The Hollow Man

by Dan Simmons

  Jeremy winces. There are two groups, kiddo. Those who—

  Shut up, wise guy. Where was I? Oh, yes, McNamara said that the three groups were people who talked mostly about things, people who talked mostly about people, and people who talked mostly about ideas.

  Jeremy nods and sends the image of a hippo yawning broadly. That’s deep, kiddo, deep. What about those people who talk about people talking about things? Is that a special subset, or can we create a whole new—

  Shut up. The point is that McNamara said that Bobby Kennedy didn’t have any time for people in the first two groups. He was only interested in people who talked about … and thought about … ideas. Important ideas.

  Pause. So?

  So that’s you, silly.

  Jeremy chalks the transform in before he forgets the equation that follows it. That’s not true.

  Yes, it is. You—

  Spend most of my waking hours teaching students who haven’t had an idea in their heads since infancy. QED.

  No … Gail opens the book again and taps long fingers against the page. You teach them. You move them into the world of ideas.

  I can barely move them into the hall at the end of the class period.

  Jerry, you know what I mean. Your removal from things … from people … it’s more than shyness. It’s more than your work. It’s just that people who spend most of their thinking time on anything lower than Cantor’s Incompleteness Theorem are boring to you … irrelevant … you want things to be cosmological and epistemological and tautological, not the clay of the everyday.

  Jeremy sends, Gödel.

  What?

  Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. It’s Cantor’s Continuum Problem. He chalks some transfinite cardinals onto his blackboard, frowns at what they have done to his wave equation, erases them, and scrawls the cardinals onto a mental blackboard instead. He begins framing a description of Gödel’s defense of Cantor’s Continuum Problem.

  No, no, interrupts Gail, the point is only that you’re sort of like Bobby Kennedy that way … impatient … expecting everyone to be interested in the abstract things that you are …

  Jeremy is growing impatient. The transform he holds in his mind is slipping slightly. Words do that to clear thinking. The Japanese at Hiroshima didn’t think that E = mc2 was particularly abstract.

  Gail sighs. I give up. You’re not like Bobby Kennedy. You’re just an insufferable, arrogant, eternally distracted snob.

  Jeremy nods and fills in the transform. He goes on to the next equation, seeing precisely now how the probability wave will collapse into something looking very much like a classical eigenvalue. Yeah, he sends, already fading, but I’m a nice insufferable, arrogant, eternally distracted snob.

  Gail does not comment, but gazes out the window at the sun setting behind the line of woods beyond the barn. The warmth of the view is echoed by the warmth of her wordless thoughts as she shares the evening with him.

  In Rats’ Alley

  Bremen was beaten and robbed fifteen minutes after he had gotten off the bus in downtown Denver.

  They had arrived late, after midnight of the third day, and Bremen had wandered away from the lights of the bus station, hunkering into snow flurries from the west, wondering at how cold it was here in mid-April, his hands in his pockets and his head down against the cold wind from the west, when suddenly the gang was around him.

  It was not a real gang, only five black and Hispanic boys—none of them yet twenty—but in the seconds before their fists and boots flew, Bremen saw their intention, felt their panic and hunger for his money, but—more than that—sensed their eagerness to give pain. It was an almost sexual thrill, and if he had been attentive to the tone of the nighttime neurobabble surging around him, he would have felt the knife-edge intensity of their anticipation. Instead, he was taken by numbed surprise as they surrounded him and moved in, herding him into an alley mouth. Through the cascade of their half-articulated thoughts and adrenaline-rushed eagerness, Bremen could see their plan—get him into the alley to beat and rob him, kill him if he made too much of an outcry—but there was nothing he could do but back into the darkness there.

  Bremen went down quickly when the fists lashed at him, tossing his remaining bills at them and curling into a tight ball. “It’s all I have!” he cried, but even as he spoke he read their lack of caring. The money was incidental now. It was the giving of pain that preoccupied them.

