The Hollow Man

by Dan Simmons

  Later on that first day’s night, sometime after it grew dark (Bremen did not consult his watch), he had gone into the shack, prepared a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich for dinner, washed it down with another beer, cleaned the dishes and then himself, and had gone to bed, to sleep for the first time in four days, and to sleep, without dreaming, for the first time in many weeks.

  On the second day Bremen slept late and fished from the dock through the morning, caught nothing at all, and was as satisfied as he had been the night before. After an early lunch he had walked along the bank almost to a point where the river drained into the swamp, or vice versa … he could not tell, and fished for a few hours from a bank. Again, he threw back everything he caught, but he saw a snake swimming lazily between the half-submerged cypress and for the first time in his life was not afraid of the serpent.

  On the evening of the second day Verge came put-putting upriver, coasted into the dock, and let Bremen know through simple signs that he was there to take him fishing back in the swamp. Bremen had hesitated a moment—he did not know if he was ready for the swamp—but then had lowered his rod and reel to the old man and jumped carefully into the front of the boat.

  The swamp had been dark and overhung with Spanish moss, and Bremen had spent less time paying attention to his fishing than in watching the huge birds flapping lazily overhead to their nests, or listening to the evening calls of a thousand varieties of frogs, and even watching two alligators move lazily through the dusk-tinted water. Verge’s thoughts were almost one with the rhythms of the boat and swamp, and Bremen found it infinitely soothing to surrender the turmoil of his own consciousness to the damaged clarity of his fishing partner’s damaged mind. Through some strange way Bremen had fathomed that Verge, although poorly educated and far from being a learned man, had been a kind of poet in his earlier days. Now, since the stroke, that poetry showed itself as a gentle cadence of wordless memories and as a willingness to surrender memory itself to the more demanding cadence of now.

  Neither of them had caught anything worth keeping, so they came out of the swamp into a lighter darkness—a full moon was rising above cypress to the east—and tied up to the little dock at Bremen’s shack. A breeze kept the mosquitoes away as they sat in companionable silence on the porch and finished the last of Bremen’s beers.

  Now, on the third morning, Bremen rose and came out into the light, blinking at the sunrise and wanting to get a little fishing in before breakfast. Bremen jumped down from the dock and walked a hundred yards south along the bank to a grassy place he had found the previous afternoon. Mist rose from the river and the birds filled the air with urgent cries. Bremen walked carefully, one eye out for snakes or alligators in the weeds along the bank, feeling the air warm quickly as the sun rose free of the trees. There was something very close to happiness turning slowly in his chest.

  The Big Two-Hearted River, came Gail’s thought.

  Bremen stopped and almost stumbled. He stood, panting slightly, closing his eyes to concentrate. It had been Gail but had not been Gail: a phantom echo, as chilling as if her actual voice had whispered to him. For a minute the dizziness grew worse, and Bremen had to sit down quickly on a hummock of grass. He lowered his head between his knees and tried to breathe slowly. After a while the humming in his ears lessened, the pounding in his chest moderated, and the wave of déjà vu bordering on nausea passed.

  Bremen raised his face to the sun, tried to smile, and lifted his rod and reel.

  He did not have his rod and reel. This morning he had carried out the 38-caliber pistol instead.

  Bremen sat on the warming riverbank and considered the weapon. The blue steel looked almost black in the bright light. He found the lever that released the cylinder and looked at the six brass circles. He clicked the cylinder shut and lifted the weapon higher, raising it almost to his face. The hammer clicked back with surprising ease and locked into place. Bremen set the short barrel against his temple and closed his eyes, feeling the warm sunlight on his face and listening to the buzz of insects.

  Bremen did not fantasize that the bullet entering his skull would free him … would send him to some other plane of existence. Neither he nor Gail had ever believed in any life but this one. But he did realize that the gun, that the single bullet, were instruments of release. His finger had found the trigger, and now Bremen knew with absolute certainty that the slightest additional pressure would bring an end to the bottomless chasm of sorrow that lay under even this brief flash of happiness. The slightest additional pressure would end forever the incessant encroachment of other people’s thoughts that even now buzzed around the periphery of his consciousness like a million bluebottle flies around rotted meat.

