An hour’s smooth drive in a rented car brought Hamlin to his old Connecticut estate. The car did its best to cope with Hamlin’s surprising ineptness as a driver. He handled the steering-stick crudely, overpushing it, frequently trying to override the car’s gyroscopic mind, constantly messing up the delicate homeostasis that kept the vehicle in its proper lane. Macy, from his vantage-point within, monitored Hamlin’s performance with mixed feelings. Obviously Hamlin, four or five years away from driving, had lost whatever skill at it he once had had, and that was worrying him, for it had occurred to him that in his absence he might have lost other skills also. Therefore he was working himself into a singleminded frenzy of concentration, gripping the stick in sweaty palm and trying to psych himself into complete mastery over the car. Macy knew he could play on Hamlin’s fears, intensifying his distress. You think you’ve come back to life, Nat, but nothing came back except your ego and your dirty mouth. You’ve lost your manual skills. You couldn’t cut paper dolls now, let alone turn out museum masterpieces. And so on. Undermining Hamlin’s self-confidence, attacking his main justification for having expelled his reconstruct. Weakening his grip on the body’s central nervous system, setting him up for a push. You think you’re still a great artist? Jesus, you don’t even know how to drivel The Rehab Center smashed you to bits, Nat, and you won’t ever be whole again. And then, getting Hamlin fuddled and panicky, he could make a try for a takeover.
The process was already well under way. The fumes of Hamlin’s tensions drifted through Macy’s interior holdfast. The oily smell of fear and doubt. Go on, give him a shove, he’s vulnerable now. But the scheme was futile, Macy knew. He hadn’t yet found the handles with which he could flip Hamlin out of his dominant position. Even if he had, he wouldn’t dare attempt a takeover at 120 miles an hour; no matter how good this car’s homeostasis was supposed to be, it wasn’t programmed for self-drive, and while he and Hamlin struggled for control, the auto might go over the edge of the embankment, or up a wall, or into the oncoming flow, in some wild uncorrected orgy of positive feedback.
So Macy sat passive while Hamlin shakily negotiated the highway and more capably guided the car up the winding leafy country lanes to the place where he once had lived. Parking the car perhaps a quarter of a mile away. Leaving the road, walking cautiously through the woods. Heartbreaking summeriness here. The foliage so green and new. Bright yellow and white flowers. Chipmunks and squirrels. Clumps of frondy ferns. They had held back the urban tide here, the surging sea of concrete and pollution, the onslaught of extinctions. An outpost of natural life, maintained for the very rich.
And there, beyond that blinding white stand of stunning birches, the house. Lofty walls of high-piled gray-brown boulders set in ancient gray mortar. Leaded-glass windows agleam in the noonlight. Hamlin’s heart leaping and bouncing. Old memories in an agitated dance. Look, look there. The pond, the creek, the pool. Exactly as Lissa had described it, exactly as Macy had seen it through the lens of Hamlin’s reminiscing mind. And the studio annex. Where so many miracles were worked.
—Why did you come here?
A pilgrimage. A sentimental journey.
—It’s somebody else’s house now.
Why don’t you go fuck yourself, Macy?
—I have your welfare at heart. You can’t just prowl around here. It may be patrolled by dogs. Scanners everywhere. You know what’ll happen to you if you’re caught?
Hamlin didn’t reply. He edged toward the studio, and Macy picked up an inchoate scheme for forcing a window and getting inside. Hamlin seemed to expect to find his workship intact, all the elaborate psychosculpting apparatus still sitting where he had left it Folly. The studio was probably some blithery suburbanite matron’s greenhouse now. Hamlin continued to slink through the copse bordering the creek. Let him try, let him just try. The alarm will go off and the place will be full of cops in ten minutes. A frantic chase through the woods. Snubnosed shiny cyberhounds snuffling on silent treads over last year’s fallen leaves, homing in on the fleeing man’s telltale thermals. The fugitive encircled, entrapped, seized. Identified as Paul Macy, Rehab reconstruct, but the police, checking with Gomez & Co., would swiftly discover that Macy had been plagued by a resurgence of his prior identity. And then. Swift action. Wham! Needles in his arm. Hamlin reamed out a second time.
