The Second Trip

3

A few minutes past six, he was still in the central newsroom, finishing his last piece of the day. A cold sullen anger still gripped him. Let the bitch kill herself. I won’t be blackmailed like that. She doesn’t mean anything to me except trouble.

With a sharp stabbing gesture he summoned control of the hovereye that patrolled the street outside the network office building, forever keeping watch for demonstrators, bombers, self-immolators. With newly skillful motions Macy brought the airborne camera down the block until it was scanning the streetcorner where Lissa had said she’d wait. Now the fine control, the vernier.

Yes, there she is. Pacing in a taut little circle. A self-contained zone of tension on the busy street. Damn her. She can do whatever she likes to herself. Whatever she likes.

Macy signed himself out of the newsroom and, gliding on the glacial flow of his rage, drifted toward the liftshaft. Down forty stories. Sweeping quickly through the lobby. Outside. A soft spring evening. Long lines of patient homegoers wearily filing into the tubemouth. So easy to avoid her, in this crowd. Just slide on past.

He found himself walking toward her, though. One-and-two-and-one-and-two; he couldn’t stop. She seemed to be talking to herself; eyes turned inward, she didn’t notice him approaching. From twenty yards away he glowered at her. Who the hell does she think she is, trying to use me this way? Playing on my sympathies. Oh, I need you, I need you so much! With throbbing violins. And working on my sense of guilt. Meet me on the corner or I’ll jump off the Palisades Bridge! Sure. What business is it of mine if you want to jump off a bridge, baby? I’ve got nothing to feel guilty about. Guilt? I haven’t done a thing. I’m brand new in the world. Christ, I’m even a virgin. That’s right: Paul Macy is a virgin. A goddamn virgin.

He was only a few feet from her, now, but she hadn’t seen him yet. He started to touch her arm, but halted as a curious discomfort flitted across his skull. That sense of doubleness, again, that scrambling of identities. Disorientation. A bonging sensation like the muffled tolling of a distant bell. With it came a fast spasm of nausea, a light tightening around his Adam’s apple.

Then all the disturbing symptoms vanished. He nudged her elbow. “All right,” he said gruffly. “Wake up! Here I am. You’re pulling a lousy stinking trick, but I fell for it. And here I am.”

“Nat!” Looking at him in mingled amazement and delight. Color stippling her cheeks. Eyes fluttering: she’s scared of me, he realized suddenly. He experienced a second spasm of strange uneasiness, here and gone before it had any real effect. “Oh, Nat, thank God you came!”

“No,” he said. “Let’s get this established once and for all. My name’s Paul Macy. You want to have anything to do with me, you call me by that name, and no options about it. Paul Macy. Say it now.”

“P-Paul.”

“Say it all.”

“Paul Macy. Paul Macy.”

“Good.” He was starting to get a headache: two spikes of pain converging on the center of his head. This girl was no good for him. “Nat Hamlin doesn’t exist any more, and don’t you forget it,” he said. “Now: you wanted me to meet you, and I met you. What’s on your mind?”

“You sound so cruel, Paul.” She stumbled on the Paul.

“Just annoyed. Your suicide threat—what a miserable tactic that is. I goddam well should have called your bluff.”

“I wasn’t bluffing.”

“Whatever you say. I fell for it I’m here. What do you want?”

“We can’t talk here,” she said. “Not in the middle of a crowd. Not out on the street.”

“Where, then?”

“Your place?”

He shook his head. “Absolutely not.”

“Mine, then. We can be there in fifteen minutes. Everything’s filthy, but—”

“What about a restaurant?” he suggested.

She brightened. “That would be okay. Any place you like. One of your favorites, where you’d feel comfortable.”

He tried to think of one of his favorite restaurants.

“I don’t know any restaurants,” he said. “You pick one.”

“You don’t know any? But you always ate out, practically every night. It was like a compulsion with you. You—”

“That was Nat Hamlin,” he said. “Hamlin might have been the one who ate out a lot. If you say so. But not me. Not yet.”

He reached into his stock of memories, looking for the names of some Manhattan restaurants. Zero. They really should have given him some restaurant memories when they were constructing the Paul Macy persona at the Rehab Center. It wouldn’t have been any big effort for them. They had given him all kinds of other things. Star of the high school lacrosse team. Chicken pox. A mother and a father. Breaking his leg on the slopes at Gstaad. Reading Proust and Hemingway. Putting his hand under Jeanie Grossman’s polo shirt. Thirty-five years of ersatz memories. But no information about restaurants. Maybe Gomez, Ianuzzi, and Brewster didn’t eat out much. Or perhaps the restaurant stuff was hidden in some cranny of his mind that he hadn’t found yet. He said, “I mean it. I’ve got no suggestions. You pick.”

