The Hollow Man

by Dan Simmons

  Gail is nonplussed. It’s like Jacob’s tests.…

  No, sends Jeremy, holding her hand there in Dr. Singh’s office, these are studying structures … like X rays … Jacob’s scans were for the wavefront actions.

  The tests are on a Friday and Singh will not get back to them until Monday. They each see the darkest possibilities hidden behind the doctor’s smooth reassurances. On Saturday, as if the tests themselves were the remedy, Gail’s headaches are gone. Jeremy suggests that they take the weekend off, drop all the work around the farm, and go to the beach. It is the week before Thanksgiving, but the sky is blue and the weather warm, a second Indian summer deep into what is usually their drabbest season in eastern Pennsylvania.

  Barnegat Light is all but deserted. Terns and sea gulls wheel and scream above the long stretch of sand below the lighthouse while Gail and Jeremy set their blankets amid the dunes and cavort like newlyweds, chasing each along the sliding edge of the Atlantic, playing tag and tickling—using any excuse to touch the other in their spray-wet suits—and finally coming back to drop goose-bumped and exhausted on the blankets to watch the sun set behind the dunes and weathered houses to the west.

  A cold wind comes up with the dying of the light and Jeremy pulls the less-tattered of the two blankets over them, wrapping them both in a warm nest as the dune grasses and narrow fences reflect the rich russets and golds of the autumn light. The white lighthouse glows in indescribable shades of pink and fading lavender during the two minutes of perfect sunset, its glass and lamps prisming the orb of the sun across the beach like a spotlight of pure gold.

  Darkness comes with the breathtaking suddenness of a curtain slamming down. There is no one else on the beach and only a few of the beach houses are lighted. The sea wind rattles dry grasses above them and stirs the dunes with a sound like an infant sighing.

  Jeremy pulls the blanket higher around them and slips Gail’s wet one-piece suit down from her shoulders, then lower, her breasts rising free from the clinging material and Jeremy feeling the goose bumps there, as hard as her nipples, and then he tugs the suit down over the curve of her hips, off her legs, past her small feet, and then frees himself from his trunks.

  Gail opens her arms and shifts her legs, pulling him above her, and suddenly the cold wind and rising darkness are distant things, forgotten in the sudden warmth of their joining and mindtouch. Bremen moves slowly, infinitely slowly, feeling her sharing his thoughts and sensations—and then only his sensations—as they seem to ride the growing breeze and rising surf noise toward some quickly receding core of things.

  They come together and then stay together, finding each other in the returning slide of external senses and small touchings, then in mindtouch structured by language once again after their wordless swirl of feelings beyond language.

  This is why I want to live, sends Gail, her mindtouch small and vulnerable.

  Jeremy feels anger and the vertigo of fear rise in him almost as strongly as the passion had moments before. You’ll live. You’ll live.

  You promise? sends Gail, her mental voice light. But Jeremy sees the fear-of-the-dark-under-the-bed beneath the lightness.

  I promise, sends Jeremy. I swear. He pulls her closer, trying to stay inside, but feeling the slow withdrawal that he has no control over. He hugs her so tightly that she gasps. I swear, Gail, he sends. I promise. I promise you.

  She sets cool hands on his shoulders above her, cusps her face to the salt-tinged hollow of his neck, and sighs, almost drifting off to sleep.

  After a moment Jeremy shifts only slightly, lying on his right hip and side so that he can hold her without wakening her. Around them the wind blowing in from the unseen ocean has become late-autumn cold, the stars burning almost without twinkling in winter clarity, but Jeremy pulls the blanket tighter and hugs Gail more firmly to him, keeping them both warm with the heat of his body and the intensity of his will.

  I promise, he sends to his sleeping love. I promise you.

  We Are the Hollow Men

  Bremen awoke late into the next day, the sun bright, his skin blistering. The gravel burned against his bare palms and forearms. His lips were chapped to the consistency of ragged parchment. Blood had caked his hip and inner thigh and run onto the hot stones beneath, congealing with the torn denim of his Levi’s to a brown, sticky paste that he had to rip free from the roof. At least he was no longer bleeding.

