—Agreed, Macy. But you’re no fool. You can see how flagrantly unjust Rehab is. They want to separate me from society because I’m dangerous, okay, I agree, I agree, put me away, try to fix me, drain all the poison out of me. Right. But instead this. The super resources of modern science are employed to murder a great but somewhat deranged sculptor and invent a dumb holovision commentator to replace him.
Thank you.
—What else can I say? Look up there, at my Antigone. Could you do that? Could anybody else do that? I did it. My unique gift to mankind. And fifty others almost as good. I’m not bragging, Macy, I’m being as objective as hell. I was somebody valuable, I had a special gift, I had intensity, I had humanity. Maybe my gift drove me crazy after a while, but at least I had something to offer. And you? What are you? Who are you? You’re nothing. You have no depth You have no texture. You have no past. You have no reality. I’ve been sitting here inside you, taking an inventory. I know what you’re made of, Macy, and it’s all ersatz. You have no purpose in existing. You can’t do anything that a robot couldn’t do better. A holovision commentator? They can program a machine with pear-shaped tones, and it’ll broadcast you off the map.
I admit all this, Macy replied. He stood stiffly, pretending to study the sculpture. He wondered how much time had elapsed during his colloquy with Hamlin. Five seconds? Five minutes? He had lost track of external things. Granted that you were a genius and I’m a nobody, what am I supposed to do about it?
—Vacate the premises.
Just like that.
—Yes. It wouldn’t be hard. I could show you how. You relax, you lower your defenses, you let me administer the coup de grace. Then you disappear back into the limbo they whistled you out of, and I can function as Nat Hamlin wearing the mask of Paul Macy. I can begin to sculpt again. Quietly. As long as I don’t harm anybody, I’d get away with it.
You’d harm me.
—But you have no right to exist! You’re fiction, Macy. You’re not real.
I exist now. I’m here. I have feelings and ambitions and fears. When I eat a steak I taste it. When I fuck a girl I enjoy it. You know how it goes. Cut me and I bleed. I’m real, as real as anybody who ever lived.
—How can I persuade you that you aren’t?
You can’t. I’m as real to me as anybody else is to himself. Look, Hamlin, look, this isn’t a thing for logic. I can’t just say to you, Okay, you’re a genius, I bow to the demands of culture, lop off my head and take my place. A far, far better thing, et cetera, et cetera. No. I’m here. I want to go on being here.
—Where does that leave me?
Up shit creek, I guess. Right now you’re the one who’s unreal, you know that? Officially you’re dead. You’re just a spook wandering around my skull. Why don’t you do the noble thing? Stop fucking up a decent and inoffensive human being’s life, and clear out. Vacate the premises, as you say. Lower the defenses and let me clobber you.
—Some chance.
You’ve given the world enough masterpieces.
—I’m still young. I’m better than you. I deserve to live.
The court said otherwise. The court sent you out of the world for God knows what kind of crimes, and—
—For rape. That’s all it was, rape.
I don’t care if it was for reusing old postage stamps. A verdict’s a verdict. I’m not giving up my life to remedy what you consider to have been a miscarriage of justice.
—You don’t have a life, Macy!
Sorry. I do.
A long silence. Macy peered at the sculpture, at the onlookers, at the walls. His head was spinning. Hamlin’s presence remained manifest within him as a steady pressure, wordless, heavy. And then, finally:
All right. We’re getting nowhere like this. Go stroll around the museum. We’ll continue the discussion some other time.
Sensation of Hamlin letting go. Dropping once more into the depths. Plop. Splash. The illusion of solitude. Solemn trombone music marking the alter ego’s exit. Macy was drenched in sweat. Unsteady on his feet.
Lissa: “Have you seen enough yet?”
“I think so. We can go. Wait, let me hold your hand.”
“Is something wrong, Paul?”
“A little wobbly.” He wasn’t able to look at her. Clutching her cool fingers between his. Step. Step. Through the invisible door. In the gallery outside he found a bench and sank down on it. Lissa fluttering over him, bewildered. He said, “While I was looking at it, I had a sort of conversation with Hamlin. Very quietly. He was almost charming.”
“What was he telling you?”
“A lot of insidious bullshit. He invited me to get out of our body so he could have it On the grounds that he’s a great artist and deserves to live more than I do.”
“That’s just the sort of thing he’d say!”
“It’s just the sort of thing he did say. I told him no, and he went back to his cave. And now I realize I must have put more energy into that chat than I thought.”
“Sit. Rest.”
“I’m going to.”
“How about the Antigone?” she asked.
“Incredible. Demolishing. I almost feel a kind of secondhand paternal pride in it. I mean, these hands here made it. This brain conceived it. Even if I wasn’t there at the time. And—”
“No,” Lissa said. “These hands made it, yes, but not this brain.” She tapped his skull lightly, affectionately, with three fingertips. “A brain’s just a globe of gray cheese. Brains don’t conceive sculptures. Minds do. And this wasn’t the mind that conceived the Antigone.”
“I realize that,” he told her stiffly. Somehow her quibbling upset him. A show of loyalty for Hamlin, perhaps. Arousing jealousy in him. Hard to accept the truth that she had been there while that piece was being fashioned, she posed, she was in on the white-hot hours of creation, she and Hamlin, in the days before Paul Macy was born. To think about that made him feel like an intruder in his own body. What ecstasies had Lissa and Hamlin shared, what joys and griefs, what moments of exaltation? He was shut out of all those events. Cut off by the impenetrable wall of the past. Other times, another self. But she could remember. Scowling, he watched the museum-goers filing by threes and fours into the Hamlin room. Hamlin is right, he thought gloomily. I’m nothing. I have no texture. I have no past. I have no reality. Abruptly standing, he said, “Is there anything else you’d like to see, as long as we’re in the museum?”
“This trip was your idea.”
“As long as we’re here.”
“No, nothing,” she said. “Not really.”
“Let’s go, then.”
“Did you learn whatever you wanted to learn from the Antigone?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said; “All that I wanted to learn. And more. Maybe too much more.” They hurried from the building by a side door in the Egyptian wing.
8
Emerging into the sunlight revived his vigor a bit. It was still only about four in the afternoon. At Lissa’s suggestion they went uptown, to her place; there were some things she needed to get, she said. Unspoken in that was the assumption that she would be moving in with him. He didn’t object. He couldn’t say that he loved her, as Hamlin evidently had, or that he was even on the verge of falling in love with her; but their individually precarious circumstances demanded a mutual defense treaty, and living together was the obvious logistical arrangement. For the time being, at least.