To Live Again and The Second Trip (37 page)

“You okay? Some kind of fit?”

“Please—if I could just sit down somewhere—”

“You need a doctor?”

“It’s only a little chest spasm—I’ve had them before—”

They took him inside. A bench in the waiting room. Advert globes floating in the air. Blinking their messages into his face. He was numb. Impossible even to think. A constant stream of people flowing by. Trains arriving, departing. Voices. Colors. After a while, his strength returned.

—If you try to go back for reconditioning, Macy, that’s what I’ll do to you, and not just a little squeeze. If necessary I’ll shut off your heart altogether. I can do it. I see where the nerve connections are now.

But then you’ll die too,
Macy said.

—That’s true. If it’s necessary for me to interrupt the life processes of this body that we’re sharing, we’ll both die. So what? I don’t expect you to commit suicide for the sake of getting rid of me. But I’m perfectly prepared to commit suicide for the sake of
keeping
you from getting rid of me, because I’ve got no choice. I’m a dead man anyway if you get inside a Rehab Center. So I offer you the ultimate threat. Keep away, or else. It wouldn’t be smart of you to call my bluff. For both our sakes, don’t.

I’m supposed to show up for weekly post-therapy sessions, though.

—Skip them.

It’s part of the court decree. If I don’t show up, they’re likely to issue a warrant for me.

—We’ll worry about that when the time comes. Meanwhile forget about therapy sessions.

But we can’t share a body,
Macy protested.
It’s insanity. There’s no room for two of us.

—Don’t worry about that now, either. We’ll work something out. For the time being we’re sharing, and you fucking well better accept the idea. Now get yourself aboard a city-bound train. Put some distance between me and that Center.

H
OME AGAIN, MID-MORNING. HIS
head throbbing. Not a peep out of Hamlin all the way back. The apartment seemed to have undergone a strange transformation in the two hours of his absence: previously a neutral place, wholly lacking emotional connotations, and now an alien and sinister cell, cramped and repellent.

The flat’s dark new tone astonished him. Its mysterious autumnal resonances. Its shadows where no shadows had been. Nothing had changed in it, really. Lissa hadn’t moved any furniture around or sprayed the walls a different color. And yet. And yet, how frightening it all looked now. How out of place he felt in it. That L-shaped bedroom, low ceiling, narrow bed jammed up against flimsy wall, old-fashioned light fixture dangling, bilious green paint, cheap smeary Picasso prints, slit of a window revealing splotchy May sunshine and two scraggly trees across the street—how ugly it looked, how coarse, how constricted, how squashed! Did people really live in places like this? Tiny bathroom, slick pink tiles. Not even an ultrasonic cleanser, just archaic sink and tub and crapper. A microscopic kitchen-dinette affair, everything jammed together, table, freezer, telephone screen, disposal unit, stove. At least a tiny buzz-cleanser for the dirty dishes. A sitting room, cheap red plastic couch, some books, cassettes, a video unit.

A prison for the soul. Our impoverished century: this is the best we can afford for human beings, after our long orgies of waste and destruction. For the last couple of weeks, this apartment had been his refuge, his harbor, his hermitage; if he thought about it at all, which he doubted, it had been in a friendly way. Why did it turn him off now? After a moment, he believed he knew. Hamlin’s sensibility now underlay his own. The sculptor’s sophisticated perceptions bleeding through to the Macy levels of their shared mind. Hamlin’s loathing for the apartment tinged Macy’s view of it. To Hamlin the proportions were wrong, the ambiance vile, the psychological texture of the place slimy and grimy, the inner environmental color a nasty one. Macy shivered. He visualized Hamlin as a kind of abscess in his brain, a pocket of pus, inaccessible, destructive.

Lissa was still in bed. That bothered him. The Protestant ethic: sleeping late equals rejection of life.

But she wasn’t asleep. Stirring lazily, sitting up, knuckles to eyes. A purring yawn. “Everything taken care of?” she asked.

“No.”

“What happened?”

He told her about the episode at the Greenwich terminal. Writhing on the blue and white terrazzo with fire in his chest. Hamlin playfully strumming the harp of his autonomic nervous system. Lissa listened, big-eyed, somber-faced, and said finally, “What are you going to do?”

“I haven’t any idea.”

“But that’s hideous. Having him inside you like a parasite. A crab hiding in your head. Like a case of brain cancer. Look, maybe if I call the Rehab Center—”

A warning twinge from Hamlin, deep down.

