Counterpart

by Robert Silverberg

Mark Jenner delivered the play’s final line with as much force as he could muster, and the curtain dropped like a shroud, cutting off stage from audience. Jenner gasped for breath and fashioned a warm smile for his face to wear. The other six members of the cast left the wings and arranged themselves around him, and the curtain rose again for the calls. A trickle of applause crossed the footlights.

This is it, Jenner thought. We’re through.

He bowed graciously, peering beyond the glare of the foots to count the house. The theater was about three quarters full—but half the people out there were free-riders, pulled in by the management just to give the house a semblance of fullness. And how many of the others were discount-ticket purchasers? Probably, Jenner thought as the curtain dropped again, there were no more than fifty legitimate customers in the house. And so another play went down the drain. A savage voice within him barked mockingly, telling him that it was his fault, that he no longer had what it took to hold an audience, that he lacked the subtle magnetism needed to pull people out of their homes and into the theater.

There would be no more curtain calls. Tiredly, Jenner walked off into the wings and saw Dan Hall, the producer, standing there. Abruptly the tinsel glamor of curtain calls faded. There could be only one reason why Hall was here now, and the dour, sallow cast of the producer’s pudgy face left no doubt in Jenner’s mind. Closing notices would be posted tonight. Tomorrow, Mark Jenner would be back to living off capital again and waiting out his days.

“Mark…”

Jenner stopped. Hall had reached out to touch his arm. “Evening, Dan. How goes it?”

“Bad.”

“The receipts?”

Hall chuckled dryly. “What receipts? We had a houseful of unemployed actors sitting out there on passes; and the advance sale for tomorrow night is about eleven bucks’ worth.”

“There isn’t going to be any tomorrow night, is there, Dan?” Jenner asked leadenly.

Hall did not answer. Marie Haas, the ingenue, radiant in the sparkling gown that looked so immodest on so young a girl, glided toward them. She wrapped one arm around the rotund producer, one around Jenner. On stage, the hands were busy pulling the set apart.

“Big house tonight, wasn’t it?” she twittered.

“I was just telling Mark,” Hall said. “Most of those people were unemployed actors here on passes.”

“And,” Jenner added, “there are seven more unemployed actors here on this stage right now.”

“No!” Marie cried.

Jenner tried to smile. It was rough on a girl of nineteen to lose her first big play after a ten-day run; but, he thought, it was rougher on a forty-year-old ex-star. It wasn’t so long ago, he told himself, that the name Mark Jenner on a marquee meant an automatic season’s run. Lovely to Look At, opened October 16, 1973, ran 630 performances. Lorelei, opened December 9, 1977, ran 713 performances. Girl of the Dawn, opened February 7, 1981, ran 583 performances. Misty Isle, opened March 6, 1989—ran ten performances. Jenner peered wearily at the producer. The rest of the cast had gathered round, now, half of them still in war paint and costume. As the star, Jenner had the right to ask the question. He asked it.

“We’re through, aren’t we, Dan?”

Hall nodded slowly. “The theater owner told me tonight that we’re below the minimum draw. He’s exercising option and throwing us out; he wants to rent the place for video. We’re through, all right.”

Jenner climbed methodically out of his costume, removed his makeup, cocked a sardonic eye on the spangled star on the door of his dressing cubicle, and left the theater. He had arranged to meet his old friend Walt Hollis after the show for a drink. Hollis was an electrician, currently handling the lights for one of the other Broadway shows—one of the hits. They had agreed to meet in a bar Jenner liked, on Forty-ninth Street off Sixth Avenue.

The bar was a doggedly old-fashioned one, without any of the strippers currently the mode in depuritanized New York, without B-girls, without synthetics, without video. Jenner felt particularly grateful for that last omission.

He sat slumped in the booth, a big, rumpled-looking man just beginning to get fleshy, and gripped the martini in one of his huge hands. He needed the cold drink to unwind the knot of tension in his stomach. Once, acting had unwound it for him; now, an evening on the stage wound it only a little tighter.

“What is it I’ve lost, Holly?” he demanded. His voice was the familiar crackling baritone of old; automatically, he projected it too far.

The man opposite him frowned, as though he were sagging under the burden of knowing that he was Mark Jenner’s oldest and possibly last friend. “You’ve lost a job, for one thing,” Walt Hollis said lightly.

Jenner scowled. “I don’t mean that. I mean—why have I lost what I once had? Why have I gone downhill instead of up? I ought to be at the peak of my acting career now; instead, I’m a has-been at forty. Was I just a flash in the pan, then, back in the seventies?”

“No. You had talent.”

“Then why did I lose it?”

“You didn’t,” Hollis said calmly. He took a deep sip of his gin and tonic, leaned back, stared at his much bigger companion. “You didn’t lose anything. You just didn’t gain.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yes, you do,” Hollis said. His thumbs squeezed against his aching eyeballs for a moment. He had had this conversation with Jenner too often, in the past five years. Jenner simply did not listen. “Acting isn’t the easiest profession in the world, Mark. Lord knows I don’t have to tell you that. But what you’ve never grasped is that acting has toughened up tremendously since the days you broke in. And you’ve remained right at the same level you hit at the start of your career.”

Jenner tightened his lips. He felt cold and curiously alone even in this crowded midtown bar.

“I used to be a star,” he said.

“Used to be. Look, Mark, these days you need something colossal to drag people out of their warm homes and into a Broadway theater. Homes are too comfortable; the streets are too risky. You never can tell when you’ll get mugged if you step out after dark. So you don’t step out. You stay home.”

“People come out to see that British play, the one with what’s-his-name in it,” Jenner pointed out.

“With Bert Tylor? Of course they do. Tylor has what it takes to get people into a theater.”

“And I don’t, is that it?” Jenner fought to keep the crispness out of his voice.

Hollis nodded slowly. “You don’t have it, Mark. Not any more.”

“And what is this—this magic something-or-other that I lack?”

“It’s empathy,” Hollis said. “The power to get yourself across the footlights, to set up a two-way flow, to get those people in the audience so damned involved in what you’re saying that it turns into part of themselves.”

Jenner glowered at the small man. “You’re not telling me anything I don’t know. All you did just now was to define what any actor has to do.”

Hollis shook his head. “It’s more than that, now. Now you need special help—techniques for reaching the soul of the fellow in the six-buck seat. I’ve been offering you these techniques for almost a year, but you’ve been too damned stubborn to listen to me—too proud to admit a gadget could help you.”

“I had a part lined up,” Jenner said in a weak voice. “Last May Dan Hall came to me, said he was doing a play that looked good for me, and was I interested? Hell, sure I was interested. I hadn’t worked for two years; I was supposed to be box-office poison. But Dan signed me.”

Hollis said, “And you rehearsed all summer, and half the fall. And played the sticks half the winter while that poor hapless devil of a playwright tried to fix up the play you were killing, Mark.”

Jenner sucked in his breath sharply. He began to say something, then throttled it. He shook his head slowly like a bull at bay. “Go on, Holly. I have this coming to me. Don’t pull the punches.”

The small man said thinly, “You weren’t putting that play across the footlights, Mark. So when it finally got to New York it opened in March and closed in March. Okay. You had all the rope you needed, and you sure hanged yourself! Where do you go from here?”

