The Hollow Man

by Dan Simmons

  He walked down the hallway, hands in his pockets, resisting the urge to whistle. The laughter and conversation grew louder behind him as someone turned into the corridor he had just vacated. He realized their destination and his mistake at the same moment.

  The hallway ended at two broad doors, above which the sign read: BE SURE TO REMOVE YOUR HEAD BEFORE ENTERING. The doors were stenciled CHARACTER LOUNGE 3 with a no-smoking sign under the stenciling. Bremen could hear more conversation from the other side of the doors. He had about three seconds before the voices behind him reached the hallway.

  To his left was a windowless gray door with a single word: MEN. Bremen stepped through just as three men and a woman turned into the long hallway behind him.

  The rest room was empty, although a tall figure on the far wall made him jump. Bremen blinked. It was a Goofy suit, at least six and a half feet tall, hanging on a hook near the sinks.

  Voices rose outside the door and Bremen slipped into a toilet stall and closed the door, latching it with a sigh of relief. No one would demand an ID badge in here. Doors opened and the voices receded into the Character Lounge.

  Bremen lowered his head into his hands and tried to concentrate.

  What the hell am I doing? His mind’s voice was barely audible above the constant roar of neurobabble from the tens of thousands of fun-seeking souls above him.

  Running, he answered himself. Hiding.

  Why?

  The neurobabble hissed and surged.

  Why? Why not just tell the authorities what happened? Lead the police back to the lake? Tell them about Vanni Fucci.

  Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, let’s have fun, goddamn it, these three days are costing me a fortune.…

  Bremen squeezed his temples.

  Uh-huh. Tell the authorities. Let the cops call to confirm your identity and find out that you’re the guy who just burned down his house and disappeared … then you just happen to be on hand when a gangster dumps a dead body. And how, pray tell, sir, did you happen to get both the gangster’s and corpse’s names?

  Why did I burn down the house?

  No, later. Later. Think about that later.

  No cops. No explanations. If you think this place is hell, try a night or two in a holding cell. Wonder what’s in your bunkmates’ little craniums … do you want a night or two of that, Jeremy old boy?

  Bremen unlocked the stall, walked to the urinal against the wall, tried to urinate, couldn’t, zipped up, and went over to the sink. The cold water helped. He was startled as the pale, sick face rose up in the mirror in front of him.

  To hell with the cops. To hell with Vanni Fucci and his pals. Just go away from here. Go away.

  There were more voices in the hall. Bremen whirled, but although the door to the ladies’ rest room across the hall banged open, no one came in here. Not yet.

  Bremen stood there a second, flicking water from his cheeks. The trick, he realized, was not just getting out of this labyrinth unchallenged, but getting out of the park itself. Vanni Fucci would have met up with the other gangsters by now—Sal, Bert, and Ernie, Bremen remembered—and they would be watching the exits.

  Bremen found a paper towel and dried his face. Suddenly he froze and lowered the towel. There were two faces in the mirror, and one of them was grinning at him.

  The golf cart came up behind Bremen in one of the main corridors. The heavyset man behind the wheel said, “Wanta ride?”

  Bremen nodded and got in. The cart hummed ahead, following a blue stripe in the concrete. Other carts passed going the other way, following a yellow stripe. The second one that passed carried three security guards.

  The driver shifted an unlit cigar to the other side of his mouth and said, “You don’t have to wear your head down here, you know.”

  Bremen nodded and shrugged.

  “It’s your sweat,” said the man. “Headin’ out or in?”

  Bremen pointed upward.

  “Which exit?”

  “The castle,” said Bremen, hoping his voice was suitably muffled.

  The driver frowned. “The castle? You mean Forecourt B-four? Or the A side?”

  “B-four,” said Bremen, and stifled the urge to scratch his head through the heavy material.

  “Yeah, I’m goin’ by there,” said the driver, and turned right down a different corridor. A minute later he stopped the cart by a stairway. The sign read FORECOURT B-4.

  Bremen slid out and gave the man a friendly salute.

