False Memory

respected the demandingly formal structures of haiku, he was enough of a free spirit to make his own rules from time to time.

     
     
    Dusty was reading about Dr. Yen Lo and the team of dedicated Communist mind-control specialists who were screwing with the brains of the hapless American soldiers, when suddenly he exclaimed, “What the hell is this,” referring to the paperback that he was holding in his hands.
    He nearly pitched The Manchurian Candidate across the waiting room, but checked himself. Instead, he dropped it on the little table next to his chair, shaking his right hand as though the book had burnt him.
    He sprang to his feet and stood looking down at the damn thing. He was no less shocked and spooked than he would have been if an evil sorcerer’s curse had transformed the novel into a rattlesnake.
    When he dared to look away from the book, he glanced at the door to Dr. Ahriman’s office. Closed. It looked as though it had been closed since time immemorial. As formidable as a stone monolith.
    The squeak of the lever-action handle, the click of the latch: He had clearly heard both those sounds. Embarrassment, alarm, shame, a sense of danger. Inexplicably, those feelings and more had crackled through him as quick as an electric arc snapping across a tiny gap in a circuit: Don’t be caught reading this! Reflexively, he had tossed the book on the table, and because its shiny cover was slippery, it had sailed right off the granite top. The door had done its pop-sigh vacuum thing, and he had started to shoot to his feet as the book hit the floor with a plop, and then... and then the novel was back in his hand, and he was reading, sitting in his chair, as if the squeak-click-pop-sigh-plop moment of alarm had never happened. Maybe his entire life, from birth to death, was on a videotape up there in kingdom come, where one of the celestial editors had rewound it a few seconds, to the moment immediately before the sounds of the door had alarmed him, erasing all those events from his past but forgetting to erase his memory of them. Apparently, an apprentice editor with a lot to learn.
    Magic. Dusty recalled the fantasy novels in Skeet’s apartment. Wizards, warlocks, necromancers, sorcerers, spellcasters. This was the kind of experience that made you believe in magic—or question your sanity.
    He reached for the book on the table, where he had dropped it— for the second time?—and then he hesitated. He poked the book with one finger, but it didn’t hiss or open an eye and wink at him.
    He picked it up, turned it wonderingly in his hands, and then riffled the pages across his thumb.
    That sound reminded him of a deck of cards being snap-shuffled, which reminded him, in turn, that the brainwashed American soldier in the novel, the one programmed to be an assassin, was activated when handed a pack of cards and asked Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire? To be effective, the question had to be asked in exactly those words. The guy then played solitaire until he turned up the queen of diamonds, whereupon his subconscious mind became accessible to his controller, making him ready to receive his instructions.
    Gazing thoughtfully at the paperback, Dusty let the edges of the pages fan across his thumb again.
    He sat down, still thoughtful. Still thumbing the pages.
    What he had here wasn’t magic. What he had here was another bit of missing time, only a few seconds, shorter even than his moment on the phone in the kitchen, the previous day.
    Shorter?
    Was it really?
    He consulted his wristwatch. Maybe not shorter. He couldn’t be sure, because he hadn’t checked the time since reading the first words of the novel. Maybe he had been zoned out for a few seconds or maybe for ten minutes, even longer.
    Missing time.
    What sense did this make?
    None.
    Energized by gut instinct, mind spinning along a trail of logic twistier than the human intestinal tract, he couldn’t concentrate on Condon’s novel right now. He crossed the room to the coat rack and tucked the book in his own jacket rather than in Martie’s.
    From another jacket pocket, he withdrew his phone.
    Instead of activating the brainwashed, programmed person with a precisely worded question—Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?—why not activate him with a name? Dr. Yen Lo.
    Instead of the deep subconscious becoming accessible to the controller upon the appearance of the queen of diamonds... why not access it by the