The Second Trip

2

Daytime it wasn’t so bad. He built a cozy routine for himself and lived within it, just as they had advised him at the Center to do. The Rehab people had found him a little apartment near the upper tip of Old Manhattan, five minutes from the network office by short-hop tube, forty minutes if he walked; he hadn’t wanted to risk exposing himself to the chaotic rush-hour environment of the tubes too soon, and so at first he went to work on foot. The exercise was good for him, and he had nothing better to do with his time anyway. But from the fourth day on he took the tube. The jostling and the screeching of wheels turned out not to bother him as much as he feared it might, and packed belly to rump in the cars, he didn’t have to worry about people staring at him or his Rehab badge.

At work he slipped easily and comfortably into the network’s news-broadcast operation. He had had six months of vocational training at the Center, and so he came to his new career already skilled in voice projection, sincerity dynamics, makeup technique, and other such things; he needed only to learn the details of the network’s daily practice, the authority levels and flow patterns and such. Everybody was kind to him, although after the first few days most of them dropped the maddening exaggerated courtesy that made him feel like such a cripple. They showed him what to do, they covered his blunders, they responded patiently and good-humoredly to his questions.

In the beginning Fredericks didn’t let him do any actual broadcasting, just dummy off-the-air runs under simulated studio circumstances. Instead he was put to work reading scripts aloud for the timing, and monitoring air checks of the other broadcasters. But he did so well at the dummy runs that by the fifth day they were putting him on the late news to do ninety-second capsule reports in what they called the mosaic-texture section, in which a bunch of broadcasters offered quick bouncy segments of the news in swift succession. Fredericks told him that in another few weeks he’d be allowed to handle full-scale stories, even to select his own accompanying hovereye coverage. So all went well professionally.

The nights were something else.

Lonely, for one thing. You’d be wisest to avoid sexual liaisons, at least at the outset, the Center therapists had suggested. They could be disturbing during the initial two or three weeks of adjustment. He paid heed. He refrained from bringing any of the network girls home with him, though plenty of them made it clear that they were available. Just ask, honey. At night he sat alone in the modest apartment. Watching a lot of holovision. Pretending that it was important to his career to study how the various networks handled the news. In truth he simply wanted the companionship of the bright screen and the loud audio; he left it on even when he wasn’t watching anything.

He didn’t go out in the evenings. A matter of economy, he told himself. Supposedly he had been a wealthy man in his former life, or at least pretty damned prosperous. A successful artist, work in constant demand, prices going up at the gallery every year, that kind of thing. But his assets had been forfeit to the state. Most of his money had been used up by the costs of his therapy and the termination settlement awarded his wife. What little was left had gone into renting and furnishing his apartment. He was essentially a pauper until the network salary checks began coming in. But he knew that the real reason for staying home was fear. He wasn’t ready yet to explore the night world of this formidable city. He couldn’t go out there while his new self was still moist and malleable around the edges.

Then there were the dreams.

He hadn’t had nightmares at the Rehab Center. He had them now. Traumatic identity crises punctuated his sleep. He ran breathlessly down long gleaming ropy corridors, pursued by a man who wore his face. He stood by the shore of a viscous gray-green pool that bubbled and steamed and heaved, and a gnarled hairy claw reached up from its depths and groped for him. He tiptoed across a sea of quicksand, sinking deeper and deeper, and something underneath plucked at his toes. Pulling him under with a loud plop. A coven of monsters waiting down below. Teeth and green horns and yellow eyes. Often he woke up shrieking. And then lay awake, listening to something knocking on the inside of his skull. Let me out, let me out, let me out, let me out! Great gusts of wind blew through his brain. Vast snorting snores setting the medulla atremble. A slumbering giant, restless, cranky, trapped behind his forehead. Belching and farting within his head. Knock. Knock. Knock.

Also the peculiar doubleness of self assailed him, the sensation of being enshrouded and entangled in the scraps and threads of his old identity, so that he momentarily was sucked back into it. I am Nat Hamlin. Married, successful. Psychosculptor. This is my face. These are my hands. Why am I in this unfamiliar little apartment? No. No. I am Paul Macy. I used to be. Formerly was. In another country, so to speak. And besides the stench is dead. Why does he haunt me? I am not Nat Hamlin.

