The Second Trip

1

Even the street felt wrong beneath his feet. Something oddly rubbery about the pavement, too much give in it. As though they had changed the mix of the concrete during the four years of his troubles. A new futuristic stuff, the 2011-model sidewalk, bouncy and weird. But no. The sidewalk looked the same. He was the new stuff. As though, when they had altered him, they had altered his stride too, changing the swing of his knees, changing the pivot of his hips. Now he wasn’t sure of his movements. He didn’t know whether he was supposed to hit the pavement with his heel or his toe. Every step was an adventure in discovery. He felt clumsy and uncertain within his own body.

Or was it his own? How far did the Rehab people go, anyway, in reconstructing your existence? Maybe a total brain transplant. Scoop out the old gray mass, run a jolt of juice through it, stick it into a waiting new body. And put somebody else’s rehabilitated brain in your vacated skull? The old wine in a new decanter. No. No. That isn’t how they work at all. This is the body I was born with. I’m having a little difficulty in coordination, true, but that’s only to be expected. The first day out on the street again. Tuesday the something of May, 2011. Clear blue sky over the towers of Manhattan North. So I’m a little clumsy at first. So? So? Didn’t they say something like this would happen?

Easy, now. Get a grip. Can’t you remember how you used to walk? Just be natural.

Step. Step. Step. Into the rhythm of it. Heel and toe, heel and toe. Step. Step. That’s the way! One-and-two-and-one-and-two-and-one-and-two. This is how Paul Macy walks. Proudly down the goddam street. Shoulders square. Belly sucked in. Thirty-nine years old. Prime of life. Strong as an—what did they say, strong as an ox? Yes. Ox. Ox. Opportunity beckons you. A second trip, a second start. The bad dream is over; now you’re awake. Step. Step. What about your arms? Let them swing? Hands in pockets? Don’t worry about that, just go on walking. Let the arms look after themselves. You’ll get the hang of it. You’re out on the street, you’re free, you’ve been rehabilitated. On your way to pick up your job assignment. Your new career. Your new life. Step. Step.

One-and-two-and-one-and-two.

He couldn’t avoid the feeling that everybody was looking at him. That was probably normal too, the little touch of paranoia. After all, he had the Rehab badge in his lapel, the glittering bit of yellow metal advertising his status as a reconstruct job. The image of the new shoots rising from the old stump, warning everybody who had known him in the old days to be tactful. No one was supposed to greet him by his former name. No one was supposed to acknowledge the existence of his past. The Rehab badge was intended as a mercy, as a protection against the prodding of absent memories. But of course it attracted attention too. People looked at him—absolute strangers, so far as he knew, though he couldn’t be sure—people looked and wondered, Who is this guy, what did he do that got him sentenced to Rehab? The triple ax murderer. Raped a nine-year-old with pinking shears. Embezzled ten million. Poisoned six old ladies for their heirlooms. Dynamited the Chartres Cathedral. All those eyes on him, speculating. Imagining his sins. The badge warned them he was something special.

There was no place to hide from those eyes. Macy moved all the way over to the curb and walked just along the edge. Right inside the strip of gleaming red metal ribbon that was embedded in the pavement, the stuff that flashed the magnetic pulses that kept autos from going out of control and jumping up on the sidewalk. It was no good here either. He imagined that the drivers zipping by were leaning out to stare at him. Crossing the pavement on an inward diagonal, he found another route for himself, hugging the sides of buildings. That’s right, Macy, skulk along. Keep one shoulder higher than the other and try to fool yourself into thinking that it shields your face. Hunch your head. Jack the Ripper out for a stroll. Nobody’s looking at you. This is New York, remember? You could walk down the street with your dong out of your pants and who’d notice? Not here. This city is full of Rehabs. Why should anybody care about you and your sordid eradicated past? Cut the paranoia, Paul.

Paul.

