False Memory

contrast between the boy and the black-satin bedclothes, he appeared to be levitating like a yogi.

“Hey, bro, how’re you doing?” Dusty asked awkwardly. He never knew what to say to his half brother, as they were largely strangers. He had left home — fled — twelve years ago, when Junior was only three.

“Do I look dead yet?” Junior asked sullenly.

Actually, the boy appeared to be magnificently alive, too alive for this world, as though he were supercharged with a spectral energy pumped into him from a wall socket in the Beyond, so that he glowed. He hadn’t been cursed with any of his father’s slippery mink looks; Fate had decided to lavish his mother’s genes on him, to bless him with a perfect form and perfect features, as had been given to none of her other children. If one day he ever decided to ascend to a stage, take a microphone in his hand, and sing, regardless of whether his voice was good or merely adequate, he would be bigger than Elvis and the Beatles and Ricky Martin combined, and both young women and young men would scream and weep and throw themselves at the stage, and a significant percentage of them would be pleased, if asked, to cut themselves and offer blood.

“What’s this?” Dusty wondered, indicating the black room and the flags on the ceiling.

“What’s it look like?” Junior asked.

“Post-Goth?”

“Goth sucks. It’s for children.”

“Looks like you’re practicing for death,” Martie said.

“Closer,” Junior said.

“What’s the point of that?”

Junior put his book aside. “What’s the point of anything else?”

“Because we all die, you mean?”

“It’s why we’re here,” Junior said. “To think about it. To watch it happen to other people. To prepare for it. And then to do it and be gone.”

“What’s this?” Dusty asked again, but this time he directed the question to his stepfather.

“Most adolescent boys, like Derek here, go through a period of intense fascination with death, and each of them thinks he has deeper thoughts about the subject than anyone before him has had,” Lampton said, talking about his son as though Junior couldn’t hear. When Dusty and Skeet had lived under his thumb, he’d done the same with them, talking about them as though they were interesting lab animals who didn’t understand a word of what he was saying. “Sex and death. They’re the big issues in adolescence. Both boys and girls, but most especially boys, are obsessive about both subjects. Periodically they go through phases that are borderline psychotic. It’s a matter of hormonal imbalance, and the best thing to do is let them indulge the obsession, because nature will correct the imbalance soon enough.”

“Well, gee, I don’t remember being obsessed with death,” Martie said.

“You were,” Lampton said, as though he’d known her as a child, “but you sublimated it into other interests — Barbie dolls, makeup.”

“Makeup is a sublimation of a death obsession?”

“How obvious can it be?” Lampton said with pedantic smugness. “The purpose of makeup is to defy the degradations of time, and time is just a synonym for death.”

“I’m still struggling with Barbie dolls,” Dusty said.

“Think about it,” Lampton urged. “What is a doll but an image of a corpse? Unmoving, unbreathing, stiff, lifeless. Little girls playing with dolls are playing with corpses — and learning not to fear death excessively.”

“I remember being obsessed with sex,” Dusty admitted, “but—”

“Sex is a lie,” Junior said. “Sex is denial. People turn to sex to avoid facing the truth that life is about death. It’s not about creation. It’s about dying.”

Lampton smiled down on his son as though he might burst his shirt buttons with pride. “Derek here has chosen to immerse himself in death for a while, in order to put the fear of it behind him much sooner than most people ever do. It’s a legitimate technique for self-forced maturation.”

“I haven’t put it behind me,” Martie noted.

“You see?” Lampton said, as if she had made his point for him. “Last year, it was sex, as it always is with fourteen-year-old boys. Next year — sex again, once he’s done immersing himself in this.”

Dusty suspected that after a year of living in this black room, obsessing on death, Junior might be the lead item on the evening news one night, and not because he had won a spelling bee.

To the boy, Lampton said, “Dusty and Martie are interested in our guerrilla operation against Mark Ahriman.”

“That creep,” Junior said. “You want to whack him some more?”

“Why don’t we?” Lampton said, rubbing his hands together.

Junior rolled off the bed, onto his feet, stretched, and then headed out of the room. As he passed Martie, he said, “Nice tits.”

Beaming after him, Lampton said, “You see? Already, he’s moving out of this phase of death obsession, even though he doesn’t entirely recognize it yet.”

In the past, Dusty and Martie had felt like kidnapping the boy, hiding out with him in some far place, and raising him themselves, to give him a chance at a normal life. A glance at Martie confirmed that she, like Dusty, still felt like hiding out, although perhaps from Junior rather than with him anymore.

They followed the boy into Lampton’s upstairs study, where Skeet and Claudette were waiting with Foster Newton.

Fig was standing by the window, peering out at the front yard and the driveway.

“Hey, Fig,” Dusty said.

He turned. “Hey.”

“Are you okay?” Martie worried.

Fig rucked up his shirt to show them his chest and belly, which were neither as pale nor as slim as Skeet’s, and which were darkened by a different but equally ugly pattern of bruises from the impact of four slugs that had been stopped by Kevlar body armor.

“This is a very trying morning,” said Claudette, grimacing with distaste.

“I’m okay,” Fig assured her, missing the point.

“You saved our lives,” Martie told him.

“Fire truck?”

“Yes.”

“And he saved mine, too,” Skeet said.

Fig shook his head. “Kevlar.”

The boy was sitting at his father’s desk, before the computer.

Lampton stood behind Junior, watching over his shoulder. “Here we go.”

Dusty and Martie crowded close and saw that Junior was composing a scathing and well-written mini-review of Learn to Love Yourself.

“Where we’re going with this,” Lampton said, “is the reader’s review page on the Amazon.com site. We’ve written and posted over a hundred and fifty denunciations of Learn to Love Yourself, using different names and E-mail addresses.”

Appalled, Dusty flashed to the memory of the inhuman viciousness in Ahriman’s face and eyes when they had confronted him in his office a short while ago. “Whose names and E-mail addresses?” he asked, wondering what vengeance the psychiatrist might have extracted from these unsuspecting and innocent people.

“Don’t worry,” Lampton said, “when we use real names, we choose brain-dead types who don’t read much. They aren’t likely to visit Amazon and see any of this.”

“Anyway,” Junior said, “most of the time we just make up names and E-mail addresses, which is even better.”

“You can do that?” Martie wondered.

“The Net is liquid,” Junior said.

Trying to puzzle out the full meaning of that statement, Dusty said, “It’s difficult to separate fiction from reality.”