  The driver nodded, shifted his cigar, and said, “Don’t let the little fuckers stick any pins in you like they did Johnson,” and then he was gone, the cart whining into the dim distance. Bremen went up the stairway as quickly as his limited visibility and oversized shoes would allow.

  He was almost out, down the phony length of Main Street and out, when the children began to gather around.

  At first he kept walking, all but ignoring them, but their shouts and his fear of being noticed by adults made him pause and sit on a bench for a moment, letting them circle him.

  “Hey, Goofy, hi!” they cried, pressing in. Bremen did what he thought characters were supposed to do … overacted, stayed silent, and raised his fat-gloved, three-fingered hand to his bulging pooch nose as if embarrassed. The kids loved it. They crowded closer, trying to sit on his lap, hugging him.

  Bremen hugged them back and acted like Goofy. Parents took pictures and shot video. Bremen blew them kisses, hugged a few more kids, got to his oversized, cartoon feet, and began shuffling away toward the exits, waving and blowing kisses as he went.

  The pack of kids and their parents moved away, laughing and waving. Bremen turned and confronted a quite different group of children.

  There were at least a dozen. The youngest might have been about six, the oldest no more than fifteen. Few of them had any hair, although most wore caps or bandannas, and one girl—Melody—wore an expensive wig. Their faces were as pale as Bremen’s had been in the rest-room mirror. Their eyes were large. Some were smiling. Some were trying to smile.

  “Hey, Goofy,” said Terry, the nine-year-old boy in the last stages of bone cancer. He was in a wheelchair.

  “Hi, Goofy!” called Sestina, the six-year-old black girl from Bethesda. She was very beautiful, her large eyes and sharp cheekbones emphasizing her fragility. Her hair was her own and set in precise cornrows; she wore blue, green, and pink ribbons. She had AIDS.

  “Say something, Goofy!” whispered Lawrence, the thirteen-year-old with the brain tumor. Four operations so far. Two more than Gail had had. Lawrence, lying in the dark of postop and hearing Dr. Graynemeir telling Mom in the hallway that the prognosis was poor, three months at the most. That had been seven weeks ago.

  Seven-year-old Melody said nothing, but stepped forward and hugged Bremen until her wig was askew. Bremen—Goofy—hugged her back.

  The children surged forward in a single movement, an orchestrated motion, as if choreographed far in advance. It was not humanly possible, even for Goofy, to hug them all at once, to find room in the circle of his arms for them all, but he did. Goofy embraced them all and sent a message of well-being and hope and love to each of them, firing it in laserlike telepathic surges of the sort he had sent to Gail when the pain and medication made mindtouch the hardest. He was sure they could not hear him, could not sense the messages, but he sent them anyway, even while encompassing them with his arms and whispering soft things in each of their ears—not Goofy-like nonsense, although in Goofy’s voice as best as he could imitate it—but secret and personal things.

  “Melody, it’s all right, your mother knows about the mistake with the piano music. It’s all right. She doesn’t care. She loves you.”

  “Lawrence, quit worrying about the money. The money’s not important. The insurance isn’t important. You’re important.”

  “Sestina, they do want to be with you, little kitten. Toby’s just afraid to give you a hug because he thinks you don’t like him. He’s shy.”

  The parents an
d nurses and trip sponsors … a woman from Green Bay had been working on this Dream for two years … all stood back while this strange hugging and huddling and whispering continued.

  Ten minutes later Goofy touched the children’s cheeks a final time, waved jauntily, and walked down the rest of Main Street, rode the monorail around its circuit, stepped off at the Transportation and Ticket Center, walked out past the ticket booths, saluted Sal Empori and Bert Cappi and a red-faced Vanni Fucci where they stood watching the crowd, sauntered out to the parking lot, and boarded a chartered bus just leaving for the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress. The elderly tourists on board the bus cheered and patted Goofy on the back.

  Bert Cappi turned to Vanni Fucci. “You believe this goddamn place?”

  Vanni Fucci’s gaze never left the crowd streaming out toward the shuttles. “Shut the fuck up and keep fucking looking,” he said.

