False Memory

Skeet was enjoying an early dinner: tomato-basil soup seasoned with chips of Parmesan, followed by rosemary-garlic chicken with roasted potatoes and asparagus. The meals at New Life were superior to ordinary hospital fare — though solid food came precut into bite-size pieces, because Skeet was on a suicide watch.

Sitting erect on the armchair, Valet watched Skeet with the interest of a born gourmand. He was a good dog, however, and though his dinner was overdue, he didn’t beg.

Around a mouthful of chicken, Skeet said, “Haven’t eaten like this in weeks. I guess nothing gives you an appetite like jumping off a roof.”

The kid was so thin that he appeared to have taken bulimia lessons from a supermodel. Considering how shrunken his stomach must be, it was difficult to believe that he had the capacity to pack away as much as he had already eaten.

Still pretending to be seeking portents in the clouds, Dusty said, “You seemed to fall asleep just because I told you to.”

“Yeah? Well, it’s a new leaf, bro. From now on I do everything you want.”

“Fat chance.”

“You’ll see.”

Dusty slipped his right hand into a pocket of his jeans and felt the folded pages from the notepad that he had found in Skeet’s kitchen. He considered asking about Dr. Yen Lo again, but intuition told him that this name, when spoken, might precipitate a second catatonic withdrawal followed by another frustrating, inscrutable dialogue similar to the one in which they had engaged earlier.

Instead, Dusty said, “Clear cascades.”

As revealed by his ghostly reflection in the window, Skeet did not even lift his gaze from his dinner. “What?”

“Into the waves scatter.”

Now Skeet looked up, but he said nothing.

“Blue pine needles,” Dusty said.

“Blue?”

Turning from the window, Dusty said, “Does that mean anything to you?”

“Pine needles are green.”

“Some are blue-green, I guess.”

Having cleaned his dinner plate, Skeet slid it aside in favor of a dessert cup containing fresh strawberries in clotted cream and brown sugar. “I think I’ve heard it somewhere.”

“I’m sure you have. Because I heard it from you.”

“From me?” Skeet seemed genuinely surprised. “When?”

“Earlier. When you were… out of it.”

After savoring a cream-slathered berry, Skeet said, “That’s weird. I’d hate to think the literary thing is in my genes.”

“Is it a riddle?” Dusty asked.

“Riddle? No. It’s a poem.”

“You write poetry?” Dusty asked with undisguised disbelief, aware of how assiduously Skeet avoided every aspect of the world that his father, the literature professor, inhabited.

“Not mine,” Skeet said, as like a little boy he licked cream from his dessert spoon. “I don’t know the poet’s name. Ancient Japanese. Haiku. I must have read it somewhere, and it just stuck.”

“Haiku,” Dusty said, trying and failing to find useful meaning in this new information.

Using his spoon as if it were a symphony conductor’s baton, Skeet emphasized the meter as he recited the poem:

“Clear cascades

into the waves scatter

blue pine needles.”

Given structure and meter, the nine words no longer sounded like gibberish.

Dusty was reminded of an optical illusion that he had seen once in a magazine, many years ago. It was a pencil drawing of serried ranks of trees, pines and firs and spruces and alders, towering and dense and regimented, which had been titled Forest. The accompanying text claimed that this woodland concealed a more complex scene that could be perceived if you put aside your expectations, if you could make yourself forget the word forest, and if you could peer through the surface image to another panorama far different from the sylvan scene. Some people required as little as a few minutes to comprehend the second picture, while others struggled more than an hour before achieving a revelation. After only ten minutes, frustrated, Dusty had pushed aside the magazine — and then from the corner of his eye had glimpsed the hidden city. When again he stared directly at the drawing, he saw a vast Gothic metropolis, where granite buildings crowded one another; shadowy woodland paths between tree trunks had metamorphosed into narrow streets buried deep in a gloom cast by man-made cliffs of stone rising cold and gray against a bleak sky.

Similarly, new meaning arose from these nine words the moment that Dusty heard them read as haiku. The poet’s intent was evident:

The “clear cascades” were gusts of wind stripping pine needles off trees and casting them into the sea. It was a pure, evocative, and poignant observation of nature, which on analysis would surely prove to have numerous metaphorical meanings pertinent to the human condition.