False Memory

been snoring, while Rock Hudson romanced Doris Day in an old movie on television.
    Where does fiction end and reality begin? That is the essence of the game. Hudson romancing Day; Earl in a fit of drunken lust, raping the helpless starlet and committing a brutal double homicide— we believe what is easy to believe, whether fiction or fact.
    The young doctor shook some of Viveca’s blood on the pants and shirt of the sleeping handyman. He used the last of it to soak one pair of the thong panties. He carefully wrapped the broken-off fingernail in the blood-soaked underwear, then put all six pair of panties in the bottom drawer of Earl’s bedroom dresser.
    When Ahriman left the apartment, Earl was still sleeping deeply. The sirens would eventually wake him.
    In the nearby gardening shed, where the lawn mowers were stored, the doctor found a five-gallon can of gasoline. He carried it into the main house and upstairs to his father’s bedroom.
    After bagging his own blood-spotted garments, quickly washing up, and changing into fresh clothes, he soaked the bodies in the gasoline, dropped the empty can on the bed, and lit the pyre.
    The doctor had been staying the week at his father’s vacation house in Palm Springs and had driven back to Bel Air this afternoon only to tend to these urgent family matters. With his work done, he returned to the desert.
    In spite of the many lovely and valuable antiques that might burn if the fire department didn’t respond quickly enough, Ahriman took with him oniy the bag full of his bloody clothes, the book of haiku, and his dad’s eyes in a jar filled with a temporary fixative solution. Little more than an hour and a half later, in Palm Springs, he burned the incriminating clothes in the fireplace along with a few aromatic cedar splits and later mixed the ashes into the mulch in the little rose garden beyond the swimming pool. As risky as it was to keep the eyes and the slim volume of poetry, he was too sentimental to dispose of them.
    He stayed up all night to watch a dusk-to-dawn marathon of old Bela Lugosi movies, ate an entire quart of Rocky-Road ice cream and a big bag of potato chips, swilled down all the root beer and cream soda he wanted, and caught a desert beetle in a big glass jar and tortured it with a match, His personal philosophy had been enriched immensely by Okyo’s three lines of haiku, and he had taken the poet’s teaching to heart: Life is short, we all die, so you better grab all the fun you can get.

     
     
    Dinner was served with a second round of beers. Having had no breakfast and only a small vanilla milk shake for lunch, Martie was famished. Nevertheless, she felt as if having an appetite, so soon after finding Susan dead, was a betrayal of her friend. Life went on, and even as you grieved, you had a capacity for pleasure, too, as wrong as that might seem. Pleasure was possible in the midst of an abiding fear, as well, for she relished every bite of her jumbo prawns even as she listened to her husband reason his way toward an understanding of the doom hanging over them.
    Fingers sprang from Dusty’s fist once again: “Six—if Susan could be programmed to submit to repeated sexual abuse and have memories of those events scrubbed from her mind, if she could be instructed to submit to rape, then what couldn’t she be made to do? Seven—she began to suspect what was happening, even though she had no proof, and maybe just that little suspicion was enough to alarm her controllers. Eight—she shared her suspicions with you, and they knew it, and they worried that she might share them with someone they didn’t control, so that meant she had to be terminated.”
    “How would they know?”
    “Maybe her phone was tapped. Maybe a lot of things. But if they decided to terminate her and instructed her to commit suicide, and she obeyed because she was programmed, then that’s not really suicide. Not morally, maybe not even legally. That’s murder.”
    “But what can we do about it?”
    Eating steak, he considered her question for a while. Then: “Hell if I know—yet. Because we can’t prove anything.”
    “If they could just call her up and make her commit suicide, behind her locked doors... what do we do the next time our telephone rings?” Martie wondered.
    They locked eyes, chewing the question, food forgotten. Finally he said, “We don’t answer it.”
    “That’s not a practical long-term solution.”
    “Frankly, Martie, if we don’t figure this out real fast, I don’t think