s possible. Your deep recall is remarkable. Perhaps you were just pronouncing them from rote memory—maybe from your aunt or other relatives.”

“Then how do you explain the image of some misshapen creature with a witch hat and a large animal with the bashed-in head? Those were as real to me as you are now.”

“I’m not a psychologist, but I think you’re making some kind of association. Tell me about the visions.”

Relaxing a bit into the gentleness of her manner, Jack described them. Their occurrences weren’t predictable or even restricted to bedtime: Daymares that would strike while he’d be taking a shower or out for a walk or sitting on the porch having a beer. But the bad flashes were always violent and thematically consistent—a darkened figure with a pointed head coming for him, then suddenly attacking another figure with some sort of bludgeon to the brutal sound of skull bone cracking. And always the flashes were perceived from the same point of view—by a window, about chest high, and through some obstruction, as if from the inside of a cage of some sort. And the banging sounds and flickering lights. What baffled Jack was that the location was deeply familiar. And although it lacked none of the non-Euclidean geometry characteristic of ordinary dreams, recognition eluded him.

“Simple nightmares.”

She had a cleanly rational explanation for things that didn’t feel clean and rational but alien and clammy. “But it felt like real time, like I was reliving it.”

She nodded and jotted something on her pad. “But this isn’t the first time you’ve had vivid recollections.”

“No, but these are different.”

“How are they different?”

He explained that these were not pleasant periodic flashes from his youth—warm vignettes of childhood play in the schoolyard or in the neighborhood park with friends, or interludes with girls he liked. What had distinguished them from daydreams or ordinary recollections was that they were violent and exquisitely vivid.

“Dreams often feel very vivid.”

“What about the possibility that it was the toxin?”

“It’s possible.” She flipped open a folder of his medical charts. “According to your most recent blood test, there are negligible traces of the toxin in your system from the original attack.” She looked back at him. “But a more likely possibility is that the massive amount that entered your system has permanently enchanced the physiology of the memory centers of your brain and, as a result, you may be experiencing memory-related nightmares. But that will require running tests on you, which you’ve refused.”

He was still not interested, but her words sent an uneasy ripple through him. “What I don’t understand is why the same violent scene.”

Dr. Heller studied Jack for a moment as she absorbed his words. “Do you recognize the figure?”

“No. But I can see its form.”

“Do you recognize the victim?”

“No.”

“And how long have you been having these spells?”

“The bad ones, since I’ve been out of Greenwood—since I moved into the house.”

“Do you recognize where the violence takes place?”

“I have a sense of being near the ocean, but I also recall a swimming pool smell.”

“A swimming pool smell?”

“Yeah, chemicals—chlorine, I guess.”

Dr. Heller folded her hands. “Mr. Koryan, I’m a neurologist, not a psychologist, but I know some very good people I’d like to refer you to.” She pulled out her pad and scribbled down a name and held it out to him. “He’s very good.”

Jack took the paper and laid it on her desk. “I’m sure. But I really don’t like the idea of some specialist shrinking me back to my toilet training then giving me a prescription to the same stuff you could write.”

Dr. Heller stared at him for a long moment parsing his comments and her own possible responses. “It might be wiser to try to get to the source.”

Maybe I don’t want to. The thought just popped up. He said nothing.

“Have you ever been physically attacked or assaulted?”

He’d had a few tussles in high school and college but nothing to produce recollections like this. “Not that I remember.”

“Have you ever been in a severe accident?”

“No.”

“Were you in the military or in any disaster—fire, earthquake, anything like that?”

“No.”

“What about traumatic childhood experiences? Any frightening events?”

Jack heard a slight hum in the back of his mind but shook it away. His uncle Kirk had died of cancer when Jack was twelve, his aunt Nancy when he was a sophomore in college. Their deaths were sad, of course, but not traumatizing. “No.”

“Well, it sounds to me as if you’re having intrusive recollections or some kind of dissociative episodes that leave you with a sense of having relived some disturbing experience, yet you say you can’t recall any such event.”

Jack wanted to leave.

“Let me just ask if any of these episodes are associated with your drinking alcohol.”

“No.”

“Are you drinking much?”

“A beer once in a while.” He checked his watch. The hum had begun to buzz through his limbs. He wanted to be out of there.