  They did that well. Bremen tried to roll away from the boy with the blade … even though the knife was still in the youth’s hip pocket … but each way he rolled, a boot met him solidly. Bremen tried to cover his face and they kicked him in the kidneys. The pain was beyond anything Bremen had experienced. He tried covering his back and they kicked him in the face. Blood gushed from his broken nose and Bremen raised one hand to cover his face again. They kicked him in the scrotum. Then their fists returned, knuckles and the heels of their hands pummeling him in the skull, neck, shoulders, and ribs.

  Bremen heard something crack, then something else crack, and then they were pulling off his shirt, ripping at his pants’ pockets. Bremen felt the blade slash at his lower belly, but the boy who wielded the knife had done so while backing away and the cut was a shallow one. Bremen did not know that at the moment. He knew very little at that moment … then he knew nothing at all.

  It was an hour until someone found him, two hours more until someone took the trouble to call the police. The police arrived when Bremen was struggling up to a half-conscious state; they seemed surprised to find him alive. Bremen heard the car radio squawk as one of the officers called for an ambulance, he closed his eyes for a brief second, and when he opened them, there were paramedics around him and they were lifting him onto a wheeled stretcher. The paramedics wore clear plastic gloves and Bremen noticed how they worked to keep from getting his blood on themselves. He did not remember the ride to the hospital.

  The emergency room was crowded. A team consisting of a Pakistani doctor and two exhausted interns dealt with his knife slash, gave him a hurried injection, and began stitching before the local anesthetic took effect. Then they left him to deal with some other patient. Bremen drifted in and out of consciousness for an hour and a half while he waited for them to return. When they did, the Pakistani doctor was gone, replaced by a young black doctor with rings of exhaustion under her heavy-lidded eyes, but the interns were the same.

  They pronounced his nose broken, set a metal bar in place there with tape, found two broken ribs and taped them, prodded his bruised kidneys until he almost fainted with the pain, and then had him urinate into a plastic bedpan. Bremen opened his eyes long enough to see that his urine was pink. One of the interns told him that his left arm was dislocated and made him hold it up while they rigged a sling. The doctor returned and peered in Bremen’s mouth. His lips were so swollen that the touch of the tongue depressor made him stifle a cry of pain. The doctor announced that he had been lucky—only one tooth had actually been knocked out. Did he have a dentist?

  Bremen grunted an answer made more vague by his swollen lips. They gave him another shot. Bremen could feel the medics’ fatigue as palpable as a thick tent canvas covering them all. None of the three had slept more than five hours during the past thirty. Their exhaustion made Bremen sleepier than the shot had.

  He opened his eyes to find a police officer there. She was stolid, her gunbelt, belt radio, flashlight, and other items swinging from heavy hips. She had smudged eyes and blotchy skin. She asked Bremen again for his name and address.

  Bremen blinked, thought of the authorities and Vanni Fucci, although he had to strain to remember through the painkiller haze who Vanni Fucci was. He gave the officer the name and address of Frank Lowell, the head of his department at Haverford. His buddy who was busy saving Bremen’s job for him.

  “You’re a long way from home, Mr. Lowell,” said the officer. Bremen’s left eye was swollen shut and his right one was too blurry to read the name tag over her badge. He mu
mbled something.

  “Can you describe the assailants?” she asked, rooting in her blouse pocket for a pencil. Bremen’s vision focused long enough for him to make out the childish scrawls in her notebook. She dotted her i’s with small circles, like the less mature students he had taught at Haverford. He described his assailants.

  “I heard one of them call the other … the tallest … Red,” he said, knowing that they called each other nothing during the attack. But one of them had been Red, he had garnered that.

  Suddenly Bremen realized that the neurobabble around him was a distant thing. Even the surges of pain and panic from the other patients in the emergency room, the mental cries and catcalls from the dark rooms stacked above him like crates of misery … all were muted. Bremen smiled at the officer and blessed the painkiller, whatever it had been.

