“Hold it, friend,” Novins said, adopting the tone. “That’s pretty muddy logic. First of all, who’s to say you’re not going to vanish back where you came from as soon as I hang up…”
“Bullshit,” Jay answered.
“Yeah, well, maybe; but even if you’re here to stay, and I don’t concede that craziness for a second, even if you are real—”
“Believe it, baby, I’m real,” Jay said, with a soft chuckle. Novins was starting to hate him.
“—even if you are real,” Novins continued, “there’s no saying we can’t both exist, and both lead happy, separate lives.”
“You know something, Novins,” Jay said, “you’re really full of horse puckey. You can’t lead a happy life by yourself, man, how the hell are you going to do it knowing I’m over here living your life, too?”
“What do you mean I can’t lead a happy life? What do you know about it?” And he stopped; of course Jay knew about it. ALL about it.
“You’d better start facing reality, Novins. You’ll be coming to it late in life, but you’d better learn how to do it. Maybe it’ll make the end come easier.”
Novins wanted to slam the receiver into its rack. He was at once furiously angry and frightened. He knew what the other Novins was saying was true; he had to know, without argument; it was, after all, himself saying it. “Only one of us is going to make it,” he said, tightly. “And it’s going to be me, old friend.”
“How do you propose to do it, Novins? You’re out there, locked out. I’m in here, in my home, safe where I’m supposed to be.”
“How about we look at it this way,” Novins said quickly, “you’re trapped in there, locked away from the world in three-and-a-half rooms. I’ve got everywhere else to move in. You’re limited. I’m free.”
There was silence for a moment.
Then Jay said, “We’ve reached a bit of an impasse, haven’t we? There’s something to be said for being loose, and there’s something to be said for being safe inside. The amazing thing is that we both have accepted this thing so quickly.”
Novins didn’t answer. He accepted it because he had no other choice; if he could accept that he was speaking to himself, then anything that followed had to be part of that acceptance. Now that Jay had said it bluntly, that only one of them could continue to exist, all that remained was finding a way to make sure it was he, Novins, who continued past this point.
“I’ve got to think about this,” Novins said. “I’ve got to try to work some of this out better. You just stay celled in there, friend; I’m going to a hotel for the night. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
He started to hang up when Jay’s voice stopped him. “What do I say if Jamie gets there and you’re gone and she calls me?”
Novins laughed. “That’s your problem, motherfucker.”
He racked the receiver with nasty satisfaction.
He took special precautions. First the bank, to clean out the checking account. He thanked God he’d had his checkbook with him when he’d gone out to meet Jamie the night before. But the savings account passbook was in the apartment. That meant Jay had access to almost ten thousand dollars. The checking account was down to fifteen hundred, even with all outstanding bills paid, and the Banks for Cooperatives note came due in about thirty days and that meant… he used the back of a deposit slip to figure the interest… he’d be getting ten thousand four hundred and sixty-five dollars and seven cents deposited to his account. His new account, which he opened at another branch of the same bank, signing the identification cards with a variation of his signature sufficiently different to prevent Jay’s trying to draw on the account. He was at least solvent. For the time being.
But all his work was in the apartment. All the public relations accounts he handled. Every bit of data and all the plans and phone numbers and charts, they were all there in the little apartment office. So he was quite effectively cut off from his career.
Yet in a way, that was a blessing. Jay would have to keep up with the work in his absence, would have to follow through on the important campaigns for Topper and McKenzie, would have to take all the moronic calls from Lippman and his insulting son, would have to answer all the mail, would have to keep popping Titralac all day just to stay ahead of the heartburn. He felt gloriously free and almost satanically happy that he was rid of the aggravation for a while, and that Jay was going to find out being Peter Jay Novins wasn’t all fun and Jamies.
Back in his hotel room at the Americana he made a list of things he had to do. To survive. It was a new way of thinking, setting down one by one the everyday routine actions from which he was now cut off. He was all alone now, entirely and totally, for the first time in his life, cut off from everything. He could not depend on friends or associates or the authorities. It would be suicide to go to the police and say, “Listen, I hate to bother you, but I’ve split and one of me has assumed squatter’s rights in my apartment; please go up there and arrest him.” No, he was on his own, and he had to exorcise Jay from the world strictly by his own wits and cunning.
Bearing in mind, of course, that Jay had the same degree of wit and cunning.
He crossed half a dozen items off the list. There was no need to call Jamie and find out what had happened to her the night before. Their relationship wasn’t that binding in any case. Let Jay make the excuses. No need to cancel the credit cards, he had them with him. Let Jay pay the bills from the savings account. No need to contact any of his friends and warn them. He couldn’t warn them, and if he did, what would he warn them against? Himself? But he did need clothes, fresh socks and underwear, a light jacket instead of his topcoat, a pair of gloves in case the weather turned. And he had to cancel out the delivery services to the apartment in a way that would prevent Jay from reinstating them: groceries, milk, dry cleaning, newspapers. He had to make it as difficult for him in there as possible. And so he called each tradesman and insulted him so grossly they would never serve him again. Unfortunately, the building provided heat and electricity and gas and he had to leave the phone connected.
The phone was his tie-line to victory, to routing Jay out of there.
When he had it all attended to, by three o’clock in the afternoon, he returned to the hotel room, took off his shoes, propped the pillows up on the bed, lay down and dialed a 9 for the outside line, then dialed his own number.
As it rang, he stared out the forty-fifth floor window of the hotel room, at the soulless pylons of the RCA and Grants Buildings, the other dark-glass filing cabinets for people. It was a wonder anyone managed to stay sane, stay whole in such surroundings! Living in cubicles, boxed and trapped and throttled, was it any surprise that people began to fall apart… even as he seemed to be falling apart? The wonder was that it all managed to hold together as well as it did. But the fractures were beginning to appear, culturally and now—as with Peter Novins, he mused—personally. The phone continued to ring. Clouds blocked out all light and the city was swamped by shadows. At three o’clock in the afternoon, the ominous threat of another night settled over Novins’s hotel room.