“Absolutely so. But that, again, is not unusual. The content of her speech, however — that was quite another matter.”
“In what way?”
“Well, her conversation focused almost exclusively on the plot, the conspiracy. She had not attempted suicide—”
“The police officer who took her to Good Samaritan saw neither a razor blade nor bloodstains in her room.”
“Dr. Helsinger saw a wound on her left wrist.”
“Presumably a police officer, trained to observe such things—”
“With all due respect for the police in Calusa, Dr. Helsinger is eminently more qualified to judge a suicide attempt. The point, Mr. Hope—”
“The point would seem to be—”
“The point is that she was unquestionably incompetent when we received her here. Hostile, suspicious, tense — all symptoms of a paranoid condition. She—”
“I imagine I would have been all those things, too, if I knew I was sane and being committed to a—”
“Mr. Hope, she was not sane. She is not sane. Please.”
“I’m trying to learn why you believe so.”
“And I’ve been trying to tell you. When we admitted her, her entire focus was on her belief that she was being wrongly persecuted. This is still her belief, nothing has changed in that respect. She said she’d been out searching for her father’s phantom lover — was that against the law? The police were after her for something that wasn’t a crime. Voices had commanded her to find ‘Daddy’s bimbo,’ as she called her, confront her, get back the money that was rightfully hers — Sarah’s, that is — stolen from her by her mother and her father’s mysterious girlfriend. The police were in cahoots with her mother. She had done nothing to break the law, but the police had taken her here against her will. Not to mention her father’s will, the different words assuming the same meaning in her mind. When it was pointed out to her that her father’s will had named only her and her mother as beneficiaries, she maintained that the police had changed the will — the real will named her father’s bimbo as well. Anyway, her father wasn’t really dead, you see. As soon as he found out she was here, he would come to get her and then we’d all be sorry because his wrath would know no bounds. She—”
“Sarah knows her father is dead,” I said. “She gave me the exact date, September third, she knows for a fact—”
“She knows it, Mr. Hope, but she doesn’t know it. Laing’s knot. She pretends to know everything, but the voices say her father is still alive, and she believes that as surely as she believes she is sane. Within days of her admission, she was hallucinating freely, seeing her father, talking to him, begging him to perform all sorts of sexual acts with her, repeatedly beseeching him to leave this woman who had stolen his love from her, come home to the loving arms of Snow White, the Virgin Queen. That’s what she calls herself — Snow White, the Virgin Queen. Her virginity is a figment of her imagination, Mr. Hope. Mrs. Whittaker has told the therapists here that Sarah was introduced to sex when she was twelve years old, by a man who’d been hired to teach her horseback riding. Sarah often confuses this man with her father in her delusions; she calls both of them the Black Knight. Apparently her father’s hair was black until the day he died, and whereas her mother seems deliberately vague about this, we feel positive that the riding instructor who seduced Sarah was a black man. She labels everyone, Sarah does, all part of her systemic filing cabinet. Her mother and the imaginary sweetheart are both the Harlot Witches; she uses the term interchangeably for each of them. Her father and the riding instructor are the Black Knights, as I mentioned. Mark Ritter, the attorney, is the Prime Minister of Justification. Dr. Helsinger is Dr. Schlockmeister, and I am Dr. Cyclops. One of the attendants on her ward is Brunhilde and another is Ilse. And in her therapy session after your last visit, she labeled you the White Knight.
“Mr. Hope, I wish I could impress upon you the depth of her delusional system. It is, in effect, a network of overlapping systems, a labyrinth of intricate constructions, a Rube Goldberg contraption that is self-propelling, self-nourishing, and self-perpetuating. She has even incorporated into it imaginary systems for some of the other patients. We have a woman here, for example, who is not at all delusional. But Sarah has labeled her as she has all the other players in her vivid inner life. This harmless, senile woman has become Anna the Porn Queen, and Sarah has constructed for her a delusional system that would have her the prime mover in an empire designed to bury America in an avalanche of pornographic films. Just as she has constructed a secret life for her father, she has also constructed one for poor Anna. And incorporated it into her own system. Can you imagine the energy involved in keeping all of this intact and manageable? And can you imagine the effort it must take to present herself to you as someone entirely reasonable in her request to be released from what she calls the Tomb of the Innocent? That’s Knott’s Retreat, Mr. Hope. The Tomb of the Innocent. Sarah the Virgin Queen buried here alive and struggling desperately to get out — if only the White Knight will help her.”
I remained silent.
“Sarah’s prognosis is a dim one,” Pearson said, “because her delusional system is so intricate. One plucks away at it as one would the threads in a tapestry, attempting to unravel now this one and now that one. But Sarah is busily stitching away in her mind, and the moment we make some progress, the moment we trace a yellow skein to its end, there is a green one to replace it, or a red one, or a blue one — and the task seems endless. You said she was intelligent and imaginative. Yes, too intelligent and too imaginative, constantly generating new data to feed into the computer bank of her already overwhelming system. Eventually, Mr. Hope, if we make no more progress than We’ve already made — the drugs, you know, are not a cure — she will retreat further and further into this private and essentially hostile universe she’s created for herself. The inner logic of her system will collapse... she will hallucinate more frequently... her delusions will grow too complex to manage within the safe parameters she has defined for herself, too inconsistent with the original master plan. And they will consume her until the disintegration of her personality is complete.”
Pearson sighed and looked across the desk at me.
“You do her a great disservice by supporting the delusion that she is sane, Mr. Hope. She has incorporated you into that system, and you have become a willing dupe — the White Knight. But the support you are giving her only strengthens the delusion. You are helping her to destroy herself.”
7
It was not until Monday, April 22, that Bloom and Rawles finally got their first real lead in the Jane Doe case. The trouble was that there were too many damn restaurants and fast-food joints in the downtown area near Albert Barish’s dry-cleaning establishment; a city that doubles as a winter resort had better have a lot of restaurants, or the people will go somewhere else for their fun and frolic. They had talked to Albert Barish on Tuesday, April 16, and had begun looking for the supposed waitress in the brown uniform the very next day. By Saturday they had come up with nothing. Since most restaurants in Calusa were closed on Sunday, they took the day off — even God rested at the end of the week. On Monday morning they hit pay dirt.
There were still a half-dozen restaurants they hadn’t yet hit, all of them catering either to kids who wanted to eat fast and run, or to older people who couldn’t afford fancier food and who lingered over a meal as if it were their last one on earth. The first of these was a Mexican joint, and the waitresses there were wearing black skirts, white peasant blouses, and sandals. One of the waitresses had a rose pinned to her coal-black hair. None of the waitresses wore name tags. The second place was a hamburger joint, and the girls behind the counter were wearing yellow uniforms and barking orders into microphones. The detectives got lucky in the third place, a pizza joint. The girls dishing out hot pizzas were all wearing brown uniforms. A little black plastic tag with a name stamped on it in white was fastened over the left breast of each uniform. The pizza smelled good. Bloom’s mouth began watering — but it was only ten-thirty in the morning.