False Memory

interested Dusty more than any other: the kid’s failure to remember anything that had happened between the moment when he had heard the name Dr Yen Lo and, minutes later, when he had obeyed Dusty’s unthinking demand that he go to sleep. Selective amnesia might be blamed. But it was more as though Skeet had conducted the conversation with Dusty while in a blackout.
    Martie had spoken of her suspicion that she was “missing time,” from her day, though she could not identify precisely when any gap or gaps had occurred. Fearful that she had opened the gas valve in the fireplace without lighting the ceramic logs, she had repeatedly returned to the living room with an urgent conviction that a furious explosion was imminent. Although the valve had always been tightly closed, she continued to be troubled by a perception that her memory had been nibbled like a holey woolen scarf beset by moths.
    Dusty had witnessed his brother’s blackout. And he sensed truth in Martie’s fear of having fallen into a fugue.
    Perhaps a link.
    This had been an extraordinary day. The two people dearest to Dusty’s heart had suffered quite different but equally dramatic episodes of aberrant behavior. The odds of such serious—even if temporary—psychological collapse striking twice, this close, were surely a great deal smaller than the one-in-eighteen-million chance of winning the state lottery.
    He supposed that the average citizen of our brave new millennium would think this was a grim coincidence. At most they would consider it an example of the curious patterns that the grinding machinery of the universe sometimes randomly produces as a useless by-product of its mindless laboring.
    To Dusty, however, who perceived mysterious design in everything from the color of daffodils to Valet’s pure joy in pursuit of a ball, there was no such thing as coincidence. The link was tantalizing—though difficult to fathom. And frightening.
    He put the pages of Skeet’s notepad on his nightstand and picked up a notepad of his own. On the top page, he had printed the lines of the haiku that his brother had referred to as the rules.

    Clear cascades
    into the waves scatter
    blue pine needles.

    Skeet was the waves. According to him, the blue pine needles were missions. The clear cascades were Dusty or Yen Lo, or perhaps anyone who invoked the haiku in Skeet’s presence.
    At first everything that Skeet said seemed to be gibberish, but the longer Dusty puzzled over it, the more he sensed structure and purpose waiting to be discerned. For some reason, he began to perceive the haiku as a sort of mechanism, a simple device with a powerful effect, the verbal equivalent of a compressor-driven paint sprayer or a nail gun.
    Give a nail gun to a carpenter from the preindustrial age, and although he might intuit that it was a tool, he would be unlikely to understand its purpose—until he accidentally fired a nail through his foot. The possibility of unintentionally causing psychological harm to his brother motivated Dusty to contemplate the haiku at length, until he understood the use of this tool, before deciding whether to explore further its effect on Skeet.
    Missions.
    To grasp the purpose of the haiku, he had to understand, at the very least, what Skeet had meant by missions.
    Dusty was certain he precisely remembered the haiku and the kid’s odd interpretation, because he was blessed with a photographic and audio-retentive memory of such high reliability that he cruised through high school and one year of college with a perfect 4.0 grade average, before deciding that he could experience life more fully as a housepainter than as an academic.
    Missions.
    Dusty considered synonyms. Task. Work. Chore. Job. Calling. Vocation. Career Church.
    None of them furthered his understanding.
    From the big sheepskin pillow in the corner, Valet whimpered anxiously, as though the rabbits in his dreams had grown fangs and were now doing the dog’s work while he played rabbit in the chase.
    Martie was too zonked to be roused by the dog’s thin squeals.
    Sometimes, however, Valet’s nightmares escalated until he woke with a terrified bark.
    “Easy boy. Easy boy,” Dusty whispered.
    Even in dreams, the retriever seemed to hear his master’s voice, and his whimpering subsided.
    “Easy. Good boy. Good Valet.”
    Although the dog didn’t wake, his feathery plumed tail swished across the sheepskin a few times before curling close around him once more.
    Martie and the dog slept on