That was a hard part too. The new name. I am Paul Macy. A sweet compact name. Who dreamed that one up? Is there a computer down in the guts of the earth that fits syllables together and makes up new names for the Rehab boys? Paul Macy. Not bad. They could have told me I was Dragomir Slivovitz. Izzy Levine. Leroy Rastus Williams. But instead they came up with Paul Macy. I suppose for the holovision job. You need a name like that for the networks. “Good evening, this is Dragomir Slivovitz, bringing you the eleven-o’clock news. Speaking from his weekend retreat at the Lunar White House, the President declared—” No. They had coined the right kind of name for his new career. Very fucking Anglo-Saxon.

Suddenly he felt a great need to see the face he was wearing. He couldn’t remember what he looked like. Coming to an abrupt stop, he turned to his left and picked his reflection off the mirror-bright pilaster beside an office building’s entrance. He caught the image of a wide-cheeked, thin-lipped, standard sort of Anglo-Saxon face, with a big chin and a lot of soft windblown yellow-brown hair and deep-set pale-blue eyes. No beard, no mustache. The face seemed strong, a little bland, decently proportioned, and wholly unfamiliar. He was surprised to see how relaxed he looked: no tension lines in the forehead, no scowl, no harshness of the eyes. Macy absorbed all this in a fraction of a second; then whoever had been walking behind him, caught short by his sudden halt, crashed into his side and shoulder. He whirled. A girl. His hand went quickly to her elbow, steadying her. More her fault than his: she ought to look where she’s going. Yet he felt guilty. “I’m terribly sor—”

“Nat,” she said. “Nat Hamlin, for God’s sake!”

Someone was slipping a long cold needle into his eye. Under the lid, very very delicately done, up and up and around the top of the eyeball, past the tangled ropes of the nerves, and on into his brain. The needle had some sort of extension; it seemed to expand telescopically, sliding through the wrinkled furrowed folded mass of soft tissue, skewering him from forehead to skullcap. A tiny blaze of sparkling light wherever the tip of the needle touched. Ah, so, ve cut out dis, und den ve isolate dis, and ve chop here a little, ja, ja, ist gut! And the pain. Oh, Christ, the pain, the pain, the pain, the fire running down every neuron and jumping every synapse, the pain! Like having a thousand teeth pulled all at once. They said it absolutely wouldn’t hurt at all. Those lying fuckers.

They had taught him how to handle a situation like this. He had to be polite but firm. Politely but firmly he said, “I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken. My name’s Paul Macy.”

The girl had recovered from the shock of their collision. She took a couple of steps back and studied him carefully. He and she now constituted an encapsulated pocket of stasis on the busy sidewalk; people were flowing smoothly around them. She was tall and slender, with long straight red hair, troubled green eyes, fine features. A light dusting of freckles on the bridge of her nose. Full lips. No makeup. She wore a scruffy blue-checked spring coat. She looked as if she hadn’t been sleeping well lately. He guessed she was in her late twenties. Very pale. Attractive in a tired, frayed way. She said, “Don’t play around with me. I know you’re Nat Hamlin. You’re looking good, Nat.”

Each time she said the name he felt the needles wiggle behind his eyeballs.

“Macy. Paul Macy.”

“I don’t like this game. It’s a cruel one, Nat. Where have you been? What is it, five years?”

“Won’t you please try to understand?” he asked. He glanced meaningfully at his Rehab badge. Her eyes didn’t follow his.

“I understand that you’re trying to hurt me, Nat. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I don’t know you at all, miss.”

“You don’t know me at all. You don’t know me at all.”

“I don’t know you at all. Right.”

“Lissa Moore.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What kind of trip are you on, Nat?”

“My second one,” Macy said.

“Your—second—one?”

He touched the badge. This time she saw it.

“Rehab?” she said. Blinking a couple of times: obviously adjusting her frame of reference. Color in her cheeks now. Biting her lip, abashed.

He nodded. “I’ve just come out. Now do you understand? I don’t know you. I never did.”

“Christ,” she said. “We had such good times, Nat.”

“Paul.”

“How can I call you that?”

