Shaw introduced the two of them, and Duran noticed that Allalin’s hands were amazingly white, as if, when not in use, they were kept in a box. They were the long and muscular fingers of a pianist, immaculate, and perfectly manicured. Designer hands.

The procedure was explained to him for the second time. “Doctor Shaw will make a small incision in your upper gum, just under the nose. Then he’ll tunnel back through the nasal passages to the sphenoid cavity. At that point, he becomes an observer. I’ll be sitting in a special chair,” Allalin said, “next to the table, working a surgical microscope with my foot, so I can see what I’m doing with my hands in close-up—on a monitor. The object is embedded in the hippocampus, and we’ll take it out.”

“How long will it take?” Duran asked.

“Thirty or forty minutes.” He paused, and then went on. “You’ll be sitting up, with your head back, for most of the operation—and semiconscious.

Duran blanched, and Shaw smiled. “You won’t feel anything,” the psychiatrist assured him. “Some discomfort the day after, but that’s about all.”

“One thing I wanted to ask you about,” Allalin remarked, “is your previous surgery. What can you tell us about it?”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Duran replied.

The neurosurgeon frowned. “This isn’t your first time,” he told him. “The scar’s right there, under your lip.” Leaning over, he took Duran’s upper lip in his fingers, and rolled it back for Shaw to see. When Shaw nodded, he let go.

Duran worked his lips. Finally, he said, “I think if I’d had brain surgery, I’d remember it.”

Shaw nodded. “Of course you would—unless you’re suffering from amnesia—”

“Which I seem to be.”

“Indeed.”

Shaw gave him another consent form to sign, then left with Allalin when Adrienne called to see how things were going.

It wasn’t much of a conversation. The Valium he’d been given kicked in right after the first hello. And yet, when he hung up, ten or twenty minutes later, it seemed to Duran that he’d heard something in her voice, something that sounded a lot like concern—concern for him. Could it be?

Nah.

In the morning, precisely at eight, a male nurse wheeled him down the corridor to the O/R, where he was intubated and given a series of injections that left him in a state of limp and indifferent paralysis. The operation began some ten minutes later, and proceeded, as nearly as Duran could tell, exactly as Allalin had described.

Most of the time, he kept his eyes closed, listening in a disinterested way to the underwater voices of the surgeons, the rhythmic symphony of the various machines. He couldn’t feel anything, but sensed the movement of those around him, the change in the light as Allalin leaned in, or moved away.

He heard clinks and dinks, instruments being picked up and put down on metal trays. At times, their words seemed to turn into nonsense syllables and he couldn’t understand what they were saying.

At one point, Shaw seemed to say, “Radashay at the semaphore,” and Allalin replied, “Dirapsian snide.”

Once or twice, he opened his eyes, and when he did, the lights in the O/R starred and shimmered. It was almost beautiful, the way it all pulsed in time with the blurred symphony of machine sound.

And then, quite clearly, Allalin announced, “Got it!”

Someone heaved a massive sigh.

And then he heard Shaw say, “Jesus! What the hell is that thing?”

Doctor Allalin’s face swam slowly into focus, fell apart into bands of light, and regained its form. Duran could see his mouth moving in an exaggerated way, but it seemed as if the sound took a long time to arrive.

“Effff.” Like the letter of the alphabet. Duran was tempted to continue with the exercise: “Geeee, Aitch, Eye.” But his mouth was too dry. Then he realized what the doctor was saying: Jeff.

“Wha?” It was as if he had a mouth full of toothpaste.

“At least he’s vocalizing,” Allalin said with an air of relief. He leaned over Duran again, his rabbitlike face slightly foreshortened—he was so close.

“Tell me, Jeff. What is your last name?”

Duran thought about it. He remembered he was in a hospital, remembered he’d had surgery. The surgery must be over. And he was all right. Neither dead, nor blind—nor a vegetable.

“Jeff?” The voice was patient, high-pitched. “Tell me. Do you remember your last name?”

Duran nodded.

“What’s your last name, Jeff?”

“D’ran.”

Suddenly, Adrienne was by his side, saying, “Hey, guy… “ He felt her hand take his, and give it a squeeze.

Doctor Shaw said, “I owe you one, Nick—that was damned good!”

Duran lay where he was, with Adrienne holding his hand, listening to the doctors chat. Allalin said, “Keep me posted. I’ll be very interested to know what Materials has to say.”

“Count on it,” Shaw replied.

Duran tried to shift himself into a sitting position, but everything in his visual field swayed, then slewed off to the left. He closed his eyes, and grabbed the sides of the bed.

“Hey,” Shaw said. “Take it easy. You had brain surgery this morning.”

Duran felt for Adrienne’s hand, found it, and closed his own around it. “What was it?” he asked.

“You mean, in your head?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s going to take a while,” Shaw replied.

“What do you mean?”

“He means it’s being analyzed,” Adrienne told him. “They sent it out to have it studied.”

“Studied?” Duran asked.

“Let me tell you what I thought we’d find,” Shaw suggested.

“Okay.”

“I was guessing a surgical staple—something like that. Especially after we saw you’d had the operation before—or something like it. And if it wasn’t that, I thought it might have been a bullet fragment, or debris from an automobile accident. Something that was overlooked in the initial extraction.”

“And?” Duran asked.

“It’s something else,” Adrienne said.

Duran glanced from Adrienne to the doctor. “What?” he asked.

Shaw pursed his lips in a moue. “We don’t know.” When Duran began to protest, Shaw overrode him. “What we do know is that it didn’t get there by accident.”

Duran frowned, his eyes following Shaw as he walked over to the window. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, it’s an implant.”

“What? What for?” Once again, Duran struggled to sit up, but failed.

“Ahhh, now that—that is the question. When Nick took it out, I thought it was a piece of glass—because that’s what it looks like. Then we looked at it under a microscope…”

“And?”

“It’s something else,” Shaw said. “It has some kind of wires in it. It’s some kind of micro-device.”

Duran moaned.

“We’ve sent it out to the Applied Materials Laboratory” Shaw told him. “They have a biomedical component—”

“Are you telling me you took something out of my head, and you don’t have a clue what it is?”

Shaw smiled. “No, that’s not what I’m saying. I know what it is: it’s an intercerebral implant. The question is: what does it do? For the moment, at least, its purpose is obscure.”

“When you say it’s obscure,” Adrienne asked, “what are we talking about? I mean, what are the possibilities?”

“To be honest?” Shaw replied. “Aside from some very preliminary animal work on Parkinson’s, the only implants that I’m familiar with have been used to control seizures—severe seizures.”

“And that’s what you think I have?” Duran asked.

“On the contrary. I haven’t seen any evidence of that at all.”

They were silent for a moment. Then Duran asked: “How long before we hear back?”

“Three or four days,” Shaw replied.

“Will I be walking by then?”

Shaw chuckled. “You’ll be out by then.”

“You’re kidding,” Adrienne said.

The psychiatrist shook his head. “Not at all.”