“I don’t know what happened,” Marissa said groggily. “All at once I was back at the clinic having a biopsy. Something keyed off a replay of the bad trip I’d had from ketamine.” She glanced back into the restaurant. People were at the window, staring out at her. She felt foolish and embarrassed as well as scared. It had been so real.

Robert put his arms around her. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

He walked her to the car. Marissa held back, her mind frantically trying to find some answers. She’d never lost control to such a degree. Never. What was happening to her? Was she going crazy?

They climbed into the car. Robert didn’t start it immediately. “Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked. The episode had unnerved him.

Marissa nodded. “At this point I’m just scared,” she said. “I’ve never experienced anything like that. I don’t know what set it off. I know I’ve been overly emotional lately, but that hardly seems like an explanation. I was hungry, but I certainly can’t blame it on that. Maybe it was that pungent smell in there. The nerves of smell connect directly with the limbic system in the brain.” Marissa was searching for a physiological explanation so she wouldn’t have to probe for a psychological one.

“I’ll tell you what it says to me,” Robert said. “It tells me you’ve been taking too many drugs. All those hormones can’t be good for you. I think it is just one more sign we should stop this in-vitro nonsense. Pronto.”

Marissa didn’t say anything. She was scared enough to think that perhaps Robert was right.

5
March 21, 1990
7:47 A.M.

“Want to flip to see who does the incision?” Ken Mueller said to Greg Hommel, the junior pathology resident who had been assigned to him for a month’s rotation doing postmortems. Ken was particularly pleased with Greg. The kid was eager and smart as a whip. Ken smiled to himself calling Greg a kid; the guy was only five years younger than himself.

“Heads I win, tails you lose,” Greg said.

“Flip,” Ken said, already engrossed in the chart. The patient was a thirty-three-year-old woman who’d fallen six stories into a rhododendron planter.

“Tails!” Greg called out. “You lose.” He laughed happily.

Greg loved doing posts. Whereas some of the other junior residents hated it, he thought it was a gas; a detective story wrapped up in the mystery of a body.

Ken didn’t share Greg’s enthusiasm for posts, but he accepted his teaching responsibilities with equanimity, especially with a resident like Greg. Yet looking at the patient’s chart, he felt a little irritated. It had been well over twenty-four hours since the patient’s death, and Ken liked to do posts as soon as possible. He thought he was able to learn more.