False Memory

don’t you realize what I could do, all the things I could do?”
    Half nauseated by worry, he said, “Martie, I’m not afraid of you.”
    “How far is it from a kiss to a bite?” she asked, her voice hoarse and ragged with dread.
    “Not far from a kiss to a bite, your tongue in my mouth.”
    “Martie, please—”
    “A kiss to a bite. So easy to tear off your lips. How do you know I couldn’t? How do you know I wouldn’t?”
    If she hadn’t already reached a full-blown panic attack, she was running downhill toward one, and Dusty didn’t know how to stop her, or even how to slow her.
    “Look at my hands,” she demanded. “These fingernails. Acrylic nails. Why do you think I couldn’t blind you with them? You think I couldn’t gouge out your eyes?”
    “Martie. This isn’t—”
    “There’s something in me I never saw before, something that scares the shit out of me, and it could do something terrible, it really could, it could make me blind you. For your own good, you better see it, too, and you better be afraid of it.”
    Tidal emotion swept through Dusty, terrible pity and fierce love, crosscurrents and rips.
    He reached for Martie, and she squeezed past him, out of the bathroom. She slammed the door between them.
    When he followed her into the bedroom, he found her at his open closet. She was riffling through his shirts, rattling the hangers on the metal pole, searching for something.
    The tie rack. Most of the rack pegs were empty. He owned only four neckties.
    She pulled a plain black tie and a red-and-blue striped number from the closet and held them out to Dusty. “Tie me.”
    “What? No. Good God, Martie.”
    “I mean it.”
    “So do I. No.”
    “Ankles together, wrists together,” she said urgently.
    “No.”
    Valet was sitting up in his bed, twitchy eyebrows punctuating a series of worried expressions as his attention bounced from Martie to Dusty to Martie.
    She said, “So if I go psycho, total blood nuts, during the night—”
    Dusty tried to be firm but calm, hoping that his example would settle her. “Please, stop it.”
    “—total blood nuts, then I’ll have to get loose before I can screw up anybody. And when I’m trying to get loose, that’ll wake you if you’ve fallen asleep.”
    “I’m not afraid of you.”
    His feigned calm didn’t infect her, and in fact words gushed out of her in an ever more feverish stream: “All right, okay, maybe you’re not afraid, even if you should be, maybe you’re not, but I am. I am afraid of me, Dusty, afraid of what the hell I might do to you or to somebody else when I’m having a fit, some crazy seizure, afraid of what I might do to myself I don’t know what’s happening here, to me, it’s weirder than The Exorcist even if I’m not levitating and my head isn’t spinning around. If I managed to get my hands on a knife at the wrong time, or your pistol, when I’m in this crazy mood, then I’d use it on myself, I know I would. I feel this sick desire in here”—she rapped her stomach with a fist—”this evil, this worm of a thing curled inside me, whispering to me about knives and guns and hammers.”
    Dusty shook his head.
    Martie sat on the bed and began cinching her ankles together with one of the neckties, but after a moment she stopped, frustrated. “Damn it, I don’t know knots the way you do. You’ve got to help me with this.”
    “One of those pills usually does the job. You took three. You don’t need to be tied.”
    “I’m not going to trust pills, not pills alone, no way. Either you help me with this, or I’ll puke up the pills, stick a finger down my throat and puke ‘em right now.”
    Reason wasn’t going to sway her. She was as high on fear as Skeet on his drug cocktail, and hardly more rational than the kid had been on the Sorensons’ roof.
    Sitting in an ineffective tangle of ties, sweating, shaking, she began to cry. “Please, baby, please. Please help me. I’ve got to sleep, I’m so tired, I need some rest, or I’m going to go bugshit. I need some peace, and I’m not going to have any peace if you don’t help me. Help me. Please.”
    Tears moved him as fury couldn’t.
    When he went to her, she lay back on the bed and covered her face with her hands, as though ashamed of the helplessness to which fear had reduced her.
    Dusty trembled as he bound her ankles together.
    “Tighter,” she said through her mask of hands.
    Although he obliged, he didn’t draw the knots as tight as she would have preferred. The thought of hurting her, even inadvertently, was more than he could