False Memory

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 Lo in 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.

Give a nail gun to a carpenter from the preindustrial age, and although he might intuit that it was a tool, he would be unlikely to understand its purpose — until he accidentally fired a nail through his foot. The possibility of unintentionally causing psychological harm to his brother motivated Dusty to contemplate the haiku at length, until he understood the use of this tool, before deciding whether to explore further its effect on Skeet.

Missions.

To grasp the purpose of the haiku, he had to understand, at the very least, what Skeet had meant by missions.

Dusty was certain he precisely remembered the haiku and the kid’s odd interpretation, because he was blessed with a photographic and audio-retentive memory of such high reliability that he cruised through high school and one year of college with a perfect 4.0 grade average, before deciding that he could experience life more fully as a housepainter than as an academic.

Missions.

Dusty considered synonyms. Task. Work. Chore. Job. Calling. Vocation. Career. Church.

None of them furthered his understanding.

From the big sheepskin pillow in the corner, Valet whimpered anxiously, as though the rabbits in his dreams had grown fangs and were now doing the dog’s work while he played rabbit in the chase.

Martie was too zonked to be roused by the dog’s thin squeals.

Sometimes, however, Valet’s nightmares escalated until he woke with a terrified bark.

“Easy boy. Easy boy,” Dusty whispered.

Even in dreams, the retriever seemed to hear his master’s voice, and his whimpering subsided.

“Easy. Good boy. Good Valet.”

Although the dog didn’t wake, his feathery plumed tail swished across the sheepskin a few times before curling close around him once more.

Martie and the dog slept on peacefully, but suddenly Dusty sat up from the pillows piled against the headboard, the very thought of sleep banished by a rattling insight. Mulling over the haiku, he’d been fully awake, but by comparison to this wide-eyed state, he might as well have been drowsing. He was now hyperalert, as cold as if he had ice water for spinal fluid.

He had been reminded of another moment with the dog, earlier in the day.

Valet stands in the kitchen, at the connecting door to the garage, ready to ride shotgun on the trip to Skeet’s apartment, patiently fanning the air with his plumed tail while Dusty pulls on a hooded nylon jacket.

The phone rings. Someone peddling subscriptions to the Los Angeles Times.

When Dusty racks the wall phone after only a few seconds, he turns toward the door to the garage and discovers that Valet is no longer standing, but lying on his side at the threshold, as though ten minutes have passed, as if he has been napping.

“You had a shot of chicken protein, golden one. Let’s see some vigor.”

With a long-suffering sigh, Valet gets to his feet.

Dusty was able to move through the scene in his mind’s eye as though it were three-dimensional, studying the golden retriever with acute attention to detail. Indeed, he could see the moment more clearly now than he’d seen it then: In retrospect the dog obviously, inarguably had been napping.

Even with his eidetic and audile memory, he could not recall whether the Times salesperson had been a man or woman. He had no memory of what he had said on the phone or of what had been said to him, just a vague impression that he had been the target of a phone-sales campaign.

At the time, he had attributed his uncharacteristic memory lapse to stress. Taking a header off a roof, watching your brother suffer a breakdown before your eyes: This stuff was bound to mess with your mind.

If he had been on the phone five or ten minutes instead of a few seconds, however, he couldn’t possibly have been speaking with anyone in the Times subscription-sales operation. What the hell would they have talked about for so long? Typefaces? The cost of newsprint? Johannes Gutenberg — What a cool guy! — and the invention of movable type? The tremendous effectiveness of the Times as a puppy-training aid in Valet’s early days, its singular convenience, its remarkable absorbency, its admirable service as an environment-friendly and fully biodegradable poop wrap?

During the minutes that Valet had settled down to nap at the connecting door to the garage, Dusty either had been on the phone with someone other than a Times salesperson or had been on the phone only a few seconds and had been engaged in some other task the rest of the time.

A task that he could not remember.

Missing time.

Impossible. Not me, too.

Ants with urgent purpose, busy bustling multitudes, seemed to be swarming up his legs, down his arms, across his back, and although he knew that no ants had invaded the bed, that what he felt was the nerve endings in his skin responding to the sudden dimpling from a case of universal gooseflesh, he brushed at his arms and at the back of his neck, as if to cast off an army of six-legged soldiers.

Unable to sit still, he got quietly to his feet, but he couldn’t stand still, either, and so he paced, but here and there the floor squeaked under the carpet, and he could not pace quietly, so he eased into bed again and sat motionless, after all. His skin was cool and antless now. But things were crawling along the surface convolutions of his brain: a new and unwelcome sense of vulnerability, an X Files perception that unknown presences, strange and hostile, had entered his life.