False Memory

Both hands around her waist now, he lifted her and carried her backward, until he was pressing her between his body and the refrigerator.

“Please” again, and then once more “please,” the dear girl so conflicted that eagerness and dread spiced her voice in equal measure.

Susan’s weeping was accompanied by neither whimper nor sob, and the doctor savored these silent streams, seeking to slake the thirst that he could never satisfy. He licked a salty pearl from the corner of her mouth, licked another from the flared rim of a nostril, and then suckled on the droplets beaded across her eyelashes, relishing the flavor as though this would be his sole sustenance for the day,

Letting go of her waist, stepping back from her, he said, “Go to your bedroom, Susan.”

Sinuous shadow, she moved like hot tears, clear and bitter.

The doctor followed, admiring her graceful walk, to her bed in Hell.

31

Valet dozed, twitching and snuffling in the company of phantom rabbits, but Martie lay in stone-still silence, as though she were a death sculpture upon a catafalque.

Her sleep seemed deeper than possible in the turbulent wake of the day’s events, and it was reminiscent of Skeet’s plumbless slumber in his room at New Life.

Sitting up in bed, barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt, Dusty once more sorted through the fourteen pages that had come from the notepad in Skeet’s kitchen, brooding on the name Dr Yen Loin all thirty-nine renditions.

That name, when spoken, had seemed to traumatize Skeet, causing him to lapse into a twilight consciousness in which he answered every question with a question of his own. Open eyes jiggling as in REM sleep, he responded directly — if often cryptically — only to questions that were framed as statements or commands. When Dusty’s frustration had led him to say Ah, give me a break and go to sleep, Skeet dropped into an abyss as abruptly as a narcoleptic responding instantaneously to the flipping of an electrochemical switch in the brain.

Of the many curious aspects of Skeet’s behavior, one currently interested Dusty more than any other: the kid’s failure to remember anything that had happened between the moment when he had heard the name Dr Yen Lo and, minutes later, when he had obeyed Dusty’s unthinking demand that he go to sleep. Selective amnesia might be blamed. But it was more as though Skeet had conducted the conversation with Dusty while in a blackout.

Martie had spoken of her suspicion that she was “missing time,” from her day, though she could not identify precisely when any gap or gaps had occurred. Fearful that she had opened the gas valve in the fireplace without lighting the ceramic logs, she had repeatedly returned to the living room with an urgent conviction that a furious explosion was imminent. Although the valve had always been tightly closed, she continued to be troubled by a perception that her memory had been nibbled like a holey woolen scarf beset by moths.

Dusty had witnessed his brother’s blackout. And he sensed truth in Martie’s fear of having fallen into a fugue.

Perhaps a link.

This had been an extraordinary day. The two people dearest to Dusty’s heart had suffered quite different but equally dramatic episodes of aberrant behavior. The odds of such serious — even if temporary — psychological collapse striking twice, this close, were surely a great deal smaller than the one-in-eighteen-million chance of winning the state lottery.

He supposed that the average citizen of our brave new millennium would think this was a grim coincidence. At most they would consider it an example of the curious patterns that the grinding machinery of the universe sometimes randomly produces as a useless by-product of its mindless laboring.

To Dusty, however, who perceived mysterious design in everything from the color of daffodils to Valet’s pure joy in pursuit of a ball, there was no such thing as coincidence. The link was tantalizing — though difficult to fathom. And frightening.

He put the pages of Skeet’s notepad on his nightstand and picked up a notepad of his own. On the top page, he had printed the lines of the haiku that his brother had referred to as the rules.

Clear cascades

into the waves scatter

blue pine needles.

Skeet was the waves. According to him, the blue pine needles were missions. The clear cascades were Dusty or Yen Lo, or perhaps anyone who invoked the haiku in Skeet’s presence.

At first everything that Skeet said seemed to be gibberish, but the longer Dusty puzzled over it, the more he sensed structure and purpose waiting to be discerned. For some reason, he began to perceive the haiku as a sort of mechanism, a simple device with a powerful effect, the verbal equivalent of a compressor-driven paint sprayer or a nail gun.