False Memory Part 28

He brought her all the way forward to the present, to the hour and minute on the bedside clock, and then he instructed her to get dressed.

Her nightclothes were scattered on the floor. She retrieved them with the slow, deliberate movements of anyone in a trance.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, as she drew the white cotton panties up her slender legs, Susan suddenly bent forward as though she'd taken a blow in the solar plexus, breath exploding from her. She inhaled with a shudder, and then spat in disgust and horror, saliva glistening like snail trails on her thighs, and spat again, as though she were desperate to rid herself of an intolerable taste. Spitting led to gagging, and between these wretched sounds were two words that she wrenched from herself at great cost-"Daddy, why, Daddy, why?"-because although she no longer believed that she was twelve years old, she remained convinced that her beloved father had brutally raped her.

To the doctor, this final unexpected spasm of grief and shame was lagniappe, a little dinner mint of suffering, a chocolate truffle after cognac. He stood before her, breathing deeply of the faint but astringent, briny fragrance arising from her cascade of tears.

When he placed a hand paternally upon her head, Susan flinched from his touch, and Daddy, why? Daddy, why? deteriorated into a soft and wordless wail. This m.u.f.fled ululation reminded him of the eerie puling of distant coyotes in a warm desert night even farther in the past than Minette Luckland impaled on the spear of Diana out there in Scottsdale, Arizona. deteriorated into a soft and wordless wail. This m.u.f.fled ululation reminded him of the eerie puling of distant coyotes in a warm desert night even farther in the past than Minette Luckland impaled on the spear of Diana out there in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Just beyond the glow of Santa Fe, New Mexico, lies a horse ranch: a fine adobe house, stables, riding rings, fenced meadows mottled with sweet bunchgra.s.s, all surrounded by chaparral in which rabbits tremble by the thousands and coyotes hunt at night in packs. One summer evening two decades before anyone has yet begun to ponder the approaching dawn of a new millennium, the rancher's lovely wife, Fiona Pastore, answers the phone and listens to three lines of haiku, a poem by Buson. She knows the doctor socially-and also because her ten-year-old son, Dion, is his patient, whom he has been endeavoring to cure of a severe stutter. On a score of occasions, Fiona has engaged in s.e.x with the doctor, often of such depravity that she has suffered bouts of depression afterward, even though all memory of their trysts has been scrubbed from her mind. She poses no danger to the doctor, but he is finished with her physically and is ready now to proceed to the final phase of their relations.h.i.+p.

Remotely activated by haiku, Fiona receives her fatal instructions without protest, proceeds directly to her husband's study, and writes a brief but poignant suicide note accusing her innocent spouse of an imaginative list of atrocities. Note finished, she unlocks a gun cabinet in the same room and removes a six-shot .45 Colt built on a Seville frame, which is a lot of gun for a woman only five feet four, 110 pounds, but she can handle it. She is a girl of the Southwest, born and raised; she has shot at game and targets for more than half her thirty years. She loads the piece with 325-grain, .44 Keith bullets and proceeds to her son's bedroom.

Dion's window is open for ventilation, screened against desert insects, and when Fiona switches on a lamp, the doctor is afforded the equivalent of a fifty-yard-line view. Ordinarily, he is unable to be present during these episodes of ultimate control, because he does not wish to risk incriminating himself-although he has friends in places high enough to all but ensure his exoneration. This time, however, circ.u.mstances are ideal for his attendance, and he is unable to resist. The ranch, although not isolated, is reasonably remote. The ranch manager and his wife, both employees of the Pastores, are on vacation, visiting family in Pecos, Texas, during the lively annual cantaloupe festival, and the other three ranch hands do not live on site. Ahriman placed his call to Fiona from a car phone, only a quarter of a mile from the house, where after he traveled on foot to Dion's window, arriving only a minute before the woman entered the bedroom and clicked on the lamp.

The sleeping boy never wakes, which is a disappointment to the doctor, who almost speaks through the fine-mesh screen, like a priest a.s.signing penance in a confessional, to instruct Fiona to rouse her son. He hesitates, and she does not, dispatching the dreaming child with two rounds. The husband, Bernardo, arrives at a run, shouting in alarm, and his wife squeezes off another pair of shots. He is lean and tan, one of those weather-beaten Westerners whose sun-cured skin and heat-tempered bones give them an air of imperviousness, but instead of bouncing off his hide, of course, the bullets punch him with terrible force. He staggers, slams into a tall chest of drawers, and hangs desperately on to it, his shattered jaw askew. Bernardo's lampblack eyes reveal that surprise has. .h.i.t him harder than either of the .44 slugs. His stare grows wider when, through the window screen, he sees the visiting doctor. Black under lampblack, a lightless eternity, in his startled eyes. A tooth or bit of bone falls from his crumbling jaw: He sags and follows that white morsel to the floor.

