To Live Again And The Second Trip

by Robert Silverberg

  But aren’t we all just webs of electrochemical impulses? What am I if not that?

  —True. Except that you’re linked with this brain at so many points that you don’t have any sense of yourself as something distinct from the bodily organ through which you perceive things. I do. I’m dissociated, disembodied. I sense my own existence as something quite separate from the existence of this brain, here, through which I get various sensory inputs when I ask for them, and through which I can force an output by working at it. It’s weird, Macy, and it’s lousy, and I don’t like it at all. But I can’t achieve a real hookup, because you’re in the way in so many places, entrenched too deeply for me to dislodge you.

  What are we going to do, then?

  —Continue annoying each other, I suppose.

  Quarter to nine. Really ought to check up on Lissa somehow, go down to her apartment, ask the cops to investigate. Not very ambitious right now, though. Maybe she’ll come in soon. A long long walk on a spring night, home after dark.

  —You’re in love with her, aren’t you, Macy?

  I don’t think so. A certain physical attraction, I don’t deny that. And a kind of solidarity of the crippled—she’s got troubles, I’ve got troubles, we really ought to stick together, that kind of feeling. But not love. I don’t know her that well. I don’t even know myself that well. I have no illusions about that. I’m inexperienced, I’m emotionally immature, I’m brand new in the world.

  —And you’re in love with her.

  Define your terms.

  —Don’t hand me that sophomoric manure. You know what I mean. Let me tell you a few things about your Lissa, though, that somebody who is as you rightly say emotionally immature might not have noticed.

  Go ahead.

  —She’s completely selfish. She exists only for the benefit of Lissa Moore. A bitch, a witch, a cunt that walks, a life-force eater. She’ll try to suck the vitality out of you. She tried it with me, hoping she could drain some of my talent out of me and into her. I was fighting her all the way. I held her off pretty well. Although I think that ESP of hers infected me somehow and caused my breakdown. I didn’t realize that at the time it was happening, Macy, but it occurred to me later, that she was fastening onto me, messing up my mind, robbing me of strength, pushing me over some sort of brink. And after a year or so I fell in. She won’t need as long with you. She’ll bleed you dry in a month.

  You make her sound like a monster. She strikes me as being an awfully pathetic monster, Hamlin.

  —That’s because you’ve come to know her only when she’s in trouble. This ESP of hers, do you think it was an accident? Something that just sprouted in her, like the measles? It’s that hunger of hers. To use people, to devour people, to drain people, to engulf people. Which finally got out of hand, which ran away with her. Now she drains automatically, she pulls in impulses from all sides, more than her mind can stand, and it’s killing her. It’s burning her out. But she asked for it.

  How harsh you are.

  —Just realistic. I never knew a woman who wasn’t some kind of vampire, and Lissa’s the most dangerous one I knew. A cunt is a cunt. A little bundle of ambitions. I fell for it, for a while. And it ruined me, Macy, it used me up.

  I think your whole outlook on women is distorted.

  —Maybe yes, maybe no. But at least I came by it honestly. Through living. Through experiencing. Through drawing my own conclusions. I didn’t pick up my ideas vicariously. I didn’t have them pumped into me at a Rehab Center.

  Granted. Which still doesn’t make your ideas Tighter than mine.

  —Whatever you say. I just wanted to warn you about her.

  I’m amazed at the difference in our images of her. You see her as a marauder, a vampire, a drinker of souls. My impression is just the opposite: that she’s a weak, passive, dependent girl, terrified by the world. How can they be reconciled?

  —They don’t need to be. Why shouldn’t my image of her be different from yours? I’m different from you. We’re two very different persons.

  And if an outsider tried to make an assessment of Lissa based on what we told him?

  —He’d have to make parallax adjustments to compensate for our differences in perspective.

  But which is the real Lissa? Yours or mine?

  —Both. She can be passive and weak and still be a monster and a vampire.

  You really believe, though, that she deliberately sets out to drain vitality from people?

