“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 bullheaded 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.”
THREE
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 cafet
eria-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.