every morning?

  Macy listened to time tolling in his head. One minute, two, three. What had

  happened? This was the second time in the last eighteen hours that he’d been

  clubbed down from within.Hamlin?

  —You bet your ass.

  What did you do to me?

  —Gave you a leetle twitch in the autonomic nervous system. I’m sitting right

  here looking at it. A bunch of ropes and cords, the most complicated frigging

  mess you could imagine. I just reached out and wentplink.

  Another shaft of pain between the shoulder blades.

  Stop it,Macy said.Jesus, why are you doing that?

  —Self preservation. Like you said a little while ago, self-preservation has to

  come before concern for others, right?

  Can you hear all my thoughts?

  —Enough of them. Enough to know when I’m being threatened.

  Threatened?

  —Sure. Where were you heading when I knocked you off your feet?

  The Rehab Center,Macy admitted.

  —That’s right. And what were you going to do there?

  I was going for my weekly post-therapy therapy session.

  —Like shit you were. You were going to tell the doctors that I had come back to

  life.

  And if I was?

  —Don’t try to play innocent. You were going to have them blot me out again,

  right? Right, Macy?

  Well—

  —Admit it!

  Macy, crouching on the shining tiles, attempted to call for help. A soft mewing

  sound came from him. The commuters continued to stream past. A flotilla of

  attaché cases and portable terminals. Please. Please. Help me.

  From Hamlin, a second time:

  —Admit it!

  Let me alone.

  Macy felt a sudden explosion of agony behind his breastbone. As if a hand had

  clasped itself about his heart for a quick powerful squeeze. Setting the valves

  aflap, emptying the ventricles, pinching the aorta.

  —I’m learning my way around in here, pal. I can do all kinds of things today

  that I couldn’t swing yesterday. Like tickling your heart. Isn’t that a lovely

  sensation? Now, suppose you tell me why you were in such a hurry to get to the

  Rehab Center, and it better be the right answer.

  To have you obliterated again,Macy confessed miserably.

  —Yes. Yes. The dirty truth will out! You were conspiring in my murder, weren’t

  you? I never murdered anybody in my life, you understand, I merely took a few

  liberties with my prick, and nevertheless the state was pleased to order my

  death—

  Your rehabilitation,said Macy.

  —My death, Hamlin shot back at him, giving him a tug on the right tricep by way

  of emphasis. They killed me and put somebody else in my body, only I came back

  to life, and you were going to have them kill me again. We don’t need to debate

  the semantics of the point. Stand up, Macy.

  Macy cautiously tested his strength and found that his legs now would support

  him. He rose, very slowly, feeling immensely fragile. A few tottering steps.

  Knees shaking. Skin clammy. Dryness in the throat.

  —Now, friend, we have to get something understood. You aren’t going to go to the

  Rehab Center today. You aren’t going to go there at all, ever again, because the

  Center is a dangerous place for me, and so in order to keep you away I’ll have

  to make it a dangerous place for you too. Let me give you just a taste of what

  will happen to you if you come within five miles of a Rehab Center. Just a

  taste.

  Again, the hand tightening around his heart. But no mere squeeze this time. A

  fierce gripping full-strength clench. It knocked Macy down once more. Gradually

  the inner grasp was relaxed, but it left him nauseated and feeble, and a

  terrible thunder reverberated in his chest. Cheek to the tile, he kicked his

  legs in a frenzy of pain. This time his anguish was too visible to be ignored,

  and he was seized by passersby and hoisted to his feet.

  “You okay? Some kind of fit?”

  “Please—if I could just sit down somewhere—”

  “You need a doctor?”

  “It’s only a little chest spasm—I’ve had them before—”

  They took him inside. A bench in the waiting room. Advert globes floating in the

  air. Blinking their messages into his face. He was numb. Impossible even to

  think. A constant stream of people flowing by. Trains arriving, departing.

  Voices. Colors. After a while, his strength returned.

  —If you try to go back for reconditioning, Macy, that’s what I’ll do to you, and

  not just a little squeeze. If necessary I’ll shut off your heart altogether. I

  can do it. I see where the nerve connections are now.

  But then you’ll die too,Macy said.

  —That’s true. If it’s necessary for me to interrupt the life-processes of this

  body that we’re sharing, we’ll both die. So what? I don’t expect you to commit

  suicide for the sake of getting rid of me. But I’m perfectly prepared to commit

  suicide for the sake ofkeeping you from getting rid of me, because I’ve got no

  choice. I’m a dead man anyway if you get inside a Rehab Center. So I offer you

  the ultimate threat. Keep away, or else. It wouldn’t be smart of you to call my

  bluff. For both our sakes, don’t.

  I’m supposed to show up for weekly post-therapy therapy sessions, though.

  —Skip them.

  It’s part of the court decree. If I don’t show up, they’re likely to issue a

  warrant for me.

  —We’ll worry about that when the time comes. Meanwhile forget about therapy

  sessions.

  But we can’t share a body,Macy protested.It’s insanity. There’s no room for two

  of us.