What about his threat to destroy their shared body in case of trouble? No, Macy thought, he can’t do it, not while he’s up there running the conscious brain. A man can’t simply shut off his own heartbeat by willing it. He could when he was down here where I am, plugged into all the neural connections, but he can’t do it now. So Hamlin will die a second time, and the body will survive. For me to have. Go on, Nat, creep and creep and creep, bust into your studio, trip the alarm, summon the hounds, start me on the road back to independent life. Yes. I’ll be so very grateful.
What’s this rising from the pool, though? Blithery suburban matron herself! Venus on the half shell. Woman in her middle forties, tall, not exactly plump but well endowed, dark hair, long arching waist, thickish thighs, amiable vacuous face. Her snatch chastely shielded by a skimpy cache-sexe; breasts bare, full, probably not as high as they used to be. Staring in surprise at Hamlin advancing toward her.
Quick adrenal response from Hamlin, too. Pupils dilated, heartbeat accelerated, prick stiffening. No wonder he’s excited. The quintessential rape situation. Daytime, suburbs, woman alone, scantily clad, man emerges out of woods. Fling her down, hand over mouth, spread the thighs, give her the ram. Ooom. Load the box and prance away. Another notch carved in your cock.
—Ahaha! Still at it. Your old tricks.
Don’t bother me, Hamlin snapped. Making an effort, recovering his sexual equilibrium, his social poise. Giving her a sexosocial smile and a little genteel nod. Everything under control. “I hope I didn’t startle you, ma’am.” The voice unctuous.
“Not fatally.” Her eyes fluttering from his face to the Rehab badge and back to face. A little confused but not alarmed. She didn’t try to cover her breasts despite the potential provocativeness of the situation. The cheerful poise of the upper crust “Forgive me if I’m making a terrible mistake, but aren’t you—weren’t you—”
“Nat Hamlin, yes. Who used to live here. But my name is Paul Macy now.”
—Liar!
“I recognized you at once. How pleasant of you to visit us!” Obviously unaware of the impropriety of a reconstruct’s visiting his earlier self’s old haunts. Or not caring “Lynn Bryson, by the way. We’ve been here two years now. My husband is a helix surgeon. Shall I get you a drink, Mr. ah Macy? Or something to smoke?”
“No, thank you, Mrs. Bryson. You bought the place from Hamlin’s ah widow?”
“From Mrs. Hamlin, yes. Such a fascinating woman! Naturally she didn’t care to stay here any longer, with such terrible memories on all sides. We struck up a wonderful friendship during the time when the house was changing hands.”
“I’ve heard many fine things about her,” Hamlin said. “Of course I have no recollection of her. You understand.”
“Of course.”
“Hamlin’s past is a closed book to me. But you understand I have a certain natural curiosity about the people and places of his life. As if he were, in a sense, a famous ancestor of mine, and I felt I should know more about him.”
“Of course.”
“Does Mrs. Hamlin still live in this area?”
“Oh, no, she’s in Westchester now. Bedford City, I believe.”
“Remarried?”
“Yes, of course.”
The knife turning in Hamlin’s gut
“You happen to know her new husband’s name?” Very carefully, concealing all traces of tension.
“I could find it,” the woman said. “A Jewish name. Klein, Schmidt, Kate, something like that, a short word, Germanic. A person in the theater, a producer maybe, a very fine man.” Her smile grew broader. Her eyes appraised Hamlin’s body with complacent sensuality. As if
she wouldn’t mind some pronging. Her vicarious way of attaining intimacy with the departed great artist. She should only know. Off with that bit of plastic about her waist, down on the grass, the white fleshy thighs parting. Ooom. “Won’t you come with me?” she said airily. “I have it in the house. And you’ll want to see the house, anyway. The studio. Do you know, we’ve kept Mr. Hamlin’s studio exactly as it was when he—before he—when his troubles started—”
“You have?” A wild interior leap. Excited. “Everything still intact?”
