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that’s an important part of your cognitive therapy.’
    â€˜Tell me what it is.’
    â€˜It won’t help.’
    â€˜I don’t care if it helps or not, Catherine. Please. I have to know what my name is. Not just that – who am I? Where do I live? Do my family know what’s happened to me? Are any of them coming to visit?’
    Doctor Connor flicked back a few pages in her legal pad.
    â€˜I shouldn’t really be telling you this. It’s
much
against my better judgment. I should really be giving you an AMI – that’s an Autobiographical Memory Interview. By doing that, I can test how severe your retrograde amnesia really is, and treat it accordingly.’
    â€˜Please – just tell me what my name is!’
    â€˜All right,’ she said, and read from her notes. ‘Your name is Gregory John Merrick. You live at ten forty-four Pine Street, San Francisco. You share an apartment with a work colleague, Kenneth Geary. You are a marine engineer working for Moffatt and Nichol. Your sister Sue lives in Oakland with her husband Jimmy and their two children. Your father died two years ago. Your mother now lives in Baywood Apartments close to your sister. Your sister brought her up here to see you soon after your accident and they regularly call to check on your progress.’
    She turned over two pages and said, ‘As a matter of fact, your sister called only yesterday afternoon, and spoke to Nurse Sheringham.’
    After she had finished, Michael said nothing.
    â€˜Does any of that help?’ asked Doctor Connor, after a while.
    Michael was unable to shake his head, because of his high plastic collar, but tears slid out of the side of each eye.
    â€˜I still can’t remember,’ he told her. ‘I still don’t know who I am.’
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s the way your brain works. It
can
re-route your memory paths, so that they bypass the shocked or damaged areas, but it needs you to initiate it.’
    She stood up, and tugged a Kleenex out of the box beside the bed, and dabbed his eyes for him, and helped him to blow his nose.
    â€˜How long was I asleep for?’ he asked her.
    â€˜Well, let’s put it this way, you’ve been quite the Rip Van Winkle.’
    â€˜How long, Catherine?’
    She looked at him steadily, and this time she didn’t smile. ‘Your accident happened on November eleventh. Today is February sixth. That makes it two months, three weeks, and four days.’

THREE
    T he first day that Catherine took him outside, it was bright but bitingly cold. The sky was almost completely clear, except for a few wispy mares’ tails over Mount Shasta.
    Michael was surprised to see how close the mountain was. He guessed that it couldn’t have been more than five or six miles away.
    â€˜Did you ever climb it?’ he asked Catherine.
    â€˜Once, yes, two summers ago. We got together a party from the clinic. Everything they say about that mountain is true. What can I say? It’s very serene up there. You feel closer to God, or Buddha, or whoever you believe in.’
    â€˜It’s the fifth highest peak in the Cascade Range,’ said Michael.
    He did an exaggerated double-take, and then he twisted around in his wheelchair and said, ‘How the hell did I know that?’
    But then he held up his hand and said, ‘Wait … I also happen to know that it’s four thousand three hundred twenty-two meters high, and that it has an estimated volume of eight hundred fifty cubic kilometers.’
    â€˜Well, there you are,’ said Catherine. ‘Little bits and pieces are starting to come back to you. You’re an engineer, aren’t you, so it’s not surprising you’re good on statistics.’
    She pushed him along the red-brick path to the far end of the clinic’s rose garden. The rose beds were lumpy with snow, and the roses themselves looked like nothing