"No man should marry a woman more than thirty years younger than himself," the maitre d' said mournfully. How did they know about that? Had they investigated his whole life? How long had they held him?
"I'm getting out of here," he shouted, pushing the maitre d' aside and bolting for the door.
Hands grasped for him and missed (they weren't really trying, he realized: he was being allowed to reach the door). When he plunged through the doorway, he realized why: he was not on the street but in another room. This was the next ordeal.
A rectangle of light appeared on the wall; somewhere in the darkness there was a projector. A card, light an old silent-movie caption, appeared in the rectangle. It said:
ALL JEW GIRLS LIKE TO BALL WITH BUCK NIGGERS
"Sons of bitches," Saul shouted back at them. They were still working on his feelings about Rebecca. Well, that would get them nowhere: he had ample reason to trust her devotion to him, especially her sexual devotion.
The card moved out of the rectangle, and a picture appeared in its place. It was Rebecca's, in her nightgown, kneeling. Before her stood a naked and enormous black man, six feet six at least, with an equally impressive penis which she held sensuously in her mouth. Her eyes were closed in bliss, like a baby nursing.
"Motherfuckers," Saul screamed. "It's a fake. That's not Rebecca- it's an actress with makeup. You forgot the mole on her hip." They could drug his senses but not his mind.
There was a nasty laugh in the darkness. 'Try this one, Saul," a voice said coldly.
A new picture slid into view: Adolph Hitler, in full Nazi uniform, and a naked Rebecca backing up to him, taking his penis in her rectum. Her face showed both pain and pleasure- and the mole on her hip was visible. Another fake- Rebecca was born years after Hitler died. But they hadn't produced the slide in the thirty seconds after his shout, and that meant they knew her body, intimately… And they also knew how skeptical and quick his mind was, and were prepared to administer a series of jolts until something got past his ability to doubt.
"No comment?" the voice asked mockingly.
"I don't believe a man who died thirty years ago would be buggering any woman today," Saul said dryly. "Your tricks are kind of corny."
"Sometimes, with the vulgar, we must communicate vulgarly," the voice replied- and it was almost gentle and pitying this time.
A new picture appeared- and this time, without doubt, it was Rebecca. But it was Rebecca three years ago, when he first met her. She sat at a table in a cheap East Village pad, wearing the emaciated and self-pitying look he remembered from those days; and she was preparing to inject a needle in her arm. It was the real thing, but the terror was in its implications: they had been watching him that long ago. Perhaps- it was hard to date the picture precisely, although he remembered her apartment in those days- they even knew he would fall in love with her before he knew it himself. No; more likely, a friend of hers in those days had taken the picture and they had somehow found it when they became interested in him. Their resources must be fantastic.
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.