The Hollow Man

Bremen blinked and looked down at his clothes. He was wearing the work pants and khaki shirt he’d bought three days ago in Norm Sr.’s store. The pants were short and his dress shoes were caked with dust and mud. Suddenly Bremen patted his pockets, but the roll of cash—most of the $3,865 he’d taken out of the savings account—was still in his suitcoat pocket draped over the chair in the tiny bedroom in the fishing shack. Bremen remembered transferring a few twenties and maybe a fifty or two to his billfold when buying provisions, but he did not check now to see how much was there. He felt the lump of his wallet against his buttock, and that was enough for now.

Yeah, I’ll make the fucking meeting on time, but I’ll be dragging retardo along. Just as long as … hey, don’t interrupt me, goddamn it … just as long as Sal knows that this fuck is their fucking responsibility. Got it?… No, wait, I said fucking got it? Okay. Okay. I’ll see you in an hour to two then. Yeah.

Vanni Fucci slammed the receiver down and walked to the edge of the highway, kicking gravel into the grass and clenching his fists. His white coat was getting dusty now. Fucci spun around and glared at Bremen through the windshield, the sunlight gleaming on the black silk of his shirt and the oil in his black hair.

Do him now. Now. No fucking traffic. No fucking houses. Just whack him here and get on with it.

Bremen glanced at the ignition, knowing without looking that Fucci had taken the keys. He could roll out the door and take off across the fields, weaving, hoping that he could outdistance Fucci and the range of the short- barreled .38 … hoping that another car would come along, that Fucci would give up the chase. Fucci was a smoker and Bremen wasn’t. Bremen set his hand on the car door and took a breath.

Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. Vanni Fucci had decided. He came around the driver’s side, got in, set his hand on the grip of his pistol in his waistband, and glared at Bremen. “You do anything cute, say anything to anybody where we’re goin’, and I swear I’ll whack you in front of a crowd. Got it?”

Bremen only stared. His hand left the door handle.

Vanni Fucci started the Cadillac and screeched out onto the road. A truck passed with a blare of air horns. Fucci gave the driver the fig with his left hand.

They drove north another ten miles on Highway 27 and then accelerated up a ramp onto Interstate 4, heading northeast now.

Bremen caught a glimpse of their destination in the churn of Vanni Fucci’s thoughts, and he smiled despite himself.

EYES

Jeremy and Gail celebrate their honeymoon on a canoe-and-backpacking trip.

Neither has canoed or backpacked before, but they do not have enough money for their first choice, Maui. Or for their second choice, Paris. Or even for their eighth choice, a motel in Boston. So, on a bright day in August, hours after their wedding in the garden of a favorite country inn, Jeremy and Gail wave good-bye to their friends and drive west and north to the Adirondacks.

There are closer camping spots: they have to drive through the Blue Mountains on the way to the Adirondacks, passing half a dozen state parks and state forests on their way, but Jeremy has read an article about the Adirondacks and wants to go there.

The VW has engine problems … it always has engine problems … and by the time the car is fixed in Binghamton, New York, they are eighty-five dollars behind their budget and four hours behind schedule. They spend that night at Gilbert Lake State Park, halfway between Binghamton and Utica.

It rains. The campground is small and crowded, the only spot left is next to the outhouse. Jeremy sets the twenty-four-dollar nylon tent up in the rain, and then goes over to the grill to see how Gail is doing with dinner. She is using her poncho as a tarp to keep the rain from dousing the few sticks they’ve scrounged for firewood, but the “fire” is little better than burning newspaper and the smoldering of wet wood.

“We should’ve eaten in Oneonta,” says Jeremy, squinting into the drizzle. It is not yet eight P.M. but the daylight has bled away through the gray clouds. The rain does not seem to discourage the mosquitoes, who whine under the tarp at them. Jeremy fans the fire while Gail fans the mosquitoes away.

They feast on half-heated hot dogs on soggy buns, kneeling inside the entrance to the tent rather than admit defeat by retreating to the comparative luxury of the car.

“I wasn’t hungry anyway,” lies Gail. Bremen sees through mindtouch that she is lying, and Gail sees that he sees.

He also sees that she wants to make love.

They are in their zipped-together sleeping bags by nine P.M., although the rain chooses to let up then and the campers on either side of them roll out of their Winnebagos and Silverstreams, cranking radios up high while they cook late dinners. The smell of charcoal-grilling steak comes to Jeremy and Gail through the inward-turning spiral of foreplay, and they both giggle as they sense the other’s distraction.

Jeremy lays his cheek on Gail’s stomach and whispers, “Think they’d give us some if we tell them we’re newlyweds?”

Hungry newlyweds. Gail runs her fingers through his hair.

Jeremy kisses the gentle curve of her lower belly. Ah, well … a little starvation never hurt anybody.

Gail giggles, then stops giggling and takes a deep breath. The rain starts again, gentle but insistent on the nylon above, driving away the insects, the noise, and the smells of cooking. For a while there is nothing in the universe but Gail’s body, Jeremy’s body … and then a single body owned totally by neither.

They have made love before … made love that first night after Chuck Gilpen’s party … but it is never less wonderful or strange, and this night, in the tent in the rain, Jeremy truly loses himself, and Gail loses herself, and their flow of thoughts becomes as joined and intermingled as the flow of their bodies. Eventually, after aeons of being lost in one another, Jeremy feels Gail’s enfolding orgasm and celebrates it as his own, even while Gail rises on the growing wave of his impending climax, so different from the seismic inward intensity of her own, yet hers now, too. They come together, Gail feeling, for a moment, the sensation of her body cradling itself in his body as he relaxes in her mind while her arms and legs hold him in place.

When they roll apart on the flattened sleeping bags, the air in the nylon tent is almost foggy with the moisture of their exhalations and exertions. It is full dark out now as Gail undoes the tent flaps and they slide their upper bodies out into the soft drizzle, feeling the gentle spray on their faces and chests, breathing the cooling air, and opening their mouths to drink from the sky.

They are not reading each other’s minds now, not visiting the other’s mind. Each is the other, aware of each thought and sensation as soon as he or she feels it. No, that is not accurate: there is no he or she for a moment, and that gender consciousness returns only gradually, like a morning tide receding slowly to leave artifacts on a fresh-washed beach.

Cooled and refreshed by the rain, they slip back inside, dry themselves with thick towels, and curl between the layers of goosedown. Jeremy’s hand finds a resting place on the small inward curve of Gail’s back as she rests her head on his shoulder. It is as if his hand has always known this place.

They fit perfectly.

The next day they have lunch in Utica and head north again, into the mountains. In Old Forge they rent a canoe and paddle up through the Chain of Lakes that Jeremy has read about. The lakes are more built up than he had imagined, the hiss and crackle of neurobabble is just audible from houses along the shores, but they find isolated islands and sandbars to camp on for the three days they are canoeing and portaging, until a two-day rainstorm and a two-and-a-half-mile portage drives them in from Long Lake on their fifth day.

Gail and Jeremy find a pay phone and ride back to Old Forge with a bearded young man from the canoe-rental place. Back in the sputtering VW, they head deeper into the mountains, making the seventy-some-mile loop up through Saranac Lake and down into the village of Keene Valley. There Jeremy buys a trail guide, they hitch up their backpacks for the first time, and head off into the boonies toward something called Big Slide.

The guidebook insists that the trip is only 3.85 miles via a moderate trail called the Brothers, but the word