  Bremen began to apply that additional pressure, feeling the perfect arc of metal under his finger, and, despite himself, converted that tactile sense of arc as a mathematical construct. He visualized the latent kinetic energy lying in the gunpowder, the sudden translation of that energy into motion, and the ensuing collapse of a much more intricate structure as the complex dance of sine waves and standing wavefronts in his skull died with the dying of the brain that generated them.

  It was the thought of destroying that beautiful mathematical construct, of smashing forever the wavefront equations that were so much more beautiful to Bremen than the flawed and injured human psyche they represented, that caused him to lower the pistol, lower the hammer of the pistol, and toss it away from him, over the high reeds, into the river.

  Bremen stood and watched the ripples widen. He felt neither elation nor sadness, satisfaction nor relief. He felt nothing at all.

  He sensed the man’s thoughts only seconds before he turned and saw him.

  The man was standing in an old skiff not twenty-five feet from Bremen, using an oar as a pole to move the flat-bottomed boat out of the shallows near where the river entered the swamp (or vice versa). The man was dressed even less appropriately for the river than Bremen had been three days before: he wore a white lounge suit with a black shirt, sharp collars slashing across the suit’s broad lapels like raven wings; there were layers of gold necklaces descending from the man’s thin throat to where black chest hair matched the black satin of his shirt; he wore expensive black pumps of a soft leather never designed for any surface more hostile than a plush carpet; a pink silk handkerchief rose from the pocket of his white lounge suit; his pants were held up by a white belt with a large gold buckle, and a gold Rolex gleamed on his left wrist.

  Bremen had opened his mouth to say good morning when he saw everything at once.

  His name is Vanni Fucci. He left Miami a little after three A.M. The dead man in the trunk had borne the unlikely name of Chico Tartugian. Vanni Fucci had dumped the body less than twenty feet from where the skiff now floated, just back among the cypresses where the swamp was black and relatively deep.

  Bremen blinked and could see the ripples still emanating from the shadowy place where Chico Tartugian had been pushed overboard with fifty pounds of steel chain around him.

  “Hey!” cried Vanni Fucci, and almost overturned the skiff as he took one hand off the oar to paw under his white jacket.

  Bremen took a step backward and then froze. For an instant he thought that the .38-caliber revolver in Vanni Fucci’s hand was his gun, the pistol Bremen’s brother-in-law had given him, the pistol he had just tossed into the river. Ripples still widened from that site of discard, although they were dying now as they met the river current and the small waves from Vanni Fucci’s bobbing skiff.

  “Hey!” shouted Vanni Fucci a second time, and cocked the pistol. Audibly.

  Bremen tried to raise his hands, but found that he had only brought them together in front of his chest in a motion suggesting neither supplication nor prayer so much as contemplation.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” screamed Vanni Fucci, the skiff wobbling so much now that the black muzzle opening of the pistol moved from being aimed at Bremen’s face to a point near his feet.

>   Bremen knew that if he were going to run, now was the time to do it. He did not run.

  “I said what the fuck are you doing here, you goddamn fuck!” screamed the man in the white suit and black shirt. His hair was as black and shiny as his shirt and rose in tight ringlets. His face was pale under a machine tan and his mouth was a cupid’s fleshy pout, now contorted into something resembling a snarl. Bremen saw a diamond gleaming in Vanni Fucci’s left earlobe.

  Unable to speak for a moment, due more to a strange exhilaration than from any surge of fear, Bremen shook his head. His hands remained cupped, fingertips almost touching.

  “C’mere, you fuck,” shouted Vanni Fucci, trying to keep the pistol steady as he tucked the oar tighter under his right arm and poled toward the bank, using his left forearm to steady himself against the oar. The skiff rocked again, but coasted forward; the muzzle of the pistol grew in size.

  Bremen blinked gnats away from his eyes and watched as the skiff floated up to the bank. The .38 was less than eight feet away now and much more steady.

