bonging sensation like the muffled tolling of a distant bell. With it came a

  fast spasm of nausea, a light tightening around his adams’ apple.

  Then all the disturbing symptoms vanished. He nudged her elbow. “All right,” he

  said gruffly. “Wake up! Here I am. You’re pulling a lousy stinking trick, but I

  fell for it. And here I am.”

  “Nat!” Looking at him in mingled amazement and delight. Color stippling her

  cheeks. Eyes fluttering: she’s scared of me, he realized suddenly. He

  experienced a second spasm of strange uneasiness, here and gone before it had

  any real effect. “Oh, Nat, thank God you came!”

  “No,” he said. “Let’s get this established once and for all. My name’s Paul

  Macy. You want to have anything to do with me, you call me by that name, and no

  options about it. Paul Macy. Say it now.”

  “P-Paul.”

  “Say it all.”

  “Paul Macy. Paul Macy.”

  “Good.” He was starting to get a headache: two spikes of pain converging on the

  center of his head. This girl was no good for him. “Nat Hamlin doesn’t exist any

  more, and don’t you forget it,” he said. “Now: you wanted me to meet you, and I

  met you. What’s on your mind?”

  “You sound so cruel, Paul.” She stumbled on thePaul.

  “Just annoyed. Your suicide threat—what a miserable tactic that is. I goddam

  well should have called your bluff.”

  “I wasn’t bluffing.”

  “Whatever you say. I fell for it. I’m here. What do you want?”

  “We can’t talk here,” she said. “Not in the middle of a crowd. Not out on the

  street.”

  “Where, then?”

  “Your place?”

  He shook his head. “Absolutely not.”

  “Mine, then. We can be there in fifteen minutes. Everything’s filthy, but—”

  “What about a restaurant?” he suggested.

  She brightened. “That would be okay. Any place you like. One of your favorites,

  where you’d feel comfortable.”

  He tried to think of one of his favorite restaurants.

  “I don’t know any restaurants,” he said. “You pick one.”

  “You don’t know any? But you always ate out, practically every night. It was

  like a compulsion with you. You—”

  “That was Nat Hamlin,” he said. “Hamlin might have been the one who ate out a

  lot. If you say so. But not me. Not yet.”

  He reached into his stock of memories, looking for the names of some Manhattan

  restaurants. Zero. They really should have given him some restaurant memories

  when they were constructing the Paul Macy persona at the Rehab Center. It

  wouldn’t have been any big effort for them. They had given him all kinds of

  other things. Star of the high school lacrosse team. Chicken pox. A mother and a

  father. Breaking his leg on the slopes at Gstaad. Reading Proust and Hemingway.

  Putting his hand under Jeanie Grossman’s polo shirt. Thirty-five years of ersatz

  memories. But no information about restaurants. Maybe Gomez, Ianuzzi, and

  Brewster didn’t eat out much. Or perhaps the restaurant stuff was hidden in some

  cranny of his mind that he hadn’t found yet. He said, “I mean it. I’ve got no

  suggestions. You pick.”

  “There’s a people’s restaurant two blocks from here. I’ve been having lunch at

  it a lot. You know it?”

  “No.”

  “We could go there,” she said.

  It was a deep, narrow room with tarnishing brass walls and a bunch of sputtering

  defective light-loops threaded through the thatchwork ceiling. Service was

  cafeteria-style; you took what you wanted from servo-actuated cubbyholes along

  the power-counter. Then you found seats at dreary long community tables. Macy,

  following Lissa to the counter, whispered, “How do you know how much anything

  costs?”

  “It’s a people’s restaurant.”

  “So?”

  “You don’t know what that is?”

  “I’m new to a lot of this.”

  “You pay whatever you can afford,” she said. “If you don’t have any money, you

  just eat, and make it up next time. Or you go around back and help wash dishes.”

  “Does the system work?” he asked.

  “Not very well.” She smiled bleakly and began piling food on her tray. In a few

  moments she had it completely crammed with dishes. Five different kinds of

  synthetic meats, a mound of salads and vegetables, three rolls, and other

  things. He was more sparing: vegetable juice, proteoid steak, fried kelp, a cup

  of no-caffy. At the end of the counter stood a central-credit console. Lissa

  walked by it without giving it a glance. Macy hesitated a moment, confused,

  peering into the glossy dark-green screen. In a flustered way he authorized the

  console to charge his credit account ten dollars. A fat flat-faced girl waiting

  behind him in line snorted contemptuously. He wondered if he had paid too much

  or too little. Lissa was already far down the aisle, heading for an empty table

  at the back of the restaurant. He seized his tray and hurried after her.

  They sat facing each other over the bare grim plank of the tabletop. “I’ve got

  some golds,” she said. “Want one?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Try.” She pulled out a pack. Its brim snapped up and a cigarette popped out. He

  took it. She took one also, and he carefully watched her nip the ignition pod

  with her nail. He did the same. A deep pull. Almost at once he felt the

  dizziness and the acceleration of his heartbeat. She winked at him and blew

  smoke in his face.

