False Memory

“On this subject,” Ahriman said, “no more curt answers. Let’s have a genuine discussion of your wife’s succulence.”

Dusty’s gaze was fixed not on Ahriman, but on a point in the air midway between them, as he said with no inflection whatsoever, as flatly as a machine might speak, “Succulent, I guess, meaning juicy.”

“Exactly,” the doctor confirmed.

“Grapes are juicy. Strawberries. Oranges. Good pork chops are succulent,” said Dusty. “But the word isn’t… accurately descriptive of a person.”

Smiling with delight, Ahriman said, “Oh, really — not accurately descriptive? Be careful, housepainter. Your genes are showing. What if I were a cannibal?”

Unable, in this state, to answer a question with anything but a request for further information, Dusty asked, “Are you a cannibal?”

“If I were a cannibal, I might be accurately descriptive when calling your tasty wife succulent. Enlighten me with your opinion of that, Mr. Dustin Penn Rhodes.”

Dusty’s emotionless tone of voice remained unchanged, but now it seemed drily pedantic, much to the doctor’s amusement. “From a cannibalistic point of view, the word works.”

“I’m afraid that under all your blue-collar earthiness lurks a droning professor.”

Dusty said nothing, but his eyes jiggled with REM.

“Well, though I’m no cannibal,” said Ahriman, “I think your wife is succulent. From now on, in fact, I’ll have a new pet name for her. She’ll be my little pork chop.”

The doctor concluded the session with the usual instructions not to retain any conscious or any accessible subconscious memory of what had transpired between them. Then: “You will return to the outgoing waiting room, Dusty. Pick up the book that you were reading and sit where you were sitting before. Find the point in the text where you were interrupted. Then, in your mind, you’ll leave the chapel where you are now. As you close the chapel door, all recollection of what happened from the moment I stepped out of my office, just after you heard the click of the latch, until you wake from your current state, will have been erased. Then, counting slowly to ten, you’ll ascend the stairs from the chapel. When you reach ten, you will regain full consciousness — and continue reading.”

“I understand.”

“Have a good afternoon, Dusty.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Dusty rose from his armchair and crossed the office, not once glancing at his wife upon the couch.

When the mister was gone, the doctor went to the missus and stood studying her. Succulent, indeed.

He dropped to one knee beside the couch, kissed each of her closed eyes, and said, “My pork chop.”

This, of course, had no effect, but it gave the doctor a laugh.

Another kiss to each eye. “Princess.”

She woke but was still in the mind chapel, not yet permitted full consciousness.

At Ahriman’s instruction, she returned to the armchair in which she had been sitting earlier.

Settling into his chair, he said, “Martie, through the rest of the afternoon and early evening, you will feel somewhat more at peace than you have been during the past twenty-four hours. Your autophobia hasn’t disappeared, but it has relented a bit. For a while, you’ll be troubled only by a low-grade uneasiness, a sense of fragility, and brief spells of sharper fear at the rate of about one an hour, each only a minute or two in duration. But later, at about…oh, at about nine o’clock, you will experience your worst panic attack yet. It’ll begin in the usual way, escalate as before — but suddenly through your mind will pass the dead and tortured people we studied together, all the stabbed and shot and mutilated bodies, the decomposing cadavers, and you’ll become convinced, against all reason, that you personally are responsible for what happened to them, that your hands committed all this torture and murder. Your hands. Your hands. Tell me if you understand what I have said.”

“My hands.”

“I leave the details of your big moment to you. You’ve certainly got the raw materials for it.”

“I understand.”

Sizzling passion eyes. Simmer in broth of eros. My juicy pork chop.

Haiku with culinary metaphor. This was nothing the masters of Japanese verse were likely to endorse, but although the doctor respected the demandingly formal structures of haiku, he was enough of a free spirit to make his own rules from time to time.

* * *

Dusty was reading about Dr. Yen Lo and the team of dedicated Communist mind-control specialists who were screwing with the brains of the hapless American soldiers, when suddenly he exclaimed, “What the hell is this,” referring to the paperback that he was holding in his hands.

He nearly pitched The Manchurian Candidate across the waiting room, but checked himself. Instead, he dropped it on the little table next to his chair, shaking his right hand as though the book had burnt him.

He sprang to his feet and stood looking down at the damn thing. He was no less shocked and spooked than he would have been if an evil sorcerer’s curse had transformed the novel into a rattlesnake.

When he dared to look away from the book, he glanced at the door to Dr. Ahriman’s office. Closed. It looked as though it had been closed since time immemorial. As formidable as a stone monolith.

The squeak of the lever-action handle, the click of the latch: He had clearly heard both those sounds. Embarrassment, alarm, shame, a sense of danger. Inexplicably, those feelings and more had crackled through him as quick as an electric arc snapping across a tiny gap in a circuit: Don’t be caught reading this! Reflexively, he had tossed the book on the table, and because its shiny cover was slippery, it had sailed right off the granite top. The door had done its pop-sigh vacuum thing, and he had started to shoot to his feet as the book hit the floor with a plop, and then…

…and then the novel was back in his hand, and he was reading, sitting in his chair, as if the squeak-click- pop-sigh-plop moment of alarm had never happened. Maybe his entire life, from birth to death, was on a videotape up there in kingdom come, where one of the celestial editors had rewound it a few seconds, to the moment immediately before the sounds of the door had alarmed him, erasing all those events from his past but forgetting to erase his memory of them. Apparently, an apprentice editor with a lot to learn.

Magic. Dusty recalled the fantasy novels in Skeet’s apartment. Wizards, warlocks, necromancers, sorcerers, spellcasters. This was the kind of experience that made you believe in magic — or question your sanity.

He reached for the book on the table, where he had dropped it — for the second time? — and then he hesitated. He poked the book with one finger, but it didn’t hiss or open an eye and wink at him.

He picked it up, turned it wonderingly in his hands, and then riffled the pages across his thumb.

That sound reminded him of a deck of cards being snap-shuffled, which reminded him, in turn, that the brainwashed American soldier in the novel, the one programmed to be an assassin, was activated when handed a pack of cards and asked Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire? To be effective, the question had to be asked in exactly those words. The guy then played solitaire until he turned up the queen of diamonds, whereupon his subconscious mind became accessible to his controller, making him ready to receive his instructions.

Gazing thoughtfully at the paperback, Dusty let the edges of the pages fan across his thumb again.

He sat down, still thoughtful. Still thumbing the pages.

What he had here wasn’t magic. What he had here was another bit of missing time, only a few seconds, shorter even than his moment on the phone in the kitchen, the previous day.

Shorter?

Was it really?

He consulted his wristwatch. Maybe not shorter. He couldn’t be sure, because he hadn’t checked the time since reading the first words of the novel. Maybe he had been zoned out for a few seconds or maybe for ten minutes, even longer.

Missing time.

What sense did this make?

None.