“It’s my name now.”

“We had such good times,” she said. “Before you went away. Before I came apart. I’m not working much now, you know. It’s been pretty bad.”

“I’m sorry,” he told her, shifting his weight uneasily. “It really isn’t good for me to spend much time with people from my first trip. Or any time at all with them, actually.”

“You don’t want to go somewhere and talk?”

“I can’t. I mustn’t.”

“Maybe some other time?” she asked. “When you’re a little more accustomed to things?”

“I’m afraid not,” he said. Firmly but politely. “The whole point is that I’ve made a total break with the past, and I mustn’t try to repair that break, or let anyone repair it for me. I’m on an entirely new trip now, can you see that?”

“I can see it,” she murmured, “but I don’t want it. I’m having a lot of trouble these days, and you can help me, Nat. If only—”

“Paul. And I’m not in any shape for helping anybody. I can barely help myself. Look at how my hand is shaking.”

“And you’ve started to sweat. Your forehead’s all wet.”

“There’s a tremendous strain. I’m conditioned to keep away from people out of the past.”

“It kills me when you say that. People out of the past. Like a guillotine coming down. You loved me. And I loved you. Love. Still. Love. So when you say—”

“Please.”

“You, please.” She was trembling, hanging onto his sleeve. Her eyes, going glassy, flitted and flickered a thousand times a second. “Let’s go somewhere for a drink, for a smoke, for a talk. I realize about the Rehab thing, but I need you too much. Please. Please.”

“I can’t.”

“Please.” And she leaned toward him, her fingertips clutching hard into the bones of his right wrist, and he felt a baffling sensation in the top of his skull. A sort of intrusion. A tickling. A mild glow of heat Along with it came a disturbing blurring of identity, a doubling of self, so that for a moment he was knocked free of his moorings. Paul Hamlin. Nat Macy. In the core of his mind erupted a vivid scene in garish colors: himself crouched over some sort of keyboard, and this girl standing naked on the far side of a cluttered room with her hands pressed to her cheeks. Scream, he was saying. Go on, Lissa, scream. Give us a good one. The image faded. He was back on a street in Manhattan North, but he was having trouble seeing, everything out of focus and getting more bleary each second. His legs were wobbly. A spike of pain under his breastbone. Maybe a heart attack, even. “Please,” the girl was saying. “Don’t turn me away, Nat Nat, what’s happening? Your face is so red!”

“The conditioning—” he said, gasping.

The pressure eased. The girl backed away from him, touching the tips of her knuckles to her lips. As the distance between them increased he felt better. He clung to the side of the building with one hand and made a little shooing gesture at her with the other. Go on. Away. Out of my life. Whoever you were, there’s no room now. She nodded. She continued to back away. He had a last brief glimpse of her tense, puffy-eyed face, and then she was cut off from him by a stream of people. Is this what it’s going to be like every time I meet somebody from the old days? But maybe the others won’t be like that. They’ll respect my badge and pass silently on. Give me a chance to rebuild. It’s only fair. She wasn’t being fair. Neurotic bitch, putting her troubles above mine. Help me, she kept saying. Please. Please, Nat. As if I could help anybody.

Twenty minutes later he arrived at the network office. Ten minutes overdue, but that was unavoidable. He had needed some time to recover after the encounter with the girl on the street. Let the adrenalin drain out of the system, let the sweat dry. It was important for him to present an unruffled exterior; more important, in fact, than showing up on time the first day. The network people were probably prepared to be tolerant of a little unpunctuality at first, considering all that he had been through. But he had to demonstrate that he had the professional qualities the job demanded. They were hiring him as an act of grace, yes, but it wasn’t pure charity: he wouldn’t have been accepted if he hadn’t been suitable for the job. So he needed to show that he had the surface slickness, the smoothness, that a holovision commentator had to have. Pause to catch the breath. Get the hair tidy. Adjust the collar. Give yourself that seamless, sprayed-on look. You had a nasty shock or two in the street, but now you’re feeling much better. All right. Now go in. A confident stride. One-and-two-and-one-and-two.