Sometimes at night it was hard to be sure of that, though. By the third night Macy dreaded going to bed. There was that man with his face, always haunting him when he crossed into dreamland. Waking in distress, he wanted to call a friend and ask for reassurance. But he had no friends. The old ones had been washed away by the therapy, and he hadn’t made any new ones yet, except a few people he had come to know at the Rehab Center, fellow reconstructs, and he didn’t want to bother them in the middle of the night. Maybe they had demons of their own to wrestle with. And the people from the network. Mustn’t call them. You’d blow the whole pretense of your stability in one gush of panicky talk. Nor could he call any of his therapists. Dr. Brewster, Dr. Ianuzzi, Dr. Gomez. You’re on your own, they said. We’re cutting the umbilicus. So. So. All alone. Sweat it out. Eventually, no matter how bad a night it was, he would sleep. Eventually.

“Is there any chance,” Macy asked, “that the Rehab job didn’t completely take? I mean, sometimes I think I can feel Hamlin trying to break through.”

A Tuesday late in May, 2011. One week after his discharge from the Rehab Center. His first session of post-therapy therapy. Dr. Gomez, round-faced, swarthy, drooping black mustache, not much chin, scowling and chewing on a computer stylus. Soft buzzing voice. “No chance of that at all, Macy.”

“But these dreams—”

“A little psychic static, is all. What gives you the idea Hamlin still exists?”

“During these nightmares I feel him pushing inside my head. Like somebody trying to get out.”

“Don’t mess things up with your pretty imagery, Macy. You’ve been having some bad dreams. Everybody has bad dreams. You think I’m immune? I’ve got my share of lousy karma. Without any fancy hypotheses, tell me why you think it’s Hamlin.”

“The man with my face chasing me.”

“A metaphor for our own unfocused past, maybe.”

“A sense of confusion. Not knowing who I really am.”

“Who are you, really?”

“Paul Macy. But—”

“That’s who you really are. Nat Hamlin doesn’t exist any more. He’s been stripped out of your body, cell by cell, and extinguished. You really surprise me, Macy. I thought you were going to make one of the best adjustments I ever saw.”

“I felt that way too,” Macy said. “But since I’ve been outside there have been these—these bursts of psychic static. I’m scared. What if Hamlin’s still there?”

“Hamlin exists only as an abstract concept. He’s a famous psychosculptor who ran into trouble with the law and was eradicated. Now he exists only through his works. Like Mozart. Like Michelangelo. He isn’t in your head.”

Macy said, “My first day at the network, I walked into the office of one of the high executives and there was a big Hamlin sculpture in the corner. I looked at it and I recognized it for what it was and I just took it in, you know, the way I’d take in a Michelangelo, and after a fraction of a second I had this sensation like somebody had banged me on the head with a mallet. I almost fell over. The impact was tremendous. How do you account for that, Dr. Gomez?”

“How do you account for it?”

“Like it was Hamlin still inside me, standing up and yelling, ‘That’s mine, I made that!’ Such a surge of pride and identity that I felt it on the conscious level as physical pain.”

“Balls,” the doctor said. “Hamlin’s gone.”

“How can you be sure of that?”

Gomez sighed. “Look,” he said, and jabbed an output node. On the walls of his office blossomed screened images of Macy’s psychological profiles. Gomez pointed. “Over on the left, that’s the EEG of Nat Hamlin. You see those greasy waves of psychopathic tendency, those ugly nasty jiggles? You see those electrical storms going on in that man’s head? That’s a sick EEG. That’s sick as hell. Right?

“Now look over here. We’ve begun the mindpick operation. We’re wiping out Nat Hamlin. The waves get smoother. Sweet as a baby. Chart after chart. Look. Look. Look. As Hamlin goes, we bring in Macy. You can see the overlay here. This is what a double mind looks like. Vestigial Hamlin, incipient Macy. Yes? Two distinct electrical patterns, no problems at all distinguishing one from the other. And now, this side of the room, you can see Hamlin wiped out entirely. Can you find any of the typical Hamlin waveforms? By shit, can you?