“Nowhere. I’m at the bottom of the heap now.”

“You still have a chance,” Hollis said. He leaned forward and seemed to be hanging on Jenner’s words like an anxious chickenhawk. “I can help you. I’ve been telling you that for a year.”

“I don’t want my mind tinkered with.”

“You could have your name up in lights again, live in a Fifth Avenue penthouse. You could get back all the things you used to have, before—before you started to slide.”

Jenner stared at the little man’s pale, unlined face as if Hollis were nothing but a pane of glass, and as if all the secrets of the universe were inscribed on the back of the booth behind him. In a low voice Jenner said, “I won’t get everything back. Fame, maybe. Money, maybe. But not everything.”

“You didn’t need to make your wife run away from you,” Hollis said with deliberate cruelty. “But maybe you could make her want to come back.”

“Would I want her back?”

“That’s up to you. I can’t answer all your questions for you. What time is it?”

“One-fifteen a.m. The morning papers will be out soon. Maybe they’ll mention the closing of Misty Isle. Maybe there’ll be a sticky little paragraph about how Mark Jenner has helped to kill another good play.”

“Forget all that,” Hollis said sharply. “Stop brooding about the past. You’re going to start everything over tonight.”

Jenner looked up, surprised. “When did I agree to let you monkey with me, Holly?”

“You didn’t. But what else can you do, now?”

The surprise widened on Jenner’s face. He looked down and stared at the formica tabletop until the pattern blurred before his eyes. Hollis was right, Jenner realized numbly. There was nothing else to do now, no place else to go, no more ships to come in.

“Okay,” Jenner said in a harsh, throaty voice. “You win. Let’s get out of here.”

They took the Bronx undertube to Hollis’ Riverdale home. Jenner kept a car stored in a Fifty-ninth Street garage, but four martinis in little more than an hour and a half had left him too wobbly to drive, and Hollis did not have a license. At half past one in the morning, the tube was crowded; Jenner and Hollis sat in one of the middle cars, and Jenner was bitterly amused to note that nobody seemed to recognize him, or at least no one cared to come over and say, “Pardon me, but are you really…”

In the old days, Jenner recalled, his agents had forbade him strictly to enter the subways. They didn’t even have the undertubes then. But if the Mark Jenner of 1977 had entered a subway, he would have been ripped apart, Orpheus-like, by the autograph hunters. Now, he was just another big man with a martini-glaze on his face.

Hollis remained silent all through the twenty-minute trip, and that forced Jenner back on his own inner resources. It was not pleasant for him to have to listen to the output of his own mind for twenty minutes. There were too many memories rising to confront him.

He could remember the tall, gawky teen-age Ohio boy who had overnight turned into the tall, confident New Yorker of twenty-one, back in ’70. The School of Dramatic Arts; the wide-eyed hours of discovering Ibsen and Chekhov and Pirandello; the big break, the lead in Right You Are at a small off-Broadway house, with a big-name Broadway mogul happening to come to the dingy little second-story theater to see young Jenner’s mordant, incisive Laudisi.

The following autumn, a bit part in a short-lived comedy, thanks to that lucky break. Then some television work; after that, a longer part in a serious drama. Finally, in the spring of 1973, an offer to play the juvenile lead in a bit of froth called Lovely to Look At. Jenner was twenty-four and obscure when the show opened, that fall; when it closed, two years later, he was famous. He owned two Cadillacs, lived in a penthouse apartment, gave away vintage champagne the way other men handed out cigarettes. In 1976, while out in Hollywood doing the film version of Lovely, he unexpectedly married dazzling, bosomy, much-publicized, twenty-year-old Helene Bryan, current queen of the movie colony. Experts predicted that the fabulous Jenner would weary of the pneumatic blonde within months; but Helene turned out to have unexpected depth, wearing a real personality behind her sleek personality mask. In the end it was she who wearied of a down-slipping, bitterly irascible, and incipiently alcoholic Jenner, eleven years later. Eleven years, Jenner thought! They seemed like a week, and the two years of separation a lifetime.

Jenner thought back on the successes. Two years of Lorelei; a year and nine months of Girl of the Dawn; then the ill-starred turkey, Hullaballoo; and finally his last big hit, Bachelor Lady, which ran a year—October 1982 to September 1983. After that, almost overnight, people stopped coming to see Mark Jenner act; he had lost his hold. In the season of 1986-87 he appeared in no less than three plays, the longest-lived of which held the boards for five weeks. Somewhere along the line, he had lost his magic. He had also lost Helene, in that dreadful spring of 1987 when she returned to California to stay.

And somewhere along the line, Jenner realized he had lost the eager young man who loved Ibsen and Chekhov and Pirandello. As a professional, he had specialized almost exclusively in frothy romantic confections. That was unintentional; it was simply that he could never resist a producer waving a fat contract. It wouldn’t have mattered, much, except that he kept up contact with Walt Hollis, one of the first people he had met when he came to New York, and Hollis served to remind Jenner of the Pirandello days.

Hollis had never been an actor. He was a lighting technician in the old days, and a lighting technician he still was, the best of his craft—a slim, mousy little man who looked no older at fifty than he had at thirty. Hollis had been more than a mere electrician, though. He was a theoretician, a student of the acting technique, a graduate engineer as well. He tinkered with gadgets, and sometimes he told Jenner about them. Jenner listened with open ears, never retaining a thing.

Two years ago, Hollis had told him of something new he was developing—a technique that might be able to turn any man with a bit of acting skill into a Barrymore, into an Olivier. Jenner had laughed. In that year, ’87, his main concern had been to show the world how self-sufficient he was in the face of adversity. He was not going to grasp at any electronic straws, oh no! That would be admitting he was in trouble!

Well, he was in trouble. And as Misty Isle sank rapidly into limbo under a fierce critical barrage, Jenner bleakly realized he could sink no lower himself. Now was the time at last to listen to Hollis. Now was the time to clutch at any offer of salvation. Now.

“We’re here,” Hollis said, breaking a twenty-minute silence. “Watch your step getting out. You don’t want to trip and mash up your pretty profile.”

In the twenty years he had known Walt Hollis, Jenner had been inside the little man’s home no more than a dozen times, and not at all in the last decade. It was a tidy little place, four small rooms, overfastidiously neat. Bookshelves lined the walls—an odd assortment of books, half literary, half technical. Hollis lived by himself; he had never married. That had made it hard for Jenner to see him socially very often; Helene had hated to visit bachelors.

Now Jenner allowed himself to be deposited in a comfortable armchair, while Hollis, ever tense, paced the worn broadloom carpet in front of him. Jenner felt completely helpless. Hollis was his last hope.

Hollis said, “Mark, I’m going to be ruthlessly frank in everything I say to you from tonight on. You aren’t going to like the things I say. If you get annoyed, blow off steam. It’ll do you good.”

“I won’t get annoyed,” Jenner said tonelessly. “There isn’t a thing you could say about me that wouldn’t be true.”

“You will get annoyed—so annoyed that you’ll want to punch me in the face.” Hollis grinned shyly. “I hope you’ll be able to control that. You’ve got me by fifty or sixty pounds.”

