Speaking of which. How about you stop dodging the subject?

During the safety of daylight, he’d concentrated on not thinking. Every time questions had crowded his mind, he’d forced them out by concentrating on practicalities. But now, hemmed in by darkness, he had nowhere to hide.

The Glock, for example. It was one thing to tell himself that lots of people owned handguns, that there was no reason to feel strange about the fact that he knew how to hold one, how to handle it. That it smelled of smoke because he’d taken it to the range. But a uniformed sheriff banging on his door made that harder to believe.

The amnesia, too. Or fugue, or lapse, or whatever he called it. He could call it Roy if he liked, didn’t change the facts. It had to come from something. Maybe he was right and Roy sprang from the trauma of his suicide swim. But maybe not. Maybe Roy was a bomb in his head. A brain tumor, for example.

And if that was true, it could have an impact on everything else. Including his personality—or what he thought was his personality. Daniel rolled down the window, let cold air rush in. Took deep breaths.

Really, all of the questions come down to one.

Who are you when you don’t remember who you are?

He didn’t feel like a bad man. Didn’t have murder in his heart, hadn’t wanted to jump the sheriff, or sideswipe the cars that cut him off. Even if he hadn’t left the Glock in Maine, the thought of holding it on a clerk and demanding the cash in the register turned his stomach.

And yet the cops were after him for something. It wasn’t a mistake. They knew his name, they knew his car, and they had come at him with guns drawn.

What if you were a bad man? A criminal, a killer? Are you that person still?

It was a haunting thought. Part of the point of life was that you looked around, you made choices, and those choices had consequences. Rotten consequences were fair because you had made the choice that got you there. Walk out on your kids, you don’t get to complain about gut-deep loneliness on Christmas morning. Tell off your boss, no whining that the promotion goes to someone else. Do murder, and you burn. Maybe not in hell—he didn’t feel particularly religious—but in life. Prison, yes, but beyond that, a shadow thrown over every day to come, a separation from every other person.

But this. To just wake up, bang, eyes open, and discover that everything was wrong. That he was suicidal and wanted by the police and maybe a monster, and to have had no choice in the matter.

If the person I was before did something wrong, do I have to pay the price?

And just how high is it going to be?

5

Daniel hocked the Rolex at a pawnshop west of Des Moines. He hated to do it, but couldn’t see another way. Maybe in the past he’d robbed liquor stores—hell, maybe he’d killed presidents—but best he could remember, he wasn’t that guy, and he didn’t want to be.

Perhaps the answer to the question of who you were when you couldn’t remember was simple: whoever you chose.

The man behind the counter offered him $325. Daniel countered with $7,500, half the retail price. Where they settled was nothing like the middle, but the man paid cash, a thick stack of worn bills. Daniel celebrated with breakfast at a truck stop and discovered that chicken-fried steak tasted way better than it had any right to.

Iowa in morning light. Sky a pale blue bowl and air just the crisp side of cold. Interstate 80, still. Still flat, still straight, still mindnumbing. Farmland sprawled on either side of the road. Corn, he thought. Or wheat. Barley. How the hell should he know?

Man, but the country was big. Things were getting bleary. Too much world, and nothing for context. No family to think of, no home to remember. Nothing to do but count the electrical towers looming like metal monsters, Dali animals come to life. The radio was all preachers and country music and one lonely station of teenage pop-tarts with nothing to peddle but firm thighs and the dream of a youth he couldn’t recall.

He imagined Emily Sweet in the seat next to him. The window open and her hair whipping in the breeze and that quirky crooked smile on her face. Neither of them talking, just comfortably passing the miles.

Nebraska. More corn.

He passed the time telling stories about people in other cars. The faded Saab was driven by a middle-aged sociology professor; though the love was gone from her marriage, they were staying together for the kids and had settled into the comfortable camaraderie of soldiers on a long campaign. But this morning she had steeled herself against the hurt in her husband’s eyes, made a long-distance phone call and a flimsy excuse, and flown westward wild and free, head full of the doctor of romance languages who was waiting at the North Platte Best Western, a man with thinning hair and an unfortunate chin but eyes that were soft and kind and long fingers that would bite into her skin as he muttered French syllables she couldn’t define but understood perfectly.

Choreographing their affair—the professor’s husband, it turned out, was not so passionless as she imagined, and would spend tonight pacing, trying not to wake the kids as he sucked a bottle of scotch and planned ways to win her back; only, her Frenchman too was smitten with her, wanted more than an affair, and would follow her east, which brought all of them into a nicely orchestrated conflict on the lawn of their suburban home—carried him into Colorado and the afternoon.

Time to check your head.

Last night he’d wondered if maybe there was something physically wrong with him. It was an uncomfortable thought even in his present state, when discomfort was pretty much the status quo. To think that something might be growing in his head, that some biochemical quirk was the cause of all his present troubles, and that it could happen again, well, it didn’t settle the nerves. And yet, he couldn’t exactly go to a hospital. No ID, no insurance, not enough money, the cops looking for him—no.

He pulled into the outskirts of Denver around four. The Rockies were just a ghost on the horizon, a blur highlighted by the lowering sun. He stopped at a gas station, filled the tank, bought some jerky and a Diet Coke he could have parked a Jet Ski in. In the hallway by the bathrooms, he used the Yellow Pages chained to the pay phones to find what he was looking for. A three-foot map pinned behind plastic laid the city out. He sipped his soda, found the address, and traced a route with his finger.

The shopping mall, like most of the city, was long and low, huddling beneath the dome of the sky. There was an organic food market, a sushi place, an Aveda salon. At the end, a pale blue sign read

CLEAR IMAGE OPEN MRI.

The ad in the phone book had listed the hours as 8 _A.M. to 6 _P.M. Daniel parked, killed the engine, and tucked a wad of jerky in his mouth.

Early darkness had fallen by the time people started trickling out of the clinic. The patients were gone by five-thirty. The doctors followed hard on their heels, well-dressed men and women heading for expensive cars. At six o’clock, a couple of receptionists in blue scrubs strolled out chatting. Daniel watched carefully, hoping he hadn’t been wrong, but neither of them stopped to lock up.