To Live Again and The Second Trip (35 page)

And there was much more to Macy’s curriculum vita. The married woman, really old, easily past thirty, who had fallen upon him with sudden ferocity when he was seventeen years old and selling encyclopedias in the summer. Sitting next to her on the couch with all his charts outspread, saying, This is an outstanding feature, our three-dimensional visual aids presentation, and we have a choice of six bindings in beautiful decorator colors, and would you like to hear about our brand-new home videotape supplement, and while he prattles she pushes the brochures off his lap and dives for his zipper and then the amazing shattering sensation of her lips engulfing his cock.

Good old Gomez. And the nurse at Gstaad, seducing him in his huge plaster cast. And the plump German girl who liked him to use the butler’s entrance. And the one with the rubber underwear and the whip. The endurance contest in Kyoto, too. The orgy on the beach at Herzlia. The dear doctor had stocked him amply with vivid and varied erotica. But what was the use? None of it was real, at least not so far as Paul Macy was concerned, and so he could no more claim it as earned experience than if he had got it all from Henry Miller and the divine marquis. He was minus any authentic lovemaking memories. So in effect he was about to lose his innocence at the age of thirty-nine. But as he fondled Lissa’s slim sleek body he realized the value of having had all those imaginary episodes of the flesh implanted in him. A real virgin would be up against anatomical confusions, the mechanics of the thing, the correct angle of entry, all those problems. He at least knew where the way in was to be found. Secondhand knowledge, maybe, but useful. The Rehab Center hadn’t turned him loose unable to cope.

One small problem, though. He didn’t seem to be able to get it up.

Lissa was primed and ready, nicely lubricated, and his item still hung slack. Through slitwide eyes she watched him and frowned. The juices souring and curdling in her as she waited to have her vacancy filled. At last understanding the reason for the delay. Cuddling against him; her hand to the scrotum, a light tickling, very skillful. Ah. Yes. Some wind in the sails, finally. The old familiar rigidifying that he had never before experienced. Up. Up. Up. At full mast, now. Swing smoothly around, slide yourself into her. They made adjustments of their positions. She prepared herself to receive him. He was athrob, inflamed, aloft.

Then came a laugh from within and a cold devilish voice:

—Take a look at this, pal.

Blossoming on the screen of his mind the image of Lissa spread wide on another bed in another room, and himself—no, not himself but Nat Hamlin—poised above her, seizing the calves of her legs, draping them over his shoulders, now lowering himself to her with ithyphallic vitality. Nailing her. And as that inward consummation took place Macy felt his own rod lose its vehemence. Limp again; shriveled, infantile, a wee-wee instead of a cock. Wearily he sagged against the girl. Doing it was impossible for him now. Not with
him
watching. I carry my own audience in my head. Hamlin, still roaring with turbulent inner laughter, was sending up scene after scene out of his no doubt actual experience, coupling with Lissa in this position, in that one, Lissa on top, Lissa down on her knees being had dogwise, the whole copulatory biography of their long-ago liaison, and Macy, helpless, his phantom images of Jeanie Grossman and the encyclopedia woman swept away by this gushing incursion of reality, lay stunned and sobbing and impotent waiting for Hamlin to stop tormenting him.

Lissa didn’t seem to understand what was happening, only that Macy had lost his hard at a critical moment and was plainly upset about it. Her long thin arms cradled him affectionately. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “You’ve been under a terrible strain, and anyway that kind of thing can happen to anybody. It’ll be better later. Just lie here and rest. It doesn’t matter. It’s all right. It’s all right.” Pressing his cheek against her breast. “Try to get some sleep,” she said. He nodded. Closing his eyes, trying to relax. Out of the darkness Hamlin’s voice:

—That was just to let you know I’m still here.

S
OMETIME DURING THE NIGHT
there must have been a flow of strength from her to him, for he had fallen asleep being comforted by her, and he was awakened by the sounds of her sobs. The room very dark: morning some hours away, yet he felt as though he’d had enough sleep. Lissa had her back to him, her bony spine pressing into his chest; she was curled up knees to breasts, making snuffling sounds, and every thirty seconds or so a great racking open-mouthed bed-shaking sob came out of her. Before he could tend to her he had to survey the condition of his own head. All seemed well. He was rested and loose. There was a delicious sense of aloneness between his ears. When he was in contact with Hamlin he felt inwardly cluttered, as though bales of barbed wire were coming unraveled in his skull. None of that now. The alter ego was sleeping, maybe, or at any rate busy in some other realm. Macy put his hand lightly on Lissa’s bare shoulder and called her name. She went on sobbing. He shook her gently.

