False Memory

“I understand.”

“I’ve given you very important work, and I’m convinced you will perform it impeccably.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

When he hung up the phone, Ahriman wished that he had been able to program the pustulant Lampton family themselves — the insufferable Derek, his slut of a wife, and their deranged son — and use them as puppets. Unfortunately, they were too aware of him and were sure to regard him with suspicion; he stood little or no chance of getting close enough to them to administer the requisite drugs and to conduct three long programming sessions.

Nevertheless, he was ebullient. Triumph was within reach.

Black cherry soda. Dead fool out in Malibu. Learn to love yourself.

Perfection. The doctor raised a toast to his poetic genius.

73

On Cape Cod or Martha’s Vineyard, this house would have looked like the place that was central to the American Dream, the place you crossed over the river and went through the woods to reach on a cool Thanksgiving dawn, the place where Santa Claus seemed to be real even to adults on a snowy Christmas morning, the quintessential house for the idealized grandmother. Although a perfect house — and indeed a faultless grandmother — had never existed in real life, this nation of passionate sentimentalists believed this was the way grandmothers’ houses universally ought to be. Slate roof with a widow’s walk. Silvered cedar-shingle siding. Window frames and shutters glossy with white marine-finish paint. A deep porch with white wicker rocking chairs and a bench swing, and a manicured yard with foot-high white picket fences surrounding each lush flower bed. On Cape Cod or Martha’s Vineyard, in a certain moment of the past, you might have found Norman Rockwell sitting at an easel in the front yard, painting two adorable children as they chased a goose with a red ribbon tied in a half-finished bow around its neck, while a happy dog frolicked in the background.

Here in Malibu, even in the middle of a coastal winter, on a low bluff above the Pacific, with steps leading down to the beach, with palm trees aplenty, the house looked misplaced. Beautiful, graceful, well designed, and well constructed, but misplaced nonetheless. If anyone’s grandmother lived herein, she would have had electric-blue fingernails, bleached-blond hair, lips sensuously recontoured with injections of collagen, and surgically enlarged breasts. The house was a shining fiction, harboring darker truths within, and the sight of it on this visit — only the fifth Dusty had paid since leaving almost twelve years ago, at the age of eighteen — affected him as it always had before, sending a chill through his heart rather than up his spine.

The house, of course, was not to blame. It was only a house.

Nevertheless, after he and Martie parked in the driveway, as they were ascending the front-porch steps, he said, “The Tower of Cirith Ungol.”

He dared not think about their little house in Corona Del Mar. If it was really burned to the ground, as Ahriman had claimed, Dusty wasn’t ready to deal with the emotional impact. A house is just a house, sure, and property is replaceable, but if you have lived well and loved in a house, if you have made good memories there, then you can’t help but grieve over the loss of it.

He dared not think, either, about Skeet and Fig. If Ahriman was telling the truth, if he had killed them, both this world and Dusty’s heart were darker places than they had been yesterday, and they were certain to remain darker for the rest of his life. The possible loss of his troubled but much-loved brother had left him half numb, as he might have expected, but he was a little surprised at how profoundly disturbed he was, as well, by the thought of Fig’s death; the quietly diligent painter had been peculiar indeed, but also kind and good-natured, and the hole he left in Dusty’s life was the size and the shape of an odd but meaningful friendship.