False Memory

he’d never been moved before. The verse expressed, as Ahriman himself could never express it, his heretofore half-repressed and formless sense of his mortality. Okyo’s three lines brought him instantly and poignantly in touch with the terrible sad truth that he, too, was destined eventually to die. He, too, was a phantasm, as fragile as any flower, one day to drop like wilting petals.

As he knelt on the bed and held the book of haiku in both hands, reading those three lines over and over again, having forgotten the drill-pierced starlet whom he still straddled, the doctor felt his chest tighten and his throat thicken with emotion at the prospect of his eventual demise. How short life is! How unjust is death! How insignificant are we all! How cruel the universe.

So powerfully did these thoughts course through his mind, the doctor was sure he must be crying. Holding the book with only his left hand, he raised his right to his dry cheeks, then to his eyes, but he was tearless. He was convinced, however, that he’d been close to tears, and he knew now that he possessed the capacity to weep if ever he experienced anything sad enough to tap his salty well.

This realization pleased him because it meant that he had more in common with his father than he had supposed, and because it proved he wasn’t like Viveca Scofield, as she had claimed. Perhaps she had no tears, but his were stored away and waiting.

She had also been wrong about not having a heart. She had one, all right. Of course, it was no longer beating.

The doctor climbed off Viveca, leaving her like an unfinished woodshop project, Black Decker embedded, and for a long while he sat on the edge of the bed, poring through the book of haiku. Here, in this unlikely place and time, he discovered his artistic side.

When he could finally pry himself away from the book, he brought Dad’s body upstairs, placed it on the bed, wiped the smears of dark chocolate off its mouth, dissected the great director’s fine lacrimal apparatus, and collected the famous eyes. He tapped into Viveca for a few ounces of blood, gathered six pair of her thong-style panties from the dresser drawer — she was a live-in fiancee — and broke off one of her acrylic fingernails.

When he used a master key to let himself into Earl Ventnor’s apartment, he found a crude replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa constructed out of empty Budweiser cans on the living-room coffee table. The handyman, rather than leaning, lay in full collapse on the sofa, snoring almost as loudly as Viveca had been snoring, while Rock Hudson romanced Doris Day in an old movie on television.

Where does fiction end and reality begin? That is the essence of the game. Hudson romancing Day; Earl in a fit of drunken lust, raping the helpless starlet and committing a brutal double homicide — we believe what is easy to believe, whether fiction or fact.

The young doctor shook some of Viveca’s blood on the pants and shirt of the sleeping handyman. He used the last of it to soak one pair of the thong panties. He carefully wrapped the broken-off fingernail in the blood-soaked underwear, then put all six pair of panties in the bottom drawer of Earl’s bedroom dresser.

When Ahriman left the apartment, Earl was still sleeping deeply. The sirens would eventually wake him.

In the nearby gardening shed, where the lawn mowers were stored, the doctor found a five-gallon can of gasoline. He carried it into the main house and upstairs to his father’s bedroom.

After bagging his own blood-spotted garments, quickly washing up, and changing into fresh clothes, he soaked the bodies in the gasoline, dropped the empty can on the bed, and lit the pyre.

The doctor had been staying the week at his father’s vacation house in Palm Springs and had driven back to Bel Air this afternoon only to tend to these urgent family matters. With his work done, he returned to the desert.

In spite of the many lovely and valuable antiques that might burn if the fire department didn’t respond quickly enough, Ahriman took with him only the bag full of his bloody clothes, the book of haiku, and his dad’s eyes in a jar filled with a temporary fixative solution. Little more than an hour and a half later, in Palm Springs, he burned the incriminating clothes in the fireplace along with a few aromatic cedar splits and later mixed the ashes into the mulch in the little rose garden beyond the swimming pool. As risky as it was to keep the eyes and the slim volume of poetry, he was too sentimental to dispose of them.

He stayed up all night to watch a dusk-to-dawn marathon of old Bela Lugosi movies, ate an entire quart of Rocky-Road ice cream and a big bag of potato chips, swilled down all the root beer and cream soda he wanted, and caught a desert beetle in a big glass jar and tortured it with a match. His personal philosophy had been enriched immensely by Okyo’s three lines of haiku, and he had taken the poet’s teaching to heart: Life is short, we all die, so you better grab all the fun you can get.

* * *

Dinner was served with a second round of beers. Having had no breakfast and only a small vanilla milk shake for lunch, Martie was famished. Nevertheless, she felt as if having an appetite, so soon after finding Susan dead, was a betrayal of her friend. Life went on, and even as you grieved, you had a capacity for pleasure, too, as wrong as that might seem. Pleasure was possible in the midst of an abiding fear, as well, for she relished every bite of her jumbo prawns even as she listened to her husband reason his way toward an understanding of the doom hanging over them.

Fingers sprang from Dusty’s fist once again: “Six — if Susan could be programmed to submit to repeated sexual abuse and have memories of those events scrubbed from her mind, if she could be instructed to submit to rape, then what couldn’t she be made to do? Seven — she began to suspect what was happening, even though she had no proof, and maybe just that little suspicion was enough to alarm her controllers. Eight — she shared her suspicions with you, and they knew it, and they worried that she might share them with someone they didn’t control, so that meant she had to be terminated.”

“How would they know?”

“Maybe her phone was tapped. Maybe a lot of things. But if they decided to terminate her and instructed her to commit suicide, and she obeyed because she was programmed, then that’s not really suicide. Not morally, maybe not even legally. That’s murder.”

“But what can we do about it?”

Eating steak, he considered her question for a while. Then: “Hell if I know — yet. Because we can’t prove anything.”

“If they could just call her up and make her commit suicide, behind her locked doors…what do we do the next time our telephone rings?” Martie wondered.

They locked eyes, chewing the question, food forgotten. Finally he said, “We don’t answer it.”

“That’s not a practical long-term solution.”

“Frankly, Martie, if we don’t figure this out real fast, I don’t think we’re going to be here long term.”

She thought of Susan in the bathtub, even though she had never seen the body, and two hands strummed her heartstrings — the hot fingers of grief and the cold of fear. “No, not long,” she agreed. “But just how do we figure it out? Where do we start?”

“Only one thing I can think of. Haiku.”

“Haiku?”

“Gesundheit,” he said, the dear thing, and opened the bookstore bag that he had brought into the restaurant. He sorted through the seven books that Ned had purchased, passed one across the table to Martie, and selected another for himself. “Judging by the jacket copy, these are some of the classic poets of the form. We’ll try them first — and hope. There’s probably so much contemporary stuff, we could be searching for weeks if we don’t find it in the classics.”

“What’re we looking for?”

“A poem that gives you a shiver.”

“Like when I was thirteen, reading Rod Stewart lyrics?”

“Good God, no. I’m going to try to forget I even heard that. I mean the kind of shiver you got when you read that name in The Manchurian Candidate.”

She could speak the name without being affected by it the way she would be if she heard it spoken by someone else: “Raymond Shaw. There, I just shivered when I said it.”

“Look for a haiku that does the same thing to you.”

“And then what?”

Instead of answering, he divided his attention between his dinner and his book. In just a few minutes, he said, “Here! It doesn’t chill my spine, but I sure am familiar with it. ‘Clear cascades…into the waves scatter…blue