False Memory

a carousel without horses but with strange beasts formed of leaves. Then as if drawn by the pipes of Pan, every leaf without exception flies to the center of the dearing and coalesces into the shape of a man, forming around the invisible presence that was always here, the sandwich-eating and soda-drinking ghost, giving it form, substance. The Leaf Man looms, huge and terrible: his bristling Halloween face, black holes where his eyes should be, the ragged maw.
    Martie struggles to get up from the sofa, before he touches her, before it is too late, but she is too weak to rise, as if afflicted by a tropical fever, malaria. Or maybe the snake is poisonous after all, the venom finally producing an effect.
    The wind has blown the leaves out of the west, and Martie is the east, and the leaves must enter her, because she is the east, and the Leaf Man places one massive bristly hand over her face. The substance of him is leaves, churning masses of leaves, some of them crisp and crimpled, others fresh and wet, still others slimy with fungus, with mold, and he pushes the leafy essence of himself into her mouth, and she bites off a piece of the beast, tries to spit it out, but more leaves are shoved into her mouth, and she must swallow, swallow or suffocate, because still more crushed and powdery leaves are forced up her nose, too, and now a moldy mass of leaves squeezes into each ear She tries to scream for Susan 's help, can’t scream, can only gag, tries to cry out to Dusty, but Dusty didn’t come here to South America or wherever this is, he's back there in California, there's no one to help, she is filling up with leaves, her belly full of leaves, her lungs clogged, her throat, choking on leaves, and now a frenzy of leaves whirling in her head, inside her skull, scraping across the surface of her brain, until she can’t think clearly anymore, until her entire attention is focused on the sound of the leaves, the incessant scraping—rattling-ticking-clicking-crunching-crackling-hissing SOUND—“And that’s where I always wake up,” Martie said.
    She looked down at her last scampi, lying on what remained of a bed of pasta, and it less resembled seafood than it did a cocoon, one of those she’d encountered from time to time when she was a kid, climbing trees. In the upper branches of one spreading giant, in what seemed to be clean bowers of sunlight and emerald-green foliage and fresh air, she’d once come upon an infestation, dozens of fat cocoons firmly glued to leaves, which curved to half conceal them, as though the tree had been induced to help protect the parasites that fed on it. Only mildly repulsed, reminding herself that caterpillars, after all, can become butterflies, she studied these spun-silk sacs and saw that squirming life filled some of them. Deciding to free whatever golden or crimson winged wonder wriggled within, to release it into the world minutes or perhaps hours before it would otherwise be free, Martie delicately peeled back the layered fabric of the cocoon— and found not a butterfly, nor even a moth, but scores of baby spiders bursting from an egg case. Having made this discovery, she never again felt exalted merely to be in the airy tops of trees, or indeed to be in the upper reaches of any place; thereafter, she understood that for every creature living under a rock or crawling through the mud, there is another equally squirmy thing that flourishes in high realms, because although this is a wondrous world, it is fallen.
    Appetite spoiled, she passed up the last scampi and resorted to her beer.
    Pushing aside what remained of his dinner, Dusty said, “I wish you’d told me your nightmare in all this detail a lot sooner.”
    “It was just a dream. What would you have made of it, anyway?”
    “Nothing,” he admitted. “Not until after my dream last night. Then I’d have seen the connections right away. Though I’m not sure what they would’ve meant to me.”
    “What connections?”
    “In your dream and mine, there’s an... an invisible presence. And a theme of possession, of a dark and unwanted presence entering the heart, the mind. And the IV line, of course, which you didn’t mention before.”
    “IV line?”
    “In my dream it’s clearly an IV line, dangling from the floor lamp in our bedroom. In your dream, it’s a snake.”
    “But it is a snake.”
    He shook his head. “Not much in these dreams is what it appears to be. It’s all symbol, metaphor. Because these aren’t just dreams.”
    “They’re