To Live Again and The Second Trip (51 page)

—Rehab wrecked you, Nat, more than you realize.

Shut your hole. I could pick all this up again in three hours.
A note of false bravado, though. Powerful currents of uncertainty coming from him. Hamlin broke off a chunk of modeling clay and began to knead it. Stiff, after all this time. The clay. And he was too. The fingers unresponsive. Let’s sculpt Mrs. Bryson. Here, we roll a long tube of clay like so, and we. No. Instantly the proportions were awry. Hamlin nibbled his lip. Correcting his intuitive beginning. She’s tall, yes, and wide through the hips, and we’ll need some clay here for the boobs.

—Give up, Nat, you don’t have it any more.

Piss off, Macy. What do you know?

Yet Hamlin was unable to conceal the extent of his uneasiness from his passenger. He was fumbling with the clay, mangling it, blundering at this elementary task of modeling, straining to get the image in his mind transferred to the lump in his hands. In that tense moment Macy made new connections and for the first time gained some control over Hamlin’s central nervous system.
Plink.
Strumming the neurons. Hamlin’s elbow jerked. The tube of clay bent double at the sudden accidental convulsion.
Plink.
Another twitch. Hamlin shouting silently at him now, bellowing in rage. Macy was enjoying this. He continued to tug at Hamlin’s synapses while the artist trembled and shivered in mounting wrath and frustration. The half-shaped model of Mrs. Bryson a ruin. Hamlin glancing around nervously at his own equipment, so alien to him, so terrifying. Telling himself that in four, four and a half years it was possible for a person to forget all sorts of superficial mechanical things, but that you never lost the real talent, the basic underlying inborn gift, the set of perceptions and insights that is the real material to which the artist applies his learned craftsmanship.

—Go on, Nat, keep saying it, you may even start to believe it soon.

Let me alone. Let me alone. I could learn all this machinery again in half a day!

—Sure you could, sweetheart. Who ever doubted it?

Giving Hamlin another twong in the medulla, a blork in the autonomic, a whonk in the limbic. Yes! Really learning my way around in here, now! Just as he did in me. The shoe on the other cortex, though. I’ll get him. I’ll get him good. Hamlin was doing a manic dance, twitching around the room as Macy toyed with him. He couldn’t seem to get himself together enough to deliver a retaliatory shot; it was as if the vibrations emanated by all the psychosculpting apparatus kept him dizzy and off balance. Keep hammering away, Macy told himself. This may be your chance to get back on top. Twong and twong and twong! Arms whipping about wildly. Knees jerking. I think I could make him crap in his undies now. A nice psychological point to score, but why shit things up for myself in case I take over?

And then Hamlin began to fight back. Coldly, furiously, ramming Macy down into subservience once more. Sweeping from his mind the distractions of this dismaying studio in order to regain inner discipline. There. There. There. Macy saw that he did not yet have the power to vanquish the other, although he was constantly learning and gaining strength. Later. Another time. He has me now.

“Isn’t the studio
absolutely fascinating,
Mr. Macy?”

An idiot warble, a gay contralto trill. Enter Mrs. Bryson. A slip of paper in her hand. By no accident, she has rid herself of her loincloth, and she comes jollying in, starkers, with flatfooted buoyancy. Eyes sparkling, breasts heaving expectantly. Thick curling deep-piled black triangle. Her nipples turning to turrets. The hot scent of a rutting bitch spreading in the warm air. We’re very casual about nudity out here, you see, Mr. Macy. Clothes are so primitive, don’t you think! And then maybe making a quick grab for his crotch, getting the pole out in the open, down on the floor amid the paraphernalia of the great artist. To be had by his simulacrum.
Ooom.
But not this time, lady. “I had some trouble finding Mrs. Hamlin’s new name and address,” she said. “It was with our papers on the house, you know, tucked away, but I dug everything out, and now—”

“Yes,” Hamlin said. Blurted. A frantic need to get out of here. Throat dry; face flushed; eyes unfocused. Defending himself simultaneously against Macy’s assaults from within and the mockeries of this equipment from without. Her black bush and hot slot of no interest to him now. The unexpectedly overbearing atmosphere of his studio had unmanned him utterly. To escape, fast. Snatching the slip of paper from her startled hand. “Thankyouverymuchgottogonow.” Moving rapidly past her toward the door. Her face suddenly a rigid mask of surprise and anger: she knows she will be denied. Hell hath no fury.