Ahriman finds the show to be even more entertaining than he had antic.i.p.ated, and if he has ever doubted the wisdom of his career choice, he knows that he will never do so again. Because certain hungers are not easily sated, he wants to amplify these thrills, crank up the volume, so to speak, by bringing Fiona at least part of the way out of her more-than-trance-not-quite-fugue state into a higher level of consciousness. Currently her personality is so firmly repressed that she is not emotionally aware of what she has done and has, therefore, no visible reaction to the carnage. If she could be released from control just enough to understand, to feel-then her agony would bring a singular storm of tears, a tide on which the doctor could sail to places he has never been before.

Ahriman hesitates, but for good reason. Released from bondage enough to realize the enormity of her crimes, the woman might behave unpredictably, might slip her fetters altogether and resist being hobbled again. He is sure that in the worst case, he will be able to reestablish control using vocal commands within a minute, but only seconds are required for her to turn toward the open window and fire one round point-blank. Potential injuries can be incurred in any game or playground sport: skinned knees, abraded knuckles, contusions, the occasional minor cut, now and then a perfectly good tooth knocked loose in a tumble. As far as the doctor is concerned, however, the mere possibility of taking a bullet in the face is enough to drain all the fun out of this frolic. He does not speak, leaving the woman to finish this Grand Guignol puppet show in a state of benightedness.

Standing over her dead family, Fiona Pastore calmly puts the barrel of the Colt in her mouth and, regrettably tearless, destroys herself. She falls so softly, but the hard clatter of steel coldly resonates: The gun in her hand, snagged on her trigger finger, raps the pine bed rail.

With the toy broken and the thrill of its function no longer to be enjoyed, the doctor stands at the window for a while, studying the art of her form for the last time. This is not as pleasurable as it once was, what with the back of her head gone, but the exit wound is turned away from him, and the distortion of her facial bone structure is surprisingly slight.

The unearthly cries of coyotes have s.h.i.+vered the air since the doctor first arrived at the ranch house, but until now they have been hunting through the chaparral a couple miles to the east. A change of pitch, a new excitement in their puling, alerts the doctor to the fact that they are drawing nearer. If the scent of blood travels well and quickly on the desert air, these prairie wolves may soon gather beneath the screened window to bay for the dead.

Throughout Indian folklore, the trickiest creature of all is named Coyote, and Ahriman sees no amus.e.m.e.nt value in matching wits with a pack of them, He walks quickly but does not run toward his Jaguar, which is parked a quarter mile to the north.

The night bouquet features the silicate scent of sand, the oily musk of mesquite, and a faint iron smell the source of which he can't identify.

As the doctor reaches the car, the coyotes fall silent, having caught a whiff of some new spoor that makes them cautious, and no doubt the cause of their caution is Ahriman himself. In the sudden hush, a sound above makes him look up.

Rare albino bats, calligraphy on the sky, sealed by the full moon. High looping white wings, faint buzz of fleeing insects: The killing is quiet.

The doctor watches, rapt. The world is one great playing field, the sport is killing, and the sole objective is to stay in the game.

Carrying moonlight on their pale wings, the freak bats recede, vanis.h.i.+ng into the night, and as Ahriman opens the car door, coyotes begin to wail again. They are close enough to include him in the chorus if he wished to raise his voice.

By the time he pulls shut the door and starts the engine, six coyotes-eight, ten-appear out of the brush and gather on the graveled lane in front of the car, their eyes fiery with reflections of the headlights. As Ahriman drives forward, loose stones crunching together under the tires, the pack divides and moves ahead along both shoulders of the narrow lane, as though they are the outrunners of a Praetorian guard, escorting the Jaguar. A hundred yards later, when the car turns west, where the high city rises in the distance, the slouching beasts break away from it and continue toward the ranch house, still in the game, as is the doctor.

As is the doctor.

Although Susan Jagger's soft quaverous cries of grief and shame were a tonic, and though the memories of the Pastore family that her tortured voice had resurrected were refres.h.i.+ng, Dr. Ahriman was not a young man now, as he'd been in his New Mexico days, and he needed to get at least a few hours of sound sleep. The day ahead would require vigor and an especially clear mind, because Martine and Dustin Rhodes would become far bigger players in this complex game than they had been thus far. Consequently, he ordered Susan to overcome her emotions and finish getting dressed.

