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But then he suddenly thought:
Surely I must have had some ID on me, when the paramedics brought me in here? A wallet, with credit cards and a driver's license? A cellphone? And what about my license plate? The police would have been able to check my identity with the Department of Motor Vehicles.

‘Catherine,' he said.

She had been jotting notes on a yellow legal pad, but now she looked up, and he could tell by her expression that she knew what he was going to say.

‘You know my name already,' he said.

Catherine nodded. ‘I do, yes. But encouraging you to remember it yourself – that's an important part of your cognitive therapy.'

‘Tell me what it is.'

‘It won't help.'

‘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.

‘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.'

‘Please – just tell me what my name is!'

‘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.

‘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.

‘I still can't remember,' he told her. ‘I still don't know who I am.'

‘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.

‘How long was I asleep for?' he asked her.

‘Well, let's put it this way, you've been quite the Rip Van Winkle.'

‘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.'

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.

‘Did you ever climb it?' he asked Catherine.

‘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.'

‘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.'

‘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 more than frozen sticks. Michael was wearing a padded navy-blue jacket with a hood, and insulated boots, and he had a thick plaid blanket tucked around him. Catherine was wearing a brindled fox-fur coat and a bobbly white knitted hat.

They stopped, and Catherine sat down on a bench. Their breath was smoking in the cold, so that it looked from a distance as if they were taking a cigarette break.

‘Did you talk to Doctor Hamid this morning?' asked Michael. ‘Does he have any idea how much longer I'll have to stay here?'

Catherine shook her head. ‘It's really hard to say. Physically you're doing pretty well, although Doctor Hamid is still concerned about the shock sustained by your spine. That can take months to heal completely. It's your amnesia that worries us the most. We can't send you home yet because you simply can't remember where you live or where you work or even what it is that you do.

‘Your sister Sue has offered to look after you, but you need highly specialized amnesia therapy, which you can only get here. You could hardly commute from Oakland every day.'

‘So you simply don't know how long it's going to take?'

‘Based on previous patients, Gregory, I'd say three to four months. I can't be more precise than that. It may be that your neural pathways suddenly open up, and you start to remember everything in a flood. To be honest with you, though, I've only known that to happen very rarely.'

Michael sat back in his wheelchair, which creaked under his weight. He still felt chronically tired, and he ached all over, especially his shoulders and his back, and when he tried to stand up his knees gave him such jabs of pain that he had to bite his lower lip to stop himself from shouting out loud.

What tired him more than anything, though, was not being able to remember who he was. He felt as if he were banging his head against a wall, again and again, as if he were autistic. By the end of the day, he was mentally exhausted, and his brain ached as well as his body.

Even though it was partially screened by the leafless trees that surrounded the rose garden, he could clearly see the dazzling white peaks of Mount Shasta. For a split second, the sight of them brought back a flash of feeling. Not a fully formed memory, but a flicker of light and shade, a snatch of somebody's voice, and – most evocative of all – the briefest hint of some light, flowery perfume.

‘Are you all right, Gregory?' Catherine asked him. ‘You look … I don't know. You look puzzled.'

He gave her a quick, dismissive shake of his head. ‘I'm OK. Just kind of disoriented, I guess. Remember, this is the first time I've been outside in over three months, even if I was asleep for most of them.'

‘Well, I want to show you something,' said Catherine. ‘In fact, this is the whole reason I brought you out here.'

She stood up and continued to push him along the bumpy red-brick path. If he had been a small child, he would have said
errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
, so that his voice wobbled. He wondered if
that
were a memory from his childhood, his mother pushing him in a baby buggy, and in his mind's eye he tried to turn around to see his mother's face, but he couldn't.

Catherine pushed him through the brick archway at the end of the rose garden, and down a small wet concrete slope. Now they were outside the white concrete walls of the clinic, in a curving street of neat single-story houses, some of them pastel pink and some of them pastel yellow, with snow-covered roofs, all set well back from the road behind their own snow-covered front lawns. All of them had cars and SUVs parked in their driveways, but all of these were covered in snow, too, and there were no tire-tracks across the sidewalks, so it looked to Michael as if none of the residents had been out today.

The road itself had been gritted and cleared of snow, so Catherine pushed Michael along the middle. The street was sunny and almost completely silent, except for the very faint sound of a television show from one of the houses, with occasional bursts of studio laughter.

There were trees on either side, but all of these were bare. Michael thought of the words ‘
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree
' but he couldn't remember why he knew them or where they came from.