“No,” Macy said.

“I could tell them what’s happened. Maybe this has happened before. Maybe they know some way to deal with him.”

“The moment they tried anything,” he said, “Hamlin would stop my heartbeat. I know that.”

“But if there’s some drug that might knock him out—I could slip it to you somehow—”

“He’s listening right now, Lissa. Don’t you think he’ll be on guard constantly? He may not even need to sleep. We can’t take chances.”

“But how can you go on with somebody else inside your head, trying to take you over?”

Macy pondered that one. “What makes you think he’s trying to take me over?”

“Isn’t it obvious? He wants his body back. He’ll try to cut you down, one block of nerves at a time, until there’s nothing left of you at all. He’ll push you out. And then he’ll be Nat Hamlin again.”

“He just said he wanted to share the body with me,” Macy muttered.

“Will he stop there? Why should he?”

“But Nat Hamlin’s a proscribed criminal. Legally he doesn’t even exist any more. If he tried to return to life—”

“Oh, he’d go on using the Macy identity,” Lissa said. “Only he’d take up sculpting again, in another country, maybe. He’d look up his old friends. He’d be the old Hamlin, except his passport would say Macy, and—” She halted. “He’d look up his old friends,” she repeated. She seemed to be examining the idea from various angles. “Old friends such as me.”

“Yes. You.” In a tone that he recognized as unpleasant, but which he found impossible to alter, Macy said, “He could even marry you. As he was originally planning to do.”

“His wife is still alive, I’m sure.”

“That marriage was legally dissolved at the time he was sentenced,” Macy said. “It’s automatic. They cut all ties. Officially, he wouldn’t be Hamlin even if he took over. He’d be Macy, and Macy is single. There you are, Lissa.” The edge of cruelty coming into his voice again. “You’d finally get to be his wife. What you’ve always wanted.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want it any more.”

“You said you loved him.”

“I once did love him. But I told you, that’s all dead now. The things he did. The crimes. The rapes.”

“The first time we met,” said Macy heavily, “when you were still insisting on calling me Nat, you made a point of saying you were still in love with me. The old me.
Him.
You said it two or three times. Talking about how much you missed him. Refusing to believe that there was somebody new living behind his face.”

“You misunderstand,” she said. “I felt so lonely. So fucking
lost.
And all of a sudden I was standing next to somebody I knew; somebody out of the past—I just wanted help, I had to talk to him—I mean, I crashed right into you in the street, was I supposed to walk away and not even say hello?”

“You saw my Rehab badge and you ignored it.”

“I didn’t see it at all.”

“You must have blanked it out deliberately. You knew Nat Hamlin had been put away for Rehab.”

“You’re shouting at me.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t help it. I’m tense as hell, Lissa. Look, so you saw somebody in the street and you thought he was Nat Hamlin, so you said hello, but did you have to tell him you were still in love with him, too?”

“I didn’t mean it.”

“You said it.”

“What else could I do?” she asked. Her voice was shrill now. “Stand there and say, Hello, you look like Nat Hamlin who I used to love, and of course I don’t love him any more and in any case he’s been wiped out but since you look just like him I’ll fall in love with you instead, so let’s go home and ball a little? How could I say that? But I couldn’t let you just vanish without saying something to you. I was making a stab at the past, trying to catch it, trying to bring it back. The beautiful past, before the hellish part started. And you were my only link to that, Paul, and I was excited, and I said Nat, Nat, I talked about being in love—”

“Exactly. You called me Nat, and said you were still in love with—”

“Why are you doing this to me, Paul?”

“Doing what?”

“Chewing on me. Shouting. All these questions.”

“I’m trying to find out which one of us you’re really loyal to. Hamlin or me. Which side you’re going to take when the struggle for this body gets rough.”

“You aren’t trying to find out any such thing. You just want to hurt me.”

“Why should I want to—”

“How would I know? Because you blame me for bringing him back to life, maybe. Because you hate me for having loved him once. Because he’s sitting inside you right now forcing you to hurt me. I don’t know. Christ, I don’t know at all. Only why do you need to find out where my loyalty is? Didn’t I tell you last night that I didn’t want him coming back? Didn’t I offer to call the Rehab Center just now?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“So how could I possibly be on his side? I want him to be wiped out. I want him gone forever. I want—oh, Christ—”

She halted suddenly. Leaping from the bed as though stung, arms and legs flying stiffly out from her torso. Turning toward him. Her face contorted, the eyes bulging, the mouth a rigid hole, the muscles of her throat bunched and jutting. From her lips a bizarre clotted baritone, hoarse and unfocused, like the blunt blurtings of a deaf mute, no words intelligible:
“Mfss. Shlrrm. Skk-kk. Vshh. Vshh. Vshh.”
A terrible gargling cry, all the more horrible because of the deep masculine tongue in which it was delivered.

