False Memory

44

Taking of the temperature, blood pressure, pulse rate, careful ophthalmoscopic examination of the left eye, then the right, a peek with auriscope at the secrets of the ears, much solemn listening with stethoscope at the chest and the back—Breathe deep and hold, breathe out, breath deep and hold—palpation of the abdomen, a quick test of the auditooculogyric reflex, one gentle rap of a small hammer on a pretty kneecap to gauge patellar reflex: All the easy stuff led Dr. Closterman to conclude that Martie was an exceptionally healthy young woman, physiologically even younger than her twenty-eight years.

From the spare chair in the corner of the examination room, Dusty said, “She seems to get younger week by week.”

To Martie, Closterman said, “Does he spread it on this heavy all the time?”

“I have to shovel out the house every morning.” She smiled at Dusty. “I love it.”

Closterman was in his late forties but, unlike Martie, looked — and no doubt tested — older than his age, and not solely because of his prematurely white hair. Double chins and dewlaps, generous jowls and a proud knob of a nose, eyes pink in the corners with a perpetual bloodshot sheen from too much time in salt air and wind and sun, and a tan that would leave any dermatologist hoarse from lecturing — all marked him as a dedicated gourmet, deep-sea fisherman, windsurfer, and probably connoisseur of beer. From his broad brow to his broader belly, he was a living example of the consequences of ignoring the sound advice that he unabashedly doled out to his patients.

Doc — his surfer handle — had a mind as sharp as a scalpel, the bedside manner of a favorite grandfather with a storybook in hand, and a dedication to his practice that would have shamed Hippocrates, yet Dusty preferred him over all other possible internists less for those fine qualities than for his very human, if medically unsound, indulgences. Doc was that rare expert without arrogance, free of dogma, able to view a problem from a fresh perspective rather than through the lenses of preconception that often blinded others who claimed high expertise, humbled by an awareness of his weaknesses and his limitations.

“Gloriously healthy,” Closterman proclaimed as he entered notes in Martie’s file. “Tough constitution. Like your dad.”

Sitting on the edge of the examination table, in a paper gown and rolled red kneesocks, Martie did indeed appear to be as healthy as any aerobics instructor on one of those cable-television shows devoted to obsessive exercise with a host who believed that death was a personal choice rather than an inevitability.

Dusty could see the changes in Martie that Closterman, in spite of his sensitivity to his patients, couldn’t perceive. A bleak shadow in her eyes that dimmed her usually bright gaze. A persistent grim set to her mouth and a defeatist slump to her shoulders.

Although Closterman agreed to refer Martie to the hospital next door for a series of diagnostic procedures, he clearly was thinking of it as just an elaborate annual checkup, not as an essential step in diagnosing the cause of a life-threatening condition. Doc had listened to a highly abbreviated account of her bizarre behavior during the past twenty-four hours, and though she’d not described her violent visions in detail, she’d recounted enough to make Dusty wish he had not eaten that greasy doughnut. Nevertheless, as the physician finished making notes in his patient’s file, he launched into an explanation of the many sources of stress, the mental and physiological problems arising from stress, and the best techniques that one might use to deal with stress — as though Martie’s problem resulted from overwork, too little leisure, a tendency to sweat the small stuff, and a lumpy mattress.

She interrupted Closterman to ask if he would please put away the reflex hammer.

Blinking, derailed from the tracks of his stress homily, which had been chugging along so nicely, he said, “Put it away?”

“It makes me nervous. I keep looking at it. I’m afraid of what I might do with it.”

The polished-steel instrument was as small as a toy hammer and appeared to be of no use as a weapon.

“If I snatched it up and threw it at your face,” Martie said, her words more disturbing for the fact that her voice was soft and reasonable, “it would stun you, maybe worse, and then I’d have time to grab something more lethal. Like the pen. Would you put the pen away, please?”

Dusty moved to the edge of his chair.

Here we go.

Dr. Closterman looked at the ballpoint that lay atop the closed patient file. “It’s just a Paper Mate pen.”

“I’ll tell you what I could do with it, Doctor. A little sample of what goes through my mind, and I don’t know where it comes from, this evil stuff, or how to stop it from coming.” The blue paper gown made a crisp and ominous crinkling sound like a dry chrysalis within which something deadly was struggling to be born. Her voice remained soft, though now there was an edge to it. “I don’t really care if it’s a Montblanc or a Bic, because it’s also a stiletto, a skewer, and I could snatch it off that folder and be at you before you knew what was happening, ram it into your eye, shove it halfway back into your skull, twist it around, twist it, twist, really screw with your brain, and either you’d fall down dead on the spot or spend the rest of your life with the mental capacity of a fucking potato.” She was shaking. Her teeth chattered. She clasped both hands to her head, as she had done in the car, as though striving to repress the hideous images that bloomed unwanted in the midnight garden of her mind. “And whether you were dead or alive on the floor, there are all kinds of things I could do to you after the pen. You’ve got syringes in one of those drawers, needles — and there on that counter, a glass beaker full of tongue depressors. Break the glass, the shards are knives. I could carve your face — or slice it off in pieces and pin the pieces to the wall with hypodermic needles, make a collage from your face. I could do this. I can see…see it in my head right now.” She buried her face in her hands.

