The Hollow Man Read online

  “You have to understand, Jeremy, that stepping out of one’s usual environment is a common mistake made by people who’ve just suffered a serious loss. Taking too much time off from work, changing homes too quickly … it all seems like it might help, but it’s just another way to postpone the inevitable confrontation with grief.”

  Bremen nodded and listened attentively.

  “Denial is the stage you’re in now,” said Dorothy. “Just as Gail had to go through that stage with her cancer, now you have to go through it in your grief … go through it and get past it. Do you understand what I’m saying, Jeremy?”

  Bremen lifted a knuckle to his lower lip and nodded slowly. Dorothy Parks was in her mid-forties but dressed like a much younger woman. This night she wore a man’s shirt, unbuttoned quite low, tucked into a long gaucho skirt. Her boots were at least twenty inches tall. The bracelets on her wrist jingled as she gestured. Her hair was cut short, dyed a red impinging on purple, and moussed into a cockscomb.

  “Gail would have wanted you to deal with this denial as quickly as possible and get on with your life, Jeremy. You know that, don’t you?”

  He’s listening. Looking at me. Perhaps I should have left that fourth button closed … just be the therapist tonight … worn the gray sweater. Well, shit with that. I’ve seen him looking at me in the lounge. He’s smaller than Darren was … not as strong looking … but that’s not so important. Wonder what he’s like in bed?

  Images of a sandy-haired man … Darren … sliding his cheek lower on her belly.

  It’s okay, he can learn what I like. Wonder where the bedroom is here? Second floor somewhere. No, my place … no, better a neutral place the first time. Clock ticking. Biological clock. Shit, whatever man came up with that phrase ought to have his balls cut off.

  “… important that you share feelings with your friends, with someone close,” she was saying. “Denial can only go on for so long before it turns the pain inward. You’ll promise you’ll call? Talk?”

  Bremen lifted his head and nodded. At that second he decided beyond any doubt that the farm could not be sold.

  On the fourth day after Gail’s funeral, Bob and Barbara Sutton, neighbors and friends, called again to express their sympathies in private. Barbara wept easily. Bob shifted uneasily in his chair. He was a big man with a blond crew cut, a permanent flush to his round face, and fingers that looked as short and soft as a child’s. He was thinking about getting home in time to watch the Celtics game.

  “You know that God doesn’t give us anything we can’t bear, Jerry,” Barbara said between bouts of weeping.

  Bremen considered that. Barbara had a premature streak of gray in her dark hair and Bremen followed the sinuous line of it back from her forehead, under her barrette, and out of sight around the curve of her skull. The neurobabble from her was like a surge of superheated air from an open hearth.

  Witnessing. Wouldn’t Pastor Miller think it wonderful if I brought this college professor to the Lord. If I quote Scripture, I’m liable to lose him … oh, wouldn’t Darlene have a fit if I came to Wednesday-night services with this agnostic … atheist … whatever he is, ready to come to Christ!

  “… He gives us the strength we need when we need it,” Barbara was saying. “Even when we can’t understand these things, there’s a reason. A reason for everything. Gail was called home for some reason the Good Lord will reveal when our time comes.”

  Bremen nodded, distracted, and stood. Somewhat startled, Bob and Barbara stood also. He moved them toward the door.

  “If there’s anything we can…” began Bob.

  “Actually, there is,” said Bremen. “I wonder if you might take care of Gernisavien while I go away for a while.”

  Barbara smiled and frowned at the same time. “The kitty? I mean, of course … Gerny gets along with my two Siamese … we’d be happy to … but how long do you think …”

  Bremen attempted a smile. “Just a while to sort things out. I’d feel better if Gernisavien were with you rather than at the vet’s or that cat boarding place on Conestoga Road. I could drop her off in the morning, if that’d be okay.”

  “Yeah,” said Bob, shaking Bremen’s hand again. Five minutes until the pregame show.

  Bremen waved as they turned their Honda around and disappeared down the gravel drive. Then he went into the house and walked slowly from room to room.

