False Memory

been working too long and too hard on the video-game adaptation. In her obsession with doing honor to The Lord of the Rings, and in her mental exhaustion, was she confusing reality and fantasy?
    No. Not that. The truth was something less fantastic but equally strange.
    Then Martie caught a glimpse of herself in the glass panel that covered a wall niche containing an emergency fire hose. Immediately, she turned away, rattled by the razor-sharp anxiety in her face. Her features appeared jagged, with deep slashes for laugh lines, a mouth like a scar; her eyes were wounds. This unflattering expression was not what made her look away. Something else. Worse. Something to which she couldn’t quite put a name.
    What’s happening to me?
    “Let’s go,” Susan said more insistently than before. “Martie, what’s wrong? Let’s go.”
    Reluctantly, Martie accompanied Susan out of the alcove. They turned left into the corridor.
    Susan took heart from her mantra—”almost safe, almost safe”— but Martie found no comfort in it.

    8
    As the wind stripped wet leaves off trees and as cataracts gushed along gutters toward half-clogged street drains, Dusty drove down through the Newport hills.
    “I’m soaked. I’m cold,” Skeet complained.
    “Me too. Fortunately, we’re high-order primates with lots of gadgets.” Dusty switched on the heater.
    “I screwed up,” Skeet mumbled. “Who, you?”
    “I always screw up.” “Everybody’s good at something.” “Are you angry with me?”
    “Right now I’m sick to death of you,” Dusty said honestly.
    “Do you hate me?”
    “No.”
    Skeet sighed and slid down farther in his seat. In his boneless slump, as a faint steam rose off his clothes, he looked less like a man than like a pile of damp laundry. His chafed and swollen eyelids drooped shut. His mouth sagged open. He appeared to be asleep.
    The sky pressed down, as gray-black as wet ashes and char. The rain wasn’t the usual glittering silver, but dark and dirty, as if nature were a scrubwoman wringing out a filthy mop.
    Dusty drove east and south, out of Newport Beach, into the city of Irvine. He hoped that the New Life Clinic, a drug-and-alcohol-rehabilitation facility. would have an open bed.
    Skeet had been in rehab twice before, once at New Life six months ago. He came out clean, sincerely intending to stay that way. After each course of therapy, however, he gradually slid backward.
    Until now he’d never gotten low enough to try suicide. Perhaps, from this new depth, he’d realize that he was facing his last chance.
    Without lifting his chin from his chest, Skeet said, “Sorry... back there on the roof. Sorry I forgot which one was your dad. Dr. Decon. It’s just that I’m so wrecked.”
    “That’s okay. I’ve been trying to forget him most of my life.”
    “You remember my dad, I’ll bet”
    “Dr. Holden Caulfield, professor of literature.”
    “He’s a real bastard,” Skeet said.
    “They all are. She’s attracted to bastards.”
    Skeet slowly raised his head, as though it were a massive weight elevated by a complex system of powerful hydraulic lifts. “Holden Caulfield’s not even his real name.”
    Dusty braked at a red traffic signal and regarded Skeet with skepticism. The name, identical to that of the protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye, seemed too pat to have been an invention.
    “He changed it legally when he was twenty-one,” Skeet said. “Sam Farner was his born name.”
    “Is this stoned talk or true talk?”
    “True,” Skeet said. “Old Sam’s dad was a career military man. Colonel Thomas Jackson Farner. His mom, Luanne, she taught nursery school. Old Sam had a falling-out with them—after the colonel and Luanne finished putting him through college and after old Sam got a scholarship toward his master’s degree. Otherwise, he might’ve waited to have his falling-out, until his folks ponied up more tuition.”
    Dusty knew Skeet’s father—the false Holden Caulfield—and knew him far too well, because the pretentious bastard was his stepfather. Trevor Penn Rhodes, Dusty’s father, was the second of their mother’s four husbands, and Holden Sam Caulfield Farner was her third. From before Dusty’s fourth birthday until past his fourteenth, this self-styled blue blood had ruled their family with a lofty sense of divine right, and with enough authoritarian zeal and sociopathic ferocity to earn praise from Hannibal Lecter. “He said his mother had been a professor at Princeton, his father at Rutgers. All those stories...
    “Not biography,” Skeet