False Memory

the street seemed likely to harbor surveillance teams assigned to track him.

    52
    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.
    “Maybe 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