False Memory

“I can’t breathe out here. I can’t breathe.”

“Sooz, you’re breathing.”

“But the air’s like a…sludge. And I’m having chest pains. My heart.”

“What I’ve got is a pain in the ass,” Martie said. “Guess its name.”

“You’re a mean bitch.”

“That’s old news.”

“I hate you.”

“I love you,” Martie said patiently.

Susan began to cry. She buried her face in her hands. “I can’t go on like this.”

“It’s not much farther.”

“I hate myself.”

Martie frowned. “Don’t say that. Don’t ever.”

“I hate what I’ve become. This frightened, quivering thing I’ve become.”

Martie’s eyes clouded with tears of pity. She blinked furiously to clear her vision.

From off the cold Pacific, waves of black clouds washed across the sky, as though the tide of night were turning and would drown this bleak new day. Virtually all the oncoming traffic, northbound on Pacific Coast Highway, approached behind headlights that silvered the wet blacktop.

Martie’s perception of unnatural menace had passed. The rainy day no longer seemed in the least strange. In fact, the world was so achingly beautiful, so right in every detail, that although she was no longer afraid of anything in it, she was terribly afraid of losing it.

Despairing, Susan said, “Martie, can you remember me…the way I used to be?”

“Yes. Vividly.”

“I can’t. Some days I can’t remember me any other way but how I am now. I’m scared, Martie. Not just of going outside, out of the house. I’m scared of…all the years ahead.”

“We’ll get through this together,” Martie assured her, “and there’ll be a lot of good years.”

Massive phoenix palms lined the entrance road to Fashion Island, Newport Beach’s premier shopping and business center. In the wind, the trees, like agitated lions preparing to roar, shook their great green manes.

Dr. Mark Ahriman’s suite of offices was on the fourteenth floor of one of the tall buildings that surrounded the sprawling, low-rise shopping plaza. Getting Susan from the parking lot to the lobby and then across what seemed like acres of polished granite into an elevator was not as arduous a trek as Frodo’s journey from the peaceful Shire to the land called Mordor, there to destroy the Great Ring of Power — but Martie was nonetheless relieved when the doors slid shut and the cab purred upward.

“Almost safe,” Susan murmured, gaze fixed on the indicator board inset in the transom above the doors, watching the light move from number to number, toward 14, where sanctuary waited.

Though entirely enclosed and alone with Martie, Susan never felt secure in the elevator. Consequently, Martie kept one arm around her, aware that from Susan’s troubled point of view, the fourteenth-floor elevator alcove and the corridors beyond it — even the psychiatrist’s waiting room — were also hostile territories harboring uncountable threats. Every public space, regardless of how small and sheltered, was an open space in the sense that anyone could enter at any time. She felt safe only in two places: in her home on the peninsula — and in Dr. Ahriman’s private office, where even the dramatic panoramic view of the coastline did not alarm her.

“Almost safe,” Susan repeated as the elevator doors slid open at the fourteenth floor.

Curiously, Martie thought of Frodo again, from The Lord of the Rings. Frodo in the tunnel that was a secret entrance to the evil land of Mordor. Frodo confronting the guardian of the tunnel, the spiderlike monster Shelob. Frodo stung by the beast, apparently dead, but actually paralyzed and set aside to be devoured later.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Susan whispered urgently. For the first time since leaving her apartment, she was eager to proceed.

Inexplicably, Martie wanted to pull her friend back into the elevator, descend to the lobby, and return to the car.

Once more she sensed a disquieting strangeness in the mundane scene around her, as if this were not the ordinary elevator alcove that it appeared to be, but was in fact the tunnel where Frodo and his companion Sam Gamgee had confronted the great pulsing, many-eyed spider.

Responding to a sound behind her, she turned with dread, half expecting to see Shelob looming. The elevator door was rolling shut. Nothing more than that.

In her imagination, a membrane between dimensions had ruptured, and the world of Tolkien was seeping inexorably into Newport Beach. Maybe she had been working too long and too hard on the video-game adaptation. In her obsession with doing honor to The Lord of the Rings, and in her mental exhaustion, was she confusing reality and fantasy?

No. Not that. The truth was something less fantastic but equally strange.

Then Martie caught a glimpse of herself in the glass panel that covered a wall niche containing an emergency fire hose. Immediately, she turned away, rattled by the razor-sharp anxiety in her face. Her features appeared jagged, with deep slashes for laugh lines, a mouth like a scar; her eyes were wounds. This unflattering expression was not what made her look away. Something else. Worse. Something to which she couldn’t quite put a name.

What’s happening to me?

“Let’s go,” Susan said more insistently than before. “Martie, what’s wrong? Let’s go.”

Reluctantly, Martie accompanied Susan out of the alcove. They turned left into the corridor.

Susan took heart from her mantra—“almost safe, almost safe”—but Martie found no comfort in it.

8

As the wind stripped wet leaves off trees and as cataracts gushed along gutters toward half-clogged street drains, Dusty drove down through the Newport hills.

“I’m soaked. I’m cold,” Skeet complained.

“Me too. Fortunately, we’re high-order primates with lots of gadgets.” Dusty switched on the heater.

“I screwed up,” Skeet mumbled.

“Who, you?”

“I always screw up.”

“Everybody’s good at something.”

“Are you angry with me?”

“Right now I’m sick to death of you,” Dusty said honestly.

“Do you hate me?”

“No.”

Skeet sighed and slid down farther in his seat. In his boneless slump, as a faint steam rose off his clothes, he looked less like a man than like a pile of damp laundry. His chafed and swollen eyelids drooped shut. His mouth sagged open. He appeared to be asleep.

The sky pressed down, as gray-black as wet ashes and char. The rain wasn’t the usual glittering silver, but dark and dirty, as if nature were a scrubwoman wringing out a filthy mop.

Dusty drove east and south, out of Newport Beach, into the city of Irvine. He hoped that the New Life Clinic, a drug-and-alcohol-rehabilitation facility, would have an open bed.

Skeet had been in rehab twice before, once at New Life six months ago. He came out clean, sincerely intending to stay that way. After each course of therapy, however, he gradually slid backward.

Until now he’d never gotten low enough to try suicide. Perhaps, from this new depth, he’d realize that he was facing his last chance.

Without lifting his chin from his chest, Skeet said, “Sorry…back there on the roof. Sorry I forgot which one was your dad. Dr. Decon. It’s just that I’m so wrecked.”

“That’s okay. I’ve been trying to forget him most of my life.”