False Memory (3 page)

Into Skeet’s
not you
chant, Dusty said, “You’re such a feeb.”

“
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 have an exaggerated perception of every gust. Since he’d long ago rejected his old man’s screwy philosophies, he figured that if Skeet could stand erect with no risk of being spun away like a Frisbee, then so could he.

Raising his voice, Skeet said, “This is for the best, Dusty.”

“Like you would know what’s for the best.”

“Don’t try to stop me.”

“Well, see, I’ve got to try.”

“I can’t be talked down.”

“I’ve become aware of that.”

They faced each other, as though they were two athletes about to engage in a strange new sport on a slanted court: Skeet standing tall, like a basketball player waiting for the opening toss-up, Dusty crouched like an underweight sumo wrestler looking for leverage.

“I don’t want to get you hurt,” Skeet said.

“I don’t want to get me hurt, either.”

If Skeet was determined to jump off the Sorensons’ house, he couldn’t be prevented from doing so. The steep pitch of the roof, the rounded surfaces of the barrel tiles, the wind, and the law of gravity were on his side. All that Dusty could hope to do was to make sure the poor son of a bitch went off the edge at exactly the right place and onto the mattresses.

“You’re my friend, Dusty. My only real friend.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, kid.”

“Which makes you my best friend.”

“By default,” Dusty agreed.

“A guy’s best friend shouldn’t get in the way of his glory.”

“Glory?”

“What I’ve seen it’s like on the Other Side. The glory.”

The only way to be sure that Skeet went off the roof precisely above the fall-break was to grab him at the right instant and hurl him to the ideal point along the brink. Which meant going down the roof and over the edge with him.

The wind tossed and whipped Skeet’s long blond hair, which was the last attractive physical quality that he had left. Once, he’d been a good-looking boy, a girl magnet. Now his body was wasted; his face was gray and haggard; and his eyes were as burnt out as the bottom of a crack pipe. His thick, slightly curly, golden hair was so out of sync with the rest of his appearance that it seemed to be a wig.

Except for his hair, Skeet stood motionless. In spite of being more stoned than a witch in Salem, he was alert and wary, deciding how best to break away from Dusty and execute a clean running dive headfirst into the cobblestones below.

Hoping to distract the kid or at least to buy a little time, Dusty said, “Something I’ve always wondered…. What does the angel of death look like?”

“Why?”

“You saw him, right?”

Frowning, Skeet said, “Yeah, well, he looked okay.”

A hard gust of wind tore off Dusty’s white cap and spun it to Oz, but he didn’t take his attention off Skeet. “Did he look like Brad Pitt?”

“Why would he look like Brad Pitt?” Skeet asked, and his eyes slid sideways and back to Dusty again, as he glanced surreptitiously toward the brink.

“Brad Pitt played him in that movie,
Meet Joe Black.
”

“Didn’t see it.”

With growing desperation, Dusty said, “Did he look like Jack Benny?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Jack Benny played him once in a really old movie. Remember? We watched it together.”

“I don’t remember much. You’re the one with the photographic memory.”

“Eidetic. Not photographic. Eidetic and audile memory.”

“See? I can’t even remember what it’s called. You remember what you had for dinner five years ago. I don’t remember yesterday.”

“It’s just a trick thing, eidetic memory. Useless, anyway.”

The first fat drops of rain spattered across the top of the house.

Dusty didn’t have to look down to see the dead lichen being transformed into a thin film of slime, because he could
smell
it, a subtle but singular musty odor, and he could smell the wet clay tiles, too.

A daunting image flickered through his mind:
He and Skeet were sliding off the roof, then tumbling wildly, Skeet landing on the mattresses without sustaining a single cut or bruise, but Dusty overshooting and fracturing his spine on the cobblestones.

“Billy Crystal,” Skeet said.

“What—you mean Death? The angel of death looked like Billy Crystal?”

“Something wrong with that?”

“For God’s sake, Skeet, you can’t trust some wise-ass, maudlin, shtick-spouting Billy Crystal angel of death!”

“I liked him,” Skeet said, and he ran for the edge.

