The question is surprising to me, and I am realizing I am never asking myself this question. “No,” I say back.

“So many memories. And they are all just as vivid and immediate to you as if they had happened yesterday. Even if they never happened to you.”

I am tensing, because she is speaking differently than before. She is speaking like doctor or scientist and not like prisoner.

“Your finger touches the floor and feels it. And it tells your brain that it is like that time your finger touched another surface, some experience your finger stores, then sends to your brain, and it gets tied up and cross-referenced to other experiences that you could have—holding a shovel or a gun or maybe the trunk of a tree—and that memory of the floor, of concrete, gets embedded there, so the two become linked. And there must be so much disorder. Without that human capacity for apophenia. For ordering these things, imposing a pattern on your memories, telling a story of self. I can’t imagine what that must feel like.”

“Is not your problem,” I am telling Ify in a low voice. I am angering because I am knowing that she is trying to confuse me and this is somehow supposed to be resulting in me letting her go and disobeying Xifeng.

But Ify is still talking like she is never hearing me, and I am wondering if this is all something she has been wanting to say for a long time and is not finding chance to say until now. “The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that there are two kinds of memory in our heads. There’s the one kind that debates with itself as to whether the sky had clouds in it or whether it was clear the afternoon of the drone strike. The kind where, by force of will, you’re able to place the detail, to put the puzzle pieces together. Then there’s the other kind. The kind that sneaks up on you. Or the kind that you stumble upon when you open an unfamiliar door in a hallway and find yourself in an open field, crouched before a hibiscus blossom.” She pauses and looks as though she is remembering where she is. Her friend, Grace, is looking at her strangely, with sadness but also pride. “I thought you and Agu were only capable of one type of memory. But I know the other type lives in you as well.” She is stopping, then closing her eyes, and I am feeling gratitude that she is finally shutting up. But then she is swaying back and forth in her seat, and I am squinting at her. Then I am seeing that her vital sign is changing and her body temperature is falling fast fast and her heart rate is slowing and slowing and if it is keeping like this, it will soon be stopping.