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camp, but I know that once I bring it into the open, I’ll trigger a showdown between the doctor and the Klasses, with me in the middle.
    "Keep your eyes closed," she says. "Think about Therese’s tenth birthday. In her diary, she wrote that was the best birthday she’d ever had. Do you remember Sea World?"
    "Vaguely." I could see dolphins jumping—two at a time, three at a time. It had been sunny and hot. With every session it was getting easier for me to pop into Therese’s memories. Her life was on DVD, and I had the remote.
    "Do you remember getting wet at the Namu and Shamu show?"
    I laughed. "I think so." I could see the metal benches, the glass wall just in front of me, the huge shapes in the blue-green water. "They had the whales flip their big tail fins. We got drenched."
    "Can you picture who was there with you? Where are your parents?"
    There was a girl, my age, I can’t remember her name. The sheets of water were coming down on us and we were screaming and laughing. Afterward my parents toweled us off. They must have been sitting up high, out of the splash zone. Alice looked much younger: happier, and a little heavier. She was wider at the hips. This was before she started dieting and exercising, when she was Mom-sized.
    My eyes pop open. "Oh God."
    "Are you okay?"
    "I’m fine—it was just ... like you said. Vivid." That image of a younger Alice still burns. For the first time I realize how sad she is now.
    "I’d like a joint session next time," I say.
    "Really? All right. I’ll talk to Alice and Mitch. Is there anything in particular you want to talk about?"
    "Yeah. We need to talk about Therese."

    Dr. S says everybody wants to know if the original neural map, the old Queen, can come back. Once the map to the map is lost, can you find it again? And if you do, then what happens to the new neural map, the new Queen?
    "Now, a good Buddhist would tell you that this question is unimportant. After all, the cycle of existence is not just between lives. Samsara is every moment. The self continuously dies and recreates itself."
    "Are you a good Buddhist?" I asked him.
    He smiled. "Only on Sunday mornings."
    "You go to church?"
    "I golf."

    There’s a knock and I open my eyes. Alice steps into my room, a stack of folded laundry in her arms. "Oh!"
    I’ve rearranged the room, pushing the bed into the corner to give me a few square feet of free space on the floor.
    Her face goes through a few changes. "I don’t suppose you’re praying."
    "No."
    She sighs, but it’s a mock-sigh. "I didn’t think so." She moves around me and sets the laundry on the bed. She picks up the book there, Entering the Stream . "Dr. Subramaniam gave you this?"
    She’s looking at the passage I’ve highlighted. But loving kindness —maitri— toward ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. The point is not to try to change ourselves. Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we already are.
    "Well." She sets the book down, careful to leave it open to the same page. "That sounds a bit like Dr. Mehldau."
    I laugh. "Yeah, it does. Did she tell you I wanted you and Mitch to be at the next session?"
    "We’ll be there." She works around the room, picking up T-shirts and underwear. I stand up to get out of the way. Somehow she manages to straighten up as she moves—righting books that had fallen over, setting Boo W. Bear back to his place on the bed, sweeping an empty chip bag into the garbage can—so that as she collects my dirty laundry she’s cleaning the entire room, like the Cat in the Hat’s cleaner-upper machine.
    "Alice, in the last session I remembered being at Sea World, but there was a girl next to me. Next to Therese."
    "Sea World? Oh, that was the Hammel girl, Marcy. They took you to Ohio with them on their vacation that year."
    "Who did?"
    "The Hammels. You were gone all week. All you wanted for your birthday was spending money for the