said the doctor.
“I thought you were blind.”
“Yes, my dear, blind as a badger, which is to say, not entirely blind, but mostly. My dear child, I have to have regular practice sessions for myself: challenges, obstacle courses, tests, and self-maintenance drills. I’m keeping myself sensitive to the world. For example, the knife throwing. I put up the target; I feel its location very carefully with my fingertips. Then I back away from it, counting the steps and feeling the floor with my toetips as I go. Finally, I install myself behind the desk, and wham! I always hit it. I can hear the blade entering the cork. A wonderful sound!”
Margaret looked back at the French doors. It was true that there were three knives in the target now, but she also saw around it, on both sides of the door, many gashes in the wood, most of them in the vicinity of the bull’s-eye—but not all. Margaret’s stomach turned. Funny, she had not noticed this on her last visit.
“So, comrade,” the doctor began, her voice becoming more rasping, “have you remembered? Are you ready to talk?”
“No,” said Margaret, irritated, despite her best hopes for the visit. The business with the knife, the lyrics—the doctor was rattling her in record time.
“Really? Nothing at all?” asked the doctor.
“That’s precisely what I wanted to talk to you about. That’s why I’m here.”
“About what?”
“The treatment is not what you said it would be,” said Margaret. “Not at all.”
“What is it then?” asked the doctor.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” the doctor asked.
“Well,” Margaret began. Although she would have liked to speak frankly, she found something rising in her, a column of secretive smoke, that forced her to speak in only vague and encrypted terms. “I haven’t remembered anything, but—there have been changes. In fact, everything has changed. But none of the things I remember are my own life.” Margaret said this and shuddered, thinking of the sibyl in her basket. Come to think of it, the swinging, grey-headed sibyl had borne a striking resemblance to Dr. Arabscheilis.
“But that’s quite fine, my dear, quite fine!” The doctor, for her part, seemed encouraged. “What is it that’s changed?”
Margaret swallowed. “Well, for starters, the buildings,” she said.
“The buildings?” The doctor stopped her in surprise.
“Yes, the buildings,” Margaret said. “They’ve turned into flesh. They’ve turned into flesh and they’re made of that now, instead of brick and stucco …” Her voice trailed off in embarrassment. “Flesh.”
“Flesh!” the doctor said. “Fascinating!”
Margaret was enlivened by the woman’s apparent ready belief. “Yes, they turned into flesh. So I think—in any case, there’s been a—malfunction of some kind. I’m not remembering my own life,” she repeated again, dumbly. And then very forcefully: “I want you to reverse the treatment.”
“If I remember correctly, my pet,” the doctor said, “when I saw you before, you didn’t have any desire to undergo treatment for what was a startlingly acute case of retrograde amnesia, if I may say so. So if you truly have not remembered, what are you complaining about? Isn’t this just how you wanted it?”
Margaret was surprised. She had assumed the doctor had not listened to her at all during the last visit. She cleared her throat. “Yes, that’s right. I was happy as I was.”
“And now you say nothing has changed, and that makes you upset?”
“Well, no. Something has changed! The city is made of fat. My life is poisoned.” This was truly how she felt in the days since the Sachsenhausen tour and the skittering mice.
“Aha!” the doctor cried, a cat after a dangling string. “So! It worked after all! Tell me, why is your life ‘poisoned’ as you say?”
“I’m doing the things I usually do—”
“Quite right,” the doctor said.
“But I can’t sleep anymore. I feel guilty.”
“You feel guilty?”
“Yes,” Margaret said. “Yes, I would say that. But I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said quickly, her voice rising involuntarily.
“Then why do you feel guilty?”
“Because the residue comes off on me. My job has become horrible. I feel sick.” Margaret was not willing, even now, to mention the hawk-woman.
The doctor was quiet for a moment, seeming to consider. “It’s history you work with as a guide, and history you study at the university?” she finally asked.
“Yes.”
“Have you considered that might be the trouble?”
“No,” Margaret said.
“But of course that’s the trouble!” And again the doctor became excited. “Let me explain it to you this way. History, for an amnesiac—comrade, my pet—is a shill, a stool pigeon, a decoy, a trap. All these years, you’ve been charming yourself with