The Second Trip Read online

  Go to see Gargantua first almost there ten minutes more find out what’s been going on the business the buying and selling my price these days it must have gone up plenty I bet they figured I’m dead the cocksuckers no more Hamlins so double the price every week well why not why not why not and then out to the studio all boarded up I bet just take a little look of course I’ll have to pose as Macy that will present some problems won’t even be able to let Gargan know the truth outright although I’ll drop him some hints that fucking mass of meat he’s clever he’s clever he’ll figure it out won’t say a word a buck or two in it for him you bet your fat ass there is so then to the studio a sentimental journey I mean I need to go there like a shrine like my own shrine like like all dusty I bet the Goths and the Vandals fuck fuck fuck they bust everything up maybe I wasn’t so pleasant a guy but I had a decent respect for property except of course all those cunts if you consider a cunt property and anyway I was crazy then much better now purified by adversity my head clear at last rid of Macy stuck him where he belongs the poor dumb shit no personality at all just a construct a plastic man well it wasn’t his fault but it wasn’t mine either the survival of the fittest don’t you see Darwin was no dope and then I’ll visit Noreen old time’s sake I’ll have to play it very cagy with her that bitch is perfectly capable of turning me in but maybe not after all nobody ever gave it to her in her life the way I did even if toward the end we were somewhat estranged nevertheless that’s part of the normal risks of marriage especially when you marry an officially accredited genius a member of the international elite of artistic achievement high intensity sometimes boils over I’m almost at Gargantua’s now I think unless he’s moved the gallery four years shit the whole shitting universe changes in four years every cell in the body turns over doesn’t it or is it seven years anyway we aren’t the same and Gargan probably sells his schlock out of Philadelphia now Chicago Karachi who knows but we’ll find out fast enough God it’s good just to walk the streets again breathe the air throw my shoulders back and tonight we’ll find some friendly hole for dicky dunking yes indeed four years without a piece that’s quite a long time for a man of my ability artistic and physical well maybe out in Darien I’ll find Noreen willing to come across or one of the others God that creepy Lissa I guess she’d do it she’d do it for anyone even Macy thinking she’s really fucking me of course but I don’t want her I don’t want to go within a million miles of her too dangerous what a shot in the head she gave me that time I don’t want her ever again ever ever I wonder what kind of work I’ll turn out as soon as I’m back in the swing of things it better be good if I can’t maintain quality might as well give the body back to Macy but I think I’ll pick up fast enough do some small pieces first recover my grasp of perspective my perspective of grasp and then we’ll see anyway the important thing is that I’m back

  —But you still have me, Hamlin.

  Macy. Oh, shit! Macy. I didn’t think I’d be hearing from you so soon.

  —Sorry to disappoint you.

  Why don’t you just erode away? Dissolve. Let yourself be absorbed by the cranial phagocytes, Hamlin suggested. You’re over and done with, anyway. Your nebulous existence has ceased to be, Macy. Admit it and go.

  —The Rehab Center failed to program me for autodestruct.

  I don’t need you, though.

  —But I do, Macy said.

  What good are you? What imaginable value do you have to the world? To anyone?

  —I have immense value to me. I’m the only me I have. And I want to survive. I’m going to beat you, Hamlin. I’m going to throw you out again and this time I’ll abolish you. Just watch and see.

  Please. Your buzzing is giving me a headache and it’s such a beautiful day.

  —I’ll give you a lot more than a headache.

  Noisy threats were pointless. Macy wanted to make some dramatic demonstration of his ability to harass Hamlin. Give him as good as he got when the tables were turned. Clutch his heart, grab a bundle of muscles in his cheek, shut his eyes, make him piss in his pants. Jolt him, but without, naturally, doing real harm to the body they shared. Only he couldn’t. Macy’s harassment quotient was close to zero. All he could do was ride again on Hamlin’s sensory input and pipe messages directly into his conscious brain. Buzzing. But no control of the motor sectors whatever. No grip on the autonomic system. Merely a passenger who hasn’t the foggiest where the throttle might be, or the brakes, or even the switch for the headlights. Meanwhile Hamlin, untroubled, turned a corner and entered the vestibule of a glossy-fronted shop on the smoked-glass window of which danced the words OMNIMUM GALLERIES, LTD. in free-floating globules of green capillary light. Inside, a battery of safety mechanisms bathed him in scanner-glow. An inner door finally rolled aside, and he entered the gallery, pausing not at all to inspect the treasures of contemporary art it displayed. He said to the girl at the desk, “Is Mr. Gargan here?”

