The Hollow Man

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