Saul Goodman tried to move. He couldn't twitch a single muscle: That last drug had been a narcotic, and a powerful one. Or was it a poison? He tried to assure himself that the reason he was paralyzed and laying in a coffin was because they were trying to break down his mind. But he wondered if the dead might tell themselves similar fables, as they struggled to escape from the body before it rotted.
As he wondered, the goat-head leaned over and closed the top of the coffin. Saul was alone in darkness.
"Leave first, Jubela."
"Yes, Master."
"Leave next, Jubelo."
"Yes, Master."
"Leave last, Jubelum."
"Yes, Master."
Silence. It was lonely and dark in the coffin, and Saul couldn't move. Let me not go mad, he thought.
Howard spotted the Lief Erikson ahead and sang: "Oh, groovy, groovy, groovy scene/Once again I'll meet Celine." Maldonado's sleek Bentley edged up the drive to the home of "America's best-known financier-philanthropist," Robert Putney Drake. (Louis marched toward the Red Widow, maintaining his dignity. An old man in a strange robe pushed to the front of the crowd, trembling with exaltation. The blade rose: the mob sucked in its breath. The old man tried to look into Louis's eyes, but the king could not focus them. The blade felclass="underline" the crowd exhaled. As the head rolled into the basket, the old man raised his eyes in ecstasy and cried out, "Jacques De Molay, thou art avenged!") Professor Glynn lectured his class on medieval history (Dean Deane was issuing the Strawberry Statement on the same campus at the same time) and said, "The real crime of the Templars, however, was probably their association. with the Hashishim." George Dorn, hardly listening, wondered if he should join Mark Rudd and the others who wanted to close down Columbia entirely.
"And modern novels are the same," Smiling Jim went on. "Sex, sex, sex- and not normal sex even. Every type of perverted, degenerate, unnatural, filthy, deviated, and sick kind of sex. This is how they're gonna bury us, as Mr. Khruschchev said, without even firing a shot."
Sunlight awakened Saul Goodman.
Sunlight and a headache. A hangover from the combination of drugs.
He was in a bed and his clothes were gone. There was no mistaking the garment he wore: a hospital gown. And the room- as he squinted against the sun- had the dull modern-penitentiary look of a typical American hospital.
He hadn't heard the door open, but a weathered-looking middle-aged man in a doctor's smock drifted into the room. He was carrying a clipboard; pens stuck their necks out of his smock pocket; he smiled benignly. His horn rimmed heavily black glasses and crewcut marked him as the optimistic, upward-mobile man of his generation, without either the depression/World War II memories that gave anxiety to Saul's contemporaries or nuclear nightmares that gave rage and alienation to youth. He would obviously think of himself as a liberal and vote conservatively at least half the time.
A hopeless schmuck.
Except that he was probably none of those things, but another of their agents, doing a very convincing performance.
"Well?" he said brightly. "Feeling better, Mr. Muldoon?"
Muldoon, Saul thought. Here we go- another ride into their kitsch idea of the Heart of Darkness.
"My name is Goodman," he said thinly. "I'm about as Irish as Moishe Dayan."
"Oh, still playing that little game, are we?" the man spoke kindly. "And are you still a detective?"
"Go to hell," Saul said, no longer in mood to fight back with wit and irony. He would dig into his hostility and make his last stand from a foxhole of bitterness and sullen brevity.
The man pulled up a chair and sat down. "Actually," he said, "these remaining symptoms don't bother us much. You were in a much worse state when you were first brought here six months ago. I doubt that you remember that. Electroshock mercifully removes a great deal of the near past, which is helpful in cases like yours. Do you know that you were physically assaulting people on the street, and tried to attack the nurses and orderlies your first month here? Your paranoia was very acute at that point, Mr. Muldoon."
"Up yours, bubi," Saul said. He closed his eyes and turned the other way.
"Such moderate hostility these days," the man went on, bright as a bird in the morning grass. "A few months ago you would have tried to strangle me. Let me show you something." There was a sound of paper.
Curiosity defeated resistance: Saul turned and looked. The man held out a driver's license, from the State of New Jersey, for "Barney Muldoon." the picture was Saul's. Saul grinned maliciously, showing his disbelief.
