False Memory

in a hurry, that’s all.”
    “Yeah? Then I’ll get that release real quick,” Nurse Hernandez replied, pushing past Martie. At the door, she pointed at Skeet, and ordered: “Don’t you go anywhere until I come back, chupaflor.”
    “Sure, okay,” Skeet promised. “But could you hurry? Claudette’s really sick, and I don’t want to miss anything.”

     
     
    The doctor instructed the actor to get off his head and then to sit on the sofa.
    Ever the exhibitionist, the heartthrob was wearing only a pair of black bikini briefs. He was as fit as a sixteen-year-old, lean and well-muscled, in spite of his formidable list of self-destructive habits.
    He crossed the room with the lithe grace of a ballet dancer. Indeed, although his personality was deeply repressed and although, in this state, he was hardly more self-aware than a turnip, he moved as if performing. Evidently, his conviction that he was at all times being watched and adored by admirers was not an attitude that he had acquired as fame had corrupted him; it was a conviction rooted in his very genes.
    While the actor waited, Dr. Ahriman took off his suit coat and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He checked his reflection in a mirror above a sideboard. Perfect. His forearms were powerful, thatched with hair, manly without being Neanderthalian. When he left this room at midnight and strolled down the hall to Caulfield’s room, he would sling his coat over his shoulder, the very picture of a weary. hardworking, deeply committed, and sexy man of medicine.
    Ahriman drew a chair to the sofa and sat facing the actor. “Be calm.”
    “I am calm.”
    Jiggle, jiggle, the blue eyes that made Nurse Ganguss weak.
    This prince of the box office had come to Ahriman the younger rather than to any other therapist because of the doctor’s Hollywood pedigree. Ahriman the elder, Josh, had been dead of petits-fours poisoning when this lad had still been failing math, history, and assorted other courses in junior high school, so the two had never worked together. But the actor reasoned that if the great director had won two Oscars, then the son of the great director must be the best psychiatrist in the world. “Except, maybe, for Freud,” he had told the doctor, “but he’s way over there in Europe somewhere, and I can’t be flying back and forth all the time for sessions.”
    After Robert Downey Jr. was finally sent to prison for a long stay, this hunk of marketable meat had worried that he, too, might be caught by “fascist drug-enforcement agents.” While he was loath to change his lifestyle to please the forces of repression, he was even less enthusiastic about sharing a prison cell with a homicidal maniac who had a seventeen-inch neck and no gender preferences.
    Although Ahriman regularly turned away patients with serious drug problems, he had taken on this one. The actor moved in elite social circles, where he could make rare mischief with a singularly high entertainment value for the doctor. Indeed, already, utilizing the actor, an extraordinary game was being prepared for play, one that would have profound national and international consequences.
    “I have some important instructions for you,” Ahriman said.
    Someone rapped urgently on the door to the suite.

     
     
    Martie was trying to get Skeet into a bathrobe, but he was resisting.
    “Honey,” she said, “it’s chilly tonight. You can’t go outside in just these thin pajamas.”
    “This robe sucks,” Skeet protested. “They provided it here. It’s not mine, Martie. It’s all nubbly with fuzz balls, and I hate the stripes.”
    In his prime, before drugs wasted him, the kid had drawn women the way the scent of raw beef brought Valet running. In those days, he’d been a good dresser, the male bird in full plumage. Even now, in his ruin, Skeet’s sartorial good taste occasionally resurfaced, although Martie didn’t understand why it had to surface now.
    Snapping shut the packed suitcase, Dusty said, “Let’s go.”
    Improvising frantically, Martie tore the blanket off Skeet’s bed and draped it over his shoulders. “How’s this?”
    “Sort of American Indian,” he said, pulling the blanket around himself. “I like it.”
    She took Skeet by the arm and hustled him toward the door, where Dusty was waiting.
    “Wait!” Skeet said, halting, turning. “The lottery tickets.” “What lottery tickets?”
    “In the nightstand,” Dusty said. “Tucked in the Bible.”
    “We can’t leave without them,” Skeet insisted.

     
     
    In response to the rapping