country, so to speak. And besides the stench is dead. Why does he haunt me? I am

  not Nat Hamlin.

  Sometimes at night it was hard to be sure of that, though. By the third night

  Macy dreaded going to bed. There was that man with his face, always haunting him

  when he crossed into dreamland. Waking in distress, he wanted to call a friend

  and ask for reassurance. But he had no friends. The old ones had been washed

  away by the therapy, and he hadn’t made any new ones yet, except a few people he

  had come to know at the Rehab Center, fellow reconstructs, and he didn’t want to

  bother them in the middle of the night. Maybe they had demons of their own to

  wrestle with. And the people from the network. Mustn’t call them. You’d blow the

  whole pretense of your stability in one gush of panicky talk. Nor could he call

  any of his therapists. Dr. Brewster, Dr. Ianuzzi, Dr. Gomez. You’re on your own,

  they said. We’re cutting the umbilicus. So. So. All alone. Sweat it out.

  Eventually, no matter how bad a night it was, he would sleep. Eventually.

  “Is there any chance,” Macy asked, “that the Rehab job didn’t completely take? I

  mean, sometimes I think I can feel Hamlin trying to break through.”

  A Tuesday late in May, 2011. One week after his discharge from the Rehab Center.

  His first session of posttherapy therapy. Dr. Gomez, round-faced, swarthy,

  drooping black mustache, not much chin, scowling and chewing on a computer

  stylus. Soft buzzing voice. “No chance of that at all, Macy.”

  “But these dreams—”

  “A little psychic static, is all. What gives you the idea Hamlin still exists?”

  “During these nightmares I feel him pushing inside my head. Like somebody trying

  to get out.”

  “Don’t mess things up with your pretty imagery, Macy. You’ve been having some

  bad dreams. Everybody has bad dreams. You think I’m immune? I’ve got my share of

  lousy karma. Without any fancy hypotheses, tell me why you think it’s Hamlin.”

  “The man with my face chasing me.”

  “A metaphor for your own unfocused past, maybe.”

  “A sense of confusion. Not knowing who I really am.”

  “Who are you, really?”

  “Paul Macy. But—”

  “That’s who you really are. Nat Hamlin doesn’t exist any more. He’s been

  stripped out of your body, cell by cell, and extinguished. You really surprise

  me, Macy. I thought you were going to make one of the best adjustments I ever

  saw.”

  “I felt that way too,” Macy said. “But since I’ve been outside there have been

  these—these bursts of psychic static. I’m scared. What if Hamlin’s still there?”

  “Hamlin exists only as an abstract concept. He’s a famous psychosculptor who ran

  into trouble with the law and was eradicated. Now he exists only through his

  works. Like Mozart. Like Michelangelo. He isn’t in your head.”

  Macy said, “My first day at the network, I walked into the office of one of the

  high executives and there was a big Hamlin sculpture in the corner. I looked at

  it and I recognized it for what it was and I just took it in, you know, the way

  I’d take in a Michelangelo, and after a fraction of a second I had this

  sensation like somebody had banged me on the head with a mallet. I almost fell

  over. The impact was tremendous. How do you account for that, Dr. Gomez?”

  “How doyou account for it?”

  “Like it was Hamlin still inside me, standing up and yelling, ‘That’s mine, I

  made that!’ Such a surge of pride and identity that I felt it on the conscious

  level as physical pain.”

  “Balls,” the doctor said. “Hamlin’s gone.”

  “How can you be sure of that?”

  Gomez sighed. “Look,” he said, and jabbed an output node. On the walls of his

  office blossomed screened images of Macy’s psychological profiles. Gomez

  pointed. “Over on the left, that’s the EEG of Nat Hamlin. You see those greasy

  waves of psychopathic tendency, those ugly nasty jiggles? You see those

  electrical storms going on in that man’s head? That’s a sick EEG. That’s sick as

  hell. Right?

