False Memory

So you don’t know?

Do I?

Can’t you look around?

Can I?

Is this an Abbott and Costello routine?

Is it?

Skeet had answered questions only with questions of his own, as if seeking to be told what he should think or do, but he had responded to statements as though they were commands, and to actual commands as though they came directly from the lips of God. When, in frustration, Dusty had said, Ah, give me a break and go to sleep, his brother had fallen instantly unconscious.

Skeet had referred to the haiku as “the rules,” and Dusty later had thought of the poem as a mechanism of some kind, a simple device with a powerful effect, the verbal equivalent of a nail gun, though he had not been quite sure what he meant by that.

Now, as he continued to explore the ramifications of the word instructions, he realized that the haiku might better be defined not as a mechanism, not as a device, but as a computer operating system, the software that allows the instructions to be received, understood, and followed.

And what the hell was the logical deduction to be drawn from the haiku-as-software hypothesis? That Skeet was…programmed?

As Dusty shut off the water, he thought he heard the faint ringing of a phone.

Dripping hands raised as though he were a surgeon fresh from a scrub sink, he stepped out of the bathroom, into the bedroom, and listened. The house was silent.

If a call had come in, it would have been picked up after the second ring by the answering machine in Martie’s office.

Most likely, he had imagined the ringing. No one ever called them at this hour. Nevertheless, he ought to check it out before he returned to bed.

In the bathroom once more, drying his hands on a towel, he turned the word programmed over and over in his mind, considering all the ramifications of it.

Staring into the mirror, Dusty saw not his reflection but a replay of the strange events in Skeet’s room at New Life Clinic.

Then his memory wound time backward to the previous morning, to the roof of the Sorensons’ house.

Skeet claimed to have seen the Other Side. An angel of death had shown him what waited beyond this world, and the kid had liked what he’d seen. Then the angel had instructed him to jump. Skeet’s very word: Instructed.

That icy glissando again, along Dusty’s spine. Another of the Chinese boxes had been opened, though yet another box lay inside it. Each box smaller than the last. Perhaps not many layers of the puzzle were left to be resolved. He could almost hear the scorpion scuttle: the sound of a nasty truth waiting to sting when the last lid was lifted.

39

The soft shush of surf, conspiratorial fog cover his return.

Dew on the gray steps. Snail on the second wet tread. Crushed hard underfoot.

Ascending, the doctor whispered into his cell phone: “The winter storm—”

Susan Jagger said, “The storm is you.”

“—hid in the bamboo grove—”

“The grove is me.”

“—and quieted away.”

“In the quiet, I will learn what is wanted.”

Arriving at the landing outside her door, he said, “Let me in.”

“Yes.”

“Quickly,” he said, and then terminated the call and pocketed the phone.

He glanced worriedly toward the deserted boardwalk.

Hanging in the fog, cascades of dead-still palm fronds, like cold dark fireworks.

With a rattle and scrape, the bracing chair was removed from under the doorknob in the kitchen. The first dead bolt. The second. The clatter of the security chain being disengaged.

When Susan greeted him demurely, without a word but with an obedient half bow, as though she were a geisha, Ahriman stepped inside. He waited while she closed the door again and engaged one of the locks, and then he instructed her to lead him to her bedroom.

Across the kitchen, through the dining room and living room, along the short hall to the bedroom, he said, “I think you’ve been a bad girl, Susan. I don’t know how you could scheme against me, why it would even occur to you to do such a thing, but I’m pretty sure that’s what you’ve done.”

Earlier, every time she had looked away from him, she had turned her eyes toward the potted ming tree. And each time, before her gaze was drawn to that bit of greenery, Ahriman had first made reference either to the videotape he’d shot of her or to the tape he intended to shoot on his next visit. When she appeared to be tense and racked by worry, he directed her to reveal the source of her anxiety, and when she said simply, The video, he made the obvious assumption. Obvious and perhaps wrong. His suspicion had been aroused, almost too late, by the fact that she always looked toward the ming tree: not at the floor, as might be expected when bowed by shame, and not at the bed where so much of her humiliation had occurred, but always at the ming tree.

Now, following her into the bedroom, he said, “I want to see what’s in that pot, under the ivy.”

Dutifully, she led him toward the Biedermeier pedestal, but the doctor stopped short when he saw what was playing on the TV.

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

He would have been damned, in fact, if he had not recognized the cause of his suspicion, if he had finally driven home and gone to bed without returning here.

“Come to me,” he said.

As Susan approached, the doctor made fists of his hands. He wanted to punch her pretty face.

Girls. They were all alike.

As a boy, he’d seen no use for them, had wanted nothing to do with them. Girls had made him sick with all their coy manipulations. The best thing about them was that he could make them cry without much effort — all those beautiful, salty tears — but then they always ran to their mothers or fathers to tattle. He was good at defending himself against their hysterical accusations; adults tended to find him charming and convincing. He had soon realized, however, that he must learn discretion and not let his thirst for tears control him the way that a taste for cocaine controlled more than a few people in the Hollywood crowd with which his father worked.

Eventually, victimized by his hormones, he discovered that he needed girls for more than their tears. He learned, too, how easily a handsome lad like him could play games that put girls’ hearts in his hands, allowing him to wring more tears from them through calculated romance and betrayal than, as a younger boy, he had ever gotten from them by pinching, poking, boxing ears, and pushing them into mud puddles.

Decades of torturing them emotionally had not, however, made them any more appealing to him than they had been when he was just a preschooler dropping caterpillars down their blouses. Girls still annoyed more than charmed him, left him feeling vaguely ill after he had indulged with them, and the fact that he was also fascinated by them only made him resent them more. Worse, sex was never enough for them; they wanted you to father their children. The marrow crawled in his bones at the thought of being anyone’s father. He had once nearly fallen into that trap, but fate had favored his escape. You couldn’t trust children. They were inside your defenses, and when you least expected it, they could kill you and steal your wealth. The doctor knew all about such treachery. And if you fathered a daughter, the mother and child would surely conspire against you at every turn. In the doctor’s view, all other men belonged to a breed different from — and far inferior to — his own, but girls were another species