  He limped the twenty feet to the hole in the roof, having to sit down twice to let dizziness and nausea pass. The sun was very hot.

  The hose still dangled into the dark hole in which cold air still stirred, but no water was dripping. The lights were out in the cold house. Bremen lifted the hose and glanced at the fifteen-hundred-gallon tank on the roof, wondering if it could possibly be empty. Then he shrugged and carried the long hose to the south edge of the roof, planning to use it as a rope to get down.

  The pain upon landing was enough to make him sit on the sandstone shower slab for several minutes, his head between his legs. Then he pulled himself to his feet and began the long trip to the hacienda.

  The dead rottweiler at the corner of the cold house was already bloated and pungent in the midday heat. Flies had been busy at its eyes. The three surviving dogs did not rise or growl as Bremen hobbled past, but merely watched him with troubled eyes as he moved down to the road and then up to the big house.

  It took him the better part of an hour to make it to the house, to cut himself out of his jeans and clean the wounds on his hip and thigh and then stand under the shower for a blissful, gray period, to apply antiseptic—he did pass out for a moment when he dabbed at his hip—and then to dig some codeine Tylenol out of Miz Morgan’s medicine cabinet, hesitate, set the bottle in his shirt pocket, find and load a rifle and a pistol from the open gun cabinet in her bedroom closet, and then to hobble down to the bunkhouse for fresh clothes.

  It was early evening before he approached the cold-house door again. The dogs watched the muzzle of the rifle, whimpered, and pulled away as far as their leashes would allow. Bremen set down the large bowl of water he had brought up from the bunkhouse, and slowly the oldest bitch, Letitia, eased forward on her belly until she was gratefully lapping at it. The other two followed.

  Bremen turned his back on the dogs and opened the combination lock. The chain dropped away.

  The door did not swing open; it was jammed. He pried it loose with a crowbar brought up from the house and then pushed it open the last few inches with the barrel of the .30-.06 and stepped back out of the doorway. Cold air billowed out, turning to fog in the hundred-degree air. Bremen crouched, safety off, his finger on the trigger. A ridge of ice gleamed almost three feet above the level of the old floor.

  Nothing emerged. There was no sound except that of the rottweilers lapping up the last of the water, some of the cattle lowing as they came in from the lower pasture, and the chugging of the auxiliary generator out behind the cold house.

  Bremen let another three minutes pass and then he went in low, sliding on the raised hummock of ice and moving to the left of the doorway quickly, letting his eyes adapt to the dark and swinging the rifle in front of him. A moment later he lowered his weapon and stood up, his breath swirling around him. He walked forward slowly.

  Most of the carcasses in the center rows had been knocked off their hooks, either by the water pressure from above or by the madness below. They stood now—beef sides and human bodies—in stalagmites of ragged ice. It looked as if the entire fifteen-hundred-gallon tank had been emptied in here. Bremen set his boots carefully on the rough and rising swirls of blue-green ice, both to keep his balance and to avoid stepping on any of the raw-ribbed carcasses frozen into the nightmare mare beneath him.

  Miz Morgan was almost directly beneath the hole where sunlight shafted down through the vapor and dripping stalactites. The ice mound was at least three and a half feet tall here, and the bodies of her and the two dogs were embedded in it like some sort of pale, three-headed frozen vegetabl
e. Her face was the closest to the surface, so close that one wide, blue eye actually was lifted above the line of frost. Her hands, with fingers still curved into claws, also rose above the general level of ice like two crude sculptures abandoned before the refining strokes could be applied.

  Her mouth was open very wide, the frozen torrent of her last breaths like a solid waterfall connecting her to the solid sea of cold around her, and for one mad second the obscene image was so perfect that Bremen could imagine her vomiting this roomful of rancid ice.

  The dogs seemed to be part of her, joined below her hips in a torrent of frozen flesh, and the shotgun rose up through the ice from one of the dogs’ bellies in a caricature of an erection.

