His chest expanded as though I’d breathed into him. Resuscitated for the moment, only later would he confess that his work had done much more. To be sure, I hadn’t known Camille before the procedure. The absentmindedness that had been so endearing, and by no means abnormal, was now an alarming indication of the procedure’s effect. I remembered: Camille losing track of time; Camille misplacing a teaspoon though she still held it in her hand; Camille missing the trolley stop she’d used for ages. It turned out these were all a very small price to pay for extracting ten months of her life in one sitting, but it was a first glimpse of what—in other patients—would be called a fractured or fragmented mind.

The next time I sat in the Professor’s office, there was a man with us whose price had been markedly higher. If Camille was pleasantly absentminded, Walter Gordon was so distractible as to appear simple. He’d been meeting with the Professor for several years by the time I observed one of his sessions, and though I occupied a visible seat in the corner, the man said to have eyes all over Chicago never noticed me.

He was the typical portrait of the kind of man who patronized the Professor’s clinic. It wasn’t love or death and it was rarely betrayal that sent them there. While women came desiring any number of memories extracted and for a variety of reasons, it seemed that men had an almost singular experience with which they couldn’t make peace.

He’d earned their removal, Walter told the Professor. He’d made a name for himself—though he had to share it with his father—and he’d told himself that only when his fortune was made did he deserve to be rid of the ugly past that chased him there.

It wasn’t the memory of his father’s swift hand he needed to forget. Not exactly. It was the humiliation of being hit, of flinching and drawing back, of being a small boy in the first place. Of being helpless, or at least of thinking he’d been. But when those memories were gone, it seemed the humiliation stayed behind, infecting other memories that had at first seemed more benign.