“I told you that we talked to every member of the patrol this summer. You know what they said about you, every one of them? That you were the greatest, warmest, most wonderful single guy they had ever met. They remembered you with love and affection, Raymond. Isn’t that funny?”
“Funny? It’s ludicrous.”
“How do you account for it?”
Raymond shrugged and grimaced. “I saved their lives. I mean, they thought I had saved their lives. I suppose the poor slobs were grateful.”
“I don’t think so. I’ve had to work all this out with our psychiatrists because I don’t have a very objective view, either, but my actual memory is that there was a broad chasm between you and those men before the patrol. They didn’t hate you, they seemed rather to fear your scorn, you know? You had a way of freezing their dislike and keeping them uneasy and off balance. The psychiatrists will tell you that an attitude, a group attitude as well as individual attitudes like that, can’t be changed into warm and eager interest, into such admiration and deep respect merely because of gratitude. No, no, no.”
“Life isn’t a popularity contest,” Raymond said. “I didn’t ask them to like me.”
“I’m going to start to prove right now that they have gotten inside your mind, Raymond, because you once told me, in a joking way, that you had come out of the Army with much more of an active interest in women than when you went in—and because I have to frighten you, I will have to embarrass you, too. We checked. We are experts. Experts’ experts, even. We went back over the seams of your life, looking for lint. You were twenty-two, going on twenty-three years old, when you left the Army, and you had never been laid. More than that. You had never even kissed a girl, had you, Raymond?” Marco leaned across the table, his eyes lambent with affection, and he said softly, “You never even kissed Jocie, did you, Raymond?”
“You had men talk to Jocie? In Argentina?” Raymond wasn’t outraged. Long before, he had set all his dials so that Marco could do no wrong with him, but he was extremely impressed and for the first time. He felt elated to be in connection with anyone who had looked at Jocie, had sat beside her and had spoken to her about anything at all, and to have spoken to her about him, about that wondrous summer together and about—about kissing. He felt as though his eyes had climbed into the upper space above the earth and that he could see himself as he sat in Hungarian Charlie’s and at the same time watch sweet, sweet Jocie as she sat in a bower, under pink roses, knitting something soft and warm, in the Argentine.
“I had to know. And I had to make you understand that going ten thousand miles and back for the answer to one question is very little to do in the face of the pressure and the threat that is implied.”
“But, Ben—Jocie—well, after all, Jocie—”
“That’s why I brought these two strangers. The only reason. Do you think I would talk about such things—things which I know are sacred to you when I also know that nothing else in this whole world is sacred to you—in front of two strangers if I wasn’t desperate to get through to you?” Raymond did not answer; he was thinking about Jocie, the Jocie he had lost and would never find again.
“They are inside your mind. Deep. Now. For eight years. One of their guys with a big sense of humor thought it would be a great gag to throw you a bone for all of the trouble they were going to put you to, and fix it up inside your head so that, all of a sudden, you’d get interested in girls, see? It meant nothing to them. It was only a gratuitous gesture, a quarter tip to the men’s-room attendant, considering all the other things they were going to do inside your head and have already done from inside your head.”
“Stop it! Stop it, goddammit, Ben. I will not listen to this. You nauseate me. Stop saying that people and things and a lot of outside filth are inside my head. Just say it some other way if you have to talk to me. Just say it some other way, and what the hell are you talking about—what they have already done from inside my head?”
“Don’t shout,” Lehner said. “Take it easy.” However, he did not touch Raymond this time.
The giant juke box had found a giant guitar. It was being strummed insanely, alternating between two of the most simply constructed chords while a farmer’s voice bellowed cretinous rhymes above it.
Marco stared at Raymond compassionately and held his gaze for a long moment before he said, “You murdered Mavole and Bobby Lembeck, kid.”
“What? Whaaaat?” Raymond pushed at the table but his back was against the wall, literally as well as figuratively, so that he could not move backward to escape the words. His glaucous eyes in the long, bony face held some of the terror seen in the eyes of a horse falling on ice. He was incredulous but Marco and Amjac and Lehner knew that Marco was getting through because they knew Raymond the way a marine knows his own rifle, because they had been drilled on Raymond, his reactions and inhibitions, for hours of day and hours of night.
“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.