He did, and barely felt the needle.
Two hours later, he joined Adrienne and Doctor Shaw in a small conference room at the clinic.
A dozen images—cross sections of Duran’s brain—were clipped to a bank of backlit viewing screens. Holding a pointer, Shaw went from one image to another, tapping the pointer’s tip against a small, bright spot in a sea of gray.
“Right here,” he said. “And here. And here. And you can see it on this one, too!”
“It’s like a piece of rice,” Adrienne said.
“What is it?” Duran asked.
Shaw thought about it for a moment, frowned and said: “I don’t know.” Then he thought some more, and shrugged. “I can tell you what it’s not,” he assured them. “It’s not tissue. It’s not a bone, or a nerve. It’s not flesh. It’s not blood. Which is to say, it’s ‘a foreign object’—which is what we call things when we’ve exhausted every way of looking at them, and still don’t know what they are.” The physician frowned and paused. One of the fluorescent light fixtures on the ceiling fizzed. “You don’t recall suffering a head injury?” he asked Duran in a hopeful tone. “Maybe a car accident? Ever been in the army? Or a plane crash?”
Duran made a wry face. “Not that I can recall.”
Shaw smiled. “Very funny.”
“Wait a minute,” Adrienne asked, looking at Shaw. “That’s what you think? That—”
“A physical injury might be responsible for his condition?” Shaw’s arms flew up, and his face contorted in an exaggerated expression of perplexity “Let’s just say… it’s a working hypothesis.” He gestured toward the display of images. “The history of psychology and neurobiology is full of examples of the ways physical trauma can affect memory. In fact, some of our best information about memory comes from accidents—crazy accidents in which brains were maimed. Which isn’t surprising, really. I mean, these aren’t experiments you can carry out in a hospital.” Shaw beat out a little rhythm on the surface of the counter then let it fade.
“Is it possible,” Adrienne asked, “that that thing… is interfering with Jeff’s memory?”
Shaw shrugged. “Absolutely,” he said. “It’s quite possible.”
“But you can’t say for sure,” Duran suggested.
“Not without examining it.” Seeing Adrienne deflate, Shaw gave her a sympathetic smile. “Memory is a very strange thing,” he told her. “People like to think that we store memories in the brain the way librarians store books—side by side, in categories of one kind or another. But it’s not true. We know it’s not true because we’ve done experiments—lots of experiments. And what we’ve learned is that memories aren’t localized, but distributed. Like smoke, they’re diffused through the brain. So if you teach a rat to run a maze—then mutilate its brain to the point where the rat can barely walk—it will still remember how to get from A to Z. Not as quickly, perhaps, but it will remember.
“What’s particularly interesting about your case,” Shaw continued, “is that we’re not seeing any of the usual profiles of memory loss. Your short-term memory is undamaged. And you seem to retain the ability to form long-term memories.”
“So what’s your theory?” Duran asked.
“I don’t have a theory” Shaw replied. “All I have is an object.” He tapped one of the images on the light panel. “That object.”
Duran stared at the image on the wall, and felt a surge of elation. The psychiatrist might be right. The object could explain a lot. Not everything, of course—not the murder of Eddie Bonilla. But… a lot.
“So where do we go from here?” Duran asked.
Shaw hesitated. “Well,” he said, “that’s up to you.”
“How so?”
“We could go in,” the psychiatrist answered. “Take it out. See what it’s made of. See what it is.”
“Is that dangerous?” Adrienne said.
Shaw’s pointer beat out a rhythm on the table, then faded to a slow, monotonous tapping. The shrink seesawed his head back and forth. “Not especially. It’s in an area that’s relatively easy to access. You’d be in a semi-sitting position, and we’d enter the sphenoid sinus cavity through the anterior nasal septum.”
“My nose.”
Shaw stopped tapping the table and slapped the pointer into his open palm. “Right. You’d need broad spectrum antibiotics, but otherwise—I should think it would be a piece of cake.”
“But there are risks,” Adrienne suggested.
Shaw nodded. “There are always risks.”
“Like what?” Duran asked.
“Damage to the optic nerve.”
“He could go blind?”
“It’s very, very unlikely. I’d be more concerned about leakage.”
“Of what?” Adrienne asked.
“CSF. The brain’s floating in a pool of cerebrospinal fluid. In surgery of this kind… ?” He ended the sentence with a shrug.
“Christ,” Duran muttered.
“The mortality rate is less than one percent.”
No one said anything.
“Of course,” the psychiatrist went on, “there might be consequences to leaving it in place, too. It could be the cause of some localized infection or swelling—the PET scans show a sort of odd… excitation… around the object.” He shuffled through a sheaf of large colored prints of Duran’s brain. The colors were intense—cerise, magenta, sapphire—so that Duran’s brain had a psychedelic look, as if it might be the model for a line of retro T-shirts.
The doctor placed a photographer’s loupe over one of the images. “Here. You can see the excitation quite clearly. Take a look.”
They did, in turn. Duran saw a tiny yellow blip surrounded by a halo of purple.
“So what do you want to do?” Duran asked.
“An exploratory—see if we can get in and out without a lot of ancillary damage. If we can, we’ll remove it. See what it is.”
“And you’d be doing the surgery?” Adrienne asked.
Shaw shook his head. “I’ll find someone with better hands.” He whirled to a bank of files behind him, pulled open a drawer, extracted a folder, selected some papers. He tapped them into a neat stack, then clipped them together. “Here,” he said, handing the papers to Duran. “Consent forms. You’ll want to read them carefully. Get a good night’s rest and… call me in the morning.”
They found a Cuban-Chinese takeout a block from the hotel, and returned to their room with cartons of rice and beans, and a six-pack of Tsing Tsao.
Duran glanced through the consent forms as Adrienne brought their plates to the little table in the corner.
“I could go blind,” he told her. “Or go through a personality change. Then, there’s my favorite: ‘loss of cognitive function.’”
She handed him a beer, and asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I could be an idiot.”
“Jesus!” she said. “I don’t know… “ She threw him a glance.
“What?”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to say anything. I mean, I don’t want the responsibility.”
The food was terrific.
“Chinese-Cuban,” Adrienne said. “Not a combination I would have come up with. I wonder how that came about.”
Duran shrugged. “There are lots of Chinese all over the West Indies,” he said. “At least in Jamaica and Haiti there are. So it stands to reason they’d be in Cuba, too.”
She paused, chopsticks suspended on the way to her mouth. “How do you know?”
“What do you mean, how do I—”