Closterman came to his feet on the word potato, rising like a dancer in spite of his size, and now Dusty rose, too.

“First thing,” said the rattled physician, “is a prescription for Valium. How many of these episodes have there been?”

“A few,” Dusty said. “I don’t know. But this one wasn’t bad.”

Closterman’s round face was better suited to a smile; his frown was unable to achieve sufficient gravity, buoyed as it was by his ball of a nose, rosy cheeks, and merry eyes. “Not bad? The others were worse? Then I wouldn’t recommend these tests without Valium. Some of these procedures, like an MRI, they disturb patients.”

“I’m disturbed going in,” Martie said.

“We’ll mellow you out, so it’s not such an ordeal.” Closterman stepped to the door, then hesitated with his hand on the knob. He glanced at Dusty. “Are you okay here?”

Dusty nodded. “These are only things she’s afraid of doing — not anything she could do. Not her, not Martie.”

“Like hell I couldn’t,” she said from behind a veil of fingers.

When Closterman had gone, Dusty moved the reflex hammer and the ballpoint beyond Martie’s reach. “Feel better?”

Between her fingers, she had seen his act of consideration. “This is mortifying.”

“Can I hold your hand?”

A hesitation. Then: “Okay.”

When Closterman returned, having phoned in a prescription for Valium to their usual pharmacy, he had two individually packaged samples of the drug. He opened one sample and gave it to Martie with a paper cup full of water.

“Martie,” said Closterman, “I truly believe the tests are going to rule out any intracranial mass — neoplastic, cystic, inflammatory, and gummatous. A lot of us, we get an unusual headache that takes a while to go away — we right away think, at least in the back of our mind, it must be a tumor. But brain tumors aren’t that common.”

“This isn’t a headache,” she reminded him.

“Exactly. And headaches are a prime symptom of brain tumors. As is a retinal condition called choked disk, which I didn’t find when I examined your eyes. You mentioned vomiting and nausea. If you were vomiting without nausea, then we’d have a classic symptom. From what you told me, you don’t actually have hallucinations—”

“No.”

“Just these unpalatable thoughts, grotesque images in your head, but you don’t mistake them for things really happening. What I see is anxiety of a high order. So when all is said and done, though we have a lot of physiological conditions to eliminate first…Well, I suspect I’ll need to recommend a therapist.”

“We already know one,” Martie said.

“Oh? Who?”

“He’s supposed to be one of the best,” Dusty said. “Maybe you’ve heard of him. A psychiatrist. Dr. Mark Ahriman.”

Although Roy Closterman’s round face couldn’t produce the sharp angles of a suitably disapproving frown, it smoothed at once into a perfectly inscrutable expression that could be read no more easily than alien hieroglyphics from another galaxy. “Yes, Ahriman, he has a fine reputation. And his books, of course. Where did you get the recommendation? I imagine his patient list is full.”

“He’s been treating a friend of mine,” Martie said.

“May I ask for what condition?”

“Agoraphobia.”

“A terrible thing.”

“It’s changed her life.”

“How’s she doing?”

Martie said, “Dr. Ahriman thinks she’s nearing a breakthrough.”

“Good news,” Closterman said.

The sun-leathered skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled, and his lips tweaked up to precisely the same degree at both sides of his mouth, but this was not the broad and winning smile of which he was capable. In fact, it was hardly a smile at all, just a variation of his inscrutable look, reminiscent of the smile on a statue of Buddha: benign but conveying more mystery than mirth.

Still tweaked and crinkled, he said, “But if you find that Dr. Ahriman isn’t taking on new patients, I know a wonderful therapist, a compassionate and quite brilliant woman, who I’m sure would see you.” He picked up Martie’s file and the pen with which she could have put out his eye. “First, before there’s any talk of therapy, let’s get those tests done. They’re expecting you at the hospital, and the various departments have promised to squeeze you into their schedules as if you were an emergency-room admission, no appointments needed. I’ll have all the results by Friday, and then we can decide what’s next. By the time you dress and get next door, that Valium will have kicked in. If you need another one before you can get the prescription filled, you’ve got the second sample. Any questions?”

Why don’t you like Mark Ahriman? Dusty wondered.

He didn’t ask the question. Considering his distrust of most academics and experts — two labels Ahriman no doubt wore with pride — and considering his respect for Dr. Closterman, Dusty found his reticence inexplicable. Nevertheless, the question remained glued between his tongue and the roof of his mouth.