He paced back and forth. Jenner watched him. For twenty years, Mark Jenner had felt a sort of pity for Hollis, for the timid and retiring electrician whose only pleasure seemed to be in helping others. Sure, Hollis made good pay, and he was the best in his business. But for all that, he was just a backstage flunky. Now he was much more than that; he was Jenner’s last hope.

Hollis said, “You’re going to have to withdraw from your regular activities completely for six months or so, Mark. Give up your room. Move in here with me until the treatment’s finished. Then we’ll see what we can do about getting you back on Broadway. It may not be easy—but if things work the way I think they’ll work, you’ll be climbing straight for the stratosphere the month I’m done with you.”

“I’ll be satisfied just to work regularly. Suppose you tell me what you’re going to do to me.”

Hollis spun around and jabbed the air with a forefinger. “First let’s talk about your past. You were a big hit once, Mark, then you started slipping. Now you’re nowhere. Okay: Why did it happen?”

“Yeah. You tell me. Why?”

“It happened,” Hollis said, “because you failed to adapt to the changing times. You never developed the kind of emotional charge that an actor needs now, if he’s going to reach his audience. You stayed put, worshiping the good old status quo. You acted in the 1973 way for fifteen years, but by 1987 it wasn’t good enough for the public or for the critics.”

“Especially the critics,” Jenner growled. “They crucified me!”

“The critics are paid to slap down anything that isn’t what the public would consider good entertainment,” Hollis said thinly. “You can’t blame them; you have to blame yourself. You had an early success, and you stuck at that level until you were left behind.”

Jenner nodded gravely. “Okay, Holly. Let’s say I frittered away my talent. I’d rather think that than that I never had any talent in the first place. How can you help me?”

Hollis paused in his nervous march and came to light like a fretful butterfly, on a backless wooden chair. “I once explained my technique to you, and you nodded all through it, but I could see you weren’t listening. You’ll have to listen to me now, Mark, or I can’t help you.”

“I’m listening.”

“I hope so. Briefly, what I’m going to do is put you through a sort of lay analysis…”

“I’ve been analyzed!”

“Keep quiet and listen for a change,” Hollis said with a vigor Jenner had never heard him display before. “You’ll be put through a sort of lay analysis, under deep narcohypnosis. What I want, actually, is a taped autobiography, going as deep into your life as I can dredge.”

“Are you qualified to do this sort of thing?” Jenner asked.

“I’m qualified to build the machine and ask the questions. The psychiatric angle I’ve researched as thoroughly as possible. The rest comes out of you, until we have the tape.”

“Okay,” Jenner said. “So what do you do with this tape biography of me?”

“I put it aside,” Hollis said. “Then I take another tape, put you under hypnosis again, and feed the new tape into you. The new tape will be one that I’ve taken from some other person. It’ll be carefully expurgated to keep you from knowing the other person’s identity, but you’ll get a deep whiff of his personality. Then I take your tape and pipe it into the man who made the other one.”

Jenner frowned, not comprehending. “I don’t get this. Who’s the other person? You?”

“Of course not. He’ll be a man you never met. You won’t ever see him; you won’t ever know who he is. But you’ll know what kind of food he likes and why; what he thinks when he’s in bed with his wife; how he feels on a hot, sweaty summer day; what he felt like the first time he kissed a girl. You’ll remember his getting whopped for stealing cigarettes from his father, and you’ll remember his college graduation day. You’ll have all his memories, hopes, dreams, fears. He’ll have yours.”

Jenner squinted and tried to figure out what the little man was heading toward. “What good will all that do—to peek into each other’s minds?”

Hollis smiled. “When you build up a character on stage, you mine him out of yourself—out of your own perceptions and reactions and experiences. You take the playwright’s bare lines, and you flesh them out by interpreting words as action, words as expression, words as carriers of emotion. If you’re a good actor—which means if you have enough inner resource to swing the trick—you convince the audience that you are the man the program says you are. If not, you get a job selling popcorn in front of the theater.”

“So…”

Hollis swept right on. “So this way you’ll have two sets of emotions and experiences to build on. You can synthesize them into a portrayal that no actor can begin to give.” Hollis locked his thin hands together over one knee and bent forward, his mild face bright with enthusiasm now. “Besides, you’ll have the advantage of being inside another man’s skull, knowing what makes him tick; it’ll give you a perspective you can’t possibly have now. Combining his memories with yours, it’ll be that much easier for you to get inside the audience’s collective skull too, Mark. You see the picture now? You follow what I’m driving at?”

“I think so,” Jenner said heavily. With awkwardly deliberate motions he pulled a cigarette out of Hollis’ pack on the table, and lit it. Jenner did not actually smoke; he valued his throat too highly. But now he needed something to do with his hands, and the cigarette-lighting ritual provided it. “But tell me this—what does this other fellow get out of having my tape pumped into him?”

“He’s a politician,” Hollis said. “By which I mean a man who’s in public life. He wants to run for a high office. He’s a capable man, but with your talent for projection, combined with his own inner drive, he’s sure to win.”

“You mean you have the other man picked out already?”

“He’s been picked out and waiting for nearly a year. I told him I would get a great actor to serve as the counterweight on this little seesaw. He’s been waiting. I had you in mind, but it took this flop tonight to make you come around. You will go along with this, won’t you?”

Jenner shut his eyes for a moment and drew the burning smoke deep into his lungs. He felt like gagging. He was drained of all strength; if Hollis had snapped off the light, he would have fallen asleep on the spot, clothes and all.

He said, after a moment, “So, I’ll be taking another man into my head with me. And that supposedly will make me a star again. Ah—have you ever tried this stunt before?”

“You and he will be the first subjects,” Hollis confessed.

“And you’re confident nothing will go wrong?”

“I’m not confident at all,” Hollis said quietly. “It ought to work; but it might make both of you gibbering lunatics instead.”

“And still you’re ready to try this on me?” Jenner asked.

“I wouldn’t want you going into it without a warning. But the odds are good in favor of a successful outcome; otherwise I wouldn’t dream of asking you to play along with me.”

Jenner stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette. He glanced around at the books on the shelves, at the single painting, at the austere furniture. “How long will it take?”

“About six months. I have to edit two tapes, don’t forget. And we can’t do all the work overnight.”

“Will it cost me anything?”

Hollis laughed. “Mark, I’d pay you to do this if you wanted me to. I want to help you—and to see if my theories were right.”

“I hope they are.” Jenner stood up, coming to his full height, squaring his shoulders, trying to play the role of a successful actor even now, when he was nothing but a hollow has-been. “Okay,” he said in the resonant Jenner tones. “I commit myself into thy hands, Holly. I’ve lost everything else a man can lose; I guess it doesn’t matter much if I lose my mind.”

Jenner woke up in the middle of the next afternoon. He had been asleep for thirteen hours, and he had needed it. Hollis was gone, having left a note explaining that he had to attend a rehearsal in Manhattan and would be back about five. Jenner dressed slowly, remembering the conversation of the night before, realizing that he had effectively pledged his soul to the unmephistophelean Hollis.