5

As though the great guns of battleships were providing cover fire for invading troops, hard hollow explosions echoed along the southfacing beaches. Enormous waves slammed onto the shore, and bullets of water, skimmed off the breakers by a growing wind, rattled inland through the low dunes and sparse stalks of grass.

Martie Rhodes hurried along the Balboa Peninsula boardwalk, which was a wide concrete promenade with ocean-facing houses on one side and deep beaches on the other. She hoped the rain would hold off for half an hour.

Susan Jagger’s narrow, three-story house was sandwiched between similar structures. The weather-silvered, cedar-shingle siding and the white shutters vaguely suggested a house on Cape Cod, although the pinched lot did not allow for a full expression of that style of architecture.

The house, like its neighbors, had no front yard, no raised porch, only a shallow patio with a few potted plants. This one was paved with bricks and set behind a white picket fence. The gate in the fence was unlocked, and the hinges creaked.

Susan had once lived on the first and second floors with her husband, Eric, who had used the third floor—complete with its own bath and kitchen—as a home office. They were currently separated. Eric had moved out a year ago, and Susan had moved up, renting the lower two floors to a quiet retired couple whose only vice seemed to be two martinis each before dinner, and whose only pets were four parakeets.

A steep exterior set of stairs led along the side of the house to the third story. As Martie climbed to the small covered landing, shrieking seagulls wheeled in from the Pacific and passed overhead, crossing the peninsula, flying toward the harbor, where they would ride out the storm in sheltered roosts.

Martie knocked, but then unlocked the door without waiting for a response. Susan was usually hesitant to welcome a visitor, reluctant to be confronted with a glimpse of the outside world; so Martie had been given a key almost a year previously.

Steeling herself for the ordeal ahead, she stepped into the kitchen, which was revealed by a single light over the sink. The blinds were tightly shut, and lush swags of shadows hung like deep-purple bunting.

The room was not redolent of spices or lingering cooking odors. Instead, the air was laced with the faint but astringent scents of disinfectant, scouring powder, and floor wax.

“It’s me,” Martie called, but Susan didn’t answer.

The only illumination in the dining room came from behind the doors of a small breakfront, in which antique majolica china gleamed on glass shelves. Here, the air smelled of furniture polish.

If all the lights had been ablaze, the apartment would have proved to be spotless, cleaner than a surgery. Susan Jagger had a lot of time to fill.

Judging by the mélange of odors in the living room, the carpet had been shampooed recently, the furniture polished, the upholstery dry-cleaned in place, and fresh citrus-scented potpourri had been placed in two small, ventilated, red-ceramic jars on the end tables.

The expansive windows, which framed an exhilarating ocean view, were covered by pleated shades. The shades were for the most part concealed by heavy drapes.

Until four months ago, Susan had been able at least to look out at the world with wistful longing, even though for sixteen months she had been terrified of venturing into it and had left her home only with someone upon whom she could lean for emotional support. Now merely the sight of a vast open space, with no walls or sheltering roof, could trigger a phobic reaction.

All the lamps glowed, and the spacious living room was brightly lighted. Yet because of the shrouded windows and the unnatural hush, the atmosphere felt funereal.

Shoulders slumped, head hung, Susan waited in an armchair. In a black skirt and black sweater, she had the wardrobe and the posture of a mourner. Judging by her appearance, the paperback book in her hands should have been the Bible, but it was a mystery novel.

“Did the butler do it?” Martie asked, sitting on the edge of the sofa.

Without looking up, Susan said, “No. The nun.”

“Poison?”

Still focused on the paperback, Susan said, “Two with an ax. One with a hammer. One with a wire garrote. One with an acetylene torch. And two with a nail gun.”

“Wow, a nun who’s a serial killer.”

“You can hide a lot of weapons under a habit.”

“Mystery novels have changed since we read them in junior high.”

“Not always for the better,” Susan said, closing the book.

They had been best friends since they were ten: eighteen years of sharing more than mystery novels—hopes, fears, happiness, sorrow, laughter, tears, gossip, adolescent enthusiasms, hard-won insights. During the past sixteen months, since the inexplicable onset of Susan’s agoraphobia, they had shared more pain than pleasure.

“I should have called you,” Susan said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t go to the session today.”