  —Not necessarily deliberately, Macy. She may not even realize what she’s doing. I’m sure she didn’t realize it until her inputs got too intense to cope with. It was just a thing she had, a telepathic thing, a need, a hunger. Which had the incidental effect of destroying people who came close to her.

  I don’t feel that she’s been destroying me.

  —You’re welcome to her, pal.

  Twenty minutes to ten. Another shot of bourbon. Smo-o-oth. Another Acapulco special, long and luscious, in the all-new, improved, negative-ion-filter format. The good haziness happening now. Perhaps Lissa’s dismembered body has by this time been scattered throughout the six boroughs of the city. She seems remote and unreal to him. For the past ten minutes he has allowed himself to indulge in a mood of intense nostalgia. A curious species of nostalgia for the life he did not live. Meditating on the fragments of Hamlin’s experience that have bled through to him across the boundaries that separate their identities. And yearning for more.

  Hamlin?

  —Yes.

  How hard would it be to merge our memory files entirely?

  —I don’t follow you. What do you mean?

  So that I’d have access to everything you can remember. And you’d have access to all that had happened to me.

  —I imagine it wouldn’t be hard.

  I’m willing if you are.

  —It would amount to a merging of identities, you realize. We wouldn’t be sure where one of us ends and the other begins. We’d blend, after a while. Frankly, I’d wipe you out.

  You think so?

  —A pretty good chance of it.

  What makes you so sure?

  —Because I’d bring to the blending thirty-five years of genuine experience. Your thirty-five years of synthetic memories would overlay that like a film of dirt, and after a time I’d polish it away, leaving my real life blended to your four years in the Rehab Center, with some interplays from your ersatz existence coloring my recollections of the things I actually did. What would emerge would be a Nat Hamlin somewhat polluted by Paul Macy. Is that what you want? I’m willing if you are, Macy.

  I didn’t mean such a complete joining. Just an exchange of memory banks.

  —I already have as much access to what the Rehab Center gave you as I need.

  But I don’t have any access to your past, except some stuff that came floating through the barrier while I was asleep. And I want more.

  —What for?

  Because I’m starting to recognize it as my own identity. Because I feel cut off from myself. I want to know what this body did, where it traveled, what it ate, who it slept with, what it was like to be a psychosculptor. The need’s been growing in me for a couple of hours now. Or maybe longer. It frustrates me to know that I was somebody important, somebody vital, and that I’m completely cut off from his life.

  —But you weren’t anybody important, Macy. I was. You weren’t anybody at all. A Rehab doctor’s wet dream.

  Don’t rub it in.

  —You admit it?

  I never denied I was only a construct, Hamlin.

  —Then why don’t you just step aside and let me have the body, then?

  I keep telling you. My past may be a fake, but my present is real as hell, and I’m not giving it up.

  —So you want to add my past to yours, to give you that extra little dimension of reality. You want to go on being Paul Macy, but you want to be able to think you used to be Nat Hamlin, too?

  Something like that.

  —Up yours, M
acy. My memories are my own property. They’re all I’ve got. Why should I let you muck around in them? Why should I sweat to make you feel realer?

  Ten-fifteen. How quiet it is at this time of night Somehow went without dinner and never even noticed. Sleepy. Sleepy. Phone the police? Tomorrow, maybe. She must have gone back to her own place. I guess. Mmmm. Mmmmmm.

  —I have a new proposition for you.

  Eh? Huh?

  —Wake up, Macy.

  What’s the matter?

  —I want to talk to you. You’ve been dozing.

  Okay. So talk. I’m listening.

  —Let’s make a deal. Let’s share the body on an alternating basis. First you run it, then me, then you again, then me again, and so on indefinitely. Operating it under the Paul identity, naturally, so we don’t get into legal difficulties.

  You mean we switch every day? Monday Wednesday Friday it’s me in charge, Tuesday Thursday Saturday it’s you, Sunday we hold dialogs?

  —Not exactly like that. You need the body four days a week to do your job, right? Those four days it’s yours. Saturdays and Sundays and holidays are mine. Weekday evenings we divide in such a way that you get some, I get some. We can work out ad-hoc arrangements for swapping time back and forth as the occasion demands.