She looks ten years older. Deep lines from cheeks to chin. The nipples going soft; the shoulders slumping. All her nakedness wasted on him. Her arm outstretched, the fingers working eagerly as if to pull him back. No chance. Hamlin had reached the exit. Out into the midday brightness. Pursued by phantom tendrils of feminine libido. “You needn’t leave so soon!” she calls to him. Hamlin made no reply. Glancing back once, saw her outside the studio door, naked well-endowed idle-rich lass on the threshold of middle age, bewildered by his panic, astounded by his rejection of her body. His panic bewildered him too. Head awhirl. Macy did his best to make things worse, yanking on all the neural lines at once. Hamlin yelped, but stayed in control, and went on running. Running. Run. Ning.

In the car again, jouncing helter-skelter westward across several counties, Macy wondered if they were going to survive this trip. These back roads didn’t have any protective strips, and thus the auto’s homeostasis mechanisms were essentially cancelled out; if the car started to slide off the road, nothing would keep it from smashing into the bulky oaks that awaited it

And Hamlin was in a ghastly state. Madly gripping the stick. Eyes glazed in Dostoevskian fixity. Jaws clenched. He was driving on reflex alone, employing one tiny plaque of cerebral tissue to operate the vehicle while the rest of his mind wildly revolved the events of the past half hour. The car teetered from side to side on the narrow road, now and then crossing the center line or running onto the shoulder.

Most of Hamlin’s defenses were relaxed, but as before Macy feared to make a takeover attempt in a moving car. He hunkered down inside Hamlin’s brain as though it were a storm shelter and temporarily disconnected his optical hookup, for the view of the madly slewing road through Hamlin’s eyes was making him seasick. Better, this way. To sit in solemn silence in a dull dark dock. About him still flashed the lightnings and eruptions of Hamlin’s distress. The studio visit had really shaken him. Moving among his implements, his elaborate sculpting apparatus, Hamlin had seemed not to know what from which or up from down. Macy wondered why. Had the Rehab process done irreversible damage to the Hamlin persona? Was there actually nothing left of the original Nat Hamlin except a clutch of old memories, a cluster of attitudes and phrases, some tics and twitches of the spirit? The sculptor, the man of genius, had he been irretrievably demolished, and was this comeback merely a delusion?

On the other hand, Macy thought, it might have been the strain of maintaining control of their shared body that had so severely drained Hamlin’s psychic energy. There had been definite signs all day that Hamlin’s grip was none too strong and was slipping from hour to hour. In the morning, striding jauntily down the street to Gargan’s gallery, presenting the contract ultimatum to the fat dealer, all that hard bargaining—Hamlin had appeared to be in full command then, but by the end of the encounter with Gargan he had started to show some fatigue, and the troubles he had had in driving from the city to his Connecticut studio had revealed a further weakening of control.

And then the disastrous studio visit. Continued slippage. The battery running down and no time for recharging. It must take a constant terrific effort for Hamlin to operate this body, injured as he had been by the Rehab obliteration experts. Macy knew that he himself was nowhere near the point where he could regain the body, but the way things were going that moment couldn’t be very far away. It was coming. It was coming. Or was he fooling himself?

He reconnected the visuals. The car still careening along the suburban back roads. Hamlin sitting rigidly, lost in contemplation, paying minimal attention. Horrifying. The body wouldn’t be worth shit to them if Hamlin smashed up the car. Certainly fatal to both of them. But there was nothing Macy could do about that right now. He blanked the scene again, escaping. Diving down deep, burrowing into Hamlin’s memory bank. Everything there was accessible to him, all the stored scenes of his prior self’s active life. Failures and triumphs, mostly triumphs. The women. The critics. The press clippings. The one-man shows. The money. The accumulation of possessions. All the surface glamour. Yet beneath the shiny shallow business of career-making Macy could see in Hamlin the authentic artistic impulse, the hunger to make his visions real. Give Hamlin credit for that. He had been a bastard, sure, still was, but he pursued a vision, he realized it, he gave it to the world. There are those who make and give, and those who take and consume, and Hamlin had been a maker and giver.

Macy envied that. Who are the real ones among us, anyway, if not those who create, who give, who enrich those about them? Regardless of their motives. Doing it for the money, for the ego trip, for whatever unworthy reason, but
doing
it. Having something worth doing and doing it. Hamlin was one of those.