  —Don’t worry about that now, either. We’ll work something out. For the time

  being we’re sharing, and you fucking well better accept the idea. Now get

  yourself aboard a city-bound train. Put some distance between me and that

  Center.

  SIX

  HOME again, midmorning. His head throbbing. Not a peep out of Hamlin all the way

  back. The apartment seemed to have undergone a strange transformation in the two

  hours of his absence: previously a neutral place, wholly lacking emotional

  connotations, and now an alien and sinister cell, cramped and repellent.

  The flat’s dark new tone astonished him. Its mysterious autumnal resonances. Its

  shadows where no shadows had been. Nothing had changed in it, really. Lissa

  hadn’t moved any furniture around or sprayed the walls a different color. And

  yet. And yet, how frightening it all looked now. How out of place he felt in it.

  That L-shaped bedroom, low ceiling, narrow bed jammed up against flimsy wall,

  old-fashioned light fixture dangling, bilious green paint, cheap smeary Picasso

  prints, slit of a window revealing splotchy May sunshine and two scraggly trees

  across the street—how ugly it looked, how coarse, how constricted, how squashed!

  Did people really live in places like this? Tiny bathroom, slick pink tiles. Not

  even an ultrasonic cleanser, just archaic sink and tub and crapper. A

  microscopic kitchen-dinette affair, everything jammed together, table, freezer,

  telephone screen, disposal unit, stove. At least a tiny buzz-cleanser for the

  dirty dishes. A sitting-room, cheap red plastic couch, some books, cassettes, a

  video unit.

  A prison for the soul. Our impoverished century: this is the best we can afford

  for human beings, after our long orgies of waste and destruction. For the last

  couple of weeks, this apartment had been his refuge, his harbor, his hermitage;

  if he thought about it at all, which he doubted, it had been in a friendly way.

  Why did it turn him off now? After a moment, he believed he knew. Hamlin’s

  sensibility now underlay his own. The sculptor’s sophisticated perceptions

  bleeding through to the Macy levels of their shared mind. Hamlin’s loathing for

  the apartment tinged Macy’s view of it. To Hamlin the proportions were wrong,

  the ambiance vile, the psychological texture of the place slimy and grimy, the

  inner environmental color a nasty one. Macy shivered. He visualized Hamlin as a

  kind of abscess in his brain, a pocket of pus, inaccessible, destructive.

  Lissa was still in bed. That bothered him. The Protestant ethic: sleeping late

  equals rejection of life.

  But she wasn’t asleep. Stirring lazily, sitting up, knuckles to eyes. A purring

  yawn. “Everything taken care of?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “What happened?”

  He told her about the episode at the Greenwich terminal. Writhing on the blue

  and white terrazzo with fire in his chest. Hamlin playfully strumming the harp

  of his autonomic nervous system. Lissa listened, big-eyed, somberfaced, and said

  finally, “What are you going to do?”

  “I haven’t any idea.”

  “But that’s hideous. Having him inside you like a parasite. A crab hiding in

  your head. Like a case of brain cancer. Look, maybe if I call the Rehab Center—”

  A warning twinge from Hamlin, deep down.

  “No,” Macy said.

  “I could tell them what’s happened. Maybe this has happened before. Maybe they

  know some way to deal with him.”

  “The moment they tried anything,” he said, “Hamlin would stop my heartbeat. I

  know that.”

  “But if there’s some drug that might knock him out—I could slip it to you

  somehow—”

  “He’s listening right now, Lissa. Don’t you think he’ll be on guard constantly?

  He may not even need to sleep. We can’t take chances.”

  “But how can you go on with somebody else inside your head, trying to take you

  over?”

  Macy pondered that one. “What makes you think he’s trying to take me over?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? He wants his body back. He’ll try to cut you down, one block

  of nerves at a time, until there’s nothing left of you at all. He’ll push you

  out. And then he’ll be Nat Hamlin again.”

  “He just said he wanted to share the body with me,” Macy muttered.

  “Will he stop there? Why should he?”

  “But Nat Hamlin’s a proscribed criminal. Legally he doesn’t even exist any more.

  If he tried to return to life—”

  “Oh, he’d go on using the Macy identity,” Lissa said. “Only he’d take up

  sculpting again, in another country, maybe. He’d look up his old friends. He’d

  be the old Hamlin, except his passport would say Macy, and—” She halted. “He’d

  look up his old friends,” she repeated. She seemed to be examining the idea from

  various angles. “Old friends such as me.”

  “Yes. You.” In a tone that he recognized as unpleasant, but which he found

  impossible to alter, Macy said, “He could even marry you. As he was originally

  planning to do.”

  “His wife is still alive, I’m sure.”

  “That marriage was legally dissolved at the time he was sentenced,” Macy said.

  “It’s automatic. They cut all ties. Officially, he wouldn’t be Hamlin even if he

  took over. He’d be Macy, and Macy is single. There you are, Lissa.” The edge of

  cruelty coming into his voice again. “You’d finally get to be his wife. What

  you’ve always wanted.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want it any more.”

  “You said you loved him.”

  “I once did love him. But I told you, that’s all dead now. The things he did.

