False Memory

for Valium. How many of these episodes have there been?”
    “A few,” Dusty said. “I don’t know. But this one wasn’t bad.”
    Closterman’s round face was better suited to a smile; his frown was unable to achieve sufficient gravity, buoyed as it was by his ball of a nose, rosy cheeks, and merry eyes. “Not bad? The others were worse? Then I wouldn’t recommend these tests without Valium. Some of these procedures, like an MRI, they disturb patients.”
    “I’m disturbed going in,” Martie said.
    “We’ll mellow you out, so it’s not such an ordeal.” Closterman stepped to the door, then hesitated with his hand on the knob. He glanced at Dusty. “Are you okay here?”
    Dusty nodded. “These are only things she’s afraid of doing—not anything she could do. Not her, not Martie.”
    “Like hell I couldn’t,” she said from behind a veil of fingers.
    When Closterman had gone, Dusty moved the reflex hammer and the ballpoint beyond Martie’s reach. “Feel better?”
    Between her fingers, she had seen his act of consideration. “This is mortifying.”
    “Can I hold your hand?”
    A hesitation. Then: “Okay.”
    When Closterman returned, having phoned in a prescription for Valium to their usual pharmacy, he had two individually packaged samples of the drug. He opened one sample and gave it to Martie with a paper cup full of water.
    “Martie,” said Closterman, “I truly believe the tests are going to rule out any intracranial mass—neoplastic, cystic, inflammatory, and gummatous. A lot of us, we get an unusual headache that takes a while to go away—we right away think, at least in the back of our mind, it must be a tumor. But brain tumors aren’t that common.”
    “This isn’t a headache,” she reminded him.
    “Exactly. And headaches are a prime symptom of brain tumors. As is a retinal condition called choked disk, which I didn’t find when I examined your eyes. You mentioned vomiting and nausea. If you were vomiting without nausea, then we’d have a classic symptom. From what you told me, you don’t actually have hallucinations—”

    “Just these unpalatable thoughts, grotesque images in your head, but you don’t mistake them for things really happening. What I see is anxiety of a high order. So when all is said and done, though we have a lot of physiological conditions to eliminate first... Well, I suspect I’ll need to recommend a therapist.”
    “We already know one,” Martie said.
    “Oh? Who?”
    “He’s supposed to be one of the best,” Dusty said. “Maybe you’ve heard of him. A psychiatrist. Dr. Mark Ahriman.”
    Although Roy Closterman’s round face couldn’t produce the sharp angles of a suitably disapproving frown, it smoothed at once into a perfectly inscrutable expression that could be read no more easily than alien hieroglyphics from another galaxy. “Yes, Ahriman, he has a fine reputation. And his books, of course. Where did you get the recommendation? I imagine his patient list is full.”
    “He’s been treating a friend of mine,” Martie said.
    “May I ask for what condition?”
    “Agoraphobia.”
    “A terrible thing.”
    “It’s changed her life.”
    “How’s she doing?”
    Martie said, “Dr. Ahriman thinks she’s nearing a breakthrough.”
    “Good news,” Closterman said.
    The sun-leathered skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled, and his lips tweaked up to precisely the same degree at both sides of his mouth, but this was not the broad and winning smile of which he was capable. In fact, it was hardly a smile at all, just a variation of his inscrutable look, reminiscent of the smile on a statue of Buddha: benign but conveying more mystery than mirth.
    Still tweaked and crinkled, he said, “But if you find that Dr. Ahriman isn’t taking on new patients, I know a wonderful therapist, a compassionate and quite brilliant woman, who I’m sure would see you.” He picked up Martie’s file and the pen with which she could have put out his eye. “First, before there’s any talk of therapy, let’s get those tests done. They’re expecting you at the hospital, and the various departments have promised to squeeze you into their schedules as if you were an emergency-room admission, no appointments needed. I’ll have all the results by Friday, and then we can decide what’s next. By the time you dress and get next door, that Valium will have kicked in. If you need another one before you can get the prescription filled, you’ve got the second sample. Any questions?”
    Why don’t you like Mark Ahriman? Dusty wondered.
    He didn’t ask the