The Second Trip Page 4

  Then she started to eat, stuffing the food down as if she hadn’t had anything in weeks. The way she wolfed it, so unself-conscious in her gluttony, fascinated him: it was like watching a fire sweep through a dry meadow. Head forward, jaws working frantically. Sounds of chewing. White teeth flashing. He sat still, dragging on the cigarette, ineffectually trying to spear a strand of kelp with his fork. She looked up. “Aren’t you hungry?” she asked, mouth full.

  “Not as hungry as you are, I guess.”

  “Don’t mind me.”

  Her wrists were dirty and there was a film of grime visible on her neck. She was wearing the same blue coat as the other day. Again, no makeup. Her fingernails were ragged. But she wasn’t merely outwardly unkempt; she conveyed a sense of inner disintegration that terrified him. Obviously she had once been a beautiful girl, perhaps extraordinarily beautiful. Traces of that beauty remained. She had a parched, ravaged look, though, as if fevers of the soul had been consuming her substance. Her eyes, large and bloodshot, never were still. Always a birdlike flickering from place to place. Cheeks hollower than they ought to be. She could use about ten pounds more, he figured. And a bath. He stubbed out his roach and cut himself a slice of steak. Filet of papier-mâché. He gagged.

  Lissa said, “God, that’s better! Some food in the gut again.”

  “Why were you so hungry?”

  “I always am. I’m burning up.”

  “Are you sick?”

  She shrugged. “Who knows?” Her eyes momentarily rested on his. “I’m trying to think of you as Paul Macy. It isn’t easy, sitting here with Nat Hamlin opposite me.”

  “Nat Hamlin doesn’t exist.”

  “You really don’t remember me?”

  “Zero,” he said.

  “Shit almighty! What did they do to you at the Rehab Center?”

  He said, “They pumped Nat Hamlin full of memory-dissolving drugs until every bit of him was flushed away. Which left a kind of zombie, you see? A healthy empty body. Society doesn’t like to waste a good healthy body. So then they built me inside the zombie’s head.”

  “Built you? What do you mean, built?”

  “Created an identity for me.” He shut his eyes a moment. There was a tightness at his collar. Choking sensation. He wasn’t supposed to have to explain any of this. The world was supposed to take it all for granted. “They built up a past, a cluster of events that I could move around in as if it had really happened. Like I grew up in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and moved to Seattle when I was twelve. My father was a propulsion engineer and my mother taught school. They’re both dead now. No brothers. No sisters. I collected African stamps and I did a lot of hunting and fishing. I went to college, UCLA, class of ’93, got a degree in philosophy of communication. Two years of national service, stationed in Bolivia and Ecuador, doing voice-overs for the People’s Democratic Channel. Then various TV and HV jobs in Europe and the States, and now here in New York. Et cetera, et cetera.”

  “God,” she said. “And it’s all phony?”

  “Pretty near. It follows Nat Hamlin’s biography only as closely as it has to. Like in age. Or Hamlin broke a leg when he was twenty-six and you can see that in the bone, so they’ve given me a skiing accident for that year.”

  “What would happen if I checked the UCLA alumni records, looking for Paul Macy in the class of ’93?”

  “You’d find him. With a Rehab asterisk saying that this is a pro forma entry covering a retroactively established identity. Same thing if you looked up the Idaho Falls birth register. They do a very thorough job.”

  “Christ,” Lissa said. And shivered. “How creepy this is! You actually are a whole new person.”

  “I don’t know how whole I am. But I’m new, all right.”

  “You don’t have any idea who I am, then.”

  “You used to pose for Nat Hamlin, didn’t you?”

  She looked startled. “How come you know that? I haven’t said anything about—”

  “The day you stopped me in the street,” he said, “while we were talking, I got a flash picture of you naked in a kind of studio, and I was leaning over a complicated keyboard thing and telling you to scream. Like a psycho-sculptor trying to get an emotional effect. I saw it maybe half a second, then it was gone.” He moistened his lips. “It was like a piece of Nat Hamlin’s blotted-out mind surfacing into mine.”

  “Or a piece of my mind reaching into yours,” she said.

