“Nat Hamlin doesn’t exist.”
“You really don’t remember me?”
“Zero,” he said.
“Shit almighty! What did they do to you at the Rehab Center?”
He said, “They pumped Nat Hamlin full of memory-dissolving drugs until every bit of him was flushed away. Which left a kind of zombie, you see? A healthy empty body. Society doesn’t like to waste a good healthy body. So then they built me inside the zombie’s head.”
“Built you? What do you mean, built?”
“Created an identity for me.” He shut his eyes a moment. There was a tightness at his collar. Choking sensation. He wasn’t supposed to have to explain any of this. The world was supposed to take it all for granted. “They built up a past, a cluster of events that I could move around in as if it had really happened. Like I grew up in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and moved to Seattle when I was twelve. My father was a propulsion engineer and my mother taught school. They’re both dead now. No brothers. No sisters. I collected African stamps and I did a lot of hunting and fishing. I went to college, UCLA, class of ’93, got a degree in philosophy of communication. Two years of national service, stationed in Bolivia and Ecuador, doing voice-overs for the People’s Democratic Channel. Then various TV and HV jobs in Europe and the States, and now here in New York. Et cetera, et cetera.”
“God,” she said. “And it’s all phony?”
“Pretty near. It follows Nat Hamlin’s biography only as closely as it has to. Like in age. Or Hamlin broke a leg when he was twenty-six and you can see that in the bone, so they’ve given me a skiing accident for that year.”
“What would happen if I checked the UCLA alumni records, looking for Paul Macy in the class of ’93?”
“You’d find him. With a Rehab asterisk saying that this is a pro forma entry covering a retroactively established identity. Same thing if you looked up the Idaho Falls birth register. They do a very thorough job.”
“Christ,” Lissa said. And shivered. “How creepy this is! You actually are a whole new person.”
“I don’t know how whole I am. But I’m new, all right.”
“You don’t have any idea who I am, then.”
“You used to pose for Nat Hamlin, didn’t you?”
She looked startled. “How come you know that? I haven’t said anything about—”
“The day you stopped me in the street,” he said, “while we were talking, I got a flash picture of you naked in a kind of studio, and I was leaning over a complicated keyboard thing and telling you to scream. Like a psycho-sculptor trying to get an emotional effect. I saw it maybe half a second, then it was gone.” He moistened his lips. “It was like a piece of Nat Hamlin’s blotted-out mind surfacing into mine.”
“Or a piece of my mind reaching into yours,” she said.
“Eh?”
“It happens. I can’t keep it under control.” A shrill giggle. “Wherever you got it from, it was right. I was one of Nat Hamlin’s models. From January to August, ’06, when he was working on his Antigone 21. The one the Metropolitan bought. His last big work, before his breakdown. You know about his breakdown?”
“Some. Don’t talk about it.” He felt a band of fire across his forehead. Simply being close to someone out of the old existence this long was painful. “Can I have another gold?”
She offered the cigarette and said, “I was also his mistress, all through ’05 and most of ’06. He said he’d get a divorce and marry me. Like Rembrandt. Like Renoir. Falling in love with the model. Only he went out of his head instead. Doing all those crazy things.”
Macy, suddenly vulnerable, tried to stop her with an upraised hand, but there was no halting the flow of her words. “The last time I saw him was Thanksgiving Day, 2006. At his studio. We had a fight and he threw me down the stairs.” She winced. Into his mind a searing image: an endless flight, the girl falling, falling, skirt up around her thighs, legs kicking, arms clutching, the dwindling scream, the sudden twist and impact. A sound of something cracking. “In the hospital six weeks with a broken pelvis. When I got out they were hunting him from Connecticut to Kansas. And then—”
“No more!” he yelled. People turned to look.
She shrank away from him. “I’m sorry,” she said, folding into herself, huddling, shaking. His cheeks were hot, were shame and turmoil. After a moment she said softly, “Does it hurt a lot when I talk about him?”
A nod. Silence.
“You asked me to see you because you were in trouble,” he said at length.
“Yes.”
“Would you honestly have killed yourself if I hadn’t shown up?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I’m all alone. I have nobody at all. And I’m going out of my mind.”
“How do you know?”
“I hear voices. Other people’s minds come into mine. And mine goes into theirs. Extrasensory perception.”
“ESP?” he said. “Like—what is it, mental telepathy?”
“Telepathy. That’s what it is. ESP. Telepathy.”
“I didn’t think that that really existed.”
A bitter laugh. “You bet your ass. Sitting right here in front of you. The genuine article.”
“You can read minds?” he said, feeling dreamfogged and unreal.
“Not exactly read. Just touch, mind to mind. It isn’t under my conscious control. Things drift in, drift out. Voices humming in my brain, a word, a phrase, an image.
It’s been happening since I was ten, twelve years old. Only much worse now. Much, much worse.” Trembling. “The past, two years. Hell. Absolute hell.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know who I am any more a lot of the time,” she said. “I get to be five, six people at once. This mushy noise in my head. The buzzing. The voices. Like static, only sometimes words drift in on the static. I pick up all these weird emotions, and they scare me. Not knowing if I’m imagining or not. There’s somebody two tables away who wants to rape me. Wishes he dared. In his head I’m naked and bloody, spreadeagled, arms and legs tied to the furniture. And over to my left, someone else, a woman, she’s transmitting the odor of shit. She sees me like some kind of giant turd sitting here. I don’t know why. And then you—”
“No,” he said. “Don’t tell me.”
“It isn’t really ugly. You think I’m dirty and you want to take me home and give me a bath. And fuck me afterward. That’s okay. I know I’m dirty. And I’d like to go to bed with you, too. But I can’t stand all this crosstalk in my head. I’m wide open, Nat, wide open to every stray thought, and—”
“Paul.”
“What?”
“I said, call me Paul. It’s important to me.”
“But you’re—”
“Paul Macy.”
“Just now, though, you were coming through as Nat Hamlin to me. From deep underneath.”
“No. Hamlin’s gone,” he said. “I’m Paul Macy.” A feeling of seasickness. The light-loops swaying and hissing overhead. He found himself covering her hand with his. Ragged cuticles against his fingertips. He said, “If you’re suffering so much, why don’t you get some help? Maybe there’s a cure for ESP. Is that what you want, a cure? I could take you to see Dr. Ianuzzi, she’s a very sensitive woman, she could get you into the right kind of psychiatric hospital and—”
“And they’d give me shock treatment,” Lissa said. “Memory dislocation with drugs, like I was a criminal. They’d wash half my brain out trying to heal me. There wouldn’t be anything of me left I’m afraid of therapy. I haven’t ever gone. I don’t want to go.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then what am I supposed to do for you?” he asked.