“Well, that’s good news,” Duran told him.

“Don’t thank me—thank managed-care.” Shaw smiled. “And in the meantime, I’ll be very interested to know if that… object… had anything to do with your amnesia. Given its location, it may well have.” His eyes glowed. “What I’m hoping, obviously, is that you’ll start remembering quite a lot. We’ll have some sessions. If you’re up to it, we can begin tomorrow.”

After the operation, Duran realized that he was living with a sense of elation that was as real as it was difficult to describe. He was lighter, somehow, as if he’d been subject to a gravitational field that had only now begun to subside.

He slept for twelve hours the first day, tried to watch television, but didn’t feel like it—then slept some more. Adrienne called from the Mayflower to ask how he was feeling, and to tell him that she’d found a cheap parking lot, way over on the West side, “only fifteen blocks from the hotel.”

On the morning of the second day, one of the residents subjected him to a battery of tests and quizzes, calculated to measure various aspects of neural function—touch, taste, smell, and vision. His recall rate was assessed, as were his motor skills and sequential memories. He took the Bender gestalt test and, when he was done, the resident suggested that he walk the halls.

“No jogging,” he joked, “just take it slow. If you get dizzy—sit down. Otherwise… keep moving—it’s good for you.”

After lunch, Shaw came to the hospital for “a little regression work,” and to ask how he was doing.

Duran told him that he felt as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders, but that he was disappointed that his memory hadn’t returned.

“Doesn’t work that way,” Shaw told him. “Even with something more basic—blindness, for example—once the stimuli return, it often takes a while for the patient to resolve them in a meaningful way. Someone who’s been blind from birth—restore his vision and, chances are, he’ll be bumping into walls for the first time in years. Why? Because he’s adjusted to being blind. He’s found a reliable way to cope with it. So if you take his blindness away, what’s left is a riot of light and color that means nothing to him. The point being that it takes a while to learn how to process things. In your case, though we haven’t identified the trauma, you’ve obviously worked out a way of getting along in the world, substituting this ‘Jeffrey Duran’ identity for your own. Since we haven’t tried to disturb this particular perceptual filter, it makes sense that it’s going to persist until it’s weakened.”

“And how’s that going to happen?”

“Well, we’ll do some hypnosis work, try to regress you with guided imagery—see what we get. We know a few things about you. Adrienne says you like chess, and… I gather the Caribbean has some meaning to you, and… you seem to know how to sail a boat.”

Duran smiled. “I’ve got a good idea,” he suggested, “why don’t we charter a sloop, and play a few games on our way down to Jamaica?”

Shaw chuckled. “Don’t tempt me.”

Two hours later, Shaw sat back in his chair in one of the consultation rooms at the end of the hall. It was a clean and pleasant space, not at all hospital-like, with track lights, museum posters, and upholstered furniture set around a chrome coffee table.

The psychiatrist crossed an ankle over his knee and found Duran’s eyes. “I know you’re disappointed,” he told him, “but I think we made some progress.”

“What? I remember sailing? I remembered that before.”

Shaw swung his head to the side. “No you didn’t. Not like this. You didn’t remember sailing in a regatta. You didn’t remember that you’d raced. Which means you were a competitive sailor, at some point. Probably—given your age—when you were a student. That gives us something to work with.”

Duran frowned. “Like what?”

“It seems likely you lived near water, at one time or another. Maybe went to a school that had a sailing team.”

“‘Maybe,’“ Duran said. “Then, again…”

“Give it a chance,” Shaw said. “With most amnesiacs, memories don’t come back all at once. They surface in a piecemeal way and often, quite slowly. It’s typical that the memory of the traumatic event—a car crash or whatever it was that triggered the amnesia—which you’d think would be particularly memorable, will be the last thing to come back. If it comes back at all.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t?”

“Quite often. Quite often that particular memory—since it has few associations and isn’t chunked with other recollections—well, it’s just gone.”

“Really.”

“So don’t be discouraged. The truth is, you’re suffering from as extreme a dissociative state as I have ever encountered. To cope with that, you’ve reinvented yourself. Now the task is to get you back to who you really are. This will bring you face-to-face with a lot of the trauma you’ve repressed. It’s not going to be easy. I can tell that, already.”

“What do you mean?” Duran asked.

“I’m getting a lot of resistance—deep resistance. Even in a trance, you’re constantly dancing away from anything that might connect you to your real past. The resistance is profound.”

“Why would that be?”

Shaw smiled, his eyes kind and reassuring. “Something happened to you. Something your mind can’t accept. Maybe there was a sailing accident, and someone you loved drowned. Perhaps you felt responsible. Perhaps you were responsible.” The psychiatrist paused. “It’s just a possibility” he added. “Who knows?” He paused a second time. “We’ll try another tack tomorrow.”

After dinner, Duran walked the halls for a while, and talked to Adrienne by telephone. Then he sat down with a copy of Sail that Shaw had left for him. It was strange. The beauty of the boats was a delight, but occasionally, his eye would fall on something in the background—a swatch of landscape or the figure of a person hiking out—and it would be as if the sun were sliding behind a cloud. A low and anxious feeling would come over him, and…

He tossed the magazine aside, and snapped on the television.

Fresh from the shower after a long, cold run in the park, Adrienne toweled off and put on her underwear. Then she slipped into a skirt and sweater, and made herself a cup of coffee in the little kitchenette beside the door. Moving to the desk in front of the window, she looked out upon a construction site that was even deeper than it was wide. Finally, she sipped her coffee, and began to sort through her sister’s mail.

She’d almost forgotten about it. Bound with a thick rubber band, it had been sitting in the backseat of the Dodge for days. Now, it was time to take a look.

The first envelope she opened was from the bank. There were shrunken photocopies of Nikki’s bank statements and checks, which turned out to be less interesting than Adrienne had hoped. Nikki lived on about $4,500 bucks a month—give or take $500, one way or the other. Every once in a while, every few months, there was another deposit, also by wire transfer: three grand this September, for instance, and almost $8,000 back in February. The statement did not identify the source of the money, which led Adrienne to make a note on the Mayflower’s stationery: Transfer—$ from where?

It was a minor mystery, at best, since Adrienne was pretty sure that she knew where the money came from: the settlement her sister had made with the Riedles. Bonilla had mentioned a bank in the Channel Islands. In fact, he was going to fax her the specifics about the bank sending funds to Nikki’s account in the States. The European account might be nothing more than a convenience, or it might contain the bulk of Nikki’s settlement with the Riedles. In either case, it was a clue to Nikki’s past. Unfortunately, Bonilla never got the chance to follow through on his promise. Adrienne made a note: Query Riggs.