Catalogued Separately

In the pharmacy museum at Heidelberg there is a jar of brown powder with its own number, and there is a head with another.

Nobody wrote them down together. If someone once knew, they kept it in their head, which is the wrong place for it.

This year a lab in Marburg ran both for what was in them, not what the cards said — old conifer resin gone stiff with air, the rest of somebody's recipe — and the two came up with the same pattern, the way you'd know a voice on a bad line.

May have shared a connection, the paper says. That's as far as it goes.

All those years the head on its shelf, not missing anything it knew of. And the powder, the kind of thing Europe used to swallow for a headache.