He turned Hollis’ sheet of notepaper over and scrawled his own note: “Going downtown to settle my affairs. Will return later tonight.” He took the undertube back to Manhattan, taxied from the tube station to his hotel, and checked out, settling his bill with cash. For two years he had lived in a twenty-dollar-a-week room in a midtown hotel, with no more personal property than he needed. Most of his possessions had been in storage since the breakup with Helene in ’87; he kept hardly enough in the hotel room to fill a single suitcase.

He packed up and left. Dragging the suitcase that contained three changes of clothing, his makeup kit, his useless script for Misty Isle, and the 1986-89 volume of his scrapbook, Jenner set out for the tube station again. It was five-thirty. If he made good connections, he could reach Hollis’ place a little after six. And that gave him time for a little bit of fortification first.

He stopped at a Lexington Avenue bar and had two martinis. On the third drink he shifted to gibsons. By the fourth, he had acquired a slatternly-looking bar girl with thick orange lipstick; he bought her the requested rye and soda, had one himself, then went into the washroom and got sick. When he came out, the girl was gone. Shrugging, Jenner wandered to another bar and had two more martinis, this time successfully keeping them down. A hundred yards up the block, he had another gibson.

He reached Hollis’ place at half past ten, sober enough to walk on his own steam but too drunk to remember what he had done with his suitcase. He kept insisting that Hollis call the police and have them search for the grip, but Hollis merely smiled amiably and ignored him, leading him to the bedroom and putting him to bed. A moment before he fell asleep, Jenner reflected that it was just as well he had lost the suitcase. With it, he had lost his pitiful press clippings of the last four years, as well as his makeup kit and his final script. Now he could shed his past with alacrity; he had no albatrosses slung around his neck.

He woke up at nine the next morning, feeling unaccountably clearheaded and cheerful. The smell of frying bacon reached his nostrils. From the kitchen, Hollis yelled, “Go take a quick shower. Breakfast’ll be ready when you come out.”

They breakfasted in silence. At twenty of ten, they finished their coffee. Hollis said quietly, “All right, Mark. Are you ready to begin?”

Walt Hollis had rigged an experimental laboratory in his fourth room and he installed Jenner in the middle of it. The room was no more than twelve by fifteen, and it seemed to Jenner that there was an enormous amount of equipment in it. He himself sat in a comfortable chair in the center of the room, facing a diabolically complex bit of apparatus with fluorescent light rings and half a dozen theatrical gelatins to provide a shifting pattern of illuminated color. There was a big tape recorder in the room, with a fifteen-inch reel primed and loaded. There were instruments that Jenner simply could not identify at all; he had no technical background, and he merely classified them as “electronic” and let it go at that.

The room’s window had been carefully curtained off; the door frame was lined with felt. When Hollis chose, he could plunge the room into total darkness. Jenner felt an irrational twinge of fear. Obscurely, the machine facing him reminded him of a dentist’s drill, an instrument he had always feared and hated. But this drill would bite deep into his mind.

“I won’t be in the room with you,” Hollis said. “I’ll be monitoring from outside. Any time you want me, just raise your right hand and I’ll come in. Okay?”

“Okay,” Jenner muttered.

“First I’ve got a pill for you, Mark. Proclorperazine. It’s an ataractic.”

“A tranquilizer?”

“Call it that; it’s just to ease your nerves. You’re very tense right now, you know. You’re afraid of what I’m going to do.”

“Damned right I’m afraid. But you don’t see me getting up and running out!”

“Of course not,” Hollis said. “Here. Take it.”

While Jenner swallowed the pill, Hollis busily rolled up the actor’s sleeve and swabbed his arm with alcohol. Jenner watched, already relaxing, as Hollis readied a glittering hypodermic.

“This is the hypnosis-inducing drug, Mark.”

“Sodium pentothal? Amytal?”

“Of that family of ego-depressants, yes.” Hollis deftly discharged the syringe’s contents into one of Jenner’s veins. “I’ve had medical help in preparing this project,” he said. “Sit back. Stretch your feet out. Relax, Mark.”

Jenner relaxed. He was vaguely conscious of Hollis’ final reassuring pat on the shoulder, of the fact that the small man had left the room, that the room had gone dark. He heard a faint hum that might have come either from the tape recorder or from the strange apparatus in the middle of the room.

Colored lights began to play on him. Wheels of bright plastic whirled before his eyes. Jenner stared, fascinated, feeling his tension drain away. All he had to do was relax. Rest. Everything would be all right. Relax.

“Can you hear me, Mark?”

“I hear you.”

“Good. Do you feel any discomfort?”

“No discomfort.”

“Fine. Listen to me, Mark.”

“I’m listening.”

“I mean really listening, now. Listening with your brain and not just your ears. Are you listening to me, Mark?”

“I’m listening.”

“Excellent. This is what I want you to do for me, Mark. I want you to go back and think about your life. Then I want you to tell me all about yourself. Everything. From the beginning.”

Spring, 1953. Mark Jenner was four years old. Mark Jenner’s brother Tom had reached the ninth of the twelve years he was to have. Tom Jenner had been fighting, against his mother’s express orders, and he had been knocked down and bruised.

Mark Jenner stared up at his older brother. Tom’s cheek was scraped and bloody, and one side of his mouth was starting to swell puffily.

“Mama’s gonna murder you,” Mark chortled. “Said you wasn’t supposed to fight.”

“Wasn’t fighting,” Tom said.

“I saw you! You picked on Mickey Swenson, and he knocked you down and made your face all bloody!”

“You wouldn’t tell mama that, would you?” Tom asked in a low voice. “If she asked you what happened to me, I mean.”

Mark blinked. “If she asked, I’d have to tell.”

“No,” Tom said. His still-pudgy hands gripped Mark’s shoulders painfully. “We’re gonna go inside. I’m gonna tell mama I tripped on a stone and fell down.”

“But you were fighting! With Mickey Swenson.”

“We don’t have to tell mama that. We can tell her something else—make up a story.”

“But…”

“All you have to do is say I fell down, that I wasn’t fighting with anybody. And I’ll give you a nickel. Okay?”

Mark looked puzzled. How could he tell mama something that was not true? It seemed easy enough. All he had to do was move his mouth and the sounds would come out. It seemed important to Tom. Already Mark was beginning to believe that Tom had really fallen, that there had been no fight.

They trooped into the house, the dirty little boy and the dirty littler one. Mrs. Jenner appeared, looming high over both of them, her hands upraised at the sight of her eldest son’s battered face.

“Tom! What happened!”

Before Tom could reply, Mark said gravely, “Tom tripped on a stone. He fell down and hurt himself.”

“Oh! You poor dear—does it hurt?”

As Mrs. Jenner trooped Tom off to the bathroom for repairs, Mark Jenner, four years old, experienced a curious warm sensation of pride. He had told his first conscious lie. He had spoken something that was not the truth, had done it deliberately with the hope of a reward. He did not know it then, but his career as an actor had begun auspiciously.

Spring, 1966. Mark Jenner was seventeen, a junior at Noah Webster High School, Massilon, Ohio. He was six feet one and weighed 152 pounds. He was carrying the schoolbooks of Joanne Lauritszon, sixteen years eight months old. The Mark Jenner of 1989 saw her for what she was: a raw, newly fledged female with a padded chest and a shrill voice. The Mark Jenner of 1966 saw her as Aphrodite.

