Even if he signed up, I wouldn’t know which group he belonged to. Might have been in one of the control groups. In the control groups we stick the jellyfish on their head, press the right buttons, but either they get no electrical pulses at all, or the electrical pulses are random, not controlled by biofeedback. She blows on her coffee. Why do you ask?

Logan stares at her face; nothing he can hook into, nothing he can read.

Does the process eradicate guilt? he asks.

Yes, she says. Yes, it does.

And you think that’s a good thing?

She smiles.

Do you have any guilt, Logan?

He is on the verge of saying no when the faces begin to crowd in. The truth: there is barely anyone he has known he doesn’t feel guilty about. Rachel, whom he had both failed to read and failed to leave, only to abandon her eventually to single motherhood and now, like him, the isolation of bereavement. Poor Johanna, with whom he had repeated the pattern so disastrously that she had cursed their son with the memory of walking in on her corpse. Yes, Tom – Tom, who rightly despised him. Jules. Even the dog—

Logan, she says softly, would you feel better without it?

How can I feel better when I can’t behave better? How would any of us stop hurting others, if we didn’t feel guilt?

What if we can’t behave better until we feel better?

Sorry?

You’ve been feeling guilty for a long time, she says. Has it stopped you hurting people?

He turns his mug around. Experiments, it says. Still too hot.

But people should feel guilty. For doing bad things. It would be inhuman not to.

What good does it do? she asks.

Images loom in his mind, April’s beatific smile, Merriweather, remorseless, and What if someone’s killed someone?

Does guilt bring the dead back?

But they should suffer! People should suffer for the wrong they do!

She scoots her chair forward on its wheels and takes his hand.

Say you could start afresh, she says. Shake off your past. As though you were almost – her gaze dances briefly to the ceiling as she stretches for the words – a brand-new person inhabiting the same body. Like – like the person you would have been had you grown up with perfect, loving parents in a perfect, loving world. Would you have ever hurt anyone, if you’d never been hurt?

He doesn’t know. How could he know?

Your friend, she says. What makes you think he’s undergone the process?

No guilt, says Logan. No remorse.

That’s not the same thing, she says. Guilt and remorse. What should he feel guilty about or remorseful for?