"You refuse to recognize yourself?" the man asked quietly.
"Where is Barney Muldoon?" Saul shot back. "Do you have him in another room, trying to convince him he's Saul Goodman?"
"Where is…?" the "doctor" repeated, seeming genuinely baffled. "Oh, yes, you admit you know the name but claim he was only a friend. Just like a rapist we had in here a while ago. He said all the rapes were committed by his roommate, Charlie. Well, let's try another tack. All those people you beat up on the street- and that Playboy Club bunny you tried to strangle- do you still believe they were agents of this, um, Prussian Illuminati?"
"This is an improvement," Saul said. "A very intriguing combination of reality and fantasy, much better than your group's previous efforts. Let me hear the rest of it."
"You think that's sarcasm," the man said calmly. "Actually, behind it, your recovery is proceeding nicely. You really want to remember, even as you struggle to keep up this Goodman myth. Very welclass="underline" you are a sixty-year-old police officer from Trenton, New Jersey. You never were promoted to detective and that is the great grievance of your life. You have a wife named Molly, and three sons- Roger, Kerry, and Gregory. Their ages are twenty-eight, twenty-five, and twenty-three. A few years ago, you started a game with your wife; she thought it was harmless at first and learned to her sorrow that it wasn't. The game was, that you pretended to be a detective and, late at night, you would tell her about the important cases you were working on. Gradually, you built up to the most important case of all- the solution to all the assassinations in America during the past decade. They were all the work of a group called the Illuminati, who were surviving top-level Nazis that had never been captured. More and more, you talked about their leader-Martin Borman, of course- and insisted you were getting a line on his whereabouts. By the time your wife realized that the game had become reality to you, it was too late. You already suspected your neighbors of being Illuminati agents, and your hatred for Nazism led you to believe you were Jewish and had taken an Irish name to avoid American anti-Semitism. This particular delusion, I must say, caused you acute guilt, which it took us a long time to understand. It was, we finally realized, a projection of a guilt you have long felt for being a policeman at all. But perhaps at this point, I might aid your struggle for self-recognition (and abort your equal and opposite struggle for self-escape) by reading you part of a report on your case by one of our younger psychiatrists. Are you game to hear it?"
"Go ahead," Saul said. "I still find this entertaining." The man looked through the papers in his clipboard and smiled disarmingly. "Oh, I see here that it's the Bavarian Illuminati, not the Prussian Illuminati, pardon my mistake." He flipped a few more pages. "Here we are," he said.
"The root of the subject's problems," he began to read, "can be found in the trauma of the primal scene, which was reconstructed under narco-analysis. At the age of three, he came upon his parents in the act of fellatio, which resulted in his being locked in his room for 'spying.' This left him with a permanent horror of being locked up and a pity for prisoners everywhere. Unfortunately, this factor in his personality, which he might have sublimated harmlessly by becoming a social worker, was complicated by unresolved Oedipal hostilities and a reaction formation in favor of 'spying,' which led him to become a policeman. The criminal became for him the father-symbol, who was locked up in revenge for locking him up; at the same time, the criminal was an ego-projection and he received masochistic gratification by identifying with the prisoner. The deep-buried homosexual desire for the father's penis (present in all policemen) was next cathected by denial of the father, via denial of paternal ancestry, and he began to abolish all Irish Catholic traces from ego-memory, substituting those of Jewish culture, since the Jew, as persecuted minority, reinforced his basic masochism. Finally, like all paranoids, the subject fancies himself to be of superior intelligence (actually, on his test for the Trenton Police Force, he rated only one hundred ten on the Stan-ford-Binet IQ index) and his resistance to therapy will take the form of 'outwitting' his doctors by finding the 'clues' which reveal that they, too, are agents of the Illuminati and that his assumed identity as 'Saul Goodman' is, in fact, his actual identity. For therapeutic purposes, I would recommend…" The "doctor" broke off. "After that," he said briefly, "it is of no interest to you. Well," he added tolerantly, "do you want to 'detect' the errors in this?"