  “Now look over here. We’ve begun the mindpick operation. We’re wiping out Nat

  Hamlin. The waves get smoother. Sweet as a baby. Chart after chart. Look. Look.

  Look. As Hamlin goes, we bring in Macy. You can see the overlay here.This is

  what a double mind looks like. Vestigial Hamlin, incipient Macy. Yes? Two

  distinct electrical patterns, no problems at all distinguishing one from the

  other. And now, this side of the room, you can see Hamlin wiped out entirely.

  Can you find any of the typical Hamlin waveforms? By shit, can you?

  “You aren’t saying anything, Macy. There’s your brain on the wall. Alpha, beta,

  the whole mess. Compare your waves and Hamlin’s. Altogether different. Two

  separate patterns. He’s him, you’re you. The machine says so. It isn’t a matter

  of opinion, it’s a matter of voltage thresholds. A voltage doesn’t lie. Amperes

  don’t have opinions. Resistances don’t fuck around with you for sly tactical

  reasons. We’re dealing in objective facts, and the objective facts tell me that

  Nat Hamlin has been wiped out. They ought to tell you that too.”

  “The dreams—the sight of that psychosculpture—”

  “So you’re a little unstable. A couple of surprise adjustment traumas. But

  Hamlin? No.”

  “Another thing. My first day out, that same day, I met a girl in the street,

  somebody from Hamlin’s life. She kept calling me Nat. Telling me she loved me.”

  “Weren’t you wearing your Rehab badge?”

  “Of course I was.”

  “And the dumb bitch still dumped all that garbage on you?”

  “I suppose she’s disturbed mentally herself. I don’t know. Anyway,” Macy said,

  “she was doing all this to me, Nat this and Nat that, paying no attention when I

  told her I was Paul Macy, and out of nowhere I felt, well, like hot on top of my

  head, and for half a second I didn’t know who I was. Which one of me I was. It

  was like something had reached into my head and mixed everything up. I could

  even remember myself making a psychosculpture of the girl. You see, she was one

  of Hamlin’s models, apparently, and I had this flickering memory of her posing,

  me at a sculptor’s keyboard—”

  “Crap,” Gomez said.

  “What?”

  “Crap. It wasn’t a memory. You couldn’t possibly remember anything out of Nat

  Hamlin’s life.”

  “What was it, then?”

  “It was an episode of free-floating masochism, Macy. A normal self-injury wish.

  You invented this phantom image of yourself sculpting the girl because you

  wanted to fool yourself into thinking that Hamlin was breaking through.”

  “But I don’t see why—”

  “Shut up and I’ll explain the mechanism. You lived at this Center for four

  years, right, and you got constant attention. It was like being in the womb.

  Every need instantly attended to. Okay, it’s time for Paul Macy to be born, and

  we toss you out into the world on your ass. Not exactly as rough as that, we

  find you a job first, we find you a place to live, but it’s still a ballbreaker

  to get evicted. Out you go. Suddenly no umbilicus to feed you. Suddenly no

  placenta to cuddle in.

  “Well, you want attention, and one way to get it is to come here yelling that

  your personality reconstruct didn’t really take, that Hamlin is knocking around

  inside your head. I don’t mean that this is a conscious thing. It’s a mechanism.

  Your rational self just wants to make a decent adjustment to outside life and

  live happily ever after as Paul Macy, but there’s this irrational side of us

  too. Which often operates directly counter to the needs and desires of the

  rational side.

  “Suppose I tell somebody that his sanity depends on never calling his

  mother-in-law by her first name, okay? And he nods, he says, ‘Yes, I understand,

  if I do that it’ll really wreck me.’ So of course every time he sees the old

  witch he finds that her first name is on the tip of his tongue. He’ll have

  dreams in which he calls her by her first name. He’ll fantasy it while he’s

  sitting at his desk. Because it’s the most destructive fucking thing he could

  possibly do, so of course the temptation to do it keeps rising out of his head,

  and he’s constantly imagining hehas done it.

