False Memory

on his jeans.
    The keys still dangled from the ignition. He plucked them out, muffled their jingle in his clenched hand, and stuffed them into one of his pockets before Martie could raise her bowed head and catch sight of them.
    He was not concerned that she would grab the keys and stab at his face in a furious determination to blind him, as she claimed to have seen herself doing in a vision. He was no more afraid of her now than he had been before this latest episode.
    In the immediate aftermath of her seizure, however, perhaps a glimpse of the keys would be enough to send her tumbling down the stairs of panic yet again.
    Silent now except for her hard breathing, she sat up straighter and lowered her hands from her head.
    “I can’t take much more like that,” she whispered.
    “It’s over.”
    “I’m afraid it isn’t.”
    “For now, anyway.”
    Dappled with sunshine and leaf shadows, Martie’s face appeared to flicker, gold and black, as if it were no more substantial than a face in a dream, likely to glimmer less with gold and darkle more with black, until at last it lost all composition and sparkled into extinction like the last few bright crackles of a Roman candle in a bottomless night sky.
    Though intellectually he rejected the possibility that he was losing her, in his heart he knew that she was slipping away from him, captive of a force that he could not understand and against which he could offer no defense.
    No. Dr. Ahriman could help her. Could, would, must.
    Perhaps Dr. Closterman, with MRIs and EEGs and PET scans and all the abbreviations and acronyms of high-tech medicine, would identify her condition, isolate the cause, and provide the cure.
    But if not Closterman, then surely Ahriman.
    From out of a wilderness of wind-stirred leaf shadows, as blue as the two jewels in the sockets of a jungle-wrapped stone goddess, Martie’s eyes met his. No illusions in her gaze. No superstitious surety that all would be well in this best of all possible worlds. Just a stark appreciation of her dilemma.
    Somehow she overcame the dread of her lethal potential. She extended her left hand to him.
    He held it gratefully.
    “Poor Dusty,” she said. “A druggie brother and a crazy wife.”
    “You’re not crazy.”
    “I’m working at it.”
    “Whatever happens to you,” he said, “won’t happen just to you. It happens to both of us. We’re in this together.”
    “I know”
    “Two musketeers.”
    “Butch and Sundance.”
    “Mickey and Minnie.”
    He didn’t smile. Neither did she. But with characteristic fortitude, Martie said, “Len go see if Doc Closterman learned any damn thing at all in medical school.”
    44
    Taking of the temperature, blood pressure, pulse rate, careful ophthalmoscope examination of the left eye, then the right, a peek with auriscope at the secrets of the ears, much solemn listening with stethoscope at the chest and the back—Breathe deep and hold, breathe out, breath deep and hold—palpation of the abdomen, a quick test of the audito-oculogyric reflex, one gentle rap of a small hammer on a pretty kneecap to gauge patellar reflex: All the easy stuff led Dr. Closterman to conclude that Martie was an exceptionally healthy young woman, physiologically even younger than her twenty-eight years.
    From the spare chair in the corner of the examination room, Dusty said, “She seems to get younger week by week.”
    To Martie, Closterman said, “Does he spread it on this heavy all the time?”
    “I have to shovel out the house every morning.” She smiled at Dusty. “I love it.”
    Closterman was in his late forties but, unlike Martie, looked— and no doubt tested—older than his age, and not solely because of his prematurely white hair. Double chins and dewlaps, generous jowls and a proud knob of a nose, eyes pink in the corners with a perpetual bloodshot sheen from too much time in salt air and wind and sun, and a tan that would leave any dermatologist hoarse from lecturing—all marked him as a dedicated gourmet, deep-sea fisherman, wind-surfer, and probably connoisseur of beer. From his broad brow to his broader belly, he was a living example of the consequences of ignoring the sound advice that he unabashedly doled out to his patients.
    Doc—his surfer handle—had a mind as sharp as a scalpel, the bedside manner of a favorite grandfather with a storybook in hand, and a dedication to his practice that would have shamed Hippocrates, yet Dusty preferred him over all other possible internists less for those fine qualities than