To Live Again and The Second Trip (32 page)

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.”

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 cafeteria-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.

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—”