too alert, and the bulge beneath his leather jacket suggests a shoulder holster. He has the concealed intensity of a cop or a soldier—eyes never still, always darting, always processing, even though his head never moves. It’s conditioning you can’t unlearn.
But he never looks at Barry.
You’re just being paranoid.
Barry is halfway through his huevos rancheros and thinking about Joe and Franny Behrman when a glint of pain flashes behind his eyes.
His nose begins to bleed, and as he catches the blood in a napkin, a completely different set of memories of the last three days crowds into his mind. He was driving home on Friday night, but no 10-56A ever came over the radio. He never rode up to the forty-first floor of the Poe Building. Never met Ann Voss Peters. Never watched her fall. Never looked at the police report regarding the attempted suicide of Franny Behrman. Never bought a train ticket to Montauk. Never interviewed Joe Behrman.
Considered from a certain perspective, he was just sitting in his recliner in his one-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights, watching a Knicks game, and now he’s suddenly in a Montauk diner with a bloody nose.
When he tries to look these alternate memories squarely in the eye, he finds that they carry a different feel from any memory he’s ever known. They’re lifeless and static, draped in hues of black and gray, just as Ann Voss Peters described.
Did I catch this from her?
His nose has stopped bleeding, but his hands have begun to shake. Throwing some money on the counter, he heads out into the night, trying to stay calm, but he’s reeling.
There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us the sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves. He’s experienced all of that. But what do you cling to, moment to moment, if memories can simply change. What, then, is real? And if the answer is nothing, where does that leave us?
He wonders if he’s going mad, if this is what it feels like to lose your mind.
It’s four blocks to the train station. There are no cars out, the town is dead, and as a creature of a city that never sleeps, he finds the silence of this off-season hamlet unnerving.
He leans against a streetlamp, waiting for the doors of the train to open, one of four people on the platform, including the man from the diner.
The rain striking his hands is turning to slush, his fingers are freezing, but he wants them that way.
The cold is the only thing keeping him tethered to reality.
HELENA
October 31, 2008–March 14, 2009
Day 366
Two days after the first use of the chair, Helena sits in the control room, surrounded by the Imaging Team, staring at a huge monitor that shows a static, 3D image of her brain, the synaptic activity represented by varying shades of luminous blue.
She says, “The spatial resolution is stunning, guys. Beyond what I ever dreamed of.”
“Just wait,” Rajesh says.
He taps the space bar, and the image comes alive. Neurons glowing and fading like a trillion lightning bugs brightening a summer evening. Like the smoldering of stars.
As the memory plays, Rajesh magnifies the image to the level of individual neurons. Threads of electricity arcing from synapse to synapse. He slows it down to show the activity over the span of a millisecond, and still the complexity remains unfathomable.
When the memory ends, he says, “You promised you’d tell us what we’ve been looking at.”
Helena smiles. “I was six years old. My father had taken me fly-fishing to this stream he loved in Rocky Mountain National Park.”
Rajesh asks, “Can you be specific in terms of exactly what you were remembering during these fifteen seconds? Was it the entire afternoon? Certain moments?”
“I would describe it as flashes, which, in the aggregate, comprise the emotional return to the memory.”
“For instance…”
“The sound of water babbling over the rocks in the streambed. Yellow aspen leaves floating in the current, and how they look like gold coins. My father’s rough hands tying a fly. The anticipation of hooking a fish. Lying in the grass on the bank, staring down into the water. Bright-blue sky and the sun coming through the trees in shards of light. A fish my father caught quivering in his hands and his explaining that the red coloration under its lower jaw is why they call it a cutthroat trout. Later that afternoon, a hook