Sometimes at night it was hard to be sure of that, though. By the third night Macy dreaded going to bed. There was that man with his face, always haunting him when he crossed into dreamland. Waking in distress, he wanted to call a friend and ask for reassurance. But he had no friends. The old ones had been washed away by the therapy, and he hadn’t made any new ones yet, except a few people he had come to know at the Rehab Center, fellow reconstructs, and he didn’t want to bother them in the middle of the night. Maybe they had demons of their own to wrestle with. And the people from the network. Mustn’t call them. You’d blow the whole pretense of your stability in one gush of panicky talk. Nor could he call any of his therapists. Dr. Brewster, Dr. Ianuzzi, Dr. Gomez. You’re on your own, they said. We’re cutting the umbilicus. So. So. All alone. Sweat it out. Eventually, no matter how bad a night it was, he would sleep. Eventually.
“Is there any chance,” Macy asked, “that the Rehab job didn’t completely take? I mean, sometimes I think I can feel Hamlin trying to break through.”
A Tuesday late in May, 2011. One week after his discharge from the Rehab Center. His first session of post-therapy therapy. Dr. Gomez, round-faced, swarthy, drooping black mustache, not much chin, scowling and chewing on a computer stylus. Soft buzzing voice. “No chance of that at all, Macy.”
“But these dreams—”
“A little psychic static, is all. What gives you the idea Hamlin still exists?”
“During these nightmares I feel him pushing inside my head. Like somebody trying to get out.”
“Don’t mess things up with your pretty imagery, Macy. You’ve been having some bad dreams. Everybody has bad dreams. You think I’m immune? I’ve got my share of lousy karma. Without any fancy hypotheses, tell me why you think it’s Hamlin.”
“The man with my face chasing me.”
“A metaphor for our own unfocused past, maybe.”
“A sense of confusion. Not knowing who I really am.”
“Who are you, really?”
“Paul Macy. But—”
“That’s who you really are. Nat Hamlin doesn’t exist any more. He’s been stripped out of your body, cell by cell, and extinguished. You really surprise me, Macy. I thought you were going to make one of the best adjustments I ever saw.”
“I felt that way too,” Macy said. “But since I’ve been outside there have been these—these bursts of psychic static. I’m scared. What if Hamlin’s still there?”
“Hamlin exists only as an abstract concept. He’s a famous psychosculptor who ran into trouble with the law and was eradicated. Now he exists only through his works. Like Mozart. Like Michelangelo. He isn’t in your head.”
Macy said, “My first day at the network, I walked into the office of one of the high executives and there was a big Hamlin sculpture in the corner. I looked at it and I recognized it for what it was and I just took it in, you know, the way I’d take in a Michelangelo, and after a fraction of a second I had this sensation like somebody had banged me on the head with a mallet. I almost fell over. The impact was tremendous. How do you account for that, Dr. Gomez?”
“How do you account for it?”
“Like it was Hamlin still inside me, standing up and yelling, ‘That’s mine, I made that!’ Such a surge of pride and identity that I felt it on the conscious level as physical pain.”
“Balls,” the doctor said. “Hamlin’s gone.”
“How can you be sure of that?”
Gomez sighed. “Look,” he said, and jabbed an output node. On the walls of his office blossomed screened images of Macy’s psychological profiles. Gomez pointed. “Over on the left, that’s the EEG of Nat Hamlin. You see those greasy waves of psychopathic tendency, those ugly nasty jiggles? You see those electrical storms going on in that man’s head? That’s a sick EEG. That’s sick as hell. Right?
“Now look over here. We’ve begun the mindpick operation. We’re wiping out Nat Hamlin. The waves get smoother. Sweet as a baby. Chart after chart. Look. Look. Look. As Hamlin goes, we bring in Macy. You can see the overlay here. This is what a double mind looks like. Vestigial Hamlin, incipient Macy. Yes? Two distinct electrical patterns, no problems at all distinguishing one from the other. And now, this side of the room, you can see Hamlin wiped out entirely. Can you find any of the typical Hamlin waveforms? By shit, can you?
“You aren’t saying anything, Macy. There’s your brain on the wall. Alpha, beta, the whole mess. Compare your waves and Hamlin’s. Altogether different. Two separate patterns. He’s him, you’re you. The machine says so. It isn’t a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of voltage thresholds. A voltage doesn’t lie. Amperes don’t have opinions. Resistances don’t fuck around with you for sly tactical reasons. We’re dealing in objective facts, and the objective facts tell me that Nat Hamlin has been wiped out. They ought to tell you that too.”
“The dreams—the sight of that psychosculpture—”
“So you’re a little unstable. A couple of surprise adjustment traumas. But Hamlin? No.”
“Another thing. My first day out, that came day, I met a girl in the street, somebody from Hamlin’s life. She kept calling me Nat. Telling me she loved me.”
“Weren’t you wearing your Rehab badge?”
“Of course I was.”
“And the dumb bitch still dumped all that garbage on you?”
“I suppose she’s disturbed mentally herself. I don’t know. Anyway,” Macy said, “she was doing all this to me, Nat this and Nat that, paying no attention when I told her I was Paul Macy, and out of nowhere I felt, well, like hot on top of my head, and for half a second I didn’t know who I was. Which one of me I was. It was like something had reached into my head and mixed everything up. I could even remember myself making a psychosculpture of the girl. You see, she was one of Hamlin’s models, apparently, and I had this flickering memory of her posing, me at a sculptor’s keyboard—”
“Crap,” Gomez said.
“What?”
“Crap. It wasn’t a memory. You couldn’t possibly remember anything out of Nat Hamlin’s life.”
“What was it, then?”
“It was an episode of free-floating masochism, Macy. A normal self-injury wish. You invented this phantom image of yourself sculpting the girl because you wanted to fool yourself into thinking that Hamlin was breaking through.”
“But I don’t see why—”
“Shut up and I’ll explain the mechanism; You lived at this Center for four years, right, and you got constant attention. It was like being in the womb. Every need instantly attended to. Okay, it’s time for Paul Macy to be born, and we toss you out into the world on your ass. Not exactly as rough as that, we find you a job first, we find you a place to live, but it’s still a ballbreaker to get evicted. Out you go. Suddenly no umbilicus to feed you. Suddenly no placenta to cuddle in.
“Well, you want attention, and one way to get it is to come here yelling that your personality reconstruct didn’t take, that Hamlin is knocking around inside your head. I don’t mean that this is a conscious thing. It’s a mechanism. Your rational self just wants to make a decent adjustment to outside life and live happily ever after as Paul Macy, but there’s this irrational side of us too. Which often operates directly counter to the needs and desires of the rational side.