“Suppose I tell somebody that his sanity depends on never calling his mother-in-law by her first name, okay? And he nods, he says, ‘Yes, I understand, if I do that it’ll really wreck me.’ So of course every time he sees the old witch he finds that her first name is on the tip of his tongue. He’ll have dreams in which he calls her by her first name. He’ll fantasy it while he’s sitting at his desk. Because it’s the most destructive fucking thing he could possibly do, so of course the temptation to do it keeps rising out of his head, and he’s constantly imagining he has done it.
“Now back to you. The last thing you want to have happen is for Hamlin to come back to life, so naturally you fantasy yourself making a sculpture of this girl. Which upsets you and sends you in a sweat back to me, screaming for help. The immediate result of this mechanism is to give you bad dreams and general trauma, and an incidental side-effect is to supply you with that claim on my attention that you unconsciously crave. You see how the dark side of our mind always craps us up? But don’t worry about it, Macy. None of this is real, in the sense that Hamlin is there. Oh, sure, it’s real in a psychological sense, but so what?” Gomez grinned triumphantly. “You’re a smart boy. You’ve been following all this, right?”
Macy said, “Isn’t it possible to run some new EEGs all the same? What if I did come up with a double wave pattern?”
“You really want me to coddle you, don’t you?”
“Would it be so hard to make an empirical test?”
“I could do it in five minutes.”
“Why not, then?”
“Because I don’t believe in giving in to an outpatient’s weepy fantasies. You think you’re my first reconstruct job? I’ve had a hundred of you. I know what’s possible and what isn’t. If I tell you Hamlin is eradicated, it’s because I know Hamlin is eradicated. I’m not just being a bull-headed bastard.”
“All right, so I’m irrational,” Macy said. “But if I had the evidence of the EEG in front of me—”
“I won’t play that game with you. The fantasy came from inside you; let the cure for it come from in there too. Sweat it out. Convince yourself that your belief in Hamlin’s continued existence is nothing but a move to get sympathy from us.”
“And if the hallucinations don’t go away?”
“They have to.”
“If they don’t, though?”
“You’ll be here again next Tuesday,” Gomez said. “I won’t be seeing you then. Dr. Ianuzzi will, and as you know she’s an entirely different kind of doctor. Sweet and refined and sympathetic, whereas I’m a vulgar and hostile son of a bitch. If this stuff is still bothering you then, maybe she’ll run an EEG for you, though I hope she doesn’t I won’t, Macy. I can’t. The top sergeant never kisses you and tucks you in, no matter how piteously you ask him, and I’m top sergeant on this team. So come back next week.”
Gomez stood up. “I saw you on the late news last night. You weren’t bad at all.”
The next morning he found a message cube addressed to him in his box at the office. Puzzled, he plugged the glossy little cassette into his desk’s output slot. The face of the girl who had talked to him on the street the week before appeared on the screen. Red-rimmed eyes, hollow cheeks. Her hair straggly, unkempt. She offered the camera an uncertain lopsided grin and said, “I saw you on holovision and so I knew where to send this. Please, Nat, don’t just ignore me. I can’t tell you—”
His hand shot out and killed the playback. Please, Nat. He couldn’t take that. The use of his old name: it was like slivers of wood under his fingernails, needles probing behind his eyes. Last night the dreams had been worse than ever. Seeing himself as Siamese twins, one body ripping and clawing at its identical brother. And then the trapdoor opening in the attic floor and the shambling disemboweled thing lurching up out of it. The girl had initiated all his traumas; there hadn’t been bad dreams before that miserable accidental meeting. He wasn’t going to give her a second chance to screw him up. If that bastard Gomez wouldn’t offer supportive therapy, he was simply going to have to defend himself against potential inner turmoil. And therefore it was necessary to avoid new sources of anguish.
Macy switched the output control to Erase and reached for the button. Then he saw the girl’s sad, eroded face in his mind. A fellow human being. She also suffers. I could at least listen once.
He turned to Playback again and she reappeared, saying, “I saw you on holovision and so I knew where to send this. Please, Nat, don’t just ignore me. I can’t tell you how much you still mean to me, even after everything. I know you’ve been through Rehab and things must be very strange to you, and you don’t want to hear from people out of your old life. But finding you like that was such a miracle that I can’t simply pretend you don’t exist. Because I can’t keep going like this much longer, Nat I’m in bad shape. I need help. I’m sinking and somebody’s got to throw me a rope.”
There was more in that vein. She said she’d wait for him Wednesday night at six o’clock on the northeast corner of 227th and Broadway, opposite the network building, and that she’d be waiting for him the same time the next two nights also, in case he wasn’t free Wednesday. Or if he wanted to make other arrangements he could call her at her home, any day after eleven in the morning, such-and-such a number. With all my love. Yours truly, Lissa Moore.
I can’t, he thought. I don’t dare. He erased the cube. That night he left ten minutes early, going out the building’s east entrance to avoid her. He did the same on Thursday and Friday.
On Monday there was a new cube from her. He carried it around for three hours, unwilling to erase it, afraid to play it, and finally slipped it into the slot. On the screen, her pale face against a black velvet backdrop. The mouth drawn into a quirky grimace. A hypothyroid bulge to the eyes that he hadn’t noticed before. The lighting in the booth where she’d recorded the message was too bright, and it struck her cheeks so fiercely that it seemed to strip them to the bone. Her voice, blurting, unmodulated: “You didn’t come. I waited, but you didn’t come. All right Nat Paul. Maybe you don’t give a damn about me. Maybe you’ve got your own neck to look out for and can’t fool around with me. I won’t bother you after today. I’ll wait tonight, six o’clock, same corner, Broadway and 227th, northeast side. You aren’t there by half past eight I’ll be dead by nine. I mean it. Now it’s up to you.”
3
A few minutes past six, he was still in the central newsroom, finishing his last piece of the day. A cold sullen anger still gripped him. Let the bitch kill herself. I won’t be blackmailed like that. She doesn’t mean anything to me except trouble.
With a sharp stabbing gesture he summoned control of the hovereye that patrolled the street outside the network office building, forever keeping watch for demonstrators, bombers, self-immolators. With newly skillful motions Macy brought the airborne camera down the block until it was scanning the streetcorner where Lissa had said she’d wait. Now the fine control, the vernier.
Yes, there she is. Pacing in a taut little circle. A self-contained zone of tension on the busy street. Damn her. She can do whatever she likes to herself. Whatever she likes.
Macy signed himself out of the newsroom and, gliding on the glacial flow of his rage, drifted toward the liftshaft. Down forty stories. Sweeping quickly through the lobby. Outside. A soft spring evening. Long lines of patient homegoers wearily filing into the tubemouth. So easy to avoid her, in this crowd. Just slide on past.
He found himself walking toward her, though. One-and-two-and-one-and-two; he couldn’t stop. She seemed to be talking to herself; eyes turned inward, she didn’t notice him approaching. From twenty yards away he glowered at her. Who the hell does she think she is, trying to use me this way? Playing on my sympathies. Oh, I need you, I need you so much! With throbbing violins. And working on my sense of guilt. Meet me on the corner or I’ll jump off the Palisades Bridge! Sure. What business is it of mine if you want to jump off a bridge, baby? I’ve got nothing to feel guilty about. Guilt? I haven’t done a thing. I’m brand new in the world. Christ, I’m even a virgin. That’s right: Paul Macy is a virgin. A goddamn virgin.