“So you called out to me.”
“No,” she said. “I reached out. With my mind.”
“You didn’t shout my name? Yell at me to come back?”
“I didn’t open my mouth. I reached. And I made contact. With both of you.”
“Both?”
“I went right into your head, and there was someone called Paul Macy there, yes, but I hit you on another level, too, and I found Nat Hamlin. Coiled up like a spring. Hiding in the dark. I’ll never forget it in a million years. My mind arcing across the gap from me to you, and finding two of you. The hidden one. Or the sleeping one, I guess.”
—Sleeping is more accurate.
Hamlin’s voice. Macy jumped, yanking his hand back from Lissa as though she were a stove.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
“I didn’t hear anything. But I felt a kind of twinge. A little jolt of ESP action.”
“It was Hamlin, talking inside me. He said, ‘Sleeping is more accurate.’ What the hell’s going on, Lissa?”
“He’s still inside you,” she said.
“No. No. That’s impossible. They all said he was gone forever.”
“I guess he wasn’t,” Lissa said. “A little bit of him left, down in the bottom of your head. Maybe you can’t ever fully wipe out a personality. Like you can breed a whole new frog if you’ve got a single cell of the old one’s body, and the new one will be identical to the old. Is that right? And so you had a couple of cells of Nat Hamlin still in your head, and I brought them back to life by touching them. I’m sorry, Paul. It’s all my fault.”
“It isn’t possible,” he said. “It’s just some hallucination I’m having.”
—You wish, brother.
“He’s really there,” Lissa said. “I felt him. A presence inside you. The two of you in one head.”
“No.”
—No?
“I didn’t mean to bring him back, Paul. I mean, I loved him, yes, but he was no good, he hurt people, he was a criminal. When they sentenced him to be wiped out, they did the right thing. I don’t want him back. How can we get rid of him?”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Macy. “He was got rid of before. He can be got rid of again.”
—Up yours, friend.
Lissa managed a brave smile. She took his hand between hers and clamped it. She looked transformed by soap and hot water, no longer the moody, embittered, disturbed waif of the restaurant. He realized that his collapse now tied her to him. She had brought him home. She had cared for him. He couldn’t throw her out. She said, “Can I get you anything? A drink? A gold?”
“Not right now. I’d like to see—if I can stand up—”
“You ought to rest A nasty shock you had.”
“Nevertheless.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed and tested his feet a couple of times before putting his weight on them. Precariously rising. Wobbly. Standing there showing his nakedness to her. Then a gesture that astounded him: modestly moving his hand to cover his crotch. Immediately pulling it back; he could think of six different reasons why it was crazy to want to hide himself from her, starting with the fact that she had been this body’s other owner’s mistress for all those months years ago.
He took a step and another, and found himself in the middle of the room, lurching a little. His left elbow was stiff and sore, which was expectable enough, considering that all his weight had landed on it. Lucky thing it wasn’t broken. But there was also a curious numbness around the right side of his face. No sensation in the cheek, and his lips felt funny in the corner of his mouth. As though he’d had an anesthetic shot at the dentist. As though he’d had a stroke, maybe.
He looked at his face in the bedroom mirror. Yes, a little lopsided, the way his father had looked after his stroke. The mouth pulled back, the lower eyelid drooping. Macy prodded the numb part of his cheek and tried to push the lips into their proper configuration. Everything hard, like plastic flesh.
—Hi ho.
“Are you doing that?”
“What’s the matter, Paul?”
“My face. He’s holding the muscles. I can’t get him to ease off.”
“Oh, Christ, Paul!” Terrified.
A battle of wills. Her terror infected him. This was grisly, having the side of your face held captive by something in your brain. Like going swimming and coming up with a lobster pinching your cock. He fought back. Tugging at the muscles, trying to soften the flesh. Re-lax—re-lax—re-lax. Yes. Getting the upper hand, or whatever. Some sensation returning, now. The mouth no longer distorted. Hamlin scuttling lobsterlike into deeper recesses of his brain, letting go. Tomorrow I scoot over to the Rehab Center and have this taken care of. A complete and exhaustive burnout of whatever vestiges of the previous self still remain. Macy glanced at the mirror again. Opening and closing his mouth, practicing big grins. The first round goes to me. He stumbled back to the bed and toppled onto it, quivering.
“You’re soaked with sweat!” Lissa cried.
“It was a real struggle. The muscles.”
“I watched it. Your face was writhing and grimacing. It looked like you were going crazy. Here, get back under the cover. You ought to rest. Would you like to smoke?”
“Maybe that’s not such a bad idea.”
She brought two golds over. Solemnly they lit up and went through the ritual of puffing, the deep drag, suck in lots of air. As the hallucinogenic smoke wandered through his lungs he imagined it traveling swiftly to his brain and befuddling the demon that Lissa’s ESP had conjured into life there. Lull him back to sleep. And then, when Hamlin’s groggy, drive a silver spike through his heart. Macy couldn’t feel any trace of the other’s presence now. For all he knew, the pot really knocked him out.
“Turn out the light,” Macy said. “Get into bed with me. We’ll lie here and smoke.”
Her thighs cool against his. He felt feverish. The strain of the last few hours, no doubt. The tips of the golds glowing in the dark. They don’t burn as fast now as they did when you had to roll your own. Time to meditate, time to contemplate. But eventually they were gone. Stubbing out the roaches. He was still unable to detect the presence of the passionate, warped soul of Nat Hamlin within him. Pot the panacea, maybe.
He reached toward Lissa.
Moving about in the bed was difficult, because of his sore elbow. Yet he managed. His right arm curling around her back and the hand coming out front on the far side to cup her distant breast. Soft firm bouncy globe, overflowing his clutching fingers. Trapping the nipple gently between index and middle, twitching his digits tenderly to excite her. Then, not easily, he pivoted upward, wriggled, touched his bad arm briefly and dismayingly against the headboard, and succeeded in wedging his right knee between her thighs without losing his grip on her breast. Her legs parted and he got the top of his knee up against the warmth of her. She made little purring sounds. The trouble was that he couldn’t kiss her in this position, his neck simply wouldn’t reach, but okay, this would do for now. Tentatively he flexed the stiff arm, planning to slide it across to her groin if it wasn’t too painful for him.
This was the first time since he had become Paul Macy that he’d been in bed with a woman.
Oh, they’d given him a set of memories. Probably Gomez had taken care of the programming job, the little horny bastard. Dreaming up phantom lays for him. A proper heterosexual background, not even neglecting a spot of innocent pubescent homophily. Here he was with Jeanie Grossman in the cabin at Mount Rainier. Sweet sixteen, both of them, tiny boobies cold and hard in his hands, Jeanie’s long black hair all disheveled, her thighs clamped tight on his probing hand. Oh, no, no, Paul, don’t, please don’t, she was saying, and then she was breathing hoarsely and murmuring, Be gentle, darling, just the way they said it in the dumb romantic novels Gomez most likely had stolen all this from, Oh, be gentle with me, Paul, it’s my first time. On her and in her, wham and bam. Frantic hasty poking. My first time too, but he doesn’t tell her that. Jeanie Grossman gasping out her inaugural orgasm with the white bulk of Mount Rainier peering over her shoulder. But of course it hadn’t happened. Not to him. To Gomez, maybe, long ago; maybe Gomez programmed his own sex life into all his reconstructs, for lack of imagination. Poor Jeanie, whoever you are, a hundred different men think they’ve had your cherry.