Newbury Street is where Ginger Weiss arrives for a meeting with Pablo Jackson on a bitter January morning and where, during a fugue, she flees through snow and ice, seeks help, and eventually comes nearly full circle to the building where Pablo was killed. The street links her attempt to investigate her erased memories with the physical danger and disorientation of her episodes.

The meeting on a winter morning

On Monday, January 6, Herbert drives Ginger to her seventh post-Christmas meeting with Pablo. Atlantic winds and the previous night’s ice storm have brought down power lines and disabled traffic lights at more than half the intersections. They reach Newbury Street at 11:05 a.m., five minutes after her appointment was due to begin.

Following a breakthrough in their Saturday session, Ginger wants to contact the people at the Tranquility Motel in Nevada about the unremembered event of July 6, two summers earlier. She does not know whether the motel’s owners helped tamper with her memory or were victims themselves; if they had been brainwashed, they might also be suffering anxiety attacks. Pablo cautions her against confronting them before she has gathered more information, warning that the risks are too great if they are connected to those responsible.

Flight through the street

When awareness returns, Ginger is huddled among dead leaves, snow, and shadows at the foot of exterior cellar steps behind a townhouse somewhere along Newbury Street, at an unknown distance from Pablo’s building. Her back and right side ache, her left palm is abraded, and the cold has seeped through her clothes as she crouches against a concrete retaining wall. She fears the gunman may still be nearby and waits rather than risk exposing herself. She is astonished that she managed to descend an ice-covered fire escape and reach shelter without falling.

During the same sequence of fugue and flight, she gets out from beneath a Mayflower Moving Company van. Seeing a police officer directing traffic half a block away at an intersection with a failed signal, she runs toward him and cries that a man has been killed and that the officer must come. But the brass buttons on his winter coat recall the buttons on the killer’s leather topcoat. Although the designs are not identical—the officer’s buttons do not bear the killer’s lion passant—the sight is enough to overwhelm her again.

Nearing Pablo’s building

When the fugue recedes once more, Ginger is in a narrow space between manicured bushes and a brick building: the former Hotel Agassiz, where Pablo has his apartment and where he was killed. She has come nearly full circle through the streets. From behind the snow-laden shrubs, she sees the same traffic officer climb over a low iron fence and approach. Fearing another seizure at the sight of his coat buttons, she closes her eyes.

Newbury Street is therefore more than the address of an appointment. Its blocked traffic, icy escape routes, hiding places, and return to Pablo’s building give Ginger’s memory crisis a physical geography: she tries to reach help, is repeatedly pulled back into fugue, and finds herself near the place where her investigation began.