FLASHBACK by Gary Braver

she’s doing. For maybe a minute she picks up pieces and begins to try to find mates. She’s unsuccessful. Then the lidded shoebox appears. “Clara, remember this? This box?”
    Clara looks at it blankly.
    “Remember what’s inside?”
    She continues to look at it blankly.
    “What’s inside?”
    “I don’t know,” she says and turns back to the puzzle.
    “Remember the lollypop?”
    “No,” she says, fingering the puzzle piece.
    Carr pokes a few keys with a stylus. “Now this is Clara six months later.”
    Clara is sitting at the same table. A wall clock behind her. Dr. Carr’s disembodied voice: “Good morning, Clara.”
    “Good morning.” She smiles at the man beside the camera.
    A shoebox slides into view. “I’m going to show you what’s inside, okay?”

    “Okay.”
    A hand opens the box and removes a spoon, a small Mr. Goodbar, and a pencil. Carr identifies each out loud, then puts them in the box and puts the lid back. “Now, do you remember what’s in the box, Clara?”
    “Yes. A spoon, a Mr. Goodbar, a pencil.”
    “Very good.” And Carr opens the box and removes each and replaces them. With the clock in constant view, he has her put together a child’s puzzle over the next fifteen minutes. She moves very slowly but manages to fit several pieces together. When time is up, the shoebox reappears. “Now, do you remember this shoebox?”
    “Yes.”
    “Do you remember what’s inside the box?”
    Clara blinks at the box for a few seconds. She looks uncertain for a moment, then says, “Yes. Mr. Goodbar, a spoon, and a pencil.”
    “Very good,” Carr says, and behind them the nursing staff cheers.
    Carr laid the Palm Pilot on the table, the freeze frame of Clara smiling proudly.
    The waiter delivered the food while René stared dumbly at the image of the woman smiling back at her. All she could think was, That could have been my father.
    “SO WHAT DO YOU THINK?” Carr said, digging into his steak.
    “Well, that’s incredible.” And for a second René wondered almost hopefully whether it had all been staged—that she wasn’t actually looking at Clara Devine but some imposter partaking in an elaborate conspiracy for whatever reasons—perhaps some security test gone awry.
    “Even more remarkable, her cognitive test scores were double what she got before she was institutionalized and two to three times that of the placebo group—not to mention a five times response rate and enhanced ability to perform her activities of daily living. Six months before she took the drug, she could not dress herself or go to the bathroom alone. Now she’s undergone a clinical regeneration in twenty-four weeks at two ten-milligram dosages daily.”
    “I’d very much like to see those results.”
    “Of course.” Carr’s eyes beamed like a child sharing a secret.
    “She was forgetting things from one moment to the next. It was like watching
her being peeled away like an onion.” Cassandra Gould’s words buzzed in René’s brain.
    And cutting across those her father’s plea: “Promise me … I don’t want to end up just some gaga thing attached to a diaper.”
    Maybe Clara Devine was just some extraordinary anomaly. “Are there other test subjects?”
    “Of course.”
    “So why all the secrecy if it’s such a miracle drug?”
    “It’s a blinded study to keep people unbiased.”
    Clinical trials were blinded so that the people responsible for patients wouldn’t attribute any and every change to the drug being tested. And while in such studies the caregivers may not know which patients receive the active drug and which patients receive a placebo, they are made aware that patients are enrolled in a clinical study. “But why wasn’t I or my pharmacy informed?”
    “Because technically the trial compound is not among the active meds supplied by CommCare, your pharmacy. The Memorine tablets came from GEM.”
    “But these patients were on other meds that CommCare supplies.”
    “Look, their