palilalic verbigeration as he tries to impress on Marcus the miraculous character of these. . — Renaissances, rebirths — that’s what they are. Really, you must understand, Reggie Voss there — he was manifesting the most extreme opisthotonos — bent back, right back — and ticcing all the time. He could barely speak — only grunt, barely feed himself let alone go to the lavatory — and now you see him, Marcus, d’you see him —. — Yes, yes. Marcus puts the same dread hand on Busner’s arm. I do see it, Busner, and I’m of course familiar with the condition of post-encephalitic patients. . their insensibility, their agitation. . Does he really remember, though? Tormented by the idea that Marcus takes me for a charlatan, Busner bridles his enthusiasm, and, as the unusual ward round progresses, he attempts to give a calm clinical picture of the reborn. It’s hard, though — what to say of Andrew McNeil, who, before being started on L-DOPA, was so hypotonic he couldn’t be propped up in bed let alone maintain a seated posture, whose voice was a faint whisper, whose face was twisted into a grimace now anguished, now terrified, whose troubled sleep was indistinguishable from his waking nightmare, and who, upon resurfacing from the stagnant pond where he had floated face up for more than forty years, told the psychiatrist he had experienced it as a continuous present, an awful and unchanging Now? It occurs to me, Busner proposes as they stand watching McNeil — red-nosed and ruddy-cheeked, a garden gnome, happily engaged with a crossword — that it’s movement that’s essential for the formation of memories — that memory is a somatic phenomenon, and so if a mind can no longer manipulate its body in space, it loses the capacity to orientate within time. . He tics with his tie, and would reach for a Biro to note this insight down were Marcus’s expression not so hopelessly sceptical . .The ward is hot, the angled casements seem not to vent the sodium hypochlorite vapours and urinous eddies, but only draw in the far-off shushing of traffic on the North Circular. — Busner is gripped by terrible doubts. Is it all a dream, my dream? Is it me who needs awakening? The elderly patients stirring for the first time in decades. . turning to one another and speaking with such animation, not of their ordeal but of a universe of trivia regained: ballpoint pens and Nimble bread. . might they be better off —? He can only press on: I’d like you to meet Mister Ostereich here. . De Gaulle standing tall, back turned to his visitors, he does something to a photograph frame with a flannel. . He’s the most, ah, eloquent of the patients who’ve been given L-DOPA. Ostereich carries on wiping — so Busner persists with his own flannelling: He has described for me vividly what it’s like to think of nothing — yes, thinking of nothing, he says, is not the same as thinking nothing, so, no Zen state of enlightenment at all but. . but a dreadful copybook sort of arithmetic, two-equals-two-equals-two, like that, over and over again. Or else, I am what I am what I am — like that, but this isn’t an ex-is-tential question, it’s only. . only an iter-iter-. . iteration of identity, its fact, nothing more, two-equals-two, I-am, d’you see? Marcus withers at him — Mboya appears anxious, Busner is saved by Peter Cushing, re-emerging from the laboratory of his past and including them all in a stare both accusatory and baleful. He says, For all this time I now realise that I was a sort of picture frame, you best believe it — quite like this one. . He fumbles with the clips, Mboya moves to assist him, but Ostereich wards him off. . No, no, no need for you — I have it, like this, see, tip-top. . Ostereich has freed the photograph, which shows uniformed bandsmen stiffly posed around the brassily silent cacophony of their instrumentation. . This is me. . he holds the frame in front of his face. . the framing of nothing, I had lost the general idea of what it was to have. . a general idea! His tongue comes out to moisten his lips and Busner wills it back in! no fly-catching today, thank you very much . .Ostereich’s nose was broken, Busner imagines, in a Vienna playground in the early nineteen hundreds — he couldn’t have served with that name, at least not in the British Army. Gratifyingly, Marcus is disposed to engage with Ostereich: And now, he asks, how do you feel now? The reborn one’s Adam’s apple bobs, his milky eyes well. — It is. . It is. . he chooses words from a child’s lexicon. . altogether fab-u-lous, quite gorrrgeous! Germanic r’s are ironed in to his locutions. . I feel that Doctor Busner here must have transfused me. . He waves the flannel and the photograph. . taken my diseased blood and replaced it with champagne! As they leave the Viennese behind, Marcus says, You think yourself, what, a Christian Barnard of the mind, is it? That it’s as that confused old man says: you’ve transplanted their brains — or that it’s as simple as apheresis? No, no, man, no drug could do this — no matter how revolutionary. You’ve seen results from pathology, I assume, you understand the histopathology, yes? You’ve seen the full extent of the lesions in these patients’ brain stems, hmm? This is real observable organic damage, Busner, scrambled eggs — you get that, yes? What Busner appreciates is the pecking Missus Marcus must’ve been subjected to as for aeons she lay flayed on the plastic runners of the St John’s Wood flat, together with cold cushions, the bony elements of old gas-fires, chopped liver. . going off. He can taste the despair. Marcus is, he reflects, the sort of man who, tiring of civilisation and all its discontents, wants to be alone — yet insists on someone else being alone with him: a hostage, the Geoffrey Jackson to his Tupamaros guerrillas. Still, there’s no real harm in him — he cares. More than anything Busner desires the approval of this near-homonym of his uncle, so he holds his breath and counts one, two, three . .now that five of the post-encephalitic patients have begun to care for themselves the staff’s workload has lightened — their tigerish bitterness poured back into its tank. I think. . he at last exhales, that you may be underestimating the brain’s capacity for functional reorganisation, Doctor Marcus. It seems to me that science is not well advanced enough for us to assess the impact of a global dopamine deficit — you see. . these patients, living statues they were, and now see them: doing crosswords, signing certificates — speaking, like Mister Ostereich, with great insight about their condition, surely this proves that health goes deeper than any disease? Mboya continues to hang about nearby — Busner senses his mind churning down below, keeping him hovering on this wide smooth apron of the moment, while beyond there is sea spray, the crude shapes of Channel freighters . .Where does he live? Tooting — and alone: a used tea mug set down on an old laminated wireless . .a carpet cleaner, its brushes furred with lint . .The long journey to Arnos Grove every day, his black hair brush drawn through the smutty flue — he says he doesn’t mind — he reads. Busner knows this because his charge nurse is more up to date than I am, and talks over lunch in the canteen of the veil, and the master–