“There’s a people’s restaurant two blocks from here. I’ve been having lunch at it a lot. You know it?”

“No.”

“We could go there,” she said.

It was a deep, narrow room with tarnishing brass walls and a bunch of sputtering defective light-loops threaded through the thatchwork ceiling. Service was cafeteria-style; you took what you wanted from servo-actuated cubbyholes along the power-counter. Then you found seats at dreary long community tables. Macy, following Lissa to the counter, whispered, “How do you know how much anything costs?”

“It’s a people’s restaurant.”

“So?”

“You don’t know what that is?”

“I’m new to a lot of this.”

“You pay whatever you can afford,” she said. “If you don’t have any money, you just eat, and make it up next time. Or you go around back and help wash dishes.”

“Does the system work?” he asked.

“Not very well.” She smiled bleakly and began piling food on her tray. In a few moments she had it completely crammed with dishes. Five different kinds of synthetic meats, a mound of salads and vegetables, three rolls, and other things. He was more sparing: vegetable juice, proteoid steak, fried kelp, a cup of no-caffy. At the end of the counter stood a central-credit console. Lissa walked by it without giving it a glance. Macy hesitated a moment, confused, peering into the glossy dark-green screen. In a flustered way he authorized the console to charge his credit account ten dollars. A fat flat-faced girl waiting behind him in line snorted contemptuously. He wondered if he had paid too much or too little. Lissa was already far down the aisle, heading for an empty table at the back of the restaurant. He seized his tray and hurried after her.

They sat facing each other over the bare grim plank of the tabletop. “I’ve got some golds,” she said. “Want one?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Try.” She pulled out a pack. Its brim snapped up and a cigarette popped out. He took it. She took one also, and he carefully watched her nip the ignition pod with her nail. He did the same. A deep pull. Almost at once he felt the dizziness and the acceleration of his heartbeat. She winked at him and blew smoke in his face.

Then she started to eat, stuffing the food down as if she hadn’t had anything in weeks. The way she wolfed it, so unself-conscious in her gluttony, fascinated him: it was like watching a fire sweep through a dry meadow. Head forward, jaws working frantically. Sounds of chewing. White teeth flashing. He sat still, dragging on the cigarette, ineffectually trying to spear a strand of kelp with his fork. She looked up. “Aren’t you hungry?” she asked, mouth full.

“Not as hungry as you are, I guess.”

“Don’t mind me.”

Her wrists were dirty and there was a film of grime visible on her neck. She was wearing the same blue coat as the other day. Again, no makeup. Her fingernails were ragged. But she wasn’t merely outwardly unkempt; she conveyed a sense of inner disintegration that terrified him. Obviously she had once been a beautiful girl, perhaps extraordinarily beautiful. Traces of that beauty remained. She had a parched, ravaged look, though, as if fevers of the soul had been consuming her substance. Her eyes, large and bloodshot, never were still. Always a birdlike flickering from place to place. Cheeks hollower than they ought to be. She could use about ten pounds more, he figured. And a bath. He stubbed out his roach and cut himself a slice of steak. Filet of papier-mâché. He gagged.

Lissa said, “God, that’s better! Some food in the gut again.”

“Why were you so hungry?”

“I always am. I’m burning up.”

“Are you sick?”

She shrugged. “Who knows?” Her eyes momentarily rested on his. “I’m trying to think of you as Paul Macy. It isn’t easy, sitting here with Nat Hamlin opposite me.”

“Nat Hamlin doesn’t exist.”

“You really don’t remember me?”

“Zero,” he said.

“Shit almighty! What did they do to you at the Rehab Center?”

He said, “They pumped Nat Hamlin full of memory-dissolving drugs until every bit of him was flushed away. Which left a kind of zombie, you see? A healthy empty body. Society doesn’t like to waste a good healthy body. So then they built me inside the zombie’s head.”

“Built you? What do you mean, built?”

“Created an identity for me.” He shut his eyes a moment. There was a tightness at his collar. Choking sensation. He wasn’t supposed to have to explain any of this. The world was supposed to take it all for granted. “They built up a past, a cluster of events that I could move around in as if it had really happened. Like I grew up in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and moved to Seattle when I was twelve. My father was a propulsion engineer and my mother taught school. They’re both dead now. No brothers. No sisters. I collected African stamps and I did a lot of hunting and fishing. I went to college, UCLA, class of ’93, got a degree in philosophy of communication. Two years of national service, stationed in Bolivia and Ecuador, doing voice-overs for the People’s Democratic Channel. Then various TV and HV jobs in Europe and the States, and now here in New York. Et cetera, et cetera.”