“Do you find yourself avoiding particular thoughts or feelings, people, or places?”

“Uh-uh.” God, he wished she’d end the session.

“What about feelings of detachment or estrangement from other people?”

“Sometimes.”

“I mean in the extreme?”

“No.”

“Any sense of foreboding?”

He shook his head. His leg was bouncing.

“Well, can you think of anything that might specifically set off these flashbacks or illusions—internal or external cues that might symbolize or resemble some aspects of the events?”

Yes. “No.”

“Do you have suicidal thoughts?”

“Suicidal thoughts? Yeah, sometimes. But it’s more that I just want to escape, not kill myself, if that makes sense.”

“Tell me the difference.”

Jack thought for a moment. “I don’t feel masochistic, like I want to punish myself. It’s just that I feel like Humpty Dumpty with too many pieces to put back—and a few missing.”

“I see.”

“But it’s not all the time, just when I’m feeling sorry for myself. But I’m not braiding a noose.”

Dr. Heller smiled, then blanked her face as she studied him, looking as she were trying to read a ticker tape across his skull.

“So what can you give me?”

She handed him the slip with the name of the neuropsychologist. “Call him. You’re clearly blocking something, and if you still choose not to”—and on her prescription pad she wrote something down—“take this to your pharmacy.” She handed him the second slip. “It’s called Zyprexa—it has sedative effects and has been shown to reduce nightmares associated with PTSD.”

“PTSD?”

“Post-traumatic stress disorder. But I think you really should see an expert if you want to do something about these episodes. Because what concerns me is that you appear to be blocking something.”

65

DR. HELLER WAS RIGHT: HE WAS BLOCKING something, all right.

And he was avoiding places—the cellar, for instance. Oh yeah, Nightmare Central, and that had sent him and his laundry to the Scrub-a-Dub coin place in town, convinced the basement was cursed.

She was also right that maybe in addition to his new PTSD pills he needed a good shrink to get behind all the memory flashes, bad dream scraps, and little pockets of horror his mind would pass through, because they had gotten worse since he’d been out of Greendale. Maybe he should call that name on the script sheet and talk all the vomit from his soul until he got to the bottom.

Aye, and there’s the rub, sweet prince, because you know as well as I do that you don’t need a shrink, because when you look down those stairs, you know what you see.

That large stuffed mouse with its head bashed in.

Maideek Mookie. He’d looked it up. Armenian for mama mouse.

BECAUSE THE ARCHIVES OF LOCAL NEWSPAPERS from thirty years ago could not be accessed online, Jack rented a car and drove to the Boston Public Library the next day. There, in the basement, he located microfilm for the Boston Globe, New Bedford’s Standard-Times, and the Cape Cod Times for August 22, 1975. One headline blared “Nor’easter Pounds Mass. Coastline. Millions in Damage.”

The New Bedford paper gave more details of the search-and-rescue attempts for the next several days. There were several different articles covering various aspects of the storm, including one that reported on the damage to coastal homes and boats.

One mentioned the disappearance of Rose Najarian.

COAST GUARD SEARCHES FOR MISSING MASS. BOATERA Massachusetts boater has been missing since Friday, when her sailboat was apparently capsized by high winds and choppy seas in the waters off Homer’s Island in the Elizabeth Island chain off the coast of Massachusetts.Coast Guard vessels went into action at daybreak, when a call went out from Falmouth police after island residents discovered the washed-up and damaged remains of an Oday 17 belonging to Rose Najarian of Watertown.

Seeing his mother’s name listed was like putting his finger in a wall socket. For as long as he could remember, she was simply the biological circumstance of his existence and a label to someone in old photographs. But seeing her name in print had the effect of connecting that existence to a life he knew almost nothing about. What he did know—and it came back to him like a heat-seeking missile—was that she had handmade that stuffed mouse.

