Memory lapses, attention problems, spacing out, trouble processing information. It can happen even after the treatments stop. It can even get worse after the treatments stop. Cognitive dysfunction. It can last for years, in some cases for the rest of a person’s life. I could give you a ton of examples, she said.

Once, mailing a package, she addressed it to herself instead of the person she meant to send it to. She went to buy shoes, and even though she tried them on she ended up buying the wrong size. Then she did the same thing buying pants. She kept losing things: keys, wallet, phone.

Everything I wrote had to be proofread a hundred times, she said, and each time I found at least one error I’d missed before. I couldn’t trust my judgment about anything anymore. Twenty percent to the driver, I’d be thinking. Then in my confusion I’d make it twenty dollars.

I wanted to ask her then how she could trust the momentous decision that had brought us here. How did she know that wasn’t chemo brain too?

II

The wonder of certain coincidences.

Checking the time, I tap my phone, which is sitting on top of a book on my desk, which happens to be Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04, and see that the time is 10:04.

Reading about a new movie while holding the cat against my shoulder. At the instant I come to the word vampire, the cat, which has never bitten me before, sinks its teeth in my neck.

On Columbus Day I see that my checking account balance is exactly $1,492.

A violent altercation between two men reported in the news. A white man and a black man. The white man’s surname is Black, the black man’s is White.

And here, in this house, on a bookshelf in the living room: A psychological thriller in the tradition of Highsmith and Simenon, set in the seamy noirish world of seventies New York.

Not so wondrous. Lots of people have the same books. What is wondrous is that the book is dog-eared at the very page—the beginning of a new chapter—where, last time, I left off.