  “Eh?”

  “It happens. I can’t keep it under control.” A shrill giggle. “Wherever you got it from, it was right. I was one of Nat Hamlin’s models. From January to August, ’06, when he was working on his Antigone 21. The one the Metropolitan bought. His last big work, before his breakdown. You know about his breakdown?”

  “Some. Don’t talk about it.” He felt a band of fire across his forehead. Simply being close to someone out of the old existence this long was painful. “Can I have another gold?”

  She offered the cigarette and said, “I was also his mistress, all through ’05 and most of ’06. He said he’d get a divorce and marry me. Like Rembrandt. Like Renoir. Falling in love with the model. Only he went out of his head instead. Doing all those crazy things.”

  Macy, suddenly vulnerable, tried to stop her with an upraised hand, but there was no halting the flow of her words. “The last time I saw him was Thanksgiving Day, 2006. At his studio. We had a fight and he threw me down the stairs.” She winced. Into his mind a searing image: an endless flight, the girl falling, falling, skirt up around her thighs, legs kicking, arms clutching, the dwindling scream, the sudden twist and impact. A sound of something cracking. “In the hospital six weeks with a broken pelvis. When I got out they were hunting him from Connecticut to Kansas. And then—”

  “No more!” he yelled. People turned to look.

  She shrank away from him. “I’m sorry,” she said, folding into herself, huddling, shaking. His cheeks were hot, were shame and turmoil. After a moment she said softly, “Does it hurt a lot when I talk about him?”

  A nod. Silence.

  “You asked me to see you because you were in trouble,” he said at length.

  “Yes.”

  “Would you honestly have killed yourself if I hadn’t shown up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m all alone. I have nobody at all. And I’m going out of my mind.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I hear voices. Other people’s minds come into mine. And mine goes into theirs. Extrasensory perception.”

  “ESP?” he said. “Like—what is it, mental telepathy?”

  “Telepathy. That’s what it is. ESP. Telepathy.”

  “I didn’t think that that really existed.”

  A bitter laugh. “You bet your ass. Sitting right here in front of you. The genuine article.”

  “You can read minds?” he said, feeling dreamfogged and unreal.

  “Not exactly read. Just touch, mind to mind. It isn’t under my conscious control. Things drift in, drift out. Voices humming in my brain, a word, a phrase, an image. It’s been happening since I was ten, twelve years old. Only much worse now. Much, much worse.” Trembling. “The past, two years. Hell. Absolute hell.”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know who I am any more a lot of the time,” she said. “I get to be five, six people at once. This mushy noise in my head. The buzzing. The voices. Like static, only sometimes words drift in on the static. I pick up all these weird emotions, and they scare me. Not knowing if I’m imagining or not. There’s somebody two tables away who wants to rape me. Wishes he dared. In his head I’m naked and bloody, spreadeagled, arms and legs tied to the furniture. And over to my left, someone else, a woman, she’s transmitting the odor of shit. She sees me like some kind of giant turd sitting here. I don’t know why. And then you—”

  “No,” he said. “Don’t tell me.”

  “It isn’t really ugly. You think I’m dirty and you want to take me home
and give me a bath. And fuck me afterward. That’s okay. I know I’m dirty. And I’d like to go to bed with you, too. But I can’t stand all this crosstalk in my head. I’m wide open, Nat, wide open to every stray thought, and—”

  “Paul.”

  “What?”

  “I said, call me Paul. It’s important to me.”

  “But you’re—”

  “Paul Macy.”

  “Just now, though, you were coming through as Nat Hamlin to me. From deep underneath.”

