False Memory (17 page)

27

After watching the evening news, Susan Jagger went through the apartment, synchronizing all the clocks with her digital wristwatch. She performed this task every Tuesday evening at the same hour.

In the kitchen, clocks were built into the oven and microwave, and another hung on the wall. A stylish, battery-operated Art Deco clock stood on the fireplace mantel in the living room, and on the nightstand beside her bed was a clock radio.

On average, none of these timepieces lost or gained more than a minute during the week, but Susan took pleasure in keeping them running tick for tick.

Through sixteen months of near isolation and chronic anxiety, she had relied on ritual to save her sanity.

For every household chore, she established elaborate procedures to which she adhered as rigorously as an engineer would follow the operational manual in a nuclear power plant where imprecision might mean meltdown. Waxing floors or polishing furniture became a lengthy enterprise that filled otherwise empty hours. Performing any task to high standards, while conforming to codified housekeeping rules, gave her a sense of control that was comforting even though she recognized that it was fundamentally an illusion.

After the clocks were synchronized, Susan went into the kitchen to prepare dinner. A tomato-and-endive salad. Chicken marsala.

Cooking was her favorite work of the day. She followed recipes with scientific exactitude, measuring and combining ingredients as carefully as a bombmaker handling explosive, unstable chemicals. Culinary rituals and religious rituals, like no others, could calm the heart and quiet the mind, perhaps because the former fed the body and the latter fed the soul.

This evening, however, she wasn’t able to concentrate on dicing, grating, measuring, stirring. Her attention repeatedly strayed to the silent telephone. She was eager to hear from Martie, now that she’d at last found the courage to mention the mysterious night visitor.

Before recent events, she’d thought she could reveal anything to Martie with complete comfort, without feeling self-conscious. For six months, however, she’d been unable to speak of the sexual assaults committed against her while she slept.

Shame silenced her, but shame inhibited her less than did the concern that she’d be thought delusional. She herself found it hard to believe that she could have been stripped out of her sleepwear, raped, and redressed on numerous occasions without being awakened.

Eric was no sorcerer with the ability to steal in and out of the apartment—and in and out of Susan herself—utterly undetected.

Although Eric might be as weak and morally confused as Martie said, Susan was reluctant to consider that he might hate her enough to do these things to her, and hatred was undeniably at the heart of this abuse. They had loved each other, and their separation had been marked by regret, not by anger.

If he wanted her, even without the obligation to stand by her in time of need, she might welcome him. There was no reason, then, why he should scheme so elaborately to take her against her will.

Yet…if not Eric, who?

Having shared this house with her and having used this top floor as his home office, Eric might know a way to circumvent the doors and windows—as unlikely as that seemed. No one else was sufficiently familiar with the place to come and go undetected.

Her hand trembled, and salt spilled from the measuring spoon.

Turning from the dinner preparations, she blotted her suddenly damp palms on a dish towel.

At the apartment door, she checked the dead bolts. Both were engaged. The security chain was in place.

She leaned with her back against the door.

I am not delusional.

On the phone, Martie had seemed to believe her.

Convincing others, however, might not be easy.

Evidence supporting her contention of rape was inconclusive. Sometimes she experienced vaginal tenderness, but not always. Bruises the size of a man’s fingertips occasionally appeared on her thighs and breasts, but she couldn’t prove they were the work of a rapist or that she hadn’t sustained them during ordinary physical activity.

Immediately on waking, she always knew when the phantom intruder had visited her during the night, even if she wasn’t sore or bruised, even before she grew aware of the deposit he left in her, because she felt violated, unclean.

Feelings, however, were not proof.

The semen was the only evidence that she had been with a man, but it did not absolutely confirm rape.

Besides, presenting her stained panties to the authorities—or, worse yet, submitting to a vaginal swab in a hospital emergency room—would involve more embarrassment than she’d be able to endure in her current condition.

