“I don’t know that either, Paul. I’m absolutely fucked up in the head, so there’s no use asking me rational questions.” Her eyes glittering eerily. Sick, sick, sick. “What you really ought to do,” she said, “is get the hell away from me, right now, like you’ve wanted to do since the first minute you saw me. Only don’t. God, please, don’t. Help me. Help me.”
“How?”
“Just be with me a little. I’m all alone. I’ve cut myself off from the whole world. Look, you know how it is with me? I don’t have a job. I don’t have friends any more. I look in the mirror and I see my own skeleton. I sit home and wait for the voices to go away, and they scream and scream at me until my head is coming off. I live off the welfare checks. Then I go out for a walk one day, on and on and on, way the hell uptown, and I crash into some guy on the street and he turns around and he’s Nat Hamlin, he’s the only man I ever really loved, only he isn’t Hamlin any more, he’s Paul Macy, that’s what he says, and—” She caught her breath. “All right. You don’t know me at all and I guess I can’t say I know you. But I know your body. Every inch. That’s a familiar thing to me, a landmark, something I can anchor myself to. Let me anchor. Let me hold on. I’m going under, Paul. I’m drowning, and maybe you can hold me up, for the sake of what I used to mean to the person you used to be. Maybe. Maybe for a little while. You don’t owe it to me, you don’t owe me anything, you could get right up and walk out of here and you’d have every right. But don’t. Because I need you.”
Sweat-soaked, numb, fists pressed together under the table, he felt a wild surge of pity for her. He felt like saying, Yes, of course, whatever I can do to help you. Come home with me, take a bath, let’s blow a few golds and talk about things, this telepathy of yours, this delusion. Not because I ever knew you. Not because the things that happened between you and Nat Hamlin give you any claim on me. But only because you’re a suffering human being and you’ve turned to me for help, and how can I refuse? An act of grace. Yes, yes, I will be your anchor.
Instead he said, “You’re asking a hell of a lot from me. I’m not the most stable individual in the world either. And I’m under doctor’s orders to keep away from people out of Nat Hamlin’s life. You could be big trouble for me. And me for you. I think the risks for both of us are bigger than the rewards.”
“Does that mean you don’t want to get involved?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Sorry I wasted so much of your time,” she said. In a dead voice. No change of expression. Not really believing he means it, maybe.
“It wasn’t wasted. I only wish I was in shape to do you any good. But a Rehab lives right on the edge of collapse himself, in the beginning. He’s got to build a whole new life. So when you ask somebody like that to take on the additional burden—” All right, Macy. Stop explaining things, get up, walk out of here, before she starts crying and you start listening to her again. Up. You don’t owe her a thing. You have your own troubles and they aren’t small ones. Getting to his feet, now. The girl watching him, stricken, incredulous. Giving her a sickly smile, knowing that a smile of any kind is out of context when you’re condemning somebody to death. Turning. Walking away from her, up the aisle of the people’s restaurant, past the counter, the sauerkraut and the algaecakes. Another ten stride’s and you’re out the door.
A scream from the back of the room.
“No! Come back! Paul! Paul! Nat!”
Her words leaped across the gulf between them like a flight of arrows. Six direct hits. Thwack thwack thwack thwack thwack thwack! The last one a killer, straight through from back to chest. He staggered. St. Sebastian stumbling in the restaurant aisle. His brain on fire, something very strange happening in there, like the two hemispheres splitting apart and taking up independent existence. And then a voice, speaking quite distinctly from a point just above his left ear, saying:
—How could you walk out on her like that, you snotty creep?
He hit the floor hard, landing elbow-first. A stunning burst of pain. Within that cone of red agony a curious clarity of perception.
Who said that? he asked, losing consciousness. And, going under, he heard:
—I did. Nat Hamlin. Your twin brother Nat.
4
He was at work in his studio again, after too long a layoff. All the sculpting equipment covered with a fine coating of dust. Maybe the delicate inner mechanisms are ruined, or at least imprecise. Try to build an armature for a man, end up with a chimp, something like that. He checked all the calibration carefully: everything in order, surprisingly. Just dusty. Ought to be, after all these years. A wonder it wasn’t busted up by vandals. Fucking vandals all over the place. Goths, too. He touched the main keyboard lightly. This was going to be his chef d’oeuvre, a group composition, a contemporary equivalent of The Burghers of Calais. But fragmented, intense, multivalued. Call it something unpretentious, like The Human Condition.
A fucking headache getting all the models together at the same time. But the group interactions are important: shit, they’re the whole point of the thing! There they all stand, now. The fat lady from the circus, eight hundred pounds of quivering suet. Half a ton of laughs. The kid from the student co-op, the one with the shaven head. Gomez, the skull doctor, for that little touch of hostility. The pregnant chick from the supersupermarket. Get the clothes off, baby, show that bulge. Bellybutton sticking way out like a handle. And the vice-president from the bank, very very proper, turn him on a little when we’re ready to start. Also the old plaster model from art school days, Apollo Belvedere, missing his prick. A real technical stunt, trying to make psychosculpture out of a hunk of plaster. Faking in the appropriate responses: the test of a master. A cat, too, the one-eyed one from downstairs, gray and white with maybe a dozen claws on each paw, the way it looks.
Lastly, Lissa. My beloved. Stand next to the banker, honey. Turn a little to the left. The banker lifts his hand. He wants to grab your tit, but he doesn’t dare, and he hangs there caught in the tension between wanting and holding back. Your nipples ought to be erect for this: you ought to be in heat, some. Wait, I’ll do it. A tickle or two down here, yes, look at them standing up.
Okay! Okay! Places, everybody! Group interaction, take one! I want each of you to project the emotion we talked about before, project just that emotion, as purely as you can. And really live it. Don’t say to yourself, I’m posing for an artist, but say, I’m so-and-so and this is my life, this is my soul, and I’m radiating it in big chunks so he can grab it with his machine and turn it into a masterpiece. Ready? Ready? Hey, you sucks, why aren’t you holding the pose? Who gave you permission to dissolve? Let’s have some fucking stability in here! Hold it! Hold it! Hold it!
He was running as fast as he could, and the effort was killing him. A band of hot metal around his chest. His eyes ready to pop out of his head. He had turned left outside the restaurant, onto Broadway, down the dark street in long loping strides, thinking at first that he was going to get away, but then he heard the footsteps precisely matching his, a clop for his clop, on and on, and knew he wouldn’t escape. Don’t look back. Something may be gaining on you.
Nat Hamlin running smoothly behind him, wearing the same body as his only four years younger. Shouting obscenities as he ran. What a foul mouth he has! You’d think artists were aesthetic types, more refined, and yet here comes this anthology of smut running after me. Shouting, Hey, you, Macy, you dumb cocksucker, slow down! We got a lot to talk about, you asshole!