The Hollow Man

??? Mild irritation at being removed from the flow of the equation he is scrawling on the chalkboard. He pauses.

Bobby Kennedy’s friend Robert McNamara said that Kennedy thought the world was divided into three groups of people—

The world’s divided into two groups of people, Jeremy interrupts. Those who think the world’s divided into groups, and those who are smart enough to know better.

Shut up a minute. Images of the pages fluttering and Gail’s left hand as she searches for her place again. The breeze through the screen smells of newly mown grass. The thick light deepens the flesh tones of her fingers and gleams on her simple gold band. Here it is … no, don’t read it! She closes the book.

Jeremy reads the sentences in her memory as she begins to structure her thoughts into words.

Jerry, stop it! She concentrates fiercely on the memory of root-canal work she’d suffered the summer before.

Jeremy retreats a bit, allows the slight fuzziness of perception that passes for a mindshield between them, and waits for her to finish framing her message.

McNamara used to go to those evening “seminars” at Hickory Hill … you know, Bobby’s home? Bobby ran them. They were sort of like informal discussion sessions … bull sessions … only Kennedy would have some of the best people in whatever field there when they talked about things.

Jeremy glances back at his equation, holding the next transform in his mind.

This won’t take long, Jerry. Anyway, Robert McNamara said that Bobby used to sort of separate people into three groups.…

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.

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