Then they were ready. There was nothing else to do. There was a kind of collective deep breath— uneasy laughter— an inability to meet the others’ eyes.

Maya, however, was still refusing to take the treatment. She was unswayed by every argument they tried. “I won’t,” she had said over and over the night before. “You’ll need a keeper in any case, in case you go crazy. I’ll do that.”

Sax had thought she would change her mind, that she was just being Maya. Now he stood before her, baffled. “I thought you were having the worst memory troubles of all.”

“Perhaps.”

“So it would make sense to try this treatment. Michel gave you lots of different drugs for mental trouble.”

“I don’t want to,” she said, looking him in the eye.

He sighed. “I don’t understand you, Maya.”

“I know.”

And she went into the old med clinic in the corner, and took on her role as their keeper for the day. Everything in there was ready, and she called them in one by one, and took up little ultrasound injectors and put them to their necks, and with a little click-hiss administered one part of the drug package, and gave them the pills that contained the rest of it, and then helped them insert the earplugs that were custom-designed for each of them, to broadcast the silent electromagnetic waves. In the kitchen they waited for everyone to finish their preparations, in a nervous silence. When they were all done Maya ushered them to the door and guided them outside. And they were off.

• • •

Sax saw and felt an image: bright lights, a feeling of his skull being crushed, choking, gasping, spitting. Chill air and his mother’s voice, like an animal’s yelp, “Oh? Oh? Oh! Oh!” Then lying wet on her chest, cold.

“Oh my.”

• • •