The Hollow Man

“No!” He cries out the syllable. “No … you don’t understand … I knew about this. …”

Gail nods, her cheek almost touching his. Her whisper mixes with the wind in the dune grass. “Yes. But do you know why you never told me? Why you had to create a mindshield like a tumor in your own mind to hide it?”

Jeremy shudders. Ashamed.

No, not ashamed, corrects Gail. Frightened.

He opens his eyes to look at her. Their faces are only inches apart. Frightened? No, I …

Frightened, sends Gail. There is no judgment in her voice, only forgiveness. Terrified.

Of what? But even as he forms the thought he grips the blanket again as the sensation of sliding, of falling, rolls across him.

Gail closes her eyes again and shows him what had been hidden from him within the tight tumor of his secret.

Fear of deformity. The baby might not be normal. Fear of having a retarded child. Fear of having a child who would never share their mindtouch and would always be a stranger in their midst. Fear of having a child with the ability who would be driven insane by their adult thoughts crashing into his or her newborn consciousness.

Fear of having a normal child who would destroy the perfect balance of his relationship with Gail.

Fear of sharing her with a baby.

Fear of losing her.

Fear of losing himself.

The shaking begins again and this time clutching the blanket and the beach sand does not save him. He feels on the verge of being swept away by riptides of shame and terror. Gail puts her arm around him and holds him until it passes.

Gail, my darling, I am so sorry. So sorry.

Her mindtouch reaches beyond his mind to someplace deeper. I know. I know.

They fall asleep there in the shadows of the dunes, with Gernisavien stalking grasshoppers and the wind rising in the high grass. Jeremy dreams then, and his dreams mix freely with Gail’s, and in neither, for the first time, is there even the hint of pain.

EYES I DARE NOT MEET IN

Jeremy walks in the orchard in the cool of the evening and tries to talk to God.

“Robby?” He whispers, but the word seems loud in the twilight silence. Robby? Are you there?

The last light has left the hillside to the east and the sky is cloudless. Color leaks out of the world until everything solid assumes a shade of gray. Jeremy pauses, glances back at the farmhouse where Gail is visible making dinner in the lantern-lit kitchen. He can feel her gentle mindtouch; she is listening.

Robby? Can you hear me? Let’s talk.

There is a sudden flutter of sparrows in the barn and Jeremy jumps. He smiles, shakes his head, grabs a lower limb of a cherry tree, and leans onto it, his chin on the back of his hands. It is getting dark down by the stream and he can see the fireflies blinking against black. All this is from our memories? Our view of the world?

Silence except for insect sounds and the slight murmur of the creek. Overhead, the first stars are coming out between the dark geometries of tree branches.

“Robby,” Jeremy says aloud, “if you want to talk to us, we would welcome the company.” That is only partially true, but Jeremy does not try to hide the part that denies it. Nor does he deny the deep question that lies under all of their other thoughts like an earthquake fault: What does one do when the God of one’s Creation is dying?

Jeremy stands in the orchard until it is full dark, leaning on the branch, watching the stars emerge, and waiting for the voice that does not come. Finally Gail calls him in and he walks back up the hill to dinner.

“I think,” says Gail as they are finishing their coffee, “that I know why Jacob killed himself.”

Jeremy sets his own cup down carefully and gives her his full attention, waiting for the surge of her thoughts to coalesce into language.

“I think it has something to do with that conversation he and I had the night we had dinner at Durgan Park,” says Gail. “The night after he did the MRI scans on us.”

Jeremy remembers the dinner and much of the conversation, but he checks his memories with Gail’s.

Jaunting, she sends.

“Jaunting? What’s that?”

You remember that Jacob and I talked about The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester?

Jeremy shakes his head even as he shares her memory of it. A sci-fi novel?

Science fiction, Gail corrects him automatically.

He is trying to remember. Yeah, I sort of remember. You and he were both sci-fi fans, it turns out. But what does “jaunting” have to do with anything … it was a sort of a “Beam me up, Scotty” teleportation thing, wasn’t it?

Gail carries some dishes to the sink and rinses them. She leans back against the counter and crosses her arms. “No,” she says, her voice carrying the slight defensive tone she always uses when discussing science fiction or religion, “it wasn’t ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’ It was a story about a man who learned to teleport all by himself. …”

By “teleport” you mean zap instantaneously from place to place, right, kiddo? Well, you have to know that that’s as impossible as anything in the—

“Yes, yes,” says Gail, ignoring him. “Bester called the personal teleportation jaunting … but Jacob and I weren’t talking about jaunting really, just how the writer had people learn how to do it.”

Jeremy settles back and sips his coffee. Okay. I’m listening.

“Well, I think the idea was that they had a lab out on some asteroid or somewhere, and some scientists were trying to find out if people could jaunt. It turns out that they couldn’t.…”

Hey, great, sends Jeremy, adding the image of a Cheshire cat’s grin, let’s put the science back in science fiction, huh?

“Shut up, Jerry. Anyway, the experiments weren’t succeeding, but then there was a fire or some sort of disaster in a closed section of a lab, and this one technician or whatever just teleported right out … jaunted to a safe place.”

Don’t we wish that life were that simple. He tries to shield the memories of him clambering up a frozen corpse while Miz Morgan approached with the dogs and a shotgun.

Gail is concentrating. “No, the idea was that a lot of people had the jaunting ability, but only one person in a thousand could use it, and that was when his or her life was in absolute jeopardy. So the scientists set up these experiments.…”

Jeremy glimpses the experiments. Jesus wept. They put loaded pistols to the subjects’ heads and squeezed the trigger, after letting them know that jaunting is the only way they can escape? The National Academy of Sciences might have something to say about that methodology, kiddo.

Gail shakes her head. What Jacob and I were talking about, Jerry, was how certain things come only out of desperate situations like that. That’s when he began talking about probability waves and Everett trees,