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.