Robert Silverberg - The Second Trip

Then she doesn’t hear from him for three months. Despair. At last an apologetic postcard from Morocco. Another, a month and a half later, from Bagdad. At Christmastime a card with Japanese stamps on it. Then, January ’05, a phonecall. Back in town at last. See you at nine tonight, break all other engagements.

And from then on she is more or less his full-time mistress, living at Darien much of the time, naturally dropping out of art school, drifting away from old friends, who now seem naive and immature to her. New friends, exciting ones. Even becoming friendly with Hamlin’s wife. (A peculiar marital relation there, Macy concluded.)

Early in ’06, after nearly a year of planning, he gets down to serious work on the Antigone 21. Months of toil for him and for her; he is a demon when he works. Twelve, fifteen, eighteen hours a day. Finally almost finished. Almost finished with her, too. He has been talking of marrying her since the summer of ’05, but their relationship grows increasingly tense. Physical violence: he slaps her, kicks her a couple of times, balls her once by main force when she doesn’t want it, ultimately knocks her down the stairs and breaks her pelvis. Hospital. During which time he succumbs completely to the disintegration of personality that has, unknown to her, been going on in him for most of the year, and commits Dreadful Deeds upon the persons of a variety of women. He is arrested and tried; she sees him no more until that eerie day in May of 2011 when she crashed into Paul Macy on the streets of Manhattan North.

And your telepathy problem, Macy wants to ask? When did that start? When did it become severe? But obviously she doesn’t want to talk about that. She will speak to him tonight only of old business, her romance with the defunct great artist. And now she has talked herself out Silence. Lights out Two red roaches in the darkness. Pungent smoke rising ceilingward. This would be the sort of moment Macy thought, when Hamlin would appear. To append footnotes to Lissa’s story. But Hamlin, missing his cue, did not appear. It began to occur to Macy that each of his encounters with Hamlin might drain the other’s strength as much as it did his, possibly more; between colloquies, Hamlin had to lie doggo, recharging. Maybe not so, but a cheering possibility. Tire him out, wear him down, eventually eject him. An endurance contest.

Macy turned dutifully to Lissa, not particularly in need of her but feeling that they ought to commemorate her moving-in with some kind of celebration of passion; his hand slipped over one of her breasts, but she responded not at all, merely lying there in a passive stony haze, and an uncheering possibility struck him: When she makes love with me, is she really only trying to recapture those moments of fire with him? I am Nat Hamlin’s well-endowed body minus Nat Hamlin’s troublesomely violent nature; is that not all she seeks from me?

The thought that he might be, for her, nothing but a dead man’s reanimated penis did not amuse him. Of course she said she enjoyed him for his own sake, but of what did his own sake consist? Having loved a genius, could she love a nonentity equally well? Or at all? A young, impressionable art student would of course be drawn automatically to a magnet such as Nat Hamlin, but Paul Macy should have no pull. Who am I, what am I, wherein lies my texture, my density? I am nothing. I am unreal. Hamlin’s shadowy successor. His relict Macy attempted to check this cascade of negativisms, telling himself that Hamlin was undoubtedly causing it by releasing a river of poisons from his subcranial den. But he could not coax himself just now to a higher self-esteem. Entering her, he pushed the piston mechanically back and forth for three or four minutes, feeling wholly detached from her except at the point of entry, and, since she gave no hint of being with him in any way, he let himself go off and sank into the usual bothered sleep, infested by incubi and revenants.

Many sympathetic glances at the network office the next day. Everybody tiptoeing around him, speaking in soft tones, grinning a lot, sidestepping every situation of potential stress or conflict. Obviously all of them afraid he might flip at the first jarring stimulus. It was a regression to the way they had treated him weeks ago, when he had first come here, when they thought a Rehab needed to be handled as carefully as a barrel of eggs. He wondered why. Was it because he had called in sick yesterday, and now they assumed he had been suffering from some special affliction of Rehabs, some slippage of the identity, that required extracautious handling? Their excessive kindness, implying as it did that he was more vulnerable than they, irritated him. After two and a half hours of it he cornered Loftus, Stilton Fredericks’ executive assistant, and asked her about it.

He said, “I want you to know that what kept me home yesterday was simply an upset stomach. A case of the runs and a lot of puking, okay?”

She looked at him blankly. “I don’t remember asking.”

“I know you didn’t ask. But everybody else around this place seems to think I had some sort of nervous breakdown. At least, that’s how they’ve been treating me today. So fucking kind it’s killing me. So I thought I’d let you spread the word that I’m all right. A mere internal indisposition.”

“You don’t like people to be nice to you, Macy?”

“I didn’t say that I just don’t want my fellow workers making inaccurate assumptions about the state of my head.”

“Okay, so you didn’t have a nervous breakdown. So why do you look so strange?”

“Strange?”

“Strange,” Loftus said.

“What way?”

“Look in the mirror.” Then, a moment of tenderness breaking through the steel: “If anything’s the matter that any of us could fix—”

“No. No. Honestly, it was only an upset stomach.”

“Uh-huh. Okay, if anybody asks, I’ll tell them. Nobody’s going to whisper behind your back.”

He thanked her and made a quick escape. Executive washroom: amid all the electronic gimmickry, the sonic shavers and the Klein-bottle urinals, he found a mirror, standard variety, silver-backed glass as in days of yore. A fierce, bloodshot face looking back at him. Furrowed forehead. Nostrils flaring. Lips compressed, mouth drawn off to one side. Jesus, no wonder! He was Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll both at the same time, his features all snarled up, reflecting the most intense kind of interior agonies.

And this without a buzz from Hamlin for the past eighteen hours. This double existence, this squatter occupation of the lower reaches of his mind, was corroding his face, turning him into an ambulatory flag of distress. Of course they were all being sweet to him today; they could see the signals of imminent collapse inscribed on his brow.

Yet he felt relatively relaxed today. What must he look like when Hamlin was near the surface and prodding him? Macy ventured an exploratory sweep. Hamlin? Hamlin, you there? My private permanent bad dream. Come up where I can see you. Let’s have a chat.

But no, all quiet on the cerebral front Feeling snubbed, Macy set out to repair his face. Stripped to the waist. Sticking his head into the hot-air blower. Loosen the muscles, soften the scowl. A little humidity, maestro. Ah. Ah, how good that is on the tactile net. Thrust noggin now into whirlpool sink. Round and round and round, bubble bubble bubble, hold your breath and let the lovely water work its magic. Ah. Ah. Splendid. Back to the hot air to dry off. Now pop a trank. Blow a gold Survey the map. Better, much better. The tension draining away; a lucky thing, too, they wouldn’t have let you step in front of a camera looking all screwed up.

Macy was still refurbishing himself, putting his clothes back on, when Fredericks walked into the John. A hearty phony laugh out of him, ho ho ho. “Interrupting you in a moment of relaxation, Paul?”