Minutes later, as he and Martie were crossing the quadrangle from the office tower to the hospital, Dusty realized that his reluctance to pose the question, though strange, was less puzzling than his failure to inform Dr. Closterman that he had already phoned Ahriman’s office to seek an appointment later this same day and was awaiting a callback.

Hard skreaks from overhead drew his attention. Thin gray clouds like bolts of dirty linen had been flung across the azure sky, and three fat black crows wheeled through the air, jinking now and then as if plucking fibers from that raveled, rotting mist to build nests in graveyards.

For some reasons clear and others not, Dusty thought of Poe, of a bad-news raven perched above a doorway. Although Martie, in a Valium lull, held his hand with none of her previous reluctance, Dusty thought also of Poe’s lost maiden, Lenore, and he wondered if the skreak of the crow, translated into the tongue of the raven, might be “never-more.”

In the hematology lab, while Martie sat watching her blood slowly fill a series of tubes, she chatted with the technician, a young Vietnamese American, Kenny Phan, who had gotten the needle into her vein quickly and without a sting.

“I cause much less discomfort than a vampire,” Kenny said with an infectious grin, “and usually have sweeter breath.”

Dusty would have watched with normal interest had this been his blood being drawn, but he was squeamish at the sight of Martie’s.

Sensitive to his discomfort, she asked that he use the moment to get Susan Jagger on his cell phone.

He placed the call and waited through twelve rings. When Susan didn’t answer, he pressed end and asked Martie for the number.

“You know the number.”

“Maybe I entered it wrong.”

He keyed it in again, reciting it aloud, and when he pressed the final number, Martie said, “That’s it.”

This time he waited through sixteen rings before terminating the call. “She isn’t there.”

“But she must be there. She’s never anywhere else — unless she’s with me.”

“Maybe she’s in the shower.”

“No answering machine?”

“No. I’ll try later.”

Mellowed by the Valium, Martie looked thoughtful, perhaps even concerned, but not worried.

Replacing a full tube of blood with the final empty vial, Kenny Phan said, “One more for my personal collection.”

Martie laughed, this time without an underlying tremor of any darker emotion.

In spite of the circumstances, Dusty felt as though normal life might be within their grasp again, much easier to rediscover than he had imagined in the grimmer moments of the past fourteen hours.

As Kenny Phan was applying a small, purple Barney the Dinosaur adhesive bandage to the needle puncture, Dusty’s cell phone rang. Jennifer, Dr. Ahriman’s secretary, was calling to confirm that the psychiatrist would be able to rearrange his afternoon schedule to see them at one-thirty.

“That’s a bit of luck,” Martie said with evident relief when Dusty gave her the news.

“Yeah.”

Dusty, too, was relieved — curiously so, considering that if Martie’s problem was psychological, the prognosis for a quick and full recovery might be less reassuring than if the malady had an entirely physical cause. He had never met Dr. Mark Ahriman, and yet a warm sense of security, a comforting flame, had been lit in him by the call from the psychiatrist’s secretary — which was also a curious and surprising reaction.

If the problem wasn’t medical, Ahriman would know what to do. He would be able to uncover the roots of Martie’s anxiety.

Dusty’s reluctance to put his trust entirely in experts of any kind was borderline pathological, and he was the first to admit as much. He was somewhat dismayed with himself for being so eager to hope that Dr. Ahriman, with all his degrees and his best-selling books and his exalted reputation, would possess a nearly magical ability to set things right.

Evidently he was more like the average sucker than he had wanted to believe he could be. When everything he cared most about — Martie and their life together — was at risk, and when his own knowledge and common sense were inadequate to solve the problem, then in his abject fear, he turned to the experts not merely with a pragmatic degree of hope but also with something uncomfortably close to faith.

All right, okay. So what? If he could just have Martie back in charge of herself, as she had been, healthy and happy, he would humble himself before anyone, anytime, anywhere.

Still all in black but with purple Barney on her arm, Martie left the hematology lab hand-in-hand with Dusty. An MRI scan was next.

The corridors smelled of floor wax, disinfectant, and a faint underlying scent of illness.

A nurse and an orderly approached, rolling a gurney on which lay a young woman no older than Martie. She was connected to an IV drip. Compresses had been applied to her face; they were spotted with fresh blood. One of her eyes was visible: open, gray-green, and glazed with shock.

Dusty looked away, feeling that he had violated this stranger’s privacy, and he tightened his hold on Martie’s hand, superstitiously certain that in this injured woman’s glassy stare was more bad luck poised to jump, quick as a blink, from her to him.

Tweaked and crinkled, the inscrutable smile of Closterman rose Cheshire-like in Dusty’s memory.