“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.
Without in so many words accusing her of lying to him, he accused her of lying to him. She was indignant and then at once contrite. Admitting everything. Left here without intending to come back. The strain, too much strain, too much mental noise, the yammering of the double soul within the single brain getting to be more than she can handle. All night long, lying next to him, picking up the blurred shapeless echoes of the conflict going on within his head. You maybe don’t even realize it yourself, she told him. How Hamlin hammers all the time, let me out, let me out, let me out. Deep down below the levels of consciousness. That constant agonized cry. And you fighting back, Paul. Suppressing him, squashing him. Don’t you know it’s going on?
And he shook his head, no, no, I’m only aware when he surfaces and starts talking to me, or when he grabs parts of my nervous system. Tell me more about this. And Lissa told him more. Conveying to him, in short nervous blurts of half-sentences, how much she was suffering from her mere proximity to him, how much it had cost her in extrasensory anguish since she had moved in. It would be bad enough if there was only one of him, but the double identity, no, too much, too fucking much, all that telepathic pressure, her head was splitting.
And it got worse every day. Cumulative. Rebirth of the old overpowering impulse to hide herself away from the whole human race. Not your fault, Paul, I know, not your fault, I asked you to take pity on me and help me, but yet, but yet, this is what happens. Even when you aren’t here I feel you and Hamlin hemming me in. Pushing against my temples.
Like a kind of air pollution, it was: he gathered that she felt the sweaty residue of their grappling selves enfogging and enfouling the place, greasy molecules of disembodied consciousness drifting in the rooms, sucked into her lungs with every breath. A daily poisoning. So at last she simply had to get out and clear her head. Setting out at five, a long twilight walk downtown, hour after hour, mechanically moving along, lift foot put foot down lift other foot. Finally reaching the vicinity of West 116th Street by nightfall. A somber prowl in darkness through the ruins of the old university.
He stared at her in alarm. You really went there? Those charred shells of buildings were, they said, a rapist’s heaven, a mugger’s paradise. Suicidal to stroll there alone after dark. And she gave him an odd masked look, faintly guilty. What had she done this evening? His imagination supplied a possible answer—or was Hamlin planting the thought, or had it come from her, bleeding across the line of mental contact? A dimly perceived figure, say, pursuing her through the shattered campus. But Lissa crazily unafraid, perhaps half eager to court death or mutilation, defiant, turning to the unknown pursuer, winking, pulling up her tunic, waggling her hips. Here, man, bang away, what do I care? Thrust and thrust and thrust on a bed of rubble. Afterward the man giving her a funny look. You must be real weird, lady. And running away from her, leaving her to proceed on her solitary wandering way. Had it happened? Her clothes weren’t rumpled or stained or soiled.
Macy told himself that it was all his own ugly fantasy; she had merely been out for a walk, hadn’t spread her legs for a stranger, hadn’t purged her head of echoes by inviting rape. Go on, he told her. You walked through the ruins. And then? I did a lot of thinking, she said. Wondering if I ought to head back to my old place and stay there. Or go uptown to you. Maybe even to kill myself. The easiest way. Misery no matter what I do, you see, that’s no joke. And finally, beginning to tire, to regret her long nocturnal expedition, beginning to worry about worrying him by her disappearance. Getting on the tube, returning. Standing outside the door and becoming aware of the tricky takeover in progress within. The entry. The last-minute rescue. Tarantara!
“Why did you come back here?” he asked.
A shrug. Vague. “I can’t say. Because I was lonely, maybe. Because I had a premonition, maybe, that you were in trouble. I didn’t think about it I just came.”
“Do you want to move out for good?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to be able to stay with you, Paul. If only. The pain. Would. Stop.” Drifting away from him again. Her voice dreamy and halting. “A river of mud flowing through my head,” she murmured. Flopping down on the bed, face in arms. Macy went to her with comfort. Such as he could offer. Stroking her tenderly despite the ache behind his eyes. Again, it seemed, the curious flow of strength had taken place. From her to him. The odd sudden reversal of roles, the comforter becoming the comforted. Ten minutes ago she had been striving to put him back together, now she was crumpled and flaccid. And Hamlin thinks this girl is destructive. A monster, a villainess. Poor pitiful monster.
She said indistinctly, not looking up, “Your Rehab Center phoned again this morning. A doctor with a Spanish name.”
“Gomez.”
“Gomez, yes, I think so.”
“And?”
Pause. “I told him the whole thing. He was very upset.”
“What did he say?”
“He wanted to see you right away. I said no, it was impossible, Hamlin would attack you if you went near the Rehab Center. He didn’t appear to believe that. I think I convinced him after a while.”