  “What’d you see, you fuck? What’d you fucking see?” Vanni Fucci punctuated the second question with an extension of the revolver, as if he meant to thrust it through Bremen’s face.

  Bremen said nothing. A part of him was very calm. He thought of Gail during her last days and nights, surrounded by instruments in the intensive care ward, her body invaded by catheters, oxygen tubes, and intravenous drips. All thought of the elegant dance of sine waves had vanished with the gangster’s shouts.

  “Get in the fuckin’ boat, motherfucker,” hissed Vanni Fucci.

  Bremen blinked again, honestly not understanding. Fucci’s thoughts were white-hot, a torrent of heated obscenities and surges of fears, and for a long moment Bremen did not know that Vanni Fucci had spoken aloud.

  “I said, get in the fucking boat, you motherfucker!” cried Vanni Fucci, and fired his pistol into the air.

  Bremen sighed, lowered his hands, and stepped carefully into the skiff. Vanni Fucci waved him into the front of the flat-bottomed craft, gestured him to a sitting position, and then clumsily began poling with one hand while the other held the pistol.

  Silently except for the cry of birds disturbed into flight by the single shot, they moved toward the opposite shore.

  EYES

  I am interested in death. It is a new concept to me. The idea that one could simply cease is perhaps the most startling and fascinating idea that Jeremy has brought to me.

  I am fairly certain that Jeremy’s own first realization of mortality is a particularly brutal one: the death of his mother when he was four. His telepathic ability is rare and undisciplined then—little more than the intrusion of certain thoughts and nightmares he would later realize are not his own—but the talent takes on a rare and unkind focus the night his mother died.

  Her name is Elizabeth Susskind Bremen and she is twenty-nine years old on the night she dies. She is returning home from a “girls’ night out” that they have renamed poker night in deference to the prissy sound of the earlier name. This group of six to ten women have been meeting once a month for years, most since before they were married, and this night they have gone into Philadelphia to catch a Wednesday-evening opening at the art museum and to go out to listen to jazz afterward. They are careful to appoint a designated driver, even though that name has not yet come into popular use, and Elizabeth’s lifelong friend Carrie has not had any alcohol before the drive home. Four of the friends live within a half hour’s drive of one another near where the Bremen home is in Bucks County, and they are carpooling in Carrie’s Chevy station wagon the night the drunk jumps the median on the Schuylkill Expressway.

  The traffic is heavy, the station wagon is in the leftmost lane, and there is no more than two seconds of warning as the drunk comes over the median in a stretch where the guardrail is being repaired. The collision is head-on. Jeremy’s mother, her friend Carrie, and another woman named Margie Sheerson are killed instantly. The fourth woman, a new friend of Carrie’s who has attended poker night for the first time that night, is thrown from the car and survives, although she remains paralyzed from that day on. The drunk—a man whose name Jeremy is never to recall no matter how many times he sees it written in years to come—survives with minor injuries.

  Jeremy slams awake and begins screaming, bringing his father running upstairs. The boy is still screaming when the highway patrol calls twenty-five minutes later.

  Jeremy remembers every detail of the following few hours: being brought to the hospital with his father, where no one seems to know where Elizabeth Bremen’s body had been sent; being made to stand next to his father as John Bremen is told to look at female corpse after female corpse in the hospital morgue in order to “identify” the missing Jane Doe; then being told that the body has never been brought in with the other victims’, but has been transferred directly to a morgue in an adjoining county. Jeremy remembers the long drive through the rain in the middle of the night, his father’s face, reflected in the mirror, lighted from the dashboard instruments, and the song on the radio—Pat Boone singing “April Love”—and then the confusion of trying to find the morgue in what seems an abandoned industrial section of Philadelphia.

  Finally, Jeremy remembers staring at his mother’s face and body. There is no discreet sheet to raise, as in the movies Jeremy watches in years to come, only a clear plastic bag, rather like a clear shower curtain, through which Elizabeth Susskind Bremen’s battered face and broken body gleam almost milkily. The sleepy morgue attendant unzips the bag with a rude motion and accidentally pulls the plastic down until Jeremy’s dead mother’s breasts are exposed. They are still caked with not-quite-dry blood. John Bremen pulls the plastic higher in a motion familiar to Jeremy from hundreds of tucking-ins, and his father says nothing, only nods identification. His mother’s eyes are open slightly, as if she is peeking at them, playing some game of hide-and-seek.