  I don’t see why I have to give you any time at all, Hamlin. The court awarded your body to me.

  —But I’m still in it. And I’m prepared to be a mammoth pain in the ass unless I’m allowed to take charge some of the time.

  You want me to yield half my lifespan to you under duress.

  —I want you to be sensible and cooperative, that’s all. Can you function freely with me playing games inside your nervous system? Do you enjoy being harassed? I can cripple your life, Macy. And what about me? Must I be condemned to be bottled up without any autonomy, with my gifts? Listen, even if you run the body for half the time, that’s three and a half days a week more than fate originally intended. By rights you shouldn’t be here at all. So why not accept a reasonable compromise? Half the time you’ll be you, and you can do any fucking thing you please. The other half you’ll surrender autonomy and ride as a passenger while I go about my business. Sculpting, screwing, eating, whatever I feel like doing. We’ll both benefit. I’ll get to live again, a little, and you’ll be free from the annoyance of having me constantly interfering with you.

  Well—

  —Another incentive. I’ll give you the free run of my memory bank. What you were asking for a little while ago. You can find out who you really were, before you became you.

  Get thee behind me, Satan!

  —Will you tell me what’s wrong with the goddam deal?

  Nothing wrong with it. It’s too damned tempting, that’s what.

  —Then why not go along with it?

  A taut uneasy moment. Considering, weighing, mulling. Blinking his eyes a lot. Aware that his head is really too foggy now for such perilous negotiations. Why surrender a chunk of his life to a condemned criminal? Wouldn’t it be better to fight it out, to try to expel Hamlin altogether, to break his grip once and for all? Maybe I can’t. Maybe when the showdown comes he’ll expel me. Perhaps it makes more sense to accept the half-and-half. But even so—a flood of suspicions, suddenly—

  How would we work this switch?

  —Easy. I’d penetrate the limbic system. You know what that is? Down underneath, in the depths of the folds. Controls your pituitary, your olfactory system, a lot of other things, blood pressure, digestion, and so forth, Also the seat of the self, so far as I can tell. You have it pretty well guarded, whether you know it or not. A wall of electrical charge sealing it off. But I could come in by way of the thalamus, reverse the charge—if we cooperate, it would be just a matter of a few seconds and we’d have our shift of identity polarity—I’ve worked out the mechanisms, I know where the levers are—

  All right. Let’s say I cooperate and you take over. What assurance do I have that you’d let me back on top again when your time was up?

  —Why, if I didn’t, you could pull all the stuff I’ve been pulling on you! The situations would be entirely reversed. You could mess around with my heart, my sex life—you’d learn the right linkups fast, Macy, you aren’t dumb—

  I’m not convinced what you say is true. Maybe you’d have a natural advantage, because it was your body originally. Maybe when you were in charge again you could evict me altogether.

  —What an untrusting bastard you are.

  My life’s at stake.

  —All I can say is you’ve got to have more faith in my good intentions.

  How can I?

  —Look, I’ll open wide to you for a minute. I’ll give you a complete unshielded entry into my personality. Poke around in there, make your own evaluation of my intentions—you’ll see them right up front—decide for yourself whether you can trust me. Okay?

  Go ahead. But no funny stuff.

  —I’m baring my soul to him, and he’s still suspicious as hell.

  Go ahead, I said. How do we work this?

  —First, we make some little electrical adjustments in the corpus callosum—

  Odd sensations along the back of the neck. Prickling, tingling, a mild stiffening of the skin. Not entirely unpleasant; a certain agreeable feel to it, in fact. Unseen fingers stroking the lobes of his brain, caressing the prominences and corrugations. A tickling on the underside of the skull. Moss beginning to sprout between the white jagged cranial ridges and the soft cerebral folds below. And the oozing of warm fluids. Pulse. Pulse. A wonderful sleepy feeling. Passivity, yes, how splendid a thing is passivity. We are merging. We are opening the gates. How could one have thought that this admirable human being meant to do one harm? When now his soul is thuswise displayed. Its peaks and valleys. Its exaltations and depressions. Its hungers and fears. See, see, I am as human as thou! And I yearn. And I lament. Come let me enfold you. Come. Put aside these unworthy untrustingnesses. Open. Open. Open. Bathed in the warm river. Lulled on the gentle tide. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. This is how we come together. The avoidance of all friction. The total lubrication of the universe. And we dissolve into one another. And we dissolve.

