False Memory

therefore, the doctor selected a Black & Decker power drill from the collection of tools. He had the presence of mind also to take a twenty-foot, orange extension cord.
    In his father’s bedroom once more, he plugged the extension cord into a wall outlet, plugged the drill into the extension cord, and thus equipped, climbed onto the bed with Viveca, straddling her but remaining on his knees. She was so doped that she snored through all his preparations, and he had to shout her name repeatedly to wake her. When she finally came around, blinking stupidly, she smiled up at him, as if she believed he was someone other than who he was, as if she thought the power drill was an elaborate new Swedish vibrator.
    Thanks to the superb instruction provided by the Harvard Medical School, the doctor was able to position the half-inch steel bit with pinpoint accuracy. To the confused and smiling Viveca, he said, “If you don’t have a heart, something else must be in there, and the best way to identify it is take a core sample.”
    The shriek of the powerful little Black & Decker motor brought her out of her drug stupor. By then, however, the drilling operation was under way and in fact nearly completed.
    After taking time just to appreciate the loveliness of Viveca being dead, the doctor noticed the book of poetry that lay open on the sheets. A whorl of blood soiled both exposed pages, but in a pristine circle of white paper in the middle of the crimson stain were three lines of verse.

    This phantasm
    of falling petals vanishes into
    moon and flowers...

    He did not know then that the poem was a haiku, that it had been written by Okyo in 1890, that it was about the poet’s own impending death, and that, like many haiku, it didn’t translate into English with the ideal five-seven-five syllable pattern in which it was composed in the original Japanese.
    What he did know was that this tiny poem moved him unexpectedly, profoundly, as he’d never been moved before. The verse expressed, as Ahriman himself could never express it, his heretofore half-repressed and formless sense of his mortality. Okyo’s three lines brought him instantly and poignantly in touch with the terrible sad truth that he, too, was destined eventually to die. He, too, was a phantasm, as fragile as any flower, one day to drop like wilting petals.
    As he knelt on the bed and held the book of haiku in both hands, reading those three lines over and over again, having forgotten the drill-pierced starlet whom he still straddled, the doctor felt his chest tighten and his throat thicken with emotion at the prospect of his eventual demise. How short life is! How unjust is death! How insignificant are we all! How cruel the universe.
    So powerfully did these thoughts course through his mind, the doctor was sure he must be crying. Holding the book with only his left hand, he raised his right to his dry cheeks, then to his eyes, but he was tearless. He was convinced, however, that he’d been close to tears, and he knew now that he possessed the capacity to weep if ever he experienced anything sad enough to tap his salty well.
    This realization pleased him because it meant that he had more in common with his father than he had supposed, and because it proved he wasn’t like Viveca Scofield, as she had claimed. Perhaps she had no tears, but his were stored away and waiting.
    She had also been wrong about not having a heart. She had one, all right. Of course, it was no longer beating.
    The doctor climbed off Viveca, leaving her like an unfinished woodshop project, Black & Decker embedded, and for a long while he sat on the edge of the bed, poring through the book of haiku. Here, in this unlikely place and time, he discovered his artistic side.
    When he could finally pry himself away from the book, he brought Dad’s body upstairs, placed it on the bed, wiped the smears of dark chocolate off its mouth, dissected the great director’s fine lacrimal apparatus, and collected the famous eyes. He tapped into Viveca for a few ounces of blood, gathered six pair of her thong-style panties from the dresser drawer—she was a live-in fiancée—and broke off one of her acrylic fingernails.
    When he used a master key to let himself into Earl Ventnor’s apartment, he found a crude replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa constructed out of empty Budweiser cans on the living-room coffee table. The handyman, rather than leaning, lay in full collapse on the sofa, snoring almost as loudly as Viveca had