  “Now back to you. The last thing you want to have happen is for Hamlin to come

  back to life, so naturally you fantasy yourself making a sculpture of this girl.

  Which upsets you and sends you in a sweat back to me, screaming for help. The

  immediate result of this mechanism is to give you bad dreams and general trauma,

  and an incidental side-effect is to supply you with that claim on my attention

  that you unconsciously crave. You see how the dark side of our mind always craps

  us up? But don’t worry about it, Macy. None of this is real, in the sense that

  Hamlinis there. Oh, sure, it’s real in a psychological sense, but so what?”

  Gomez grinned triumphantly. “You’re a smart boy. You’ve been following all this,

  right?”

  Macy said, “Isn’t it possible to run some new EEGs all the same? What if I did

  come up with a double wave pattern?”

  “You really want me to coddle you, don’t you?”

  “Would it be so hard to make an empirical test?”

  “I could do it in five minutes.”

  “Why not, then?”

  “Because I don’t believe in giving in to an outpatient’s weepy fantasies. You

  think you’re my first reconstruct job? I’ve had a hundred of you. I know what’s

  possible and what isn’t. If I tell you Hamlin is eradicated, it’s because Iknow

  Hamlin is eradicated. I’m not just being a bull-headed bastard.”

  “All right, so I’m irrational,” Macy said. “But if I had the evidence of the EEG

  in front of me—”

  “I won’t play that game with you. The fantasy came from inside you; let the cure

  for it come from in there too. Sweat it out. Convince yourself that your belief

  in Hamlin’s continued existence is nothing but a move to get sympathy from us.”

  “And if the hallucinations don’t go away?”

  “They have to.”

  “If they don’t, though?”

  “You’ll be here again next Tuesday,” Gomez said. “I won’t be seeing you then.

  Dr. Ianuzzi will, and as you know she’s an entirely different kind of doctor.

  Sweet and refined and sympathetic, whereas I’m a vulgar and hostile son of a

  bitch. If this stuff is still bothering you then, maybe she’ll run an EEG for

  you, though I hope she doesn’t. I won’t, Macy. I can’t. The top sergeant never

  kisses you and tucks you in, no matter how piteously you ask him, and I’m top

  sergeant on this team. So come back next week.”

  Gomez stood up. “I saw you on the late news last night. You weren’t bad at all.”

  The next morning he found a message cube addressed to him in his box at the

  office. Puzzled, he plugged the glossy little cassette into his desk’s output

  slot. The face of the girl who had talked to him on the street the week before

  appeared on the screen. Red-rimmed eyes, hollow cheeks. Her hair straggly,

  unkempt. She offered the camera an uncertain lopsided grin and said, “I saw you

  on holovision and so I knew where to send this. Please, Nat, don’t just ignore

  me. I can’t tell you—”

  His hand shot out and killed the playback.Please, Nat. He couldn’t take that.

  The use of his old name: it was like slivers of wood under his fingernails,

  needles probing behind his eyes. Last night the dreams had been worse than ever.

  Seeing himself as Siamese twins, one body ripping and clawing at its identical

  brother. And then the trapdoor opening in the attic floor and the shambling

  disemboweled thing lurching up out of it. The girl had initiated all his

  traumas; there hadn’t been bad dreams before that miserable accidental meeting.

  He wasn’t going to give her a second chance to screw him up. If that bastard

  Gomez wouldn’t offer supportive therapy, he was simply going to have to defend

  himself against potential inner turmoil. And therefore it was necessary to avoid

  new sources of anguish.

  Macy switched the output control toErase and reached for the button. Then he saw

  the girl’s sad, eroded face in his mind. A fellow human being. She also suffers.

  I could at least listen once.

