The Hollow Man (34 page)

She is dressed in a blue smock and is waving her arms at him. By the time he is downstairs she has thrown half a dozen items into their old wicker basket and is boiling water to make iced tea. “Come on, sleepyhead,” she says, grinning at him. “I have a surprise for you.”

“I’m not sure we need any more surprises,” he mumbles. Gernisavien is back and moving between their legs, occasionally rubbing up against a chair leg as if offering affection to the chair.

“This
one we do,” she says, and is upstairs, humming and thrashing around in the closet.

“Let me shower and get some coffee,” he says, and stops.
Where does the water come from?
The electric lights had not been working yesterday, but the taps had all functioned.

Before he can ponder the question further, Gail is back in the kitchen and handing him the picnic basket. “No shower. No coffee. Come on.”

Gernisavien follows reluctantly as Gail leads them up and over the hill where the highway once had been. They cross meadows to the east and then climb a final hill that is steeper than any he can remember in this part of Pennsylvania. At the summit Jeremy lets the picnic basket drop from a suddenly nerveless hand.

“Holy shit,” he whispers.

In the valley where the turnpike had been there is now an ocean.

“Holy shit,” he says again softly, almost reverently.

It is the curve of beach so familiar to them from their trips to Barnegat Light along the New Jersey shore, but now there is no lighthouse, no island, and the coastline stretching north and south looks more like some remote stretch of cliffs along the Pacific than any rim of the Atlantic that Jeremy has ever seen. The hillside they have been climbing was actually the rear slope of a mountain that drops off several hundred feet on its east side to the beach and breakers below. The rocky summit they are standing on seems strangely familiar to Jeremy, and recognition slowly dawns.

Big Slide Mountain
, confirms Gail.
Our honeymoon
.

Jeremy nods. His mouth is still open. He does not find it necessary to remind her that Big Slide Mountain had been in the New York Adirondacks, hundreds of miles from the sea.

They picnic on the beach just north of where the sheer face of the mountain catches the morning sun. Gernisavien has to be carried down the final stretch of steep slope, and once set down, she runs off to hunt insects in the dune grass. The air smells of salt and rotting vegetation and clean summer breezes. Far out to sea, gulls wheel and pivot while their cries make minor counterpoint to the crash of surf.

“Holy shit,” Jeremy says a final time. He sets the picnic basket down and tosses the blanket onto the sand.

Gail laughs and tugs off her smock. She is wearing a dark one-piece suit underneath.

Jeremy collapses onto the blanket. “Is that why you went upstairs?” he manages between laughs. “To get a
suit? Afraid the lifeguards will toss you out if they see you skinny-dipping?”

She kicks sand at him and runs to the water. Her dive is clean and perfectly timed and she cuts into the surf like an arrow. Jeremy watches her as she swims out twenty yards, treads water as another breaker rolls by under her, and then paddles in to where she can stand. He can see by the way her shoulders are hunched and by the sight of her nipples raised under the thin Lycra that she is freezing.

“Come on in!” she calls, just managing to grin without having her teeth chatter. “The water’s fine!”

Jeremy laughs again, steps out of his Top-Siders, gets out of his clothes in three quick movements, and runs down the wet shingle of beach. She is waiting for him with open but goose-bumpy arms when he comes up spluttering from his dive.

After their picnic breakfast of croissants and iced tea from the Thermos, they lie back among the dunes to get out of the rising wind. Gernisavien returns to stare at them, finds nothing interesting, and goes back to the high grasses. From where they lie they can see the sun climbing higher and throwing new shadows along the uneven face of the mountain south of them.

Gail has removed her suit to sunbathe and falls asleep. Jeremy is almost asleep with his head on her thigh when he becomes suddenly and totally aware of the clean-sweat scent of her skin, and of the fine film of moisture glistening along the soft groove inches from his face where the curve of her thigh meets her groin. He turns over, rests his elbows on the blanket, and looks up beyond the compressed hillocks of her pale breasts at the undercurve of her chin, at the suggestion of dark stipple under her
arms, and at the corona of light the sun is making around her hair.