  “Is he expecting you, sir?”

  “I don’t think so. But he’ll see me.”

  “Your name?”

  Hamlin faltered at that. Macy picked up the scathing tides of chagrin. A dilemma, yes. After a moment Hamlin said, “My name is Macy, Paul Macy.” With a meaningful glance at the Rehab badge in his lapel. “Tell him I used to be Nat Hamlin, though.”

  “Oh.” A little gasp. A flutter of confusion; a pretty spasm of embarrassment that turned the girl scarlet down to her fashionably exposed breasts. A quick recovery. Jeweled finger to the intercom. “Mr. Macy to see you, Mr. Gargan. Paul Macy. Formerly Mr. Nat Hamlin.”

  From some inner office, a bellow of surprise that needed no amplification. Hamlin was speedily ushered in. A spherical room, dense mossy black carpet installed 360°-wise everywhere, a man of implausible corpulence lolling along the curved left wall with a meaty hand held languidly over a control panel bristling with jeweled switches. Not rising when Hamlin entered. An ocean of blubber; flesh hanging in folds over folds of flesh. The features barely discernible within that mass: piggy little eyes, puggy little nose, narrow pinched puritan lips. Out of the vastness a thin man’s piping voice: “God’s own cock, what are you doing here? You aren’t supposed to be coming here, Nat!”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Do I mind? Do I mind? You know I love you. Only I don’t follow this at all. They took you in for Rehab; I thought that was the end of you. When did you get out, anyway?”

  “Early in May. I would have seen you before this but there were problems.”

  “You look okay. You sound okay. Just like your old self. But you’ve got the badge. You’re somebody else now, right? What’s your new name?”

  “Macy. Paul Macy.”

  “Don’t like it. It’s a name without any balls.”

  “I didn’t pick it, Gargantua.”

  The fat man tugged at his dewlaps. “Am I supposed to call you Nat or Paul?”

  “You better call me Paul.”

  “Paul. Paul. Well, I’ll try. Sit down, Paul. Jesus, what a fruity name! Sit down, anyway.” Hamlin sat Macy, a helpless spectator within him, sat also. Listening to every word of the conversation but unable to speak. As though watching it on a screen. He had seen this fat man, this gallery owner, before, drifting around in the debris of Hamlin’s memory; but he seemed much fatter now. This man and Hamlin had grown rich together on the proceeds of Hamlin’s genius. Now Hamlin stretched out voluptuously. In full command of his recaptured body. The black carpeting seemed to be a foot thick: bouncy, lush. Gargan touched one of the switches on the panel in front of him and the room silently revolved, changing its axis by some 15°. Hamlin’s side of the sphere went up and Gargan’s descended. Macy experienced some vertigo. The fat man lay pleasantly sprawled, kneading his belly. Shortly he belched and said, “How do you like the setup here? Or don’t you remember the old one?”

  “I remember. This is tremendous, Gargantua. Like a fucking Babylonian palace. A gallery for sybarites, eh?”

  “We get a good clientele here.”

/>   “You’re prospering. And you’ve gained some weight, haven’t you? Unless I’m mistaken, quite a lot of weight.”

  “Quite. Two or three hundred pounds since you last saw me.”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  “I think so.”

  “How the crap do you have the patience to eat so much, though?”

  “Oh, I don’t waste time overeating,” Gargan said. “I’ve had my lipostat surgically adjusted. My whole body-fat-and-glucose equation has been changed. I burn slowly, my friend, I burn very slowly. The eating it takes to give you an ounce gives me a pound. And I grow lovely, eh, more lovely every day. I want to weigh a thousand pounds, Nat! Paul. I must call you Paul.”

  “Paul, yes.”