  The crimes. The rapes.”

  “The first time we met,” said Macy heavily, “when you were still insisting on

  calling me Nat, you made a point of saying you were still in love with me. The

  old me.Him. You said it two or three times. Talking about how much you missed

  him. Refusing to believe that there was somebody new living behind his face.”

  “You misunderstand,” she said. “I felt so lonely. So fuckinglost. And all of a

  sudden I was standing next to somebody I knew, somebody out of the past—I just

  wanted help, I had to talk to him—I mean, I crashed right into you in the

  street, was I supposed to walk away and not even say hello?”

  “You saw my Rehab badge and you ignored it.”

  “I didn’t see it at all.”

  “You must have blanked it out deliberately. You knew Nat Hamlin had been put

  away for Rehab.”

  “You’re shouting at me.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t help it. I’m tense as hell, Lissa. Look, so you saw somebody

  in the street and you thought he was Nat Hamlin, so you said hello, but did you

  have to tell him you were still in love with him, too?”

  “I didn’t mean it.”

  “You said it.”

  “What else could I do?” she asked. Her voice was shrill now. “Stand there and

  say, Hello, you look like Nat Hamlin who I used to love, and of course I don’t

  love him any more and in any case he’s been wiped out but since you look just

  like him I’ll fall in love with you instead, so let’s go home and ball a little?

  How could I say that? But I couldn’t let you just vanish without saying

  something to you. I was making a stab at the past, trying to catch it, trying to

  bring it back. The beautiful past, before the hellish part started. And you were

  my only link to that, Paul, and I was excited, and I said Nat, Nat, I talked

  about being in love—”

  “Exactly. You called me Nat, and said you were still in love with—”

  “Why are you doing this to me, Paul?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Chewing on me. Shouting. All these questions.”

  “I’m trying to find out which one of us you’re really loyal to. Hamlin or me.

  Which side you’re going to take when the struggle for this body gets rough.”

  “You aren’t trying to find out any such thing. You just want to hurt me.”

  “Why should I want to—”

  “How would I know? Because you blame me for bringing him back to life, maybe.

  Because you hate me for having loved him once. Because he’s sitting inside you

  right now forcing you to hurt me. I don’t know. Christ, I don’t know at all.

  Only why do you need to find out where my loyalty is? Didn’t I tell you last

  night that I didn’t want him coming back? Didn’t I offer to call the Rehab

  Center just now?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “So how could I possibly be on his side? I want him to be wiped out. I want him

  gone forever. I want—oh, Christ—”

  She halted suddenly. Leaping from the bed as though stung, arms and legs flying

  stiffly out from her torso. Turning toward him. Her face contorted, the eyes

  bulging, the mouth a rigid hole, the muscles of her throat bunched and jutting.

  From her lips a bizarre clotted baritone, hoarse and unfocused, like the blunt

  blurtings of a deaf-mute, no words intelligible:“Mfss. Shlrrm. Skk-kk. Vshh.

  Vshh. Vshh.” A terrible gargling cry, all the more horrible because of the deep

  masculine tone in which it was delivered.

  She lurched around the room, stumbling into things, clawing at the air. A plain

  case of demonic possession. What rides her?

  “Grkk. Lll. Llll. Pkd-dd.”Eyes wild, pleading. Bare breasts heaving wildly. A

  sheen of sweat on her skin.

  Macy rushed toward her, trying to embrace her, calm her, ease her back to the

  bed. She pivoted like a robot and her arm crashed across his chest, doubling him

  up in gasps. When he looked at her again her face was scarlet with strain and

  her mouth was open to the full reach of her jaws, beyond it, perhaps. The wild

  gargling sounds still erupted from her, and her eyes registered total horror and

  despair.

  Once again Macy tried to seize her. This time successfully. Muscles leaping and

  churning and twitching all over her spare naked form. He forced her down on the

  bed and covered her with his body, hands gripping her wrists, knees imprisoning

  her thighs. A sour smell of sweat rising from her, bad sweat, fear-sweat.

  Some kind of epileptic fit? Epilepsy was much on his mind this morning. In a low

  urgent voice he talked to her, tried to soothe her, to reach her somehow. More

  baritone drivel coming out of her in halting husky bleeps of thick noise. The

  static of the soul.

  “Lissa?” he said. “Lissa, can you hear me? Try to go limp. Let all your muscles

  hang loose.”

  Easier said than done. She still twitched. While in the midst of this he felt a

  hot sensation at the base of his skull, as of an auger drilling into him. Or

  drilling toward the outside from the soft center of his brain. Something jumped

  frantically within his mouth, and it was a moment before he realized that it was

  his tongue, jerking itself crazily backward toward his gullet.“Vshh. Vshh.

  Pkd-dd. Slrr. Msss.” The sounds not from Lissa this time. From him.

  Lying there congealed and coagulated on top of Lissa, he understood perfectly

  what was happening. Nat Hamlin, having conserved his strength for a couple of

  hours, was trying to achieve a takeover of a new level of their shared brain.

  Specifically, Hamlin was attempting to grab Macy’s speech centers.