The Second Trip

4

He was at work in his studio again, after too long a layoff. All the sculpting equipment covered with a fine coating of dust. Maybe the delicate inner mechanisms are ruined, or at least imprecise. Try to build an armature for a man, end up with a chimp, something like that. He checked all the calibration carefully: everything in order, surprisingly. Just dusty. Ought to be, after all these years. A wonder it wasn’t busted up by vandals. Fucking vandals all over the place. Goths, too. He touched the main keyboard lightly. This was going to be his chef d’oeuvre, a group composition, a contemporary equivalent of The Burghers of Calais. But fragmented, intense, multivalued. Call it something unpretentious, like The Human Condition.

A fucking headache getting all the models together at the same time. But the group interactions are important: shit, they’re the whole point of the thing! There they all stand, now. The fat lady from the circus, eight hundred pounds of quivering suet. Half a ton of laughs. The kid from the student co-op, the one with the shaven head. Gomez, the skull doctor, for that little touch of hostility. The pregnant chick from the supersupermarket. Get the clothes off, baby, show that bulge. Bellybutton sticking way out like a handle. And the vice-president from the bank, very very proper, turn him on a little when we’re ready to start. Also the old plaster model from art school days, Apollo Belvedere, missing his prick. A real technical stunt, trying to make psychosculpture out of a hunk of plaster. Faking in the appropriate responses: the test of a master. A cat, too, the one-eyed one from downstairs, gray and white with maybe a dozen claws on each paw, the way it looks.

Lastly, Lissa. My beloved. Stand next to the banker, honey. Turn a little to the left. The banker lifts his hand. He wants to grab your tit, but he doesn’t dare, and he hangs there caught in the tension between wanting and holding back. Your nipples ought to be erect for this: you ought to be in heat, some. Wait, I’ll do it. A tickle or two down here, yes, look at them standing up.

Okay! Okay! Places, everybody! Group interaction, take one! I want each of you to project the emotion we talked about before, project just that emotion, as purely as you can. And really live it. Don’t say to yourself, I’m posing for an artist, but say, I’m so-and-so and this is my life, this is my soul, and I’m radiating it in big chunks so he can grab it with his machine and turn it into a masterpiece. Ready? Ready? Hey, you sucks, why aren’t you holding the pose? Who gave you permission to dissolve? Let’s have some fucking stability in here! Hold it! Hold it! Hold it!

He was running as fast as he could, and the effort was killing him. A band of hot metal around his chest. His eyes ready to pop out of his head. He had turned left outside the restaurant, onto Broadway, down the dark street in long loping strides, thinking at first that he was going to get away, but then he heard the footsteps precisely matching his, a clop for his clop, on and on, and knew he wouldn’t escape. Don’t look back. Something may be gaining on you.

Nat Hamlin running smoothly behind him, wearing the same body as his only four years younger. Shouting obscenities as he ran. What a foul mouth he has! You’d think artists were aesthetic types, more refined, and yet here comes this anthology of smut running after me. Shouting, Hey, you, Macy, you dumb cocksucker, slow down! We got a lot to talk about, you asshole!

Sure we do. The first thing we talk about is which of us dies and which of us lives, and I know right away what your position is on that, Nat. So I’m just going to keep on running until I drop. Maybe you’ll drop first, even though you’re younger. With your acid and your golds and your broads tearing you down, and I’ve lived a clean life in the Center all these years.

On. On. Almost at the bridge, now. The shining towers of Old Manhattan ahead of me. Hamlin still screaming garbage. Isn’t that one of the network hovereyes up there? Sure it is! Following right along, taping the whole thing, just in case a nice sweet murder happens. Call the police, you dumb machine! Look, there’s a lunatic on my ass, a convicted criminal making an illegal breakthrough to life after having been eradicated! See, see, he’s got my face! Why don’t you do something? I’m a network man, can’t you tell? Paul Macy. Number six on the late news. I know, you’re just a machine, an objective reporter, a self-contained self-propelled passive observer, but screw all that now. My life’s at stake. If he catches up with me. And I can’t hold out much longer. Fire in my guts. All that spaghetti in there going up and down with every stride. Liver and lights ajiggle. Oh, Christ, a hand on my shoulder. Tag, I’m it!

