Manhattan with a sense of civic duty, one James Mortimer, came around the corner at just that moment. James Mortimer carried a police whistle at all times, since he knew he was living in a still-violent society. He blew several blasts, loud and shrill. Pablo Gomez fled without getting any money, and an ambulance arrived in time to rush Benny to the hospital and save his life.
THE ROOMS WERE TURNED INSIDE OUT
The “nervous breakdown” (as it was called) of Hassan i Sabbah X did not attract much attention; the Cult of the Black Mother had never been as well publicized as the Nation of Islam or the Black Panthers. The New York News-Times-Post actually referred to Hassan as a “well-known nightclub owner in Harlem,” in their very brief story, and their reporter hadn’t even investigated far enough to learn that Hassan was also the head of a cult with more members than the Missouri Synod Lutherans. But, then, the Cult of the Black Mother had never been publicity-minded; even The Amsterdam News, unaware of its membership, described it as “a small church.”
Hassan had been delivered to Bellevue in a state of raving mania, under physical restraint by two of his former aides. The psychiatrists quickly pronounced him “paranoid schizophrenic” and prescribed the heaviest tranquilizer then available, which in fact kept him fairly drowsy even when he wasn’t comatose. Nonetheless, when able to summon the energy to rise out of his lethargy and talk again, he would monotonously repeat to any other inmate or orderly who came near, “Look, I don’t belong here. Something terrible has happened. I’m really the President of this fucking country …” and so on, with endless elaborations and details.
“A deeply defended psychosis,” the psychiatrists decided, and began a course of electroshock treatments.
Whenever the flipped-out black came out of his daze, however, he would begin the same schizzy ranting all over: “Hey, listen, I’m the President of this fucking country….”
The electroshock was stepped up. Hassan retreated into a permanent daze and ceased to annoy anybody. By this time his brain had been fried to the consistency of a White Tower scrambled egg and his impressions of the external world were mostly olfactory and aural, like those of a subnormal toy poodle; he no longer argued about anything, since he no longer understood such abstract concepts as ego persistence or identity. The psychiatrists were satisfied: “If you can’t cure a nut,” their tacit motto was, “at least you can keep him from running around the ward annoying people.”
Two FBI agents later discussed the matter privately.
“You think CIA did it?” asked the first, Tobias Knight.
“You figure he’d been working for them?” the other, Roy Ubu, asked in return. “I always had that notion myself. But why would they fuck his head like that, when God only knows what he might spill to somebody who’d get released from the nuthouse and repeat it to a reporter? Nah, CIA doesn’t work that way. They’d just—” He drew a finger across his throat.
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Knight said stubbornly. “Somebody got to him.”
“Something,” Ubu corrected with a sinister intonation. “You know as well as I do what he was. A witch.”
“Voodooist,” Knight corrected.
“Whatever. Everybody we ever sent in died of a heart attack, right?” Ubu looked over his shoulder. “Officially, the Bureau doesn’t believe in witches. But I’ll tell you what happened to Mr. Hassan i Sabbah X in my opinion. He called up something that he couldn’t put down.”
THE LOCK IS A HOLE
Dr. Francis Dashwood—neat, clean, rich, and not yet forty—drove into the grounds of the Orgasm Research Foundation on Van Ness in San Francisco at precisely 8:57 in the morning. He checked his wristwatch again after he parked his sleek M.G. in the executive parking lot. It was 8:58. Excellent. A quick trot and he was at his desk before the office clock reached nine. Once again he had demonstrated the punctuality (anal-retentive personality, silly prescientific Freudians called it) which had contributed so much to raising him to his present high position in the medical research bureaucracy of the United States.
Frank Dashwood, M.D., L.L.D., Ph.D., at the age of only thirty-eight, headed the most heavily funded and hotly debated institution in the world: Orgasm Research, a multimillion-dollar project dedicated to filling in the psychological intangibles left out of the pioneering research of Masters and Johnson two decades earlier. Since these psychological intangibles were—as Dr. Dashwood sometimes wittily remarked—“both psychological and intangible,” there was no end to the research. Meanwhile,