“Slow down,” Shaw said. “Describe them some more. Do they button or zip? What is the fabric made of?”

“I can’t think. There’s no room to think.” His sensations had narrowed to: pressure and cold. He had the panicked sensation that his head was being squeezed from all sides by plates of ice, his brain crystallizing.

“You can think. Do they button or zip?”

Nothing.

“Let’s hang the jacket up in your room,” Shaw suggested.

That was easier. The jacket was on a hook, not him. “They zip,” he said.

“Excellent! Is there anything on the front of the jacket? Apart from the zipper?”

“Embroidery”

“What color?”

“White.”

“What is it—the embroidered thing? Letters? A word?” He hesitated. “Your name?”

“It’s a bear,” Duran said, surprising himself as well as the doctor.

“Just the head? Or the whole thing?”

“It’s a bear,” Duran told him.

“A white bear?”

Duran nodded. Speaking seemed to take a huge effort and a long time. “A polar bear.”

“A polar bear,” Shaw said, almost in a whisper. But there was a sense of elation in his words. “Black and white. A polar bear,” Shaw repeated, this time in a louder voice—one that carried a distinct if muted tone of triumph, a tone that filled Duran with dread.

The polar bear was on the front of the jacket. And on the back, which he could now imagine clearly, were the words Bowdoin Sailing. These were the varsity jackets the school provided to its athletes: Bowdoin Sailing, Bowdoin Hockey, Bowdoin Soccer.

“Bowdoin,” Duran said. “Bowdoin College.”

“Ah,” said Shaw. “Of course. Admiral Peary. Polar bears.”

That was where he’d gone to school as an undergraduate: Bowdoin, not Brown. And no wonder he’d gone unrecognized at the Sidwell reunion—because he was a Maine boy, all the way. He remembered now. He’d gone to school in Bethel at the Gould Academy, where his mother had been an English teacher.

And then big segments of his past snapped into focus in a way that made his heart stagger—as if he had been on a long voyage, and the ship’s engine had suddenly cut out. His life passed before his eyes in an instant that unwound for what seemed like hours, and the result was like a near death experience. For a moment—that moment—he was sure he was having a heart attack. But then, the engine started again, and he realized he wasn’t having a heart attack, it was just Lew McBride, coming home to himself after a long absence. For an instant, he was overcome with elation—until an image began to form behind his eyes. An ochre room, a sort of… abattoir, the walls running with blood, and a nonsense thought shrieking through his head: My God, I’ve killed them all.

And then it was gone. The image vanished as quickly as it had come. His eyes flew open, and he found himself where he’d always been, sitting in a comfortable chair across from Doctor Shaw, filled with a wintry mix of joy and desolation. Glad to know who I am, he thought. Sorry it had to be me.

They stayed at it. Now that McBride remembered his name, he was struck by how well it fit. He remembered his mother—his real mother, not the icon in the picture frame at his apartment—lifting him up, and singing, “Hello, yewwwww! Hello, Lewwwww!”

“Wait a second,” Shaw ordered. “I want to flip the tape.”

He’d been Lewis. He’d been Lew. For a while, he’d been Mac—and, as he recalled, there was even a semester when his friends had called him Bridey. But Jeff, which he had answered to just an hour earlier, was as foreign to him as Horatio or Etienne.

“All right, ready to go again,” Shaw told him. “You said your father medalled in the Olympics. Was that it? I mean—that’s fantastic, of course. But, did he ever compete again?”

“No, just the once. He was the first American after Bill Koch to medal in a Nordic event. But he was thirty-four when he took the silver. After that, he worked mostly as a ski instructor.”

“Where?”

“Killington, for a while. Sugarloaf. Stowe. Sunday River would have been handier, but it didn’t exist at the time.”

“That’s in Maine?” Shaw guessed.

“Right. That’s where we lived. In Bethel. Anyway, he’d go off for three or four months—come home midweek, if things were slow. Later, when cross-country caught on, he gave lessons at the Bethel Inn—which is famous for it.”

“Were they happy?”

“Who?”

“Your parents.”

McBride didn’t know what to say. At the moment, he was wondering why he wasn’t happy—why, in point of fact, he was filled with a sense of trepidation. Finally, he shrugged. “We didn’t have a lot of money,” he said. “So there was that. My mother clipped coupons and hunted down bargains. Teachers in private school don’t earn that much, and my father’s income was… sporadic. And I’m not sure my mother really trusted him when he was away. He was a go-for-it kind of guy. Even during the run up for the Olympics, my mother wasn’t behind him the way wives are on those segments you see on TV.”

“Oh?”

“He stopped working to train and my mother didn’t want him to. She was pregnant with me. And even after he made the team, it wasn’t like she got to go to Sapporo. It would have cost too much.”

“And after he won?”

“Well… he didn’t win, and it wasn’t the hundred meters. He finished second in the ten-kilometer biathlon—so there wasn’t a Wheaties box in it, or anything else, for that matter. I think my mother thought he was a case of arrested development. I remember, one time, he blew out his ankle. Which was not so good, because he didn’t have disability insurance, and he couldn’t work. So things were tight. I remember my mother standing at the top of the stairs and tossing the bills down, then coming down to see which ones were face up, because those were the ones she’d pay.” Duran paused. “Would it be okay if I had a glass of water?”

“Of course,” Shaw said, and scurried to fetch him a cup from the cooler.

Not that McBride was actually thirsty. He was just buying time—because he could feel the panic rising inside him, hear the tremor in his voice as his concentration began to fly apart—and this, despite the drug he’d been given.

“Thanks,” he said, and took a small sip.

“Keep going,” the psychiatrist urged.

“Well—where was I?”

“Things were tight.”

“Yeah,” McBride said, “they were tight, but she was crazy about him all the same—they were still in love, I think, to the day they died.”

Shaw gave him a sympathetic look. “They’re not living?”

McBride shook his head. “No. A semi fell on them.”

The psychiatrist was taken aback. “‘Fell’ on them?”

“Cat-Mousam Road. Truck jackknifed, went over the rail, and landed on the Interstate. Landed on their Volvo. Complete freak.”

“I’m sorry.”

McBride shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

“Who took care of you? Aunts and uncles?”

“Never had any. But my mother had some life insurance. I was in college when it happened.”

“And before that? Were you happy, as a child?”

“I don’t know. I suppose so. Bethel was nice. I had friends. And I worked.”

“Where?”

“Stocking shelves at the IGA, setting pins in the bowling alley. When I was older, I worked as a camp counselor. Lots of camps in Maine.”

As the afternoon wore on, Shaw sent out for coffee, and later for pizza. Several times he asked if McBride was too fatigued to continue—but the strange lassitude that had gripped him for so long—the languor which had enabled him to kill entire days watching television—was gone. Except for the sense of dread that came at him in waves, he felt awake and anxious to remember all he could. The drug that he’d been given had worn off, and Shaw was eager to keep going.

They talked about his childhood and his college days, about Bowdoin and Stanford, where he’d earned a doctoral degree in psychology. “I was interested in research,” he explained.