“What?” she said, sounding foggy and far away.

“Tell me what the trouble is.”

A long silence. No reply. Had she gone back to sleep? Had she ever been awake?

“Lissa? Lissa, what’s the trouble?”

“Trouble?”

“You’ve been crying.”

“It’s all a bad dream,” she said, and he realized that she was still asleep. She pulled away from him, getting even more tightly into the fetal position. Heaving a terrible sigh. Sounds of weeping. He wrapped himself around her, thighs to her buttocks, his lips just above her ear. Her skin was cold. She was shivering. “Chasing me,” she murmured. “Ten arms, like some kind of octopus.”

“Wake up,” he said. “It’ll all go away if you wake up.”

“Why are you so sure?”

And she sent him her dream, nicely wrapped. Popping from her mind to his, clicking smartly into place like a cassette. Jesus. A lunar landscape of crumbling concrete, thousands of miles wide, a million cracks and furrows and fissures. Not a building, not a tree, not a shrub in sight, only this gray-white plateau of flat ruinous stony pavement covering the universe. From above a fierce white light plays on the concrete, so that the upthrust rims of the fissure-lines cast long harsh shadows. A frosty wind blowing. Footsteps. Lissa appears from the right, naked, breathless, running hard, her hair streaming behind her, streaming
into
the wind. Her pale white skin is marked by dozens of circular red cicatrices, suction marks. And now her pursuer thunders after her. Nat Hamlin, yes, wearing his bland even-featured Anglo-Saxon face, but he has eight, ten, a dozen curling tentacles coming out of his shoulders, tentacles equipped with big rigid sucker-cups. Not hard to tell where Lissa got the red marks on her body. And a dick a yard long sticking out in front of him, like a club. His feet are frog-flipped the size of snowshoes. Thromp! Thromp! Thromp! He comes flapping toward her at an incredible speed. And then there are the voices. People are saying things about her in Sanskrit, in Hungarian, in Basque, in Hopi, in Turkish. Unfavorable comments about her breasts. Snide remarks about her unshaven armpits. A cutting reference to a mole on her left hind cheek. They are laughing at her in Bengali. They are offering her perversions in Polish. She hears everything. She understands everything. Hamlin now has split in two, a double pursuer, one of him somehow coming from the other side of her, and she is trapped between them. Closer…closer…impaling her fore and aft…she screams…

I reject this dream, Macy thought. It isn’t a necessary nightmare. To hell with it.

“Wake up,” he said again, loudly.

Waking her wasn’t so easy. She was hovering in a peculiar borderline state, almost a hypnotic trance, in which she was able to hear him and even give him rational answers, without, however, being plugged into the waking world in any meaningful way. Lost in her hallucinatory horrors. He switched on the light. Half past four in the morning. He’d been sleeping only about two hours, then. Seemed like a full night. Pulling her to a sitting position, he opened her eyes with his thumbs.

She stared blearily at him. Eyes like mirrors, seeing nothing. “Lissa? Jesus, Lissa,
snap out of it!
” Waves of terror rippling across her face. Her sharp little elbows digging hard into her sides, fists balled and held tight to her clavicles. Still sobbing, a quick panicky inhaling and exhaling. Macy hauled her from the bed and frogmarched her into the bathroom. His palm touching the shower control. A computerized cascade of chilly water. Get under, girl. A shriek. As though he were flaying her. But she was awake now.

“My God,” she said. “I was on some other planet.”

“I know. I know.”

“My head’s all full of it. A million square miles of cracked pavement. I still see it. And that light shining overhead, such a fucking bright light. And those tentacles.”

“They’re gone now,” he said.

“No. They came out of my head, didn’t they? They’re still in there, the way Nat Hamlin’s in you. I’m going crazy, Paul, isn’t that obvious? Christ, hold tight to me. Maybe the octopus is real and this is the dream.”

Her teeth were chattering. He wrapped a towel around her and guided her back to the bedroom. Her cheeks felt hot. A high fever raging in her. “I just want to hide somewhere,” she said. “To disappear into my own brain, you understand what I mean? To get away into some inner world where nobody can find me. Where I can’t hear the voices.”

She slithered under the covers, pulling the blankets over her head. A thick mound in the bed, a lump, like a rabbit in a snake’s belly. From underneath came muffled words. “What’s going to happen to us, Paul? We’re both crazy.”