‘This is Trinity,' said Catherine. She stopped, and took a tissue out of her pocket, and dabbed her nose. ‘This is our local community.'

‘Looks pretty quiet,' said Michael. ‘In fact, I'd say “sleepy”.'

‘That's why people come to live here,' said Catherine, resuming her wheelchair-pushing. ‘They want peace, and fresh air, and good neighbors. And more peace.'

‘So where do they work? Where's the nearest town to here?'

‘Some of them are retired, but most of them work from home. One or two of them have businesses in Redding or Yreka. I think one of them is a personal injury lawyer. But of course nobody's at work today because it's Saturday.'

She kept on pushing him along the street, around the curve, until they came to a wide-open area like a playing-field, with houses all around it. A young girl in a red duffel coat was walking a shaggy white sheepdog around the edge of the field, while another young girl in a pink windbreaker was circling around and around her on a bicycle.

The girl on the bicycle pedaled up to Michael and Catherine and began to circle around Michael's wheelchair. She had frizzy brown hair fastened with wooden beads into bunches. Her face was very pale and she had a livid pink lightning-flash scar on her left temple. It almost looked as if somebody had hit her with a machete.

‘Who are
you
?' she asked Michael. ‘I never saw
you
before. Are you a cripple?'

Catherine said, ‘His name's Gregory, Jemima, and he was hurt in a car crash. But he's getting better and soon he'll be walking again, so you'd better watch what you say to him or else he's going to come after you when he can walk and give you a pasting.'

Jemima kept on circling around and around. ‘He'd better not
try
! I'll tell my mom, else.'

The girl with the sheepdog called out, ‘Come
on
, Jem! We're going to be late!'

‘Where are you going?' Michael asked her. ‘Anyplace exciting?'

Jemima tapped the side of her nose with her finger and said, ‘Mind your own beeswax, Mr Nosy Parker Cripple!'

With that, she furiously pedaled off to catch up with her friend.

‘Kids!' said Catherine. ‘Mind you, I was probably worse than that when I was her age. I was always getting myself into scrapes!'

Michael would have liked to have been able to say ‘me, too!' but he couldn't remember his childhood at all. Nothing. He couldn't remember if he had ever owned a bicycle, or roller-skates, or even if he had ever climbed trees.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree
.

Catherine continued to push him around the playing field. The sun was shining on the snow so brightly that it was difficult to look at it without being dazzled. As he lifted his gloved hand to shield his eyes, Michael had another momentary flash of feeling, like the sensation he had experienced in the rose garden. The sound of a voice – maybe a woman's voice. A flicker of light, and the faint smell of some floral perfume. Then it was gone.

Looking across the playing field, he saw two forlorn basketball posts, their nets clotted with snow. What he thought was strange, though, was that there were no footprints in the snow, none at all, human or animal. No ski-tracks or sledge-tracks, either, which he would have expected, especially so close to a winter resort like Mount Shasta, where almost everybody must own a pair of skis or a sledge or at least a child's toboggan.

He thought of mentioning the playing field's pristine condition to Catherine, but he decided not to, although he didn't quite know why. Instead, he said, ‘So, Catherine! Where are you taking me? Or are
you
going to tell me to mind my own beeswax, too?'

‘I'm taking you right
here
,' said Catherine. She pushed him up the snowy slope in front of a pale yellow house and then maneuvered his wheelchair through the narrow space beside a snow-covered Jeep Compass. As they approached the front porch, the door opened, and a young woman appeared, smiling and lifting her hand in greeting.

‘Isobel! Hi!' called Catherine. She turned Michael's wheelchair around so that she could heave it backward up the two front steps. The young woman took one side of it and helped her to lift it over the ledge into the hallway.

‘Now I
do
feel like a cripple,' said Michael.

‘Oh, don't be so silly,' Catherine scolded him. ‘You're just recuperating, that's all!'

She turned the wheelchair around and pushed Michael through to the living room. There was a wide bay window, with a window-seat, but natural-colored calico blinds had been drawn right down to the window sills, so that the light in the living-room was pale and muted.

Michael looked around. The room was furnished with two traditional armchairs and a bulky couch, all upholstered in a busy floral fabric. On the left-hand wall there was a sandstone fireplace with a gas log fire blazing in it, and over the fireplace hung a large framed print of a log cabin, in a gloomy forest, with three or four trappers gathered outside it.

Below the print, on a varnished pine shelf, stood a collection of small china figurines, most of them dogs or Native Americans in buckskins or Disney characters like Bambi and Thumper – although, if anybody had asked him, Michael wouldn't have been able to remember what their names were.