False Memory

of Dustin and Martie Rhodes, to review all his strategic moves to date and decide how best to proceed to the next level of the game.
    In the elevator, descending to the garage, he thought fleetingly of Susan Jagger, but she was the past, and the face that most easily came to mind now was Martie’s.
    He could never wring tears from multitudes, as his father had done time and again. Delight could be found, however, in the drawing of tears from an audience of one. Considerable intelligence, skill, and craft were required. And a vision. No one form of entertainment was more legitimate than another.
    As the elevator doors opened at the garage, the doctor wondered if Martie’s lacrimal glands and sacs were plumper than Dad’s.

    46
    Already scanned, rayed, scoped, graphed, and bled, Martie was required only to pee in a small plastic cup before she could leave the hospital with all tests completed and samples given. Thanks to the Valium, she was sufficiently calm to risk going into the bathroom alone, without the mortified and mortifying presence of Dusty, though he offered to be her “urine-sample sentinel.”
    She was still not herself. Her irrational anxiety had not been drenched by the drug, merely dampened; hot coals smoldered sullenly in the darker corners of her mind, capable of flaring again into an all-consuming fire.
    As she washed her hands at the sink, she dared to look into the mirror. Mistake. Within the reflection of her eyes, she glimpsed the Other Martie, pent-up and full of rage, chafing at this chemical restraint.
    As she finished washing her hands, she kept her eyes downcast.
    By the time that she and Dusty were leaving the hospital, those embers of anxiety were glowing bright.
    Only three hours had passed since she’d taken the first Valium, not an ideal spacing of doses. Nevertheless, Dusty tore open the sample package and gave her the second tablet, which she washed down at a drinking fountain in the lobby.
    A greater number of people than earlier were going to and fro in the quadrangle. A quiet voice in Martie, as soft as a sinister spirit speaking at a seance, kept up a running commentary regarding the comparative vulnerability of the other pedestrians. Here was a man in a leg cast, walking with the aid of crutches, so easy to topple, defenseless when down, vulnerable to the toe of a boot in the throat. And here, now, rolling along with a smile, was a woman in a battery-powered wheelchair, left arm withered and slack in her lap, right hand operating the controls, as defenseless a target as might pass this way all day.
    Martie lowered her attention to the pavement ahead of her and tried to block out all awareness of the people she passed, which might also silence the hateful inner voice that so terrified her. She held fast to Dusty’s arm, relying on Valium and her husband to get her to the car.
    As they reached the parking lot, the January breeze quickened and brought a slight chill out of the northwest. The big carrotwoods whispered conspiratorially. The busy flickers and flashes of sunshine and shadow off scores of automobile windshields were like semaphored warnings in a code she could not read.
    They had time for lunch before the appointment with Dr. Ahriman. Even though the second Valium would soon be kicking in, Martie didn’t trust herself to spend forty-five minutes in even the coziest café without making a scene, so Dusty went in search of a drive-through, fast-food restaurant.
    He had driven little more than a mile before Martie asked him to pull over in front of a sprawling, three-story, garden-apartment complex. The development stood behind a lawn as green as a golf course, shaded by graceful California pepper trees, lacy melaleucas, and a few tall jacarandas with early purple flowers. Pale yellow stucco walls. Red tile roofs. It looked like a clean, safe, comfortable place.
    “They had to rebuild half of it after the fire,” Martie said. “Sixty apartments burned down.”
    “How long ago was that?”
    “Fifteen years. And they replaced the roofs on the buildings that weren’t destroyed, because it was the old cedar shingles that allowed the blaze to spread so fast.”
    “Doesn’t look haunted, does it?”
    “Ought to be. Nine died, three of them small children. Seems funny... how it looks so nice now, you know, like that night must’ve been just a dream.”
    “Would’ve been worse without your dad.”
    Although Dusty knew all the details, Martie wanted to talk about the fire. All she had of