He never complained about it. He liked being there more than he liked being home. He liked old people and he liked veterans, and because he was specializing in geriatric medicine, those were the kinds of people he spent his time with.

Home, in his present case, was a one-bedroom apartment in Arlington, Virginia, with a view of the parking lot. He always thought he would get himself a real house in a beautiful place. God knew he had the money. But he always got shitty, temporary places with month-to-month leases. This one had a full stove, but he hadn’t turned it on yet. It had three closets, but two of them were empty. He had a big plasma-screen TV and a cable package that entitled him to see virtually every football, baseball, basketball, and hockey game played at every hour of the day. And other sports, too, but he wasn’t as interested in those. Except tennis in the middle of the night when the Australian Open came along.

He’d skipped college altogether this time around. He’d skipped the first two years of medical school, too. He faked transcripts from both when he “transferred” to George Washington for his third year. That was about a month after he’d hoped to drown himself in the Appomattox River and failed at it. He was a sucker for more. He had too much to lose to commit suicide well.

GW had been happy to take him. It was remarkable what you could get away with if you had the audacity. He wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t known he was reasonably prepared.

He had graduated from several colleges and universities in the States and in Europe. He’d gone through medical training more than once. Dozens of times, if you counted everything he’d learned about herbs and folk medicine through the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. And those were surprisingly helpful to him. It was funny how the old practices always came around again.

It was the rhythm of human enterprise to invent and worship some new approach, to fully reject it a generation later, to realize the need for it again a generation or two after that and then hastily reinvent it as new, usually without its original elegance. Scientists hated to look backward for anything.

That was always a source of amazement to him, the blind devotion to making things new. People didn’t seem to realize what a slender edge they stood on in human history and that every person before them stood on that same edge, thinking it was the world. If they were to look back they would see quite a landscape spreading out behind them, but mostly they didn’t.

The building superintendent had taped a recycling poster to his apartment door, and it made him laugh. There was a burst of enthusiasm for recycling every so often, but it usually didn’t extend to the heart or the mind. It was usually limited to tires or bottles. He was pro-recycling, all right. What if people knew they were recycled? Would that change anything?

There were a few basic things he sometimes wished he could tell people. Maybe he’d write an advice book someday. He’d educate them on recycling and also point out practical things, such as how every moment spent worrying about commercial jet crashes or shark attacks is a moment wasted.

Someday he would approach her again. He often fantasized about that moment. Someday he would know the right things to say to make up for last time. Someday he would call her with a quick question or send her a humorous e-mail or casually jot a message on her wall, and she would not be horrified by it, because by then the disaster of their last meeting would feel as though it was far behind them. Someday was the thing he had, because it was a lot harder to ruin than today.

Sleep was going to have to catch him unawares if it was going to catch him at all tonight. Hence the large TV and the cable package.

He hauled himself over to the couch, armed with his trusty remote. The Lakers were in a play-off series against the Spurs. It wasn’t a deciding game tonight but still good to watch. He settled down into another episode of the Kobe Bryant show with a certain feeling of relaxation. He considered the story of Kobe. Not a brand-new soul but a young one, he could tell. Those often were the best athletes. They’d been around long enough to see the big patterns but not long enough to be encumbered by them. There were exceptions, of course. Shaq was fresh out of the box, and Tim Duncan, he was pretty sure, had been going on for centuries.

Somewhere around the end of the third quarter, during a long stretch of ads for cars and trucks, he started to doze off. When the picture shifted back to the game, he blearily tuned in again. The camera hung obsequiously on the big courtside celebrities for a few seconds. That was all right. That’s what they did. His eyelids started sinking again, when he suddenly caught sight of something. He sat up. He blinked his eyes to clear them and leaned forward. He felt an awful tingle in his extremities.

There was a man just behind the courtside seats in the second row. He was tall, with a flashy jacket and a careful haircut. He might have been handsome if the look of him hadn’t turned Daniel’s stomach. He wore his body stiffly, like an expensive suit. He was in profile now, talking to somebody. He had glanced at the camera for only a second, but that was enough. Daniel felt the adrenaline hit his bloodstream so hard it felt as though his eyes were vibrating in his head.

He had never seen this man before, but he knew him well.

Having spent hundreds of years so sharply alone with his own memory, it felt bizarre for Daniel to be in any kind of proximity with another person who knew the things about the world that he did, who even remembered some of Daniel’s early lives the way he did. If it had been any other soul, it would have been a comfort.

Daniel thought of the last time he had seen Joaquim, just a glance in a village square in Hungary in the thirteen hundreds. He’d already learned by that point that Joaquim also had the Memory, and he’d been on his guard, but Joaquim had shown no sign of recognizing him. Daniel kept expecting him to turn up much closer at hand—his uncle, his father, his teacher, his son, his brother again—as significant people often did. But unlike most things he dreaded, it hadn’t happened. At first, Daniel expected, it was because his former brother’s basic misanthropy held him up in death for long periods of time. If there was ever a soul that died apart—far apart—it was his. In lighter moments he’d pictured Joaquim zagging randomly around the globe, turning up here in Jakarta, there in Yakutsk.

Much later, Daniel had learned that Joaquim had begun to bend the rules of leaving and coming back. It was a chilling notion. Daniel didn’t know how he did it; he’d learned it from a mystical soul, his old (really old) friend Ben, and how Ben came to know these things he never understood. But Daniel could well imagine that Joaquim wouldn’t stand to wait his turn, or put up with starting again as a powerless infant. He wouldn’t tolerate the impotence of childhood time after time. He was geared toward revenge, and he wouldn’t leave the hunt for his enemies to chance, though he probably would have found them faster if he had.

It was a bitter thing to see him again after all that time. Daniel had been tempted to think that Joaquim’s soul had finished, but of course not. He had too much hate to be gone for good. Daniel imagined Joaquim using his memory for the sole purpose of grinding out his vendettas over the centuries. Who knew how many he had.

It was grating to see him in a body he did not deserve. It was sick to think of how he’d done it and what had become of the man who did deserve it. Daniel had no way of knowing what Joaquim was up to. But he had a bleak sense that it was dangerous for him—and dangerous for Sophia, if he ever found her.