Indeed, her condition, the agoraphobia, was the primary reason she had been reluctant to confide in Martie, let alone in the police or other strangers. Although enlightened people knew that an extreme phobia wasn’t a form of madness, they could not help but regard it as
odd.
And when she claimed that she was being sexually violated in her sleep, by a ghostly assailant whom she’d never seen, by a man who could enter through bolted doors…Well, even her lifelong best friend might wonder if the agoraphobia, while not itself a form of madness, was a precursor to genuine mental illness.

Now, after checking the dead bolts yet again, Susan impatiently reached for the telephone. She couldn’t wait a minute longer for Martie’s considered response. She needed to be reassured that her best friend, if no one else, believed in the phantom rapist.

Susan keyed the first four digits of Martie’s number—but hung up. Patience. If she appeared fragile or too needy, she might seem less believable.

Returning to the marsala sauce, she realized she was too nervous to be lulled by culinary rituals. She wasn’t hungry, either.

She opened a bottle of Merlot, poured a glassful, and sat at the kitchen table. Lately, she was drinking more than usual.

After sipping the Merlot, she held the glass up to the light. The dark ruby liquid was clear, apparently uncontaminated.

For a while, she had been convinced that someone was drugging her. That possibility was still troubling but not as likely as it had once seemed.

Rohypnol—which the news media had dubbed the date-rape drug—might explain how she was able to remain unconscious, or at least oblivious, even during rough intercourse. Mix Rohypnol into a woman’s drink, and she appears to be in an advanced stage of inebriation: disoriented, pliant—defenseless. The drugged state ultimately gives way to genuine sleep, and upon waking, she has little or no memory of what took place during the night.

In the morning, however, after her mysterious visitor ravaged her, Susan never experienced any symptoms of Rohypnol hangover. No queasy stomach, no dry mouth, no blurring of vision, no throbbing headache, no lingering disorientation. Routinely, she woke clear-headed, even refreshed, though feeling violated.

Nevertheless, she had repeatedly changed grocers. Sometimes Susan relied on Martie to do her shopping, but for the most part she ordered groceries and other supplies from smaller family-owned markets that offered home delivery. Few provided that extra service these days, even for a charge. Although Susan had tried all of them, paranoically certain that someone was lacing her food with drugs, changing vendors didn’t bring an end to the postmidnight assaults.

In desperation, she had sought answers in the supernatural. The mobile library brought her lurid books about ghosts, vampires, demons, exorcism, black magic, and abductions by extraterrestrials.

The delivering librarian, to his credit, never once commented upon—or even raised an eyebrow at—Susan’s insatiable appetite for this peculiar subject matter. Anyway, it was no doubt healthier than an interest in contemporary politics or celebrity gossip.

Susan had been particularly fascinated by the legend of the incubus. This evil spirit visited women in their sleep and had sex with them while they dreamed.

Fascination had never become conviction. She hadn’t descended so far into superstition that she had slept with copies of the Bible at all four corners of her bed or while wearing a necklace of garlic.

Ultimately, she ceased researching the supernatural, because as she delved into those irrational realms, her agoraphobia intensified. By sitting down to a banquet of unreason, she seemed to be feeding the sick part of her psyche in which her inexplicable fear thrived.

Her glass of Merlot was half empty. She refilled it.

Carrying the wine with her, Susan set out on a circuit of the apartment, to ascertain that all possible entrances were secured.

Both windows in the dining room faced the residence next door, which crowded close to Susan’s house. They were locked.

In the living room, she switched off the lamps. She sat in an armchair, sipping Merlot, while her eyes adjusted to the darkness.

Although her phobia had progressed until she had difficulty looking at the daylight world even through windows, she could still tolerate the night view when the sky was overcast, when no deep sea of stars awaited her contemplation. In weather like this, she never failed to test herself, for she worried that if she didn’t exercise her weak muscle of courage, it would atrophy altogether.

When her night vision improved and the Merlot lubricated the little engine of fortitude in her heart, she went to the middle pane of the three big ocean-facing windows. After a brief hesitation and a deep breath, she raised the pleated shade.