I’m one of the consumers, thought Macy. Blame Gomez & Co., I guess: they could have made me someone worthwhile. Their own artistic achievement, their creative self-justification. But of course they aren’t paid to do that. Just to fill up vacant bodies with reasonably functional human beings. Gomez isn’t an artist, he’s a doctor, and he can’t transcend himself when he does a reconstruct. If I am second-rate, it’s because my makers were second-raters too.

Unlike this bastard Hamlin. Whose darker side was also visible: the inner collapse, the breaking free from moorings. Roaming the quiet streets. The artist as predator. Each rape neatly labeled and catalogued in the archives. And not just mere rape, either. Not just the shoving of Blunt Object X into Unwilling Orifice Y, but also the associated stuff, the peripherals, the leering, the mocking, the capering, the perversions, the garbage. Even in a permissive age there still are such things as abominations. Hamlin must have been out of his mind. The big-eyed twelve-year-old forced to watch her pretty young blond mother blowing the famous artist: what kind of scars does that leave on an unformed psyche? And all this buggery. A trail of torn sphincters across four states. Not even greasing it first. That’s sadism, Hamlin. Out of your fucking mind.

But how crazy were you, really? Didn’t you have a clear conscious awareness of what was going on, and didn’t you enjoy it? Yes. And wasn’t all this crap latent in you all along? Yes. Okay, something brought you out. Suddenly it was Monster Time in your head, and you went forth to fulfill all the steamy dreams you had nurtured since your cramped lonely adolescence. Right? Right. And filed everything away for subsequent gloating. No wonder they sentenced you to deconstruct. Jesus, I feel filthy just rummaging through this stuff. Maker of masterpieces. Giver of unique visions. And your demonic laughter underneath. Telling the court you were insane, that you were in the grip of an irresistible impulse, an obsessive compulsion, but were you? Perhaps you thought you were creating a new kind of work of art, made not out of paint or clay or plastic or bronze but out of bleeding invaded female bodies, an abstract sculpture composed of dozens of victims, forming a pattern you alone could have designed. Jesus. What a case for obliteration you were!

Macy noticed that the car no longer was moving. Hastily he plugged in the visuals again.

They were parked in the central shopping plaza of a medium-sized suburban city, with two- and three-story Westchester Tudor halftimbered shops, freshly whitewashed and their brown beams newly painted, glistening in the amber light of late afternoon. Hamlin had his head out the side door; he was asking a policeman—a
policeman!
—how to find Lotus Lane. A rapid-fire stream of instructions. Turn left at the computer stanchion, follow Colonial Avenue to Route 4480, turn right at the yellow blinker, go about ten blocks, no, twelve, you’ll come to the industrial park, you turn right there past the tall building and you drive on to the sniffer palace—a grin, we’ve even got that stuff up here!—and make a left and that puts you on Route 519, all the cross streets there are marked, you won’t miss Lotus. On the left.

Thank you, officer. And off we go. Left, right, right, left. Quiet country lanes again. Hamlin tense. No difficulty following the instructions, though. Left, right, right, left, the sniffer palace, the residential area, Cypress Walk, Red-bud Drive, Oak Pond Road, Lotus Lane. Lotus. Number 55. A trim stucco house twenty or thirty years old, with a perspex sundome and glossy oval opaquer-windows. A sign out front:
THE KRAFFTS.
Hamlin presented himself to the door-scanner. From within, via intercom, a warm firm sweetly modulated mezzo voice: “Who is it?”

“Paul Macy.”

“Paul. Macy.” Doubtfully. “Paul Macy? Oh, my God! My God, you shouldn’t have come here!”

“Please,” Hamlin said. “Just a few minutes. To talk.”

A moment of empty humming from the intercom. Then, hesitantly, “Well, I suppose. All right. Although this is probably a big mistake.” Two moments more; then the door began to open. In the same instant Hamlin’s left hand rose toward his throat. For the purpose, Macy sensed, of ripping the telltale Rehab badge from his clothing. Macy blocked the attempt with a fierce neural jab, the accuracy of which surprised him; Hamlin, his arm arrested in midclimb, stiffened and let the arm sag to his side, while simultaneously snapping a furious silent curse at Macy. The door was open. Framed in the vaulted entranceway stood a woman of extraordinary poise and beauty. Tall, nearly to his shoulder, but slender, fine-boned, a delicate tiny-featured face, alert ironic eyes, sleek glossy black hair in tumbling cascades, full sardonic lips, strong chin, long columnar neck. An aristocrat. Paul guessed her age at thirty-one or thirty-two. She held herself well.