The Hollow Man Page 3

  Robby was hospitalized for four months, spent five weeks in a county home, and was then returned to the custody of his mother. In accordance with further court orders, he was dutifully bused to the Day School for the Blind for five hours of treatment a day, six days a week.

  When Jeremy boards the airplane on this April morning, he is thirty-five years old and his future is as predictable as the elegant and ellipsoid mathematics of a yo-yo’s path. On this same morning, eight hundred-some miles away, as thirteen-year-old Robby Bustamante is lifted aboard his van for the short voyage to the Day School for the Blind, his future is as flat and featureless as a line extending nowhere, holding no hope of intersection with anyone or anything.

  Out of the Dead Land

  The captain had dimmed the seat-belt sign and announced that it was safe to move about in the cabin—urging everyone to keep their belts on while seated anyway, just as a precaution—when the true nightmare began for Bremen.

  For an instant he was sure that the plane had exploded, that some terrorist bomb had been triggered, so brilliant was the flash of white light, so loud was the sudden screaming of a hundred and eighty-seven voices in his mind. His sudden sense of falling added to the conviction that the plane had shattered into ten thousand pieces and that he was one of them, tumbling out into the stratosphere with the rest of the screaming passengers. Bremen closed his eyes and prepared to die.

  He was not falling. Part of his consciousness was aware of the seat under him, of the floor under his feet, of the sunlight coming through the window to his left. But the screaming continued. And grew louder. Bremen realized that he was on the verge of joining that chorus of screams, so he stuffed his knuckles in his mouth and bit down hard.

  A hundred and eighty-seven minds suddenly reminded of their own mortality by the simple routine of an aircraft taking off. Some in terror recognized, some in full denial behind their newspapers and drinks, some buoyed by the routine of it all even as a deeper center of their brains drowned in the fear of being locked in this long, pressurized coffin and suspended miles above the ground.

  Bremen writhed and twitched in the isolation of his empty row while a hundred and eighty-seven careening minds trampled him with iron-shod hooves.

  Jesus, I should’ve called Sarah before the flight left.…

  Son of a bitch knew what the contract said. Or should have. It isn’t my fault if …

  Daddy … Daddy … I’m sorry … Daddy …

  If Barry didn’t want me to sleep with him, Barry should’ve called …

  She was in the tub. The water was red. Her wrists were as white and open as a sliced tuber.…

  Fuck Frederickson! Fuck Frederickson! Fuck Frederickson and Myers and Honeywell, too! Fuck Frederickson!…

  What if the plane goes down, oh shit and Jesus and goddamn, what if it goes down and they find the stuff in the briefcase, oh shit and Jesus, ashes and burned steel and bits of me and what if they find the money and the Uzi and the teeth in the velvet bag and the bags like so many sausages up my ass and down my gut, oh please, Jesus … what if the plane goes down and … And these were the easy ones, the fragments of language that cut Bremen like so many shards of dull steel. It was the images that lacerated and sliced. The images were the scalpels. Bremen opened his eyes and saw the cabin as normal as it could be, sunlight streaming through the window to his left, two middle-aged flight attendants beginning to hand out breakfasts twelve rows ahead, people lounging and reading and dozing … but the panicked images kept coming, the vertigo of it all was too great, so Bremen undid his seat belt, folded back the armrest, and curled up on the empty seat to his left, still being pummeled by the sounds and textures and discordant colors of a thousand uninvited thoughts.

  Teeth dragging on slate. The burned ozone and enamel smell of a dentist’s drill left too long on a rotten tooth. Sheila! Christ, Sheila … I didn’t mean to … Teeth dragging slowly across slate.

  A fist crushing a tomato, pulp oozing between spattered fingers. Only it is not a tomato but a heart.

  Friction and lubricity, the slow, rhythmical thrust and pull of sex in the dark. Derek … Derek, I warned you.… Lavatory graffiti images of penis and vulva, Technicolor hues, moist and three-dimensional. Slow close-up of a vagina opening ahead like a cavern between moist portals. Derek … I warned you that she would consume you!