  “No. Hamlin’s gone,” he said. “I’m Paul Macy.” A feeling of seasickness. The light-loops swaying and hissing overhead. He found himself covering her hand with his. Ragged cuticles against his fingertips. He said, “If you’re suffering so much, why don’t you get some help? Maybe there’s a cure for ESP. Is that what you want, a cure? I could take you to see Dr. Ianuzzi, she’s a very sensitive woman, she could get you into the right kind of psychiatric hospital and—”

  “And they’d give me shock treatment,” Lissa said. “Memory dislocation with drugs, like I was a criminal. They’d wash half my brain out trying to heal me. There wouldn’t be anything of me left I’m afraid of therapy. I haven’t ever gone. I don’t want to go.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then what am I supposed to do for you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know that either, Paul. I’m absolutely fucked up in the head, so there’s no use asking me rational questions.” Her eyes glittering eerily. Sick, sick, sick. “What you really ought to do,” she said, “is get the hell away from me, right now, like you’ve wanted to do since the first minute you saw me. Only don’t. God, please, don’t. Help me. Help me.”

  “How?”

  “Just be with me a little. I’m all alone. I’ve cut myself off from the whole world. Look, you know how it is with me? I don’t have a job. I don’t have friends any more. I look in the mirror and I see my own skeleton. I sit home and wait for the voices to go away, and they scream and scream at me until my head is coming off. I live off the welfare checks. Then I go out for a walk one day, on and on and on, way the hell uptown, and I crash into some guy on the street and he turns around and he’s Nat Hamlin, he’s the only man I ever really loved, only he isn’t Hamlin any more, he’s Paul Macy, that’s what he says, and—” She caught her breath. “All right. You don’t know me at all and I guess I can’t say I know you. But I know your body. Every inch. That’s a familiar thing to me, a landmark, something I can anchor myself to. Let me anchor. Let me hold on. I’m going under, Paul. I’m drowning, and maybe you can hold me up, for the sake of what I used to mean to the person you used to be. Maybe. Maybe for a little while. You don’t owe it to me, you don’t owe me anything, you could get right up and walk out of here and you’d have every right. But don’t. Because I need you.”

  Sweat-soaked, numb, fists pressed together under the table, he felt a wild surge of pity for her. He felt like saying, Yes, of course, whatever I can do to help you. Come home with me, take a bath, let’s blow a few golds and talk about things, this telepathy of yours, this delusion. Not because I ever knew you. Not because the things that happened between you and Nat Hamlin give you any claim on me. But only because you’re a suffering human being and you’ve turned to me for help, and how can I refuse? An act of grace. Yes, yes, I will be your anchor.

  Instead he said, “You’re asking a hell of a lot from me. I’m not the most stable individual in the world either. And I’m under doctor’s orders to keep away from people out of Nat Hamlin’s life. You could be big trouble for me. And me for you. I think the risks for both of us are bigger than the rewards.”

  “Does that mean you don’t want to get involved?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Sorry I wasted so much of your time,” she said. In a dead voice. No change of expression. Not really believing he means it, maybe.

  “It wasn’t wasted. I only wish I was in shape to do you any good. But a Rehab lives right on the edge of collapse himself, in the beginning. He’s got to build a whole new life. So when you ask somebody like that to take on the additional burden—” All right, Macy. Stop explaining things, get up, walk out of here, before she starts crying and you start listening to her again. Up. You don’t owe her a thing. You have your own troubles and they aren’t small ones. Getting to his feet, now. The girl watching him, stricken, incredulous. Giving her a sickly smile, knowing that a smile of any kind is out of context when you’re condemning somebody to death. Turning. Walking away from her, up the aisle of the people’s restaurant, past the counter, the sauerkraut and the algaecakes. Another ten stride’s and you’re out the door.

  A scream from the back of the room.

  “No! Come back! Paul! Paul! Nat!”

  Her words leaped across the gulf between them like a flight of arrows. Six direct hits. Thwack thwack thwack thwack thwack thwack! The last one a killer, straight through from back to chest. He staggered. St. Sebastian stumbling in the restaurant aisle. His brain on fire, something very strange happening in there, like the two hemispheres splitting apart and taking up independent existence. And then a voice, speaking quite distinctly from a point just above his left ear, saying:

  —How could you walk out on her like that, you snotty creep?

  He hit the floor hard, landing elbow-first. A stunning burst of pain. Within that cone of red agony a curious clarity of perception.

  Who said that? he asked, losing consciousness. And, going under, he heard:

  —I did. Nat Hamlin. Your twin brother Nat.

  FOUR

  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 d
issolve? 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!