  Behind them the bus for the Hyatt pulled away with a hiss and a roar.

  At the Violet Hour

  A little over half of Bremen’s remaining money would buy him a bus ticket to Denver. He bought it and slept in the park across from the Hyatt where he had dumped the Goofy suit. The bus departed Orlando at 11:15 that night. He waited until the last minute to board, coming in through a maintenance entrance and walking straight to the bus, his head down and collar up. He saw no one who looked like a gangster; more important, the surge and rasp of neurobabble had not been punctuated by the shock of recognition from any of the bystanders.

  By one A.M. they were halfway to Gainesville and Bremen began to relax, watching out the window at the closed stores and mercury vapor lamps lining the streets of Ocala and a dozen smaller towns. The neurobabble was less this late at night. For years Bremen and Gail had been convinced that much of the effect of the so-called circadian rhythm on human beings was nothing more than nascent telepathy in most people sensing the national dream sleep around them. It was very hard to stay awake this night, although Bremen’s nerves were jumping and twitching with the ricocheting thoughts of those two dozen or so people still awake aboard the bus. The dreams of the others added to the mental din, although dreams were deeper, more private theaters of the mind, and not nearly so accessible.

  Bremen thanked God for that.

  They were on Interstate 75 and headed north out of Gainesville when Bremen began to ponder his situation.

  Why hadn’t he gone back to the fishing shack? Somehow his home of the past three days seemed like the only haven in the world for him now. Why hadn’t he returned … for his money if nothing else?

  Bremen knew that part of it was that it seemed almost certain that Vanni Fucci or Sal Empori or some of their cronies would be watching the place. And Bremen had no desire to get Norm Sr. or the old man Verge in trouble with gangsters on his account.

  He thought of the rental car parked there. But Verge or Norm Sr. would have found him missing by now. And found the money in the cabin. That would certainly settle the bill with the rental people. Would Norm Sr. call the police about his disappearance? Unlikely. And what if he did? Bremen had never given his name, never shown his driver’s license. The two men had respected Bremen’s privacy to the extent that there was little they could tell the police about him other than his description.

  A more practical reason for Bremen not returning there was simply that he did not know the way. He knew only that the fishing shack was somewhere closer to Miami than to Orlando, on the edge of a lake and a swamp.

  Bremen thought about phoning Norm Sr. from Denver, asking that the bulk of the money be wired to a P.O. box in Denver, but he remembered seeing no name on the little store and Norm Sr. had never thought of his own last name when Bremen was eavesdropping. The refuge of the fishing shack was lost forever.

  It was only two hundred and fifty-some miles from Orlando to Tallahassee, but it was after five A.M. by the time the bus pulled through the rain-silent streets of the capital and hissed to a stop. “Rest break!” called the driver, and quickly disembarked. Bremen lay back in his seat and dozed until the others reboarded. He already knew his fellow passengers very well and their return echoed in his skull like shouts in a metal pipe. The bus pulled out at 5:42 A.M. and leisurely found its way back to Interstate 10 West while Bremen squeezed his temples and tried to concentrate on his own dreams.

  Two rows behind him sat a young marine, Burk Stemens, and a young WAF sergeant named Alice Jean Dernitz. They had not met until boarding the bus in Orlando, but they were quickly becoming more than friends. Neither had slept much during the past seven hours; each had told the other more about his or her life than either had ever revealed to their mates, past or present. Burk had just gotten out of fourteen months in the brig for assaulting a noncommissioned officer with a knife. He had traded a dishonorable discharge from the Marines for the final four months of his sentence and was now on his way home to Fort Worth to see his wife, Debra Anne, and his two infants. He did not tell Alice Jean about Debra Anne.

  Sergeant Dernitz was two months away from a quite honorable discharge from the Air Force and was spending the bulk of that time on leave. She had been married twice, the last time to the brother of her first husband. She had divorced the first brother, Warren Bill, and lost the second, William Earl, four months ago; he had been killed when his Mustang went off a Tennessee mountain road at eighty-five miles per hour. Alice Jean hadn’t cared too much by then. She and brother number two had been separated for almost a year before the accident. She did not tell Burk about either Warren Bill or the late William Earl.