  Screams of violence. The violence of horses. Violence without boundaries or pause. A face being struck, like a clay figure being pounded flat again, only the face is not clay … the bone and cartilage crack and broaden, the flesh pulps and ruptures … the fist does not relent.

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  Bremen managed to sit up, to clench his right hand on the armrest, and to smile at the flight attendant. “Yes, fine,” he said.

  The middle-aged woman seemed all wrinkles and tired flesh behind the tan and makeup. She held a breakfast tray. “I can check to see if there is a doctor aboard if you’re not feeling well, sir.”

  Damn. Just what we need this morning … some feeb with epilepsy or worse. We’ll never get the geese fed if I have to hold this guy’s hand while he twitches and sweats all the way to Miami. “I’d be happy to have the captain check for a doctor if you’re ill, sir.”

  “No, no.” Bremen smiled and took the offered breakfast, pulled down the tray from the seat ahead. “I’m fine, honestly.”

  Goddamn, son of a bitch, fucking plane goes down, they find the sausages up my ass, motherfucker Gallego gonna cut Doris’s tits off an’ feed ’em to Sanctus for fucking breakfast.

  Bremen sliced a bit of omelet, raised the fork, swallowed. The flight attendant nodded and moved on.

  Bremen made sure that no one was watching, then spat the soft mass of omelet into a paper napkin and set it next to the tray of food. His hands shook as he set his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.

  Daddy … oh, Daddy … I’m so sorry, Daddy.…

  Pounding the face into a flattened mass, pounding the mass until the marks of knuckles in ridged flesh were the only features, pounding the flattened mass back into the crude shape of a face to pound it again.…

  Twenty-eight thousand from Pierce, seventeen thousand from Lords, forty-two thousand from Unimart-Selex … the white wrist like a sliced tuber in the bathtub … fifteen thousand seven hundred from Marx, nine thousand from Pierce’s backer …

  Bremen lowered the left armrest and gripped it tightly, both arms straining with the effort. It was like hanging from a vertical wall … as if his row of seats were bolted onto the face of a cliff and only the strength of his forearms was holding him in place. He could hang on for a minute more … perhaps two minutes more … hold on for three minutes more before the tidal wave of images and obscenities and the tsunami of hates and fears washed him off. Perhaps five minutes. Sealed here in this long tube, miles above nothing, with no way to escape, nowhere to go.

  “This is your captain speaking. Just wanted to let you know that we’ve reached our cruising altitude of thirty-five thousand feet, that it looks like clear weather all the way down the coast today, and that our flying time to Miami will be … ah … three hours and fifteen minutes. Please let us know if we can do anything to make your trip more comfortable today … and thanks for flying the friendly skies of United.”

  On the Joyless Beach

  Bremen had no memory of the rest of the flight, no memory of the Miami airport, no memory of renting the car or driving out away from the city into the Everglades.

  But he must have. He was here … wherever here was.

  The rental Beretta was parked under low trees by the side of a gravel road. Tall palm trees and a riot of tropical foliage formed a green wall in front and on two sides of the car. The road behind him was empty of traffic. Bremen was sitting with his forehead against the steering wheel, hands on the wheel on either side of his head. Sweat dripped onto his knees and the plastic of the wheel. He was shaking.

  Bremen pulled the keys, thrust open the d
oor, and staggered away from the car. He stumbled into the foliage and fell to his knees a brief second before the cramps and nausea rolled over him. Bremen vomited into the undergrowth, crawled backward, was assailed by more waves of illness, dropped to his elbows, and continued to vomit until only noise came up. After a moment he dropped to his side, rolled away from the mess, wiped his chin with a shaking hand, and lay staring up through palm fronds at the sky.

  The sky was a gunmetal gray. Bremen could hear the rasp of distant thoughts and images still echoing through his skull. He remembered a quote that Gail had shown him—something she had dredged up from the sports-writer Jimmy Cannon after she and Bremen had argued about whether prizefighting was a sport or not. “Boxing is a filthy enterprise,” Cannon had written, “and if you stay in it long enough, your mind will become a concert hall where Chinese music never stops playing.”

