"All right. You'd go in anonymously, so there wouldn't be any stigma attached if the story wouldn't work out. If it does, you can tell the whole truth—including Dr. Randolph's collusion in getting you in and out again. The cat will be out of the bag, then.
"You might get what you want in a few days-and you wouldn't stay on it more than a couple of weeks in any case."
"How many at the asylum would know who I was and what I was there for, besides Randolph?"
"No one." Candler leaned forward and held up four fingers of his left hand. He pointed to the first. "Four people would have to be in on it. You." He pointed to one finger. "Me." A second. "Dr. Randolph." The third finger. "And one other reporter from here."
"Not that I'd object, but why the other reporter?"
"Intermediary. In two ways. First, he'll go with you to some psychiatrist; Randolph will recommend one you can fool comparatively easily. He'll be your brother and request that you be examined and certified. You convince the psychiatrist you're nuts and he'll certify you. Of course it takes two doctors to put you away, but Randolph will be the second. Your alleged brother will want Randolph for the second one."
"All this under an assumed name?"
"If you prefer. Of course there's no real reason why it should be."
"That's the way I feel about it. Keep it out of the papers, of course. Tell everybody around here-except my-hey, in that case we couldn't make up a brother. But Charlie Doerr, in Circulation, is my first cousin and my nearest living relative. He'd do, wouldn't he?"
"Sure. And he'd have to be intermediary the rest of the way, then. Visit you at the asylum and bring back anything you have to send back."
"And if, in a couple of weeks, I've found nothing, you'll spring me?"
Candler nodded. "I'll pass the word to Randolph; he'll interview you and pronounce you cured, and you're out. You come back here, and you've been on vacation. That's all."
"What kind of insanity should I pretend to have?"
He thought Candler squirmed a little in his chair. Candler said, "Well-wouldn't this Nappy business be a natural? I mean, paranoia is a form of insanity which, Dr. Randolph told me, hasn't any physical symptoms. It's just a delusion supported by a systematic framework of rationalization. A paranoiac can be sane in every way except one."
He watched Candler and there was a faint twisted grin on his lips. "You mean I should think I'm Napoleon?"
Candler gestured slightly. "Choose your own delusion. But-isn't that one a natural? I mean, the boys around the office always kidding you and calling you Nappy. And-" He finished weakly, "-and everything."
And then Candler looked at him squarely. "Want to do it?"
He stood up. "I think so. I'll let you know for sure tomorrow morning after I've slept on it, but unofficially-yes. Is that good enough?"
Candler nodded.
He said, "I'm taking the rest of the afternoon off; I'm going to the library to read up on paranoia. Haven't anything else to do anyway. And I'll talk to Charlie Doerr this evening. Okay?"
"Fine. Thanks."
He grinned at Candler. He leaned across the desk. He said, "I'll let you in on a little secret, now that things have gone his far. Don't tell anyone. I am Napoleon!"
It was a good exit line, so he went out.
HE car his hat and coat and went outside, out of the air-conditioning and into the hot sunlight. Out of the quiet madhouse of a newspaper office after deadline, into the quieter madhouse of the streets on a sultry July afternoon.
He tilted his panama back on his head and ran his hand-kerchief across his forehead. Where was he going? Not to the library to bone up on paranoia; that had been a gag to get off for the rest of the afternoon. He'd read everything the library had on paranoia-and on allied subjects-over two years ago. He was an expert on it. He could fool any psychiatrist in the country into thinking that he was sane-or that he wasn't.
He walked north to the park and sat down on one of the benches in the shade. He put his hat on the bench beside him and mopped his forehead again.
He stared out at the grass, bright green in the sunlight, at the pigeons with their silly- head-bobbing method of walking, at a red squirrel that came down one side of a tree, looked about him and scurried up the other side of the same tree.
And he thought back to the wall of amnesia of three years ago.
The wall that hadn't been a wall at all. The phrase intrigued him: a wall at all. Pigeons on the grass, alas. A wall at all.
It wasn't a wall at all; it was a shift, an abrupt change. A line had been drawn between two lives. Twenty-seven years of a life before the accident. Three years of a life since the accident.
They were not the same life.
But no one knew. Until this afternoon he had never even hinted the truth-if it was the truth-to anyone. He'd used it as an exit line in leaving Candler's office, knowing Candler would take it as a gag. Even so, one had to be careful; use a gagline like that often, and people begin to wonder.
The fact that his extensive injuries from that accident had included a broken jaw was probably responsible for the fact that today he was free and not in an insane asylum. That broken jaw-it had been in a cast when he'd returned to consciousness forty-eight hours after his car had run head-on into a truck ten miles out of town-had prevented him from talking for three weeks.
And by the end of three weeks, despite the pain and the confusion that had filled them, he'd had a chance to think things over. He'd invented the wall. The amnesia, the convenient amnesia that was so much more believable than the truth as he knew it.
But was the truth as he knew it?
That was the haunting ghost that had ridden him for three years now, since the very hour when he had awakened to whiteness in a white room and a stranger, strangely dressed, had been sitting beside a bed the like of which had been in no field hospital he'd ever heard of or seen. A bed with an overhead framework. And when he looked from the stranger's face down at his own body, he saw that one of his legs and both of his arms were in casts and that the cast of the leg stuck upward at the angle, a rope running over a pulley holding it so.
He'd tried to open his mouth to ask where he was, what had happened to him, and that was when he had discovered the cast on his jaw.
He'd stared at the stranger, hoping the latter would have sense enough to volunteer the information and the stranger had grinned at him and said, "Hi, George. Back with us, huh? You'll be all right."
And there was something strange about the language until he placed what it was. English. Was he in the hands of the English? And it was a language, too, which he knew little of, yet he understood the stranger perfectly. And why did the stranger call him George?
Maybe some of the doubt, some of the fierce bewilderment, showed in his eyes, for the stranger leaned closer to the bed. He said, "Maybe you're still confused, George. You were in a pretty bad smashup. You ran that coupe of yours head-on into a gravel truck. That was two days ago, and you're just coming out of it for the first time. You're all right, but you'll be in the hospital for a while, till all the bones you busted knit. Nothing seriously wrong with you."
And then waves of pain had come and swept away the confusion, and he had closed his eyes.
Another voice in the room said, "We're going to give you a hypo, Mr. Vine," but he hadn't dared open his eyes again. It was easier to fight the pain without seeing.