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It was a statement, though John knew it for a question. “No,” he answered, shaking his head.

In the sanatorium, there was more than enough to occupy one’s day. Those seeking exercise could use the cricket pitch, badminton court, and swimming pool, while those of a less strenuous bent could retire to the snooker room and social club. In his days at Holloway, though, John had been content to do little but sit in an eastern facing room in the mornings, in a western facing room in the afternoons, sitting always in the sunlight. It was as though he were a flower seeking out as many of the sun’s rays as possible in the brief time remaining to him. The less charitably minded might even accuse him of seeking out the light through some fear of shadows, since by night the electric lights in his room were never extinguished, and when he slept it was in a red-lidded darkness, never black.

“Tell me, Dr. Watson,” Rhys continued, glancing up from his notes, “have you given any further thought to our discussion yesterday?”

John sighed. Rhys was an earnest young man, who had studied with Freud in Vienna, and who was fervent in his belief that science and medicine could cure all ills. When John first arrived in Holloway weeks before, he had taken this passion as encouraging, but as the days wore on and his condition failed to improve, his own aging enthusiasms had begun to wane.

Had Watson ever been so young, so convinced of the unassailable power of knowledge? He remembered working in the surgery at St. Bartholomew’s, scarcely past his twentieth birthday, his degree from the University of London still years in his future. The smell of the surgery filled his nostrils, and he squinted against the glare of gaslights reflecting off polished tiles, the sound of bone saws rasping in his ears.

“Dr. Watson?”

John blinked, to find Rhys’ hand on his knee, a concerned look on his face.

“I’m sorry,” John managed. “My mind … drifted.”

Rhys nodded sympathetically. “Memory is a pernicious thing, Dr. Watson. But it is still a wonder and a blessing. After our meeting yesterday I consulted my library, and found some interesting notes on the subject. Are you familiar with Pliny’s Naturalis Historia?”

John dipped his head in an abbreviated nod. “Though my Latin was hardly equal to the task in my days at Wellington.”

Rhys flipped back a few pages in his moleskin-bound notebook. “Pliny cites several historical cases of prodigious memory. He mentions the Persian king Cyrus, who could recall the name of each soldier in his army, and Mithridates Eupator, who administered his empire’s laws in twenty-two languages, and Metrodorus, who could faithfully repeat anything he had heard only once.”

John managed a wan smile. “It is a fascinating list, doctor, but I’m afraid that my problem involves the loss of memory, not its retention.”

Rhys raised a finger. “Ah, but I suspect that the two are simply different facets of the same facility. I would argue, Dr. Watson, that nothing is ever actually forgotten, in the conventional sense. It is either hidden away, or never remembered at all.”

“Now I am afraid you have lost me.”

“Freud teaches that repression is the act of expelling painful thoughts and memories from our conscious awareness by hiding them in the subconscious. If you were having difficulty recalling your distant past, I might consider repression a culprit. But your problem is of a different nature, in that your past memories are pristine and acute, but your present recollections are transient and thin.”

John chuckled, somewhat humorlessly. “I remember well enough that I described my own condition to you in virtually the same terms upon my arrival.”

Rhys raised his hands in a gesture of apology. “Forgive me, I tend to forget your own medical credentials, and have a bad habit of extemporizing. But tell me, doctor, what do you know of Freud’s theories concerning the reasons dreams are often forgotten on waking?”

John shook his head. “More than the man on the Clapham omnibus, I suppose, but considerably