They were right, but thinking about them I came to the conclusion, after a long period of hard meditation, that they were not a hell of a lot better than me. I mean, there’s a lot of rubbish in what they have to say, too. They’re darn near a bunch of nuts in their own way, although possibly it isn’t quite so obvious as in my case.
For instance, anybody who kills himself is a nut. Let’s face it (as Fay says). And even at the time I was conscious that his killing all those helpless animals was an example of the lunatic brain at work. And then that nut Nathan Anteil who just got married to a very nice girl and then dumped her as soon as he got mixed up with my sister… that isn’t exactly a model of logic. To get rid of a sweet harmless woman for a shrew like Fay.
As far as I’m concerned, the nuttiest of us all is my sister, and she’s still the worst; take my word for it. She’s a psychopath. To her, everybody else is just an object to be moved around. She has the mind of a three-year-old. Is that sanity?
So it doesn’t seem to me that I should be the only person who has to bear the onus of believing an admittedly ridiculous notion. All I want is to see the blame spread around fairly. For a day or so I considered writing to the San Rafael newspapers and giving them the story in the form of a letter to the editor; after all, they have to print that. It’s their duty as a public service. But in the end I decided against it. The hell with the newspapers. Nobody reads the letters to the editor column except more nuts. In fact, the whole world is full of nuts. It’s enough to get you down.
After thinking it all over, and weighing every consideration, I decided to avail myself of the clause in Charley Hume’s will and take the thousand dollars worth of psychoanalysis. So I collected all my things that I had around the house, packed them up, and got a neighbor to drive me down to the Greyhound. A couple of days before I had to I left the house that Charley and Fay had built –Fay’s house– and started back to the Bay Area.
As the bus drove along I considered how I would locate the best analyst. In the end I decided to get the names of every one of them practicing in the Bay Area, and visit each of them in turn. In my mind I began putting together a questionaire for them to fill out, telling the number of patients they had had, the number of cures, the number of total failures, length of time involved in cures, number of partial cures, etc. So on the basis of that I could draw up a chart and compute which analyst would be the most likely to give me help.
It seemed to me that the least I could do was try to use Charley’s money wisely and not squander it on some charlatan. And on the basis of past choices, it seems pretty evident that my judgment is not of the best.