When she was in her panties and T-s.h.i.+rt once more, he said, "Get to your feet."

She rose.

"You are a vision, daughter. I wish I could've gotten you on video tonight instead of next time. Those sweet tears. Why, Daddy? Why? Why, Daddy? Why? That was particularly poignant. I won't ever forget that. You've given me another albino-bats moment." That was particularly poignant. I won't ever forget that. You've given me another albino-bats moment."

Her attention had s.h.i.+fted from him.

He followed her gaze to the ming tree in the bronze pot atop the Biedermeier pedestal.

"Horticulture," he said approvingly, "is a therapeutic pastime for an agoraphobic. Ornamental plants allow you to remain in touch with the natural world beyond these walls. But when I'm talking to you, I expect your attention to remain on me."

She looked at him again. She was no longer weeping. The last of her tears were drying on her face.

An oddness about her, subtle and indefinable, nagged at the doctor. The levelness of her stare. The way her lips were pressed together, mouth pinched at the corners. Here was a tension unrelated to her humiliation and shame.

"Spider mites," he said.

He thought he saw worry crawling through her eyes.

"They're h.e.l.l on a ming tree, spider mites."

Unmistakably, what spun across her face was a web of worry, but surely not about the health of her houseplants.

Sensing trouble, Ahriman made an effort to clear the postcoital haze from his mind and concentrate on Susan. "What are you worried about?"

"What am I worried about?" she asked.

He rephrased the question as a command: "Tell me what you're worried about."

When she hesitated, he repeated the command, and she said, "The video."

35.

Valet's hackles smoothed. He stopped growling. He became his familiar, tail-wagging, affectionate self, insisted upon a cuddle, and then returned to his bed, where he dozed off as though he had never been bothered.

Bound hand and foot at her insistence, even more profoundly subdued by three sleeping pills, Martie was unnervingly still and silent. A few times, Dusty raised his head from the pillow and leaned close to her, worried until he heard her faint respiration.

Although he expected to lie awake all night, and therefore left his nightstand lamp aglow, eventually he slept.

A dream stirred his sleep, blending dread and absurdity into a strange narrative that was disturbing yet nonsensical.

He is lying in bed, atop the covers, fully dressed except for his shoes. Valet is not present. Across the room, Martie sits in the lotus position on the dog's big sheepskin pillow, utterly still, eyes closed, fingers laced in her lap, as though lost in meditation.

He and Martie are alone in the room, and yet he is talking to someone else. He can feel his lips and tongue moving, and although he can hear his own voice reverberating-deep, hollow, fuzzy-in the bones of his skull, he cannot quite make out a single word of what he is saying. The pauses in his speech indicate that he is engaged in a conversation, not a monologue, but he can hear no other voice, not a murmur, not a whisper.

Beyond the window, the night is slashed by lightning, but no thunder protests the wound, and no rain drizzles on the roof. The only sound arises when a large bird flies past the window, so close that one of its wings brushes the gla.s.s, and it squawks. Although the creature appears and vanishes in an instant, Dusty somehow knows that it is a heron, and the cry it makes seems to travel in a circle through the night, fading and then growing louder, again faint but then near once more.

He becomes aware of an intravenous needle in his left arm. A plastic tube loops from the needle to a clear plastic bag, which is plump with glucose and dangling from a pharmacy-style floor lamp that serves as a makes.h.i.+ft IV rack.

Again the storm flashes and the huge heron pa.s.ses the window in the pulsing glare, its shriek traveling into the darkness behind the lightning.

The right sleeve of Dusty's s.h.i.+rt is rolled higher than the left, because his blood pressure is being taken; the pressure cuff of a sphygmomanometer wraps his upper arm. Black rubber tubing extends from the cuff to the inflation bulb, which floats in midair like an object in zero gravity. Strangely, as if in the grip of an unseen hand, the bulb is being rhythmically compressed and released, while the pressure cuff tightens on his arm. If a third person is in the room, this nameless visitor must have mastered the magic of invisibility.

When lightning flares again, it is borne and comes to ground in the bedroom, not in the night beyond the window. Many-legged, nimble, slowed from the speed of light to the speed of a cat, the bolt hisses out of the ceiling as it usually sizzles from a cloud, springs to a metal picture frame, from there to the television, and finally to the floor lamp that serves as an IV rack, spitting sparks as it gnashes its bright teeth against the bra.s.s.

Immediately behind the leaping lightning swoops the big heron, having entered the bedroom through a closed window or a solid wall, its swordlike bill cracking wide as it shrieks. It's huge, at least three feet, head to foot: prehistoric-looking, with its pterodactyl glare. Shadows of wings wash the walls, fluttering feathery forms in the flickering light.

