“This Dr. Agawa. She stay all over!”

Dr. Agawa—Japanese, slim, petite, sweet-faced—turned out to be a surfer, running a clinic in the Solomon Islands. “My clinic was on Santa Isabel, so I’m lucky. Good surf at Papatura.”

“Good surf here,” Luana said. “Da bess. Big, da waves!”

“I’m locum here for this month,” Dr. Agawa said to Olive.

“How are you liking it?”

Before she could answer, Luana said, “Funny case today. Family members bring him in. Got no mojo, they said. Just staring out the window. Not eating.”

As though to calm Luana’s ebullience, Dr. Agawa lowered her head and said in an earnest whisper, “Give-up-itis—it’s a serious condition.”

“Give-up-itis is a diagnosis?” Olive said.

“I’ve seen it in the Solomons. It’s been written about. You know, abulia—lack of willpower, someone fading away.”

“Sort of suicide?” Luana said.

“No. It’s involuntary,” Dr. Agawa said. “Voodoo death.”

“I adore these rarefied scientific names,” Olive said.

“That’s what a certain Dr. Cannon called it. He’s the fight-or-flight guy.”

Luana said, “A Hawaiian woman eats a coconut under the kapu system. She realizes she broke the kapu and she stops eating. Stops everything. Pretty soon she wen’ make. Old Hawaii tradition.”

“Psychogenic death,” Dr. Agawa said.

Olive said, “From breaking a taboo?”

“Or any serious trauma. You know how trauma affects the nerve circuits in the brain. It can cause the anterior cingulate circuit to malfunction—kills motivation. How do you survive in life if you have no motivation? The next phase is apathy. Give-up-itis. It’s been studied.”

“In the Solomons?”

“All over. Concentration camps. Prisons. Situations of extreme desperation. People give up. Maybe that guy this morning.”

“But they don’t know they’re traumatized?” Olive said.

“I guess they’re not really conscious of anything,” Dr. Agawa said.

Luana widened her eyes and spoke to Olive. “Awesome, eh?”

That evening she returned to the house before dark so that she could load her things into her car to take them to her room at the hospital, the same one she’d used for her previous escape—but she’d find a better place eventually.

She was thrown by seeing cars in the driveway, a motorcycle she recognized—one of his surfer friends—and the orange-and-white pickup truck of the lifeguard rescue patrol, its warning lights flashing, a jet ski mounted on the trailer.

“He’s going to be all right,” someone said insistently to her as she mounted the stairs, and the urgency of it made it sound insincere. Men and boys, barefoot in board shorts, crowded the lanai. A man in a long-sleeved lifeguard shirt walked quickly toward her, more to prevent her from entering the house than to console her.