False Memory

long time answering: “I don’t know. Could you? Just... in cold blood? Walk up to him and pull the trigger?”
    “Maybe.”
    She was silent for minutes, but he knew she wasn’t drawing near to sleep.
    “No,” she said eventually. “I don’t think I could. Kill him, I mean. Him or anyone. Not again.”
    “I know you wouldn’t want to have to do it. But I think you could. And so could I.”
    To his surprise, he found himself telling her about the optical illusion that had fascinated him as a kid: the drawing of the forest that by a simple shift of perspective suddenly revealed a bustling metropolis.
    “This applies?” she asked.
    “Yeah. Because tonight I was that drawing. I always thought I knew exactly who I was. Then a simple shift of perspective, and I see a different me. Which one is real and which is fiction?”
    “They’re both the real you,” she said. “And that’s okay.”
    Hearing her say that it was okay actually made it okay in his mind. Although she didn’t know it, and although he would never be able to quite put his feelings into words that she would understand, Martie was the only touchstone by which Dusty measured his value as a human being.
    Later, when he was near sleep, she said, “There’s got to be a way out. Just... shift perspective.”
    Maybe she was right. A way out. But he couldn’t find it either in the waking world or in dreams.
    72
    In the blue morning, flying out of Albuquerque with neither a toy fire truck nor a handgun, stiff and sore from the previous day’s exertions, Martie felt tired and old. While Dusty read Learn to Love Yourself to better understand their enemy, Martie pressed her forehead to the window and gazed down at the snow-dusted city as it rapidly disappeared below them. The whole world had grown so strange that she might as well have been flying out of Istanbul or another exotic capital.
    Slightly less than seventy-two hours ago, she’d taken Valet for his morning walk, and her shadow had briefly frightened her. After the odd moment passed, she’d been amused. Her dearest friend had still been alive. She had not yet been to Santa Fe. Back then, she believed that life had a mysterious design, and she saw reassuring patterns in the events of her days. She still believed in the existence of design, though the patterns she saw now were different from those she’d seen before, different and troublingly more complex.
    She had expected to suffer terrible nightmares—and not from two cans of beer and crummy cheese sandwiches. But her sleep hadn’t been disturbed.
    Smilin’ Bob had not come to her in dreams, either, nor in those moments during the night when, awake, she had searched the shadows of the motel room for the distinctive shape of his helmet and the faintly luminescent stripes on his turnout coat.
    Martie had badly wanted to see him in dreams or otherwise. She felt abandoned, as if she no longer deserved his guardianship.
    With California coming and with all that waited there, she needed both the men in her life, Dusty and Smilin’ Bob, if she were to have hope.

     
     
    The doctor rarely saw patients other than on the first four days of the week. Only Martie and Dusty Rhodes were on his schedule this Friday, and they were not going to be able to keep their appointment.
    “You better be careful,” he told his reflection in the bathroom mirror. “Pretty soon, you’re not going to have any practice at all if you keep killing off your patients.”
    Having sailed through the crises of the past two days with his tail unbobbed and both horns intact—a little metaphysical humor, there—he was in a splendid mood. Moreover, he had thought of a way to revive the game that had seemed hopelessly unplayable last night, and he had arrived at a lovely use for the fragrant contents of the blue bag.
    He dressed in another fine Zegna suit: a black, sartorially cut number with the very latest lapel style and a two-button jacket. He cut such a dashing figure in the three-panel dressing mirror in his walk-in closet that he considered setting up the video camera to record how terrific he had looked on this historic day.
    Unfortunately, time was of the essence, just as it had been the previous night. He had promised the Keanuphobe that he would be in the office all day, awaiting her decision as to whether or not she would join the rebellion against the malevolent computer. He must not disappoint the nouveau-riche nutcake.
    For the second day in a row, he decided to carry a gun. The threat seemed