The Hollow Man (2 page)

The smell of steak being grilled came to him on the breeze. Bremen tried to remember whether he had eaten that day or not. His stomach twisted in a mild shadow of the pain that still filled Gail even now that the medication was working. Bremen considered going back to the convenience store near the lighthouse to get a sandwich, but remembered an old Payday candy bar he had purchased from the vending machine in the hospital corridor during the previous week’s vigil. It was still in his jacket pocket. Bremen contented himself with chewing on the rock-hard wedge of peanuts while he watched the evening settle in.

Footsteps continued to echo in the hall. It sounded as if entire armies were on the march. The rush of footsteps, clatter of trays, and vague chatter of aides bringing dinner to the other patients reminded Gail of lying in bed as a child and listening to one of her parents’ parties downstairs.

Remember the party where we met?
sent Bremen.

Mmmm
. Gail’s attention was thin. Already the black fingers of panic were creeping around the edge of her
awareness as the pain began to overwhelm the painkiller. The thin needle behind her eye seemed to grow hotter.

Bremen tried to send memory images of Chuck Gilpen’s party a decade earlier, of their first meeting, of that first second when their minds had opened to one another and they had realized
I am not alone
. And then the corollary realization,
I am not a freak
. There, in Chuck Gilpen’s crowded town house, amid the tense babble and even tenser neurobabble of mingling teachers and graduate students, their lives had been changed forever.

Bremen was just inside the door—someone had pressed a drink in his hand—when suddenly he had sensed another mindshield quite near him. He had put out a gentle probe, and immediately Gail’s thoughts had swept across him like a searchlight in a dark room.

Both were stunned. Their first reaction had been to increase the strength of their mindshields, to roll up like frightened armadillos. Each soon found that useless against the unconscious and almost involuntary probes of the other. Neither had ever encountered another telepath of more than primitive, untapped ability. Each had assumed that he or she was a freak—unique and unassailable. Now they stood naked before each other in an empty place. A second later, almost without volition, they flooded each other’s mind with a torrent of images, self-images, half memories, secrets, sensations, preferences, perceptions, hidden shames, half-formed longings, and fully formed fears. Nothing was held back. Every petty cruelty committed, sexual experiment experienced, and prejudice harbored poured out along with thoughts of past birthday parties, former lovers, parents, and an endless stream of trivia. Rarely had two people known each other as well after fifty years of marriage.

A minute later they met for the first time.

The beacon from Barnegat Light passed over Bremen’s head every twenty-four seconds. There were more lights burning out at sea now than along the dark line of beach. The wind had come up after midnight, and Bremen clutched the blanket around himself tightly. Gail had refused the needle when the nurse had last made her rounds, but her mindtouch was still clouded. Bremen forced the contact through sheer strength of will.

Gail had always been afraid of the dark. Many were the times during their nine years of marriage that he had reached out in the night with his mind or arm to reassure her. Now she was the frightened little girl again, left alone upstairs in the big old house on Burlingame Avenue. There were things in the darkness beneath her bed.

Bremen reached through her pain and confusion to share the sound of the sea with her. He told her stories about that day’s antics of Gernisavien, their calico cat. He lay in the hollow of the sand to match his body with hers on the hospital bed. Slowly she began to relax, to surrender her thoughts to his. She even managed to doze a few times without the morphine, and her dreams were the movement of stars between clouds and the sharp smell of the Atlantic.

Bremen described the week’s work at the farm—what little work he had done between hospital vigils—and shared the subtle beauty of the Fourier equations across the chalkboard in his study and the sunlit satisfaction of planting a peach tree by the front drive. He shared memories of their ski trip to Aspen the year before and the sudden shock of a searchlight reaching in to the beach from an unseen ship out at sea. He shared what little poetry he had memorized, but the words kept sliding into pure images and purer feelings.

The night drew on, and Bremen shared the cold clarity
of it with his wife, adding to each image the warm overlay of his love. He shared trivia and hopes for the future. From seventy-five miles away he reached out and touched her hand with his. When he drifted off to sleep for only a few minutes, he sent her his dreams.

Gail died just before the first false light of dawn touched the sky.

T
wo days after the funeral, Frank Lowell, the head of the mathematics department at Haverford, came to the house to assure Bremen that his job would be kept safe no matter what he decided to do in the coming months.

“Seriously, Jerry,” Frank was saying, “there’s nothing to worry about in that area. Do what you have to do to put things back together. Whenever you want it back, it’s yours.” Frank smiled his best little-boy smile and adjusted his rimless glasses. He seemed to have a chubby thirteen-year-old’s cheeks and chin behind the mat of beard. His blue eyes were open and guileless.

Satisfaction. A rival removed. Never really liked Bremen … too
smart. The Goldmann research made him too much of a threat
.

Images of the young blonde from MIT whom Frank had
interviewed the summer before and slept with through the long winter
.

Perfect. No more need for lying to Nell or inventing conferences to fly to over long weekends. Sheri can stay in town, near campus, and she’ll have the chair by next Christmas if Bremen stays away too long. Perfect
.

“Seriously, Jer,” said Frank, and leaned forward to pat Bremen’s knee, “just take whatever time you need. We’ll consider it a sabbatical and keep the position open for you.”

Bremen looked up and nodded. Three days later he mailed in his letter of resignation to the college.

Dorothy Parks from the psychology department came on the third day after the funeral, insisted on making dinner for Bremen, and stayed until after dark, explaining the mechanisms of grief to him. They sat on the porch until darkness and chill drove them inside. It was beginning to feel like winter again.

“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.