He continued reading:

According to officials, Mrs. Najarian was apparently attempting to batten down her vessel in anticipation of yesterday’s nor‘easter, characterized by northeast winds of 30 to 40 mph. Police reported that her two-year-old child was found inside a beachfront cottage over a mile from where her boat washed up.It is not known if life a jacket was worn since four were found in or near the boat, adding to official’s theory of why Mrs. Najarian was in the boat. According to a Coast Guard spokesman, even if she had worn a life jacket, exposure for a few hours even in warm water would lead to hypothermia. No sign of Mrs. Najarian has yet been found.Rose Najarian, a widow, was a research biochemist affiliated with MIT. Her two-year-old son, Jack, was found the next morning in the beach cottage in fair condition …The fast-moving storm caused coastal flooding and damage to homes on the islands and to southern Massachusetts …

Jack made a photocopy of the article, then scanned the next days’ papers. Two days later a second article appeared in the Boston Globe.

COAST GUARD GIVES UP SEARCH FOR MASS. BOATERThe Coast Guard officially ended its search for a Massachusetts woman, which began Saturday morning after her sailboat capsized off Homer’s Island …Rose Najarian was apparently drowned when trying to secure her boat in anticipation of last week’s storm. The search included a Jayhawk rescue helicopter from Coast Guard Air Station Cape Cod and two rescue boats from Station Pt. Judith, R.I. “The decision to suspend a search is never an easy one,” said Petty Officer James Fagan of the First Coast Guard District Office.“However, we’ve saturated more than 125 square miles with rescue and air assets for 28 hours and, based on that information, we feel that if the victim was on the surface, we would have detected her … .”

Jack wrote down the officer’s name, although he didn’t need to. The details of the articles stuck to his mind like frost.

WHEN HE REACHED HOME LATER THAT day, Jack called the Massachusetts Coast Guard Station at Woods Hole and explained that he was investigating the disappearance of his mother some years ago. After two holds, he was connected to a public information officer who asked if he were a policeman on a cold case. Jack was tempted to say he was, only to avoid the obvious questions: Why do you want to know? And why now?

“I’m sorry, we don’t keep records from that far back.”

Jack then called Vince and explained that he needed a contact at the Coast Guard. In vague terms Jack explained that he was interested in how, exactly, his mother had died, and that he had time on his hands. Vince didn’t know what to make of Jack’s explanation, but half an hour later he called back with a name: Fred Barboza.

Two hours later, Jack reached Lieutenant Fred Barboza, who said that it could not be done over the phone, that Jack would have to come to the CG Falmouth office in person. And tomorrow was not a good day.

ON FRIDAY HE DROVE HIS RENTAL to Falmouth for an eleven A.M. appointment.

The Coast Guard station was located on the southwest shore of Little Harbor in Woods Hole. The administration building was a long, narrow, two-story cinder-block-and-brick structure that sat in the middle of a long dock along which several CG vessels were docked. Jack checked in at the security desk, and after a brief wait a man in a uniform appeared and introduced himself as Fred Barboza. He led Jack to a small office.

“It’s an unusual request—something police or other investigative agencies pursue when they’ve got a cold case involving foul play.”

Foul play.

“May I ask why you’re doing this?”

He wanted to say, Remember the story of the princess and the pea? Something poking me under all the layers. “Just that she was never found, and I’m wondering if I can learn anything about the circumstances of her disappearance.” He showed Barboza the photocopies of the news clippings.

“It says that a storm was forecast and small craft warnings had been issued.”

“Yes.”

Barboza looked at him with a flat, uncomprehending stare. “Mr. Koryan, it’s been thirty years. We don’t keep records going back that far. Besides, this seems to tell it all. She got lost in a storm trying to tie down her boat.”

He was right, of course. But he also could have told him that over the phone and spared him the three-hour round-trip. “Maybe you can tell me about the kind of efforts that went into finding her.”

“I’m sure they gave it their all. The article says two search-and-rescue boats and a chopper.” Then he added, “Maybe it’s better to leave the dead in peace.”

It’s not the dead who need the peace. “Do you know where I might find James Fagan? He was a petty officer at the time.”

“No.”

“But you didn’t even look.”

“He retired ten years ago.”

“And you have no records where he may have retired to? Nobody here who keeps up contact—old friends, guys who still keep in touch, retired officers’ clubs, reunion parties?”

Barboza had irritation scored across his brow. But he glanced at the wall clock, then pushed himself up and crossed the floor to a file drawer and ferreted through a thick batch of folders until he found one. He slouched back to his desk and ripped off the top sheet of his pad, then jotted something down and handed it to Jack.

A telephone number with a Massachusetts area code.