Immediately in front of the house, the paved promenade lay under the false frost of widely separated streetlamps. Though the hour was not yet late, the promenade was nearly deserted in the January chill. A young couple skated by on Rollerblades. A cat scurried from one drift of shadows to another.

Thin tendrils of mist wound between the few palm trees and the streetlamps. In the still air, the fronds hung motionless, so the creeping mist seemed to be alive, advancing with silent menace.

Susan couldn’t see much of the night-cloaked beach. She could not see the Pacific at all: A bank of dense fog had advanced as far as the shore, where it could be glimpsed only intermittently—high, gray, like a towering tsunami flash-frozen an instant before it would have smashed across the coast. The lazy mist writhed off the face of the fog bank, as cold steam rises off a block of dry ice.

With the stars lost above the low clouds, with darkness and fog partitioning the world into small spaces, Susan should have been able to stand at the window for hours, insulated from her fear, but her heart began to race. Agoraphobia was not the cause of her sudden apprehension; rather, she was overcome by a sense of being watched.

Since the night assaults had begun, she was increasingly plagued by this new anxiety. Scopophobia: fear of being watched.

Surely, however, this wasn’t just another phobia, not just an unreasonable fear, but an entirely rational one. If her phantom rapist was real, he must at times keep her home under surveillance, to be sure that he’d find her alone when he paid a visit.

Nevertheless, she was concerned about acquiring new layers of fear atop her agoraphobia, until eventually she would be bound up like an Egyptian mummy, wrapped by smothering shrouds of anxiety, paralyzed and effectively embalmed alive.

The promenade was deserted. The palm boles weren’t wide enough to conceal anyone.

He’s out there.

For three nights in a row, Susan hadn’t been assaulted. This all too human incubus was due. He exhibited a pattern of need, more regular than—but as reliable as—the pull of the moon on the blood tides of a werewolf.

Often she had tried to stay awake on the nights she expected him. When she succeeded, exhausted and grainy-eyed by dawn, he never showed. Usually, if her willpower failed her and she dozed off, he paid a visit. Once, she fell asleep fully dressed, in an armchair, and she woke fully dressed, but in bed, with the faint scent of his sweat clinging to her and with his hateful, sticky issue clotted in her panties. He seemed to know, by some sixth sense, when she was sleeping and most vulnerable.

He’s out there.

On the generally flat beach, a few low dunes rose at the outer limit of visibility, curving smoothly away into darkness and mist. An observer might be watching from behind one of them, although he would have to be lying prone in the sand to remain hidden.

She felt his gaze upon her. Or thought she felt it.

Susan quickly lowered the pleated shade, covering the window.

Furious with herself for being so shamefully timid, shaking more with anger and frustration than with fear, sick of being a helpless victim, after having been anything
but
a victim for most of her life, she wished fervently that she could overcome her agoraphobia and go outside, storm across the beach, kick through the sand to the crest of each dune, and either confront her tormentor or prove to herself that he was not out there. But she didn’t have the courage to stalk the stalker, wasn’t able to do anything but hide and wait.

She couldn’t even hope for deliverance, because her hope, which had long sustained her, had recently shrunk until, if given physical substance, it would not be visible through either a magnifying glass or the most powerful microscope.

Magnifying glass.

As she dropped the cord of the window shade, Susan picked up a new idea, turned it around in her mind, and liked the shape of it. Housebound by agoraphobia, she couldn’t stalk her stalker, but maybe she could watch him while he watched her.

In the bedroom closet, above the hanging clothes, on the top shelf, was a vinyl carrying case containing a pair of high-power binoculars. In better days, when she had not been unnerved by the very sight of the sunlit world in all its vastness, she had enjoyed watching sailboat regattas staged along the coast and larger ships bound for South America or San Francisco.

With a two-step folding stool borrowed from the kitchen, she hurried to the bedroom. The binoculars were where she expected to find them.

Stored on the same shelf, among other stuff, was an item that she had forgotten. A video camera.