False Memory

choice; after all, Skeet pretty much lived in a fantasy, anyway, and wouldn’t seem to need it for entertainment.
    “What incident?” Martie repeated.
    “Went into a trance.”
    “What do you mean, a trance?”
    “You know, like a magician, one of those stage hypnotists, casts on you and then makes you cluck like a chicken.”
    “Skeet was clucking like a chicken?”
    “No, it was more complicated than that.”
    As Dusty continued along the shelves, the titles began to make him terribly sad. He realized that perhaps his brother sought refuge in these make-believe kingdoms because they were all cleaner, better, more-ordered fantasies than the one in which the kid lived. In these books, spells worked, friends were always true and brave, good and evil were sharply defined, good always won—and no one became drug-dependent and screwed up his life.
    “Quacking like a duck, gobbling like a turkey?” Martie asked from her corner exile.
    “What?”
    “How was it more complicated, what Skeet did at the clinic?”
    Quickly sorting through a stack of magazines, finding nothing published by any cult more nefarious than the Time-Warner media group, Dusty said, “I’ll tell you later. We don’t have time for it now.”
    “You are exasperating.”
    “It’s a gift,” he said, leaving the magazines and books for a quick look through the small kitchen.
    “Don’t leave me alone here,” she pleaded.
    “Then come along.”
    “No way.” she said, obviously thinking about knives and meat forks and potato mashers. “No way. That’s a kitchen.”
    "I’m not going to ask you to cook.”
    The combination kitchen and dining area was open to the living room, all one big California floor plan, so Martie was in fact able to see him pulling open drawers and cabinet doors.
    She was silent for half a minute, but when she spoke, her voice was shaky. “Dusty; I’m getting worse.”
    “To me, babe, you just keep getting better and better.”
    “I mean it. I’m serious. I’m on the edge here, and sliding fast.” Dusty wasn’t finding any cult paraphernalia among the pots and pans. No secret decoder rings. No pamphlets about Armageddon looming. No tracts about how to recognize the Antichrist if you run into him at the mall.
    “What’re you doing in there?” Martie demanded.
    “Stabbing myself through the heart, so you won’t have to.”
    “You bastard.”
    “Been there, done that,” he said, returning to the living room.
    “You’re a cold man,” she complained. Her pale face squinched with anger. “I’m ice,” he agreed.
    “You are. I mean it.” “Arctic.”
    “You make me so angry.”
    “You make me so happy,” he countered.
    Squinch became startled realization, and her eyes widened as she said, “You’re my Martie.”
    “That doesn’t sound like another insult.”
    “And I’m your Susan.”
    “Oh, this is no good. We’ll have to change all our monogrammed towels.”
    “For a year, I’ve treated her like you’re treating me. Jollying her along, always needling her out of her self-pity, trying to keep her spirits up.”
    “You’ve been a real bitch, huh?”
    Martie laughed. Shaky, one tremble away from a sob, like those laughs in operas, when the tragic heroine pitches a soprano trill and lets it fall into a contralto quaver of despair. “I’ve been a bitch and a sarcastic wiseass, yeah, because I love her so much.”
    Smiling, Dusty held out his right hand toward her. “We’ve got to be going.”
    One step out of her corner, she stopped, unable to come farther. “Dusty; I don’t want to be Susan.”
    “I know.”
    “I don’t want to... fall that far down.”
    “You won’t,” he promised.
    “I’m scared.”
    Rather than follow her customary preference for bright colors, Martie had gone to the dark side of her wardrobe. Black boots, black jeans, a black pullover, and a black leather jacket. She looked like a mourner at a biker’s funeral. In this stark outfit, she should have appeared to be tough, as hard and as formidable as night itself. Instead, she seemed as ephemeral as a shadow fading and shrinking under a relentless sun.
    “I’m scared,” she repeated.
    This was a time for truth, not for jollying, and Dusty said, “Yeah. Me, too.”
    Overcoming the fear of her imagined homicidal potential, she took his hand. Hers was cold, but touching was progress.
    “I’ve got to phone Susan,” she said. “She was expecting me to call last night.”
    “We’ll phone her from the car.”
    Out of the apartment, along the common hail, down the stairs, across the small foyer where Skeet had penciled