  Then she started to eat, stuffing the food down as if she hadn’t had anything in

  weeks. The way she wolfed it, so unselfconscious in her gluttony, fascinated

  him: it was like watching a fire sweep through a dry meadow. Head forward, jaws

  working frantically. Sounds of chewing. White teeth flashing. He sat still,

  dragging on the cigarette, ineffectually trying to spear a strand of kelp with

  his fork. She looked up. “Aren’t you hungry?” she asked, mouth full.

  “Not as hungry as you are, I guess.”

  “Don’t mind me.”

  Her wrists were dirty and there was a film of grime visible on her neck. She was

  wearing the same blue coat as the other day. Again, no makeup. Her fingernails

  were ragged. But she wasn’t merely outwardly unkempt; she conveyed a sense of

  inner disintegration that terrified him. Obviously she had once been a beautiful

  girl, perhaps extraordinarily beautiful. Traces of that beauty remained. She had

  a parched, ravaged look, though, as if fevers of the soul had been consuming her

  substance. Her eyes, large and bloodshot, never were still. Always a birdlike

  flickering from place to place. Cheeks hollower than they ought to be. She could

  use about ten pounds more, he figured. And a bath. He stubbed out his roach and

  cut himself a slice of steak. Filet of papier-mâché. He gagged.

  Lissa said, “God, that’s better! Some food in the gut again.”

  “Why were you so hungry?”

  “I always am. I’m burning up.”

  “Are you sick?”

  She shrugged. “Who knows?” Her eyes momentarily rested on his. “I’m trying to

  think of you as Paul Macy. It isn’t easy, sitting here with Nat Hamlin opposite

  me.”

  “Nat Hamlin doesn’t exist.”

  “You really don’t remember me?”

  “Zero,” he said.

  “Shit almighty! What did theydo to you at the Rehab Center?”

  He said, “They pumped Nat Hamlin full of memory-dissolving drugs until every bit

  of him was flushed away. Which left a kind of zombie, you see? A healthy empty

  body. Society doesn’t like to waste a good healthy body. So then they built me

  inside the zombie’s head.”

  “Built you? What do you mean, built?”

  “Created an identity for me.” He shut his eyes a moment. There was a tightness

  at his collar. Choking sensation. He wasn’t supposed to have to explain any of

  this. The world was supposed to take it all for granted. “They built up a past,

  a cluster of events that I could move around in as if it had really happened.

  Like I grew up in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and moved to Seattle when I was twelve. My

  father was a propulsion engineer and my mother taught school. They’re both dead

  now. No brothers. No sisters. I collected African stamps and I did a lot of

  hunting and fishing. I went to college, UCLA, class of ’93, got a degree in

  philosophy of communication. Two years of national service, stationed in Bolivia

  and Ecuador, doing voice-overs for the People’s Democratic Channel. Then various

  TV and HV jobs in Europe and the States, and now here in New York. Et cetera, et

  cetera.”

  “God,” she said. “And it’s all phony?”

  “Pretty near. It follows Nat Hamlin’s biography only as closely as it has to.

  Like in age. Or Hamlin broke a leg when he was twenty-six and you can see that

  in the bone, so they’ve given me a skiing accident for that year.”

  “What would happen if I checked the UCLA alumni records, looking for Paul Macy

  in the class of ’93?”

  “You’d find him. With a Rehab asterisk saying that this is a pro forma entry

  covering a retroactively established identity. Same thing if you looked up the

  Idaho Falls birth register. They do a very thorough job.”

  “Christ,” Lissa said. And shivered. “How creepy this is! You actually are a

  whole new person.”

  “I don’t know how whole I am. But I’m new, all right.”

  “You don’t have any idea who I am, then.”

  “You used to pose for Nat Hamlin, didn’t you?”

  She looked startled. “How come you know that? I haven’t said anything about—”

  “The day you stopped me in the street,” he said, “while we were talking, I got a

  flash picture of you naked in a kind of studio, and I was leaning over a

  complicated keyboard thing and telling you to scream. Like a psychosculptor

  trying to get an emotional effect. I saw it maybe half a second, then it was

  gone.” He moistened his lips. “It was like a piece of Nat Hamlin’s blotted-out

  mind surfacing into mine.”

  “Or a piece of my mind reaching into yours,” she said.

  “Eh?”

  “It happens. I can’t keep it under control.” A shrill giggle. “Wherever you got

  it from, it was right. I was one of Nat Hamlin’s models. From January to August,

  ’06, when he was working on hisAntigone 21. The one the Metropolitan bought. His

  last big work, before his breakdown. You know about his breakdown?”

  “Some. Don’t talk about it.” He felt a band of fire across his forehead. Simply

  being close to someone out of the old existence this long was painful. “Can I

  have another gold?”

  She offered the cigarette and said, “I was also his mistress, all through ’05

  and most of ’06. He said he’d get a divorce and marry me. Like Rembrandt. Like

  Renoir. Falling in love with the model. Only he went out of his head instead.

  Doing all those crazy things.”

