Hang On To Yourself

by Lyle Hopwood

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

I slip into New York, that night in my dreams, without knowing. And so, I wake at first light, intending to turn to Taira, and touch... I recoil from the feel of her. She sleeps on beside me. Long head hair gives way to translucent vellus hair covering her face. Brown patches speckle her white skin. Freckles. A natural pigmentation. Her eyes are half-open even in sleep.

I never learned her name, and the Richard-residue fights against telling me. I doze then, for an hour or so, ignoring Richard’s mildewed bookshop and its waiting staff. When I wake, she is up and making breakfast. She sits down beside me, reading her phone as we eat cereal, with milk. From a cow!

She taps the phone. “Fourteen thousand cases in New York alone. It must be a neurosis, like Dr. Webermann says. He compares it to the Dancing Mania that overtook Europe in the sixteenth century. A symptom of an Apocalypse-oriented culture, he says.”

Fourteen thousand cases?

She stares at me as my face — Richard Robinson’s face — twists in disbelief. There are less than a thousand people in my icy, tidy world. If all our human population Rode at the same time, it would not explain the numbers in New York alone. Perhaps a mania is to blame. A bright, white thought strikes me. Somehow these people must be calling each other. If I sever the link, Richard Robinson’s ill-starred subconscious will find some hapless moron from his own time to do his dirty work.

Seeing me smile, the woman pulls me to her, and with a shudder I follow her lead. What an indignity, to roll on the cockroached floor of a primitive and take his mate as a wife. Taira begged me to love my double life. Did she think it would lead to this?

Richard’s outraged mind screams again, louder now, as his heartbeat quickens to another man’s rhythm. In his climax, as everything softens and flows, I cry, “Taira!” The world splashes into broken color, and resolves as the cool, fresh doma, the mountains looming outside the unit wall.

Shattered, I get up and ask the doma’s pharma for a sedative. The chilled rust-colored drink unfortunately reminds me of that she-creature whose nails raked Richard’s back: Louise.

Richard gave me her name eventually. Even after the numbness of the sedative sets in, I feel a grating anxiety. My mind ponders it for a while, turning it round and examining it. It’s new. And yet, so familiar. And then, with horror, I know the truth. I recognize the same dismal phobia that motivates Richard, the same nagging inadequacy, the same fear of the future. The growing inability to plan with confidence.

I can’t live like this, arbitrarily uprooted at the whim of a psychotic who died a million years before I was born. The dead cannot destroy me.

Taira re-enters, the unit reassembling to admit her and her baggage. The baggage bows and runs to the storage shelves. I hug her.

“I’ve missed you. I had to go back to Richard Robinson for ages while you were gone. And I found out a great thing. They must call each other with their links, because there are more possessed than people — our people, I mean. If I can turn Richard to that reflexive possession, I can free myself.”

“I have never heard of this reflexive possession. There is no evidence for it.”

I order another sedative from the doma pharm.

The tear in the fabric separating self from self gapes once again as the soporific takes effect. I can smell the pulp, hear the crosstown traffic outside the store, and experience once more Richard’s formless shout of hopelessness.

The sedative fails to lock it out. I lie down to sleep with the yell ringing in my mind like an alarm. When I awake I pace, knowing myself vulnerable, but the inescapable gut-tug does not come.

The waiting is worse than the torture. If he does not call me soon, I will go mad. The door remains open, and the fear strengthens my resolve. I have a purpose. I will kill him. It’s the only sure way. That or suicide, which would be murder. Taira cannot live without me. And I cannot live without her.

* * *

The portal eases open as I relax in Taira’s arms that night, unaware and unprepared. Richard sits on a wooden bench in a busy park, holding a sandwich from a nearby delicatessen. His Rider takes hold as he throws crumbs to the tame squirrels that flock around the benches.

I appear suddenly in this scene, freezing his fingers in mid-offer, and a squirrel, miscalculating, bites his finger. I yell, and people look over. I stand Richard up, and before the startled pest can drop to the ground and run, I scoop it up in both our hands and wring its neck. A police officer swiftly appears and confronts us.

The nearby people, becoming a crowd, shout: “Taken. Taken!” But the officer does not back off. He begins to harangue Richard in a rapid brogue and I, lost, throw the rodent carcass at him and walk off. Three steps later, I am turned around by the furious policeman.

“Don’t walk away from me! I won’t have psychos like you turning your back, pretending the devil has hold of you.”

I have Richard shake free and take another step. The policeman shouts. I turn around on Richard’s deep impulse and see the officer crouched down holding a weapon in both hands.

“Get on the ground, jabroni,” shouts the officer, red-faced and ready to shoot. I turn Richard around again. The crowd scatters, behind trees, behind rocks, flattening themselves on the grass behind the officer. A young woman tries to move her baby carriage from the line of fire. I take two steps and stop, impressed at the cavity that has opened in the ground before Richard’s feet. Seven inches across, three inches deep. The sound of the shot echoes back from the trees, ending before the soil shower patters back onto the grass.

Richard’s suppressed ego twists and rolls around inside his body. No danger of unseating me, though, worse luck.

Richard’s atrophied will to stay alive — newly sparked — begins to challenge my own. I stagger Richard toward the officer, attempting an attitude of domination. Richard tries to throw his body flat on the grass as instructed. I override it. Do it, Richard!

Die, Richard! What will it be like? Does one feel projectile cavitation when the cavity blossoms inside a borrowed head? Will I see the astral light if it isn’t my own death? His continual thin scream rings out, filling my mind. Filling Richard’s head.

Casting around for something to annoy the sweating officer, I thrust one hand into Richard’s pocket. Terrified, goaded, the policeman fires four shots into Richard’s body, and Richard staggers like a man expecting to catch a beach ball and instead being thrown a concrete block. The squirrels scatter.

He looks down with one remaining eye, and I am taken by the new configurations, the new angle between his legs and his body, the precise dynamic of the streaming red fluid from his abdomen. No pain. His eye closes. Darkness descends.

A scene flickers in my mind; the vision of a man falling forwards, reddened, torn apart. Sight of grass, smell of earth. Feel of tree trunk. Fear. The gun smoking in my hands. Pedaling along, scared by the sudden loud noise. Scamper along a branch, small, cold, hungry. A man, exploded across the middle, half a head, falling forwards, seen from behind.

Again, the tree. Again, the grass. Again, my short stubby legs, my bicycle with stabilizers. Red, red, red as blood. A man on the ground, seen from above. A stain filtering into the leaf-choked gutters.

I step out from behind a tree. From on the branch. I put my gun away.

“Oh, Thais,” says the police officer. I watch him holster my cooling gun. I drive the patrol car along the gravel walkway, siren on. As I look out of the baby-carriage, my eyes meet mine. I widen, I spread out like a ripple across the park. Across the city. Louise is here, looking in a mirror. Then she is gone, leaving only my reflection.

In the bookstore, customers’ identities ablate, and I am leafing through my books. We are aware of a dislocation. “How will I get back to my doma now?” says the barkeep, and he pours a double. I nod at him, and order one for myself. In Dr. Webermann’s office I stop pondering on the psychoses that affect an apocalyptic culture. I push my books from his shelves.

What can have happened? I, no longer Richard, am homeless. Will all these people take me in? Will this flitting spread? Will it fall to me to animate the world forever?

Oh, Taira, how can I ever get back to you? I am needed here now. Everyone needs me now.