A new card came on the screen;
ONCE A JUNKIE ALWAYS A JUNKIE
A new picture quickly followed: Rebecca, as she looked today, sitting in his kitchen- with the new cafe curtains they had just hung last week- once again injecting a needle into her arm.
"You're the vulgar ones, O mighty Illuminati," Saul said caustically. "I would have noticed the tracks on her arm, if she was shooting up again."
The answer was nonverbaclass="underline" the picture of Rebecca and the giant black man came back on the screen, and was immediately followed by a close-up of her face, eyes closed, mouth open receiving the penis. It was in perfect focus, the work of an artist with the camera, and he could see no sign of any makeup that would help another woman to pass as Rebecca. He held to his memory that the mole on her hip was missing, but, perversely, his mind tasted at last the other possibility- makeup can change a face, and it can also hide a mole… If they wanted him to use his skepticism, so that they could gradually destroy that, and, in the process, undermine his total psyche… Another sign came on the screen:
THAT WE CAN CALL THESE DELICATE CREATURES OURS BUT NOT THEIR APPETITES
Saul remembered, all too well, Rebecca's passion in bed. "Shakespeare," he called hoarsely. "Advertising your erudition at a time like this is worse than vulgarity. It's petit-bourgeois pretentiousness."
The answer was brutaclass="underline" a whole series of slides, maybe fifteen or twenty in all, cascaded across the screen in such rapid succession that he couldn't examine them carefully, except that the central character was Rebecca, always Rebecca, Rebecca with the black giant in other sexual positions, Rebecca with another woman, Rebecca with Spiro Agnew, Rebecca with a little seven-year-old boy, Rebecca, Rebecca, in a rising crescendo of perversion and abnormality, Rebecca with a Saint Bernard dog- and a peppermint-colored sine-wave, part of the drug still working on him, cutting across the scene…
"The true sadist has style," Saul gasped fighting for control of his voice. "You people are about as evil and frightening as a bad B-movie."
There was a whirring mechanical sound and a movie began in place of the slides. It was Rebecca and the Saint Bernard, with several close-ups, and her expressions were the ones he knew. Could any actress portray another woman's individual style of sexual response? Yes- if necessary, these people would use hypnosis to get the effect letter-perfect.
The movie stopped abruptly and the projector had another message for him, held on the screen for minutes:
ONLY THE MADMAN IS ABSOLUTELY SURE
When he realized that there would be no further progress until he spoke, Saul said coldly, "Very entertaining. Where do I go to crumble into a bundle of neuroses?"
There was no answer. No sound. Nothing happened. He half-saw a latticework of red pentagons, but that was the drug- and it helped identify which drug, for geometric patterns were characteristic of the mescaline experience. As he considered that, the peppermint sine-waves appeared before the pentagons and the screen gave him a new message:
HOW MUCH IS THE DRUG?
HOW MUCH IS OUR TRICKERY?
HOW MUCH IS REALITY?
Suddenly, Saul was in Copenhagen, on a cruise boat, passing the mermaid of the harbor. She turned and looked at him. "This case is fishy," she said- and as she opened her mouth a school of guppies swam out. "I'm a mouth-breeder," she explained.
Saul had a reproduction of that famous statue in his home (which must be the source of the hallucination), yet he was strangely disturbed. Her punning words seemed to conceal a deeper meaning than mere casual references to the Confrontation bombing… something that went back… back through his whole life… and explained why he had purchased the statue in the first place.
I'm about to have one of those famous drug insights that hippies always talk about, he thought. But the mermaid broke apart into pentagons of red, orange, yellow…
And a unicorn winked at him. "Man," it said, "am I ever horny!"
Those sketches I made the other day, Saul thought… but the screen asked him:
IS THE THOUGHT OF A UNICORN A REAL THOUGHT?
… and he suddenly understood for the first time what the words "a real thought" meant; what Hegel meant by defining the Absolute Idea as pure thought thinking about pure thought; what Bishop Berkeley meant by denying the reality of the physical world in seeming contradiction of all human experience and common sense; what every detective was secretly attempting to detect, although it was always right out in the open; why he became a detective in the first place; why the universe itself became; why everything; and then he forgot it; caught a fleeting glimpse of it again- it had something to do with the eye at the top of the pyramid; and lost it again in visions of unicorns, stallions, zebras, bars, bars, bars.
Now his whole visual field was hallucinatory… octagons, triangles, pyramids, organic shapes of embryos and growing ferns. The drug was taking stronger hold on him. Criminals he had sent to jail appeared- sullen, hating faces- and the screen said
GOODMAN IS A BAD MAN
He laughed to keep from crying. They had touched his deepest doubt about his job- his career, his life's work- precisely at the time the drug also was leading him there, with those damnable accusing faces. It was as if they could read his mind and see his hallucinations. No; it was just one lucky coincidence, because among all their tricks one was statistically likely to occur in tandem with an appropriate drug experience.
WHILE THERE IS A SOUL IN PRISON I AM NOT FREE
Saul laughed again, more wildly, almost hysterically; and knew, even more clearly than before, the tears hiding behind the laughter. Prisons reform nobody; my life is wasted; I offer society a delusion of security but not a real service. Worse yet, I have known it for years, and lied to myself. The sense of total failure and utter bitterness that washed over Saul at that moment was, he knew, not produced but only magnified by the drug. It had been with him a long, long time but always pushed aside, brushed away from his attention by concentrating on something else; the drug merely allowed him (forced him) to look at the emotion honestly and totally for a few wrenching moments.
A doorway suddenly lit up toward his right and a neon light came on above it, saying, "Absolution and Redemption."
"OK," he said icily, "I'll play the next move." He opened the door.
The room was tiny but furnished like the world's most expensive brothel. Above the four poster bed was an illustration of Alice and a mushroom labeled "Eat Me." And on the bed, stripped of her Playboy costume, pinkly and beautifully naked with legs spread in anticipation, was the blonde bunny. "Good evening," she said speaking rapidly and fixing his eyes with her own stare, "I'm your Virgin Bunny. Every man wants a Virgin Bunny, to eat on Easter to celebrate the miracle of the Resurrection. Do you understand the miracle of the Resurrection, sir? Do you know that nothing is true and everything is permissible and that a man who dares to break the robot conditioning of society and commit adultery dies in the moment of orgasm with his whore and wakes resurrected to a new life? Did they teach you that in shule? Or did they just fill you with a lot of monogamous Yiddish horseshit?" Most hypnotists spoke slowly, but she was obtaining the same effect by talking rapidly. "You thought you were going to eat a dead animal, which is disgusting even if this crazy society accepts it as normal, but instead you're going to eat a desirable woman (and fuck her afterward), which is normal even if this crazy society thinks of it as disgusting. You are one of the Illuminated, Saul, but you never knew it. Tonight you are going to learn. You are going to find your real self as you were before your mother and father conceived you. And I'm not talking about reincarnation. I'm talking about something much more marvelous."