Days of Discovery (December 26–January 11)

Dates and Narrative Frame

The interval appears beneath the heading FOUR, with December 26–January 11 given as its span. The dated scenes supplied from this period fall between December 27 and January 5: Ginger makes repeated visits to Pablo Jackson in Boston, while Dominick Corvaisis flies to Portland on January 5. The range therefore places the two characters’ separate efforts to recover or revisit the past within one narrative frame; the available scenes do not establish what happens on every day of the interval.

The period’s title, Days of Discovery, fits a movement from uncertainty toward partial knowledge, not a completed revelation. Ginger and Pablo make progress in identifying the shape of her missing memory, but the people behind its apparent suppression and the thing she witnessed remain unknown. Dominick’s return to Portland likewise begins a retracing rather than recording its result.

Ginger Weiss and Pablo Jackson

Between December 27 and January 5, Dr. Ginger Weiss visits Pablo Jackson’s Back Bay apartment six times. On each visit, Pablo uses hypnosis to probe patiently and cautiously at the Azrael Block sealing off part of her memory. His response to Ginger is not only therapeutic: he comes to see her as increasingly intelligent, charming, and tough-minded, and feels a protective, fatherly attachment he has never experienced before. He regards her with the tenderness he might have felt toward a daughter.

Pablo tells Ginger nearly everything he learned from Alexander Christophson at the Hergensheimers’ Christmas party, including the possibility that her memory block was implanted by unknown people rather than arising naturally. Ginger resists that explanation. She sees it as too extraordinary to apply to an ordinary person like herself, and describes herself as a farmishteh from Brooklyn rather than someone caught up in international intrigue. Her skepticism makes the discovery difficult in two ways: the sessions must approach a blocked memory, while she must also consider an explanation that unsettles her understanding of her own experience.

The Recovered Outline of July 6

In one session, Pablo tries to lead Ginger onward into the crucial memory of the frightening event that was about to happen. He cannot get past the limit of the block. Its span becomes clearer, however: it formed while she was running for the restaurant door and persisted until the following Tuesday morning, when she drove east toward Salt Lake City. Pablo considers reducing the block to smaller dimensions over time, but the day’s work has already established its boundaries.

By this point, Ginger and Pablo have identified a likely sequence. On the night of Friday, July 6, the year before last, Ginger saw something she was not meant to see. The account judges that she was almost certainly detained in a room at the Tranquility Motel, where sophisticated brainwashing techniques were used to hide the event from her and prevent her from reporting it. The suppression lasted three days—Saturday, Sunday, and Monday—and she was released on Tuesday with sanitized recollections. This is a strong reconstruction, but it does not answer what she saw or identify the people responsible; those questions remain open.

Dominick Corvaisis Returns to Portland

On Sunday, January 5, Dominick Corvaisis flies to Portland and takes a hotel room near the apartment house where he once lived. Hard rain and cold weather surround the return. Apart from dinner in the hotel restaurant, he spends the afternoon and evening at the window-side table in his room, looking out at the rain-lashed city and studying road maps.

He repeatedly reviews the trip he took the summer before last, the same journey he is due to begin again the following day. The maps give this backward-looking work a concrete form: unlike Ginger’s attempt to recover a memory concealed behind a psychological block, Dominick prepares to revisit a route through the world. The juxtaposition makes the interval a period of investigation and return, while leaving both journeys’ further discoveries beyond the scenes recorded here.