  Bremen lowered the rifle and reached out one shaking hand to touch the layer of ice above her head, as if the warmth of his touch would cause her to begin squirming and struggling in her cold shroud, curved claws tearing through ice to get at him.

  There was no movement, no white noise. His breath fogged the ice above her straining, open-mawed face.

  Bremen turned and went out of that place, taking care not to set his boot soles above any other sunken faces with staring eyes.

  Bremen left at dark, releasing the dogs and setting out enough food and water to keep them comfortable around the hacienda for a week or more. He left the Toyota where it was parked and took the Jeep. The distributor cap had been sitting atop Miz Morgan’s dresser like some clumsy trophy. He took none of her money—not even the pay due him—but loaded the back of the Jeep with three shopping bags of food and several two-gallon plastic jugs of water. Bremen considered taking the .30-.06 or the pistol, but ended up wiping them clean and setting them back in the closet gun case. For a while he went around with a dust rag cleaning surfaces in the bunkhouse as if he could eradicate all of his fingerprints, but then he shook his head, climbed into the Jeep, and drove away.

  Bremen drove west through the night, letting the cool desert air bring him up out of the nightmare that he had been dwelling in for so long now. He went west because going back east was unthinkable to him. Sometime after ten P.M. he reached Interstate 70 and turned west again below Green River, half expecting Deputy Howard Collins’s cruiser to come roaring up behind him with all of its lights flashing. There were no lights. Bremen passed only a few cars as he drove west through the Utah night.

  He had stopped in Salina to use the last of his cash to buy gas and was heading west out of town on Highway 50 when he found himself behind a slow-moving state patrol cruiser. Bremen waited until he found a road branching off—Highway 89 as it turned out—and turned south on it.

  He drove a hundred and twenty-five miles south, cut west again at Long Valley Junction, passed through Cedar City and over Interstate 15 just before dawn, continued west on State Road 56, and found a place to park the Jeep out of sight behind some dry cottonwoods at a county rest stop east of Panaca, twenty miles across the state line into Nevada. Bremen made a breakfast of a bologna sandwich and water, spread his blanket out on some dust-dry leaves in the shade of the Jeep, and was asleep before his mind had time to dredge up any recent memories to keep him awake.

  The next night, driving slowly south through the fringes of the Pharanagat National Wildlife Refuge on Highway 93, headed nowhere in particular, feeling the thrusts and echoes of mindbabble from passing cars, but still being able to concentrate better in the still desert air than he had in many weeks, Bremen realized that in another seventy-five miles or so he would be out of gas and out of luck. He had no money to take a bus or train anywhere, not a cent to buy food when the groceries ran out, and no identification in his pocket.

  He also had no ideas. His emotions, so spiked and exaggerated during the previous weeks, seemed to have been stored away somewhere for the duration. He felt strangely calm, comfortably empty, much as he had as a young child after a long, hard bout of crying.

  Bremen tried to think about Gail, about Goldmann’s research and its implications, but all of that was from another world, from someplace left far above in the sunlight where sanity prevailed. He would not be going back there.

  So Bremen drove south without thinking, the gas gauge hovering near empty, and suddenly found that Highway 93 ended at Interstate 15. Obediently, he followed the access ramp down and continued southwest across the desert.

  Ten minutes later, coming across a small rise, expecting the Jeep to cough and glide to a stop any second, Bremen blinked in surprise as the desert exploded in light—rivers of light, flowing constellations of light—and in that second of electric epiphany, he knew precisely what he would do that night, and the next night, and the night after that. Solutions blossomed like the missing transform in some difficult equation suddenly coming to mind, shining as clearly as the oasis of brilliance ahead of him in the desert night.

  The Jeep got him just far enough.

  EYES

  It is hard for me to understand, even now, the concept of mortality as Jeremy and Gail brought it to me.

  Dying, ending, ceasing to be, is simply not an idea that had existed for me previous to their dark revelation. Even now it disturbs me with its black, irrational imperative. At the same time it intrigues me, even beckons me, and I cannot help but wonder if the true fruit of the tree denied to Adam and Eve in the fairy tales that Gail’s parents taught her so assiduously when she was young had been not knowledge, as the folktale insists, but death itself. Death can be an appealing notion to a deity who has been denied even sleep while tending to His creation.

