EYES
The problem is that Gail has suffered terrible migraines since puberty, so when the headaches become more frequent and more severe, neither she nor Jeremy takes adequate notice for some months. Emotional stress often triggers the migraines, and both of them suspect that Jacob Goldmann’s suicide is what has triggered this most recent series of headaches. Finally, though, when Jeremy has to leave a symposium at the college, weaving with the reflected pain of her headaches, to find her vomiting endlessly in the downstairs bathroom, blinded by the pain, they see the doctor. He sends them to a specialist, Dr. Singh, who immediately schedules Gail for CAT scans and MRI studies.
Gail is nonplussed.
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.
Jeremy feels anger and the vertigo of fear rise in him almost as strongly as the passion had moments before.
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.
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.
