False Memory полностью

“Hurry;” she pleaded.

“All right.”

“But don’t drive too fast.”

“Okay.”

“But hurry.”

“Which is it?” he asked, pulling away from the curb.

“If you drive too fast, maybe I might try to grab the wheel, try to pull the car off the road, roll it, or plow us head-on into a truck.”

“Of course, you won’t.”

“I might,” she insisted. “I will. You don’t want to see what’s in my head, the pictures in my head.”

The residual effect of three caplets of sleep-aid medication was fading from her by the second, while Dusty’s heartburn from the cream-filled, glazed doughnut was steadily growing.

“Oh, God,” she groaned. “God, please, please, don’t let me see these things, don’t make me see them.”

Huddled forward in abject misery, apparently sickened by the violent images spurting unwanted through her mind, Martie gagged, and soon the gagging evolved into fierce spasms of retching that would have brought up her breakfast if she had eaten any.

The morning traffic on these surface streets was moderately heavy, and Dusty weaved from lane to lane, sometimes taking risks to wedge into a gap, ignoring the angry looks of other motorists and the occasional hard bark of a horn. Martie appeared to be on an emotional toboggan run, rocketing along slick ice, with a panic attack at the end of the chute. Dusty wanted to be as close to Dr. Closterman’s office as possible if she hit the wall and ricocheted into a crack-up like the one he had witnessed the previous night.

Although dry heaves racked her with greater force than ever; she achieved no relief, not merely because her stomach was empty; but because she needed to disgorge the undisgorgeable vomitous images churning in her mind. Perhaps her mouth flooded with saliva, as is usual during bouts of nausea, because more than once she spat on the floorboards.

Between fits of retching, she gasped vehemently for breath, her throat surely parched and half raw from the sheer force of these inhalations. Shudders shook Martie, too, and with such violence that Dusty was shivered by a sympathetic cold revulsion, even though he could not imagine what ghastly visions plagued her.

He drove faster yet, weaving with greater aggression from lane to lane, taking bigger risks, to the accompaniment of more blaring horns and, now, the frequent squeal of brakes. He almost hoped that a policeman would pull him over. Considering Martie’s condition, any cop was likely to forgo issuing a traffic citation and, instead, provide an emergency escort, with siren.

Worsening condition. For the moment, her convulsive retching passed, but she began to rock back and forth in her seat, groaning, thumping her forehead against the padded dashboard, softly at first, slow and easy, as though to distract herself from the hobgoblins that seethed through her mind, but then with greater force, faster, and faster still, no longer groaning but grunting like a football player slamming into a tackling dummy, faster; harder:“Uh, uh, uh, uh, uuuhhh.”

Dusty spoke to her; urged her to calm down, to hang on, to remember that he was here for her, that he trusted her; and that everything was going to be all right. He didn’t know if she could hear him. Nothing he said appeared to comfort her.

He wanted desperately to reach out to her and gentle her with his touch, but he suspected that during this seizure, any contact would have the opposite effect of what he intended. His hand upon her shoulder might send her into even greater paroxysms of terror and revulsion.

Dr. Closterman’s offices were in a medical high-rise adjacent to the hospital. Both buildings rose in the next block, the tallest structures in sight.

Regardless of the padding, she was certain to hurt herself if she kept knocking her head against the dashboard, but she would not relent. She didn’t cry out in pain, only grunted with each impact, cursed, and quarreled with herself — “Stop it, stop it, stop it” — and seemed like nothing less than a woman possessed. More precisely, she was both the possessed and the exorcist, striving mightily to cast out her own demons.

At the medical complex, the surrounding parking lots were shaded by aisles of big carrotwood trees. He searched for and found a space close to the office high-rise, under a canopy of branches.

Even after he braked to a halt and put the car in park, Dusty felt as though he were still moving. A morning breeze shivered leaf shadows across the windshield, while interleaved blades of sunshine fluttered against the curve of glass and seemed to tumble away to each side as if they were bright scraps of foliage spinning into his wake on a slipstream.

As Dusty switched off the engine, Martie stopped butting the dash. Her hands, until now trapped between her clamped thighs, broke free. She clasped her head as though trying to suppress the waves of pain from a migraine headache, pressing so hard on her skull that the skin over her knuckles tightened until it was as smooth and white as the bone beneath.