  Macy, suddenly vulnerable, tried to stop her with an upraised hand, but there

  was no halting the flow of her words. “The last time I saw him was Thanksgiving

  Day, 2006. At his studio. We had a fight and he threw me down the stairs.” She

  winced. Into his mind a searing image: an endless flight, the girl falling,

  falling, skirt up around her thighs, legs kicking, arms clutching, the dwindling

  scream, the sudden twist and impact. A sound of something cracking. “In the

  hospital six weeks with a broken pelvis. When I got out they were hunting him

  from Connecticut to Kansas. And then—”

  “No more!”he yelled. People turned to look.

  She shrank away from him. “I’m sorry,” she said, folding into herself, huddling,

  shaking. His cheeks were hot with shame and turmoil. After a moment she said

  softly, “Does it hurt a lot when I talk about him?”

  A nod. Silence.

  “You asked me to see you because you were in trouble,” he said at length.

  “Yes.”

  “Would you honestly have killed yourself if I hadn’t shown up?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m all alone. I have nobody at all. And I’m going out of my mind.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I hear voices. Other people’s minds come into mine. And mine goes into theirs.

  Extrasensory perception.”

  “ESP?” he said. “Like—what is it, mental telepathy?”

  “Telepathy. That’s what it is. ESP. Telepathy.”

  “I didn’t think that that really existed.”

  A bitter laugh. “You bet your ass. Sitting right here in front of you. The

  genuine article.”

  “You can read minds?” he said, feeling dreamfogged and unreal.

  “Not exactly read. Just touch, mind to mind. It isn’t under my conscious

  control. Things drift in, drift out. Voices humming in my brain, a word, a

  phrase, an image. It’s been happening since I was ten, twelve years old. Only

  much worse now. Much, much worse.” Trembling. “The past two years. Hell.

  Absolute hell.”

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know who I am any more a lot of the time,” she said. “I get to be five,

  six people at once. This mushy noise in my head. The buzzing. The voices. Like

  static, only sometimes words drift in on the static. I pick up all these weird

  emotions, and they scare me. Not knowing if I’m imagining or not. There’s

  somebody two tables away who wants to rape me. Wishes he dared. In his head I’m

  naked and bloody, spreadeagled, arms and legs tied to the furniture. And over to

  my left, someone else, a woman, she’s transmitting the odor of shit. She sees me

  like some kind of giant turd sitting here. I don’t know why. And then you—”

  “No,” he said. “Don’t tell me.”

  “It isn’t really ugly. You think I’m dirty and you want to take me home and give

  me a bath. And fuck me afterward. That’s okay. I know I’m dirty. And I’d like to

  go to bed with you, too. But I can’t stand all this crosstalk in my head. I’m

  wide open, Nat, wide open to every stray thought, and—”

  “Paul.”

  “What?”

  “I said, call me Paul. It’s important to me.”

  “But you’re—”

  “Paul Macy.”

  “Just now, though, you were coming through as Nat Hamlin to me. From deep

  underneath.”

  “No. Hamlin’s gone,” he said. “I’m Paul Macy.” A feeling of seasickness. The

  light-loops swaying and hissing overhead. He found himself covering her hand

  with his. Ragged cuticles against his fingertips. He said, “If you’re suffering

  so much, why don’t you get some help? Maybe there’s a cure for ESP. Is that what

  you want, a cure? I could take you to see Dr. Ianuzzi, she’s a very sensitive

  woman, she could get you into the right kind of psychiatric hospital and—”

  “And they’d give me shock treatment,” Lissa said. “Memory dislocation with

  drugs, like I was a criminal. They’d wash half my brain out trying to heal me.

  There wouldn’t be anything ofme left. I’m afraid of therapy. I haven’t ever

  gone. I don’t want to go.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then what am I supposed to do for you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know that either, Paul. I’m absolutely fucked up in the head, so

  there’s no use asking me rational questions.” Her eyes glittering eerily. Sick,

  sick, sick. “What you really ought to do,” she said, “is get the hell away from

  me, right now, like you’ve wanted to do since the first minute you saw me. Only

  don’t. God, please, don’t. Help me. Help me.”

  “How?”

  “Just be with me a little. I’m all alone. I’ve cut myself off from the whole

  world. Look, you know how it is with me? I don’t have a job. I don’t have

  friends any more. I look in the mirror and I see my own skeleton. I sit home and

  wait for the voices to go away, and they scream and scream at me until my head

  is coming off. I live off the welfare checks. Then I go out for a walk one day,

  on and on and on, way the hell uptown, and I crash into some guy on the street

  and he turns around and he’s Nat Hamlin, he’s the only man I ever really loved,

  only he isn’t Hamlin any more, he’s Paul Macy, that’s what he says, and—” She

  caught her breath. “All right. You don’t know me at all and I guess I can’t say

  I know you. But I know your body. Every inch. That’s a familiar thing to me, a

  landmark, something I can anchor myself to. Let me anchor. Let me hold on. I’m

  going under, Paul. I’m drowning, and maybe you can hold me up, for the sake of

  what I used to mean to the person you used to be. Maybe. Maybe for a little

  while. You don’t owe it to me, you don’t owe me anything, you could get right up

  and walk out of here and you’d have every right. But don’t. Because I need you.”