False Memory

on the door, the doctor called out impatiently, “I am not to be disturbed here.”
    A hesitation, and then more rapping.
    To the actor, Ahriman said quietly, “Go into the bedroom, lie down on the bed, and wait for me.”
    As though the direction he had just received was from a lover promising all the delights of the flesh, the actor rose from the sofa and glided out of the room. Each liquid step, each roll of the hips was sufficiently seductive to fill theater seats all over the world.
    The rapping sounded a third time. “Dr. Ahriman? Dr. Ahriman?”
    As he moved toward the door, the doctor decided that if this interruption was courtesy of Nurse Woosten, he would apply himself more diligently to the problem of what to do with her tongue.

     
     
    Martie took the pair of lottery tickets out of the Bible and tried to give them to Skeet.
    Clutching the blanket-cloak with his left hand, he waved away the tickets with his right. “No, no! If I touch them, they won’t be worth anything, all the luck will go out of them.”
    As she thrust the tickets into one of her pockets, she heard someone farther down the hall calling for Dr. Ahriman.

     
     
    When Ahriman opened the door to 246, he was even more dismayed to see Jasmine Hernandez than he would have been to see Nurse Wosten with pink tongue rampant.
    Jasmine was an excellent RN, but she was too much like a few especially annoying girls the doctor had encountered in his boyhood and early adolescence, a breed of females that he referred to as The Knowers. They were the ones who mocked him with their eyes, with sly little looks and smug smiles that he caught in his peripheral vision as he turned away from them. The Knowers seemed to see through him, to understand him in ways he didn’t wish to be understood. Worse, he had the curious feeling that they knew something hilarious about him, as well, something he himself didn’t know, that he was a figure of fun to them due to qualities in himself he couldn’t recognize.
    Since the age of sixteen or seventeen, when his previous gangly cuteness had begun to mature into devastating good looks, the doctor had rarely been troubled by The Knowers, who for the most part seemed to have lost their ability to see into him. Jasmine Hernandez was one of that breed, however, and though she had not yet been able to x-ray him, there were times when he was sure that she was going to blink in surprise and peer more closely, her eyes filling with that special mockery and the corner of her mouth turning up in the faintest smirk.
    “Doctor, I’m sorry to disturb you, but when I told Nurse Ganguss what’s happening, and she said you were on the premises, I felt you ought to know.”
    She was so forceful that the doctor backed up a couple steps, and she took this as an invitation to enter the room, which was not what he had intended.
    “A patient is self-discharging,” Nurse Hernandez said, “and in my estimation, under peculiar circumstances.”
    Skeet said, “Could I have my Yoo-hoo?”
    Martie looked at him as if he had gone a little mad. Of course, when she thought about it, there was ample evidence that both of them were in possession of less than half their marbles, so she tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. “Your what?”
    “His soda,” Dusty said from the doorway. “Grab it and let’s get out of here!”
    “Someone called Ahriman,” Martie said. “He’s here.”
    “I heard it, too,” Dusty assured her. “Get the damn soda quick.”
    “Vanilla Yoo-hoo, or the chocolate for that matter,” Skeet said, as Martie rounded the bed and snatched the bottle off the nightstand, “isn’t a soda. It’s not carbonated. It’s more of a dessert beverage.”
    Shoving the bottle of Yoo-hoo into Skeet’s right hand, Martie said, “Here’s your dessert beverage, honey. Now move your ass, or I’ll put a boot in it.”

     
     
    Initially, in his confusion, the doctor assumed that Nurse Ganguss had mentioned to Nurse Hernandez that the actor was going to check himself out of the hospital and that this was the self-discharging patient about whom she was so exercised.
    Since the whole story about the actor was a lie to cover the doctor's true purpose in coming to the clinic this evening, he said, “Don’t worry, Nurse Hernandez, he won’t be leaving, after all.”
    “What? What’re you talking about? They’re trying to hustle him out of here right now.”
    Ahriman turned to look at the living room and the open door to the bedroom. He half expected to see several