  Burk and Alice Jean had been inching toward intimacy since Gainesville, and by Lake City, just before I-75 encountered I-10, they had ceased swapping barracks stories and gotten down to the business at hand. As they passed Lake City Alice Jean was pretending to nap and had let her head fall on Burk’s shoulder, while Burk had put his arm around her and let his hand “accidentally” fall to her left breast.

  By the suburbs of Tallahassee both were breathing shallowly, Burk’s hand was inside her blouse, and Alice Jean’s hand was on Burk’s lap under the jacket he had spread like a robe across both of them. She had just unzipped his pants when the driver announced the rest break.

  Bremen had been prepared to spend the rest break in the tiny bus station rather than suffer the next stage of their slow and painful foreplay, but luckily Burk had whispered in Alice Jean’s ear and both had left the bus, Burk holding his jacket rather clumsily in front of himself. They had thoughts of trying their luck in a storeroom or … if all else failed … in the ladies’ rest room.

  Bremen tried to doze with the other sleeping passengers aboard the bus, but Burk and Alice Jean’s contortions—it had been the ladies’ rest room—assaulted him even from a distance. Their lovemaking was as banal and short-lived as their loyalty to their current and former mates.

  By the time the bus was approaching Pensacola it was almost ten A.M. and everyone aboard was awake and the highway sounds had taken on a new timbre. Storm clouds lay heavy in the west, the direction they were headed, but a thick, low light from the east painted the fields on either side in rich hues and threw the shadow of their bus ahead of them. The neurobabble was much louder than the hiss of tires on asphalt.

  Across the aisle and three rows ahead of Bremen were a couple from Missouri. As far as Bremen could sort out, their names were Donnie and Donna. He was very drunk; she was very pregnant. Both were in their early twenties, although from the glimpses Bremen got through the seats ahead—and occasionally from Donnie’s perception—Donna looked at least fifty. The two were not married, although Donna considered their four-year relationship a common-law marriage. Donnie didn’t think of it that way.

  The couple had been on a seventeen-day Odyssey across the nation trying to find the best place to have the baby while having welfare pay for it. They had ricocheted east from St. Louis to Columbus, Ohio, on the advice of a Missouri friend, had found Columbus no more generous in its welfare policies than St. Louis, and then had started on an en
dless series of bus trips—charging it all to Donna’s sister’s husband’s borrowed credit card—going from Columbus to Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C.… where they were shocked at how poorly the nation’s capital treated its deserving citizens … and then from Washington to Huntsville because of something they had read in the National Enquirer about Huntsville being one of the ten friendliest cities in America.

  Huntsville had been terrible. The hospitals would not even admit Donna unless it was an emergency or proof of their ability to pay was shown in advance. Donnie had started drinking in earnest in Huntsville and had dragged Donna out of the hospital while shaking his fist and hurling curses at doctors, administrators, nurses, and even at a cluster of patients staring from their wheelchairs.

  The trip to Orlando had been bad, with the credit card approaching its max and Donna saying that she was definitely feeling contractions now, but Donnie had never seen Walt Disney World and he figured that they were close, so what the hell?

  Brother-in-law Dickie’s card lasted long enough to get them into the Magic Kingdom, and Bremen noticed through Donnie’s drunken memories that the two had been there while he had been fleeing Vanni Fucci. Small world. Bremen pressed his cheek and temple to the glass hard enough to drive thoughts away, to form a barrier between these new wavelengths of foreign thoughts and his own bruised mind.

  It did not work.

  Donnie hadn’t enjoyed the Magic Kingdom much, even though he’d waited his whole life to go there, because goddamn spoilsport Donna refused to go on any of the real rides with him. She’d ruined his fun by standing, ponderous as a cow heavy with two heifers, and waving as he’d boarded Space Mountain and Splash Mountain and all the fun rides. She’d said it was because her water broke an hour after coming into the park, but Donnie knew it was mostly to spite him.