  Well, Bremen reflected grimly, barely able to sort out his own thoughts from the distant neurobabble, my mind’s sure as hell a concert hall. I just wish it was only Chinese music playing.

  He got to his knees, saw a glint of green water down the slope through the shrubs, rose, and staggered that way. A river or swamp stretched away through dim light. Spanish moss hung from live oak and cypress trees along the shore and more cypress rose from the brackish water. Bremen knelt, skimmed away the crust of green scum from the water, and washed his cheeks and chin. He rinsed his mouth and spat into the algae-choked water.

  There was a house—little more than a shack, actually—under tall trees fifty yards to Bremen’s right. His rented Beretta was parked near the beginnings of a trail that wound through foliage to the sagging structure. The faded pine boards of the shack blended with the shadows there, but Bremen was able to make out signs on the wall facing the road: LIVE BAIT and GUIDE SERVICE and CABIN RENTALS and VISIT OUR SNAKE EMPORIUM. Bremen moved that way, shuffling along the edge of the river, stream, swamp … whatever that green-and-brown expanse of water was.

  The shack was set up on cement blocks; from beneath it came a loam-rich scent of wet earth. An old Chevy was parked on the far side of the low building, and now Bremen could see a wider lane that ran down from the road. He paused at the screen door. It was dark inside, and despite the signs the place seemed more some hillbilly’s shack than a store. Bremen shrugged and opened the door with a screech.

  “Howdy,” said one of the two men watching from the darkness. The one who spoke had been standing behind a counter; the other sat back amid shadows in the doorway to another room.

  “Hello.” Bremen paused, felt the rush of neurobabble from the two men like the hot breath of some giant creature, and almost staggered outside again before noticing the big, electric cooler. He felt as if he had not drunk anything for days. It was the old kind of cooler with a sliding top, bottles of cold pop resting in half-melted ice. Bremen fished out the first bottle he uncovered, an RC Cola, and went to the counter to pay for it.

  “Fifty cents,” said the standing man. Bremen could see him better now: wrinkled tan slacks, a T-shirt that once had been blue but had been washed to a near gray, rough, reddened face, and blue eyes that hadn’t faded looking out from under a nylon cap with a mesh back.

  Bremen fumbled in his pocket and found no change. His wallet was empty. For a second he was sure that he had no money, but then he fished in his gray suitcoat pocket and came out with a roll of bills, all twenties and fifties from the looks of it. Now he remembered going to the bank the day before and removing the $3,865.71 that had been left in their joint account after mortgage and hospital payments.

  Shit. Another goddamn drug dealer. Prob’ly from Miami.

  Bremen could hear the standing man’s thoughts as clearly as if they had been spoken, so he replied in words even as he peeled off a twenty-dollar bill and set it on the counter. “Uh-uh,” he rasped, “I’m not a drug dealer.”

  The standing man blinked, set a red hand on the twenty-dollar bill, and blinked again. He cleared his throat. “I didn’t say you was, mister.”

  It was Bremen’s turn to blink. The man’s anger pulsed at him like a hot, red light. Through the static of neurobabble, he could sort out a few images.

  Fucking druggies killed Norm Jr. as sure as if they’d put a gun to his head. Boy never had no discipline, no common sense. If his mommy’d lived, mighta been different.… Images of a child on a tire swing, the seven-year-old boy laughing, front tooth missing. Images of the boy as a man in his late twenties, eyes darkened, pale skin slick with sweat. Please, Dad … I swear I’ll pay you back. Just a loan so I can get on my feet again.

  You mean get on your feet until you can score another hit of coke, or crack, or whatever you call it now. Norm Sr.’s voice. When Norm Sr. had gone into Dade County to see the boy. Norm Jr. shaking, sick, deep in debt, ready to go infinitely deeper in debt to keep up his habit. Over my dead body you’ll get more money for this shit. You wanna come home, work at the store … that’s all right. We’ll get you into the county clinic.… Images of the boy, the man now, sweeping dishes and coffee cups from the tabletop and stalking from the café. Memory of Norm Sr. weeping for the first time in almost fifty years.

