Back and forth. Back and forth. He was beginning to feel embarrassed too. Perhaps she was right: this was mere madness that had possessed his soul. There are no gateways. He could not walk back and forth in front of those horrendous stone faces all afternoon. “Once more,” he said, and nothing happened and he turned away. “It doesn’t work,” he told her. “Or else it works only when one’s counterpart is passing through it at the same instant. And that would be impossible to arrange. If I could send him a message—tie it to a rock, toss it through the gateway, tell him to be here tomorrow at nine sharp—”
“Let’s go,” Celia said.
“All right. Yes.” Defeated, dejected, he let her lead him across the dry hot temple courtyard to the waiting taxi. They returned to Mexico City in the full madness of the evening rush hour, saying little to each other. Their hotel room turned out to have two single beds instead of a double. Just as well, Hilgard thought. He felt an immense airless distance between himself and this woman who believed she was his wife. They had a bleak dinner at a Zona Rosa restaurant and went to sleep early, and before daybreak they were up and out and on their way to the airport.
“Maybe when you’re in your own home,” she said, “you’ll begin to get pieces of your memory back.”
“Maybe,” he said.
But the co-op on East 85th meant nothing to him. It was a handsome apartment, thirty stories up, obviously worth a fortune, and it was furnished beautifully, but it was someone else’s house, with someone else’s books and clothes and treasures in it. The books included a good many that he also owned, and the clothes fit him, and some of the paintings and primitive artifacts were quite in accordance with his own taste. It was like being in one’s twin brother’s home, perhaps. But he wandered helplessly and in growing panic from room to room, wondering where his files were, his little hoard of boyhood things, his first editions, his Peruvian pottery collection. Delusions? Phantom memories of a nonexistent life? He was cut off from everything that he thought to be real, and it terrified him. The Manhattan phone book listed no Theodore Hilgard on Third Avenue, and no Hilgard Galleries, either. The universe had swallowed that Ted Hilgard.
“I phoned Judith,” Celia said, “and told her something of what happened. She wants to see you first thing tomorrow.”
He had been to Judith’s Rockefeller University office often enough, just a few blocks east of his gallery. But this was a different Judith and her office was at New York Medical, uptown at the edge of Spanish Harlem. Hilgard walked over to Fifth and caught a bus, wondering if he had to pay his fare with some sort of token in this world, wondering if the Metropolitan Museum was where he remembered it, wondering about Judith. He negotiated the bus problem without difficulty. The gray bulk of the museum still crouched on the flank of Central Park. Upper Fifth Avenue looked more or less untransformed, the Frick Collection building just as dignified as ever, the Guggenheim spiral as peculiar as ever. And Judith was untransformed also: elegant, beautiful, warm, with the light of that wonderful intelligence gleaming in her eyes. The only thing missing was that certain mischievous sparkle, that subliminal aura of shared intimacies, that acknowledged that they had long been lovers. She greeted him as a friend and nothing more than a friend.
“What in God’s name has been going on with you?” she asked at once.
He smiled ruefully. “Between one moment and the next I seem to have had a total identity transplant. I used to be a bachelor with an art gallery down the block from Bloomingdale’s. Now I’m a married man with a marketing research company on 57th Street. And so on. A burst of dizziness at the ruins of Teotihuacan and everything in my life got switched around.”
“You don’t remember Celia?”
“It isn’t just amnesia, if that’s where you’re heading. I don’t remember Celia or anything else having to do with my life here. But I do remember a million other things that don’t seem to exist any more, a complete reality substructure: phone numbers, addresses, biographical details. You, for instance. The Judith I know is with Rockefeller University. She’s single and lives at 382 East 61st Street and her phone number is—you see what I mean? As a matter of fact, you may be the only link between my old life and this one. Somehow I got to know you in both identities. Figure the odds against that.”
Judith looked at him with intense, somber concern. “We’ll arrange a full battery of neurological tests right away. This sounds like the damnedest mental short circuit I’ve ever heard of, though I suspect I’ll turn up some similar cases in the literature. People who experienced sudden drastic dissociative reactions leading to complete disruption of personality patterns.”
“Some sort of schizoid break, is that what you’re saying?”
“We don’t use terms like schizophrenia or paranoia much any more, Ted. They’ve been corrupted by popular misconceptions, and they’re too imprecise anyway. We know now that the brain is an enormously complex instrument that has capabilities far beyond our rational understanding—I mean freakish stuff like being able to multiply ten-digit numbers in your head—and it’s entirely possible that given the right stimulus it can manufacture a perfectly consistent surrogate identity, which—”
“In layman’s terms, I’m crazy.”
“If you want to use layman’s terms,” Judith said, “you’re suffering from delusions of an extraordinarily vivid kind.”
Hilgard nodded. “Among those delusions, you should know, is that you and I were lovers for the past four years.”
She smiled. “I’m not at all surprised. You’ve been carrying on a lovely little flirtation with me from the moment we met.”
“Have we ever been to bed together?”
“Of course not, Ted.”
“Have I ever seen you naked?”
“Not unless you’ve been spying on me.”
He wondered how much this Judith differed from his. Risking it, he said, “Then how do I know you have a small surgical scar on your left breast?”
Shrugging, she said, “I had a little benign tumor removed years ago. Celia might have mentioned that to you.”
“And I’d know which breast?”
“You might.”
“I can tell you six or seven other things about your body that only somebody who’s plenty familiar with it would know. I can tell you what your favorite lovemaking position is, and why. I can imitate the sound you make at your climax.”
“Oh? Can you?”
“Listen,” he said, and did his best to duplicate that strange whining passionate cry he had heard so many times. Judith’s playful, challenging smile disappeared. Her lips grew taut and her eyes narrowed and splotches of color came to her cheeks. She glanced away from him.
Hilgard said, “I didn’t have a tape recorder under your bed. I haven’t been discussing your sexual idiosyncrasies with Ron. I wouldn’t even know Ron if I tripped over him in the street. And I’m not reading your mind. How do I know all these things, then?”
She was silent. She moved papers about randomly on her desk. Her hands appeared to be shaking.
“Maybe you’re the one with dissociative reactions,” he said. “You’ve forgotten all about our affair.”
“You know that’s nonsense.”
“You’re right. Because the Judith Rose I’ve been to bed with is at Rockefeller University. But I’ve been to bed with a Judith Rose who’s very much like you. Do you doubt that now?”
She made no reply. She was staring at him in an astounded way, and there seemed to be something else in her look, a volatility, an excitement, that led him to think he had somehow reached across the barrier of his lost world to touch her, this Judith, to arouse her and kindle in her some simulacrum of the love and passion that he knew they had had in another existence. A sudden wild fantasy erupted in him—getting free of Celia, getting Judith free of Ron, and reconstructing in this unfamiliar world the relationship that had been taken from him. But the idea faded as quickly as it had come. It was foolishness; it was nonsense; it was an impossibility.