one should toss about. “The institute is a thing of beauty, but Luke must go.”
“Of course,” Toby agrees with a yawn.
“He’s brought back an ex-officio president, and the two of them are attempting to hijack the place.” Toby still doesn’t get it: not only is Jasper’s job on the line but the future of the institute. “They’re plotting to get rid of me. It’s a strategic ouster.”
This snaps Toby to attention. “Can they do that?”
“Luke is omnipotent.”
Toby doesn’t believe a word of this, for it is Jasper who is omnipotent.
With his free hand Jasper throws the boy’s dirty socks into the laundry hamper. Before tossing his jeans into the same pile, he slides an empty box of Smarties from the rear pocket. Not quite empty: a solo red bead sticks to the bottom. When Toby arrived at the halfway house all those years ago in the middle of winter, he pulled his guitar out of its battered case and launched into the mournful Sarabande while snow melted in his hair. Jasper stood in the doorway holding the discharge file while residents trickled in and out of the room, oblivious to the divine sound that had entered their realm. The boy was achingly thin after his hospital stay, a frail bird waiting for Jasper to rescue him.
“How do your colleagues sound?” Jasper asks.
“I avoid listening.”
“You don’t want to be influenced?”
“I don’t want to be scared.” Toby gives a crackly laugh.
“Are you eating well?” Jasper probes.
“Like a field hand.”
Jasper feels the boy holding back information. This is not a good sign: his secrets are such a burden to him.
“I’m perfectly all right,” Mrs. Ivy Cronin assures Jasper. “It was just a nasty bout of the flu.”
Jasper nods in an encouraging way but says nothing.
“Monkey flu,” she says. “It jumped species. Don’t you find that interesting?” She stops for a moment to marvel. “I was on a ventilator for ten days, but you know all that.”
“You’ve had a rough time.”
“And look at me now,” she says, spreading her arms wide.
What Jasper sees is a handsome but gaunt woman with coifed hair whose voice, still hoarse from the ventilator tube, is bravely chipper.
“Let’s start with a few questions,” he says, pen poised over the clipboard. They’re sitting in the lounge area of the institute overlooking the boulevard many floors below.
Mrs. Cronin hasn’t touched her coffee or the bowl of nuts, but then neither has Jasper. It strikes him that she might have difficulty swallowing, and he makes a mental note to offer yogourt from the staff fridge. Choking disorders aren’t uncommon in these cases. New Age, vaguely Indonesian music, a mistake to his mind, wafts from overhead speakers. Luke cites research on its tranquilizing properties.
“Ivy, do you know what day of the week it is?”
His client smiles evenly. “Do I care?”
Jasper presses on, used to such evasion. “Let’s just say that I do.”
“Is this a trap?”
“By no means.”
“Because I’m not going back to that place. Wild horses can’t drag me.”
“Don’t worry,” Jasper assures her. “You’ve graduated with flying colours.” This is true. Ivy was a woman fighting for her life and mind less than a month ago.
“So ask me something interesting.” Ivy leans forward in her chair. “Given the fact that I’ve stared death in the face.” Her eyes are milky with medication. She left hospital fifteen days ago, her departure a media event, cameras recording each movement as she was helped from a wheelchair into a waiting car.
“All right, where were you born?”
She lets out a barking laugh, a sound that causes the intern, Rachel, to poke her head around the doorway.
“I’ve been reborn,” Ivy proclaims. “From the chrysalis of pain to my present state.”
“Why do you think you’re here?”
For a moment Jasper fears she isn’t going to answer, but she releases a long breath and says, “Because I’ve forgotten nearly everything. I can hardly dress myself in the morning, and they won’t let me near the kitchen.”
“I can help,” Jasper says, “if you’ll agree to work with me.”
Ivy looks dismayed. “You have no idea, do you?”
“We’ve found notable improvements in such cases.”
“What I really long to remember,” Ivy says, “is being sick.” She hesitates, then offers with a burst of intensity, “Where was I then?”
The panicked stare is chillingly familiar; Ashok, the Emergency Room physician, gazes at Jasper the same way. The illness takes them on an arduous journey to another country, and when they return, they’ve forgotten how things are done here. Mrs. Cronin, according to her file, ran a garden nursery before getting ambushed by the virus.
“How can I possibly return,” she says, “if I don’t know where I’ve been?”
When Jasper suggests they develop a recovery plan, she gives him a pained look.
“We might start with a short routine you can easily follow,” he says.
That look again. Some might call it blank, but Jasper knows better. Ashok says he lost his limbs and was just a floating head during his illness, surrounded by string instead of air. Another time he was an aquatic creature nosing at his own inert body. No one came to see him for months, years.
“Is there something in particular you’d like to learn to do?” Jasper asks.
Ivy brightens. “I’ve never been able to remember a joke and tell it right.”
Toby practises his bows in front of the dormitory mirror, bobbing up and down like a manservant. Ten points will be awarded for presentation, and bowing is a minefield of potential indignity. You don’t want to look like a fool before you begin to play. He grabs the guitar by the scruff of the neck, then bends deeply beside it, demonstrating the dead-chicken bow. Next, as practised by the dazzling Romero brothers, he stuffs the instrument under one arm like a surfboard and strides across the floor, smiling and nodding at an imaginary audience.
Bad idea. The mirror reflects a taut, crazed expression that would spook anyone. He circles the common room, edging past the weathered tables and scuffed chairs, then returns to the ad hoc stage, this time mimicking Scottish virtuoso David Russell. He holds the guitar horizontally in front of him like a magician about to perform a levitation caper, then rotates the instrument so the sound hole faces outward