“Mrs. Hamlin didn’t want any of his things, so they came to us with the house. And we thought, well, the way they have Rembrandt’s house on display in Amsterdam, or the house of Rubens in what is it Antwerp, so we would keep Nathaniel Hamlin’s studio intact here, not for public display of course, but simply as a kind of shrine, a memorial, and in case some scholar wished to see it, some great admirer of Hamlin, well, we would make it accessible. And then of course future generations. Won’t you come with me?” Smiling, turning, striding across the barbered lawn. Meaty buttocks waggle waggle waggle. Hamlin, sweating, adrenalized, following. The familiar old stone house. The squat spacious annex. A cheery wave of her hand. “There’s an entrance to the studio on the far side of—” Hamlin was already on his way around there. “Oh, I see you know that.” But how is it that he knows it? No indication that she suspects anything. “I’ll look for Mrs. Hamlin’s new name, and her address too, I suppose, and I’ll meet you in a couple of minutes in the—”
Studio. Exactly as he had left it. To the left of the door, the big rectangular window. Floods of light. Facing the window, the posing dais with the microphones and scanners and sensors still in place and even his last chalk-marks still on the floor. On the right-hand wall his command console, levers and knobs and studs and dials that would surely have perplexed Rembrandt or Rubens or for that matter Leonardo da Vinci. The headphones. The ionization controller. The unjacked connectors. The data-screen. The light-pen. The sonic generator. Such a tangle of apparatus. In back, the other little room, the annex of the annex, more things visible, coils of wire, metal struts, mounds of modeling clay, the big electropantograph, the photomultiplier, the image intensifier, and other things which Hamlin did not seem to recognize. Hamlin wandered numbly among it all. Macy picked up his somber thoughts. The artist was frightened, even appalled, by the complexity of the studio. Trying to adjust to the idea that he had once used all this stuff by second nature. What was this thing for? And this? And this? Shit, how does it all work? I can’t remember a thing.
—Rehab wrecked you, Nat, more than you realize.
Shut your hole. I could pick all this up again in three hours. A note of false bravado, though. Powerful currents of uncertainty coming from him. Hamlin broke off a chunk of modeling clay and began to knead it. Stiff, after all this time. The clay. And he was too. The fingers unresponsive. Let’s sculpt Mrs. Bryson. Here, we roll a long tube of clay like so, and we. No. Instantly the proportions were awry. Hamlin nibbled his lip. Correcting his intuitive beginning. She’s tall, yes, and wide through the hips, and we’ll need some clay here for the boobs.
—Give up, Nat, you don’t have it any more.
Piss off, Macy. What do you know?
Yet Hamlin was unable to conceal the extent of his uneasiness from his passenger. He was fumbling with the clay, mangling it, blundering at this elementary task of modeling, straining to get the image in his mind transferred to the lump in his hands. In that tense moment Macy made new connections and for the first time gained some control over Hamlin’s central nervous system. Plink. Strumming the neurons. Hamlin’s elbow jerked. The tube of clay bent double at the sudden accidental convulsion. Plink. Another twitch. Hamlin shouting silently at him now, bellowing in rage. Macy was enjoying this. He continued to tug at Hamlin’s synapses while the artist trembled and shivered in mounting wrath and frustration. The half-shaped model of Mrs. Bryson a ruin. Hamlin glancing around nervously at his own equipment, so alien to him, so terrifying. Telling himself that in four, four and a half years it was possible for a person to forget all sorts of superficial mechanical things, but that you never lost the real talent, the basic underlying inborn gift, the set of perceptions and insights that is the real material to which the artist applies his learned craftsmanship.
—Go on, Nat, keep saying it, you may even start to believe it soon.
Let me alone. Let me alone. I could learn all this machinery again in half a day!
—Sure you could, sweetheart. Who ever doubted it?
Giving Hamlin another twong in the medulla, a blork in the autonomic, a whonk in the limbic. Yes! Really learning my way around in here, now! Just as he did in me. The shoe on the other cortex, though. I’ll get him. I’ll get him good. Hamlin was doing a manic dance, twitching around the room as Macy toyed with him. He couldn’t seem to get himself together enough to deliver a retaliatory shot; it was as if the vibrations emanated by all the psychosculpting apparatus kept him dizzy and off balance. Keep hammering away, Macy told himself. This may be your chance to get back on top. Twong and twong and twong! Arms whipping about wildly. Knees jerking. I think I could make him crap in his undies now. A nice psychological point to score, but why shit things up for myself in case I take over?
And then Hamlin began to fight back. Coldly, furiously, ramming Macy down into subservience once more. Sweeping from his mind the distractions of this dismaying studio in order to regain inner discipline. There. There. There. Macy saw that he did not yet have the power to vanquish the other, although he was constantly learning and gaining strength. Later. Another time. He has me now.