Gail begins to stir, to question his movement, but he restrains her with the palm of his hand against her stomach. Her eyelids flutter and then stay closed. Jeremy shifts position, lifts himself and then lowers himself so he is lying between her legs, parts her thighs with his hands, and lowers his face to the sun-moistened warmth of her. Thinking of a line she had shared with him years before from a John Updike novel, he imagines a kitten learning to lap milk.

Moments later she pulls him higher, her hands and breathing rapid against him. Their lovemaking is more violent than any that has come before and the sharing of it goes beyond passion and mindtouch. Later, after Jeremy has lain alongside her with his head on her shoulder, their breathing slowing finally, their heartbeats receding so that they can hear the surf again, he fumbles for a towel and brushes away the sweat and traces of sand from her skin.

“Gail,” he whispers finally, just as they are both ready to drop off to sleep in the shade of the dune grass, “I have to tell you something.” But even as he speaks he feels the remnant of his last mindshield tighten and curl in a reflex protective action. The secret of the variocele has been hidden too deeply for too long to be surrendered so easily. He struggles for the words, or the thoughts, but neither come. “Gail, I … oh, Jesus, kiddo … I don’t know how …”

She turns on her side and touches his cheek.
The variocele? The fact that you didn’t tell me? I know, Jerry
.

The shock is like a physical blow to him. “You know?”
???? When? How long?

She closes her eyes and he sees the moisture in the
lashes.
That last night I was sick. While you were sleeping. I knew there was … something … I’d known it for a long time. But the secret of it hurt you for so long that I had to know before …

Jeremy begins shaking as if from illness. After a moment he does not try to hide the shaking, but clutches at the blanket until it passes. Gail touches the back of his head.
It’s all right
.

“No!” He cries out the syllable. “No … you don’t understand … I
knew
about this.…”

Gail nods, her cheek almost touching his. Her whisper mixes with the wind in the dune grass. “Yes. But do you know
why
you never told me? Why you had to create a mindshield like a tumor in your own mind to hide it?”

Jeremy shudders.
Ashamed
.

No,
not ashamed
, corrects Gail.
Frightened
.

He opens his eyes to look at her. Their faces are only inches apart.
Frightened? No, I …

Frightened
, sends Gail. There is no judgment in her voice, only forgiveness.
Terrified
.

Of what?
But even as he forms the thought he grips the blanket again as the sensation of sliding, of falling, rolls across him.

Gail closes her eyes again and shows him what had been hidden from him within the tight tumor of his secret.

Fear of deformity. The baby might not be normal. Fear of having a retarded child. Fear of having a child who would never share their mindtouch and would always be a stranger in their midst. Fear of having a child
with
the ability who would be driven insane by their adult thoughts crashing into his or her newborn consciousness
.

Fear of having a normal child who would destroy the perfect balance of his relationship with Gail
.

Fear of sharing her with a baby
.

Fear of losing her
.

Fear of losing himself
.

The shaking begins again and this time clutching the blanket and the beach sand does not save him. He feels on the verge of being swept away by riptides of shame and terror. Gail puts her arm around him and holds him until it passes.

Gail,
my darling, I am so sorry. So sorry
.

Her mindtouch reaches beyond his mind to someplace deeper.
I know. I know
.

They fall asleep there in the shadows of the dunes, with Gernisavien stalking grasshoppers and the wind rising in the high grass. Jeremy dreams then, and his dreams mix freely with Gail’s, and in neither, for the first time, is there even the hint of pain.

J
eremy walks in the orchard in the cool of the evening and tries to talk to God.

“Robby?” He whispers, but the word seems loud in the twilight silence.
Robby? Are you there?

The last light has left the hillside to the east and the sky is cloudless. Color leaks out of the world until everything solid assumes a shade of gray. Jeremy pauses, glances back at the farmhouse where Gail is visible making dinner in the lantern-lit kitchen. He can feel her gentle mindtouch; she is listening.

Robby? Can you hear me? Let’s talk
.

