False Memory

beautiful, which was why the doctor had gotten such a kick out of implanting the suggestion that her autophobia would really begin to get a grip on her when she had a sudden vision of sticking a key into one of those beloved eyes.
    “On this subject,” Ahriman said, “no more curt answers. Let’s have a genuine discussion of your wife’s succulence.”
    Dusty’s gaze was fixed not on Ahriman, but on a point in the air midway between them, as he said with no inflection whatsoever, as flatly as a machine might speak, “Succulent, I guess, meaning juicy.”
    “Exactly,” the doctor confirmed.
    “Grapes are juicy. Strawberries. Oranges. Good pork chops are succulent,” said Dusty. “But the word isn’t... accurately descriptive of a person.”
    Smiling with delight, Ahriman said, “Oh, really—not accurately descriptive? Be careful, housepainter. Your genes are showing. What if! were a cannibal?”
    Unable, in this state, to answer a question with anything but a request for further information, Dusty asked, “Are you a cannibal?”
    “If I were a cannibal, I might be accurately descriptive when calling your tasty wife succulent. Enlighten me with your opinion of that, Mr. Dustin Penn Rhodes.”
    Dusty’s emotionless tone of voice remained unchanged, but now it seemed drily pedantic, much to the doctor’s amusement. “From a cannibalistic point of view, the word works.”
    “I’m afraid that under all your blue-collar earthiness lurks a droning professor.”
    Dusty said nothing, but his eyes jiggled with REM.
    “Well, though I’m no cannibal,” said Ahriman, “I think your wife is succulent. From now on, in fact, I’ll have a new pet name for her. She’ll be my little pork chop.”
    The doctor concluded the session with the usual instructions not to retain any conscious or any accessible subconscious memory of what had transpired between them. Then: “You will return to the outgoing waiting room, Dusty. Pick up the book that you were reading and sit where you were sitting before. Find the point in the text where you were interrupted. Then, in your mind, you’ll leave the chapel where you are now. As you close the chapel door, all recollection of what happened from the moment I stepped out of my office, just after you heard the click of the latch, until you wake from your current state, will have been erased. Then, counting slowly to ten, you’ll ascend the stairs from the chapel. When you reach ten, you will regain full consciousness—and continue reading.”
    “I understand.”
    “Have a good afternoon, Dusty.”
    “Thank you.”
    “You’re welcome.”
    Dusty rose from his armchair and crossed the office, not once glancing at his wife upon the couch.
    When the mister was gone, the doctor went to the missus and stood studying her. Succulent, indeed.
    He dropped to one knee beside the couch, kissed each of her closed eyes, and said, “My pork chop.”
    This, of course, had no effect, but it gave the doctor a laugh.
    Another kiss to each eye. “Princess.”
    She woke but was still in the mind chapel, not yet permitted full consciousness.
    At Ahriman’s instruction, she returned to the armchair in which she had been sitting earlier.
    Settling into his chair, he said, “Martie, through the rest of the afternoon and early evening, you will feel somewhat more at peace than you have been during the past twenty-four hours. Your auto-phobia hasn’t disappeared, but it has relented a bit. For a while, you’ll be troubled only by a low-grade uneasiness, a sense of fragility, and brief spells of sharper fear at the rate of about one an hour, each only a minute or two in duration. But later, at about... oh, at about nine o’clock, you will experience your worst panic attack yet. It’ll begin in the usual way, escalate as before—but suddenly through your mind will pass the dead and tortured people we studied together, all the stabbed and shot and mutilated bodies, the decomposing cadavers, and you’ll become convinced, against all reason, that you personally are responsible for what happened to them, that your hands committed all this torture and murder. Your hands. Your hands. Tell me if you understand what I have said.”
    “My hands.”
    “I leave the details of your big moment to you. You’ve certainly got the raw materials for it.”
    “I understand.”
    Sizzling passion eyes. Simmer in broth of eros. My juicy pork chop.
    Haiku with culinary metaphor. This was nothing the masters of Japanese verse were likely to endorse, but although the doctor