Dean Koontz - False Memory

“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 down shift in his mood, now that the comforting ambiance 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

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 for him to get a clear look at it. Indeed, every time he went into the shadows after it, the thought slipped away altogether.

He remembered the drawing of the forest that became a city when his preconceived perception of it changed. Here was another situation where he couldn’t see the city for the trees.

He recalled, as well, the dream of the lightning and the heron. The inflation bulb of the sphygmomanometer had floated in midair, being compressed and released by an invisible hand. In that dream with him and Martie, there had been a third presence as transparent as a ghost.

That presence was their tormentor, whether an extraterrestrial or an agent of Big Brother, or someone else. Dusty suspected that if he were indeed operating according to some hypnotically implanted program, then his programmers had hobbled him with the suggestion that if he ever became suspicious, his suspicion would not fall on them but on a host of other suspects both probable and improbable, such as aliens and government agents. His enemy might cross his path at any moment but be as effectively invisible in real life as he was in the nightmare of the shrieking heron.

As Dusty turned right onto Pacific Coast Highway, Martie opened The Manchurian Candidate and scanned the first sentence in it, which contained the name that had triggered her mini-blackout. Dusty saw a chill shiver through her when she read it, but she didn’t switch into that detached, anticipatory state.

Then she spoke it aloud, “Raymond Shaw,” with no more serious effect than another brief shiver.

“May be it doesn’t work on you properly when you read it or say it yourself, “he suggested, “only when someone says it to you.”

“Or maybe just by knowing the name, I’ve taken away its power over me.”

“Raymond Shaw,” he said.

“I’m listening.”

When Martie returned to full consciousness after about ten seconds, Dusty said, “Welcome back. And so much for that theory.”

Scowling at the book, she said, “We should take it home and burn it.”

“No point doing that. There are clues in it. Secrets. Whoever put the book into your hands — and I tend to think you didn’t just go out and buy it — whoever they are, they must be working the other side of the street from the people who programmed us. They want us to wise up to what’s happening to us. And the book is a key. They gave you a key to unlock all this.”

“Yeah? Why didn’t they just walk up to me and say, ‘Hey, lady, some people we know are screwing with your brain, planting auto-phobia in your head and lots more stuff you don’t even know about yet, for reasons you couldn’t even imagine, and we just don’t like it much.’

“Well, let’s say it is some secret government agency, and inside the agency there’s this small faction that’s morally opposed to the project —”

“Opposed to Operation Brainwash Dusty, Skeet, and Martie.”

“Yeah. But they can’t come to us publicly.”

“Why?” she persisted.

“Because they’d be killed. Or maybe it’s just that they’re afraid of being fired and losing their pensions.”

“Morally opposed but not to the extent of losing their pensions. That part sounds creepily real. But the rest of it… So they slip me this book. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Then for some reason they seem to program me not to read it.”