Leading its shadow, the bird darts toward Dusty, and he knows it will stand upon his chest and pluck out his eyes. His arms feel as if they are strapped to the bed, although the right is restrained only by the pressure cuff and the left is weighed down by nothing but the bracing board that prevents him from bending his elbow while the needle is in the vein. Nevertheless, he lies immobile, defenseless, as the bird shrieks toward him.

When lightning arcs from television to floor lamp, the clear-plastic glucose bag glows like the gauzy sac in a pressurized gas lantern, and a hot rain of bra.s.sy sparks-which ought to set the bedclothes afire but does not-showers upon Dusty. The shadow of the descending heron shatters into as many black fragments as there are sparks, and when the clouds of bright and dark mites swarm dazzlingly together, Dusty closes his eyes in terror and confusion.

He is a.s.sured, perhaps by the invisible visitor, that he need not be afraid, but when he opens his eyes, he sees a fearsome thing hanging over him. The bird has been impossibly condensed, crushed-twisted-squeezed, until it now fits inside the bulging glucose bag. In spite of this compression, the heron remains recognizable-though it resembles a bird painted by some half-baked Pica.s.so wanna-be with a taste for the macabre. Worse, it is somehow still alive and shrieking, although its shrill cries are muted by the clear walls of its plastic prison. It tries to squirm inside the bag, tries to break free with sharp beak and talons, cannot, and rolls one bleak black eye, glaring down at Dusty with demonic intensity.

He feels trapped, too, lying here helpless under the pendant bird: he with the weakness of one crucified, it with the dark energy of an ornament fas.h.i.+oned for a satanist's mock Christmas tree. Then the heron dissolves into a b.l.o.o.d.y brown slush, and the clear fluid in the intravenous line begins to cloud as the substance of the bird seeps out of the bag and downward, downward. Watching this filthy murk contaminate the tube inch by inch, Dusty screams, but he makes no sound. Paralyzed, drawing great draughts of air but as silently as one struggling to breathe in a vacuum, he tries to lift his right hand and tear out the IV, tries to cast himself off the bed, cannot, and he rolls his eyes, straining to see the last inch of the tube as the toxin reaches the needle.

A terrible flash of inner heat, as though lightning arcs through his veins and arteries, is followed by a shriek when the bird enters his blood. He feels it surging up his median basilic vein, through biceps and into torso, and almost at once an intolerable fluttering arises within his heart, the busy twitching-pecking-fluffing of something making a nest.

Still in the lotus position on Valet's sheepskin pillow, Martie opens her eyes. They are not blue, as before, but as black as her hair. No whites at all: Each socket is filled with a single, smooth, wet, convex blackness. Avian eyes are generally round, and these are almond-shaped like those of a human being, but they are the eyes of the heron nonetheless.

"Welcome," she says.

Dusty snapped awake, so clearheaded the instant he opened his eyes that he didn't cry out or sit up in bed to orient himself. He lay very still, on his back, staring at the ceiling.

His nightstand lamp was aglow, as he had left it. The floor lamp was beside the reading chair, where it belonged; it had not been pressed into service as an IV stand.

His heart didn't flutter. It pounded. As far as he could tell, his heart was still his private domain, where nothing roosted except his own hopes, anxieties, loves, and prejudices.

Valet snored softly.

Beside Dusty, Martie enjoyed the deep slumber of a good woman-albeit goodness was in this case a.s.sisted by three doses of sleep-inducing antihistamines.

While the dream remained fresh, he walked around it in his mind, considering it from a variety of perspectives. He tried to apply the lesson he had long ago learned from the pencil drawing of a forest primeval that morphed into an image of a Gothic metropolis when it was approached without preconceptions.

Ordinarily, he didn't a.n.a.lyze his dreams.

Freud, however, had been convinced that fishy expressions of the subconscious could be seined from dreams to provide a banquet for a psychoa.n.a.lyst. Dr. Derek Lampton, Dusty's stepfather, fourth of Claudette's four husbands, also cast his lines into that same sea and regularly reeled in strange, squishy hypotheses that he force-fed to his patients without regard for the possibility that they might be poisonous.

Because Freud and Lizard Lampton had faith in dreams, Dusty had never taken them seriously. Now he was loath to admit there might be meaning in this one, and yet he sensed a morsel of truth in it. Finding one sc.r.a.p of clean fact in that heap of trash, however, was going to be a Herculean task.

