False Memory

The walk might have been fun, even romantic, on any night before this one. Now, Dusty associated snow with death, and he suspected that the two would be so closely linked in his mind for the rest of his life that he would prefer always to stay by the balmy California coast throughout the winter months.

At an all-night grocery, they purchased a loaf of white bread, a package of cheese, a jar of mustard, corn chips, and beer.

Moving along the aisles, making selections, engaged in what otherwise might have been a task that made him impatient, Dusty was so overcome with emotion, so thankful to be alive, so glad to have Martie at his side, that his legs grew weak, and gratitude almost drove him to his knees. He leaned against a shelf, pretending to read the label on a can of stew.

If others in the store saw him, they were probably fooled. Martie wasn’t deceived. She stood with him, one hand on the back of his neck, pretending to read the label with him, and in a whisper she said, “I love you so much, babe.”

Back in their room, he phoned an airline’s 800 number, seeking the earliest possible flight. He found available seats and used a credit card solely to reserve them, asking the agent not to run the purchase. “I prefer to pay cash when I pick them up tomorrow.”

They took very hot, long showers. The thin, miniature cakes of hotel soap had melted away by the time they finished.

Dusty discovered a skinned spot just behind his right ear. It was caked with blood. Perhaps he had taken a knock when the car rolled. He hadn’t even felt it until now.

Sitting in bed, using a bath towel for a tablecloth, they made cheese sandwiches. They had kept the cans of beer cold in a snow-filled wastebasket.

The sandwiches and the chips tasted neither good nor bad. It was just something to eat. Fuel to keep them going. The beer was to help them sleep, if they could.

Neither of them had talked much on the trip from Santa Fe, and neither of them said much now. In the years to come, should they be lucky enough to have years left instead of mere hours or days, they probably wouldn’t speak often or at length about what had happened in those Indian ruins. Life was too short to dwell on nightmares instead of dreams.

Too worn out to talk, they watched TV while they ate.

The television news was full of images of warplanes. Explosions in the night, somewhere half a world away.

On the advice of experts in international relations, the world’s most powerful alliance of nations was once again trying to bring two military factions to the bargaining table by bombing the crap out of civilian infrastructure. Bridges, hospitals, electric-power plants, video-rental stores, waterworks, churches, sandwich shops. Judging by the news, no one across the spectrum of politics or media, or in fact anywhere in the higher reaches of the social order, questioned the morality of the operation. The debate among the experts centered, instead, on how many millions of pounds of bombs in what type of high-tech packages would have to be dropped to bring about a popular uprising against the targeted government, thereby avoiding a full-fledged war.

“To the people who were in that fucking sandwich shop,” Martie said, “it’s already a war,”

Dusty turned off the TV.

After they’d eaten — and finished two beers each — they got under the covers and lay in the dark, holding hands.

The previous night, sex had been an affirmation of life. Now it would seem like blasphemy. Closeness was all they needed, anyway.

After a while, Martie asked, “Is there a way out of this?”

“I don’t know,” he said honestly.

“These people at the institute. whatever they’re doing, they didn’t really have any bone to pick with us before we came here. They went after us just to protect Ahriman.”

“But now there’s Zachary and Kevin.”

“They’ll probably take a practical view about that. I mean, for them, it’s a cost of doing business. We don’t have anything on them. We’re no real threat to them.”

“So?”

“So if Ahriman were dead. wouldn’t they leave us alone?”

“Maybe.”

Neither of them spoke for a while.

The night was so hushed that Dusty almost believed he could hear the snowflakes striking the ground outside.

“Could you kill him?” he finally asked.

She was a long time answering: “I don’t know. Could you? Just… in cold blood? Walk up to him and pull the trigger?”

“Maybe.”

She was silent for minutes, but he knew she wasn’t drawing near to sleep.

“No,” she said eventually. “I don’t think I could. Kill him, I mean. Him or anyone. Not again.”

“I know you wouldn’t want to have to do it. But I think you could. And so could I.”

To his surprise, he found himself telling her about the optical illusion that had fascinated him as a kid: the drawing of the forest that by a simple shift of perspective suddenly revealed a bustling metropolis.

“This applies?” she asked.

“Yeah. Because tonight I was that drawing. I always thought I knew exactly who I was. Then a simple shift of perspective, and I see a different me. Which one is real and which is fiction?”