Down on the ground. His knees on the crooks of my arms. Pinned. His lips drooling. A lunatic with my face. Get off! Get off! Get off! And he laughs. And over his right shoulder I see the hovereye recording everything. Wonderful. Now we bring you the final moments of Paul Macy, thirty-nine, tragically slain by his berserk alter ego. After this brief message from the makers of Acapulco Golds. Going. Going. Go—

He was moving warily through a sleepy suburb, Queens or Staten Island, he wasn’t sure which. They all looked the same. A biting January day. High-pressure system sitting on the city: not even a cloud in the sky, just a bright blank blue shield pressing down, no hint of oncoming snow, though some blackened heaps of the Christmas snowfall still lined the curb. In this sort of dryness it was difficult to believe it would ever snow again. The leafless trees like gaunt bundles of sticks, silently shouting, I am an oak, I am a maple, I am a tulip tree, and nobody listening because they all look the same. Squat two-story brick houses, reasonably far apart, on both sides of the street. The kiddies at school. The hubbies at work. A hot little wifey behind each picture window.

He wasn’t sure how he had found his way here. Starting out from Connecticut about half past nine in the morning, the work going all wrong, a fucking nightmare in the studio finishing in a horrid botch of a week’s good labors, and then driving into the city, crossing two or maybe three bridges, ending up here. And the familiar yellow haze now swathing the temples and forehead, the steamy mist of madness. He welcomed it. There comes a time when you have to surrender to the dark forces. Yes, yes, go on, take possession of me. Nat Hamlin at your service. Call me Raskolnikov Junior. Ha, that crazy Rooshian understood something about intensity! How we boil inside. And sometimes boil over.

Look at this house, now. A completely stereotyped suburban villa, maybe fifty years old, product of the buggy seventies, the creepy sixties. I shall bring some illumination into its dreary existence. By an act of will I shall intensify the life-experience of its inhabitant. See how easy it is to force the side door? Just this flimsy little latch: you insert the slicer, you waggle it, you push…yes.

Now we go inside. Good morning, ma’am, this is the mad rapist, the Darien cocksmith, I’m peddling ecstatic terror this happy day. No, don’t scream, I’m friendly. I never do unnecessary injury. I assure you that I wouldn’t be here at all except for this irresistible compulsion I have. Is it my fault I’m off my hinges? A man is entitled to have a breakdown. Especially if he’s a serious important artist. You ought to be thrilled to know who’s going to fuck you. You’re part of one of the most significant personal disintegrations in the history of western art. Like, suppose I was Van Gogh and I cut off my fucking ear right here on your kitchen linoleum? Wouldn’t that give you at least a peripheral place in his biography? Well, all right, then. He had his collapse, I’m having mine. Come here, now. Let’s get this tunic off you. See what kind of merchandise you’re offering. Sorry, I wouldn’t have ripped it if you had been cooperating. Why fight it? This can be much more meaningful for you if you just spread and give in. There. There. See, you’re creaming for me! How can you deny the activity of your own Bartholin glands? This lubrication brands you whore, milady! Ah, In. In. In. That’s the ticket. In and out, in and out. Con amore. Allegro, allegrissimo! Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. Zip it up. Out the door. Mad rapist strikes again. Thus we enact the latest fascinating episode in our case of personality disruption. I look so cleancut for being a psychopath. Oops! Hey, no, officer! Put that stunner down!

Don’t—hey, watch it—I surrender, damn you, I surrender! I’ll go peacefully! I’ll—go—peacefully—

Blinking furiously, soggy-headed, disoriented, he woke up. He found himself in bed, his own bed, the covers up around his chin, the lights on in the bedroom. Darkness beyond the window. The sheets cool against his skin: somebody has undressed him. From his elbow there flowed rivulets of agony. For a moment he was totally unable to recollect his last previous period of consciousness; then the incident in the people’s restaurant came back to him. Walking out on Lissa. The girl calling after him. Nat Hamlin’s voice whispering snakelike in his ear. Calamity. Collapse. Chaos. “Hello?” he said, voice breaking, ragged. “Is anybody here? Hello? Hello?”

Out of the other room came the girl. Framed in the doorway, naked. Even more slender than he had imagined, ribcage visible, the double ridge of muscle on the flat belly, thighs lean with a gap of an inch or two between them all the way up. The breasts still full, though. Not big boobs but nicely shaped. Triangular red bush. Her skin pink, scrubbed-looking, still moist. She’s had a bath. Looks about five years younger now.

