False Memory

question. Considering his distrust of most academics and experts—two labels Ahriman no doubt wore with pride— and considering his respect for Dr. Closterman, Dusty found his reticence inexplicable. Nevertheless, the question remained glued between his tongue and the roof of his mouth.
    Minutes later, as he and Martie were crossing the quadrangle from the office tower to the hospital, Dusty realized that his reluctance to pose the question, though strange, was less puzzling than his failure to inform Dr. Closterman that he had already phoned Ahriman’s office to seek an appointment later this same day and was awaiting a callback.
    Hard shreaks from overhead drew his attention. Thin gray clouds like bolts of dirty linen had been flung across the azure sky, and three fat black crows wheeled through the air, jinking now and then as if plucking fibers from that raveled, rotting mist to build nests in graveyards.
    For some reasons clear and others not, Dusty thought of Poe, of a bad-news raven perched above a doorway. Although Martie, in a Valium lull, held his hand with none of her previous reluctance, Dusty thought also of Poe’s lost maiden, Lenore, and he wondered if the skreak of the crow, translated into the tongue of the raven, might be “nevermore.”

     
     
    In the hematology lab, while Martie sat watching her blood slowly fill a series of tubes, she chatted with the technician, a young Vietnamese American, Kenny Phan, who had gotten the needle into her vein quickly and without a sting.
    “I cause much less discomfort than a vampire,” Kenny said with an infectious grin, “and usually have sweeter breath.”
    Dusty would have watched with normal interest had this been his blood being drawn, but he was squeamish at the sight of Martie’s.
    Sensitive to his discomfort, she asked that he use the moment to get Susan Jagger on his cell phone.
    He placed the call and waited through twelve rings. When Susan didn’t answer, he pressed end and asked Martie for the number.
    “You know the number.”
    “Maybe I entered it wrong.”
    He keyed it in again, reciting it aloud, and when he pressed the final number, Martie said, “That’s it.”
    This time he waited through sixteen rings before terminating the call. “She isn’t there.”
    “But she must be there. She’s never anywhere else—unless she’s with me.”
    “Maybe she’s in the shower.”
    “No answering machine?”
    “No. I’ll try later.”
    Mellowed by the Valium, Martie looked thoughtful, perhaps even concerned, but not worried.
    Replacing a full tube of blood with the final empty vial, Kenny Phan said, “One more for my personal collection.”
    Martie laughed, this time without an underlying tremor of any darker emotion.
    In spite of the circumstances, Dusty felt as though normal life might be within their grasp again, much easier to rediscover than he had imagined in the grimmer moments of the past fourteen hours.
    As Kenny Phan was applying a small, purple Barney the Dinosaur adhesive bandage to the needle puncture, Dusty’s cell phone rang. Jennifer, Dr. Ahriman’s secretary, was calling to confirm that the psychiatrist would be able to rearrange his afternoon schedule to see them at one-thirty.
    “That’s a bit of luck,” Martie said with evident relief when Dusty gave her the news.
    “Yeah.”
    Dusty, too, was relieved—curiously so, considering that if Martie’s problem was psychological, the prognosis for a quick and full recovery might be less reassuring than if the malady had an entirely physical cause. He had never met Dr. Mark Ahriman, and yet a warm sense of security, a comforting flame, had been lit in him by the call from the psychiatrist’s secretary—which was also a curious and surprising reaction.
    If the problem wasn’t medical, Ahriman would know what to do. He would be able to uncover the roots of Martie’s anxiety.
    Dusty’s reluctance to put his trust entirely in experts of any kind was borderline pathological, and he was the first to admit as much. He was somewhat dismayed with himself for being so eager to hope that Dr. Ahriman, with all his degrees and his best-selling books and his exalted reputation, would possess a nearly magical ability to set things right.
    Evidently he was more like the average sucker than he had wanted to believe he could be. When everything he cared most about—Martie and their life together—was at risk, and when his own knowledge and common sense were inadequate to solve the problem, then in his abject fear, he turned