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physical description of her, including information about her age, height, weight, hair color, and eye color. At the bottom of the card, an employee identification number was printed in red ink. Nothing else.
     
    Dr. McGee stood beside the bed, looking down at her as she examined the card. “Does it help?”
     
    “No,” she said.
     
    “Not just a little bit?”
     
    “I can’t remember seeing this before.”
     
    She turned the card over and over in her hands, straining to make a connection, trying hard to switch on the current of memory. She couldn’t possibly have been more amazed by the card if it had been an artifact from a nonhuman civilization and had just that very minute been brought back from the planet Mars; it could not have been more alien.
     
    “It’s all so weird,” she said. “I’ve tried to remember back to when I last went to work, the day before I started my vacation. I can recall some of it. Parts of the day are crystal clear. I remember getting up that morning, having breakfast, glancing at the newspaper. That’s all as fresh in my mind as the memory of the lunch I just ate. I recall going into the garage that morning, getting in the car, starting the engine...” She let her voice trail off as she stared down at the card. She fingered that small rectangle as if she were a clairvoyant feeling for some sort of psychic residue on the plastic. “I remember backing the car out of my driveway that morning... and the next thing I remember is ... coming home again at the end of the day. In between, there’s nothing but blackness, emptiness. And that’s the way it is with all my memories of work, not just that day but every day. No matter how I try to sneak up on them, they elude me. They aren’t there in the mist. Those memories simply don’t exist any more.”
     
    Still standing beside the bed, McGee spoke to her in a soft, encouraging voice. “Of course they exist, Susan. Nudge your subconscious a little bit. Think about sitting behind the wheel of your car that morning.”
     
    “I have thought about it.”
     
    “Think about it again.”
     
    She closed her eyes.
     
    “It was probably a typical August day in Southern California,” he said, helping her set the scene in her mind. “Hot, blue, maybe a little smoggy.”
     
    “Hot and blue,” she said, “but there wasn’t any smog that day. Not even a single cloud, either.”
     
    “You got in the car and backed out of the driveway. Now think about the route you drove to work.”
     
    She was silent for almost a minute. Then she said, “It’s no use. I can’t remember.”
     
    He persisted gently. “What were the names of the streets you used?”
     
    “I don’t know.”
     
    “Sure you do. Give me the name of just one street. Just one to start the ball rolling.”
     
    She tried hard to snatch at least a single meager scrap of memory out of the void—a face, a room, a voice, anything —but she failed.
     
    “Sorry,” she said. “I can’t come up with the name of even one street.”
     
    “You told me that you remembered backing down your driveway that morning. All right. If you remember that, then surely you remember which way you went when you pulled out of your driveway. Did you turn left, or did you turn right?”
     
    Her eyes still closed, Susan considered his question until her head began to ache. Finally she opened her eyes, looked up at McGee, and shrugged. “I just don’t know.”
     
    “Philip Gomez,” McGee said.
     
    “What?”
     
    “Philip Gomez.”
     
    “Who’s that? Somebody I should know?”
     
    “The name doesn’t mean anything to you?”
     
    “No.”
     
    “He’s your boss at Milestone.”
     
    “Really?” She tried to picture Philip Gomez. She couldn’t summon up an image of his face. She couldn’t recall anything whatsoever about the man. “My boss? Philip Gomez? Are you sure about that?”
     
    McGee put his hands in the pockets of his lab coat. “After you were admitted