False Memory

peacefully, but suddenly Dusty sat up from the pillows piled against the headboard, the very thought of sleep banished by a rattling insight. Mulling over the haiku, he’d been fully awake, but by comparison to this wide-eyed state, he might as well have been drowsing. He was now hyperalert, as cold as if he had ice water for spinal fluid.
    He had been reminded of another moment with the dog, earlier in the day.
    Valet stands in the kitchen, at the connecting door to the garage, ready to ride shotgun on the trip to Skeet's apartment, patiently fanning the air with his plumed tail while Dusty pulls on a hooded nylon jacket.
    The phone rings. Someone peddling subscriptions to the Los Angeles Times.
    When Dusty racks the wall phone after only a few seconds, be turns toward the door to the garage and discovers that Valet is no longer standing, but lying on his side at the threshold, as though ten minutes have passed, as if he has been napping.
    “You had a shot of chicken protein, golden one. Let’s see some vigor”
    With a long-suffering sigh, Valet gets to his feet.
    Dusty was able to move through the scene in his mind’s eye as though it were three-dimensional, studying the golden retriever with acute attention to detail. Indeed, he could see the moment more clearly now than he’d seen it then: In retrospect the dog obviously, inarguably had been napping.
    Even with his eidetic and audile memory, he could not recall whether the Times salesperson had been a man or woman. He had no memory of what he had said on the phone or of what had been said to him, just a vague impression that he had been the target of a phone-sales campaign.
    At the time, he had attributed his uncharacteristic memory lapse to stress. Taking a header off a roof, watching your brother suffer a breakdown before your eyes: This stuff was bound to mess with your mind.
    If he had been on the phone five or ten minutes instead of a few seconds, however, he couldn’t possibly have been speaking with anyone in the Times subscription-sales operation. What the hell would they have talked about for so long? Typefaces? The cost of newsprint? Johannes Gutenberg—What a cool guy!—and the invention of movable type? The tremendous effectiveness of the Times as a puppy-training aid in Valet’s early days, its singular convenience, its remarkable absorbency, its admirable service as an environment-friendly and fully biodegradable poop wrap?
    During the minutes that Valet had settled down to nap at the connecting door to the garage, Dusty either had been on the phone with someone other than a Times salesperson or had been on the phone only a few seconds and had been engaged in some other task the rest of the time.
    A task that he could not remember.
    Missing time.
    Impossible. Not me, too.
    Ants with urgent purpose, busy bustling multitudes, seemed to be swarming up his legs, down his arms, across his back, and although he knew that no ants had invaded the bed, that what he felt was the nerve endings in his skin responding to the sudden dimpling from a case of universal gooseflesh, he brushed at his arms and at the back of his neck, as if to cast off an army of six-legged soldiers.
    Unable to sit still, he got quietly to his feet, but he couldn’t stand still, either, and so he paced, but here and there the floor squeaked under the carpet, and he could not pace quietly, so he eased into bed again and sat motionless, after all. His skin was cool and antless now. But things were crawling along the surface convolutions of his brain: a new and unwelcome sense of vulnerability, an X Files perception that unknown presences, strange and hostile, had entered his life.

    32
    Tear-damp flush of face, white cotton so sweetly curved, bare knees together. Susan was sitting on the edge of the bed, waiting.
    Ahriman sat across the room from her, in an armchair upholstered with peach-colored moire silk. He was in no hurry to have her.
    Even as a young boy, he had understood that the cheapest toy was fundamentally like one of his father’s expensive antique automobiles. As much pleasure could be taken from the leisurely study of it—from the appreciation of its lines and fine details—as from its use. In fact, to truly possess a plaything, to be a worthy master of it, one must understand the art of its form, not merely the thrill of its function.
    The art of Susan Jagger’s form was twofold: physical, of course, and psychological. Her face and body were exceptionally beautiful. But