"I've never been in Trenton in my life," Saul said wearily. "I don't know what anything in Trenton looks like. But you'll just tell me that I've erased those memories. Let's move to a deeper level of combat, Herr Doktor. I am quite convinced that my mother and father never performed fellatio in their lives. They were too old-fashioned." This was the heart of the labyrinth, and their real threat: while he was sure that they could not break down his belief in his own identity, they were also insidiously undermining that identity by suggesting it was pathological. Many of the lines in the Muldoon case history could refer to any policeman and might, conceivably, refer to him; as usual, behind a weak open attack they were mounting a more deadly covert attack.
"Do you recognize these?" the doctor asked, producing a sketchbook open to a page with some drawings of unicorn.
"It's my sketchbook," Saul said. "I don't know how you got it but it doesn't prove a damned thing, except that I sketch in my spare time."
"No?" The doctor turned the book around; a bookplate on the cover identified the owner as Barney Muldoon, 1472 Pleasant Avenue, Trenton, NJ.
"Amateur work," Saul said. "Anybody can paste a bookplate onto a book."
"And the unicorn means nothing to you?" Saul sensed the trap and said nothing, waiting. "You are not aware of the long psychoanalytical literature on the unicorn as symbol of the father's penis? Tell me, then, why did you decide to sketch unicorns?"
"More amateurism," Saul said. "If I sketched mountains, they would be symbols of the father's penis, too."
"Very well. You might have made a good detective if your- illness- hadn't prevented your promotion. You do have a quick, skeptical mind. Let me try another approach- and I wouldn't be using such tactics if I weren't convinced you were on the road to recovery; a true psychotic would be driven into catatonia by such a blunt assault on his delusions. But, tell me, your wife mentioned that just before the acute stage of your- problem- you spent a lot of money, more than you could afford on a patrolman's salary, on a reproduction of the mermaid of Copenhagen. Why was that?"
"Damn it," Saul exclaimed, "it wasn't a lot of money." But he recognized the displaced anger and saw that the other man recognized it too. He was avoiding the question of the mermaid… and her relation to the unicorn. There must be a relationship between fact number one and fact number two… "The mermaid," he said, getting there before the enemy could, "is a mother symbol, right? She has no human bottom, because the male child dare not think about that area of the mother. Is that correct jargon?"
"More or less. You avoid, of course, the peculiar relevance in your own case: that the sex act in which you caught your mother was not a normal one but a very perverted and infantile act, which, of course, is the only sex act a mermaid can perform- as all collectors of mermaid statues or mermaid paintings unconsciously know."
"It's not perverted and infantile," Saul protested. "Most people do it…" Then he saw the trap.
"But not your mother and father? They were different from most people?"
And then it clicked: the spell was broken. Every detail from Saul's notebook, every physical characteristic Peter Jackson had described, was there. "You're not a doctor," he shouted. "I don't know what your game is but I sure as hell know who you are. You're Joseph Malik!"
George's stateroom was paneled in teak, the walls hung with small but exquisite paintings by Rivers, Shahn, De Kooning, and Tanguy. A glass cabinet built into one wall held several rows of books. The floor was carpeted in wine red with a blue stylized octopus in the center, its waving tentacles radiating out like a sunburst. The light fixture hanging from the ceiling was a lucite model of that formidable jellyfish, the Portuguese man-of-war.
The bed was full size, with a rosewood headboard carved with Venetian seashell motifs. Its legs didn't touch the floor; the whole thing was supported on a huge, rounded beam that allowed the bed to seesaw when the ship rolled, the sleeper remaining level. Beside the bed was a small desk. Going to it, George opened a drawer and found several different sizes of writing paper and half a dozen felt-tipped pens in various colors. He took out a legal-size pad and a green pen, climbed on the bed, curled up at the head and began writing.
April 24
Objectivity is presumably the opposite of schizophrenia. Which means that it is nothing but acceptance of everybody else's notion of reality. But nobody's perception of reality is the same as everybody's notion of it, which means that the most objective person is the real schizophrenic.
It is hard to get beyond the accepted beliefs of one's own age. The first man to think a new thought advances it very tentatively. New ideas have to be around a while before anyone will promote them hard. In their first form, they are like tiny, imperceptible mutations that may eventually lead to new species. That's why cultural cross-fertilization is so important. It increases the gene-pool of the imagination. The Arabs, say, have one part of the puzzle. The Franks another. So, when the Knights Templar meet the Hashishim, something new is born.
The human race has always lived more or less happily in the kingdom of the blind. But there is an elephant among us. A one-eyed elephant.
George put the pen down and read the green words with a frown. His thoughts still seemed to be coming from outside his own mind. What was that business about the Knights Templar? He had never felt the slightest interest in that, period since his freshman year in college, when old Morrison Glynn had given him a D for that paper on the Crusades. It was supposed to be a simple research paper displaying one's grasp of proper footnote style, but George had chosen to denounce the Crusades as an early outbreak of Western racist imperialism. He'd even gone to the trouble of finding the text of a letter from Sinan, third leader of the Hashishim, in which he exonerates Richard Coeur de Lion of any complicity in the murder of Conrad of Montferret, King of Jerusalem. George felt the episode demonstrated the essential goodwill of the Arabs. How was he to know that Morrison Glynn was a staunch conservative Catholic? Glynn claimed, among other dyspeptic criticisms, that the letter from the castle called Messiac was well known as a forgery. Why were the Hashishim coming back to mind again? Did it have to do with the weird dream he'd had of the temple in the Mad Dog jail?
The sub's engine was vibrating pleasantly through the floor, the beam, the bed. The trip so far had reminded George of his first flight in a 747-a surge of power, followed by motion so smooth it was impossible to tell how fast or how far they were going.