False Memory

interested in the sciences since childhood, he didn’t possess the temperament to be a scientist: the patience, the acceptance of repeated failures in a quest for ultimate success, the preference for knowledge over sensation. The respect given to most scientists was a prize the young Ahriman coveted, and the authority and quiet superiority with which they often conducted themselves—high priests in this culture that worshiped change and progress—were attitudes that came naturally to Ahriman. The gray, joyless atmosphere of laboratories had no appeal for him, however, nor did the tedium of serious research.
    When he was thirteen, a child prodigy already in his first year of college, he realized that psychology offered him an ideal career. Those who claimed to understand the secrets of the mind were regarded with respect bordering on reverence, much as priests must have been in prior centuries, when belief in the soul was as widespread as the current belief in the id and the ego. Upon a psychologist's claim of authority, laymen at once accorded it to him.
    Most people regarded psychology as a science. Some called it a soft science, but those making such a distinction grew fewer by the year.
    In the hard sciences—like physics and chemistry—a hypothesis was proposed to guide inquiry into a group of phenomena. Thereafter, if a large enough body of research by many scientists supported the propositions of that hypothesis, it might become a general theory. In time, if a theory proved universally effective in thousands of experiments, it might become a law.
    Some psychologists strove to hold their field to this standard of proof. Ahriman pitied them. They operated under the illusion that their authority and their power were linked to the discovery of timeless truths, when in reality, truth was an annoying constraint on authority and power.
    Psychology, in Ahriman’s view, was an appealing field because you needed only to compile a series of subjective observations, find the proper prism through which to view a set of statistics, and then you could leap over the hypothesis and the theory, declaring the discovery of a law of human behavior.
    Science was tedium, work. To young Ahriman, psychology clearly was play, and people were the toys.
    He always pretended to share his colleagues’ outrage when their work was denigrated as soft science, but in fact he thought of it as liquid science, even gaseous, which was the very quality that he cherished about it. The power of the scientist, who must work with hard facts, was limited by those facts; but within psychology was the power of superstition, which could shape the world more completely than electricity, antibiotics, and hydrogen bombs.
    Having entered college at thirteen, he acquired his doctorate of psychology by his seventeenth birthday. Because a psychiatrist is even more widely admired and highly esteemed than a psychologist, and because the greater authority of the tide would facilitate the games that he wished to play, Ahriman added a medical degree and other necessary credentials to his résumé.
    Considering that medical school requires so much real science, he thought that it would be tedious, but on the contrary, it proved to be great fun. After all, a good medical education involved much blood and viscera; he had numerous opportunities to witness suffering and grievous pain, and wherever suffering and pain flourished, there was no shortage of tears.
    When he was a little boy, he was as filled with wonder at the sight of tears as other children were affected by rainbows, starry skies, and fireflies. Upon achieving puberty, he discovered that the mere sight of tears, more than hard-core pornography, enflamed his libido.
    He himself had never cried.
    Now fully dressed, the doctor stood at the foot of Susan’s bed and studied her tear-stained face. Desolate pools, her eyes. Her spirit floated in them, almost drowned. The objective of his game was to finish the drowning. Not this night. But soon.
    “Tell mc your age,” he said.
    “Twelve,” she replied in the voice of a schoolgirl.
    “You will now come forward in time, Susan. You are thirteen... fourteen... fifteen... sixteen. Tell me your age.”
    “Sixteen.”
    “You are now seventeen... eighteen...
    He brought her all the way forward to the present, to the hour and minute on the bedside clock, and then he instructed her to get dressed.
    Her nightclothes were scattered on the floor. She retrieved them with the slow,