The lobby was dark and cavernous. Screens everywhere, a hundred sensors mounted in the onyx walls, anti-vandal robots poised with bland impersonality to come rolling forth if anybody tried anything troublesome. Standing beneath the security panel, Macy activated one of the screens and a cheery female face appeared. Just a hint of plump bare breasts at the bottom of the screen, cut off by the prudish camera angle. “I have an appointment,” he said. “Paul Macy. To see Mr. Bercovici.”

“Certainly, Mr. Macy. The liftshaft to your right. Thirty-eighth floor.”

He stepped into the shaft. It was already programmed; serenely he floated skyward. At the top, another screen. Face of an elegant haggard black girl, shaven eyebrows, gleaming cheekbones, no flesh to spare. The expectable gorgeous halo of shimmering hair. “Please step through Access Green,” she said. A throaty, throbbing contralto. “Mr. Fredericks is expecting you in Gallery Nine of the Rotunda.”

“My appointment is with Mr. Bercovici—”

Too late. Screen dead. Access Green, an immense oval doorway the color of a rhododendron leaf, was opening from a central sphincter, like the irising shutter of an antique camera. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Macy stepped hastily through, worrying about having the sphincter reverse itself when he had one leg on each side. Beyond the doorway the air was soft and clammy, heavy with a rain-forest warmth and humidity, and mysterious fragrances were adrift. He saw low, dim passages radiating in a dozen directions. The walls were pink and rounded, no corners anywhere, and seemed to be made of some spongy resilient substance. The whole place was like one vast womb. Trapped in the fallopian tubes. Macy tried to persuade himself not to start sweating again. There was a popping sound, of the sort one could make by pushing a fingertip against the inside of one’s cheek and sliding it swiftly out of one’s mouth, and the black girl emerged from a gash in the wall that promptly resealed itself. She was sealed too, encased in purple plastic from throat to toes, like a chrysalis, everything covered but nothing concealed: her tight wrap startlingly displayed the outlines of her bony body. Superb skeletal structure. She said, “I’m Loftus. I’ll show you to Mr. Fredericks’ office.”

“Mr. Bercovici—”

She didn’t wait Hurrying down the hall, legs going like pistons, bare feet hitting the spongy floor, thwunk thwunk thwunk. Trim flat rump: no buttocks at all, so far as he could tell, merely a termination, like a cat’s hindquarters. He was upset. Bercovici was the one who had interviewed him at the Rehab Center, all smiles and sincerity, thinning blond hair, pudgy cheeks. Don’t worry, Mr. Macy, I’ll be looking after you personally during your difficult transition back to daily life. Bercovici was his lifeline. Without looking back, the black girl called out, “Mr. Bercovici’s been transferred to the Addis Ababa office.”

“But I spoke to him only ten days ago, Miss Loftus!”

She halted. Momentary blaze of the eyes. “Loftus is quite sufficient,” she said. Then the expression softened. Perhaps remembering she was dealing with a convalescent. “Sometimes transfers happen rapidly here. But Mr. Fredericks has your full dossier. He’s aware of the problems.”

Mr. Fredericks had a long cavernous office, rounded and womby, from the sloping ceiling of which dangled hundreds of soft pink globes, breast-shaped; a tiny light was mounted in each nipple. He was a small dapper man with a moist handshake. Macy received from him a sweet sad embarrassed smile, the kind one gives a man who has had a couple of limbs or perhaps his genitals amputated to check the metastasis of some new lightning cancer. “So glad you’ve come, Mr. Macy. Paul, may I make it? And call me Stilton. We’re all informal here. A wonderful opportunity for you in this organization.” Eyes going to Macy’s Rehab badge, then away, then back, as though he couldn’t refrain from staring at it. The stigmata of healing.

“Show you around,” Fredericks was saying. “Get to know everybody. The options here are tremendous: the whole world of modern data-intake at your service. We’ll start you slowly, feed you into the news in ninety-second slices, first, then, as you pick up real ease at it, we’ll nudge you into the front line.”