There is a sudden flutter of sparrows in the barn and Jeremy jumps. He smiles, shakes his head, grabs a lower limb of a cherry tree, and leans onto it, his chin on the back of his hands. It is getting dark down by the stream
and he can see the fireflies blinking against black.
All this is from our memories? Our view of the world?

Silence except for insect sounds and the slight murmur of the creek. Overhead, the first stars are coming out between the dark geometries of tree branches.

“Robby,” Jeremy says aloud, “if you want to talk to us, we would welcome the company.” That is only partially true, but Jeremy does not try to hide the part that denies it. Nor does he deny the deep question that lies under all of their other thoughts like an earthquake fault:
What does one do when the God of one’s Creation is dying?

Jeremy stands in the orchard until it is full dark, leaning on the branch, watching the stars emerge, and waiting for the voice that does not come. Finally Gail calls him in and he walks back up the hill to dinner.

“I think,” says Gail as they are finishing their coffee, “that I know why Jacob killed himself.”

Jeremy sets his own cup down carefully and gives her his full attention, waiting for the surge of her thoughts to coalesce into language.

“I think it has something to do with that conversation he and I had the night we had dinner at Durgan Park,” says Gail. “The night after he did the MRI scans on us.”

Jeremy remembers the dinner and much of the conversation, but he checks his memories with Gail’s.

Jaunting
, she sends.

“Jaunting? What’s that?”

You remember that Jacob and I talked about
The Stars My Destination
by Alfred Bester?

Jeremy shakes his head even as he shares her memory of it.
A sci-fi novel?

Science fiction
, Gail corrects him automatically.

He is trying to remember.
Yeah, I sort of remember. You
and he were both sci-fi fans, it turns out. But what does “jaunting” have to do with anything … it was a sort of a “Beam me up, Scotty” teleportation thing, wasn’t it?

Gail carries some dishes to the sink and rinses them. She leans back against the counter and crosses her arms. “No,” she says, her voice carrying the slight defensive tone she always uses when discussing science fiction or religion, “it wasn’t ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’ It was a story about a man who learned to teleport all by himself.…”

By “teleport” you mean zap instantaneously from place to place, right, kiddo? Well, you have to know that that’s as impossible as anything in the—

“Yes, yes,” says Gail, ignoring him. “Bester called the personal teleportation jaunting … but Jacob and I weren’t talking about jaunting really, just how the writer had people learn how to do it.”

Jeremy settles back and sips his coffee.
Okay. I’m listening
.

“Well, I think the idea was that they had a lab out on some asteroid or somewhere, and some scientists were trying to find out if people could jaunt. It turns out that they couldn’t.…”

Hey, great
, sends Jeremy, adding the image of a Cheshire cat’s grin,
let’s put the science back in science fiction, huh?

“Shut up, Jerry. Anyway, the experiments weren’t succeeding, but then there was a fire or some sort of disaster in a closed section of a lab, and this one technician or whatever just teleported right out … jaunted to a safe place.”

Don’t we wish that life were that simple
. He tries to shield the memories of him clambering up a frozen corpse while Miz Morgan approached with the dogs and a shotgun.

Gail is concentrating. “No, the idea was that a lot of
people had the jaunting ability, but only one person in a thousand could use it, and that was when his or her life was in absolute jeopardy. So the scientists set up these experiments.…”

Jeremy glimpses the experiments.
Jesus wept. They put loaded pistols to the subjects’ heads and squeezed the trigger, after letting them know that jaunting is the only way they can escape? The National Academy of Sciences might have something to say about that methodology, kiddo
.

Gail shakes her head.
What Jacob and I were talking about, Jerry, was how certain things come only out of desperate situations like that. That’s when he began talking about probability waves and Everett trees, and I lost him. But I remember him saying that it would be like the ultimate two-slit experiment. That’s why I was interested in what you were talking about when we were going home on the train.… alternate realities and all.…

Jeremy stands up so quickly that his chair clatters to the floor behind him. He does not notice. “My God, kiddo, Jacob didn’t just kill himself out of despair. He was trying to jaunt.”