False Memory

Lo, and he got loosey-goosey, babbling about the rules, upset with me because I wasn’t operating him correctly. But you’re tighter, you just wait for the right thing to be said, and then if I don’t have the verse to open you for instruction, you snap right out of it.”

She looked at him as though he were addled.

“I’m not addled,” he insisted.

“You’re definitely weirder than when I married you. What’s this stuff about Skeet?”

“Something bizarre happened at New Life yesterday. I haven’t had a chance to tell you about it.”

“Here’s your chance.”

He shook his head. “Later. Let’s settle this first, prove to you what’s happening. Do you have any candy in your mouth?”

“In my mouth?”

“Yeah. Did you finish that last piece you took, or is some of it still in your mouth?”

She slipped the half-dissolved chocolate morsel out of the pocket of her cheek, showed it to him on the tip of her tongue, and then tucked it away again. Holding the half-finished roll of candy toward him, she said, “But wouldn’t you prefer an unused piece?”

Taking the roll from her, he said, “Swallow the candy.”

“Sometimes I like to let it melt.”

“You can let the next one melt,” he said impatiently. “Come on, come on, swallow it.”

“Definitely hypoglycemic.”

“No, I’m irritable by nature,” he said, peeling a chocolate from the roll. “Have you swallowed?”

She swallowed theatrically.

“No candy in your mouth?” he pressed. “It’s gone? All of it?”

“Yeah, yeah. But what does this have to do with—”

“Raymond Shaw,” Dusty said.

“I’m listening.”

Eyes drifting out of focus, a subtle slackness pulling down on her face, mouth open expectantly, she waited for the haiku that he didn’t know.

Instead of poetry, Dusty gave her candy, slipping the chocolate lozenge between her open lips, past her teeth, onto her tongue, which didn’t even twitch when the treat touched it.

Even as Dusty leaned away from her, Martie blinked, started to finish the sentence that Dusty had interrupted with the name Raymond Shaw—and became aware of the candy in her mouth.

For her, this moment was equivalent to Dusty’s finding the book in his hand again, magically, the instant after dropping it on the waiting-room floor. He had almost thrown the paperback across the room, in shock, before he’d checked himself. Martie wasn’t able to check herself: She gasped with surprise, choked, coughed, and ejected the candy with immeasurably more force than a Pez dispenser, scoring a direct hit on his forehead.

“I thought you liked to let them melt,” he said.

“It’s melting.”

As he wiped the candy off his forehead with a Kleenex, Dusty said, “You were gone for a few seconds.”

“I was gone,” she agreed, a tremor in her voice.

Her post-therapy glow was fading. She scrubbed nervously at her mouth with the back of her hand, pulled down the sun visor to examine her face in the small mirror, at once recoiled from her reflection, and flipped the visor up again. She shrank back in the seat.

“Skeet,” she reminded him.

As succinctly as possible, Dusty told her about the plunge off the Sorensons’ roof, the pages from the notepad in Skeet’s kitchen, the episode at New Life, and his recent realization that he himself was experiencing at least brief periods of missing time. “Blackouts, fugues, whatever you want to call them.”

“You, me, and Skeet,” she said. She glanced at the paperback on the dashboard. “But…brainwashing?”

He was acutely aware of how outlandish his theory seemed, but the events of the past twenty-four hours lent it credibility, though without diminishing the absurdity factor. “Maybe, yeah. Something’s happened to us. Something’s…been done to us.”

“Why us?”

He checked his wristwatch. “We better go. Have to meet Ned.”

“What’s Ned got to do with this?”

Starting the engine, Dusty said, “Nothing. I asked him to get some things for me.”

As Dusty backed the car out of the parking slot, Martie said, “Back to the big question. Why us? Why is this happening to us?”

“Okay, I know what you’re thinking. A housepainter, a video-game designer, and poor Skeet the feeb. Who would have anything to gain by messing with our minds, controlling us?”

Plucking the paperback off the dashboard, she said, “Why do they brainwash the guy in this story?”

“They turn him into an assassin who can never be traced back to the people who control him.”

“You, me, and Skeet — assassins?”

“Until he shot John Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald was at least as big a nobody as we are.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“True. And Sirhan Sirhan. And John Hinckley.”

Whether or not the sea would prove to be heavily marbled with black when eventually he saw it, Dusty was aware of a new downshift in his mood, now that the comforting ambience of the psychiatrist’s office was far behind him. At the exit from the parking lot, when he came to the cashier’s kiosk with its striped crossbar blocking the lane, the little building seemed to house a threat, as though it were a guard post at some remote, godforsaken border crossing high in the Balkans, where uniformed thugs with machine guns routinely robbed and sometimes murdered travelers. The cashier was a pleasant woman — thirtyish, pretty, somewhat chubby, with a butterfly barrette in her hair — but Dusty had the paranoid feeling that she was someone other than whom she appeared to be. When the crossbar rose and he drove out of the lot, half the cars passing in the street seemed likely to harbor surveillance teams assigned to track him.

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