If his exceptional eidetic and audile memory preserved all the details of dreams as well as it stored away real experiences, then at least he could be sure that if he sorted through the refuse of this nightmare carefully enough, he would eventually find any s.h.i.+ny truth that might await discovery like a piece of heirloom silverware accidentally thrown out with the dinner garbage.

36.

"The video," Susan repeated, in response to Ahriman's inquiry, and once more she looked away from him, toward the ming tree.

Surprised, the doctor smiled. "You're still such a modest girl, considering the things you've done. Relax, dear. I've made only one tape of you-a ninety-minute astonishment, I will admit-and there'll be just one more, next time we meet. n.o.body but me gets to see my little home movies. They will never be broadcast on CNN or NBC, I a.s.sure you. Although the Nielson ratings would be through the roof, don't you think?"

Susan continued to stare at the potted ming tree, but now the doctor understood why she was able to look away from him even though he had commanded her to stand eye to eye. Shame was a powerful force, from which she drew the strength for this one small rebellion. We all commit acts that shame us, and with varying degrees of difficulty, we reach accommodation with ourselves, forming pearls of guilt around each offending bit of moral grit. Guilt, unlike shame, can be nearly as soothing as virtue, because the jagged edges of the thing that it encapsulates can no longer be felt, and the guilt itself becomes the object of our interest. Susan could have made a necklace from all the moments of shame to which Ahriman had subjected her, but because she was aware of the videotape record, she was not able to form her little pearls of guilt and thus smooth the shame away.

The doctor commanded her to look at him, and after a hesitation, she once more s.h.i.+fted her attention from the ming tree to his eyes.

He instructed her to descend the steps of her subconscious, until she returned to the mind chapel, from which he had previously allowed her to ascend a short distance in order to enhance their play session.

When she was once more in that deep redoubt, her eyes jiggled briefly. Her personality had been filtered from her and set aside, as a chef would strain the solids out of beef broth to make bouillon, and now her mind was a pellucid liquid, waiting to be flavored according to Ahriman's recipe.

He said, "You will forget your father was here tonight. Memories of his face where you should have seen mine, memories of his voice when you should have heard mine, are now dust, and less than dust, all blown away. I am your doctor, not your father. Tell me who I am, Susan."

Her whispery voice seemed to echo from a subterranean room: "Dr. Ahriman."

"As always, of course, you will have absolutely no accessible memory of what happened between us, absolutely no accessible memory of my presence here tonight."

In spite of his best efforts, somewhere memory survived, perhaps in an unknowable realm below below the subconscious. Otherwise, she would not suffer shame at all, because no recollection of these depravities or those of other nights would remain. Her lingering shame was, in the doctor's view, proof of a sub-subconscious-a level even beneath the id-where experience left an indelible mark. This deepest of all memory was, Ahriman believed, virtually inaccessible and of no danger to him; he needed only to wipe clean the slates of her conscious and subconscious to be safe. the subconscious. Otherwise, she would not suffer shame at all, because no recollection of these depravities or those of other nights would remain. Her lingering shame was, in the doctor's view, proof of a sub-subconscious-a level even beneath the id-where experience left an indelible mark. This deepest of all memory was, Ahriman believed, virtually inaccessible and of no danger to him; he needed only to wipe clean the slates of her conscious and subconscious to be safe.

Some would have wondered if this sub-subconscious might be the soul. The doctor was not one of them.

"If nevertheless you have any reason to feel that you have been s.e.xually a.s.saulted, any soreness or other clue, you will suspect no one other than your estranged husband, Eric. Tell me now whether or not you fully understand what I've just said."

A spasm of REM accompanied her reply, as if the specified memories were being shaken out of her through her oscillating eyes: "I understand."

"But you are strictly forbidden from confronting Eric with your suspicions."

"Forbidden. I understand."

"Good."

Ahriman yawned. Regardless of how much fun a play session had been, it was ultimately diminished by the need to clean up at the end, to put away the toys and straighten the room. Although he understood why neatness and order were absolute necessities, he begrudged the time spent on this put-away period as much now as he had when he was a boy.

"Please lead me to the kitchen," he requested, yawning around his words.

Still graceful in spite of the crude use to which she had been put, Susan moved through the dark apartment with the fluid suppleness of a pale koi swimming in a midnight pond.

In the kitchen, as thirsty as any player would be after a long and demanding game, Ahriman said, "Tell me what beer you have?"

"Tsingtao."

"Open one for me."

She got a bottle from the refrigerator, fumbled in a drawer in the dark until she found an opener, and popped the cap off the beer.

While in this apartment, the doctor took care to touch as seldom as possible those surfaces on which fingerprints could be left.