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, Macy. 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.