“How long have you been up?” she asked him.

“Maybe half a minute. What day is this?”

“It’s still the same Monday night. No, it’s Tuesday morning by now. Half past one in the morning.”

“You brought me home?”

“With some help. There was this cabdriver in the people’s restaurant. He carried you out. Christ, I was scared, Paul. I thought you were dead!”

“Did you try to get a doctor?”

She laughed. “At this time of night? I just sat here and watched you and hoped you’d snap out of it. You seemed to be having nightmares. Your eyeballs rolling around under the lids. I touched your mind just once, more or less an accident, and it was pretty scary, something about being chased through a dark alley.” Coming over to the bed, she said, “Do you feel all right? Headache?”

“Headache, yes. Jesus.”

“After a while it looked like you were just sleeping. So I took a bath, like you said I needed. You should have seen the mud come off me. But you get to feeling so shitty sometimes that you don’t even bother to wash yourself, and that’s where I was at. Well, that’s over, now. I couldn’t figure out how to work your cassette player, so I’ve been inside reading a book, and—”

“What happened to me in the restaurant?” he asked.

She sat on the edge of the bed. He looked at her thighs and wanted to let his hand rest on them, but it took two tries before the quivering arm would lift itself and make the ten-inch journey. Her skin was cool and smooth. He stroked her thigh, up and down, midway between knee and crotch.

She said, “You got up to leave, remember? I didn’t think you were going to do it, but you did, and there you were, walking away from me. The one hope I had, walking away from me. And I knew I had hit bottom right there.”

“So you called out to me.”

“No,” she said. “I reached out. With my mind.”

“You didn’t shout my name? Yell at me to come back?”

“I didn’t open my mouth. I reached. And I made contact. With both of you.”

“Both?”

“I went right into your head, and there was someone called Paul Macy there, yes, but I hit you on another level, too, and I found Nat Hamlin. Coiled up like a spring. Hiding in the dark. I’ll never forget it in a million years. My mind arcing across the gap from me to you, and finding two of you. The hidden one. Or the sleeping one, I guess.”

—Sleeping is more accurate.

Hamlin’s voice. Macy jumped, yanking his hand back from Lissa as though she were a stove.

“Did you hear that?” he asked.

“I didn’t hear anything. But I felt a kind of twinge. A little jolt of ESP action.”

“It was Hamlin, talking inside me. He said, ‘Sleeping is more accurate.’ What the hell’s going on, Lissa?”

“He’s still inside you,” she said.

“No. No. That’s impossible. They all said he was gone forever.”

“I guess he wasn’t,” Lissa said. “A little bit of him left, down in the bottom of your head. Maybe you can’t ever fully wipe out a personality. Like you can breed a whole new frog if you’ve got a single cell of the old one’s body, and the new one will be identical to the old. Is that right? And so you had a couple of cells of Nat Hamlin still in your head, and I brought them back to life by touching them. I’m sorry, Paul. It’s all my fault.”

“It isn’t possible,” he said. “It’s just some hallucination I’m having.”

—You wish, brother.

“He’s really there,” Lissa said. “I felt him. A presence inside you. The two of you in one head.”

“No.”

—No?

“I didn’t mean to bring him back, Paul. I mean, I loved him, yes, but he was no good, he hurt people, he was a criminal. When they sentenced him to be wiped out, they did the right thing. I don’t want him back. How can we get rid of him?”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Macy. “He was got rid of before. He can be got rid of again.”

—Up yours, friend.

Lissa managed a brave smile. She took his hand between hers and clamped it. She looked transformed by soap and hot water, no longer the moody, embittered, disturbed waif of the restaurant. He realized that his collapse now tied her to him. She had brought him home. She had cared for him. He couldn’t throw her out. She said, “Can I get you anything? A drink? A gold?”

“Not right now. I’d like to see—if I can stand up—”

“You ought to rest A nasty shock you had.”

“Nevertheless.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed and tested his feet a couple of times before putting his weight on them. Precariously rising. Wobbly. Standing there showing his nakedness to her. Then a gesture that astounded him: modestly moving his hand to cover his crotch. Immediately pulling it back; he could think of six different reasons why it was crazy to want to hide himself from her, starting with the fact that she had been this body’s other owner’s mistress for all those months years ago.