  He turned toPlayback again and she reappeared, saying, “I saw you on holovision

  and so I knew where to send this. Please, Nat, don’t just ignore me. I can’t

  tell you how much you still mean to me, even after everything. I know you’ve

  been through Rehab and things must be very strange to you, and you don’t want to

  hear from people out of your old life. But finding you like that was such a

  miracle that I can’t simply pretend you don’t exist. Because I can’t keep going

  like this much longer, Nat. I’m in bad shape. I need help. I’m sinking and

  somebody’s got to throw me a rope.”

  There was more in that vein. She said she’d wait for him Wednesday night at six

  o’clock on the northeast corner of 227th and Broadway, opposite the network

  building, and that she’d be waiting for him the same time the next two nights

  also, in case he wasn’t free Wednesday. Or if he wanted to make other

  arrangements he could call her at her home, any day after eleven in the morning,

  such-and-such a number. With all my love. Yours truly, Lissa Moore.

  I can’t, he thought. I don’t dare. He erased the cube. That night he left ten

  minutes early, going out the building’s east entrance to avoid her. He did the

  same on Thursday and Friday.

  On Monday there was a new cube from her. He carried it around for three hours,

  unwilling to erase it, afraid to play it, and finally slipped it into the slot.

  On the screen, her pale face against a black velvet backdrop. The mouth drawn

  into a quirky grimace. A hyperthyroid bulge to the eyes that he hadn’t noticed

  before. The lighting in the booth where she’d recorded the message was too

  bright, and it struck her cheeks so fiercely that it seemed to strip them to the

  bone. Her voice, blurting, unmodulated: “You didn’t come. I waited, but you

  didn’t come. All right, Nat. Paul. Maybe you don’t give a damn about me. Maybe

  you’ve got your own neck to look out for and can’t fool around with me. I won’t

  bother you after today. I’ll wait tonight, six o’clock, same corner, Broadway

  and 227th, northeast side. You aren’t there by half past eight, I’ll be dead by

  nine. I mean it. Now it’s up to you.”

  THREE

  A FEW minutes past six, he was still in the central newsroom, finishing his last

  piece of the day. A cold sullen anger still gripped him. Let the bitch kill

  herself. I won’t be blackmailed like that. She doesn’t mean anything to me

  except trouble.

  With a sharp stabbing gesture he summoned control of the hovereye that patrolled

  the street outside the network office building, forever keeping watch for

  demonstrators, bombers, self-immolators. With newly skillful motions Macy

  brought the airborne camera down the block until it was scanning the

  streetcorner where Lissa had said she’d wait. Now the fine control, the vernier.

  Yes, there she is. Pacing in a taut little circle. A self-contained zone of

  tension on the busy street. Damn her. She can do whatever she likes to herself.

  Whatever she likes. Macy signed himself out of the newsroom and, gliding on the

  glacial flow of his rage, drifted toward the liftshaft. Down forty stories.

  Sweeping quickly through the lobby. Outside. A soft spring evening. Long lines

  of patient homegoers wearily filing into the tubemouth. So easy to avoid her, in

  this crowd. Just slide on past.

  He found himself walking toward her, though. One-and-two-and-one-and-two; he

  couldn’t stop. She seemed to be talking to herself; eyes turned inward, she

  didn’t notice him approaching. From twenty yards away he glowered at her. Who

  the hell does she think she is, trying to use me this way? Playing on my

  sympathies. Oh, I need you, I need you so much! With throbbing violins. And

  working on my sense of guilt. Meet me on the corner or I’ll jump off the

  Palisades Bridge! Sure. What business is it of mine if you want to jump off a

  bridge, baby? I’ve got nothing to feel guilty about. Guilt? I haven’t done a

  thing. I’m brand new in the world. Christ, I’m even a virgin. That’s right: Paul

  Macy is a virgin. A goddamn virgin.

  He was only a few feet from her now, but she hadn’t seen him yet. He started to

  touch her arm, but halted as a curious discomfort flitted across his skull. That

  sense of doubleness, again, that scrambling of identities. Disorientation. A