  “But none of this makes any sense.” Gargan stirred ever so slightly, craning his neck. “How can you remember me? Why didn’t Rehab wipe you out?”

  “It did.”

  “But you sound just like—”

  “I’m a special case. Don’t ask too many questions.”

  “I follow you, Nat.”

  “Paul.”

  “Paul.”

  “Be more careful about my name, will you? I’m a brand-new man. The loathsome countersocial rapist who did such grievous damage to so many innocent women has been humanely destroyed, Gargantua, and will never walk the earth again.”

  “I follow. Where are you living?”

  “Way uptown. A temporary place. You can have the address if you want.”

  “Please. And the phone.”

  “I won’t be there long. As soon as I’ve got some cash together I’ll find something a little more suitable.”

  “Are you working yet?”

  “As a holovision commentator,” Hamlin said. “Maybe you’ve seen me. The late news.”

  “I mean working.”

  “No. I have no equipment, no studio. I haven’t even had a chance to think about work in a serious way.”

  “But soon?”

  “Soon, yes.” Macy felt Hamlin’s lips curve into a sly, malicious smile. “Would you like to represent me when I get started again, Gargantua?”

  “Why ask? You know we have a contract.”

  “We don’t,” said Hamlin.

  “I could show it to you. Wait, let me punch the retrieve.” Gargan’s meaty fingers hovered over the console buttons. As he started to stab a stud Hamlin reached out and stopped him.

  “You had a contract with Nat Hamlin,” Hamlin said. “Hamlin’s dead. You can’t represent his ghost. My name is Paul Macy, and I’m looking for a dealer. You interested?”

  Gargan’s face looked puffier. “You know I am.”

  “Fifteen percent.”

  “The old contract said thirty.”

  “The old contract was signed twenty years ago. The situation then doesn’t apply now. Fifteen.”

  Lengthy tugging at dewlaps. “I never take less than thirty.”

  “You will if you want me to come back to you.” The voice very flat now. “All Hamlin’s contracts were legally dissolved when his personality underwent deconstruct. I’m not bound by anything. Also I’m without assets and I need to rebuild my capital in a hurry. Fifteen. Take it or leave it.”

  In Gargan’s eyes a countervailing slyness. “Nat Hamlin was an established master with a line of museum credits longer than my cock. Paul—what is it, Macy?—Paul Macy is a nobody. I had a waiting list for Hamlins, for anything he’d turn out. Why should people buy you?”

  “Because I’m as good as Hamlin.”

  “How do I know that?”

  “Because I tell you so. Business may be slow at first until the word-of-mouth starts, but when the public realizes that Macy is as good as Hamlin, even better than Hamlin because he’s been through an extra hell and knows how to make use of it, the public will come around and clean you out. You’ll cover your nut with plenty to spare. Do we have a deal at fifteen or don’t we?”

  “I want to see some of Paul Macy’s work,” Gargan said slowly, “before I offer a contract.”

  “Contract first or you don’t see a thing.”

  A tut and a tut from the narrow lips. “Artists aren’t supposed to be rapacious. That’s why they need dealers, to be sons of bitches on their behalf.”

  “I can be my own son of a bitch,” Hamlin said. “Look, Gargantua, don’t waltz around with me. You know who I am and you know how good I am. I’ve had a rough time and I need money, and anyway at this stage of my career it’s crazy for me to be cutting my dealer in for thirty. Give me a contract and advance me ten thousand so I can set up a studio, and let’s not crap around any more.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “There are two dozen dealers within five blocks of here.”

  “Who would jump at the chance of taking on somebody named Paul Macy, I suppose?”

  “They’d know who I really was.”

  “Would they? The Rehab process is supposed to be foolproof. Suppose this is all a clever hoax? Suppose you are Paul Macy, and somebody’s coached you on how to sound like Nat Hamlin, and you’re just trying to sweat some quick cash out of me?”

  “Test me. Ask me anything about Hamlin’s life.” Macy sensed Hamlin’s distress now. Adrenalin flooding. Pores opening: Genitals contracting.