  “Your wallet is missing,” said the cop. “Your ID is gone, your insurance card, everything.…” The officer eyed him, and even through the fog of medication Bremen could feel her suspicion: he looked like a derelict, but they had checked his arms, thighs, and feet … no track marks … and while his urine had held ample blood, there had been no immediate trace of drugs or alcohol. Bremen felt her decide to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  “You’ll spend the night here in observation, Mr. Lowell,” she said. “You told Dr. Chalbatt that you had no one to call here in the Denver area, so Dr. Elkhart isn’t too keen on turning you loose tonight without supervision. They’ll book you in as soon as there’s a room available, monitor the bruised kidney overnight, and take another look at you tomorrow. We’ll send someone over in the morning to go over the assault and battery with you.”

  Bremen closed his eyes and nodded slowly, but when he opened his eyes again, he was alone on a gurney in an echoing hallway. The clock read 4:23. A woman in a pink sweater came by, adjusted his blanket, and said, “There should be a room available anytime now.” Then she was gone and Bremen fought going back to sleep.

  He had been an idiot to give the police officer Frank Lowell’s name and address. Someone would call Frank’s home in the morning, a description would be given, and Bremen would be sitting in custody, answering questions about his burned farmhouse … and possibly about a body found in a Florida swamp.

  Bremen moaned and sat up, swinging his legs off the edge of the gurney. He almost fell off. He stared at his bare toes and realized that he was in a paper-thin gown; there was a plastic hospital bracelet on his left wrist.

  Gail. Oh, God, Gail.

  He slid off the cart, went to his knees, and used his good hand to feel around on the shelf under the cart. His clothes were stacked there, bloodstained and ripped though they were. Bremen checked the hall … it was still empty, although rubber soles squeaked just out of sight around the corner … and then he was hobbling to a supply closet down the hall, dressing painfully … finally giving up and draping the shirt over his slinged arm like a cape … and then out. Before he left the supply closet, he rummaged in a hamper of soiled clothing, came up with a white cotton intern’s jacket, and tugged it on, knowing how little warmth it would give out in the streets.

  He checked the hall, waited until there was no noise, and moved as quickly as he could to a side door.

  It was snowing outside. Bremen scurried way down an alley, not knowing where he was or where he was headed. Overhead, between the dark cliffs c buildings, the sky showed no hint of dawn.

  EYES

  I do not mean to suggest that Jeremy and Gail are the perfect couple, never disagreeing, never arguing, never disappointing one another. It is true that sometimes their mindtouch is more of an invitation to discord than a binding force.

  Their closeness acts like a magnifying mirror for their smallest faults. Gail’s temper is fast to ignite and even faster to burn; Jeremy grows quickly tired of that. She cannot stand his slow, Scandinavian evenness in the face of even the most absurd provocation. Sometimes they fight about his refusal to fight.

  Each decides early in the marriage that couples should be given biorhythm exams before the wedding rather than blood tests. Gail is an early-to-bed, early-to-rise type who enjoys the morning above all else. Jeremy loves the late night and does his best work at the chalkboard after one A.M. Mornings are anathema to him, and on those days when he does not have classes, he rarely stirs before 9:30. Gail does not enjoy mindtouch with him before his second cup of coffee, and even then says that it is like achieving telepathy with a surly bear half-risen from hibernation.

  Their tastes, complementary in so many important areas, are flatly divergent on some equally important things. Gail loves reading and lives for the written word; Jeremy rarely reads anything outside his field and considers novels a waste of time. Jeremy will come down from the study at three A.M. and happily plop down in front of a documentary; Gail has little time for documentaries. Gail loves sports and would spend every fall weekend at a football game if she could; Jeremy is bored by sports and agrees with George Will’s definition of football as the “desecration of autumn.”

  With music, Gail plays the piano, French horn, clarinet, and guitar; Jeremy cannot hold a tune. When listening to music, Jeremy admires the mathematical baroqueness of Bach; Gail enjoys the unprogrammable humanity of Mozart. Each enjoys art, but their visits to galleries and art museums become telepathic battlefields: Jeremy admiring the abstract exactitude of Josef Albers’s Homage to the Square series; Gail indulging in the Impressionists and early Picasso. Once, for her birthday, Jeremy spends all of his savings and most of hers to buy a small painting by Fritz Glarner—Relational Painting, No. 57—and Gail’s response, upon seeing it in Jeremy’s mind as he drives the Triumph up the drive with the painting in the boot, is My God, Jerry, you spent all our money on those … those … squares?