She lurched around the room, stumbling into things, clawing at the air. A plain case of demonic possession. What rides her?

“Grkk. Lll. Llll. Pkd-dd.”
Eyes wild, pleading. Bare breasts heaving wildly. A sheen of sweat on her skin.

Macy rushed toward her, trying to embrace her, calm her, ease her back to the bed. She pivoted like a robot and her arm crashed across his chest, doubling him up in gasps. When he looked at her again her face was scarlet with strain and her mouth was open to the full reach of her jaws, beyond it perhaps. The wild gargling sounds still erupted from her, and her eyes registered total horror and despair.

Once again Macy tried to seize her. This time successfully. Muscles leaping and churning and twitching all over her spare naked form. He forced her down on the bed and covered her with his body, hands gripping her wrists, knees imprisoning her thighs. A sour smell of sweat rising from her, bad sweat, fear-sweat.

Some kind of epileptic fit? Epilepsy was much on his mind this morning. In a low urgent voice he talked to her, tried to soothe her, to reach her somehow. More baritone drivel coming out of her in halting husky bleeps of thick noise. The static of the soul.

“Lissa?” he said. “Lissa, can you hear me? Try to go limp. Let all your muscles hang loose.”

Easier said than done. She still twitched. While in the midst of this he felt a hot sensation at the base of his skull, as of an auger drilling into him. Or drilling toward the outside from the soft center of his brain. Something jumped frantically within his mouth, and it was a moment before he realized that it was his tongue, jerking itself crazily backward toward his gullet
“Vshh. Vshh. Pkd-dd. Slrr. Msss.”
The sounds not from Lissa this time. From him.

Lying there congealed and coagulated on top of Lissa, he understood perfectly what was happening. Nat Hamlin, having conserved his strength for a couple of hours, was trying to achieve a takeover of a new level of their shared brain. Specifically, Hamlin was attempting to grab Macy’s speech centers.

Macy knew that that would mark the start of his own obliteration; once Hamlin had control of the voice, it would be
his
thoughts, not Macy’s that their body would express. Hamlin would have access to the external world and Macy would be shut inside. But at the moment Hamlin wasn’t doing too well. He had grabbed the neural sectors governing speech, only his grasp was incomplete, and the best he could manage were these bursts of nonsense. Somehow, Macy realized, Lissa had become entangled in the battle before he himself had known it was going on. Her brain hooked into his; Hamlin speaking, or trying to, through her mouth. A microphoning effect of some kind. Now they were both doing it, the two of them bellowing like demented seals. Feeding hour at the zoo. Is this where it ends? Does Hamlin take over from me now? No. No. Fight back. Stop him here and drive him into a corner.

How, though?

The way you did last night, when he had hold of the side of your mouth. Pry him loose. Through sheer strength of concentration, break his grip.

Macy tried to visualize the interior of his brain. Telling himself, This is where Hamlin lives, this pocket of gunk, and these are the pathways he’s been building to other parts of my brain, and this is the place he’s attacking now. It was a purely imaginary construct, but it would serve for the moment. Try to visualize the speech centers themselves. Say, row upon row of tight-strung pink cords, a kind of piano deal, with a switchboard attached. Hamlin at the switchboard, plugging things in, looking for the right connection; and the pink cords, all ajangle, giving off weird groaning noises. Come up behind him. Grab his arms. He isn’t any stronger than you are. Pull him away, knock him on his ass. Jump on him. Careful, don’t smash any of the machinery. You’ll need it when this is over. Just hang on to him. Stay on top. Pin him, pin him, pin him! Good! Smash his head against the floor a couple of times! Okay, the floor’s spongy, it gives a little, smash him anyway. Stun him. Right. Now start hauling him the hell out of there. Heavy fucker, isn’t he? One hundred ninety pounds, same as you. Heave. Heave. Heave. Into this musty corridor. A hot humid smell coming out of it. Things must be rotting in there. In with him! Down the chute! Slam the door. There. Easier than you expected, eh? All it takes is some mental energy. Perseverance. You can relax now. Catch your breath.