Finally, there were just too many complaints for even the police to ignore, and after they became convinced that jail was not the place for Jonathan Newman (and it wasn’t; he would die there just as surely as if he had been sent to the electric chair), they sent him once again to the hospital. So in the end, his delusions be- came a self-fulfilling prophecy—one gray blustery day in November the men in uniform did arrive to take him away, and he was placed a little roughly in the back of one of those dark blue cars he worried so much about. This did nothing to help his growing number of problems.

Once a day he met with the beautiful doctor in a small, tastefully decorated room with a couch and two chairs, and even a hanging plant in one corner. It’s an experiment, she told him once. The people who run this place want to see how patients react to a soothing environment. This was one of the reasons he began to trust her. She made him feel like they were conspirators, together against the enemies outside that threatened him every day. He started to talk to her more freely as the visits grew longer.

“You have reacted,” she explained to him in one of their sessions, “in a perfectly normal way to stress. We all develop defenses against threats in life, whether they are real or imaginary. Some people just lose sight of where they began. Think about a boy who is being chased by a dog. He runs away. Wouldn’t you? That’s perfectly normal, the right thing to do. But what if, later down the road, his father buys him a dog for a present, a cute little puppy. The problem is, the boy can’t go near it, because he’s too scared that the puppy will bite him. Now, he has a problem. But where did the problem begin? In a perfectly normal reaction to a frightening situation.”

He listened to her carefully. She was intelligent, and she cared about him too. He wanted to make her happy.

“You might think that it’s no big deal. Just get rid of the dog. But what if it’s something more serious? What if later on the boy falls in love with a dog trainer and he can’t even get near dogs? What if you say that the dog that chased him was not a dog at all, but a man? Now the boy is afraid of all men. When he grows up he can’t work with others, he has trouble meeting new people. Now, you have a real problem.”

He nodded. This was true; he understood it all.

“Something has happened to you, Jonathan, that has made you so afraid. Besides the war. That’s part of it, but not all, am I right? What is it?”