Macy got in beside her, and abruptly she turned to him with such fantastic ferocious passion that the breath was knocked from him. Grappling with him, knotting her arms and legs about his. Her belly pushing at his. Her pubic bone jabbing him painfully. Lissa clutching him as if she wanted to devour him. As a boy living in Seattle in the life he hadn’t lived, he had watched a starfish in a tidepool going to work on a clam, pulling its shell open with its suction cups, then turning itself inside out so that its stomach might go forth and ingest. He thought of that now as Lissa writhed against him. Waiting for something long and slimy to extrude from her slit and begin digesting him. Thank you, Dr. Gomez, for that lovely image. Do you hate women too, you mindfucking bastard?

“Paul,” she murmured. “Paul. Paul. Paul.” Rhythmic exclamations. To his surprise he found his member stiffening despite everything, and in a single swift gesture he slipped it into her. She was hot and wet. As he speared her he expected Hamlin to surface and interfere with things again, but this time he was allowed the privacy of his genitals. Lissa cried out and came almost immediately. Her spasms were still going on when his began, a million and a quarter years later.

At half past seven he woke again. Lissa seemed to be sleeping soundly. Hamlin quiescent. He showered and went into the little kitchen-cum-dinette. Picked up the phone, tapped out the delayed-message code, and instructed it to call the network at nine to say that he was sick and wouldn’t be coming in. Then he called the Rehab Center and arranged for today’s post-therapy session to be moved up from four in the afternoon to nine in the morning. He didn’t want to lose any time getting the Hamlin problem dealt with. “Will you hold?” the Center’s computer asked him, and he held, and two or three minutes later the machine came back to him and said, “I’ve checked Dr. Ianuzzi’s schedule, Mr. Macy, and it will be possible for her to see you at nine today.” The computer’s face, on the telephone screen, was that of an efficient, good-looking brunette. “Fine,” Macy said, winking at her.

He peered into the bedroom. Lissa lay face down, one arm dangling to the floor. Snoring faintly. Well, she’d had a hard night He programmed breakfast for himself.

Macy wondered if Dr. Gomez would be at the Center today. He wanted to see the look on the little Mex’s face when he showed up with a supposedly obliterated identity surfacing in his brain. Macy could still hear the doctor’s cocky spiel. “If I tell you Hamlin is eradicated, it’s because I
know
Hamlin is eradicated.” Sure. “I’m not just being a bullheaded bastard.” No, of course not. “Nat Hamlin doesn’t exist any more.” You tell it, baby. “Hamlin exists only as an abstract concept.” Right on, sweetheart. How was Gomez going to explain any of last night’s events? I hope Hamlin spits right in his goddam face. With my mouth.

He thought he had a good idea what had brought Hamlin back to life. Who. Lissa was who. This telepathy business of hers had somehow managed to nudge the expelled ego out of limbo and give him at least a partial grip on his former body. Looking back over his relationship with Lissa, Macy saw the pattern clearly. That first day, two weeks ago exactly, when she’d collided with him on the street, that first moment of recognition, Lissa refusing to honor his Rehab badge and calling him by Nat Hamlin’s name: right then, at the beginning, he’d felt a stabbing pain, as if he were Hamlin and back at the Center having his past uprooted. And then, a few minutes later, same incident, when Lissa had leaned close and grabbed his wrist: that feeling of heat in his brain, that sense of an intrusion. Clearly it was her ESP stirring things up in him. Producing an instant of confusion, of double identity, when he wasn’t sure whether he was Hamlin or Macy. Probably that was the moment at which Hamlin’s return to conscious existence was stimulated. When I got that vision of myself in Hamlin’s studio, Lissa posing for me. And thought I was having a heart attack on the street.

And then? Later the same day, when he almost passed out in front of Harold Griswold’s Hamlin sculpture, that must have been Hamlin giving a wild whoop and a leap inside him at the sight of something familiar. That night he had the first of his pursuit dreams. Hamlin loose in his head, and chasing him. Next? When Lissa sent the letter threatening suicide, and he met her on the street. Good Christ, was that only last night? And he walked up to her and there was that doubleness again, the nausea, the confusion. No doubt she had given Hamlin another little nudge. Lastly, when he tried to leave her in the restaurant, and she cried out for him to come back. The sheer mental voltage of that must have been the clincher, awakening Hamlin fully, giving him a chance to jump to the conscious level. He was so stunned by Lissa’s telepathic scream that Hamlin was able to grab some of the cerebral centers and start talking to him. Even to seize the facial muscles on the right side, for a little while. He doesn’t have solid control of anything, not for long, he holds on a while and slips away, but he’s there. Lissa’s fault. Of course she didn’t intend to. A weird telepathic accident, is all. Or maybe not so accidental. It was Hamlin she loved, he thought; I’m just a stranger in his body. Suppose this is her way of getting rid of me and helping him come back.