  What’s that sound?

  Buzz saw at work in the forest! Dentist’s drill raping a bicuspid! Jackhammers unpeeling the street! Braked wheels squealing! The fury of clawed cats!

  Key turning in the lock!

  Lissa! Lissa! Lissa!

  Standing on the threshold. Fingertips pressed to lips in alarm. Body curved backward, recoiling in shock. Then the scream. And then:

  “Leave him alone! Get your filthy hands off him, Nat!”

  Followed by a sudden instinctive bombardment of mental force, a single massive jolt out of her that sent Macy crumpling stunned to the floor. Blackout Internal churning. Clicking of defective gears. Slow return to semiconsciousness. Lissa embracing him, cradling his throbbing head. A coppery taste in his throat. Incredible lancing pain between the eyes. Her face, smudged, strained, close to his. Her faint worried smile. And Hamlin nowhere within reach. There was in Macy’s head that strange blessed aloneness that he had experienced so few times since the first awakening of his other self. Alone. Alone. How quiet it is in here.

  10

  “PAUL? CAN YOU HEAR me?”

  “From a million miles away.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Dazed. Groggy. Jesus, groggy!” Trying to sit up. She tugging him back into his chair. Surprising how strong she is. He looked at his hands. Quivering and twitching. As if a powerful electrical current had passed through his body and was still recycling itself through the peripheral circuits, touching off a muscular spasm here and here and here.

  Searching for Hamlin. No, not in evidence. Not at the moment.

  “What happened?” he said.

  “I was at the door,” said Lissa. “And from outside, I could feel the waves coming from his mind and yours. Mostly from his. You were—asleep, drugged, drunk, I don’t know. Passive, anyway. An
d he was taking you over, Paul. His mind was wrapped around yours, and he was turning you off switch by switch—that’s the only way I can describe it—and you were about half gone already. Submerged, dismantled, switched off, whatever word is best.”

  “We made a deal. We were going to share the body, half the time him running the show, and me the rest of the time. He promised me that if I let him take over, he’d turn the body back to me when it was my time to have control.”

  “He was tricking you,” she said. “What were you, drunk? Stoned?”

  “Both.”

  “Both. It figures. He was just getting you to lower your defenses so that he could get full control. I felt the whole thing from outside. I opened the door. It was much stronger in here. You sitting there with an idiot smile on your face. Eyes open, but you couldn’t see. Hamlin swarming all over you. So I—I don’t know, I didn’t stop to think, I just hit him. With my mind.”

  “I think you killed him,” Macy said.

  “No. I hurt him, but I didn’t kill him.”

  “I can’t feel him any more.”

  “I can,” she said. “He’s very weak, but I can sense him down at the bottom of your brain. It’s like he fell off a twenty-five-foot wall. I don’t know how I did it. I just lashed out.”

  “Like you did that time in the restaurant.”

  “I suppose,” she said. “Why did you let him do that to you?”

  Macy shrugged. “We were talking to each other all evening. While I waited for you to come home. Getting chummy with him. We were proposing deals to each other, compromises, arrangements. And then this talk of sharing came up. I was pretty stoned by then, I suppose. Lucky thing you came in.” He glanced up at her and said, after a moment, “Where the hell were you, anyway?”

  Out, she told him. She just decided to go out around five o’clock. Back to her apartment to pick up some of her things. He gave her a fishy look. Even in his present shellshocked condition he was able to see that she had come in emptyhanded. He taxed her with the inconsistency, and she made a stagy attempt to seem innocent, with much shrugging and tossing of the head, telling him that when she had reached her place she had decided she didn’t need those things after all, and had left them there. And the rest of the evening? From six o’clock till now? Chatting with old friends down at the house, she said. Sure, he thought, remembering the sort of neighbors she had had there, the shimmies, the bandits.