  Gernisavien was sleeping on the blue blanket at the foot of their bed. The calico’s head twitched as Bremen entered the room and her yellow eyes squinted accusingly at him for awakening her. Bremen touched her neck and went to the closet. He lifted one of Gail’s blouses and held it to his cheek a second, then covered his face with it, breathing deeply. He went out of the room and down the hall to his study. Student test booklets remained stacked where he had left them a month earlier. His Fourier equations lay scrawled where he had chalked them in a burst of two A.M. inspiration the week before Gail had been diagnosed. Heaps of manuscripts and unread journals covered every surface.

  Bremen stood for a minute in the center of the room, rubbing his temples. Even here, a half mile from the nearest neighbor and nine miles from town or the expressway, his head buzzed and crackled with neurobabble. It was as if all of his life he had heard a radio tuned softly in another room and now someone had buried a boom box in his skull and turned the volume to full. Ever since the morning Gail had died.

  And the babble was not only louder, it was darker. Bremen knew that it now came from a deeper and more malevolent source than the random skimming of thoughts and emotions he had held access to since he was thirteen. It was as if his almost symbiotic relationship with Gail had been a shield, a buffer between his mind and the razor-edged slashings of a million unstructured thoughts. Before last Friday, he would have had to concentrate to pick up the mélange of images, feelings, and half-formed language phrases that constituted Frank’s thoughts, or Dorothy’s, or Bob and Barbara’s. But now there was no shielding himself from the onslaught. What he and Gail had thought of as their mindshields—simple barriers to mute the background hiss and crackle of neurobabble—were simply no longer there.

  Bremen touched the chalkboard as if he were going to erase the equation there, then set down the eraser and went downstairs. After a while Gernisavien joined him in the kitchen and brushed up against his legs. Bremen realized that it had grown dark while he was sitting at the table, but he did not turn on the light as he opened a fresh can of cat food and fed the calico. Gernisavien looked up at him as if in disapproval of his not eating or turning on a light.

  Later, when he went in to lie on the couch in the living room to wait for morning, the calico lay on his chest and purred.

  Bremen found that closing his eyes brought on the dizziness and impending sense of terror … the sure knowledge that Gail was here somewhere, in the next room, outside on the lawn, and that she was calling for him. Her voice was almost audible. Bremen knew that if he slept, he would miss the instant when her voice reached the threshold of his hearing. So he lay awake and waited as the night passed and the house creaked and moaned in its own restlessness, and his sixth night without sleep passed into the gray chill of his seventh morning without her.

  At seven A.M. Bremen rose, fed the cat again, turned the kitchen radio on full, shaved, showered, and had three cups of coffee. He called a cab company and told them to have a taxi meet him at the Import Repair garage on Conestoga Road in forty-five minutes. Then he set Gernisavien in her travel cage—her tail thrashed since the cage had been used only for trips to the vet in the two years since her disastrous flight out to California on the visit to Gail’s sister there—and then he carried the cage out to the passenger seat of the Triumph.

  He had bought the eight jerricans of kerosene on Monday, before dressing for the funeral. Now he lugged four of them to the back porch and twisted off their lids. The sharp fumes sliced through the cold morning air. The sky suggested rain before nightfall.

  Bremen began with the seco
nd floor, dousing the bed, the quilt, the closets and their contents, the cedar chest, and then the bed again. He watched the white paper wrinkle and darken in the study as he slopped liquid from the second jerrican, and then he left a trail down the stairs, soaking the dark banisters that he and Gail had so painstakingly stripped and refinished five years before.

  He used another two cans on the downstairs, sparing nothing—not even Gail’s barn coat still hanging on the hook by the door—and then he went around the outside of the house with the fifth can, soaking front and back porches, the Adirondack chairs out back, and the doorway lintels and screens. The final three cans were used on the outbuildings. Gail’s Volvo was still in the barn they used as a garage.

  He parked the Triumph fifty yards down the drive toward the road and walked back to the house. He’d forgotten matches, so he had to go back into the kitchen and rummage in the junk drawer for them. The kerosene fumes made tears stream down his cheeks and seemed to cause the very air to ripple, as if the butcher-block table and Formica counter and tall, old refrigerator were as insubstantial as a heat mirage.

