False Memory

“You’re the feeb.”

“Wrong. You’re the feeb.”

“You are so completely the feeb,” Skeet said.

Dusty shook his head. “No, I’m the psychological progeriac.”

“The what?”

“Psychological, meaning ‘of, pertaining to, or affecting the mind.’ Progeriac, meaning ‘someone afflicted with progeria,’ which is a ‘congenital abnormality characterized by premature and rapid aging, in which the sufferer, in childhood, appears to be an old person.’”

Skeet bobbed his head. “Hey, yeah, I saw a story about that on 60 Minutes.”

“So a psychological progeriac is someone who is mentally old even as a kid. Psychological progeriac. My dad used to call me that. Sometimes he shortened it to the initials — PP. He’d say, ‘How’s my little pee-pee today?’ or ‘If you don’t want to see me drink another Scotch, you little pee-pee, why don’t you just hike your ass out to the tree house in the backyard and play with matches for a while.’”

Casting anguish and anger aside as abruptly as he had embraced them, Skeet said sympathetically, “Wow. So it wasn’t like a term of endearment, huh?”

“No. Not like feeb.”

Frowning, Skeet said, “Which one was your dad?”

“Dr. Trevor Penn Rhodes, professor of literature, specialist in deconstructionist theory.”

“Oh, yeah. Dr. Decon.”

Gazing at the Santa Ana Mountains, Dusty paraphrased Dr. Decon: “Language can’t describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader’s interpretation is equally valid, more important than the author’s intention. In fact, nothing in life has meaning. Reality is subjective. Values and truth are subjective. Life itself is a kind of illusion. Blah, blah, blah, let’s have another Scotch.”

The distant mountains sure looked real. The roof under his butt felt real, too, and if he fell headfirst onto the driveway, he would either be killed or crippled for life, which wouldn’t prove a thing to the intractable Dr. Decon, but which was enough reality for Dusty.

“Is he why you’re afraid of heights,” Skeet asked, “because of something he did?”

“Who — Dr. Decon? Nah. Heights just bother me, that’s all.”

Sweetly earnest in his concern, Skeet said, “You could find out why. Talk to a psychiatrist.”

“I think I’ll just go home and talk to my dog.”

“I’ve had a lot of therapy.”

“And it’s done wonders for you, hasn’t it?”

Skeet laughed so hard that snot ran out of his nose. “Sorry.”

Dusty withdrew a Kleenex from a pocket and offered it.

As Skeet blew his nose, he said, “Well, me…now I’m a different story. Longer than I can remember, I’ve been afraid of everything.”

“I know.”

“Getting up, going to bed, and everything between. But I’m not afraid now.” He finished with the Kleenex and held it out to Dusty.

“Keep it,” Dusty said.

“Thanks. Hey, you know why I’m not afraid anymore?”

“Because you’re shitfaced?”

Skeet laughed shakily and nodded. “But also because I’ve seen the Other Side.”

“The other side of what?”

“Capital O, capital S. I had a visitation from an angel of death, and he showed me what’s waiting for us.”

“You’re an atheist,” Dusty reminded him.

“Not anymore. I’m past all that. Which should make you happy, huh, bro?”

“How easy for you. Pop a pill, find God.”

Skeet’s grin emphasized the skull beneath the skin, which was frighteningly close to the surface in his gaunt countenance. “Cool, huh? Anyway, the angel instructed me to jump, so I’m jumping.”

Abruptly the wind rose, skirling across the roof, chillier than before, bringing with it the briny scent of the distant sea — and then briefly, like an augury, came the rotten stink of decomposing seaweed.

Standing up and negotiating a steeply pitched roof in this blustery air was a challenge that Dusty did not want to face, so he prayed that the wind would diminish soon.

Taking a risk, assuming that Skeet’s suicidal impulse actually arose, as he insisted, from his newfound fearlessness, and hoping that a good dose of terror would make the kid want to cling to life again, Dusty said, “We’re only forty feet off the ground, and from the edge of the roof to the pavement, it’s probably only thirty or thirty-two. Jumping would be a classic feeb decision, because what you’re going to do is maybe end up not dead but paralyzed for life, hooked up to machines for the next forty years, helpless.”

“No, I’ll die,” Skeet said almost perkily.

“You can’t be sure.”

“Don’t get an attitude with me, Dusty.”

“I’m not getting an attitude.”

“Just denying you have an attitude is an attitude.”

“Then I’ve got an attitude.”

“See.”

Dusty took a deep breath to steady his nerves. “This is so lame. Let’s get down from here. I’ll drive you over to the Four Seasons Hotel in Fashion Island. We can go all the way up to the roof, fourteen, fifteen floors, whatever it is, and you can jump from there, so you’ll be sure it’ll work.”

“You wouldn’t really.”

“Sure. If you’re going to do this, then do it right. Don’t screw this up, too.”

“Dusty, I’m smacked, but I’m not stupid.”

Motherwell and the security guard came out of the house with a king-size mattress.

As they struggled with that ungainly object, they had a Laurel and Hardy quality that was amusing, but Skeet’s laugh sounded utterly humorless to Dusty.

Down in the driveway, the two men dropped their burden squarely atop the pair of smaller mattresses that were already on the tarp.

Motherwell looked up at Dusty and raised his arms, hands spread, as if to say, What’re you waiting for?

One of the circling crows went military and conducted a bombing run with an accuracy that would have been the envy of any high-tech air force in the world. A messy white blob splattered across Skeet’s left shoe.

Skeet peered up at the incontinent crow and then down at his soiled sneaker. His mood swung so fast and hard that it seemed his head ought to have spun around from the force of the change. His eerie smile crumbled like earth into a sinkhole, and his face collapsed in despair. In a wretched voice, he said, “This is my life,” and he reached down to poke one finger into the mess on his shoe. “My life.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dusty said. “You’re not well enough educated to think in metaphors.”

This time, he couldn’t make Skeet laugh.

“I’m so tired,” Skeet said, rubbing bird crap between his thumb and forefinger. “Time to go to bed.”

He didn’t mean bed when he said bed. He didn’t mean he was going to take a nap on the pile of mattresses, either. He meant that he was going to settle in for the big sleep, under a blanket of dirt, and dream with the worms.

Skeet got to his feet on the peak of the roof. Although he was hardly more than a wisp, he stood at his full height and didn’t seem unduly bothered by the hooting wind.

When Dusty rose into a cautious crouch, however, the onshore flow hit him with gale force, rocking him forward, off the heels of his shoes, and he teetered for a moment before he settled into a position that gave him a lower center of gravity.

Either this was a deconstructionist’s ideal wind — the effect of which would be different according to each person’s interpretation of it, a mere breeze to me, a typhoon to thee — or Dusty’s fear of heights caused him to