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."

Saul found his voice. "Your offer is appreciated but declined," he said. "Frankly, I find your tawdry mysticism even more adolescent than your sentimental vegetarianism and coarse lasciviousness. The trouble with the Illuminati is that you have no sense of true drama and not even a patina of subtlety."

Her eyes widened as he spoke, but not with surprise at his resistance- either she was really alarmed, and sorry for him, or she was a great actress. "Too bad," she said sadly. "You've refused Heaven, so you must travel the harder path through the halls of Hell."

Saul heard a movement behind him, but before he could turn a sharp sensation pricked his neck: a needle, another drug. Just as he was guessing they had given him a stronger psychedelic to escalate the effect, he felt consciousness slipping away. It was a narcotic or a poison.

The wagon started with a jerk: we were off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of arse. What was it Hagbard had said to me, the first time we met, about straight lines, courtrooms, and shit? I couldn't remember, my mind drifted, Joseph K. opening the law books and finding pornographic illustrations (Kafka knew where it was at), deSade keeping a precise mathematical tally in the brothel, how many times he flogged the whores, how many times they flogged him, the Nazis counting every gold filling in the corpses at Auschwitz, Shakespeare scholars debating about that line in Macbeth (was it benches or banks of time?), the prisoner may approach the bench, you can bank on it, buddy, bank on it… PIGS EAT SHIT PIGS EAT SHIT… and Pound wrote "the buggering bank," he rejected Freud, but even so he got a whiff of the real secret… how one homo ominously loopses another…

"My God," the Englishman said. "When do we get out of the teargas area?"

"We're out of it," I told him wearily. "That's regular Chicago air now. Courtesy of Commonwealth Edison and U.S. Steel over in Gary."

The McCarthy woman was weeping quietly, although the Mace had worn off by now. The rest of us rode silently, a little caravan of dried snot and tears, the parmesan cheese odor of stale vomit, some lingering acrid Mace fumes, the urine of somebody who had peed himself, and that high sulphur dioxide and slaughterhouse aroma of Chicago's South Side. The quality of mercy is very strained; it drippeth like the pus from chancre. Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Chairman Mao appeared and lectured us: "Ho is just a poetaster. Now, if you want to hear some real socialist verse, consider my latest composition: