"Of course not. But I punched up your file out of curiosity, almost automatically-and what do you know? There's no record of your having contemplated suicide. And it seems you have new orders cut, too. Authorized by the same major general in Washington who cut my orders. But you're not part of the 'Medical Personnel Redistribution Group'; you're in a training program for assimilation into command structure. A soldier who wanted to commit suicide because he killed someone. That's interesting.
"And so I trace you down to here. A rest home for old soldiers who aren't so old, and some of whom aren't soldiers."
"So you want to lose your colonelcy," Mendez said, "and go back to Texas? To Portobello?"
"Not at all. I'll risk telling you this: I didn't go through channels. I don't want to rock the boat." He pointed at me. "But I have a patient here, and a mystery I'd like to solve."
"The patient's fine," I said. "The mystery is something that you don't want to be involved in."
There was a long, thick silence. "People know where I am."
"We don't mean to threaten you, or frighten you," Mendez said. "But there's no way you have the clearance to be told about this. Julian can't let you jack with him, for that reason."
"I have top-secret clearance."
"I know." Mendez leaned forward and said quietly: "Your ex-wife's name is Eudora and you have two children – Pash, who's in medical school in Ohio, and Roger, who's in a New Orleans dance company. You were born on 5 March 1990 and your blood type is O-Negative. Do you want to know your dog's name?"
"You're not threatening me with this."
"I'm trying to communicate with you."
"But you're not even in the military. Nobody here is, except Sergeant Class."
"That should tell you something. You have top-secret clearance and yet my identity is concealed from you."
The colonel shook his head. He leaned back and drank some wine. "There's been time enough for somebody to find out these things about me. I can't decide whether you're some kind of super-spook or just one of the best bullshit artists I've ever come across."
"If I were bluffing, I'd threaten you now. But you know that, and that's why you said what you just said."
"And so you threaten me by making no threat."
Mendez laughed. "Takes one to know one. I will admit to being a psychiatrist."
"But you're not in the AMA database."
"Not anymore."
"Priest and psychiatrist is an odd combination. I don't suppose the Catholic Church has any record of you, either."
"That's harder to control. It would be cooperative of you not to check."
"I don't have any reason to cooperate with you. If you're not going to shoot me or throw me in a dungeon."
"Dungeon's too much paperwork," Mendez said. "Julian, you've jacked with him. What do you think?"
I remembered a thread from the common mind session. "He's completely sincere about doctor-patient confidentiality."
"Thank you."
"So if you left the room, he and I could talk patient-to-doctor. But there's a catch."
"There is indeed," Mendez said. He remembered the thread as well. "A trade you might not want to make."
"What's that?"
"Brain surgery," Mendez said.
"You could be told what we're doing here," I said, "but we'd have to make it so that no one could learn it from you."
"Memory erasure," Jefferson said.
"That wouldn't be enough," Mendez said. "We'd have to erase the memory of not only this trip and everything associated with it, but also your memories of treating Julian and people who knew him. That's too extensive."
"What we'd have to do," I said, "is take out your jack and fry all the neural connections. Would you be willing to give that up forever, to be let in on a secret?"
"The jack is essential to my profession," he said. "And I'm used to it, would feel incomplete without it. For the secret of the universe, maybe. Not for the secret of St. Bartholomew's Home."
Someone knocked on the door and Mendez said to come in. It was Marc Lobell, holding a clipboard over his chest.
"May I have a word with you, Father Mendez?"
When Mendez left, Jefferson leaned over toward me. "You're here of your own free will?" he said. "No one's coerced you?"
"No one."
"Thoughts of suicide?"
"Nothing could be farther from my mind." The possibility was still back there, but I wanted to see how this turned out. If the universe ceased to exist, it would take me with it anyhow.
I suspected that that would be the attitude of someone resigned to suicide, and that realization may have shown on my face.
"But something's bothering you," Jefferson said.
"When did you last meet someone with nothing bothering him?"
Mendez came through the door alone, carrying the clipboard. A lock on the door clicked behind him.
"Interesting." He asked the bar for a cup of coffee and sat down. "You've taken a month's leave, Doctor."
"Sure, moving."
"People expect you back in what, a day or two?"
"Soon."
"What people? You're not married or living with anyone."