I have time to spend in closets with nurses because I've got a half-shift off this morning; I'm doing an experiment. There's a whole crew that's come up from Santa Barbara to run tests on me and two other patients, a very old woman named Marie and my friend Stu. We used to be epileptics, until the doctors decided that we'd probably kill ourselves seizing and cut the cables connecting the two halves of our brains. I like Stu because he smokes, and because he spins the most amazing bullshit about "Little Stu," which isn't what you'd think.

"I've got a new car," Stu tells me as he sucks down some harsh, foul vapor, then blows it out into a plume made darkly luminous by the street lamp, cut up by the rain. "LS can't figure it out. Keeps turning on the windshield wipers when I need the headlights."

"You should trade it in for something voice-activated," I say. You learn that soon after the surgery: The right side of your brain can understand language, but it can't speak. Used to learn, I should say. They don't do callosotomies for epilepsy any more—for which praise be, because there are only so many colostomy jokes a man can take. We are hot commodities, crumbling fast.

Stu shakes his head. "LS and I don't work like that," he says. "If he gets bored, he makes trouble." Little Stu's target of choice is Stu's pants—interfering with don and doff, redirecting flow at a urinal, crotch-scratching, crack-picking. Stu also unbuttons his fly in mixed company, which he blames on LS, but I suspect they are in cahoots on that. "I think he's getting Alzheimer's. Can that happen? One half of your brain gets Alzheimer's and not the other?"

"I'm not really the expert, Stu."

"Bah." He makes a scornful hand gesture and passes by me to dispose of his cigarette butt. "What do they teach you all that science for if you can't tell an old man about Alzheimer's?" He's opening a new pack as he crosses back to his spot on the steps, but then his face does something strange and the pack falls to the ground. Something odd happens with his body—he lurches into a turn, as if he's about to bolt into the drizzle that's falling contentedly from a bright sky. Then he wrenches his body back to face me full-on, looks me over, and bends carefully to pick up the cigarettes. He walks back and resumes his place to my left, then finishes opening the pack. "Everything all right, Stu?" I ask.

"Yeah." He taps a cigarette from the pack and lights it; he holds the flame steady, but the cigarette itself shivers. "What are you popping?"

"What?"

"You don't smoke any more, but now you're taking pills."

I look down. He's right—I'm holding an orange bottle in my fingertips, a pill in my palm. I shake my head. "Propanolol. For PTSD. I got mugged and stabbed, you know." I point to the messy scar on my neck. Stu squints to see it, as if through twilight.

"Man alive," he says when his eyes relax. "I'm sorry, Drake. You tell Mike and the docs? They always want to know about medication history."

"What they don't know won't hurt them." Mike and the docs pay well for our time. I don't want them to think my data might be bogus. Stu gives me a penetrating look. "I really need this, Stu. All right? I'm not going to mess up Mike's experiments. It's not like the pill is going to magically stitch my brain together."

"Ha," says Stu. "Slip me some if it does." He takes a drag and stares directly at the sun, then sends another plume of smoke through the lamplight and the shining rain. "And make sure you take it with meals."

"I do."

A police cruiser swings silently around the corner, flashing lights and high beams cutting through the peace of the morning. A cop swings out of the car, hand not as far from his gun as I'd like. He's swarthy, sandy-haired and blue-eyed, good-looking in a familiar way I can't place. "Good evening, gentlemen," he says. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to come with me."

Stu flicks his cigarette butt into a pool of shadow from a street lamp and takes in the cordon of police vehicles. "What seems to be the problem, officer?"

"Nothing personal, sir," the cop says. Stu was a cop, too, before the surgery stole his stereopsis and his aim; he's trying to leverage a sense of fraternity, but the cop's "sir" is a shutdown. "We need an accounting of the whereabouts of all hospital employees, and we're going to need to ask a few people a few questions. Most of you will be back to work in an hour or two."

"I'm a guest, not an employee," says Stu as we get up; the officer motions us toward the dock door, into the hospital. "And we've got to be an experiment. They flew up from Santa Barbara for us."

"If you can confirm that you weren't here yesterday, you can go," says the officer. He looks at my lab coat and name tag. "If you can't, we'll need to keep you."