“You aren’t saying anything, Macy. There’s your brain on the wall. Alpha, beta, the whole mess. Compare your waves and Hamlin’s. Altogether different. Two separate patterns. He’s him, you’re you. The machine says so. It isn’t a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of voltage thresholds. A voltage doesn’t lie. Amperes don’t have opinions. Resistances don’t fuck around with you for sly tactical reasons. We’re dealing in objective facts, and the objective facts tell me that Nat Hamlin has been wiped out. They ought to tell you that too.”

“The dreams—the sight of that psychosculpture—”

“So you’re a little unstable. A couple of surprise adjustment traumas. But Hamlin? No.”

“Another thing. My first day out, that came day, I met a girl in the street, somebody from Hamlin’s life. She kept calling me Nat. Telling me she loved me.”

“Weren’t you wearing your Rehab badge?”

“Of course I was.”

“And the dumb bitch still dumped all that garbage on you?”

“I suppose she’s disturbed mentally herself. I don’t know. Anyway,” Macy said, “she was doing all this to me, Nat this and Nat that, paying no attention when I told her I was Paul Macy, and out of nowhere I felt, well, like hot on top of my head, and for half a second I didn’t know who I was. Which one of me I was. It was like something had reached into my head and mixed everything up. I could even remember myself making a psychosculpture of the girl. You see, she was one of Hamlin’s models, apparently, and I had this flickering memory of her posing, me at a sculptor’s keyboard—”

“Crap,” Gomez said.

“What?”

“Crap. It wasn’t a memory. You couldn’t possibly remember anything out of Nat Hamlin’s life.”

“What was it, then?”

“It was an episode of free-floating masochism, Macy. A normal self-injury wish. You invented this phantom image of yourself sculpting the girl because you wanted to fool yourself into thinking that Hamlin was breaking through.”

“But I don’t see why—”

“Shut up and I’ll explain the mechanism; You lived at this Center for four years, right, and you got constant attention. It was like being in the womb. Every need instantly attended to. Okay, it’s time for Paul Macy to be born, and we toss you out into the world on your ass. Not exactly as rough as that, we find you a job first, we find you a place to live, but it’s still a ballbreaker to get evicted. Out you go. Suddenly no umbilicus to feed you. Suddenly no placenta to cuddle in.

“Well, you want attention, and one way to get it is to come here yelling that your personality reconstruct didn’t take, that Hamlin is knocking around inside your head. I don’t mean that this is a conscious thing. It’s a mechanism. Your rational self just wants to make a decent adjustment to outside life and live happily ever after as Paul Macy, but there’s this irrational side of us too. Which often operates directly counter to the needs and desires of the rational side.

“Suppose I tell somebody that his sanity depends on never calling his mother-in-law by her first name, okay? And he nods, he says, ‘Yes, I understand, if I do that it’ll really wreck me.’ So of course every time he sees the old witch he finds that her first name is on the tip of his tongue. He’ll have dreams in which he calls her by her first name. He’ll fantasy it while he’s sitting at his desk. Because it’s the most destructive fucking thing he could possibly do, so of course the temptation to do it keeps rising out of his head, and he’s constantly imagining he has done it.

“Now back to you. The last thing you want to have happen is for Hamlin to come back to life, so naturally you fantasy yourself making a sculpture of this girl. Which upsets you and sends you in a sweat back to me, screaming for help. The immediate result of this mechanism is to give you bad dreams and general trauma, and an incidental side-effect is to supply you with that claim on my attention that you unconsciously crave. You see how the dark side of our mind always craps us up? But don’t worry about it, Macy. None of this is real, in the sense that Hamlin is there. Oh, sure, it’s real in a psychological sense, but so what?” Gomez grinned triumphantly. “You’re a smart boy. You’ve been following all this, right?”

Macy said, “Isn’t it possible to run some new EEGs all the same? What if I did come up with a double wave pattern?”

“You really want me to coddle you, don’t you?”

“Would it be so hard to make an empirical test?”

“I could do it in five minutes.”

“Why not, then?”

“Because I don’t believe in giving in to an outpatient’s weepy fantasies. You think you’re my first reconstruct job? I’ve had a hundred of you. I know what’s possible and what isn’t. If I tell you Hamlin is eradicated, it’s because I know Hamlin is eradicated. I’m not just being a bull-headed bastard.”

