Dean Koontz - False Memory

Skeet was likely to be at New Life for a minimum of three weeks. Perhaps six. Because of his suicide attempt, a series of nurses would be with him around the clock for at least three days.

Even with painting contracts lined up and with Martie’s deal to design a new Lord of the Rings game, they were not going to be able to afford a long Hawaiian vacation this year. Instead, they could put a few tiki lanterns in the backyard, wear aloha shirts, crank up a Don Ho CD, and have a canned-ham luau. That would be fun, too. Any time spent with Martie was fun, whether the backdrop was Waimea Bay or the painted board fence at the end of their flower garden.

As Dusty sat on the edge of the bed, Skeet dropped the issue of Time that he’d been reading. “This magazine sucks since they stopped running nudes.” When Dusty didn’t respond, Skeet said, “Hey, that was just a joke, bro, not the drugs talking. I’m not particularly high anymore.”

“You were funnier when you were.”

“Yeah. But after the flight goes down, it’s hard to be funny in the wreckage.” His voice wobbled like a spinning top losing momentum.

The rataplan of rain on the roof was usually soothing. Now it was depressing, a chilling reminder of all the dreams and drug-soaked years washed down the drain.

Skeet pressed pale, wrinkled fingertips to his eyelids. “Saw my eyes in the bathroom mirror. Like someone hocked wads of phlegm in a couple dirty ashtrays. Man, that’s how they feel, too.”

“Anything particular you’d like besides your gear? Some new magazines, books, a radio?”

“Nah. For a few days, I’ll be sleeping a lot.” He stared at his fingertips, as if he thought part of his eye might have stuck to them. “I appreciate this, Dusty. I’m not worth it, but I do appreciate it. And I’ll pay you back somehow.”

“Forget it.”

“No. I want to.” He slowly melted down into the chair, as though he were a wax candle in the shape of a man. “It’s important to me.

Maybe I’ll win the lottery or something big. You know? It could happen.”

“It could,” Dusty agreed, because although he didn’t believe in the lottery, he did believe in miracles.

The first-shift nurse arrived, a young Asian American named Tom Wong, whose air of relaxed competence and boyish smile gave Dusty confidence that he was putting his brother in good hands.

The name on the patient — ID sheet was Holden Caulfield Jr., but when Tom read it aloud, Skeet was roused from his lethargy. “Skeet!” he said ferociously, sitting up straighter in his chair, clenching his fists. “That’s my name. Skeet and nothing but Skeet. Don’t you ever call me Holden. Don’t you ever How can I be Holden junior when my phony shit of a father isn’t even Holden senior? Who I should be is Sam Farner Jr. Don’t you call me that, either! You call me anything but Skeet, then I’ll strip naked, set my hair on fire, and throw myself through that freaking window. Okay? You understand? Is that what you want, me taking a flaming-naked suicide leap into that pretty little garden of yours?”

Smiling, shaking his head, Tom Wong said, “Not on my shift, Skeet. The flaming hair would be an amazing sight, but I sure don’t want to see you naked.”

Dusty smiled with relief. Tom had struck the perfect note.

Slumping in the armchair again, Skeet said, “You’re all right, Mr. Wong.”

“Please call me Tom.”

Skeet shook his head. “I’m a bad case of arrested development, stuck in early adolescence, more screwed-up-twisted-up-tangled-up than a couple earthworms makin’ babies. What I need here aren’t a bunch of new friends, Mr. Wong. What I need here, you see, are some authority figures, people who can show me the way, ‘cause I really can’t go on like this and I really do want to find the way, I really do. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Tom Wong.

“I’ll be back with your clothes and stuff,” Dusty said.

When Skeet tried to get to his feet, he didn’t have sufficient strength to push himself up from the chair.

Dusty bent down and kissed him on the cheek. “Love you, bro.”

“Truth is,” Skeet said, “I’ll never pay you back.”

“Sure you will. The lottery, remember?”

“I’m not lucky.”

“Then I’ll buy the ticket for you,” Dusty said.

“Hey, would you? You’re lucky. Always were. Hell, you found Martie. You walk around in luck up to your ears.”

“You have some pay coming. I’ll buy you two tickets a week.”

“That would be cool.” Skeet closed his eyes. His voice settled into a murmur. “That would be… cool.” He was asleep.

“Poor kid,” Tom Wong said.

Dusty nodded.

From Skeet’s room, Dusty went directly to the second-floor care station, where he spoke to the head nurse, Colleen O’Brien: a stout, freckled woman with white hair and kind eyes, who could have played the mother superior in every convent in every Catholicthemed movie ever produced. She claimed to be aware of the treatment limitation special to Skeet’s case, but Dusty went through it with her anyway.

“No drugs. No tranquilizers, no sedatives. No antidepressants. He’s been on one damn drug or another since he was five, sometimes two or three at once. He had a learning disability, and they called it a behavior disorder, and his old man had him on a series of drugs for that. When one drug had side effects, then there were drugs to counter the side effects, and when those produced side effects, there were more drugs to counter the new side effects. He grew up in a chemical stew, and I know that’s what screwed him up. He’s so used to popping a pill or taking an injection that he can’t figure how to live straight and clean.”

“Dr. Donklin agrees,” she said, producing Skeet’s file. “He’s got a zero-medication advisory in place.”

“Skeet’s metabolism is so out of whack, his nervous system so shot, you can’t always be sure what reaction he’ll have even to some usually harmless patent medicine.”

“He won’t even get Tylenol.”

Listening to himself, Dusty could hear that in his concern for Skeet, he was babbling. “He nearly killed himself once with caffeine tablets, they were such a habit. Developed caffeine psychosis, had some amazingly weird hallucinations, went into convulsions. Now he’s incredibly sensitized to it, allergic. You give him coffee, a Coke, he could go into anaphylactic shock.”

“Son,” she said, “that’s here in the file, too. Believe me, we’re going to take good care of him.” To Dusty’s surprise, Colleen O’Brien made the sign of the cross and then winked at him. “No harm is going to come to your little brother on my watch.”

If she had been a mother superior in a movie, you would have had full confidence that she was speaking both for herself and for God.

“Thank you, Mrs. O’Brien,” he said softly. “Thank you very, very much.”

Outside again, in his van, he did not at once switch on the engine. He was trembling too badly to drive.

The shakes were in part a delayed reaction to the fall off the Sorensons’ roof. Anger shook him, too. Anger at poor screwed-up Skeet and the endless burden he imposed. And the anger made Dusty tremble with shame, because he loved Skeet, as well, and felt responsible for him, but was powerless to help him. Being powerless was the worst of it.

He folded his arms across the steering wheel, put his forehead on his arms, and did something that he had rarely permitted himself to do in his twenty-nine years. He cried.

After the session with Dr. Ahriman, Susan Jagger appeared to be restored to her former self, the woman she had been prior to the agoraphobia. As she slipped into her raincoat, she declared that she was famished. “With considerable humor and flair, she rated the three Chinese restaurants that Martie suggested for takeout. “I don’t have a problem with MSG or too many hot red peppers in the Szechuan beef, but I’m afraid I must rule out choice number three based on the possibility of getting an unwanted cockroach garnish.” Nothing in her face or in her manner marked her as a woman in the nearly paralytic grip of a severe phobia.