False Memory

Though entirely enclosed and alone with Martie, Susan never felt secure in the elevator. Consequently, Martie kept one arm around her, aware that from Susan’s troubled point of view, the fourteenth-floor elevator alcove and the corridors beyond it — even the psychiatrist’s waiting room — were also hostile territories harboring uncountable threats. Every public space, regardless of how small and sheltered, was an open space in the sense that anyone could enter at any time. She felt safe only in two places: in her home on the peninsula — and in Dr. Ahriman’s private office, where even the dramatic panoramic view of the coastline did not alarm her.

“Almost safe,” Susan repeated as the elevator doors slid open at the fourteenth floor.

Curiously, Martie thought of Frodo again, from The Lord of the Rings. Frodo in the tunnel that was a secret entrance to the evil land of Mordor. Frodo confronting the guardian of the tunnel, the spiderlike monster Shelob. Frodo stung by the beast, apparently dead, but actually paralyzed and set aside to be devoured later.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Susan whispered urgently. For the first time since leaving her apartment, she was eager to proceed.

Inexplicably, Martie wanted to pull her friend back into the elevator, descend to the lobby, and return to the car.

Once more she sensed a disquieting strangeness in the mundane scene around her, as if this were not the ordinary elevator alcove that it appeared to be, but was in fact the tunnel where Frodo and his companion Sam Gamgee had confronted the great pulsing, many-eyed spider.

Responding to a sound behind her, she turned with dread, half expecting to see Shelob looming. The elevator door was rolling shut. Nothing more than that.

In her imagination, a membrane between dimensions had ruptured, and the world of Tolkien was seeping inexorably into Newport Beach. Maybe she had been working too long and too hard on the video-game adaptation. In her obsession with doing honor to The Lord of the Rings, and in her mental exhaustion, was she confusing reality and fantasy?

No. Not that. The truth was something less fantastic but equally strange.

Then Martie caught a glimpse of herself in the glass panel that covered a wall niche containing an emergency fire hose. Immediately, she turned away, rattled by the razor-sharp anxiety in her face. Her features appeared jagged, with deep slashes for laugh lines, a mouth like a scar; her eyes were wounds. This unflattering expression was not what made her look away. Something else. Worse. Something to which she couldn’t quite put a name.

What’s happening to me?

“Let’s go,” Susan said more insistently than before. “Martie, what’s wrong? Let’s go.”

Reluctantly, Martie accompanied Susan out of the alcove. They turned left into the corridor.

Susan took heart from her mantra — “almost safe, almost safe”— but Martie found no comfort in it.

8

As the wind stripped wet leaves off trees and as cataracts gushed along gutters toward half-clogged street drains, Dusty drove down through the Newport hills.

“I’m soaked. I’m cold,” Skeet complained.

“Me too. Fortunately, we’re high-order primates with lots of gadgets.” Dusty switched on the heater.

“I screwed up,” Skeet mumbled. “Who, you?”

“I always screw up.” “Everybody’s good at something.” “Are you angry with me?”

“Right now I’m sick to death of you,” Dusty said honestly.

“Do you hate me?”

“No.”

Skeet sighed and slid down farther in his seat. In his boneless slump, as a faint steam rose off his clothes, he looked less like a man than like a pile of damp laundry. His chafed and swollen eyelids drooped shut. His mouth sagged open. He appeared to be asleep.

The sky pressed down, as gray-black as wet ashes and char. The rain wasn’t the usual glittering silver, but dark and dirty, as if nature were a scrub woman wringing out a filthy mop.

Dusty drove east and south, out of Newport Beach, into the city of Irvine. He hoped that the New Life Clinic, a drug-and-alcohol-rehabilitation facility. would have an open bed.

Skeet had been in rehab twice before, once at New Life six months ago. He came out clean, sincerely intending to stay that way. After each course of therapy, however, he gradually slid backward.

Until now he’d never gotten low enough to try suicide. Perhaps, from this new depth, he’d realize that he was facing his last chance.

Without lifting his chin from his chest, Skeet said, “Sorry… back there on the roof. Sorry I forgot which one was your dad. Dr. Decon. It’s just that I’m so wrecked.”

“That’s okay. I’ve been trying to forget him most of my life.”

“You remember my dad, I’ll bet”

“Dr. Holden Caulfield, professor of literature.”

“He’s a real bastard,” Skeet said.

“They all are. She’s attracted to bastards.”

Skeet slowly raised his head, as though it were a massive weight elevated by a complex system of powerful hydraulic lifts. “Holden Caulfield’s not even his real name.”