  It is not an appealing notion to Gail.

  In the first hours and days after the discovery of the inoperable tumor behind her eye, she is the essence of bravery, sharing her confidence with Jeremy through language and mindtouch. She is sure that the radiation treatments will help … or the chemo … or some sort of remission. Having found the enemy, identified it, she is less afraid of the darkness under her bed than she has been.

  But then, as the illness and terrible ordeal of medical treatment wear her down, filling her nights with apprehensions and her afternoons with nausea, Gail begins to despair. She realizes that the darkness under the bed is not the cancer but the death it brings.

  Gail dreams that she is in the backseat of her Volvo and it is hurtling toward the edge of a cliff. No one is in the driver’s seat and she cannot reach forward to grab the steering wheel because of a clear Plexiglas wall separating her from the front seat. Jeremy is running along behind the Volvo, unable to catch up, shouting and waving his arms, but Gail cannot hear him.

  Gail and Jeremy both awake from the nightmare just as the car hurtles over the cliff. Each has seen that there are no rocks below, no cliff face, no beach, no ocean … nothing but a terrible darkness that assures an eternity of sickening fall.

  Jeremy helps her through the winter months, holding tightly with mindtouch and real touch as they share the terrible roller coaster of the illness—hope and suggestion of remission one day, small bits of promising medical news the next, then the spate of days with the growing pain and weakness and no glimmer of hope.

  In the last weeks and days it is Gail again who provides the strength, diverting their thoughts to other things when she can, bravely confronting what needs to be confronted when she must. Jeremy draws farther and farther into himself, rocked by her pain and her growing distance from the reassuring absorption of mundane things.

  Gail is hurtling toward the cliff edge, but Jeremy is there with her until the last few yards. Even when she is too ill to be physically close, embarrassed by the loss of her hair and the pain that makes her live only for the shots that help for so few minutes, there are islands of clarity where their mindtouch holds the bantering intimacy of their long time together.

  Gail knows that there is something in the core of Jeremy’s thoughts that he is not sharing with her—she can see it only through the absence his scarred-over mindshield leaves there—but there have been many things that he has been reluctant to share with her since the medical nightmare be
gan, and she assumes that this is another sad prognosis.

  On Jeremy’s part, the long-hidden and shameful fact of the variocele has become so encysted that it is difficult to imagine sharing now. Also, there is no reason to share it now … they will have no children together.

  Still, on the night that Jeremy drives alone to Barnegat Light to share the ocean and stars with Gail lying in her hospital room, he has decided to share it with her. To share all of the small slights and shames he has hidden over the years, like opening the doors and windows to a musty room that has been sealed for far too long. He does not know how she will react, but knows that those final days they are to have together cannot be what they must be unless he is totally honest with her. Jeremy has hours to prepare his revelation since Gail spends so much time sleeping, medicated, beyond mindtouch.

  But then he falls asleep in the weak hours before sunrise on that Easter weekend morning, and when he wakes, there is no future of even a few more final days with her. The cliff had been reached while he slept.

  While she was alone. And frightened. And unable to touch him a final time.

  Yes, this idea of death interests me very much. I see it as Gail saw it … as the whisper from the dark under the bed … and I see it as the warm embrace of forgetfulness and surcease of pain.

  And I see it as something close and drawing closer.

  It interests me, but now, with so much opening up, the curtain opening so wide, it seems vaguely disappointing that everything might cease to be and the theater be emptied before the final act.

  Malebolge

  Bremen liked it here in the place where there was no night, no darkness, and where the neurobabble knew no boundaries between the penultimate, mindless surges of lust and greed and the ultimate, fiercely minded concentration on numbers, shapes, and odds. Bremen liked it here where one never had to move in the harsh glare of sunlight, but could exist solely in the warm chrome-and-wood glow of never-dimming lights, here where the laughter and movement and intensity never slackened.