“That’s a place my arse has not been before.”

“With some luck, your arse will find another place to sit soon, Elisa.” He imitates my accent so perfectly that I stop reaching and gape at him. He is making no effort at all to hide the fact that he is peeking under my dress.

“Your Oxford accent is flawless!” I blurt out—almost like an accusation. Now I’m seriously consumed with his brain. “Have you lived in England?” What else makes sense?

“I have visited.”

“But how do you get the pronunciation so right? I’ve tried to speak with an American accent for the last four years!”

He laughs. “It most definitely has not worked, although you’ve adopted the jargon. Now, I can stay here all day, staring at your delectable legs and these rather fetching cotton knickers but I’d prefer to shred them in private. So, show me what you need to show me because there is only so much a man can tolerate.” He slides his hand under my dress, tracing his fingers upward.

“Okay, okay, here it is.” I reach for the familiar tome. He slides me down, my body flush with his.

“The Science of Poverty Eradication?” he reads, his eyebrows arching.

“I know, I know, technical titles but look.” I flip to page 845 and point. “This is what you helped me live today.”

He takes the book, his pupils zooming in on the text. His mouth opens into a perfect O.

“‘The Hunger Genome’, by Peter Andrew Snow and Elisa Cecilia Snow,” he reads slowly. “This is what you wrote when you were sixteen!”

I nod, unable to speak. He looks utterly engrossed, unlike Reagan’s yawn or Javier’s roll of the eyes, which are much more understandable reactions than this fascination. He starts flipping through the pages but I yank it from his hands.

“Oh, you don’t have to read it. I only wanted to show you because it meant a lot to me to meet Fleming today. Come, let’s go read more fun things.”

“More fun than ‘If there ever was a responsibility for humans—one which we should not pass along but accomplish—it is to eliminate that which will eliminate our offspring. Through the production of synthetic NPY/AGRP and POMC, we can embed in our DNA artificial sequences that not only satiate hunger but also extinguish it.’” He quotes the article without looking at it once.

I stare at him, gobsmacked, until a hand waving in front of my face brings me to my senses.

“How did you do that?” I blubber. “You just quoted straight from page 879 but there’s no way you could have read that far. Have you read this before?”

“No.”

I think back through my experiences with him and suddenly, it all clicks. “You have photographic memory, don’t you?”

He tilts his head side to side. “Not exactly.”

For a moment, it looks like he is not going to say more but then he frowns as he makes a decision. He runs his hand over the span of a shelf, looking at me.

“I have a version of eidetic memory, Elisa.”

What? “Are you serious? I thought eidetic memory was a myth,” I manage, remembering my cognitive psychology professor griping that people overuse the term total recall.

“True eidetic memory may well be a myth. Memory is not fully understood. That’s why I say I have a version of it.” He smiles kindly. He has obviously met skepticism before.

“Will you explain it to me? How does it work?” I marvel, wondering if he will let me scan his skull with Reed’s MRI machine so I can look inside.

“Well, it’s broader than photographic memory. I don’t remember only what I read and see, but also what I hear, taste, experience, feel—the full gamut of perception. Once I perceive something, every time I think of it, I will re-experience the same feelings and reactions with perfect clarity. It doesn’t apply just to emotional experiences, but also to mundane ones.” He chuckles, no doubt because my jaw has left and is running to the neuroscience section.

“This is how you knew I was the woman in the painting and Javier was the painter! You remembered even my throat and his paint stains, didn’t you?”

He smiles. “Yes. Those are the obvious parts. Sight. Sound. Centifolia’s smell. It’s why I can play the piano without looking. Why I can sound just like you or even Fleming.” He switches to perfect Mancunian accent. “Why I take no pictures or notes.”

“What about the nonobvious parts? Will you show me some more, please?” I beg shamelessly with a spawning terror that I just lost any hope of ever wanting another man.

He chuckles and takes my hand, heading back to the Purple Room. Fleming is nowhere in sight. “Here’s an example you may know. You said you arrived here on August 24, 2011.”

“Yes,” I breathe, expecting everything from the sound of a Boeing triple-seven coming from his mouth to more accents from British Airways.

“Well, I remember vividly what I did that day.” He winds deeper into the maze. “It was seventy-six degrees Fahrenheit. I had an omelet and four slices of bacon for breakfast, grilled wild salmon for lunch at Ringside, which cost twenty-eight dollars, and spaghetti with meatballs for dinner. I made fourteen business calls, sent one hundred and seventeen emails and read the paper where I learned that the summer Olympics ended in China and Judge Kaplan of Oregon District Court ruled against a local company on logging violations.” He turns on Aisle 422 and reaches on shelf sixteen for a law textbook.

“Page one twenty-seven, paragraph three from the bottom.” He hands it to me.

I skim the book and there it is! Judge Kaplan’s opinion, verbatim. I think I just had an orgasm. With my brain.

“Bloody hell! You’re absolutely right! That day I bought the paper when I landed, and I’ve read it so many times over the years. I remember the news about the summer Olympics except you probably only read it once.” I resolve to dig the paper out of my closet later and read it again.

“That’s why I picked that date. I thought it would stick out for you. And of course, you already know that’s the day I bought my house. I must have known you were coming.”

He is not trying to be romantic. He reports this in his usual factual way. But it’s the most intimate confession of his feelings he has made. I can’t resist. I throw my arms around his neck, reaching for his lips like they might soothe this cerebral fire. But they only fuel it further.

He laughs. “Does my place turn you on?”

“No, you turn me on.”

“Elisa, I think you have a fetish for men with strange brains.”

“Yes, I really think I do.”

“By all means, be my guest.” He brings my lips back to his but now I’m alert again. I want to know more. There is something about what he said that is hinting at the curse behind the blessing.

“You said you also remember every emotion?”

I’ve hit something because the tectonic plates shift in his eyes. Now I realize the secret behind those eyes. They zoom and absorb and shift because he is living in many places and times all at once.

“Yes, I remember emotion.” His words are guarded, his voice harder. I know I have minutes, maybe seconds, before his sudden disclosure ends.

I sort through thousands of questions for the most relevant. “Can you ever forget?”

He smiles without his dimple and brushes his fingers against my cheek. He takes the book from my hand and tucks it back in its spot without looking.

“No, Elisa. I cannot.”

“Never?”

“Some doctors theorize it will wane with age. But since age seven when we first discovered it, I have noticed zero difference.”

His voice is slower, heavier, as though the memories of his thirty-five years are weighing it down. No matter how astonishing I find his brain, it just occurred to me what a fearsome sentence this must be.

“Do you wish you could forget?”

He smiles. “Some things, yes. Others—like the way you look right now—no.”

I walk into his arms and caress his stubble. “And the things you wish you could forget? Are those what make you tense this way?” I risk the thesis question.