  “I don’t play guessing games,” said Gargan. Idly he punched a button; the room tilted the other way. Hamlin’s intestines lolled. The dealer said, “You’ve got no leverage, friend. No reputable dealer would trust a Rehab reconstruct who says he’s still got the skills of his old self. So the take-it-or-leave-it is on my side. I’ll sign you, Paul, because I’m sentimental and I love you, loved you in the old days, anyway, and I’ll even give you some money to start you up again. But I won’t be blackjacked. Twenty-five percent and nothing lower.”

  “Twenty.”

  “Twenty-five.” A gargantuan yawn. “You’re starting to bore me, Paul.”

  “Don’t get snotty. Remember who you’re talking to, what kind of talent you’ve got sitting next to you here. A year from now you’ll regret having muscled me. Twenty percent, Gargantua.”

  “Twenty-five.”

  Now Hamlin was plainly upset. The swagger was gone; his ductless glands were working overtime. Macy, who had not ceased to probe avenues of neural connections, thought he had found a good one and that this might be a suitable moment for making a try at retaking the body. He pressed hard. Lunged. Claws outstretched, attacking the cerebral switchboard. But no go. Hamlin brushed him away as though he were a mosquito and said aloud, “Let’s split the difference. Twenty-two and a half and I’m yours.”

  An hour’s smooth drive in a rented car brought Hamlin to his old Connecticut estate. The car did its best to cope with Hamlin’s surprising ineptness as a driver. He handled the steering-stick crudely, overpushing it, frequently trying to override the car’s gyroscopic mind, constantly messing up the delicate homeostasis that kept the vehicle in its proper lane. Macy, from his vantage-point within, monitored Hamlin’s performance with mixed feelings. Obviously Hamlin, four or five years away from driving, had lost whatever skill at it he once had had, and that was worrying him, for it had occurred to him that in his absence he might have lost other skills also. Therefore he was working himself into a singleminded frenzy of concentration, gripping the stick in sweaty palm and trying to psych himself into complete mastery over the car. Macy knew he could play on Hamlin’s fears, intensifying his distress. You think you’ve come back to life, Nat, but nothing came back except your ego and your dirty mouth. You’ve lost your manual skills. You couldn’t cut paper dolls now, let alone turn out museum masterpieces. And so on. Undermining Hamlin’s self-confidence, attacking his main justification for having expelled his reconstruct. Weakening his grip on the body’s central nervous system, setting him up for a push. You think you’re still a great artist? Jesus, you don’t even know how to drive! The Rehab Center smashed you to bits, Nat, and you won’t ever be whole again. And then, getting Hamlin fuddled and panicky, he coul
d make a try for a takeover.

  The process was already well under way. The fumes of Hamlin’s tensions drifted through Macy’s interior holdfast. The oily smell of fear and doubt. Go on, give him a shove, he’s vulnerable now. But the scheme was futile, Macy knew. He hadn’t yet found the handles with which he could flip Hamlin out of his dominant position. Even if he had, he wouldn’t dare attempt a takeover at 120 miles an hour; no matter how good this car’s homeostasis was supposed to be, it wasn’t programmed for self-drive, and while he and Hamlin struggled for control, the auto might go over the edge of the embankment, or up a wall, or into the oncoming flow, in some wild uncorrected orgy of positive feedback.

  So Macy sat passive while Hamlin shakily negotiated the highway and more capably guided the car up the winding leafy country lanes to the place where he once had lived. Parking the car perhaps a quarter of a mile away. Leaving the road, walking cautiously through the woods. Heartbreaking summeriness here. The foliage so green and new. Bright yellow and white flowers. Chipmunks and squirrels. Clumps of frondy ferns. They had held back the urban tide here, the surging sea of concrete and pollution, the onslaught of extinctions. An outpost of natural life, maintained for the very rich.

  And there, beyond that blinding white stand of stunning birches, the house. Lofty walls of high-piled gray-brown boulders set in ancient gray mortar. Leaded-glass windows agleam in the noonlight. Hamlin’s heart leaping and bouncing. Old memories in an agitated dance. Look, look there. The pond, the creek, the pool. Exactly as Lissa had described it, exactly as Macy had seen it through the lens of Hamlin’s reminiscing mind. And the studio annex. Where so many miracles were worked.

  —Why did you come here?