Good evening, ladies and chentlemen, this is Pavel Nathanielovitch Macy coming to you from the Kremlin on the eve of the long-awaited summit.

The rear wall of Frederick’s office vanished as though it had been annihilated by some wandering mass of antimatter, and Macy found himself staring into an immense stupefying abyss, a dark well hundreds of feet across and perhaps infinitely deep. A great many golden specks floated freely in that bowl of nothingness. He was so awestruck by the unexpected sight that he lost a chunk of Fredericks’ commentary, but picked up on it in time to hear, “You see, we have thousands, literally thousands of free-ranging hovereye cameras posted in every spot throughout the world where news is likely to break. Their normal altitude is eighty to a hundred feet, but of course we can raise or lower them on command. You can think of them simply as passive observers hanging everywhere overhead, little self-contained self-propelled passive observers, sitting up there soaking in a full range of audio and visual information and holding it all on twenty-four-hour tape-scanning drums. Those of us here at Manhattan North Headquarters can tap in on any of these inputs as needed. For instance, if I want to get some idea of what’s doing at the Sterility Day parade in Trafalgar Square—” he touched a small blue button in a broad console on his desk, and up out of the darkness one of the golden specks came zooming, halting in midair just beyond the place where the wall of Fredericks’ office had been. “What we have here,” Fredericks explained, “is the slave-servo counterpart of the hovereye camera that’s hanging above that parade right now. I simply induce an output—here, we get a visual”Macy saw gesticulating women waving banners and setting off flares—“and here we get the audio.” Raucous screams, the chanting of slogans.

Macy hadn’t heard of Sterility Day before. The world becomes terribly strange when you spend four years out of circulation.

“If we want any of this for the next newscast, you see, we just pump the signal into a recorder and set it up for editing—and meanwhile the hovereye is still up there, soaking it all in, relaying on demand. Gathering the news is no frigging chore at all when you have ten thousand of these lovely little motherfuckers working for you all over the place.” A nervous giggle. “Sometimes our language gets a little rough around here. You stop noticing it after a while.” One doesn’t speak crude Anglo-Saxon to a man who wears the badge of his trauma on his lapel, is that it?

Fredericks had him by the arm. “Time to meet your new colleagues,” he was saying. “I want to fill you in completely. You’re going to love it working here.”

Out of the office. The rear wall mysteriously restoring itself as they leave, the dark well of the hovereyes vanishing once more. Down the humid fallopian passageways. Doors opening. Neat, well-groomed executives everywhere, all of them getting up to greet him. Some of them speaking exceptionally loudly and clearly, as if they thought a man who had had his troubles might find it difficult to understand what they said. Long-legged girls flashing the promise of ecstasy. Some of them looking a trifle scared; maybe they were hip to the evil deeds of his former self. Macy was aware of what crimes the previous user of his body had committed, and sometimes they scared him a little, too.

“In here,” Fredericks said. Into a bright, gaudy room, twice the size of Fredericks’ office. “I’d like you to meet the chief of daytime news, Paul. One hell of a guy. Harold Griswold, and he’s some beautiful son of a bitch. Harold, here’s our new man, Paul Macy. Number six on the late news. Bercovici told you the story, right? Right He’s going to fit in here perfectly.”

Griswold stood up, a slow and complex process, and smiled. Macy smiled. His facial muscles were beginning to ache from all the smiling he had done in the last hour and a half. One doesn’t smile much at a Rehab Center. He shook the hand of the chief of daytime news. Griswold was implausibly tall, slabjawed, perhaps fifty years old, obviously a man of great prestige; he reminded Macy somehow of George Washington. He wore a bright-blue tank suit, an earwatch, and an elaborate breastplate of several kinds of exotic polished Woods. His office was like a museum annex, with works of art everywhere: shaped paintings, crystallines, talk-spikes, programmed resonances. A million-dollar collection. In the corner, to the right of Griswold’s kidney-shaped desk, stood a striking psycho-sculpture, a figure of an old woman. Macy, who had been glancing from piece to piece by way of an implied compliment to Griswold, lurched forward at the sight of the last work, coughed, grabbed the edge of the desk to steady himself. He felt as though he had been clubbed at the back of the neck. Instantly friendly hands clutched at him. “Are you all right? What’s the trouble, fella?” Macy fought off dizziness. He straightened and shook himself free of the propping hands.

