False Memory

cage of ribs, she snatched up the hated package and descended the porch steps.

     
     
    Tom Wong timed Skeet’s pulse, listened to his heart, and took his blood pressure. The cold stethoscope diaphragm against the kid’s bare chest and the tightness of the pressure cuff around his right arm failed to elicit even a slight response from him. Not a twitch, blink, shiver, sigh, grunt, or grumble. He lay as limp and pale as a peeled, cooked zucchini.
    “His pulse was forty-eight when I took it,” Dusty said, watching from the foot of the bed.
    “Forty-six now.”
    “Isn’t that dangerous?”
    “Not necessarily. There’s no sign of distress.”
    According to his chart, Skeet’s average normal pulse, when he was clean and sober and awake, was sixty-six. Ten or twelve points lower when sleeping.
    “Sometimes you see sleeping pulse rates as low as forty,” Tom said, “although it’s rare.” He peeled back Skeet’s eyelids, one at a time, and examined his eyes with an ophthalmoscope. “Pupils are the same size, but it could still be apoplexy.”
    “Brain hemorrhage?”
    “Or an embolism. Even if it’s not apoplectic, it could be another type of coma. Diabetic. Uremic.”
    “He’s not diabetic.”
    “I better get the doctor,” Tom said as he left the room.

     
     
    The rain had stopped, but the oval leaves of the Indian laurels wept as if with green-eyed grief.
    Carrying the package of knives, Martie hurried to the east side of the house. She wrenched open the gate of the trash-can enclosure.
    An observant part of her, a sane part of her imprisoned by her fear, was grimly aware that her posture and her movements were like those of a marionette: head thrust forward on a stiff neck, shoulders drawn up sharply, seemingly all elbows and knees, rushing forward in herky-jerky urgency.
    If she were a marionette, then the puppeteer was Johnny Panic. In college, some of her friends had been devoted to the brilliant poetry of Sylvia Plath; and though Martie had found Plath’s work too nihilistic and too depressive to be appealing, she had remembered one painful observation by the poet—a convincing explanation of what motivated some people to be cruel to one another and to make so many self-destructive choices. From where I sit, Plath wrote, I figure the world is run by one thing and this one thing only. Panic with a dog-face, devil—face, hag-face, whore—face, panic in capital letters with no face at all—it’s the same Johnny Panic, awake or asleep.
    For all her twenty-eight years, Martie’s world had been largely free of panic, rich instead with a serene sense of belonging, peace, purpose, and connection with creation, because her dad had brought her up to believe that every life had meaning. Smilin’ Bob said that if you were always guided by courage, honor, self-respect, honesty, and compassion, and if you kept your mind and your heart open to the lessons that this world teaches you, then you would eventually understand the meaning of your existence, perhaps even in this world, but certainly in the next. Such a philosophy virtually guaranteed a brighter life, less shadowed by fear than the lives of those who were convinced of meaninglessness. Yet here, at last, inexplicably, Johnny Panic came into Martie’s life, too, somehow snared her in his controlling strings, and was now jerking her through this demented performance.
    In the trash enclosure alongside the house, Martie removed the clamp-on lid from the third of three hard-plastic cans, the only one that was empty. She dropped the tape-encased box of knives into the can, jammed the lid on, and fumbled the steel-wire clamp into place.
    She should have felt relieved.
    Instead, her anxiety grew.
    Fundamentally, nothing had changed. She knew where the knives were. She could retrieve them if she was determined. They would not be beyond her reach until the trash collector tossed them into his truck and drove away with them in the morning.
    Worse, these knives weren’t the only instruments with which she could give expression to the new violent thoughts that terrified her. Her brightly painted house, with its charming gingerbread millwork, might appear to be a place of peace, but it was in fact a well-equipped abattoir, an armory bulging with weapons; if you had a mind for mayhem, many apparently innocent items could be used as blades or bludgeons.
    Frustrated, Martie clasped her hands to her temples as though she could physically suppress the riot of frightful thoughts that churned and