“Isn’t the studio absolutely fascinating, Mr. Macy?”
An idiot warble, a gay contralto trill. Enter Mrs. Bryson. A slip of paper in her hand. By no accident, she has rid herself of her loincloth, and she comes jollying in, starkers, with flatfooted buoyancy. Eyes sparkling, breasts heaving expectantly. Thick curling deep-piled black triangle. Her nipples turning to turrets. The hot scent of a rutting bitch spreading in the warm air. We’re very casual about nudity out here, you see, Mr. Macy. Clothes are so primitive, don’t you think! And then maybe making a quick grab for his crotch, getting the pole out in the open, down on the floor amid the paraphernalia of the great artist. To be had by his simulacrum. Ooom. But not this time, lady. “I had some trouble finding Mrs. Hamlin’s new name and address,” she said. “It was with our papers on the house, you know, tucked away, but I dug everything out, and now—”
“Yes,” Hamlin said. Blurted. A frantic need to get out of here. Throat dry; face flushed; eyes unfocused. Defending himself simultaneously against Macy’s assaults from within and the mockeries of this equipment from without. Her black bush and hot slot of no interest to him now. The unexpectedly overbearing atmosphere of his studio had unmanned him utterly. To escape, fast. Snatching the slip of paper from her startled hand. “Thankyouverymuchgottogonow.” Moving rapidly past her toward the door. Her face suddenly a rigid mask of surprise and anger: she knows she will be denied. Hell hath no fury.
She looks ten years older. Deep lines from cheeks to chin. The nipples going soft; the shoulders slumping. All her nakedness wasted on him. Her arm outstretched, the fingers working eagerly as if to pull him back. No chance. Hamlin had reached the exit. Out into the midday brightness. Pursued by phantom tendrils of feminine libido. “You needn’t leave so soon!” she calls to him. Hamlin made no reply. Glancing back once, saw her outside the studio door, naked well-endowed idle-rich lass on the threshold of middle age, bewildered by his panic, astounded by his rejection of her body. His panic bewildered him too. Head awhirl. Macy did his best to make things worse, yanking on all the neural lines at once. Hamlin yelped, but stayed in control, and went on running. Running. Run. Ning.
In the car again, jouncing helter-skelter westward across several counties, Macy wondered if they were going to survive this trip. These back roads didn’t have any protective strips, and thus the auto’s homeostasis mechan
isms were essentially cancelled out; if the car started to slide off the road, nothing would keep it from smashing into the bulky oaks that awaited it
And Hamlin was in a ghastly state. Madly gripping the stick. Eyes glazed in Dostoevskian fixity. Jaws clenched. He was driving on reflex alone, employing one tiny plaque of cerebral tissue to operate the vehicle while the rest of his mind wildly revolved the events of the past half hour. The car teetered from side to side on the narrow road, now and then crossing the center line or running onto the shoulder.
Most of Hamlin’s defenses were relaxed, but as before Macy feared to make a takeover attempt in a moving car. He hunkered down inside Hamlin’s brain as though it were a storm shelter and temporarily disconnected his optical hookup, for the view of the madly slewing road through Hamlin’s eyes was making him seasick. Better, this way. To sit in solemn silence in a dull dark dock. About him still flashed the lightnings and eruptions of Hamlin’s distress. The studio visit had really shaken him. Moving among his implements, his elaborate sculpting apparatus, Hamlin had seemed not to know what from which or up from down. Macy wondered why. Had the Rehab process done irreversible damage to the Hamlin persona? Was there actually nothing left of the original Nat Hamlin except a clutch of old memories, a cluster of attitudes and phrases, some tics and twitches of the spirit? The sculptor, the man of genius, had he been irretrievably demolished, and was this comeback merely a delusion?
On the other hand, Macy thought, it might have been the strain of maintaining control of their shared body that had so severely drained Hamlin’s psychic energy. There had been definite signs all day that Hamlin’s grip was none too strong and was slipping from hour to hour. In the morning, striding jauntily down the street to Gargan’s gallery, presenting the contract ultimatum to the fat dealer, all that hard bargaining—Hamlin had appeared to be in full command then, but by the end of the encounter with Gargan he had started to show some fatigue, and the troubles he had had in driving from the city to his Connecticut studio had revealed a further weakening of control.
To Live Again And The Second Trip Page 40