“I don’t know what hit me,” he muttered. “Just as I looked at that sculpture in the corner—”

“The Hamlin over there?” Griswold asked. “One of my favorites. A gift from my first wife, ten years back, when Hamlin was still an unknown—”

“If you don’t mind—some cold water—”

Two gulps. Another cup. Three gulps. Carefully averting his eyes from the figure of the old woman. The Hamlin over there. The sleek smooth network men frowning at him, then erasing the frowns the instant he noticed. Everyone so solicitous. “Forgive me,” he said. “You know, it’s only my first day on the outside. The strain, the tension.”

“Of course. The tension.” Griswold.

“The strain. We understand.” Fredericks.

He forced himself to look at the psychosculpture. The Hamlin over there. An excellent piece of work. Poignance; pathos; a sense of the tragedy of aging, a sense of the heroism of defying time. A soft hum coming from its resonators, subtly coloring the mood it was designed to stimulate. The Hamlin over there. Macy said, “That’s Nathaniel Hamlin who did it?”

“Right,” Griswold said. “God only knows what it’s worth now. On account of Hamlin’s tragic fate. Not that I have the slightest interest in selling, but of course when an artist dies young his work skyrockets amazingly in value.”

He didn’t know, then. He couldn’t just be pretending. And he couldn’t be that dumb. Either Bercovici hadn’t told him, or he’d been told and hadn’t cared enough to remember. That was interesting. Macy was shaken, though, by the intensity of his reaction to the unexpected sight of the sculpture. They hadn’t warned him at the Rehab Center that such things might happen. He made a mental note to ask about it when he went back next week for his first session of outpatient post-therapy therapy. And a mental note, also, to stay out of Griswold’s office as much as possible.

The sculpture was still exerting an effect on him. He felt an undertow, the sucking of a subcerebral ocean in his mind. Hollow echoing sounds of surf from far below. A hammering against the threshold of consciousness. The Hamlin over there. That’s Nathaniel Hamlin who did it? On account of his tragic fate. Jesus. Jesus. A bad attack of wobbly knees. Sweaty forehead. Paroxysms of confusion. Going to collapse, going to fall down in a screaming fit, going to vomit all over Harold Griswold’s nappy green electronic carpet. Unless you regain control fast. He turned apologetically to Stilton Fredericks and said in a thick furry voice, “It’s more upsetting than I thought. You’d better get me out of here fast.”

Fredericks took his arm. A firm grasp. To Griswold: “I’ll explain afterward.” Propelling Macy urgently toward the door. Stumbling feet. Head swaying on neck. Jesus. Outside the office, finally.

The moment of intolerable angst ebbing.

“I feel much better now,” Macy murmured.

“Can I get you a pill?”

“No. No. Nothing.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t look all right.”

“It’ll pass. It shook me up more than I expected. Listen, Fredericks—Stilton—I don’t want you to think that I’m fragile, or anything, but you know I’ve just been released from the Rehab Center, and for the first few days—”

“It’s perfectly natural,” said Fredericks. A comradely pat on the shoulder. “We understand the problem. We can make allowances. This was my fault, anyway. I should have checked things out before I brought you in there. He’s got so many works of art in his office, though—”

“Sure. How could you have known?”

“I should have checked anyway. Now that I see the difficulty, I’ll check the whole building. I simply didn’t realize that it would upset you so much to come face to face with one of your own sculptures.”

“Not mine,” Macy said, shaking his head emphatically. “Not mine.”