False Memory

Although still in a state of disengagement from the world around him, Skeet spoke for the first time since Dusty had initially mentioned that name when they had been in the adjacent bathroom. “I’m listening,” he said, which was precisely what he had said before.

“Listening to what?” “Listening to what?”

“What’re you doing?”

“What am I doing?” Skeet asked.

“I asked what you were listening to.” “You.”

“Yeah. Okay, so tell me who’s Dr. Yen Lo.” “You.”

“Me? I’m your brother. Remember?” “Is that what you want me to say?”

Frowning, Dusty said, “Well, it’s the truth, isn’t it?”

Although his face remained slack, expressionless, Skeet said, “Is it the truth? I’m confused.”

“Join the club.”

“What club do you want me to join?” Skeet asked with apparent seriousness.

“Skeet?”

“Hmmm?”

Dusty hesitated, wondering just how detached from reality the kid might be. “Do you know where you are?”

“Where am I?”

“So you don’t know?”

“Do I?”

“Can’t you look around?”

“Can I?”

“Is this an Abbott and Costello routine?”

“Is it?”

Frustrated, Dusty said, “Look around.”

Immediately, Skeet raised his head off the pillows and surveyed the room.

“I’m sure you know where you are,” Dusty said.

“New Life Clinic.”

Skeet lowered his head onto the pillows once more. His eyes were again directed at the ceiling, and after a moment, they did something odd.

Not quite certain what he had seen, Dusty leaned closer to his brother, to look more directly at his face.

In the slant of the lamplight, Skeet’s right eye was golden, and his left was a darker honey-brown, which gave him an unsettling aspect, as if two personalities were staring Out of the same skull.

This trick of light was not, however, the thing that had caught Dusty’s attention. He waited for almost a minute before he saw it again: Skeet’s eyes jiggled rapidly back and forth for a few seconds, then settled once more into a steady stare.

“Yes, New Life Clinic,” Dusty belatedly confirmed. “And you know why you’re here.”

“Flush the poisons out of the system.”

“That’s right. But have you taken something since you checked in, did you sneak drugs in here somehow?”

Skeet sighed. “What do you want me to say?”

The kid’s eyes jiggled. Dusty mentally counted off seconds. Five. Then Skeet blinked, and his gaze steadied.

“What do you want me to say?” he repeated.

“Just tell the truth,” Dusty encouraged. “Tell me if you snuck drugs in here.”

“No.”

“Then what’s wrong with you?”

“What do you want to be wrong with me?”

“Damn it, Skeet!”

The faintest frown creased the kid’s forehead. “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.”

“The way what is supposed to be?”

“This.” Tension lines tweaked the corners of Skeet’s mouth. “You aren’t following the rules.”

“A what rules?”

Skeet’s slack hands curled and tightened into half-formed fists.

His eyes jiggled again, side to side, this time while also rolling back in his head. Seven seconds.

REM. Rapid eye movement. According to psychologists, such movements of the closed eyes indicated that a sleeper was dreaming.

Skeet’s eyes weren’t closed, and though he was in some peculiar state, he wasn’t asleep.

Dusty said, “Help me, Skeet. I’m not on the same page. What rules are we talking about? Tell me how the rules work.”

Skeet didn’t at once reply. Gradually the frown lines in his brow melted away. His skin became smooth and as pellucid as clarified butter, until it appeared as though the white of bone shone through. His stare remained fixed on the ceiling.

His eyes jiggled, and when the REM ceased, he spoke at last in a voice untouched by tension but also less flat than before. A whisper:

“Clear cascades.”

For all the sense they made, those two words might have been chosen at random, like two lettered Ping-Pong balls expelled from a bingo hopper.

“Clear cascades,” Dusty said. When his brother didn’t respond, he pressed: “I need more help, kid.”

“Into the waves scatter,” Skeet whispered.

Dusty turned his head toward a noise behind him.

Valet had gotten down from the armchair. The dog padded out of the room, into the hallway, where he turned and stood with his ears pricked, tail tucked, staring warily in at them from the threshold, as though he had been spooked.

Into the waves scatter.

More bingo balls.

A small snowflake moth, with delicate patterns of piercing along the edges of its fragile white wings, had landed on Skeet’s upturned right hand. As the moth crawled across his palm, his fingers didn’t twitch; there was no indication that he could feel the insect. His lips were parted, jaw slack. His breathing was so shallow that his chest didn’t rise and fall. His eyes jiggled again; but when that quiet seizure ended, Skeet could have passed for a dead man.

“Clear cascades,” Dusty said. “Into the waves scatter. Does this mean anything, kid?”

“Does it? You asked me to tell you how the rules work.”

“Those are the rules?” Dusty asked.

Skeet’s eyes twitched for a few seconds. Then: “You know the rules.”

“Pretend I don’t.”

“Those are two of them.”

“Two of the rules.” “Yes.”

“Not quite as straightforward as the rules of poker.”