“Is it possible,” Adrienne asked, “that that thing… is interfering with Jeff’s memory?”

Shaw shrugged. “Absolutely,” he said. “It’s quite possible.”

“But you can’t say for sure,” Duran suggested.

“Not without examining it.” Seeing Adrienne deflate, Shaw gave her a sympathetic smile. “Memory is a very strange thing,” he told her. “People like to think that we store memories in the brain the way librarians store books—side by side, in categories of one kind or another. But it’s not true. We know it’s not true because we’ve done experiments—lots of experiments. And what we’ve learned is that memories aren’t localized, but distributed. Like smoke, they’re diffused through the brain. So if you teach a rat to run a maze—then mutilate its brain to the point where the rat can barely walk—it will still remember how to get from A to Z. Not as quickly, perhaps, but it will remember.

“What’s particularly interesting about your case,” Shaw continued, “is that we’re not seeing any of the usual profiles of memory loss. Your short-term memory is undamaged. And you seem to retain the ability to form long-term memories.”

“So what’s your theory?” Duran asked.

“I don’t have a theory” Shaw replied. “All I have is an object.” He tapped one of the images on the light panel. “That object.”

Duran stared at the image on the wall, and felt a surge of elation. The psychiatrist might be right. The object could explain a lot. Not everything, of course—not the murder of Eddie Bonilla. But… a lot.

“So where do we go from here?” Duran asked.

Shaw hesitated. “Well,” he said, “that’s up to you.”

“How so?”

“We could go in,” the psychiatrist answered. “Take it out. See what it’s made of. See what it is.”

“Is that dangerous?” Adrienne said.

Shaw’s pointer beat out a rhythm on the table, then faded to a slow, monotonous tapping. The shrink seesawed his head back and forth. “Not especially. It’s in an area that’s relatively easy to access. You’d be in a semi-sitting position, and we’d enter the sphenoid sinus cavity through the anterior nasal septum.”

“My nose.”

Shaw stopped tapping the table and slapped the pointer into his open palm. “Right. You’d need broad spectrum antibiotics, but otherwise—I should think it would be a piece of cake.”

“But there are risks,” Adrienne suggested.

Shaw nodded. “There are always risks.”

“Like what?” Duran asked.

“Damage to the optic nerve.”

“He could go blind?”

“It’s very, very unlikely. I’d be more concerned about leakage.”

“Of what?” Adrienne asked.

“CSF. The brain’s floating in a pool of cerebrospinal fluid. In surgery of this kind… ?” He ended the sentence with a shrug.

“Christ,” Duran muttered.

“The mortality rate is less than one percent.”

No one said anything.

“Of course,” the psychiatrist went on, “there might be consequences to leaving it in place, too. It could be the cause of some localized infection or swelling—the PET scans show a sort of odd… excitation… around the object.” He shuffled through a sheaf of large colored prints of Duran’s brain. The colors were intense—cerise, magenta, sapphire—so that Duran’s brain had a psychedelic look, as if it might be the model for a line of retro T-shirts.

The doctor placed a photographer’s loupe over one of the images. “Here. You can see the excitation quite clearly. Take a look.”

They did, in turn. Duran saw a tiny yellow blip surrounded by a halo of purple.

“So what do you want to do?” Duran asked.

“An exploratory—see if we can get in and out without a lot of ancillary damage. If we can, we’ll remove it. See what it is.”

“And you’d be doing the surgery?” Adrienne asked.

Shaw shook his head. “I’ll find someone with better hands.” He whirled to a bank of files behind him, pulled open a drawer, extracted a folder, selected some papers. He tapped them into a neat stack, then clipped them together. “Here,” he said, handing the papers to Duran. “Consent forms. You’ll want to read them carefully. Get a good night’s rest and… call me in the morning.”

They found a Cuban-Chinese takeout a block from the hotel, and returned to their room with cartons of rice and beans, and a six-pack of Tsing Tsao.

Duran glanced through the consent forms as Adrienne brought their plates to the little table in the corner.

“I could go blind,” he told her. “Or go through a personality change. Then, there’s my favorite: ‘loss of cognitive function.’”

She handed him a beer, and asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I could be an idiot.”

“Jesus!” she said. “I don’t know… “ She threw him a glance.

“What?”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to say anything. I mean, I don’t want the responsibility.”

The food was terrific.

“Chinese-Cuban,” Adrienne said. “Not a combination I would have come up with. I wonder how that came about.”

Duran shrugged. “There are lots of Chinese all over the West Indies,” he said. “At least in Jamaica and Haiti there are. So it stands to reason they’d be in Cuba, too.”

She paused, chopsticks suspended on the way to her mouth. “How do you know?”

“What do you mean, how do I—”

“I mean really,” she said. “Think about it. Have you been there? To Jamaica? The Caribbean.”

He thought about it. “I think so,” he said. “To Haiti, anyway.”

“Well, let’s think about it! See what you can remember.”

He savored another spoonful of rice and beans, then closed his eyes, and sipped his beer. Finally, he said, “Big, white house. Verandah. Palm trees.” He stopped for a moment. He could hear the traffic in the street, the dull roar of white noise. “When the wind came up and blew the palms around,” Duran said, “it wasn’t a soft sound, like wind moving through the leaves. It was a thrashing sound.” He paused, and then went on. “There was a gardener who used to climb the trees when a storm was coming… “ He fell silent.

“Why?” Adrienne prompted.

“To cut the coconuts—so they wouldn’t damage the verandah.”

“Keep going,” Adrienne encouraged. She put the chopsticks down. “It’s like when we were playing chess. Remember? The rum, the heat, I think—”

Across from her, Duran’s face had been relaxed, with just a tiny frown of concentration pinching at his eyes. Suddenly, he was on his feet, eyes wide.

“What’s the matter?”

He shook his head, looked away, then took a couple of deep breaths. Finally, he turned to her. “Sometimes… when I start to remember things… I see this room—and it scares the shit out of me.”

“What room?”

He shook his head, and walked to the window. Looked out. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You have to.”

He kept looking out the window, as if he was searching for something. A minute passed, and then he said: “I’ve been trying to figure out the color.”

“What color?”

“Of the room. It’s not yellow, but… ochre. And there’s blood everywhere.” He heaved a sigh. “I really don’t want to think about this.”

“But you should, that’s exactly what you should do—you should think about it. Keep going. Maybe—”

“No!”

“Fine,” she said, picking up her chopsticks again. She ran them through the reddish sauce, then concentrated on capturing a single black bean.

“I’m sorry” Duran told her. “I just can’t do it. It’s… I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”

“No problem,” Adrienne replied in a dismissive tone. “Whatever.”

“Look—”

“I just think, you know, you’ve got some kind of memory trace there, something important happened—I’d think you’d want to go with it.”

He didn’t say anything for a while. A lock of his dark hair, which he kept combed back, had fallen down onto his forehead and he pushed at it with his fingers. “I’m not explaining this very well, but it’s like—I can’t go with it. I can’t stand it.”