False Memory

the name FARNER under CAULFIELD on his mailbox label, and out of the building, Dusty felt Martie’s hand warming in his and dared to think he could save her.
    A gardener early to work, was bundling hedge trimmings into a burlap tarpaulin. A handsome young Hispanic with eyes as dark as mole sauce, he smiled and nodded.
    Lying on the lawn, near him, were a small pair of hand clippers and a large pair of two-hand shears.
    At the sight of the blades, Martie let out a strangled cry. She wrenched her hand free of Dusty’s and ran, not toward those makeshift weapons but away from them, to the red Saturn that was parked at the curb.
    “Disputa?” the gardener asked Dusty sympathetically, as if he himself had a regrettable amount of experience arguing with women.
    “Infinidad,” Dusty replied as he hurried past, and he was all the way to the car before he realized he had meant to say enfermedad, meaning “illness,” but had instead said “infinity.”
    The gardener stared after him, not frowning with puzzlement, but nodding solemnly, as though Dusty’s wrong word choice were in fact an indisputable profundity.
    Thus are reputations for wisdom raised on foundations flimsier than those of castles built on air.
    By the time Dusty got behind the wheel of the car, Martie was in the passenger’s seat, doubled over as far as the dashboard would allow, shuddering, groaning. Her thighs were pressed together, trapping her hands as though they itched with the desire to make mayhem.
    When Dusty pulled his door shut, Martie said, “Is there anything sharp in the glove box?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Is it locked?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Lock it, for God’s sake.”
    He locked it and then started the engine.
    “Hurry;” she pleaded.
    “All right.”
    “But don’t drive too fast.”
    “Okay.”
    “But hurry.”
    “Which is it?” he asked, pulling away from the curb.
    “If you drive too fast, maybe I might try to grab the wheel, try to pull the car off the road, roll it, or plow us head-on into a truck.”
    “Of course, you won’t.”
    “I might,” she insisted. “I will. You don’t want to see what’s in my head, the pictures in my head.”
    The residual effect of three caplets of sleep-aid medication was fading from her by the second, while Dusty’s heartburn from the cream-filled, glazed doughnut was steadily growing.
    “Oh, God,” she groaned. “God, please, please, don’t let me see these things, don’t make me see them.”
    Huddled forward in abject misery, apparently sickened by the violent images spurting unwanted through her mind, Martie gagged, and soon the gagging evolved into fierce spasms of retching that would have brought up her breakfast if she had eaten any.
    The morning traffic on these surface streets was moderately heavy, and Dusty weaved from lane to lane, sometimes taking risks to wedge into a gap, ignoring the angry looks of other motorists and the occasional hard bark of a horn. Martie appeared to be on an emotional toboggan run, rocketing along slick ice, with a panic attack at the end of the chute. Dusty wanted to be as close to Dr. Closterman’s office as possible if she hit the wall and ricocheted into a crack-up like the one he had witnessed the previous night.
    Although dry heaves racked her with greater force than ever; she achieved no relief, not merely because her stomach was empty; but because she needed to disgorge the undisgorgeable vomitous images churning in her mind. Perhaps her mouth flooded with saliva, as is usual during bouts of nausea, because more than once she spat on the floorboards.
    Between fits of retching, she gasped vehemently for breath, her throat surely parched and half raw from the sheer force of these inhalations. Shudders shook Martie, too, and with such violence that Dusty was shivered by a sympathetic cold revulsion, even though he could not imagine what ghastly visions plagued her.
    He drove faster yet, weaving with greater aggression from lane to lane, taking bigger risks, to the accompaniment of more blaring horns and, now, the frequent squeal of brakes. He almost hoped that a policeman would pull him over. Considering Martie’s condition, any cop was likely to forgo issuing a traffic citation and, instead, provide an emergency escort, with siren.
    Worsening condition. For the moment, her convulsive retching passed, but she began to rock back and forth in her seat, groaning, thumping her forehead against the padded dashboard, softly at first, slow and easy, as though to distract herself