  On political issues Gail is hopeful, Jeremy is cynical. On social issues Gail is liberal in the finest tradition of the word, Jeremy is indifferent.

  Don’t you want to end homelessness, Jerry? Gail asks one day.

  Not especially.

  Why on earth not?

  Look, I didn’t make these people homeless, I can’t make them not-homeless. Besides, most of them are refugees from asylums anyway … tossed out by a liberal do-goodism that condemns them to a life on the streets.

  Some of them aren’t crazy, Jerry. Some are just down on their luck.

  Come on, kiddo. You’re talking to an expert on probability here. I may know more about why luck doesn’t exist than anyone in the commonwealth.

  Perhaps, Jer … but you don’t know much about people.

  Agreed, kiddo. And I don’t especially want to. Do you want to go deeper into that morass of confusion that most people call thoughts?

  They’re people, Jerry. Like us.

  Uh-uh, kiddo. Not like us. And even if they were, I wouldn’t want to spend time brooding about them. And what would you spend time brooding about?

  Gail gleans what the equation is all about by patiently waiting for some language-equivalent translation to cross Jeremy’s mind. Big deal, she sends, honestly angry, you and some guy named Dirac can do a relativistic wave equation. How does that help anyone?

  It helps us understand the universe, kiddo. Which is more than you can say for eavesdropping on the confused mullings of all those “common folk” you’re so hot to understand.

  Gail’s anger is unfiltered now. It washes over Jeremy like a black wind. God, you can be arrogant sometimes, Jeremy Bremen. Why do you think electrons are more worthy of study than human beings?

  Jeremy pauses. That’s a good question. He closes his eyes a second and ponders the thought, excluding Gail as much as possible from his deliberations. People are predictable, he sends at last. Electrons aren’t. Before Gail can respond, he continues. I don’t mean that people’s actions are all that predictable, kiddo … we know how perverse people’s actions can be … but the motivations for their actions make up a very finite set, as does the range of the actions resulting from those motivations. In that
sense, the uncertainty principle applies much less to people than to electrons. In a real sense, people are boring.

  Gail forms an angry response, but then stifles it. You’re serious, aren’t you, Jerry?

  He forms an image of himself nodding.

  Gail raises her mindshield to think about this. She does not shut herself off from Jeremy, but the contact is less intimate, less immediate. Jeremy considers following up on the exchange, trying to explain further, if not justify, but he can feel her absorption with her own thoughts and he decides to save the conversation until later.

  “Mr. Bremen?”

  He opens his eyes and looks out at his class of math students. The young man, Arnie, has stepped back from the chalkboard. It is a simple differential equation, but Arnie has missed it completely.

  Jeremy sighs, swivels in his chair, and proceeds to explain the function.

  Rat’s Coat, Crowskin, Crossed Staves

  Bremen lived in a cardboard box under the Twenty-Third Street overpass and learned the litany of survival: rise before sunrise, wait, breakfast at the Nineteenth Street Salvation Army outlet, after waiting at least an hour for the minister to arrive and cajole them with motivation, then another half an hour for the prewarmed food to arrive … then, out by 10:30, shuffle twenty blocks to the Lighthouse for lunch, but not before more waiting. There is a job call at the Lighthouse and Bremen must line up for work in order to line up for lunch. Usually only five or six out of the sixty or so men and women are tagged for work, but Bremen is chosen more than once in April. Perhaps it is because he is relatively young. Usually it is unskilled, mindless work—cleaning up around the Convention Center, perhaps, or sweeping out the Lighthouse itself—and Bremen does it uncomplainingly, pleased to have something fill his hours other than the endless waiting and walking from meal to meal.