The Hollow Man

We go to bed, sent Jeremy, and he took her hand and led her into their home.

EYES I DARE NOT MEET

Jeremy dreams of rocking back and forth in a darkness deeper than his dream can convey; he dreams of sleeping with mildewed blankets against his cheek, of rough wool against lacerated skin, and of being struck by unseen hands. He dreams of lying broken and battered in a pit full of human shit while rain drips on his upturned face. He dreams of drowning.

In Jeremy’s dream he is watching with growing curiosity as two people make love on a golden hillside. He floats through a white room where people have no shape, are only voices, and where the voice-bodies shimmer to the heartbeat of an invisible machine.

He is swimming and can feel the tug of inexorable planetary forces in the pull of the riptide. Jeremy is just able to resist the deadly current by exerting all of his energy, but he can feel himself tiring, can feel the tide pulling him out to deeper water. Just as the waves close over him he vents a final shout of despair and loss.

He cries out his own name.

Jeremy awakes with the shout still echoing in his mind. The details of the dream fracture and flee before he can grasp them. He sits up quickly in bed. Gail is gone.

He has almost reached the door of their bedroom before he hears her voice calling to him from the side yard. He returns to the window.

She is dressed in a blue smock and is waving her arms at him. By the time he is downstairs she has thrown half a dozen items into their old wicker basket and is boiling water to make iced tea. “Come on, sleepyhead,” she says, grinning at him. “I have a surprise for you.”

“I’m not sure we need any more surprises,” he mumbles. Gernisavien is back and moving between their legs, occasionally rubbing up against a chair leg as if offering affection to the chair.

“This one we do,” she says, and is upstairs, humming and thrashing around in the closet.

“Let me shower and get some coffee,” he says, and stops. Where does the water come from? The electric lights had not been working yesterday, but the taps had all functioned.

Before he can ponder the question further, Gail is back in the kitchen and handing him the picnic basket. “No shower. No coffee. Come on.”

Gernisavien follows reluctantly as Gail leads them up and over the hill where the highway once had been. They cross meadows to the east and then climb a final hill that is steeper than any he can remember in this part of Pennsylvania. At the summit Jeremy lets the picnic basket drop from a suddenly nerveless hand.

“Holy shit,” he whispers.

In the valley where the turnpike had been there is now an ocean.

“Holy shit,” he says again softly, almost reverently.

It is the curve of beach so familiar to them from their trips to Barnegat Light along the New Jersey shore, but now there is no lighthouse, no island, and the coastline stretching north and south looks more like some remote stretch of cliffs along the Pacific than any rim of the Atlantic that Jeremy has ever seen. The hillside they have been climbing was actually the rear slope of a mountain that drops off several hundred feet on its east side to the beach and breakers below. The rocky summit they are standing on seems strangely familiar to Jeremy, and recognition slowly dawns.

Big Slide Mountain, confirms Gail. Our honeymoon.

Jeremy nods. His mouth is still open. He does not find it necessary to remind her that Big Slide Mountain had been in the New York Adirondacks, hundreds of miles from the sea.

They picnic on the beach just north of where the sheer face of the mountain catches the morning sun. Gernisavien has to be carried down the final stretch of steep slope, and once set down, she runs off to hunt insects in the dune grass. The air smells of salt and rotting vegetation and clean summer breezes. Far out to sea, gulls wheel and pivot while their cries make minor counterpoint to the crash of surf.

“Holy shit,” Jeremy says a final time. He sets the picnic basket down and tosses the blanket onto the sand.

Gail laughs and tugs off her smock. She is wearing a dark one-piece suit underneath.

Jeremy collapses onto the blanket. “Is that why you went upstairs?” he manages between laughs. “To get a suit? Afraid the lifeguards will toss you out if they see you skinny-dipping?”

She kicks sand at him and runs to the water. Her dive is clean and perfectly timed and she cuts into the surf like an arrow. Jeremy watches her as she swims out twenty yards, treads water as another breaker rolls by under her, and then paddles in to where she can stand. He can see by the way her shoulders are hunched and by the sight of her nipples raised under the thin Lycra that she is freezing.

“Come on in!” she calls, just managing to grin without having her teeth chatter. “The water’s fine!”

Jeremy laughs again, steps out of his Top-Siders, gets out of his clothes in three quick movements, and runs down the wet shingle of beach. She is waiting for him with open but goose-bumpy arms when he comes up spluttering from his dive.

After their picnic breakfast of croissants and iced tea from the Thermos, they lie back among the dunes to get out of the rising wind. Gernisavien returns to stare at them, finds nothing interesting, and goes back to the high grasses. From where they lie they can see the sun climbing higher and throwing new shadows along the uneven face of the mountain south of them.

Gail has removed her suit to sunbathe and falls asleep. Jeremy is almost asleep with his head on her thigh when he becomes suddenly and totally aware of the clean-sweat scent of her skin, and of the fine film of moisture glistening along the soft groove inches from his face where the curve of her thigh meets her groin. He turns over, rests his elbows on the blanket, and looks up beyond the compressed hillocks of her pale breasts at the undercurve of her chin, at the suggestion of dark stipple under her arms, and at the corona of light the sun is making around her hair.

Gail begins to stir, to question his movement, but he restrains her with the palm of his hand against her stomach. Her eyelids flutter and then stay closed. Jeremy shifts position, lifts himself and then lowers himself so he is lying between her legs, parts her thighs with his hands, and lowers his face to the sun-moistened warmth of her. Thinking of a line she had shared with him years before from a John Updike novel, he imagines a kitten learning to lap milk.

Moments later she pulls him higher, her hands and breathing rapid against him. Their lovemaking is more violent than any that has come before and the sharing of it goes beyond passion and mindtouch. Later, after Jeremy has lain alongside her with his head on her shoulder, their breathing slowing finally, their heartbeats receding so that they can hear the surf again, he fumbles for a towel and brushes away the sweat and traces of sand from her skin.

“Gail,” he whispers finally, just as they are both ready to drop off to sleep in the shade of the dune grass, “I have to tell you something.” But even as he speaks he feels the remnant of his last mindshield tighten and curl in a reflex protective action. The secret of the variocele has been hidden too deeply for too long to be surrendered so easily. He struggles for the words, or the thoughts, but neither come. “Gail, I … oh, Jesus, kiddo … I don’t know how …”

She turns on her side and touches his cheek. The variocele? The fact that you didn’t tell me? I know, Jerry.

The shock is like a physical blow to him. “You know?” ???? When? How long?

She closes her eyes and he sees the moisture in the lashes. That last night I was sick. While you were sleeping. I knew there was … something … I’d known it for a long time. But the secret of it hurt you for so long that I had to know before …

Jeremy begins shaking as if from illness. After a moment he does not try to hide the shaking, but clutches at the blanket until it passes. Gail touches the back of his head. It’s all right.