You’re not going to do that to me, he told the passing buildings, the skyline, the river.

“It doesn’t look like such a tough town,” he said.

The truck driver looked at him in surprise. Their conversation had unraveled its way into tired silence eighty miles back, between Hartford and Worcester, following a tight, terse disagreement over the John Birch Society. Now the man said something indistinct which was lost against the thrum of the truck’s motor.

Adam shook his head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand you.”

“What’s the matter, you deaf?”

“A little. Just in my left ear.”

The man frowned, suspecting mockery. “I said, you got a job waiting?”

Adam nodded.

“Doing what?”

“I’m a surgeon.”

The driver looked at him in disgust, confident now that his suspicions were justified. “Sure, you beatnik punk. I’m an astronaut.”

He opened his mouth to explain and then thought to hell with him and shut it again and concentrated on the scenery. Poking up through the murk on the other side of the Charles River he could see white spires, undoubtedly Harvard. Somewhere over there was Radcliffe College and Gaby Pender sleeping like a pussycat, he thought, wondering how long he could wait before he called her. Would she remember him? A quotation came to his mind uninvited—something about how often a man needs to see a woman—that once is sufficient, but twice may confirm it.

Within his head the little computer told him who was the author of the lines. As usual, the ability to remember a non-medical reference filled him with bilious discontent instead of pride. A waster of words, he could hear his father say. Adamo Roberto Silverstone, you smug bastard, he told himself, see where the gift of memory is when you’re struggling with something from Thorek’s Anatomy in Surgery or Wangensteen’s Intestinal Obstruction.

In a little while the man swung the wheel and the truck lumbered off Storrow Drive and down a ramp and suddenly there were lighted warehouse windows, trucks, cars, people, a market district. The driver tooled the van down one street of cobblestones, past a diner whose neon still flashed, and up another long cobblestoned street, stopping before BENJ. MORETTI & SONS PRODUCE. In answer to his horn a man emerged and peered at them from the loading platform. Beefy and balding, in his white smock he looked not unlike one of the pathologists at the Georgia hospital where Adam had taken his internship and first year of residency. Eh, paisan.

“What you got?”

The driver belched, a sound like carpet ripping. “Melons. Persians.” The man in white nodded and disappeared.

“End of the line, kid.” The driver opened the door and climbed heavily down from the cab.

Adam reached behind the seat, took up the worn valpak and joined the other man on the ground. “Can I help you unload?”

The driver scowled at him with suspicion. “They do it,” he said, jerking his head toward the warehouse. “You want a job, you ask them.”