False Memory

What videotape? Dr. Ahriman is—”

“—a great psychiatrist. He’s—”

“—deeply committed to—”

“—his patients.”

That faint thereminlike music, eerie and tuneless, played in the concert hall inside Dusty’s skull: not music, actually, but the psyche’s equivalent of an acute ringing in the ears, tinnitus of the mind. It was caused by what hundred-dollar-an-hour psychologists call cognitive dissonance: simultaneously holding diametrically opposed convictions about the same subject. The subject in this instance was Mark Ahriman. Dusty was awash in cognitive dissonance because he believed Ahriman was a great psychiatrist and now also a rapist, believed Ahriman was a doctor deeply committed to the welfare of his patients and now also a murderer, compassionate therapist and cruel manipulator.

“It can’t be true,” he said.

“It can’t,” she agreed.

“But the haiku.”

“The mahogany forest in my dream.”

“His office is paneled in mahogany.”

“And has a west-facing window,” she said.

“It’s crazy.”

“Even if it could be him — why us?”

“I know why you,” Dusty said darkly. “For the same reason as Susan. But why me?”

“Why Skeet?”

Of the last two messages on the tape, the first had come in at nine o’clock this morning, the second at four o’clock this afternoon, and both were from Martie’s mother. The first was brief; Sabrina was just calling to chat.

The second message was longer, full of concern, because Martie worked at home and usually returned her mother’s calls in an hour or two; the lack of a quick response gave Sabrina cause for apocalyptic speculations. Also unspoken in the rambling message — but clear to anyone familiar with Sabrina’s skills of indirect expression — was the ardent hope that (1) Martie was at an appointment with a divorce attorney, (2) Dusty had proved to be a drunk and was now being checked into a clinic to dry out, (3) Dusty had proved to be a philanderer and was now in the hospital recuperating from a beating — a severe beating — administered by another woman’s husband, or (4) Dusty, the drunk, was drying out in a clinic after being beaten — severely — by another woman’s husband, and Martie was at the divorce attorney’s office.

Ordinarily, Dusty would have been annoyed in spite of himself, but this time, Sabrina’s lack of faith in him seemed inconsequential.

He rewound the tape to Susan’s key message. In every way, her words were harder to listen to the second time than they had been the first.

Susan dead, but now her voice.

Ahriman the healer, Ahriman the killer.

Cognitive dissonance.

The answering-machine tape was not the conclusive evidence they could have used, because Susan’s message had not been sufficiently specific. She had not accused the psychiatrist of rape — or, indeed, of anything other than being a bastard.

Nevertheless, the tape was evidence of a sort, and they needed to preserve it.

While Dusty extracted the microcassette, grabbed a red felt-tip pen from the desk, and printed SUSAN on the label, Martie inserted a fresh tape into the answering machine. He put the marked cassette in the shallow center drawer in the desk.

Martie looked wounded.

Susan dead. And now Dr. Ahriman, who had seemed to be such a reliable pillar in an uncertain world, apparently had become a trapdoor.

57

From the kitchen, Dusty phoned Roy Closterman’s office and got the physician’s exchange that handled after-hours calls. He claimed that Martie was having an allergic reaction to medication prescribed by the doctor. “We’ve got an emergency situation here.”

While his master and mistress sat at the kitchen table, waiting for a callback, Valet sprawled under the table, sighing to make it clear that they were wasting valuable time that could be better spent on tug-of-war or any game with a ball.

Dusty searched The Manchurian Candidate for a name that would give him a shiver like the one he’d gotten from the Bash-o verse about the heron. In Dr. Ahriman’s waiting room, he had read enough of the thriller to encounter most if not all of the leading characters, none of whose names made his skin crawl. Now, late in the book, scanning quickly, he found a walk-on character that did the trick: a second-rate opera singer, Viola Narvilly, which seemed to be a silly name for Ahriman — or whoever — to have chosen for such deadly purpose.

Now they read haiku to each other.

Dusty went first with the activating name. “Raymond Shaw.”

“I’m listening,” she said, detached, eyes glazed and yet alert.

“Blown from the west—”

“You are the west and the western wind.”

Suddenly Dusty was reluctant to proceed through all three lines of verse, because he didn’t know how to handle her if he succeeded in accessing her subconscious. Opened for instruction, she would surely be in a fragile state, vulnerable, and suggestions he made to her or questions he asked might have serious unintended consequences, cause unforeseeable psychological damage.

Besides, he didn’t know how to bring her out of her trance, to full consciousness, except by telling her to sleep it off, as Skeet had done. And Skeet, at New Life, slept so deeply that calling his name, shaking him, even administering smelling salts failed to rouse him; he came around at his own pace. If Dusty’s sense of time running out was perceptive rather than paranoid, they couldn’t take a chance that Martie would tumble into a narcoleptic quasi-coma from which he could not make her stir.

When Dusty didn’t proceed to the second line of the haiku, Martie blinked, and her rapt expression vanished as she returned to full awareness. “So?”

He told her. “But it would have worked. That’s clear. Now you try me — through just the first line of my verse.”

Unable to rely on memory, Martie resorted to the book of poetry.

He saw her open her mouth to speak—

— and then the retriever was pushing his burly head into Dusty’s lap, seeking to comfort or be comforted.

A fraction of a second ago, Valet had been slumped in a furry pile at Dusty’s feet.

No, not a fraction of one second. Ten or fifteen seconds had passed, maybe longer, a piece of time now lost to Dusty. Evidently, when Martie had used the activating name, Viola Narvilly, Dusty had responded — and the dog, sensing a wrongness in his master, had risen to investigate.

“That’s spooky,” Martie said, closing the poetry book, grimacing as she pushed it aside, as though it were a satanic bible. “The way you looked…zoned out.”

“I don’t even have any memory of you saying the name.”

“I said it, all right. And the first line of the poem, ‘Lightning gleams.’ And you said, ‘You are the lightning.’”

The phone rang.

Getting up from the table, Dusty nearly knocked his chair over, and as he snatched the handset off the wall