The Hollow Man

serving as one wall and a sheet of tin as the door.

He led Bremen to a pile of smelly rags and blankets. Bremen was shaking so fiercely now that he could not warm himself, no matter how deep in the pile he burrowed. Sighing, Soul Dad removed his outer two layers of topcoat, draped them over Bremen, and curled close himself. He smelled of wine and urine, but his human warmth came through the rags.

Still shaking, but less fiercely now, Bremen fled again to dreams.

April had been cruel, but May was little better. Winter seemed reluctant to leave Denver, and even on the milder days the night air was cold at 5,280 feet of altitude. To the west, occasionally glimpsed between buildings, the real mountains rose steeply, their ridges and foothills less white from day to day, but their summits snowy into June.

And then, suddenly, summer was there and Bremen made his food rounds with Soul Dad and Carrie T. and the others through a haze of heat waves from the sidewalks. Some days they all stayed in the shade of the overpasses near their plastic tent village far across the tracks near the Platte River—the cops had rousted their more comfortable village under the Twenty-Third Street overpass in mid-May, “spring cleaning” Mister Paulie had called it—and ventured out only after dark to one of the open-late missions up beyond the state capitol building.

The alcohol did not cure the curse of Bremen’s enhanced mindtouch, but it dulled it a bit. At least he believed that he dulled it. The wine gave him terrible headaches, and perhaps the headaches themselves dulled the neurobabble. He had been drunk all the time by late April—it had been a type of self-destruction that neither Soul Dad nor the usually solicitous Carrie T. seemed to care about, since they also practiced it—but, using the illogic that if a little bit of addiction is good, more would be better, he had almost killed himself, physically and psychically, by buying crack from one of the teenage dealers down near the Auraria campus.

Bremen had gotten the cash from two days on the Lighthouse work program, and he returned to his box with great anticipation.

“What you smiling through your poor honkie excuse for a beard for, anyway?” Soul Dad had asked, but Bremen ignored the old man and scuttled into his box. Bremen had not smoked since his teenage years, but now he lighted the pipe he’d bought from the kid near Auraria, flipped the glass bubble over the end of the pipe as instructed, and inhaled deeply.

For a few seconds there had been peace. Then there was only hell.

Jerry, please … can you hear me? Jerry!

Gail?

Help me, Jerry! Help me get out of here. Images of the last thing she had seen: the hospital room, IV stand, the blue blanket at the end of her bed. Several nurses were gathered around. The pain was worse than Bremen had remembered … worse than the hours and days after his beating as bones healed poorly and bruises bled into his flesh … Gail’s pain was beyond description.

Help me, Jerry! Please.

“Gail!” Bremen screamed aloud in his box. He writhed to and fro, battering the cardboard walls with his fists until they ruptured and he was battering concrete. “Gail!”

Bremen screamed and pounded for almost two hours on that waning April day. No one came to check on him. The next morning, shuffling to Nineteenth Street, none of the rest of them would meet his eyes.

Bremen did not try crack again.

Soul Dad’s thoughts were a haven of slow harmony in a sea of mental chaos. Bremen stayed around the old man as much as possible, trying not to eavesdrop on the other’s thoughts, but always calmed when Soul Dad’s slow, rhythmic, almost wordless musings came through Bremen’s ineffective mindshield and curtains of alcohol- induced stupor.

Soul Dad, Bremen discovered, was named after a prison the old man had spent more than a third of the century in. In his youth Soul Dad had been filled with a fierce violence—a street-gang member decades ahead of his time: knife carrying, grudge holding, confrontation seeking. One of those confrontations in the late 1940s in Los Angeles had left three younger men dead and Soul Dad serving a life sentence.

It had been a life sentence in the truest sense of the word: conferring life. Soul Dad had shaken off his street mannerisms, the false bravado, the zoot-suit shallowness, the sense of worthlessness and self-pity. While quickly acquiring the deep toughness needed to survive in the toughest wing of the toughest penitentiary in America—a willingness to fight to the death rather than be trespassed upon in the slightest way—Soul Dad had gained a sense of peace, almost serenity, there in the midst of that penitentiary madness.

For five years Soul Dad spoke to no one. After that he spoke only when necessary, preferring to keep his thoughts to himself. And his thoughts were active. Even in the bits of accidental mindtouch, Bremen saw the remnants of those days and months and years of Soul Dad’s working in the prison library, reading in his prison cell: the philosophy he had studied—beginning with a brief conversion to Christianity, and then, in the sixties with its influx of a new breed of black criminal, a second conversion to the Black Muslim creed, and then moving beyond dogma into real theology, real philosophy. Soul Dad had read and studied Berkeley and Hume and Kant and Heidegger. Soul Dad had reconciled Aquinas with the ethical imperatives of the mean streets and had discarded Nietzsche as just another pimp-rolling, self-justifying zoot suiter with a chip on his shoulder.

Soul Dad’s own philosophy was one beyond words and images. It was something closer to Zen or to the elegant nonsense of nonlinear mathematics than to anything else Bremen had ever encountered. Soul Dad had rejected a world rampant with racism and sexism and hatred of every sort, but he had not rejected it with anger. He moved through it with a kind of stately grace—an elegant Egyptian barge floating amid the carnage of some wild naval battle between Greeks and Persians—and as long as his peaceful and wordless reverie was not invaded, he allowed the world to tend to the world while he tended to his garden.

Soul Dad had read Candide.

Bremen sometimes sought out the haven of the old man’s slow thoughts in much the same way that a small ship would seek shelter in the lee of a solid island when ocean seas grew too wild.

And usually the seas were too wild. Too wild even for Soul Dad’s solipsistic musings to offer shelter for long.

Bremen knew better than anyone alive that the mind was not a radio—neither receiver nor transmitter—but as the summer passed in the underbelly of Denver, Colorado, Bremen felt as if someone had tuned his mind to darker and darker wavelengths. Wavelengths of fear and flight. Wavelengths of power and self-induced potency.

Wavelengths of violence.

He drank more as the neurobabble turned to neuroshouts. The fuzziness helped a bit; the headaches distracted him. Soul Dad’s stolid presence was an even better shield than the drinking.

But the violent shouting continued around him and above him.

Crips and Bloods, showing their colors, cruising by in vans looking for trouble out here beyond their turfs, or pimp-strutting across the overpass in groups of three and five. Armed. Carrying little .32 revolvers and heavy .45 automatics and sawed-off shotguns and even some plastic-feeling Uzis and Mac-10s. Out looking for trouble, seeking an excuse to be enraged.

Bremen rolled into his box and drank and held his aching head between his hands, but the violence surged in him and through him like a shot of evil adrenaline.

The lust to inflict pain. The yearning for violent action. The pornographic intensity of street violence, experienced in a rush of images and shouts, replayed in slow motion like a favorite video.

Bremen shared the powerlessness turned to power by the simple act of squeezing a trigger, of slipping a blade into his palm. He felt the vicarious thrill of a victim’s fear, the taste of a victim’s pain. Pain was something one offered to others.

Most of the violent people Bremen touched with his mind were stupid … many amazingly stupid, many compounding their stupidity with drugs … but the haze of their thought and memory centers was nothing compared with the blood-scent clarity of the now, the heart-pounding, penis-raising immediacy of those seconds of violence they had sought and savored. The memory of these acts was not so much in their minds as in their hands and muscles and loins. Violence validated. It balanced all the banal