“God,” she said. “And it’s all phony?”

“Pretty near. It follows Nat Hamlin’s biography only as closely as it has to. Like in age. Or Hamlin broke a leg when he was twenty-six and you can see that in the bone, so they’ve given me a skiing accident for that year.”

“What would happen if I checked the UCLA alumni records, looking for Paul Macy in the class of ’93?”

“You’d find him. With a Rehab asterisk saying that this is a pro forma entry covering a retroactively established identity. Same thing if you looked up the Idaho Falls birth register. They do a very thorough job.”

“Christ,” Lissa said. And shivered. “How creepy this is! You actually are a whole new person.”

“I don’t know how whole I am. But I’m new, all right.”

“You don’t have any idea who I am, then.”

“You used to pose for Nat Hamlin, didn’t you?”

She looked startled. “How come you know that? I haven’t said anything about—”

“The day you stopped me in the street,” he said, “while we were talking, I got a flash picture of you naked in a kind of studio, and I was leaning over a complicated keyboard thing and telling you to scream. Like a psycho-sculptor trying to get an emotional effect. I saw it maybe half a second, then it was gone.” He moistened his lips. “It was like a piece of Nat Hamlin’s blotted-out mind surfacing into mine.”

“Or a piece of my mind reaching into yours,” she said.

“Eh?”

“It happens. I can’t keep it under control.” A shrill giggle. “Wherever you got it from, it was right. I was one of Nat Hamlin’s models. From January to August, ’06, when he was working on his Antigone 21. The one the Metropolitan bought. His last big work, before his breakdown. You know about his breakdown?”

“Some. Don’t talk about it.” He felt a band of fire across his forehead. Simply being close to someone out of the old existence this long was painful. “Can I have another gold?”

She offered the cigarette and said, “I was also his mistress, all through ’05 and most of ’06. He said he’d get a divorce and marry me. Like Rembrandt. Like Renoir. Falling in love with the model. Only he went out of his head instead. Doing all those crazy things.”

Macy, suddenly vulnerable, tried to stop her with an upraised hand, but there was no halting the flow of her words. “The last time I saw him was Thanksgiving Day, 2006. At his studio. We had a fight and he threw me down the stairs.” She winced. Into his mind a searing image: an endless flight, the girl falling, falling, skirt up around her thighs, legs kicking, arms clutching, the dwindling scream, the sudden twist and impact. A sound of something cracking. “In the hospital six weeks with a broken pelvis. When I got out they were hunting him from Connecticut to Kansas. And then—”

“No more!” he yelled. People turned to look.

She shrank away from him. “I’m sorry,” she said, folding into herself, huddling, shaking. His cheeks were hot, were shame and turmoil. After a moment she said softly, “Does it hurt a lot when I talk about him?”

A nod. Silence.

“You asked me to see you because you were in trouble,” he said at length.

“Yes.”

“Would you honestly have killed yourself if I hadn’t shown up?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I’m all alone. I have nobody at all. And I’m going out of my mind.”

“How do you know?”

“I hear voices. Other people’s minds come into mine. And mine goes into theirs. Extrasensory perception.”

“ESP?” he said. “Like—what is it, mental telepathy?”

“Telepathy. That’s what it is. ESP. Telepathy.”

“I didn’t think that that really existed.”

A bitter laugh. “You bet your ass. Sitting right here in front of you. The genuine article.”

“You can read minds?” he said, feeling dreamfogged and unreal.

“Not exactly read. Just touch, mind to mind. It isn’t under my conscious control. Things drift in, drift out. Voices humming in my brain, a word, a phrase, an image.

It’s been happening since I was ten, twelve years old. Only much worse now. Much, much worse.” Trembling. “The past, two years. Hell. Absolute hell.”

“How so?”

“I don’t know who I am any more a lot of the time,” she said. “I get to be five, six people at once. This mushy noise in my head. The buzzing. The voices. Like static, only sometimes words drift in on the static. I pick up all these weird emotions, and they scare me. Not knowing if I’m imagining or not. There’s somebody two tables away who wants to rape me. Wishes he dared. In his head I’m naked and bloody, spreadeagled, arms and legs tied to the furniture. And over to my left, someone else, a woman, she’s transmitting the odor of shit. She sees me like some kind of giant turd sitting here. I don’t know why. And then you—”

“No,” he said. “Don’t tell me.”

“It isn’t really ugly. You think I’m dirty and you want to take me home and give me a bath. And fuck me afterward. That’s okay. I know I’m dirty. And I’d like to go to bed with you, too. But I can’t stand all this crosstalk in my head. I’m wide open, Nat, wide open to every stray thought, and—”

“Paul.”

“What?”

“I said, call me Paul. It’s important to me.”