  Then, as he retrieved the two books of matches from the tumble of stuff in the drawer, Bremen was suddenly and blissfully certain of what he should do.

  Stand here. Light them. Go lie down on the couch.

  He had actually removed two matches and was on the verge of striking them when the vertigo struck. It was not Gail’s voice denying him the act, but it was Gail. Like fingers scratching wildly on a pane of Plexiglas that separated them. Like fingers on the mahogany lid of a coffin.

  You aren’t in a coffin, kiddo. You were cremated … as per your request when we drank too much three New Year’s Eves ago and got all weepy about mortality.

  Bremen staggered to the table and closed the cover of the matchbook over the two matches, ready to strike them. The vertigo grew worse.

  Cremated. Pleasant thought. Ashes for both of us. I spread yours in the orchard out beyond the barn … perhaps the wind will carry some of mine there.

  Bremen started to strike the matches, but the scratching intensified, grew magnified, until it roared in his skull like a runaway migraine, shattering his vision into a thousand dots of light and darkness, filling his hearing with the scrabbling of rats’ feet on linoleum.

  When Bremen opened his eyes, he was outside and the flames were already working on the kitchen and a second glow was visible in the front windows. For a moment he stood there, his headache throbbing with each pounding of his pulse, considering going back into the house, but when the flames became visible at the second-story windows and the smoke was billowing out through the screens of the back porch, he turned and walked quickly to the outbuildings instead. The garage went up with a muffled explosion that singed Bremen’s eyebrows and drove him back past the pyre of the farmhouse.

  A line of crows from the orchard rose skyward, scolding and screeching at him. Bremen hopped in the idling Triumph, touched the cage as if to calm the agitated cat, and drove quickly away.

  Barbara Sutton was red-eyed as he dropped the cat off. A line of trees blocked the sight of smoke rising from the valley he had left behind. Gernisavien crouched in her carry cage, slat-eyed and suspicious, trembling and glaring at Bremen. He cut through Barbara’s attempt at small talk, said that he had an appointment, drove quickly to the Import Repair shop on Conestoga Road, sold the Triumph to his former mechanic there at the price they had discussed, and then took a cab to the airport. Fire engines passed them as they drove toward the expressway to Philadelphia. He was only five minutes behind schedule.

  Once at the airport, Bremen went to the United counter and bought a one-way ticket on the next flight out. The Boeing stretch 727 was airborne and Bremen was beginning to relax, seat reclined, beginning to feel that sleep might be permissible now, when the full force of everything struck him.

  And then the nightmare began in earnest.

  EYES

  In the beginning was not the Word.

  Not for me, at least.

  As hard as it is to believe, and harder yet to understand, there are universes of experience that do not depend upon the Word. Such was mine. The fact that I was God there … or at least a god … is not yet relevant.

  I am not Jeremy, or Gail, although someday I would share all that they had known and been and wished to become. But that does not make me them any more than watching a television show makes you that stream of electromagnetic pulses that is the show. Neither am I God, nor god, although I was both until that unanticipated intersection of events and personalities, that meeting of parallel lines that cannot meet.

  I am beginning to think in mathematics, like Jeremy. Actually, in the beginning there was not the Number, either. Not for me. No such concept existed … neither counting nor adding nor subtracting, nor any of the supernatural divinations that constitute mathematics … for what is a number other than a ghost of the mind?

  I’ll cease the coyness before I begin to sound like some disembodied, alien intelligence from outer space. (Actually, that would not be too far from the mark, even though the concept of outer space did not exist for me then … and even now seems an absurd thought. And as far as alien intelligences go, we do not have to seek for them in outer space, as I can attest and Jeremy Bremen is soon to learn. There are alien intelligences enough among you on this earth, ignored or misunderstood.)

  But on this morning in April when Gail dies, none of this means anything to me. The concept of death itself means nothing to me, much less its multifoliate subtleties and variations.

