The psychiatrist returned to Martie.
The door fell shut with a muffled but impressive thud, and the latch automatically engaged. There was no handle on this side. The door could only be opened from the inner office.
48
Black hair, black attire. Blue eyes shine like Tiffany. Her light, too, a lamp.
The doctor polished that haiku in his mind, rather pleased with it, as he returned to his armchair and sat across the low table from Martie Rhodes.
Without a word, he studied her face, feature by feature and then as a whole, taking his time, curious to see if his protracted silence would make her uneasy.
Unperturbed, she waited, evidently confident that the doctor’s mute inspection had a clinical purpose that would be explained to her when the time was right.
As with Susan Jagger, Dr. Ahriman had previously implanted in Martie and Dustin Rhodes the suggestion that they would feel deeply at ease in his office. Likewise, they were always to be reassured at the sight of him.
In their unconscious minds, he had embedded six thoughts, like little prayers, to which they were able to resort one sentence at a time or in a single long calming mantra, if any doubt or nervousness overcame them in his presence.
The doctor had found it richly amusing to watch them smiling and nodding, even as they must have wondered at their sudden shedding of anxiety. And what fun it was to have a man so gratefully entrust his wife to you when your intention was to debase, demean, humiliate, and ultimately destroy her.
After the unanticipated halftime occasioned by Susan’s suicide, the game would now resume.
“Martie?” he said.
“Yes, Doctor?”
“Raymond Shaw.”
Her demeanor changed at once. She stiffened and sat straighter in her chair. Her lovely half smile froze, faded, and she said, “I’m listening.”
Having switched her on with that name, the doctor now loaded the elaborate program that was so succinctly coded in her personal haiku. “Blown from the west—”
“You are the west and the western wind,” she said dutifully.
“—fallen leaves gather—”
“The leaves are your instructions.”
“—in the east.”
“I am the east,” Martie said, and now all instructions that the doctor gave her would be gathered in like autumn leaves, to compost in the dark warm depths of her subconscious mind.
As Dusty hung Martie’s black leather jacket on the coatrack, he felt the paperback in the right-hand pocket. It was the novel she had carried here when escorting Susan, not for the entire past year, but at least for four or five months.
Although she had claimed that it was an entertaining read, the book appeared to be as pristine as when it had first been stocked on a bookstore shelf. The spine was smooth, uncreased. When he riffled the pages, they were so crisp and fresh that this might have been the first time they had been parted from one another since being married at the bindery.
He remembered how Martie had spoken of this story in the vague language of a high-schooler faking a report on a book she’d never taken the time to crack. He was suddenly sure that Martie had read none of the novel, but he couldn’t imagine why she would lie about anything this trivial.
Indeed, Dusty found it hard to get his mind around the thought that Martie would ever lie about any matter whatsoever, whether great or small. Uncommon respect for the truth was one of the touchstones by which she constantly tested her right to call herself Smilin’ Bob Woodhouse’s daughter.
After hanging up his own jacket, still holding the paperback, he looked at the magazines fanned on the table. They were of one ilk, dedicated either to shameless fawning over celebrities or to the supposedly witty skewering and hip analysis of the doings and sayings of celebrities, which in the end had essentially the same effect as shameless fawning.
Leaving the magazines untouched, he sat down with the book.
He was vaguely familiar with the title. In its time, this novel had been a best-seller. A famous film had been adapted from it. Dusty had neither read the book nor seen the movie.
According to the copyright page, the first edition was published in 1959. An age ago. Another millennium.
Yet still in print. A good sign.
Chapter 1. Although a thriller, the book opened not on a dark stormy night, but in San Francisco, in sunshine. Dusty began to read.
The doctor asked Martie to sit on the couch, where he could sit beside her. Obediently, she moved from the armchair.
Wrapped up all in black. Odd color to wrap a toy — one not yet broken.
That haiku also resonated with him, and he ran it through his mind a few times with increasing pleasure. It wasn’t as good as the Tiffany one, but far better than his recent efforts to capture Susan Jagger in verse.
Sitting on the couch close to Martie but not thigh to thigh, the doctor said, “Today, together, we enter a new phase.”
In the solemn and hushed confines of her mind chapel, where the only votive candles were lit to the god Ahriman, Martie attended his every word with the quiet acceptance and the shining visionary stare of Joan of Arc listening to her Voice.
“From this day forward, you will discover that destruction and self-destruction are ever more appealing. Terrifying, yes. But even terror has a sweet appeal. Tell me if you have ever ridden a roller coaster, one of those that takes you on barrel rolls, loops at high speed.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me how you felt on that roller coaster.”
“Afraid.”
“But you felt something else.”
“Exhilaration. Delight.”
“There. Terror and pleasure are linked in us. We are a badly miswired species, Martie. Terror delights us, both the experience of terror and the dealing out of it to others. We are healthier if we admit to this miswiring and do not struggle to be better than our natures allow. You do understand what I’m saying.”
Her eyes jiggled. REM. She said, “Yes.”
“Regardless of what our Creator intended us to be, what we have become is what we
“Yes.”
“Power and its primary consequences — death and sex. That’s what drives us. Power over others is the thrill of thrills for us. We idolize politicians because they have so much power, and we worship celebrities because their