“All right, so I’m irrational,” Macy said. “But if I had the evidence of the EEG in front of me—”

“I won’t play that game with you. The fantasy came from inside you; let the cure for it come from in there too. Sweat it out. Convince yourself that your belief in Hamlin’s continued existence is nothing but a move to get sympathy from us.”

“And if the hallucinations don’t go away?”

“They have to.”

“If they don’t, though?”

“You’ll be here again next Tuesday,” Gomez said. “I won’t be seeing you then. Dr. Ianuzzi will, and as you know she’s an entirely different kind of doctor. Sweet and refined and sympathetic, whereas I’m a vulgar and hostile son of a bitch. If this stuff is still bothering you then, maybe she’ll run an EEG for you, though I hope she doesn’t I won’t, Macy. I can’t. The top sergeant never kisses you and tucks you in, no matter how piteously you ask him, and I’m top sergeant on this team. So come back next week.”

Gomez stood up. “I saw you on the late news last night. You weren’t bad at all.”

The next morning he found a message cube addressed to him in his box at the office. Puzzled, he plugged the glossy little cassette into his desk’s output slot. The face of the girl who had talked to him on the street the week before appeared on the screen. Red-rimmed eyes, hollow cheeks. Her hair straggly, unkempt. She offered the camera an uncertain lopsided grin and said, “I saw you on holovision and so I knew where to send this. Please, Nat, don’t just ignore me. I can’t tell you—”

His hand shot out and killed the playback. Please, Nat. He couldn’t take that. The use of his old name: it was like slivers of wood under his fingernails, needles probing behind his eyes. Last night the dreams had been worse than ever. Seeing himself as Siamese twins, one body ripping and clawing at its identical brother. And then the trapdoor opening in the attic floor and the shambling disemboweled thing lurching up out of it. The girl had initiated all his traumas; there hadn’t been bad dreams before that miserable accidental meeting. He wasn’t going to give her a second chance to screw him up. If that bastard Gomez wouldn’t offer supportive therapy, he was simply going to have to defend himself against potential inner turmoil. And therefore it was necessary to avoid new sources of anguish.

Macy switched the output control to Erase and reached for the button. Then he saw the girl’s sad, eroded face in his mind. A fellow human being. She also suffers. I could at least listen once.

He turned to Playback again and she reappeared, saying, “I saw you on holovision and so I knew where to send this. Please, Nat, don’t just ignore me. I can’t tell you how much you still mean to me, even after everything. I know you’ve been through Rehab and things must be very strange to you, and you don’t want to hear from people out of your old life. But finding you like that was such a miracle that I can’t simply pretend you don’t exist. Because I can’t keep going like this much longer, Nat I’m in bad shape. I need help. I’m sinking and somebody’s got to throw me a rope.”

There was more in that vein. She said she’d wait for him Wednesday night at six o’clock on the northeast corner of 227th and Broadway, opposite the network building, and that she’d be waiting for him the same time the next two nights also, in case he wasn’t free Wednesday. Or if he wanted to make other arrangements he could call her at her home, any day after eleven in the morning, such-and-such a number. With all my love. Yours truly, Lissa Moore.

I can’t, he thought. I don’t dare. He erased the cube. That night he left ten minutes early, going out the building’s east entrance to avoid her. He did the same on Thursday and Friday.

On Monday there was a new cube from her. He carried it around for three hours, unwilling to erase it, afraid to play it, and finally slipped it into the slot. On the screen, her pale face against a black velvet backdrop. The mouth drawn into a quirky grimace. A hypothyroid bulge to the eyes that he hadn’t noticed before. The lighting in the booth where she’d recorded the message was too bright, and it struck her cheeks so fiercely that it seemed to strip them to the bone. Her voice, blurting, unmodulated: “You didn’t come. I waited, but you didn’t come. All right Nat Paul. Maybe you don’t give a damn about me. Maybe you’ve got your own neck to look out for and can’t fool around with me. I won’t bother you after today. I’ll wait tonight, six o’clock, same corner, Broadway and 227th, northeast side. You aren’t there by half past eight I’ll be dead by nine. I mean it. Now it’s up to you.”