“Absolutely,” he said.

“No matter what?”

“No matter what.”

I watched him when he said it. I believed him.

“Pick up your money,” I said. “You’re on.”

He didn’t do it. He said, “As you remarked a minute ago, that is up to me. You can’t buy these treatments like a candy bar. We have to work together. If either one of us can’t do that, it’s useless. You can’t walk in on the first psychotherapist you find in the phone book and make any demand that occurs to you just because you can pay for it.”

I said tiredly, “I didn’t get you put of the phone book and I’m not just guessing that you can help me. I winnowed through a dozen or more head-shrinkers before I decided on you.”

“Thanks,” he said, and it looked as if he was going to laugh at me, which I never like. “Winnowed, did you say? Just how?”

“Things you hear, things you read. You know. I’m not saying, so just file that with my street address.”

He looked at me for a long time. It was the first time he’d used those eyes on me for anything but a flash glance. Then he picked up the bill.

“What do I do first?” I demanded.

“What do you mean?”

“How do we start?”

“We started when you walked in here.”

So then I had to laugh. “All right, you got me. All I had was an opening. I didn’t know where you would go from there, so I couldn’t be there ahead of you.”

“That’s very interesting,” Stern said. “Do you usually figure everything out in advance?”

“Always.”

“How often are you right?”

“All the time. Except—but I don’t have to tell you about no exceptions.”

He really grinned this time. “I see. One of my patients has been talking.”

“One of your ex-patients. Your patients don’t talk.”

“I ask them not to. That applies to you, too. What did you hear?”

“That you know from what people say and do what they’re about to say and do, and that sometimes you let’m do it and sometimes you don’t. How did you learn to do that?”

He thought a minute. “I guess I was born with an eye for details, and then let myself make enough mistakes with enough people until I learned not to make too many more. How did you learn to do it?”

I said, “You answer that and I won’t have to come back here.”

“You really don’t know?”

“I wish I did. Look, this isn’t getting us anywhere, is it?”

He shrugged. “Depends on where you want to go.” He paused, and I got the eyes full strength again. “Which thumbnail description of psychiatry do you believe at the moment?”

“I don’t get you.”

Stern slid open a desk drawer and took out a blackened pipe. He smelled it, turned it over while looking at me. “Psychiatry attacks the onion of the self, removing layer after layer until it gets down to the little sliver of unsullied ego. Or: psychiatry drills like an oil well, down and sidewise and down again, through all the muck and rock, until it strikes a layer that yields. Or: psychiatry grabs a handful of sexual motivations and throws them on the pinball-machine of your life, so they bounce on down against episodes. Want more?”

I had to laugh. “That last one was pretty good.”

“That last one was pretty bad. They are all bad. They all try to simplify something which is complex by its very nature. The only thumbnail you’ll get from me is this: no one knows what’s really wrong with you but you; no one can find a cure for it but you; no one but you can identify it as a cure; and once you find it, no one but you can do anything about it.”

“What are you here for?”

“To listen.”

“I don’t have to pay somebody no day’s wage every hour just to listen.”

“True. But you’re convinced that I listen selectively.”

“Am I?” I wondered about it. “I guess I am. Well, don’t you?”

“No, but you’ll never believe that.”

I laughed. He asked me what that was for. I said, “You’re not calling me Sonny.”

“Not you.” He shook his head slowly. He was watching me while he did it, so his eyes slid in their sockets as his head moved. “What is it you want to know about yourself, that made you worried I might tell people?”

“I want to find out why I killed somebody,” I said right away.

It didn’t faze him a bit. “Lie down over there.”

I got up. “On that couch?”

He nodded.

As I stretched out self-consciously, I said, “I feel like I’m in some damn cartoon.”

“What cartoon?”

“Guy’s built like a bunch of grapes,” I said, looking at the ceiling. It was pale gray.

“What’s the caption?”

“ ‘I got trunks full of ’em.’ ”

“Very good,” he said quietly.