It took all his skill to work the conversation to the subject of the forthcoming junior prom. It took all his courage to invite the girl who walked at his side.

It took all his strength to endure her as she said, “But I’ve got a prom date already, Mark. I’m going with Nat Hospers.”

“Oh—yes, of course. Sorry. I should have figured it out myself.”

And he handed her back her books and ran stumbling away, cursing himself for his awkwardness, cursing Hospers for his car and his football-player muscles and his aplomb with girls. Mark had saved up for months for the prom; he had vowed he would die of grief if Joanne refused him. Somehow, he did not die.

Autumn, 1976. Hollywood. Mark Jenner was twenty-seven, rugged-looking and tanned, drawing three thousand dollars a week during the filming of Lovely to Look At. He sat at the best table in Hollywood’s most exclusive nightclub, and opposite him, resplendent in her ermine wrap, sat the queen of filmland, Helene Bryan, lovely, moist-lipped, high-bosomed, that month blazoned on the covers of a hundred magazines in near nudity. She was twenty. She had been a coltish ten-year-old, interested only in dolls and frills, the year Mark Jenner had first thought he had fallen in love. Now he had fallen in love with her, with this $250,000-a-year goddess of sexuality.

An earlier Mark Jenner might have drawn back timidly from such a radiant beauty, but the Mark Jenner of 1976 was afraid of no one, of nothing. He smiled at the blonde girl in the ermine wrap.

He said, “Helene, will you marry me?”

“Of course, darling! Of course!”

Spring, 1987. Mark Jenner was thirty-eight. Three Days in Marrakesh had played nine days on Broadway. The night that closing notices went up, Mark Jenner pub-crawled until 3 a.m. The sour taste of cheap tap beer was in his mouth as he staggered home, feeling the ache in his feet and the soreness in his soul. He had not even bothered to remove the gray makeup from his hair. With it, he looked sixty years old, and right now he felt sixty, not thirty-eight. He wondered if Helene would be asleep.

Helene was not asleep; Helene was up, and packing. She wore a simple cotton dress and no makeup at all, and for once she looked her thirty-one years, instead of seeming to be in her late teens or very early twenties. She had the suitcase nearly full. Jenner had been expecting this for a long time, and now that it had come he was hardly surprised. He was too numb to react emotionally. He dropped heavily on the bed and watched her pack.

“The show closed tonight,” he said.

“I know. Holly phoned and told me all about it, at midnight.”

“I’m sorry I came home late. I stopped to condole with a few friends.”

The brisk packing motions continued unabated. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Helene…”

“I’m just taking this one suitcase, Mark. I’ll wire you my new address when I’m in Los Angeles, and you can ship the rest of my things out to me.”

“Divorce?”

“Separation. I can’t watch you this way any more, Mark.”

He smiled. “No. It isn’t fun to watch a man fall apart, I guess. Goodbye, Helene.”

He was too drained of energy to care to make a scene. She finished packing, locked the suitcase, and went into the study to make a phone call. Then she left, without saying good-bye. Jenner sat smiling stupidly for a while after the door slammed, slowly getting used to the fact that it was all over at last. He rose, went to the sideboard, poured himself a highball glass of gin. He gulped it. He cried.

Late winter, 1989. Mark Jenner was forty years old. He sat in a special chair in Walt Hollis’ apartment while lights played on his tranquil face…

It was three months and many miles of mylar tape before Hollis was satisfied. Jenner had gone through a two-hour session each morning, reminiscing with unhesitating frankness. It had not been like the analysis at all; the analysis had not been successful because he had lied to the analyst frequently and well, digging up bits of old parts and offering them as his personal experiences, out of perverse and no doubt psychotic motivations.

This was different. He was drugged; he spewed forth his genuine past, and when the session was over he had no recollection of what he had said. Hollis never told him. Sometimes Jenner would ask, as he drowned his grogginess in a postsession cup of coffee, but Hollis would never reply.

From ten to twelve every day, Jenner recorded. From one to three, Hollis cloistered himself in the little room and edited the tapes. From three to six every day, Jenner was banished from the house while his counterpart in the project occupied the little room. Jenner never got so much as a glimpse of the other.

When the three months had elapsed, when Jenner had finally surrendered as much of his past life as he could yield, when Hollis had edited the formless stream of consciousness into a continuous, consecutive, and intelligible pattern, the time came to enter the second stage of the process.

Now there were new drugs, new patterns of light, new responses. Jenner did not speak; he listened. His subconscious lay open, receptive, absorbing all that reached it and locking it in for permanent possession.

And slowly, the personality of a man formed in Jenner’s mind, embedding itself deep in layers of consciousness previously private, inextricably meshing itself with the web of memories that was Mark Jenner.

This man was like Jenner in many ways. He was physically commanding; his voice had the ring of authority, and people listened when he spoke. But as Jenner watched the man’s life shape itself from day to day, from year to compressed and edited year, he realized the difference. The other had chosen to be personally dominating as well. He, Jenner, had sacrificed his personality in order to be able to don many masks. A politician or a statesman must thrust his ego forward; an actor must bury his.

The other man, Jenner’s mind told him, was forty-two years old. A severe attack of colitis five years back was the only serious illness he had had. He stood six feet one and a half, weighed 190 pounds, was mildly hyperthyroid metabolically, and never slept more than five hours a night.

He had a law degree from a major university—Hollis had edited the school’s identity out. He had been married twice, divorcing his first wife on grounds of her adultery, and he had two children by his second wife, who regarded him with the awe one usually reserves for a paternal parent. He had been an assistant district attorney and had schemed for his superior’s disgrace; eventually he had succeeded to the post himself, and had consciously been involved in the judicial murder of an innocent man.

Despite this, he thought of himself, by and large, as liberal and enlightened. He had served two terms in the Congress of the United States, representing an important eastern state. He hoped to be elected to the Senate in the 1990 elections. Consulting an almanac, Jenner discovered that many eastern states would be electing senators in 1990: Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia. About all Jenner learned from that was that his man was not officially an inhabitant of New York, Pennsylvania, or Connecticut.

Before the three months ended, Jenner knew the other man’s soul nearly as well as he knew his own, or perhaps better. He understood the pattern of childhood snubs and paternal goadings that had driven him toward public life. He knew how the other had struggled to overcome his shyness. He knew how it had been when the other had first had a woman; he knew, for the first time in his life, what it was like to be a father.

The other man in Jenner’s head was a “good” man, dedicated and intelligent; but yet, he stood revealed as a liar, a cheat, a hypocrite, even indirectly a murderer. Jenner realized with sudden icy clarity that any human being’s mind would yield the same muck of hidden desires and repressed, half-acknowledged atrocities.

The man’s memories were faceless; Jenner supplied faces. In the theater of his imagination, he built a backdrop for the other’s childhood, supplied an image for parents and first wife and second wife and children and friends. Day by day the pattern grew; after ninety days, Jenner had a second self. He had a double well of memories. His fund of experiences was multiplied factorially; he could now judge the agonies of one adolescence against another, now could evaluate one man’s striving against another’s, now could compare two broken marriages and could vicariously know the joys of an almost-successful one. He knew the other’s mind the way no man before had ever known another’s mind. Not even Hollis, editing the tapes, could become the other man in the way Jenner, drugged and receptive, had become.

