False Memory

there was beauty in her mind, too—in her personality and in her intellect.
    As a toy, she also had a twofold function, and the first was sexual. Tonight and for a few more nights, Ahriman would use her savagely and at length.
    Her second function was to suffer and die well. As a plaything, she had already given him considerable delight with her courageous if hopeless battle to overcome agoraphobia, her anguish and despair as rich as marzipan. Her brave determination to keep her sense of humor and to win back her life was pathetic and therefore delectable. Soon he would enhance and complicate her phobia, sending her into a swift and irreversible decline, and then he would enjoy the final— and sharpest—thrill that she was capable of providing.
    Now she sat tearful and timid, conflicted by the prospect of imagined incest, repulsed and yet full of a sick sweet yearning, as programmed. Trembling.
    From time to time, her eyes jiggled, the telltale REM that marked the deepest state of personality submersion. It distracted the doctor and compromised her beauty.
    Susan already knew the roles they were playing tonight, knew what was expected of her in this erotic scenario, so Ahriman brought her closer to the surface, though nowhere near to full consciousness. Just far enough to put an end to the spasms of rapid eye movement.
    “Susan, I want you to move out of the chapel now,” he said, referring to that imaginary place in her deepest subconscious where he had taken her for instruction. “Come out and move up the stairs, but not too far, one flight, where a little more light filters down. There, right there.”
    Her eyes were like clear ponds made murky by the reflections of gray clouds on their surfaces, suddenly touched by a few faint beams of sunshine, and now revealing greater depths.
    “What you’re wearing still appeals to me,” he said. “White cotton. The simplicity.” Several visits ago, he had instructed her to dress for bed in this fashion until he suggested something different; the look excited him. “The innocence. Purity. Like a child, yet so incredibly ripe.”
    The roses in her cheeks blossomed brighter, and she lowered her eyes demurely. Tears of shame, like beads of dew, quivered on the petals of the blush.
    She actually saw her father when she dared to look at the doctor. Such was the power of suggestion when Ahriman spoke to her one-on-one in the deep sanctity of that mind chapel.
    When they were finished playing tonight, he would instruct her to forget all that had happened from the moment he phoned until he left her apartment. She would recall neither his visit nor this fantasy of incest.
    If he chose to do so, however, Ahriman could concoct for Susan a detailed history of sexual abuse at the hands of her father. Many hours would be required to weave that lurid narrative through the tapestry of her real memories, but thereafter he could instruct her to believe in her lifelong victimization and gradually to “recover” those repressed traumas during her therapy sessions.
    If her belief drove her to report her father to the police, and if they asked her to submit to a lie-detector test, she would respond to each question with unwavering conviction and precisely the correct shadings of emotion. Her respiration, blood pressure, pulse, and her galvanic skin response would convince any polygraph examiner that she was telling the truth, because she would be convinced that her vile accusations were indeed factual in every detail.
    Ahriman had no intention of toying with her in that fashion. He had enjoyed that game with other subjects; but it bored him now.
    “Look at me, Susan.”
    She raised her head. Her eyes met his, and the doctor recalled a bit of verse by e. e. cummings: In your eyes there lives / a green egyptian noise.
    “Next time,” he said, “I’ll bring my camcorder, and we’ll make another videotape. Do you remember the first one I shot of you?”
    Susan shook her head.
    “That’s because I’ve forbidden you to remember. You so debased yourself that any memory of it might have left you suicidal. I wasn’t ready for you to be suicidal yet.”
    Her gaze slid away from him. She stared at the miniature ming tree in the pot atop the Biedermeier pedestal.
    He said, “One more tape to remember you by. Next time. I’ve been giving my imagination a workout. You’ll be a very dirty girl next time, Susie. It’ll make the first tape look like Disney.”
    Keeping a video record of his most outrageous puppetry was