The Hollow Man

Gail is hurtling toward the cliff edge, but Jeremy is there with her until the last few yards. Even when she is too ill to be physically close, embarrassed by the loss of her hair and the pain that makes her live only for the shots that help for so few minutes, there are islands of clarity where their mindtouch holds the bantering intimacy of their long time together.

Gail knows that there is something in the core of Jeremy’s thoughts that he is not sharing with her—she can see it only through the absence his scarred-over mindshield leaves there—but there have been many things that he has been reluctant to share with her since the medical nightmare began, and she assumes that this is another sad prognosis.

On Jeremy’s part, the long-hidden and shameful fact of the variocele has become so encysted that it is difficult to imagine sharing now. Also, there is no reason to share it now … they will have no children together.

Still, on the night that Jeremy drives alone to Barnegat Light to share the ocean and stars with Gail lying in her hospital room, he has decided to share it with her. To share all of the small slights and shames he has hidden over the years, like opening the doors and windows to a musty room that has been sealed for far too long. He does not know how she will react, but knows that those final days they are to have together cannot be what they must be unless he is totally honest with her. Jeremy has hours to prepare his revelation since Gail spends so much time sleeping, medicated, beyond mindtouch.

But then he falls asleep in the weak hours before sunrise on that Easter weekend morning, and when he wakes, there is no future of even a few more final days with her. The cliff had been reached while he slept.

While she was alone. And frightened. And unable to touch him a final time.

Yes, this idea of death interests me very much. I see it as Gail saw it … as the whisper from the dark under the bed … and I see it as the warm embrace of forgetfulness and surcease of pain.

And I see it as something close and drawing closer.

It interests me, but now, with so much opening up, the curtain opening so wide, it seems vaguely disappointing that everything might cease to be and the theater be emptied before the final act.

Malebolge

Bremen liked it here in the place where there was no night, no darkness, and where the neurobabble knew no boundaries between the penultimate, mindless surges of lust and greed and the ultimate, fiercely minded concentration on numbers, shapes, and odds. Bremen liked it here where one never had to move in the harsh glare of sunlight, but could exist solely in the warm chrome-and-wood glow of never-dimming lights, here where the laughter and movement and intensity never slackened.

He sometimes wished that Jacob Goldmann were alive so that the old man could have shared this all-too- physical realization of their research—a place where probability waves were colliding and collapsing every second of every day and where reality was as insubstantial as the human mind could make it.

Bremen spent a week in the desert town and loved every greedy, foul-minded, belly-ruling-the-mind second of it. Here he could be born again.

He had sold the Jeep to an Iranian guy out on East Sahara Avenue. The Iranian was deliriously happy to get transportation for his last two hundred and eighty-six dollars and made no demands for little things such as a pink slip or registration.

Bremen used forty-six of the dollars to check into the Travel Inn near the downtown. He slept fourteen straight hours and then showered, shaved the last of his beard off, dressed in his cleanest shirt and jeans, and then began working his way through the downtown casinos: the Lady Luck, the Sundance, the Horseshoe, the Four Queens, ending up in the old Golden Nugget. He had started the evening with a hundred forty-one dollars and sixty cents. He ended the night with a little over six thousand dollars.

Bremen hadn’t played cards since his college days—and that had been mostly bridge—but he remembered the rules of poker. What he had not remembered was the Zen-deep concentration that the game demanded. The razor slashes of outside neurobabble were dulled here at the poker table because of the laser intensity of the concentration surrounding him, by the near-total absorption with the mathematical permutations that every bid and new card brought, and by the concentration demanded of Bremen himself in sorting everything out. Playing five-card stud was not like trying to pay attention to six televisions tuned to different stations; it was more like attempting to read half a dozen highly technical books simultaneously while the pages were being turned.

The other players ran the gamut: professional poker players whose livelihoods depended upon their skill and whose minds were as disciplined as those of any research mathematicians Bremen had ever met, gifted amateurs who blended real enjoyment of the high-stakes game with their quest for luck, and even the occasional pigeon sitting there fat, happy, and stupid … not even aware that he was being played like a cheap fiddle by the professionals at the table. Bremen took them all on.

During his second week in Las Vegas Bremen moved through the casinos on the Strip, checking into each with enough money to deposit in the safe to have his room comped and generally to be treated as a high roller. Then he would wander down to the card room and stand in line, occasionally watching the closed-circuit videos that explained how the game was played. To look the part, Bremen purchased Armani jackets that could be worn with open-collared silk shirts, three-hundred-dollar linen slacks that wrinkled if he looked at them hard, not one but two gold Rolexes, Gucci loafers, and a steel carrying case to hold his cash. He did not even have to leave the hotels to outfit himself.

Bremen tried his luck and found it good at Circus-Circus, Dunes, Caesar’s Palace, the Las Vegas Hilton, the Aladdin, the Riviera, Bally’s Grand, Sam’s Town, and the Sands. Sometimes he saw the familiar faces of the professionals who moved from casino to casino, but more often the players at the hundred-dollar tables preferred to play at their favorite casino. The mood in the card room was as intense as that of a hospital operating room, with only the loud voice of the occasional boisterous amateur breaking the low-murmured concentration. Amateur or professional, Bremen won, taking care as he did so to win and lose with the slow accretion of gain that might be attributed to luck. Soon the professionals avoided his table. Bremen continued winning, knowing now that luck favored the telepathic mind. The Frontier, El Rancho, the Desert Inn, Castaways, Showboat, the Holiday Inn Casino. Bremen moved through the town like a vacuum sweeper, being careful not to sweep up too much from any one table.

Unlike the other games, even blackjack, where the player was pitted against the house and security against cheating, card counting, or some “system” was heavy, only the house-provided dealer usually monitored the poker players. Occasionally Bremen would glance at the mirrored ceiling where the “eye in the sky” was certainly videotaping proceedings, but since the house took its profit from a share of the winner’s pot, he knew there would be little suspicion here.

Besides, he was not cheating. At least not by any measurable standards.

Occasionally Bremen felt guilty about taking money from the other players, but usually his mindtouch with the professionals at the table showed them to be similar to the casino dealers themselves—smugly confident that time would average out the winnings in their favor. Some of the amateurs were experiencing an almost sexual thrill at playing with the big boys, and Bremen felt he was doing some of these pigeons a favor by retiring them early.

Bremen did not really think about what he was going to do with the money; acquiring it had been his goal, his desert epiphany, and the details of how he was going to spend it could be deferred for a while. Another week here, he thought, and he could lease a Learjet to take him anyplace in the world he wanted to go.

He did not really want to go anywhere. Here, in this deepest of the tunnels he had traveled, he found some solace in the intensity of greed and lust and shallowness that surrounded him.

Walking the halls in one of the casino hotels reminded Bremen of watching the Mayor Marion Barry videotape of a few years earlier: a boring exercise in banality, ego, and frustrated sexuality. Even the high rollers in their shag-carpeted suites, rolling around in their Jacuzzis with one or more showgirls, ended up feeling hollow and frustrated, wanting more experience than the experience itself offered. Bremen found the entire town symbolized perfectly by the chrome troughs of its always-open buffets offering up heaps of underpriced, mediocre food, and by