When the last tape had been funneled into Jenner’s skull, when the picture was complete, Jenner knew the experiment had been a success. Now he had the inner drive he had lacked before; now he could reach out into the audience and squeeze a man’s heart. He had always had the technical equipment of a great actor. Now he had the soul of one.

He wondered frequently about the other man and decided to keep his eye on the coming senatorial campaign in the East. He wanted desperately to know who was the man who bore in his brain all of Mark Jenner’s triumphs and disappointments, all the cowardices and vanities and ambitions that made him human.

He had to know, but he postponed the search; at the moment, returning to the stage was more important.

The show was called No Roses for Larrabee. It was about an aging video star named Jack Larrabee, who skids down to obscurity and then fights his way back up. It had appeared the previous fall as a ninety-minute video show; movie rights had already been sold, but it was due for a Broadway fling first. The author was a plump kid named Harrell, who had written three previous triple-threat dramas. Harrell had half a million dollars in the bank, fifty thousand more in his mattress at his Connecticut villa, and maintained psychoanalysts on both coasts.

Casting was scheduled to start on October 20. The play had already been booked into the Odeon for a February opening, which meant a truncated pre-Broadway tour. Advance sales were piling up. It was generally assumed in the trade that the title role would be played by the man who had created it for the video version, ex-hoofer Lloyd Lane.

On October 10, Mark Jenner phoned his agent for the first time in six months. The conversation was brief. Jenner said, “I’ve been away, having some special treatments. I feel a lot better now. I want you to get me a reading for the stage version of Larrabee. Yeah, that’s right. I want the lead.”

Jenner didn’t care what strings his agent had to pull to get the reading. He wasn’t interested in the behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Six days later, he got a phone call from the play’s producer, J. Carlton Vincennes. Vincennes was skeptical, but he was willing to take a look, anyway. Jenner was invited to come down for a reading on the twentieth.

On the twentieth, Jenner read for the part of Jack Larrabee. There were only five other people in the room—Vincennes; Harrell, the playwright; Donovan, the director; Lloyd Lane; and an actor named Goldstone who was there to try out for the secondary lead. Jenner picked up the part cold, riffled through it for a few minutes, and started to read it as if he were giving his maiden speech on the floor of the Senate. He put the words across as if he had a pipeline into the subconscious minds of his five auditors. He did things with vowel shadings and with facial expressions that he had never dared to do before, and this was only improvisation as he went. He wasn’t just Mark Jenner, has-been, now; he was Mark Jenner plus someone else, and the combined output was overpowering.

After twenty minutes he tired and broke off the reading. He looked at the five faces. Four registered varying degrees of amazed pleasure and disbelief; the fifth belonged to Lloyd Lane. Lane was pale and sweat-beaded with the knowledge that he had just lost a leading role, and with it the hefty Hollywood contract that was sure to follow the Broadway one.

Two days later Jenner signed a run-of-the-show contract with Vincennes. A squib appeared in the theatrical columns the day after that:

Mark Jenner will be making a Broadway comeback in the J. C. Vincennes production of No Roses for Larrabee. The famed matinee idol of the seventies has been absent from the stage for nearly a year. His last local appearance was in the ill-starred Misty Isle, which saw ten performances last March. Jenner reportedly has spent the cast season recovering from a nervous breakdown.

Rehearsals were strange. Jenner had always been a good study, and so he knew his lines flat by the fourth or fifth run-through. The other actors were still shambling through their parts mechanically, muttering from their scripts, while Jenner was acting—projecting at them, putting his character across. After a while, the disparity became less noticeable. The cast came to life, responding to the vigor of Jenner’s portrayal. When they started working out in the empty theater, there were always a few dozen witnesses to the rehearsal. Backers came, and other directors, theatrical people in general, all attracted by the rumors of Jenner’s incandescent performance.

And it was incandescent. Not only because the part was so close to his own story, either; an actor playing an autobiographical role can easily slip into maudlin sogginess. For Jenner the part was both autobiographical and external. He interpreted it with his double mind, with the mind of a tired actor and with the mind of a potential senator on the way up. The two personalities crossbred; Jenner’s performance tugged at the heart. Advance sales piled up until record figures began to dance across the ledger pages.

They opened in New Haven on the tenth of February to a packed house and rave reviews. Ten days later was the Broadway opening, right on schedule; neither driving snow nor pelting rain kept the tuxedo-and-mink crowd away from the opening-night festivities. A little electric crackle of tension hung in the air in the theater. Jenner felt utterly calm. This is it, he told himself. The chips are down. The voters are going to the polls…

The curtain rose, and Jenner-as-Larrabee shuffled on stage and disgorged his first mumbled lines; he got his response and came across clearer the second time, still a bent figure with hollow cheeks and sad eyes, and the part began to take hold of him. Jack Larrabee grew before the audience’s eyes. By nine o’clock, he was as real as any flesh-and-blood person. Jenner was putting him across; the playwright’s words were turning to gold.

The first-act curtain line was a pianissimo; Jenner gave it and dropped to his knees, then listened to the drumroll of applause welling up out of the ten-dollar seats. The second-act clincher was the outcry of a baffled, doomed man, and Jenner was baffled and doomed as he wrenched the line out of him. The audience roared as the curtain cascaded down. Jenner drew the final line of the play too—a triumphal, ringing asseveration of joy and redemption that filled the big house like a trumpet call. Then the curtain was dropping, and rising again; and dropping and rising and dropping and rising, while a thunder of applause pounded at his temples; and he knew he had reached them, reached them deeply, reached them so deep they had sprung up from their own jaded weariness to acclaim him.

There was a cast party later that night, much later, in the big Broadway restaurant where such parties are traditionally given. Vincennes was there belligerently waving the reviews from the early editions. The word had gone out: Jenner was back, and Jenner was magnificent. Lloyd Lane came up to him—Jenner’s understudy, now. He looked shell-shocked. He said, “God, Mark, I watched the whole thing from the wings. I’ve never seen anything like it. You really were Larrabee out there, weren’t you?”

Looking at this man he had elbowed aside, Jenner felt a twinge of guilt, and redness rose to his cheeks. Then the other mind intervened, the ruthless mind of the nameless politician, and Jenner realized that Lane had deserved to be pushed aside. A better actor simply had supplanted him. But there were tears in the corners of Lane’s eyes.

Someone rushed up to Jenner with a gaudy magnum of champagne, and there was a pop! and then the champagne started to flow. Jenner, who had not had anything to drink for months, gratefully accepted the bubbling glass. Within, he kept icy control over himself. This was his night of triumph. He would drink, but he would not get drunk.

He drank. Vapid showgirls clawed through the circle of well-wishers around him to offer their meaningless congratulations. Flashbulbs glittered in his eyes. Men who had not spoken a civil word to him in five years pumped his hand. Within, Jenner felt a core of melancholy. Helene was not here; Walt Hollis—to whom he owned all this—was not here. Nor was his counterpart, the man whose mind he wore.

