False Memory

piercing for cosmetic purposes was no longer shocking, when ears and eyebrows and nostrils and lips and navels and even tongues were regularly drilled and fitted with baubles, the doctor couldn’t have done much to Woosten’s tongue that, upon waking, she would have deemed horrifying or even objectionable.
    Sometimes he found it frustrating to be a sadist in an age when self-mutilation was all the rage.
    So, on to Room 246 and his star patient.
    The doctor was the principal investor in New Life Clinic, but he didn’t regularly treat patients here. Generally speaking, people with drug problems didn’t interest him; they were so industriously wrecking their lives that any additional misery he could inflict on them would be merely filigree atop filigree.
    Currently, his only patient at New Life was in 246. Of course, he also had a particular interest in Dustin Rhodes’ brother, down the hall in 250, but he was not one of Skeet’s official physicians; his consultation in that case was strictly off the record.
    When he entered 246, which was a two-room suite with full bath, he found the famous actor in the living room, standing on his head, palms flat on the floor, heels and buttocks against a wall, watching television upside down.
    “Mark? What’re you doing here at this hour?” the actor asked, holding his yoga position—or whatever it was.
    “I was in the building for another patient. Thought I’d stop by and see how you’re doing.”
    The doctor had lied to Nurses Ganguss and Woosten when he had said that the actor had phoned him, threatening to check out of the clinic in the morning. Ahriman’s real purpose was to be here when the midnight shift arrived, so he could program Skeet after the too-diligent Nurse Hernandez went home. The actor was his cover. After a couple hours in 246, the few minutes that he spent with Skeet would seem like an incidental matter, and any staff who noticed the visit would not find it remarkable.
    The actor said, “I spend about an hour a day in this position. Good for brain circulation. It’d be nice to have a second, smaller TV that I could turn upside down when I needed to.”
    Glancing at the sitcom on the screen, Ahriman said, “If that’s the stuff you watch, it's probably better upside down.”
    “No one likes critics, Mark.”
    “Don Adriano de Armado.”
    “I’m listening,” said the actor, quivering briefly but able to maintain his headstand.
    For the name to activate this subject, the doctor had chosen a character from Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare.
    The upside-down actor, who collected twenty million dollars plus points for starring in a film, had accepted little education of any kind during his thirty-odd years, and had received no formal training in his profession. When he read a screenplay, he often didn’t read anything except his own lines, and frogs were likely to fly before he ever read Shakespeare. Unless the legitimate theater was one day turned over to the management of chimps and baboons, there was no chance whatsoever that he would be cast in anything by the Bard of Avon, and so no danger that he would hear the name Don Adriano de Armado other than directly from the doctor himself.
    Ahriman put the actor through his personal, enabling haiku.

     
     
    As Martie finished tying the laces of Skeet’s athletic shoes, Jasmine Hernandez said, “If you’re checking him out of here, I’ll need you to sign a release of liability.”
    “We’re bringing him back tomorrow,” Martie said, rising to her feet and encouraging Skeet to stand up from the edge of the bed.
    “Yeah,” Dusty said, still jamming clothes into the suitcase, “we just want to take him to see Mom, and then he’ll be back.”
    “You’ll still have to sign a release,” Nurse Hernandez insisted.
    “Dusty,” Skeet warned, “you better never let Claudette hear you call her Mom instead of Claudette. She’ll bust your ass for sure.”
    “He attempted suicide only yesterday,” Nurse Hernandez reminded them. “The clinic can’t take any responsibility for his discharge in this condition.”
    “We absolve the clinic. We take full responsibility,” Martie assured her.
    “Then I’ll get the release form.”
    Martie stepped in front of the nurse, leaving Skeet to wobble on the uncertain support of his own two legs. “Why don’t you help us get him ready? Then the four of us can go up to the nurses’ station together and sign the release.”
    Eyes narrowing, Jasmine Hernandez said, “What’s going on here?”
    “We’re