  Of course, his father does not take him along that night. Jeremy has been left with a neighbor, tucked into a sofa bed in the neighbor’s guest room smelling of carpet cleanser, and has shared each second of his father’s nightmare ordeal while lying between clean sheets and staring, wide-eyed, at the slowly moving bands of light on the neighbor’s guest-room ceiling as passing cars hiss by on wet pavement. It is more than twenty years later, after he has married Gail, that Jeremy realizes this. In truth, it is Gail who realizes it—who interrupts Jeremy’s bitter telling of that evening’s events—it is Gail who has access to parts of Jeremy’s memory that not even he can reach.

  Jeremy did not weep when he was four, but he does this night twenty-one years later: he weeps on Gail’s shoulder for almost an hour. Weeps for his mother and for his father, now gone, who has died of cancer un-forgiven by his son. Jeremy weeps for himself.

  I am not so sure about Gail’s first telepathic encounter with death. There are memories of burying her cat Leo when she is five, but the remembered mindtouch during that animal’s final hours after being struck by a car might be more a mourning for the absence of purring and furry warmth than any real contact with the cat’s consciousness.

  Gail’s parents are fundamentalist Christians, increasingly fundamentalist as Gail grows older, and she rarely hears death spoken of in any terms other than “passing over” to Christ’s kingdom. When she is eight and her grandmother dies—she has been a stiff, formal, and odd-smelling old lady whom Gail rarely visits—Gail is lifted up to view the body in the funeral home while her father whispers in her ear, “That’s not really Grams … Grams is in heaven.”

  Gail has decided early, even before Grams’s passing over, that heaven is almost certainly a crock of shit. Those are her Great-Uncle Buddy’s words—”All this holy-roller stuff, Beanie, it’s all a crock of shit. This heaven and choirs-of-angels stuff … all a crock of shit. We die and fertilize the ground, just like Leo Puss is doing out in the backyard right now. The only thing we know that happens after we’re dead is that we help the grass a
nd flowers grow, everything else is a crock of shit.” Gail has never been sure why Great-Uncle Buddy called her Beanie, but she thinks it has to do with a sister of his who died when they were children.

  Death, she decides early, is simple. One dies and makes the grass and flowers grow. Everything else is a crock of shit.

  Gail’s mother hears her sharing this philosophy with a playmate—they are burying a hamster who has died—and Gail’s mother sends the playmate home and harangues Gail for over an hour about what the Bible says, how the Bible is God’s Word on earth, and how stupid it is to think that a person simply ceases to be. Gail, stubborn, stares and listens, but refuses to recant. Her mother says that Great-Uncle Buddy is an alcoholic.

  So are you, the nine-year-old Gail thinks, but does not say aloud. She does not know this through her mindtouch ability—that will come under her control four years later when she enters puberty—but has deduced it through finding the can opener under the towels in the bathroom, from hearing her mother’s usually precise diction slurred and loud late at night, and from listening to the voices rising up the stairs from the parties her parents throw for their born-again friends.

  Ironically, the first person close to Gail to die after she comes into the true birthright of her telepathic ability is her Great-Uncle Buddy. She has taken the bus all the way across Chicago to visit Uncle Buddy in the hospital where he lies dying. He has been unable to talk, his throat catheterized for the breathing tubes that keep air flowing past the cancer-ridden throat into the cancer-riddled lungs, but fifteen-year-old Gail remains there for six hours, long past visiting hours, holding his hand and trying to project her own thoughts to his through the shifting veils of pain and painkillers. There is no sense that he hears her mindtouch messages, although she is all but overwhelmed by the complex tapestry of his daydreamed memories. Through them all there has been a sense of sadness and loss, much of it centered around the sister, Beanie, who was Uncle Buddy’s one friend in a hostile world.