Champagne slid easily down his gullet. His smile grew broader. A bald-headed man named Feldstein clinked glasses with him and said, “You must really be relishing this night, Mark. You had it coming, all right. How does it feel to be a success again?”

Jenner grinned warmly. The champagne within him loosened the words, and they drifted easily up through his lips. “It’s wonderful. I want to thank everyone who supported me in this campaign. I want to assure them that their trust in me will be amply repaid when I reach Washington.”

“Hah! Great sense of humor, Mark. Wotta fellow!” And the bald-headed man turned away, laughing. It was good that he turned away at that moment—for if he had continued to face Mark Jenner, he would have had to witness the look of dismay and terror that came over Jenner’s suddenly transformed, suddenly horror-stricken face.

The play was a success, of course. It became one of those plays that everybody simply had to see, and everyone saw it. It promised to run for at least two seasons, which was extraordinary for a nonmusical play.

But night after night in the hotel suite Mark Jenner had rented, he wrestled with the same problem:

Who am I?

The words that had first slipped out the night of the cast party now recurred in different forms almost every day. Phantom memories obsessed him; in his dreams, women he had never known came to reminisce with him about the misdeeds of a summer afternoon. He missed the children he had never fathered—the boy who was seven, and the girl who was four. He found himself reading the front pages of newspapers, scanning the Washington news, though always before he had turned first to the theatrical pages. He detected traces of pomposity in some of his sentences.

He knew what was happening. Walt Hollis had done the job too well; the other mind was encroaching on his own, intertwining, enmeshing, ingesting. There were blurred moments in the dark of the night when Jenner forgot his own name, and temporarily nameless, dreamed the dreams the other man should have dreamed.

And, no doubt, it was the same way with the other, whoever he was. Jenner realized bleakly that a strange compulsion bound him. He lay under a geas; he had to find his counterpart, the man who shared his mind. He had to know who he was.

He asked Hollis.

Hollis had come to him in the lavish hotel suite on the sixth day after Larrabee’s opening. The little man approached Jenner diffidently, almost as if he were upset by the magnitude of his own experiment’s success.

“I guess it worked,” Hollis said.

Jenner grinned expansively. “That it did, Holly! When I’m up there on the stage I have the strength I never knew I could have. Have you seen the play?”

“Yes. The third night. I was—impressed.”

“Damn right you were impressed,” Jenner said. “You should be, watching your Frankenstein monster in action up there. Your golem.” There was nothing bitter in Jenner’s tone; he was being genially sardonic.

But Hollis went pale. “Don’t talk about it that way.”

“True, isn’t it?”

“Don’t—don’t ever refer to yourself that way, Mark. It isn’t right.”

Jenner shrugged. Then casually, he interjected a new theme. “My alter ego—the chap you matched up with me—how’s he doing?”

“Coming along all right,” Hollis said quietly.

“Just—all right?”

“In his profession it takes time for results to become apparent. But he’s building up strength, lining up an organization. I saw him yesterday, and he said he’s very hopeful for the future.”

“For the Senate race, you mean?”

Hollis looked past Jenner’s left shoulder. “Perhaps.”

Jenner scowled. “Holly—tell me his name.”

“I can’t do that.”

“I have to know it, Holly! Please!”

“Mark, one of the terms of our agreement…”

“To hell with our agreement! Will you tell me or won’t you?”

The small man looked even smaller now. He seemed to be shivering. He rose, backed toward the door of Jenner’s suite. His hand fumbled for the opener button.

“Where are you going?” Jenner demanded.

“Away. I don’t dare let you keep asking me about him. You’re too convincing. And you mustn’t make me tell you. You mustn’t find out who he is. Not ever.”

“Holly! Come back here! Holly!”

The door slammed. Jenner stood in the middle of the room staring at it, slowly shaking his head. Hollis had bolted like a frightened hare. He was afraid of me, Jenner realized. Afraid I’d make him talk.

“All right,” Jenner said out loud, softly. “If you won’t tell me, I’ll have to find out for myself.”

It took him ten days to find out. Ten days in which he delivered eleven sterling performances in No Roses for Larrabee, ten days in which he felt the increasing encroachment of the stranger in his mind, ten days it which Mark Jenner and the stranger blurred even closer together. Or the seventh of those ten days, he received a phone call from Helene long distance. He stared at her tired face in the tiny screen and remembered how like a new-blown rose she had looked on the morning after their wedding, in Acapulco, and he listened to her strangely subdued voice.

“…visiting New York again in a few weeks. Mind if I stop up to see you, Mark? After all, we’re still legally married, you know.”

He smiled and made an empty reply. “Be glad to see you, Helene. For old times’ sake.”

“And of course I want to see the play. Can I get seats easily?”

“If you try hard enough, you can scrape up a seat in the balcony for fifty bucks,” he said. “But I’m allotted a few ducats for each show. Let me know the night, and I’ll put a couple away for you.”

“One’s enough,” she said quietly.

He grinned at her, and they made a bit of small talk, and they hung up. She was obviously angling for a reconciliation. Well, he wasn’t so sure he’d take her back. From what he’d heard, she had done a good bit of sleeping around in the past three years, and she was thirty-four now. A successful man like Mark Jenner might reasonably be expected to take a second wife, a girl in her twenties, someone more decorative than Helene was now. After all, the other had married again, and he had done it only because his first wife did not mix well with the party bigwigs—not primarily because she had been cheating on him.

Three days later, Jenner knew the identity of the nameless man in his mind.

It was not really hard to find out. Jenner hired a research consultant to do some work for him. What he wanted, Jenner explained, was a list of members of the House of Representatives who fulfilled the following qualifications: they had to be in their early forties, more than six feet tall, residents of an eastern state, married, divorced, and married again, with two children by the second wife. They had to be in their second term in the House, and had to be considered likely prospects for a higher political post in the near future. These were the facts Hollis had allowed him to retain. Jenner hoped they would be enough.

A few hours later, he had the answer he was hoping for. Only one man, of all the 475 representatives in the one hundredth Congress, fit all of the qualifications. He was Representative Clifford T. Norton, Republican, of the Fifth District of Massachusetts.

A little more research filled in some of Representative Norton’s background. His first wife had been named Betty, the second Phyllis. His children’s names were Clifford Junior and Karen. He had gone to Yale as an undergraduate, then to Harvard Law, thereby building up loyalties at both schools. He had been elected to the House in ’86 after a distinguished career as district attorney, and he had been returned by a larger plurality in the ’88 elections. His term of office expired in January of 1991. He hoped to move into the other wing of the Capitol immediately, as junior senator from Massachusetts. In recent months, according to the morgue file Jenner’s man consulted, Norton had shown sudden brilliance and persuasiveness on the House floor.

It figured. Now Norton was a politician with the mind of an actor grafted to his own. The combination couldn’t miss, Jenner thought.

Jenner felt an odd narcissistic fascination for this man with whom he was a brain-brother; he wanted anxiously to meet Norton. He wondered whether Norton had managed to uncover the identity of the actor whose tape Hollis had crossed with his own; and, Jenner wondered, if Norton did know, was he proud to share the memories of Broadway’s renascent idol?

