orient himself. He lay very still, on his back, staring at the ceiling.
His nightstand lamp was aglow, as he had left it. The floor lamp was beside the reading chair, where it belonged; it had not been pressed into service as an IV stand.
His heart didn’t flutter. It pounded. As far as he could tell, his heart was still his private domain, where nothing roosted except his own hopes, anxieties, loves, and prejudices.
Valet snored softly.
Beside Dusty, Martie enjoyed the deep slumber of a good woman — albeit goodness was in this case assisted by three doses of sleep-inducing antihistamines.
While the dream remained fresh, he walked around it in his mind, considering it from a variety of perspectives. He tried to apply the lesson he had long ago learned from the pencil drawing of a forest primeval that morphed into an image of a Gothic metropolis when it was approached without preconceptions.
Ordinarily, he didn’t analyze his dreams.
Freud, however, had been convinced that fishy expressions of the subconscious could be seined from dreams to provide a banquet for a psychoanalyst. Dr. Derek Lampton, Dusty’s stepfather, fourth of Claudette’s four husbands, also cast his lines into that same sea and regularly reeled in strange, squishy hypotheses that he force- fed to his patients without regard for the possibility that they might be poisonous.
Because Freud and Lizard Lampton had faith in dreams, Dusty had never taken them seriously. Now he was loath to admit there might be meaning in this one, and yet he sensed a morsel of truth in it. Finding one scrap of clean fact in that heap of trash, however, was going to be a Herculean task.
If his exceptional eidetic and audile memory preserved all the details of dreams as well as it stored away real experiences, then at least he could be sure that if he sorted through the refuse of this nightmare carefully enough, he would eventually find any shiny truth that might await discovery like a piece of heirloom silverware accidentally thrown out with the dinner garbage.
36
“The video,” Susan repeated, in response to Ahriman’s inquiry, and once more she looked away from him, toward the ming tree.
Surprised, the doctor smiled. “You’re still such a modest girl, considering the things you’ve done. Relax, dear. I’ve made only one tape of you — a ninety-minute astonishment, I will admit — and there’ll be just one more, next time we meet. Nobody but me gets to see my little home movies. They will never be broadcast on CNN or NBC, I assure you. Although the Nielson ratings would be through the roof, don’t you think?”
Susan continued to stare at the potted ming tree, but now the doctor understood why she was able to look away from him even though he had commanded her to stand eye to eye. Shame was a powerful force, from which she drew the strength for this one small rebellion. We all commit acts that shame us, and with varying degrees of difficulty, we reach accommodation with ourselves, forming pearls of guilt around each offending bit of moral grit. Guilt, unlike shame, can be nearly as soothing as virtue, because the jagged edges of the thing that it encapsulates can no longer be felt, and the guilt itself becomes the object of our interest. Susan could have made a necklace from all the moments of shame to which Ahriman had subjected her, but because she was aware of the videotape record, she was not able to form her little pearls of guilt and thus smooth the shame away.
The doctor commanded her to look at him, and after a hesitation, she once more shifted her attention from the ming tree to his eyes.
He instructed her to descend the steps of her subconscious, until she returned to the mind chapel, from which he had previously allowed her to ascend a short distance in order to enhance their play session.
When she was once more in that deep redoubt, her eyes jiggled briefly. Her personality had been filtered from her and set aside, as a chef would strain the solids out of beef broth to make bouillon, and now her mind was a pellucid liquid, waiting to be flavored according to Ahriman’s recipe.
He said, “You will forget your father was here tonight. Memories of his face where you should have seen mine, memories of his voice when you should have heard mine, are now dust, and less than dust, all blown away. I am your doctor, not your father. Tell me who I am, Susan.”
Her whispery voice seemed to echo from a subterranean room: “Dr. Ahriman.”
“As always, of course, you will have absolutely no accessible memory of what happened between us, absolutely no accessible memory of my presence here tonight.”
In spite of his best efforts, somewhere memory survived, perhaps in an unknowable realm
Some would have wondered if this sub-subconscious might be the soul. The doctor was not one of them.
“If nevertheless you have any reason to feel that you have been sexually assaulted, any soreness or other clue, you will suspect no one other than your estranged husband, Eric. Tell me now whether or not you fully understand what I’ve just said.”
A spasm of REM accompanied her reply, as if the specified memories were being shaken out of her through her oscillating eyes: “I understand.”
“But you are strictly forbidden from confronting Eric with your suspicions.”
“Forbidden. I understand.”
“Good.”
Ahriman yawned. Regardless of how much fun a play session had been, it was ultimately diminished by the need to clean up at the end, to put away the toys and straighten the room. Although he understood why neatness and order were absolute necessities, he begrudged the time spent on this put-away period as much now as he had when he was a boy.
“Please lead me to the kitchen,” he requested, yawning around his words.
Still graceful in spite of the crude use to which she had been put, Susan moved through the dark apartment with the fluid suppleness of a pale koi swimming in a midnight pond.
In the kitchen, as thirsty as any player would be after a long and demanding game, Ahriman said, “Tell me what beer you have?”
“Tsingtao.”
“Open one for me.”
She got a bottle from the refrigerator, fumbled in a drawer in the dark until she found an opener, and popped the cap off the beer.
While in this apartment, the doctor took care to touch as seldom as possible those surfaces on which fingerprints could be left.
He hadn’t yet decided if eventually Susan would self-destruct when he was finished with her. If he concluded that suicide would be sufficiently entertaining, then her long and depressing struggle to overcome agoraphobia would provide a convincing motive, and her handwritten farewell note would close the case without a rigorous investigation. More likely, she would be used in the bigger game with Martie and Dusty, culminating in mass murder in Malibu.
Other options included arranging to have Susan murdered by her estranged husband or even by her best friend. If Eric snuffed her, a homicide investigation would ensue — even if he phoned the cops from the scene, confessed, blew his own brains out, and fell dead beside his wife, with all the forensic evidence supporting the conclusion that an ugly domestic altercation was to blame. Then the Scientific Investigation Division would move in, with their pocket protectors and bad haircuts, seeking fingerprints with powders, iodines, silver nitrate solutions, ninhydrin solutions, cyanoacrylate fumes, even with methanol solution of rhodamine 6G and an argo ion laser. If Ahriman had inadvertently left a single print where these tedious but meticulous scientific types thought to look for it, his life would be changed, and not for the better.
