“So you didn’t do clinical. I mean, like Jeffrey Duran?”

“No, I never had a client, never shrunk a head. Eventually, I might have but… I received a fellowship that, uh, went on for a while.”

“Which fellowship was that?” Shaw asked.

“Institute of Global Studies.” McBride stirred uncomfortably in his chair. Coughed, and crossed his legs.

“Tell me about it.”

“It’s a foundation that makes grants to researchers in various disciplines.”

“So it doesn’t just pay your tuition somewhere.”

“No. They give you a stipend, and travel expenses. It’s pretty generous—plus, you get a lot of exposure.”

Shaw frowned. “What kind of exposure?”

Duran thought about it, then made a helpless gesture. “I’m sorry, I… I guess I’m uncomfortable. I mean, I’m trying to think how long… how long I’ve been away.”

Shaw shook his head. “Now, this is what happens when you start blocking. So don’t get fixated on trying to figure out where Lew McBride begins and Jeff Duran ends. Just… “ His right hand rotated in the air between them. “Roll with it. You were talking about the fellowship.”

McBride nodded. “Yeah, well, the way it worked: I wrote a sort of letter, a report, really, every month or so. I’d send it to the director of the Institute, and the Institute would send out copies to a slew of publications, the idea being that they could reprint it for free, so long as they gave the Institute credit. Other copies went to interested academics, and an A-list of influential people in the States and elsewhere.”

“Sounds wonderful. How do you apply?”

“You don’t. What happens is, someone recommends you—they don’t tell you who, but it’s usually a professor, a former fellow—someone like that. Anyway, they take you to lunch a couple of times, and ask what you’d do if you had the time and the money to do what you want. After a while—unless you’re an idiot—you find yourself pitching a study. They make some recommendations about how the study could be better, and the next thing you know, you’re taking a lot of tests.”

“What kind of tests?”

“Like the ones you gave me. MMPI, Myers-Briggs… it took all day. I remember that.”

Shaw made a face. “Hunh! Why would they do that?”

“I asked the same question. They said it had to do with identifying candidates who could work on their own—there’s very little supervision. Basically, they pat you on the back, and send you on your way. And I think they want to be sure they’re getting people who are comfortable working abroad—because they’re big on that.”

“On what?”

“Working abroad.”

“What was your area of study?” Shaw asked. “What did you pitch?”

McBride smiled, a little sheepishly. “The title was ‘Animist Therapeutics and the Third World.’”

Shaw raised his eyebrows. “Interesting!”

“The idea was to study the psychological and therapeutic components of nativist religions. Which meant studying everything from Indian sweat lodges to the induction of trance states, the effect of eclipses and different ways cultures used hallucinogenic mushrooms.”

“And did you?”

“Yes. I started in this hemisphere and… “ McBride’s voice trailed off.

“What?”

Suddenly, he felt as if a small bird was doing barrel rolls in his stomach. “I’m sorry” he said. “I get distracted.”

Shaw’s brow furrowed. “So what did you do?”

“I was in South America a lot, and the Caribbean. I wrote pieces on everything. Faith healing, Santería, one on ultramarathoning as a form of flagellation and meditation. Two of the articles I wrote were reprinted in the Times.”

“What were they about?” Shaw asked.

“One was about the spiritual aspects of video gaming—the quest, you know. The other was about communal drinking games as a way of relieving seasonal affective disorder.”

“And how did that work?”

McBride laughed. “I went up to the Yukon in February, and got drunk with the Inuits.”

“And then what?”

“I stopped caring about the weather.”

Shaw chuckled. “You mentioned the Caribbean.”

“Right. I was in Haiti for a while. Studying cadence and tempo cues in posthypnotic suggestions.”

“Sounds fascinating.”

“It was, actually,” McBride said. He rapped out a rhythm on the table with his fingertips. Tippety tip tip! Five taps. “Something as abbreviated as that could do the trick.”

“Really. Well, not so surprising, I guess. Aural memory tends to be sequential so that once you initiate a progression of sounds, the mind tends to complete the sequence. So, where else did you go?”

“I was supposed to go on to Jamaica.”

Shaw waited for McBride to continue. When he did not, the psychiatrist broke the silence. “Yes?”

Suddenly, McBride couldn’t speak. There was an ache in the back of his throat that had to do with flying back to San Francisco from Port-Au-Prince, bringing home his tapes and photographs and notes. It was expensive, flying back, but his apartment was a good place to write and, what was even more to the point, it gave him a chance to spend time with Judy and Josh. They could be a family—if only for a few days each month.

The news of Judy’s pregnancy had come hard on the heels of the news that he’d won the fellowship, and they’d agreed that he couldn’t pass up the chance it represented—that they’d just make the best of it. He would come home, as often as possible, and that would be that.

And that’s exactly the way it was. In the months before Josh was born, Judy had come to join him for a week here and a few days there—whenever she was able to take time off from her own career as a graphic designer. But that stopped when Josh arrived because… well, for one thing, they couldn’t afford it and, even if they had been able to, the places he was going were no place for a baby.

“Lew?” Doctor Shaw leaned forward, his forehead wrinkling with concern.

McBride could hear a helicopter outside and, down the street, a siren moving closer, with its fluctuating wail. Sunlight poured through the slats of the venetian blinds, striping the bloodred, oriental carpet.

No place for a baby.

“Lew?”

He had the sensation that the pattern of light and shadow had risen up from the floor, and shone through his brain. And that the wail of the siren was the inconsolable bawl of an infant.

A baby.

He heard Shaw’s voice, but it was very faint, and muffled, as if it were traveling a long distance, or moving through layers and layers of insulation.

“Jeff? What’s going on? Are you all right?”

He didn’t reply. He was in the ochre room. The nursery. The abattoir. He had the bat in his hand, the Louisville Slugger that Judy kept in the umbrella stand by the door. He could feel it cracking bone, then sinking into the soft melon-flesh of, first, his son, and then his wife. The blood was flying, misting the air. He was skating in it, slipping and swinging until there was nothing left of Joshua and Judy but pulp.