It was the last week in March 1990. Congress was home for its Easter recess. No doubt, Representative Norton was making ample use of his new oratorical powers among the home folks, as he began his drive toward the Senate seat. On a rainy Tuesday afternoon Jenner put through a long-distance phone call to Representative Norton at his Massachusetts office. Jenner had to give his name to a secretary before Norton would come to the phone.

Norton’s voice was deep and rich, like Jenner’s own. He did not use a visual circuit on his phone. He said, “Hello there, Jenner. I was wondering when you were going to call me.”

“You knew about me, then?”

“Of course I knew! As soon as that play opened and I read the reviews, I knew you were the one!”

They arranged a meeting for two the following afternoon, at the home of Walt Hollis in Riverdale. Hollis had once given Jenner a key, and somehow Jenner had kept it. And he knew Hollis would not be home until five that afternoon, which gave them three hours to talk.

That night, Jenner phoned the theater and let the stage manager know that he was indisposed. The stage manager pleaded, but Jenner stood on his contractual rights. That evening Lloyd Lane played the part of Jack Larrabee, to the dismay of the disgruntled and disappointed audience. Jenner spent the evening pacing through the five rooms of his suite, clenching his hands, glorying masochistically in the turmoil and hatred bubbling inside him. He counted the hours of the sleepless night. In the morning, he breakfasted late, read till noon, paced the floor till half past one, and took the undertube to Hollis’ place.

He used the key to let himself in. There was no sign of Norton. Jenner seated himself in Hollis’ neat-as-a-pin living room and waited, thinking that it was utterly beyond toleration that another man should walk the earth privy to the inmost thoughts of Mark Jenner.

At two-fifteen, the doorbell rang. Jenner activated the scanner. The face in the lambent visual field was dark, strong chinned, square, powerful. Jenner opened the door and stood face to face with the only man in the universe who knew that the nine-year-old Mark Jenner had eaten a live angleworm on a dare. Clifford Norton stared levelly at the only man in the universe who knew what he had done to twelve-year-old Marian Simms in her father’s garage, twenty-nine years ago.

The two big men faced each other for a long moment in the vestibule of Hollis’ apartment. They maintained civil smiles. They both breathed deeply. In Jenner’s mind, thoughts whirled wildly, and he knew Norton well enough to be aware that Norton was planning strategy too.

Then the stasis broke.

The animal growl of hatred burst from Jenner’s lips first, but a moment later Norton was roaring too, and the two men crashed heavily together in the middle of the floor. They clinched, and one of Norton’s legs snaked between Jenner’s, tumbling him over; Norton dropped on top of him, but Jenner sidled out from under and slammed his elbow into the pit of Norton’s stomach.

Norton gasped. He lashed out with groping hands and caught Jenner’s throat. His hands tightened, while Jenner tugged and finally dragged Norton’s fingers from his throat. He sucked in breath. His knee rose, going for Norton’s groin. The two men writhed on the floor like raging lions, each trying to cripple and damage the other, each hoping to land a crushing blow, each trying ultimately to kill the other.

It lasted only a few moments. They separated with no spoken word and came separately to their feet. They stared at each other once again, now flushed and bruised, their neat suits rumpled, their shirttails out.

“We’re acting like fools,” Norton said. “Or like little boys.”

“We couldn’t help ourselves,” Jenner said. “It was a natural thing for us to fight. We leaped at each other like men trying to catch their own shadows.”

They sat down, Jenner in Hollis’ chair, Norton on the couch across the room. For more than a minute, the only sound was that of heavy breathing. Jenner’s heart pounded furiously. He hadn’t engaged in physical combat in twenty-five years.

“I didn’t think it would be this way, exactly,” Norton said. “There are times when I wake up and I think I’m you. Angling for a tryout, quarreling with your wife, hitting the bottle.”

“And times when I remember prosecuting an innocent man for murder and winning the case,” Jenner said.

Norton’s face darkened. “And I remember eating a live worm…”

“And I remember a scared twelve-year-old girl cornered in a garage…”

Again they fell silent, both of them slumped over, bearing the burden of each other’s pasts. Norton said, “We should never have done this. Come here, and met.”

“I had to see you.”

“And I had to see you.”

“We can’t ever see each other again,” said Jenner. “It’s either got to be murder or a truce between us. Those few minutes when we were fighting—I actually wanted to kill you, Norton. To see you go blue in the face and die.”

Norton nodded. “I had the same feeling. Neither of us can really bear the idea that someone else knows him inside and out, even though it’s done us so much good in so many ways. I’ll get the Senate, all right. And maybe the White House in another six years.”

“And I’m back on the stage. I’ll get my wife back, if I want her. Everything I lost. Yes,” Jenner said. “It’s worth sharing your mind. But we can’t ever meet again. We’re each a small part of each other, and the hatred’s too strong. I guess it’s self-hatred, really. But we might—we might lose control of ourselves, the way we did just now.”

The front door opened suddenly. Walt Hollis stood in the vestibule, a small pinched-faced man with narrow shoulders and a myopic squint. And, just now, a dazed expression on his face.

“You two—how did you get here—why…”

“I still had a key,” Jenner said. “I called Norton and invited him down to meet me here. We didn’t expect you back so early.”

Hollis’ mouth worked spasmodically for ten seconds before the words came. “You should never have met each other. The traumatic effects—possible dangers…”

“We’ve already had a good brawl,” Norton said. “But we won’t any more. We’ve declared a truce.”

He crossed the room and forced himself to smile at Jenner. Jenner summoned his craft and made his face show genial conviviality, though within all was loathing. They shook hands.

“We aren’t going to see each other ever again,” Jenner explained. “Norton’s going to be president, and I’m going to win undying fame in the theater. And each of us will owe our accomplishments to the other.”

“And to you, Hollis,” Norton added.

“Maybe Norton and I will keep in touch by mail,” Jenner said. “Drop each other little notes, suggestions. An actor can help a politician. A politician can help an actor. Call it long-range symbiosis, Holly. The two of us ought to go places, thanks to you.”

Jenner glanced at Norton, and this time the smile that was exchanged was a sincere one. There was no need for words between them. They walked past the numb Hollis and into the small laboratory room and methodically smashed the equipment. If Hollis were to put someone else through this treatment, Jenner thought, the competition might be a problem. He and Norton wanted no further competition in their chosen fields.

They returned to the living room and gravely said good-bye to Hollis. Jenner was calm inside, now, at last. He and Norton departed, going their separate ways once they reached the street. Jenner knew he would never see Norton again. It was just as well; he would have to live with Norton’s memories for the rest of his life.

Hollis surveyed the wreckage of his lab with a stony heart. He felt cold and apprehensive. This was the reward of his labors, this was what he got for trying to help. But he should have realized it. After all, he had edited the tapes for both of them. He knew what they were. He carried the burden of both souls in his own small heart. He knew what they had done, and he knew what they were capable of doing, now that the errors of one sanctioned the errors of the other.

Tiredly, Hollis closed the laboratory door, cutting off the sight of the wreckage. He thought of Jenner and Norton and wondered when they would realize that he knew all their secrets.

He wondered how long Jenner and Norton would let him live.

Content

Counterpart
by Robert Silverberg