This was ritual, and Martie played her part: “Of course, you can, Susan. And you will.”

Putting the paperback aside, shaking her head, Susan said, “No, I’ll call Dr. Ahriman and tell him I’m just too ill. I’m coming down with a cold, maybe the flu.”

“You don’t sound congested.”

Susan grimaced. “It’s more a stomach flu.”

“Where’s your thermometer? We’d better take your temperature.”

“Oh, Martie, just look at me. I look like hell. Pasty-faced and red-eyed and my hair like straw. I can’t go out like this.”

“Get real, Sooz. You look like you always look.”

“I’m a mess.”

“Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Cameron Diaz—they’d all kill to look as good as you, even when you’re sick as a dog and projectile vomiting, which you aren’t.”

“I’m a freak.”

“Oh, yeah, right, you’re the Elephant Woman. We’ll have to put a sack over your head and warn away small children.”

If beauty had been a burden, Susan would have been crushed flat. Ash-blond, green-eyed, petite, with exquisitely sculptured features, with skin as flawless as that of a peach on a tree in Eden, she had turned more heads than a coven of chiropractors.

“I’m bursting out of this skirt. I’m gross.”

“A virtual blimp,” Martie said sarcastically. “A dirigible. A giant balloon of a woman.”

Although Susan’s self-imprisonment allowed her no exercise except housecleaning and long walks on a treadmill in the bedroom, she remained svelte.

“I’ve gained more than a pound,” Susan insisted.

“My God, it’s a liposuction emergency,” Martie said, bolting up from the sofa. “I’ll get your raincoat. We can call the plastic surgeon from the car, tell him to get an industrial-size sump pump to suck out all the fat.”

In the short hall that led to the bedroom, the coat closet featured a pair of sliding, mirrored doors. As Martie approached it, she tensed and hesitated, concerned that she would be overcome by the same irrational fear that had seized her earlier.

She had to keep a grip on herself. Susan needed her. If she leaped into looniness again, her anxiety would feed Susan’s fear, and perhaps vice versa.

When she confronted the full-length mirror, nothing in it made her heart race. She forced a smile, but it looked strained. She met her eyes in the reflection, and then quickly looked away, sliding one of the doors aside.

As she slipped the raincoat off the hanger, Martie considered, for the first time, that her recent peculiar bouts of fear might be related to the time that she’d spent with Susan during the past year. Maybe you should expect to absorb a little overspill of anxiety if you hung out a lot with a woman suffering from an extreme phobia.

A faint heat of shame flushed Martie’s face. Even to consider such a possibility seemed superstitious, uncharitable, and unfair to poor Susan. Phobic disorders and panic attacks weren’t contagious.

Turning away from the closet door and then reaching back to slide it shut, she wondered what term psychologists used to describe a fear of one’s shadow. A disabling fear of open spaces, which afflicted Susan, was called agoraphobia. But shadows? Mirrors?

Martie stepped out of the hall and into the living room before she realized that she had reached behind her back to pull shut the sliding door in order to avoid glancing in the mirror again. Startled that she had acted with such unconscious aversion, she considered returning to the closet and confronting the mirror.

From the armchair, Susan was watching her.

The mirror could wait.

Holding the raincoat open, Martie approached her friend. “Get up, get in this, and get moving.”

Susan gripped the arms of the chair, miserable at the prospect of leaving her sanctuary. “I can’t.”

“If you don’t cancel a session forty-eight hours ahead, you have to pay for it.”

“I can afford to.”

“No, you can’t. You don’t have any income.”

The only psychological malady that could have destroyed Susan’s career as a real-estate agent more effectively than agoraphobia was uncontrollable pyromania. She had felt reasonably safe inside any property while showing it to a client, but such paralyzing terror had overcome her while she was traveling between houses that she hadn’t been able to drive.

“I have the rent,” Susan said, referring to the monthly check from the parakeet-infatuated retirees downstairs.

“Which doesn’t quite cover the mortgage, taxes, utilities, and maintenance on the property.”

“I have a lot of equity in the house.”

Which might eventually be the only thing between you and total destitution, if you don’t beat this damn phobia,
Martie thought, but she could not bring herself to speak those words, even if that dire prospect might motivate Susan to get out of the armchair.

