False Memory

52

On Newport Center Drive, the wind-shaken rows of towering palm trees tossed their fronds, as if warning Dusty off the route that he was driving.

Martie said, “Okay, if something like this was done to us — who did it?”

“In The Manchurian Candidate, it’s the Soviets, the Chinese, and the North Koreans.”

“The Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore,” she noted. “Somehow, I can’t see the three of us being the instruments of an elaborate conspiracy of Asian totalitarians.”

“In the movies, it would probably be extraterrestrials.”

“Great,” she said sarcastically. “Let’s call Fig Newton and tap into his vast store of knowledge on the subject.”

“Or some giant corporation bent on turning us all into mindless, robotic consumers.”

“I’m halfway there without their help,” she said.

“A secret government agency, scheming politicians, Big Brother.”

“That one’s a little too real for comfort. But again — why us?”

“If it wasn’t us, it would have to be somebody else.”

“That’s weak.”

“I know,” Dusty said, smoldering with more frustration than a monastery full of celibates.

From the shadowy regions of his mind, another answer teased him, glimmering dully but not bright enough for him to get a clear look at it. Indeed, every time he went into the shadows after it, the thought slipped away altogether.

He remembered the drawing of the forest that became a city when his preconceived perception of it changed. Here was another situation where he couldn’t see the city for the trees.

He recalled, as well, the dream of the lightning and the heron. The inflation bulb of the sphygmomanometer had floated in midair, being compressed and released by an invisible hand. In that dream with him and Martie, there had been a third presence as transparent as a ghost.

That presence was their tormentor, whether an extraterrestrial or an agent of Big Brother, or someone else. Dusty suspected that if he were indeed operating according to some hypnotically implanted program, then his programmers had hobbled him with the suggestion that if he ever became suspicious, his suspicion would not fall on them but on a host of other suspects both probable and improbable, such as aliens and government agents. His enemy might cross his path at any moment but be as effectively invisible in real life as he was in the nightmare of the shrieking heron.

As Dusty turned right onto Pacific Coast Highway, Martie opened The Manchurian Candidate and scanned the first sentence in it, which contained the name that had triggered her mini-blackout. Dusty saw a chill shiver through her when she read it, but she didn’t switch into that detached, anticipatory state.

Then she spoke it aloud, “Raymond Shaw,” with no more serious effect than another brief shiver.

“Maybe it doesn’t work on you properly when you read it or say it yourself,” he suggested, “only when someone says it to you.”

“Or maybe just by knowing the name, I’ve taken away its power over me.”

“Raymond Shaw,” he said.

“I’m listening.”

When Martie returned to full consciousness after about ten seconds, Dusty said, “Welcome back. And so much for that theory.”

Scowling at the book, she said, “We should take it home and burn it.”

“No point doing that. There are clues in it. Secrets. Whoever put the book into your hands — and I tend to think you didn’t just go out and buy it — whoever they are, they must be working the other side of the street from the people who programmed us. They want us to wise up to what’s happening to us. And the book is a key. They gave you a key to unlock all this.”

“Yeah? Why didn’t they just walk up to me and say, ‘Hey, lady, some people we know are screwing with your brain, planting autophobia in your head and lots more stuff you don’t even know about yet, for reasons you couldn’t even imagine, and we just don’t like it much.’”

“Well, let’s say it is some secret government agency, and inside the agency there’s this small faction that’s morally opposed to the project—”

“Opposed to Operation Brainwash Dusty, Skeet, and Martie.”

“Yeah. But they can’t come to us publicly.”

“Why?” she persisted.

“Because they’d be killed. Or maybe it’s just that they’re afraid of being fired and losing their pensions.”

“Morally opposed but not to the extent of losing their pensions. That part sounds creepily real. But the rest of it…So they slip me this book. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Then for some reason they seem to program me not to read it.”

Dusty braked to a stop in a backup at a red traffic light. “A little lame, huh?”

“A lot lame.”

They were on a bridge that spanned the channel between Newport Harbor and its back bay. Under the sunless sky, the broad expanse of water was dark gray-green, though not black, with hatching drawn on it by the breeze above and the currents below, so that it looked scaly, like the hide of a fearsome slumbering reptile out of the Jurassic Period.

“But there’s something that isn’t lame,” Martie said, “not in the least lame. Something that’s happening to Susan.”

A grimness in her voice drew Dusty’s attention from the harbor. “What about Susan?”

“She’s missing periods of time, too. Not little pieces, either. Big blocks of time. Whole nights.”

The Valium veil in her eyes had been gradually lifting, that welcome but artificial calm giving way to anxiety once more. At Dr. Ahriman’s office, the unnatural paleness left her, replaced by peachy color, but now shadows were gathering in the tender skin under her eyes, as though her face were darkening in sympathy with the slowly waning winter afternoon.

Beyond the farther end of the bridge, the red signal changed to green. The traffic began to move.

Martie told him about Susan’s phantom rapist.

Dusty had been worried. He had been frightened. Now a feeling worse than worry or fear wrapped his heart.

Sometimes, when he woke in the abyss of night and lay listening to Martie’s sweet soft breathing, a mortal dread — more terrible than simple fear — crept into him. After one too many glasses of wine at dinner, too much cream sauce, and perhaps a bitter clove of garlic, his mind was as sour as his stomach, and he contemplated the silence of the predawn world without his usual appreciation for the beauty of stillness, hearing no peace in it, hearing instead the threat of the void. In spite of the faith that was his rock through most of his life, a worm of doubt chewed at his heart on these hushed nights, and he wondered if all that he and Martie had together was this one life, and nothing beyond it but a darkness that allowed no memory and was empty even of loneliness. He didn’t want until-death-do-you-part, didn’t want anything short of forever, and when a despairing inner voice suggested that forever was a fraud, he always reached out in the night to touch Martie in her sleep. His intention was not to wake her, only to feel in her what she invariably contained and what was detectable to even his lightest touch: her given grace, her immortality and the promise of his own.

Now, as he listened to Martie recount Susan’s story, Dusty was an apple to the worm of doubt again. Everything that was happening to all of them seemed unreal, meaningless, a glimpse into the chaos underlying life. He was overcome by a feeling that the end, when it arrived, would be only the end, not also a beginning, and he sensed that it was coming fast, too, a cruel and brutal death toward which they were hurtling blindly.

When Martie finished, Dusty handed his cell phone to her. “Try Susan again.”

She placed the call. The number rang and rang. And rang.

“Let’s go see if the retirees downstairs know where she’s gone,” Martie suggested. “It’s not far.”

“Ned will be waiting for us. As soon as I pick up what he’s got for me, we’ll go to Susan’s. But for sure, it can’t be Eric creeping around there at night.”

“Because whoever is doing this to her, he’s one of them behind what’s happening to you, me, Skeet.”

“Yeah. And Eric, hell, he’s an investment adviser, a numbers cruncher, not a mind-control wizard.”

Martie keyed Susan’s number in again. She pressed the phone tightly to her ear. Her face was pinched by the strain of wishing fervently for an answer.