He took a step and another, and found himself in the middle of the room, lurching a little. His left elbow was stiff and sore, which was expectable enough, considering that all his weight had landed on it. Lucky thing it wasn’t broken. But there was also a curious numbness around the right side of his face. No sensation in the cheek, and his lips felt funny in the corner of his mouth. As though he’d had an anesthetic shot at the dentist. As though he’d had a stroke, maybe.

He looked at his face in the bedroom mirror. Yes, a little lopsided, the way his father had looked after his stroke. The mouth pulled back, the lower eyelid drooping. Macy prodded the numb part of his cheek and tried to push the lips into their proper configuration. Everything hard, like plastic flesh.

—Hi ho.

“Are you doing that?”

“What’s the matter, Paul?”

“My face. He’s holding the muscles. I can’t get him to ease off.”

“Oh, Christ, Paul!” Terrified.

A battle of wills. Her terror infected him. This was grisly, having the side of your face held captive by something in your brain. Like going swimming and coming up with a lobster pinching your cock. He fought back. Tugging at the muscles, trying to soften the flesh. Re-lax—re-lax—re-lax. Yes. Getting the upper hand, or whatever. Some sensation returning, now. The mouth no longer distorted. Hamlin scuttling lobsterlike into deeper recesses of his brain, letting go. Tomorrow I scoot over to the Rehab Center and have this taken care of. A complete and exhaustive burnout of whatever vestiges of the previous self still remain. Macy glanced at the mirror again. Opening and closing his mouth, practicing big grins. The first round goes to me. He stumbled back to the bed and toppled onto it, quivering.

“You’re soaked with sweat!” Lissa cried.

“It was a real struggle. The muscles.”

“I watched it. Your face was writhing and grimacing. It looked like you were going crazy. Here, get back under the cover. You ought to rest. Would you like to smoke?”

“Maybe that’s not such a bad idea.”

She brought two golds over. Solemnly they lit up and went through the ritual of puffing, the deep drag, suck in lots of air. As the hallucinogenic smoke wandered through his lungs he imagined it traveling swiftly to his brain and befuddling the demon that Lissa’s ESP had conjured into life there. Lull him back to sleep. And then, when Hamlin’s groggy, drive a silver spike through his heart. Macy couldn’t feel any trace of the other’s presence now. For all he knew, the pot really knocked him out.

“Turn out the light,” Macy said. “Get into bed with me. We’ll lie here and smoke.”

Her thighs cool against his. He felt feverish. The strain of the last few hours, no doubt. The tips of the golds glowing in the dark. They don’t burn as fast now as they did when you had to roll your own. Time to meditate, time to contemplate. But eventually they were gone. Stubbing out the roaches. He was still unable to detect the presence of the passionate, warped soul of Nat Hamlin within him. Pot the panacea, maybe.

He reached toward Lissa.

Moving about in the bed was difficult, because of his sore elbow. Yet he managed. His right arm curling around her back and the hand coming out front on the far side to cup her distant breast. Soft firm bouncy globe, overflowing his clutching fingers. Trapping the nipple gently between index and middle, twitching his digits tenderly to excite her. Then, not easily, he pivoted upward, wriggled, touched his bad arm briefly and dismayingly against the headboard, and succeeded in wedging his right knee between her thighs without losing his grip on her breast. Her legs parted and he got the top of his knee up against the warmth of her. She made little purring sounds. The trouble was that he couldn’t kiss her in this position, his neck simply wouldn’t reach, but okay, this would do for now. Tentatively he flexed the stiff arm, planning to slide it across to her groin if it wasn’t too painful for him.

This was the first time since he had become Paul Macy that he’d been in bed with a woman.