“But you’re—”

“Paul Macy.”

“Just now, though, you were coming through as Nat Hamlin to me. From deep underneath.”

“No. Hamlin’s gone,” he said. “I’m Paul Macy.” A feeling of seasickness. The light-loops swaying and hissing overhead. He found himself covering her hand with his. Ragged cuticles against his fingertips. He said, “If you’re suffering so much, why don’t you get some help? Maybe there’s a cure for ESP. Is that what you want, a cure? I could take you to see Dr. Ianuzzi, she’s a very sensitive woman, she could get you into the right kind of psychiatric hospital and—”

“And they’d give me shock treatment,” Lissa said. “Memory dislocation with drugs, like I was a criminal. They’d wash half my brain out trying to heal me. There wouldn’t be anything of me left I’m afraid of therapy. I haven’t ever gone. I don’t want to go.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then what am I supposed to do for you?” he asked.

“I don’t know that either, Paul. I’m absolutely fucked up in the head, so there’s no use asking me rational questions.” Her eyes glittering eerily. Sick, sick, sick. “What you really ought to do,” she said, “is get the hell away from me, right now, like you’ve wanted to do since the first minute you saw me. Only don’t. God, please, don’t. Help me. Help me.”

“How?”

“Just be with me a little. I’m all alone. I’ve cut myself off from the whole world. Look, you know how it is with me? I don’t have a job. I don’t have friends any more. I look in the mirror and I see my own skeleton. I sit home and wait for the voices to go away, and they scream and scream at me until my head is coming off. I live off the welfare checks. Then I go out for a walk one day, on and on and on, way the hell uptown, and I crash into some guy on the street and he turns around and he’s Nat Hamlin, he’s the only man I ever really loved, only he isn’t Hamlin any more, he’s Paul Macy, that’s what he says, and—” She caught her breath. “All right. You don’t know me at all and I guess I can’t say I know you. But I know your body. Every inch. That’s a familiar thing to me, a landmark, something I can anchor myself to. Let me anchor. Let me hold on. I’m going under, Paul. I’m drowning, and maybe you can hold me up, for the sake of what I used to mean to the person you used to be. Maybe. Maybe for a little while. You don’t owe it to me, you don’t owe me anything, you could get right up and walk out of here and you’d have every right. But don’t. Because I need you.”

Sweat-soaked, numb, fists pressed together under the table, he felt a wild surge of pity for her. He felt like saying, Yes, of course, whatever I can do to help you. Come home with me, take a bath, let’s blow a few golds and talk about things, this telepathy of yours, this delusion. Not because I ever knew you. Not because the things that happened between you and Nat Hamlin give you any claim on me. But only because you’re a suffering human being and you’ve turned to me for help, and how can I refuse? An act of grace. Yes, yes, I will be your anchor.

Instead he said, “You’re asking a hell of a lot from me. I’m not the most stable individual in the world either. And I’m under doctor’s orders to keep away from people out of Nat Hamlin’s life. You could be big trouble for me. And me for you. I think the risks for both of us are bigger than the rewards.”

“Does that mean you don’t want to get involved?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Sorry I wasted so much of your time,” she said. In a dead voice. No change of expression. Not really believing he means it, maybe.

“It wasn’t wasted. I only wish I was in shape to do you any good. But a Rehab lives right on the edge of collapse himself, in the beginning. He’s got to build a whole new life. So when you ask somebody like that to take on the additional burden—” All right, Macy. Stop explaining things, get up, walk out of here, before she starts crying and you start listening to her again. Up. You don’t owe her a thing. You have your own troubles and they aren’t small ones. Getting to his feet, now. The girl watching him, stricken, incredulous. Giving her a sickly smile, knowing that a smile of any kind is out of context when you’re condemning somebody to death. Turning. Walking away from her, up the aisle of the people’s restaurant, past the counter, the sauerkraut and the algaecakes. Another ten stride’s and you’re out the door.

A scream from the back of the room.

“No! Come back! Paul! Paul! Nat!”

Her words leaped across the gulf between them like a flight of arrows. Six direct hits. Thwack thwack thwack thwack thwack thwack! The last one a killer, straight through from back to chest. He staggered. St. Sebastian stumbling in the restaurant aisle. His brain on fire, something very strange happening in there, like the two hemispheres splitting apart and taking up independent existence. And then a voice, speaking quite distinctly from a point just above his left ear, saying:

—How could you walk out on her like that, you snotty creep?

He hit the floor hard, landing elbow-first. A stunning burst of pain. Within that cone of red agony a curious clarity of perception.

Who said that? he asked, losing consciousness. And, going under, he heard:

—I did. Nat Hamlin. Your twin brother Nat.