"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 well: 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?"

"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."