Oh, they’d given him a set of memories. Probably Gomez had taken care of the programming job, the little horny bastard. Dreaming up phantom lays for him. A proper heterosexual background, not even neglecting a spot of innocent pubescent homophily. Here he was with Jeanie Grossman in the cabin at Mount Rainier. Sweet sixteen, both of them, tiny boobies cold and hard in his hands, Jeanie’s long black hair all disheveled, her thighs clamped tight on his probing hand. Oh, no, no, Paul, don’t, please don’t, she was saying, and then she was breathing hoarsely and murmuring, Be gentle, darling, just the way they said it in the dumb romantic novels Gomez most likely had stolen all this from, Oh, be gentle with me, Paul, it’s my first time. On her and in her, wham and bam. Frantic hasty poking. My first time too, but he doesn’t tell her that. Jeanie Grossman gasping out her inaugural orgasm with the white bulk of Mount Rainier peering over her shoulder. But of course it hadn’t happened. Not to him. To Gomez, maybe, long ago; maybe Gomez programmed his own sex life into all his reconstructs, for lack of imagination. Poor Jeanie, whoever you are, a hundred different men think they’ve had your cherry.

And there was much more to Macy’s curriculum vita. The married woman, really old, easily past thirty, who had fallen upon him with sudden ferocity when he was seventeen years old and selling encyclopedias in the summer. Sitting next to her on the couch with all his charts outspread, saying, This is an outstanding feature, our three-dimensional visual aids presentation, and we have a choice of six bindings in beautiful decorator colors, and would you like to hear about our brand-new home videotape supplement, and while he prattles she pushes the brochures off his lap and dives for his zipper and then the amazing shattering sensation of her lips engulfing his cock.

Good old Gomez. And the nurse at Gstaad, seducing him in his huge plaster cast. And the plump German girl who liked him to use the butler’s entrance. And the one with the rubber underwear and the whip. The endurance contest in Kyoto, too. The orgy on the beach at Herzlia. The dear doctor had stocked him amply with vivid and varied erotica. But what was the use? None of it was real, at least not so far as Paul Macy was concerned, and so he could no more claim it as earned experience than if he had got it all from Henry Miller and the divine marquis. He was minus any authentic lovemaking memories. So in effect he was about to lose his innocence at the age of thirty-nine. But as he fondled Lissa’s slim sleek body he realized the value of having had all those imaginary episodes of the flesh implanted in him. A real virgin would be up against anatomical confusions, the mechanics of the thing, the correct angle of entry, all those problems. He at least knew where the way in was to be found. Secondhand knowledge, maybe, but useful. The Rehab Center hadn’t turned him loose unable to cope.

One small problem, though. He didn’t seem to be able to get it up.

Lissa was primed and ready, nicely lubricated, and his item still hung slack. Through slitwide eyes she watched him and frowned. The juices souring and curdling in her as she waited to have her vacancy filled. At last understanding the reason for the delay. Cuddling against him; her hand to the scrotum, a light tickling, very skillful. Ah. Yes. Some wind in the sails, finally. The old familiar rigidifying that he had never before experienced. Up. Up. Up. At full mast, now. Swing smoothly around, slide yourself into her. They made adjustments of their positions. She prepared herself to receive him. He was athrob, inflamed, aloft.

Then came a laugh from within and a cold devilish voice:

—Take a look at this, pal.

Blossoming on the screen of his mind the image of Lissa spread wide on another bed in another room, and himself—no, not himself but Nat Hamlin—poised above her, seizing the calves of her legs, draping them over his shoulders, now lowering himself to her with ithyphallic vitality. Nailing her. And as that inward consummation took place Macy felt his own rod lose its vehemence. Limp again; shriveled, infantile, a wee-wee instead of a cock. Wearily he sagged against the girl. Doing it was impossible for him now. Not with him watching. I carry my own audience in my head. Hamlin, still roaring with turbulent inner laughter, was sending up scene after scene out of his no doubt actual experience, coupling with Lissa in this position, in that one, Lissa on top, Lissa down on her knees being had dogwise, the whole copulatory biography of their long-ago liaison, and Macy, helpless, his phantom images of Jeanie Grossman and the encyclopedia woman swept away by this gushing incursion of reality, lay stunned and sobbing and impotent waiting for Hamlin to stop tormenting him.

Lissa didn’t seem to understand what was happening, only that Macy had lost his hard at a critical moment and was plainly upset about it. Her long thin arms cradled him affectionately. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “You’ve been under a terrible strain, and anyway that kind of thing can happen to anybody. It’ll be better later. Just lie here and rest. It doesn’t matter. It’s all right. It’s all right.” Pressing his cheek against her breast. “Try to get some sleep,” she said. He nodded. Closing his eyes, trying to relax. Out of the darkness Hamlin’s voice:

—That was just to let you know I’m still here.