“You want the best for all your patients.”

“You’re more than my patient. That night was a test, sure it was, but it was a lot more than that for me. You’re the hard one, not me. You never give up much of yourself, do you? Maybe Leo was the same, maybe not. But last night when you didn’t call I was worried out of my head. If I called your flat once, I did it ten times. I thought you might have had a collapse, or be in pain, or all sorts of things. I even called the hospitals in the area, to see if you had checked into one.”

For Tess, that was a very long speech. I sat there in silence for a few seconds. “I’m sorry,” I said at last. I had to clear my throat before I could speak again. “You’re right. I’m a selfish bastard, and underneath I guess I’m a prude as well.”

Deep down Tess had touched another nerve. You never give up much of yourself, do you? Maybe Leo was the same, maybe not. Those words stung more because I had had that thought, too. Leo gave more of himself, and more was given back in return.

I reached up to take her hands and drew her gently forward to sit by me on the couch.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “What you did was quite right. Would you tell me what else Sir Westcott told you? I promise I won’t mind.”

“He said that the crucial period is still ahead, no matter how well you feel now. There will be a time when the main integration of brain tissue will happen, and when it does the Madrill technique goes out of control. The information transfer will become very fast — like a hole in a dike, he said, first a trickle, then a sudden flood. When that happens you have to be somewhere quiet. You’ll pass out, and you’ll need good medical care.”

“I’ve had the same sort of warning from him in person.” I turned to look at her. “No point in worrying about that until it happens. But what about — you know. Did he say that it’s all right for me to have sex? Am I well enough for it?”

The frown lines were gone from her forehead, “You had no pain last time, did you?”

“Did you hear me groaning?”

“Yes.” Tess smiled. “But I heard me groaning, too, and I wasn’t in pain.”

“So everything is all right.”

“I don’t know.” She didn’t look worried, but her face wore a softer, heavy-eyed look, almost like a drowsiness. “You’ve had scientific training, too. You know you can’t draw statistical conclusions from a single experiment. You need more data points.”

“How many samples does it take?” I put my arm around her shoulder and drew her closer.

She slid forward to move her body against me. “I think that depends on you more than me.”

For the first time in twenty-four hours Scouse and his gang were pushed beyond even the periphery of my attention. I hadn’t realized it the first night, but Tess must have been holding part of herself in check, watching me for any signs of trouble or discomfort. Now she was willing to let herself go completely. We gave Sir Westcott’s handiwork a severe test, and it passed again. I did have an after-the-fact ache in my right side, but Tess felt around it and diagnosed a simple muscle strain.

By eleven o’clock we were lying together in Tess’s luxurious double bed. I knew from her breathing that she was drowsing, but for me sleep wouldn’t come. A summer storm was on the way, and we lay there with the curtains open and the window cracked to let in the warm night air. The flicker of sheet lighting, far off, and an occasional distant grumble of thunder created in me the postcoital depression that Ovid attributed to all animals.

I brooded again over Tess’s words. You never give much of yourself, do you?, and I thought of John Donne’s much older ones, Love, any devil else but you, would for a given soul give something too.

It hurt all the more because I had suffered the same worry for years. While Leo had found ways to open himself to others, I had travelled the world cocooned in the threads of my music, protected by Bach and Mozart and Schubert. Now Tess was offering me a golden chance to change, to give in return; and I was going to turn away from it. I knew I would. Before I left the bookshop in the afternoon, I had decided. I had to chase Leo’s flicker of memory, to pursue it wherever it led me. If it was unsafe for me in England , a foreign region would be no worse.

I was sweating, uneasy and weary in mind and body. I eased myself an inch away from Tess. Our bodies were sticky and closely twined, and as I moved she gave a little mutter of protest and snuggled back into the fold of my arm. Her hair tickled my chest but I did not move again. Uncertainty, misery and guilt hung over me, until finally the rain came, the air cooled, and I could drift slowly down into my own release of sleep.

- 8 -

“Keep a diary,” said Sir Westcott.

“Why? I don’t need one, my memory’s always been good.” Better than yours, I was tempted to add — Sir Westcott moved through a cloud of mislaid books, forgotten appointments, and lost umbrellas.

“Never mind how good your memory is,” he replied. “Keep a diary — you’ll see why in a few months.”

That had been a few weeks before I was released from the hospital. I went along with his eccentric request, jotting down notes on events that I knew I’d be able to remember in detail months or years later.

Now I had the book out on my knee, drowsing through it as the plane flew steadily on through the night skies of northern India . We had left London the previous night. On the long journey east, losing hour after hour to the shifting time zones, we passed through Rome , Athens , Tehran , Bombay , and so to the final jump to Calcutta . I hoped the flight crew had taken the trip better than I had — blocked sinuses, eyes sore and gritty, and an iron filings taste in my mouth. The Persians next to me muttered to each other and puffed on a ghalian, passing the tube quietly from hand to hand. It didn’t smell much like tobacco, but at three in the morning the stewardesses weren’t worrying.

Don’t think my coordination is getting any better now, I had written. Seems to be at a plateau. And later that day, feeling guilty about the neglect of my business manager, Should call Mark, but it can wait a while longer.

The entries were innocent enough, and I could remember all of them. What I could not recall, what now seemed quite wrong to me, was their tone. It was nervous and diffident, reluctant to face Sir Westcott, oddly hesitant about approaching Tess. I was beginning to understand the surgeon’s flat assertion.

“It won’t happen the way you’re expecting. You seem to think that you’ll wake up one day and feel yourself merging thoughts with your brother. But you’re sitting there on the inside. There’s no way a person can get an objective view of the workings of his own brain. The only way you’ll see changes is by looking back at earlier behavior and comparing. Write things down. Otherwise you’ll have nothing to compare it with.”

It had been easy enough to do that when I was still in the hospital, with time on my hands. Recently there hadn’t been a spare minute. The new idea I’d had before going over to Tess’s house had been a winner.

I had to accept that the right brain hemisphere is pictorial and largely nonverbal — the medical texts had made that clear enough. That meant I was wasting my time trying to dig messages out of the right brain portions that came from Leo. Words were hard to get — Nymphs, Scouse, Valnora Warren, or any others. What I should be providing was picture inputs that might stimulate the right brain hemisphere and elicit a solid physical reaction from my body.

I was sure that Leo had been doing something in India . But where in India ? To answer that question, Tess and I made a trip to the British Museum and looked through the picture files. It was a long job. I stared at photographs of Delhi , Madras , Lahore , Bombay , Agra , and Calcutta ; and in that last city, when we came to a color picture of the Maidan, the big park-like rectangle at the city center, I felt a return of the vivid excitement that had hit me outside the bookstore.