The Hollow Man (3 page)

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 second 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.

I
n 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.

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.

T
he 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.