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!
Down on the ground. His knees on the crooks of my arms. Pinned. His lips drooling. A lunatic with my face. Get off! Get off! Get off! And he laughs. And over his right shoulder I see the hovereye recording everything. Wonderful. Now we bring you the final moments of Paul Macy, thirty-nine, tragically slain by his berserk alter ego. After this brief message from the makers of Acapulco Golds. Going. Going. Go—
He was moving warily through a sleepy suburb, Queens or Staten Island, he wasn’t sure which. They all looked the same. A biting January day. High-pressure system sitting on the city: not even a cloud in the sky, just a bright blank blue shield pressing down, no hint of oncoming snow, though some blackened heaps of the Christmas snowfall still lined the curb. In this sort of dryness it was difficult to believe it would ever snow again. The leafless trees like gaunt bundles of sticks, silently shouting, I am an oak, I am a maple, I am a tulip tree, and nobody listening because they all look the same. Squat two-story brick houses, reasonably far apart, on both sides of the street. The kiddies at school. The hubbies at work. A hot little wifey behind each picture window.
He wasn’t sure how he had found his way here. Starting out from Connecticut about half past nine in the morning, the work going all wrong, a fucking nightmare in the studio finishing in a horrid botch of a week’s good labors, and then driving into the city, crossing two or maybe three bridges, ending up here. And the familiar yellow haze now swathing the temples and forehead, the steamy mist of madness. He welcomed it. There comes a time when you have to surrender to the dark forces. Yes, yes, go on, take possession of me. Nat Hamlin at your service. Call me Raskolnikov Junior. Ha, that crazy Rooshian understood something about intensity! How we boil inside. And sometimes boil over.
Look at this house, now. A completely stereotyped suburban villa, maybe fifty years old, product of the buggy seventies, the creepy sixties. I shall bring some illumination into its dreary existence. By an act of will I shall intensify the life-experience of its inhabitant. See how easy it is to force the side door? Just this flimsy little latch: you insert the slicer, you waggle it, you push…yes.
Now we go inside. Good morning, ma’am, this is the mad rapist, the Darien cocksmith, I’m peddling ecstatic terror this happy day. No, don’t scream, I’m friendly. I never do unnecessary injury. I assure you that I wouldn’t be here at all except for this irresistible compulsion I have. Is it my fault I’m off my hinges? A man is entitled to have a breakdown. Especially if he’s a serious important artist. You ought to be thrilled to know who’s going to fuck you. You’re part of one of the most significant personal disintegrations in the history of western art. Like, suppose I was Van Gogh and I cut off my fucking ear right here on your kitchen linoleum? Wouldn’t that give you at least a peripheral place in his biography? Well, all right, then. He had his collapse, I’m having mine. Come here, now. Let’s get this tunic off you. See what kind of merchandise you’re offering. Sorry, I wouldn’t have ripped it if you had been cooperating. Why fight it? This can be much more meaningful for you if you just spread and give in. There. There. See, you’re creaming for me! How can you deny the activity of your own Bartholin glands? This lubrication brands you whore, milady! Ah, In. In. In. That’s the ticket. In and out, in and out. Con amore. Allegro, allegrissimo! Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. Zip it up. Out the door. Mad rapist strikes again. Thus we enact the latest fascinating episode in our case of personality disruption. I look so cleancut for being a psychopath. Oops! Hey, no, officer! Put that stunner down!
Don’t—hey, watch it—I surrender, damn you, I surrender! I’ll go peacefully! I’ll—go—peacefully—
Blinking furiously, soggy-headed, disoriented, he woke up. He found himself in bed, his own bed, the covers up around his chin, the lights on in the bedroom. Darkness beyond the window. The sheets cool against his skin: somebody has undressed him. From his elbow there flowed rivulets of agony. For a moment he was totally unable to recollect his last previous period of consciousness; then the incident in the people’s restaurant came back to him. Walking out on Lissa. The girl calling after him. Nat Hamlin’s voice whispering snakelike in his ear. Calamity. Collapse. Chaos. “Hello?” he said, voice breaking, ragged. “Is anybody here? Hello? Hello?”
Out of the other room came the girl. Framed in the doorway, naked. Even more slender than he had imagined, ribcage visible, the double ridge of muscle on the flat belly, thighs lean with a gap of an inch or two between them all the way up. The breasts still full, though. Not big boobs but nicely shaped. Triangular red bush. Her skin pink, scrubbed-looking, still moist. She’s had a bath. Looks about five years younger now.
“How long have you been up?” she asked him.
“Maybe half a minute. What day is this?”
“It’s still the same Monday night. No, it’s Tuesday morning by now. Half past one in the morning.”
“You brought me home?”
“With some help. There was this cabdriver in the people’s restaurant. He carried you out. Christ, I was scared, Paul. I thought you were dead!”
“Did you try to get a doctor?”
She laughed. “At this time of night? I just sat here and watched you and hoped you’d snap out of it. You seemed to be having nightmares. Your eyeballs rolling around under the lids. I touched your mind just once, more or less an accident, and it was pretty scary, something about being chased through a dark alley.” Coming over to the bed, she said, “Do you feel all right? Headache?”
“Headache, yes. Jesus.”
“After a while it looked like you were just sleeping. So I took a bath, like you said I needed. You should have seen the mud come off me. But you get to feeling so shitty sometimes that you don’t even bother to wash yourself, and that’s where I was at. Well, that’s over, now. I couldn’t figure out how to work your cassette player, so I’ve been inside reading a book, and—”
“What happened to me in the restaurant?” he asked.
She sat on the edge of the bed. He looked at her thighs and wanted to let his hand rest on them, but it took two tries before the quivering arm would lift itself and make the ten-inch journey. Her skin was cool and smooth. He stroked her thigh, up and down, midway between knee and crotch.
She said, “You got up to leave, remember? I didn’t think you were going to do it, but you did, and there you were, walking away from me. The one hope I had, walking away from me. And I knew I had hit bottom right there.”