False Memory

paperback novel.
    “It’s a real thriller,” she said aloud, though she was alone. “The writing’s good. The plot is entertaining. The characters are colorful. I’m enjoying it.”
    Now, here in the disordered kitchen, she remained troubled by a perception of time lost. She sensed an ominous gap in her day, during which something terrible had happened.
    Consulting her wristwatch, she was surprised to see that the hour had grown so late—5: 12 P.M. The day had dissolved and washed away with the rain.
    She didn’t know when she had first gone into the living room to inspect the fireplace. Perhaps a minute ago. Perhaps two or four or ten minutes ago.
    Early-winter night breathed at the open door to the back porch. She couldn’t recall if darkness had pressed against the living-room windows when she had been in there. If a gap existed in her day, it must have been in that room, at the fireplace.
    Martie raced toward the front of the house, and the territory through which she passed was familiar yet different from what it had been this morning. No space was quite rectangular or precisely square anymore; each was fluid—now almost triangular, now hexagonal, and now curved, or otherwise curiously proportioned. Ceilings that had been flat appeared to be subtly pitched. She could have sworn that the floor canted under her, as if it were the deck of a tacking ship. The powerful anxiety that warped her mental processes also at times seemed to bend the physical world into strange shapes, although she knew that this surreal plasticity was imaginary.
    In the living room: no hiss of escaping gas. No odor.
    The key lay on the mantel. She didn’t touch it. Gaze fixed on that shiny brass item, Martie retreated from the fireplace, carefully backing between the armchairs and the sofa, out of the room.
    When she reached the hall, she glanced at her watch. Five-thirteen. One minute had passed. No lost time. No fugue.
    In the kitchen, shaking uncontrollably, she consulted her watch again. Still 5:13. She was all right. She hadn’t blacked out. She couldn’t have returned to the living room in a fugue and switched on the gas. One number changed before her eyes—5: 14.
    In his note, Dusty had promised to be home by five o’clock. He was overdue. Dusty was usually prompt. He kept his promises.
    “God, please,” she said, shocked by the pathetic tone of her voice, by the wretched tremor that distorted her words, “bring him home. God, please, please, help me, please bring him home now.”
    When Dusty returned, he would drive his van into the garage, park it beside her Saturn.
    No good. The garage was a dangerous place. Uncounted sharp tools were stored out there, deadly machinery, poisonous substances, flammable fluids.
    She would stay in the kitchen, wait for him here. Nothing would happen to him in the garage if she weren’t out there when he arrived. Sharp tools, poisons, flammables—they were not dangerous. Martie herself was the real danger, the only threat.
    From the garage, he would come directly into the kitchen. She must be sure that she had stripped from this room everything that might serve as a weapon.
    Yet to continue this purge of the sharp and the blunt and the toxic was sheer madness. She would never harm Dusty. She loved him more than she loved life. She would die for him, as she knew he would die for her. You didn’t kill someone whom you loved that much.
    Nevertheless, these irrational fears infected her, swarmed in her blood, bred in her bones, crawled in bacterial plenitude through her mind, and she was growing sicker by the second.

    24
    Skeet was sitting in bed, propped against pillows, pallid and sunken-eyed, his lips more gray than pink, and yet he had a tattered and tragic dignity, as though he were not merely one of the legion of lost souls who wandered through the ruins of this crumbling culture, but was instead a consumptive poet, living during a distant past more innocent than this new century, perhaps taking the tuberculosis cure in a private sanatorium, struggling not against his own compulsions, not against a hundred years of cold philosophies that denied purpose and meaning to life, but against nothing more than stubborn bacteria. A footed bed tray bridged his lap.
    Standing at the window, Dusty might have been gazing at the night sky, reading his fate in the patterns of the lingering storm clouds. The prows and keels of the eastward-tacking thunderheads appeared to be filigreed with gold leaf, for they were