As the town car coasts down through the switchbacks in the dark hills Thales tries to make a phone call from the car’s computer. Some indefinite number of calls have already failed and he’s accepted that they always will and now he’s absently fast-scrolling through the contacts list, placing doomed calls without looking, and as he does wonders who decided the family could make do with such useless electronics.
He expects to once again hear the dull bleat that means another failure but instead he hears a ringing, and looking down at the car’s screen he sees he’s dialed the surgeon, and feels a twinge of social distress—it’s hardly etiquette to call this late, absent a medical emergency.
“Thales,” says the surgeon, perfectly composed and somewhat distant even at this hour.
“I’m surprised I got through.”
“What’s the problem? Have you been losing yourself in the mathematics?”
Thales thinks of the madwoman, his gaps in memory, his mother’s absence. A degree of amnesia is to be expected, given his injuries, but when he first came to LA he could remember Brazil, he thinks—it’s only since his collapse in the tunnel by the beach that it’s disappeared, and if the surgeon can edit his memories then is this forgetting by design, and what does the surgeon not want him to remember?
“When I collapsed, what was happening to me?” he asks, not wanting to approach the issue too directly.
“Why do you ask?”
“I’d just like to know what’s going on in my life.”
“It was a natural part of the progression of your injury. It’s useless to dwell on it.”
“So there was no … additional damage?” He wonders if he used to be different—he’s heard of brain injury causing changes in personality.
“Do you feel that something’s strange, or that you’re missing part of your memory?”
He feels a fleeting impulse to be honest with his doctor but despite its superficial innocence the question is so perfectly apropos that Thales’ skin crawls and he says, “What? No. I feel fine,” simulating naivete, surprising himself with the conviction of his performance. “Why do you ask?”
“I’ll see you soon. Call me if you have any problems.”
Before the surgeon can ring off Thales says, “Have you spoken with my mother recently?”
“Yes. She’s fine. She’ll call you soon.”
The line goes dead and Thales is left staring at the phone, wondering what to make of their inconclusive verbal fencing, but his eyes turn to the undulations of the hills and he wonders what geologies, what vanished seas shaped them, and what stories are encoded in their forms, and in the wind moving through the grasses, and in the crumbling mounds of grey rock, and then, as the car rounds a bend, the city is revealed like a magic trick. The moonlight reflects palely on the loops of road incising the miles of hillside below him and in the far distance are the graded shadows of the mountains and out over the sea the lights of some new complex rise like a river of light, its heights lost in the fog, and now the car accelerates as it turns and it feels like the city is drawing him in.