  But I know this now—that however innocent and transparent Jeremy’s soul and emotions seem on this April morning, there is a darkness already abiding there. A darkness born of deception and deep (if unintentional) cruelty. Jeremy is not a cruel man—cruelty is as alien to his nature as it is to mine—but the fact that he has kept a secret from Gail for years when neither thought that he or she could keep a secret from the other, and the fact that this secret is essential to the denial of their shared wishes and desires for so many years—this secret in and of itself constitutes a cruelty. One that has hurt Gail even when she does not know it is hurting her.

  The mindshield that Jeremy thinks he has lost as he boards his airplane to a random destination is not exactly lost—he still has the same ability as ever to shield his mind from the random telepathic surges of others—but that mindshield is no longer capable of protecting him from those “dark wavelengths” he must now endure. It had not been the “shared mindshield,” merely the shared life with Gail that had protected him from this cruel underside of things.

  And as Jeremy begins his descent into hell he carries another secret—this one hidden even from himself. And it is this second secret, a hidden pregnancy in him as opposed to an earlier hidden sterility there, that will mean so much to me later.

  So much to all three of us.

  But first let me tell you of someone else. On the morning that Jeremy boards his aircraft to nowhere, Robby Bustamante is being picked up at the usual time by the van from the East St. Louis Day School for the Blind. Robby is more than blind—he has been blind, deaf, and retarded since birth. If he had been a more normal child physically, the diagnosis would have included the term “autistic,” but with the terminally blind, deaf, and retarded, the word “autism” is a redundancy.

  Robby is thirteen years old, but already weighs one hundred and seventy-five pounds. His eyes, if one can call them that, are the sunken, darkened caverns of the irrevocably blind. The pupils, barely visible under drooping, mismatched lids, track separately in random movements. The boy’s lips are loose and blubbery, his teeth gapped and carious. At thirteen, he already has the dark down of a mustache on his upper lip. His black hair stands out in violent tufts; his eyebrows meet above the bridge of his broad nose.

  Robby’s obese body balances precariously on grub-white, emaciated legs. He learned to walk at age eleven, but still will stagger only a few paces before toppling over. When he does move
, it is in a series of pigeon-toed lurches, his pudgy arms pulled in as tight as two broken wings, wrists cocked at an improbable angle, fingers separate and extended. As with so many of the retarded blind, his favorite motion is a perpetual rocking with his hand fanning above his sunken eyes as if to cast shadows into the pits of darkness there.

  He does not speak. Robby’s only sounds are animallike grunts, occasional, meaningless giggles, and a rare squeal of protest that sounds like nothing so much as an operatic falsetto.

  As I mentioned earlier, Robby has been blind, deaf, and retarded since birth. His mother’s drug addiction during pregnancy and an additional placental malfunction had shut off Robby’s senses as surely as a sinking ship condemns compartment after compartment to the sea by the automatic shutting of watertight doors.

  The boy has been coming to the East St. Louis Day School for the Blind for six years. His life before that is largely unknown. The authorities had taken notice of Robby’s mother’s addiction in the hospital and had ordered social-worker follow-ups in the home, but through some bureaucratic oversight, none of these had occurred for seven years after the boy’s birth. As it turned out, the social worker who did finally make a home visit was doing so in relation to a court-ordered methadone-treatment program for the mother rather than out of any solicitude for the child. In truth, the courts, the authorities, the hospital … everyone … had forgotten that the child existed.

  The door to the apartment had been left open, and the social worker heard noises. The social worker said later that she would not have entered, except that it sounded like some small animal was in distress. In a very real sense, that was the fact of it.

  Robby had been sealed into the bathroom by the nailing of a piece of plywood over the bottom half of the door. His small arms and legs were so atrophied that he could not walk and could barely crawl. He was seven years old. There were wet papers on the tile floor, but Robby was naked and smeared with his own excrement. It was obvious that the boy had been sealed in there for several days, perhaps longer. A tap had been left on, and water filled the room to the depth of three inches. Robby was rolling fitfully in the mess, making mewling noises and trying to keep his face above water.