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—”