“You killed them. Not your fault. They just used your body the way they would use any other machine. You strangled Mavole and you shot Bobby.”
“In the dream?”
“Yes.”
Raymond was unutterably relieved. He had been greatly startled but at last things had been returned to reality. These men with Marco were captives of their belief in that unfortunate man’s delusion which had almost cost him his sanity late the year before. Everything fell into place for Raymond as he understood the motivation of all of this fantasy. Ben was his friend and Raymond would not let him down. He would go right along as he was supposed to, becoming agitated now and then if necessary, because Ben looked as though he had regained his health and his ability to sleep and Raymond would have fought off an army to preserve that.
“The dream happened again and again in my sleep because it had happened so indelibly in my life. I have to frighten you, Raymond. If you can live in continuous fear perhaps we can force you to see what we aren’t able to discover. Whenever it happens—this thing that has been set to happen—we have to find some way to reach you, to give you new reflexes so that you will do whatever we will tell you to do—even kill yourself if that has to be—the instant that you know what it is they have built you to do. They made you into a killer. They are inside your mind now, Raymond, and you are helpless. You are a host body and they are feeding on you, but because of the way we live we can’t execute you or lock you up to stop you.”
Raymond did not need to simulate alarm. Every time Marco told him of the invasion of his person by those people it made him wince, and to think of himself as a host body on which they were feeding almost made him cry out or stand up and run out of the saloon. His voice became different. It was not the flat, undeigning drawl. It was a voice he might have borrowed from an Errol Flynn movie in which the actor faced immolation with hopeless resigned gallantry. It was a new voice for him, one he created specifically to help his friend through the maze of his fantasy, and it was most convincing. “What do you want?” the hoarsened new voice said.
Marco’s voice attacked. It moved like a starving rodent which gnaws at flaws behind the doors, mad to get through to an unknown trove of crazing scent on the other side.
“Will you submit voluntarily to a brainwashing?” that voice asked.
“Yes,” Raymond answered.
The giant juke box spat the sounds out as though trying to break the rows upon rows of shining bottles behind the bar.
Friday morning, just before noon, a psychiatric and biochemical task force began to work Raymond over on the fourth floor of the large house in the Turtle Bay district. The total effort exhausted and frustrated both the scientists and the policemen. The effect of the narcotics, techniques, and suggestions, which resulted in deep hypnosis for Raymond, achieved a result that approximated the impact an entire twenty-five-cent jar of F. W. Woolworth vanishing cream might have on vanishing an aircraft carrier of the Forrestal class when rubbed into the armor plate. They were unable to dredge up one mote of information. Under the deep hypnosis, loaded to the eyes with a cocktail of truth serums, Raymond demonstrated that he could not remember his name, his color, his sex, his age, or his existence. Before he had been put under he had been willing to divulge anything within his power. In catalepsy, his mind seemed to have been sealed off as an atomic reactor is separated from the rest of a submarine. It all served to confirm what they already knew. Raymond had been brainwashed by a master of exalted skill. The valiant, long-cherished hope that they would be able to counterplant suggestion within Raymond’s already dominated unconscious mind never had a chance of being put into work.
When it was over, the medical staff wanted to tell Raymond that the explorations had been entirely successful, on the grounds that he was able to accept suggestion with his conscious mind, but Marco overruled that. He said he would tell Raymond that he was beyond their reach, that he was going to be directed entirely by the enemy, that they could not help him but that they had to stop him and that they would stop him. Marco wanted Raymond to stay scared, as much as he disbelieved that Raymond could sustain any feeling.
After that first afternoon when Marco had poured it on him in Hungarian Charlie’s, Raymond had dug in to what he was determined to maintain as a fixed position. He was a lucid man. He knew he was in excellent health, mental and physical. He knew Marco’s health was a long way from what it had once been. He knew it was Marco who had been having the nightmares and breakdowns and that for unknown reasons, probably relative to the phrase “the Army takes care of its own,” his commanders had decided to humor Marco. Well, Raymond decided, I will outhumor and outbless them. Marco is closer to me than any one or all of those uniformed clots. Raymond accordingly formed his policy. It deployed his imagination like the feelers of an insect, advancing it ahead of him wherever his mind, which moved on thousands of tiny feelers of prejudice, took him in its circuitous detour that would allow him to avoid exposing himself to himself as a murderer, a sexual neutral, and a man despised and scorned by his comrades. He put his back into the performance. He used all the tricks of the counterfeiter’s art he could summon to project all of the surface emotions which their little playlets seemed to require of him. He bent, or seemed to bend, into their intentions to halt what he saw as a comic-book plot in which a sinister foreign power, out to destroy America, would achieve its ends by using him as an instrument. They wanted him to be scared. He would seem, when under observation, to be scared, and he worked hard for an effect of seeming as distressed and as aware as game running ahead of guns.
Fortunately, he remembered that the vegetable substitute for benzedrine, which he had taken at one time to lose weight, always gave him hand tremors, so that helped. He knew that a double dose or more of it could produce an authentic crying jag in him, with uncontrollable tears and generally distraught conduct, so that helped.
Marco’s surveillance teams duly reported his purchases of this drug and the unit’s psychological specialists confirmed the side-effects they would produce, so Marco was not deceived by Raymond’s somewhat piteous conduct from time to time. He was very proud of Raymond, however, because he could see that Raymond was going to intolerable trouble, for Raymond, to meet Marco’s urgent requirements, but the discouraging and depressing fact remained that all of them were armless in their attempt to stave off shapeless disaster.
However, there was one relentless, inexorable strength on Marco’s side: in combination or singly, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Army Intelligence, and the Central Intelligence Agency represented maximum police efficiency. Such efficiency suspends the law of averages and flattens defeat with patience.
Eighteen
EUGÉNIE ROSE WAS IN BOSTON WITH JUSTIN’S new musical show, which, secretly, had been based upon a map of the heavens issued by the National Geographic Society two years before. Marco planned to join her the next day. She and Marco talked on the telephone at odd hours. They were still dedicated to an early marriage and seemed more than ever convinced that, in a world apparently so populated, no one else existed.
It was Christmas Eve. Raymond had invited Marco for dinner, telephoning him from the office to say that he had given Chunjin the night off and that Chunjin had resisted. Marco said that was because Chunjin was undoubtedly a Buddhist and not a celebrant at Christmas. Raymond said he was sure Chunjin was not a Buddhist because he left books by Mary Baker Eddy around the pantry and kitchen and was forever smiling. Marco said he felt a sense of disappointment at that news because he had figured if he sent Chunjin a Christmas card, Chunjin would then be obligated to send him a card on Buddha’s birthday, or lose face.