False Memory

the thrill of your function. Now I want you to be calm, perfectly calm, detached, observant, obedient.”
    “I understand.”
    He opened the textbook again.
    With the doctor’s patient guidance, dry-eyed this time, Martie studied the crime-scene photograph of the dismembered girl, whose parts had been creatively rearranged. He instructed her to imagine what it would be like to commit this atrocity herself, to glory in the reeking wet reality of what she saw here on the glossy page. To be certain Martie involved all five of her senses in this exercise, Ahriman employed his medical knowledge, his personal experience, and his well-conditioned imagination to assist her with many details of color, texture, and stench.
    Then other pages. Other photographs. Fresh corpses but also bodies in various stages of decomposition.
    Blink.
    Blink.
    Finally he returned the two heavy volumes to the bookshelves.
    He had spent fifteen minutes too long with Martie, but he had taken considerable satisfaction in refining her appreciation for death. Sometimes the doctor thought he might have been a first-rate teacher, costumed in tweed suits, suspenders, bow ties; and he knew he would have enjoyed working with children.
    He instructed Martie to lie on her back, on the couch, and close her eyes. “I’m going to bring Dusty in here now, but you will not hear a word of what either of us says. You will not open your eyes until I tell you to do so. You will go away now into a soundless, lightless place, into a deep sleep, from which you will awake back in the mind chapel only when I kiss your eyes and call you princess.”
    After waiting a minute, the doctor timed the pulse in Martie’s left wrist. Slow, thick, steady. Fifty-two beats per minute.
    Now on to Mr. Rhodes, housepainter, college dropout, closet intellectual, soon to be infamous from sea to shining sea, unwitting instrument of vengeance.

     
     
    The novel was about brainwashing, which Dusty realized within a page or two of encountering Dr. Yen Lo.
    This discovery startled him almost as much as seeing the name from Skeet’s notepad. He didn’t fumble the book this time, kept his place, but muttered, “Son of a bitch.”
    At the kid’s apartment, Dusty had searched without success for evidence of cult membership. No tracts or pamphlets. No religious vestments or icons. Not one caged chicken clucking worriedly as it awaited sacrifice. Now, when Dusty hadn’t even been thinking about Skeet’s troubles, here came the mysterious Chinese physician, popping up from Condon’s novel, revealing himself to be an expert in the science and art of brainwashing.
    Dusty didn’t believe in coincidence. Life was a tapestry with patterns to be discerned if you looked for them. This book didn’t just happen to be the one Martie had been carrying around for months. It had been made available to them because it contained a clue to the truth of this insane situation. He would have given his left testicle— or, with more alacrity, all the money in their checking account—to know who had ensured The Manchurian Candidate would be here, now, when needed. Although Dusty believed in a universe intelligently designed, he had difficulty crediting God with working miraculously through a paperback thriller rather than a burning bush or the more traditional and flashier signs in the sky. Okay, so it wasn’t God, wasn’t coincidence, and therefore must be someone of flesh and bone.
    Dusty heard himself speaking aloud, as though he were imitating an owl, and he silenced himself with the realization that he knew too little to answer his question.
    In Condon’s novel, which was set during and after the Korean War, Dr. Yen Lo had brainwashed some American soldiers, turning one of them into a robotic killer who remained unaware of what had been done to him. Back home, acclaimed a hero, the soldier would lead a normal life—until, activated by a game of simple solitaire and then instructed, he became an obedient assassin.
    But the Korean War had ended in 1953, and this thriller had been published in 1959, long before Dusty had been born. Neither the young soldier nor Dr. Yen Lo was real. There was no apparent reason why a connection should exist between this novel and Dusty, Martie, and Skeet with his haiku rules.
    He could only read further, in search of revelation.
    After he had shot through several more pages, Dusty heard the lever-action handle squeak against its escutcheon on the other side of the door to Ahriman’s office,