  Bremen blinked as Norm Sr. handed him his change. “I …” began Bremen, then realized that he could not say that he was sorry. “I’m not a drug dealer,” he said again. “I know how it must look. The teller gave me the balance in fifties and twenties … our savings.” Bremen popped the top off the RC Cola and took a long drink. “I just flew down from Philadelphia,” he said, wiping his chin with the back of his hand. “My … my wife died last Saturday.”

  It was the first time Bremen had said those words and they sounded flat and patently false to him. He took another sip and looked down, confused.

  Norm’s thoughts were churned, but the red heat was gone. Maybe. What the hell … fella can be strung out from his missus dyin’ as much as from drugs. Suspicious of everybody these days. He looks like I did when Alma Jean passed on … he looks like hell.

  “You thinking of doin’ some fishin’?” said Norm Sr.

  “Fishing …” Bremen finished the drink and looked up at the shelves stocked with lures, small cardboard boxes of bobbers, and reels. He saw cane and fiberglass rods stacked against the far wall. “Yesss,” he said slowly, surprising himself with his answer, “I’d like to do some fishing.”

  Norm Sr. nodded. “You need any tackle? Bait? A license? Or you got that already?”

  Bremen licked his lips, feeling something returning to the insides of his skull. His scoured, bruised skull. “I need everything,” he said, almost in a whisper.

  Norm Sr. grinned. “Well, mister, you got the money for it.” He began moving around, offering Bremen choices on tackle, bait, and rental rods. Bremen wanted no choices; he took the first of everything that Norm Sr. offered. The stack on the countertop grew.

  Bremen went back to the cooler and fished around for a second bottle, feeling somehow liberated at the thought of that also going on his growing tab.

  “You need a place to stay? It’s easier if you stay out on one of the islands if you’re gonna fish the lake.”

  Was that swamp he’d mistaken for the Everglades a lake? “A place to stay?” Bremen repeated, seeing in the reflecting glass of Norm Sr.’s slow thoughts that the man was sure that he was retarded in his grief. “Yes. I’d like to stay here a few days.”

  Norm Sr. turned back to the silent, seated man. Bremen opened his thoughts to the dark figure there, but almost no language came through. The man’s thoughts churned like an infinitely slow washing machine turning a few rags and bundles of images, but almost no words at all. Bremen almost gasped at the newness of this.

  “Verge, didn’t that Chicago fella check out of Copely Isle Two?”

  Verge nodded, and in a sudden shift of light from the only window, Bremen could see now that he was an old man, toothless, liver spots almost glowing in the errant touch of daylight.

  Norm Sr. turned back. “Verge don’t talk so goo
d after his last stroke … aphasia is what Doc Myers calls it … but his mind’s all right. We got an opening on one of the island cabins. Forty-two dollars a day, plus rental of one of the boats an’ outboards. Or Verge could take you out … no charge for that. Good spots right from the island.”

  Bremen nodded. Yes. Yes to everything.

  Norm Sr. returned the nod. “Okay, minimum three nights’ stay, so there’s a hundred-and-ten-dollar deposit. You gonna stay three nights?”

  Bremen nodded. Yes.

  Norm Sr. turned to a surprisingly modern electronic cash register and began totaling the bill. Bremen pulled several fifties from his wad of bills, shoved the rest into his pocket.

  “Oh …” said Norm Sr., rubbing his cheek. Bremen could sense the reluctance to ask a personal question. “I imagine you got clothes for fishin’, but if … ah … if you need somethin’ else to wear. Or groceries …”

  “Just a minute,” said Bremen, and left the store. He walked up the narrow trail, past where he had vomited, back to the rental Beretta. There was a single piece of luggage on the passenger seat: his old gym bag. Bremen had no recollection of checking it through, but there was a claim check on it. He lifted it, felt the uneasy emptiness except for a single lump of weight, and unzipped it.

  Inside, wrapped in a red bandanna that Gail had given him the previous summer, was a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver. It had been a gift from Gail’s policeman brother the year they had lived in Germantown and there had been break-ins up and down their block. Neither Bremen nor Gail had ever fired it. He had always meant to throw it away—it and the box of shells Carl had given them with the pistol—but instead had left it locked in the lower right-hand drawer of his desk.