Raising her delicate chin in an unconvincing expression of brave defiance, Susan said, “Besides, Eric sends me a check.”

“Not much. Hardly more than pocket change. And if the swine divorces you, maybe there won’t be anything more at all from him, considering you came into this marriage with more assets than he did, and there aren’t any kids.”

“Eric’s not a swine.”

“Pardon me for not being blunt enough. He’s a pig.”

“Be nice, Martie.”

“I gotta be me. He’s a skunk.”

Susan was determined to avoid self-pity and tears, which was highly admirable, but she was equally determined not to admit to her anger, which was less so. “He just was so upset seeing me…this way. He couldn’t take it anymore.”

“Oh, the poor sensitive darling,” Martie said. “And I guess he was just too distressed to remember the part of the marriage vows that goes ‘in sickness and in health.’”

Martie’s anger at Eric was genuine, although she made an effort to stoke it like a fire and keep it ever alive. He had always been quiet, self-effacing, and sweet—and in spite of his abandonment of his wife, he remained hard to hate. Martie loved Susan too much
not
to despise Eric, however, and she believed that Susan needed anger to motivate her in her struggle against agoraphobia.

“Eric would be here if I had cancer or something,” Susan said. “I’m not just sick, Martie. I’m crazy, is what I am.”

“You aren’t crazy,” Martie insisted. “Phobias and anxiety attacks aren’t the same as madness.”

“I feel mad. I feel stark raving.”

“He didn’t last four months after this started. He’s a swine, a skunk, a weasel, and worse.”

This grim part of each visit—which Martie thought of as the
extraction phase—
was stressful for Susan, but it was downright grueling for Martie. To get her resistant friend out of the house, she had to be firm and relentless; and although this was a firmness informed by much love and compassion, she felt as though she were hectoring Susan. It wasn’t within Martie’s character to be a bully, even in a good cause, and by the end of this brutal four-or five-hour ordeal, she would return home to Corona Del Mar in a state of physical and emotional exhaustion.

“Sooz, you’re beautiful, kind, special, and smart enough to whip this thing.” Martie shook the raincoat. “Now get your ass out of that chair.”

“Why can’t Dr. Ahriman come to me for these sessions?”

“Leaving this house twice a week is part of the therapy. You know the theory—immersion in the very thing you’re frightened of. A sort of inoculation.”

“It isn’t working.”

“Come on.”

“I’m getting worse.”

“Up, up.”

“It’s so cruel,” Susan protested. Letting go of the arms of the chair, she fisted her hands on her thighs. “So damn cruel.”

“Whiner.”

She glared at Martie. “Sometimes you can be such a mean bitch.”

“Yeah, that’s me. If Joan Crawford were alive, I’d challenge her to a wire coat-hanger fight, and I’d
lacerate
her.”

Laughing, then shaking her head, Susan rose from the armchair. “I can’t believe I said that. I’m sorry, Martie. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Holding the raincoat as Susan slipped her arms into it, Martie said, “You be good, girlfriend, and on the way back from the doctor, we’ll get some great Chinese takeout. We’ll open a couple bottles of Tsingtao, and we’ll play some killer two-hand pinochle over lunch, fifty cents a point.”

“You already owe me over six hundred thousand bucks.”

“So break my legs. Gambling debts aren’t legally collectible.”

After Susan switched off all but one of the lamps, she retrieved her purse from the coffee table and led Martie through the apartment.

As she was crossing the kitchen behind Susan, Martie found her attention drawn to a wicked-looking item that lay on a cutting board near the sink. It was a mezzaluna knife, a classic Italian kitchen tool: The curved stainless-steel blade was shaped like a half-moon, with a handle at each end, so it could be rocked rapidly back and forth to dice and slice.

Like an electric current, scintillant light seemed to sizzle along the cutting edge.

Martie could not look away from it. She didn’t realize how completely the mezzaluna had mesmerized her—until she heard Susan ask, “What’s wrong?”

Her throat was tight, and her tongue felt swollen. With audible thickness, she asked a question to which she already knew the answer: “What’s that?”