The Hollow Man

Gail’s voice is a whisper. “What does that mean, Jerry?”

Jeremy abandons his iced tea with its melting ice cubes and goes to the fridge to get a beer. He pops the top and drinks deeply, pausing to burp once. Beyond Gail, the late-afternoon light is painting the cherry trees beyond the barn in rich colors. Out there, he shares with Gail. And in our minds. Different … and the same. The universe as a standing wavefront, as fragile and improbable as a baby’s dreams.

He burps again and says aloud, “Beats the hell out of me, kiddo.”

Lasciate Ogne Speranza, Voi Ch’intrate

On the third day, Bremen rose and went out into the light. There was a small dock behind the shack, little more than two boards on pilings really, and it was here that Bremen stood and blinked at the sunrise while birds made riotous sounds in the swamp behind him and fish rose to feed in the river in front of him.

On the first day he had been content to let Verge ferry him across the river and show him his fishing shack. The old man’s thoughts were a welcome change to Bremen’s exhausted mind: wordless thoughts, images without words, slow emotions without words, thoughts as rhythmic and soothing as the put-putting of the ancient outboard motor that propelled them across the slow-moving river.

The shack had been more than Bremen had expected for forty-two dollars a day; beyond the dock the little structure boasted a porch, a tiny living room with screened windows, one sprung couch, and a rocking chair, a small kitchen with a half-sized refrigerator—there was electricity!—the bulky oven and promised hot plate, and finally a narrow table with a faded oilcloth. There was also a bedroom not much larger than the built-in bed itself, its single window looking out on an honest-to-God outhouse. The shower and sink were makeshift things in an open alcove outside the back door. But the blankets and folded sheets were clean, the three electric lights in the shack worked, and Bremen collapsed onto the sprung couch with an emotion very close to elation at having found this place … if one can feel elation while feeling a sadness so profound that it bordered on vertigo.

Verge had come in and sat on the rocking chair. Remembering his manners, Bremen had gone through the grocery sacks, found the six-pack of beer that Norm Sr. had packed, and had offered one to Verge. The old man did not refuse, and Bremen basked in the warm glow of the old man’s wordless thoughts as they sat in the warm twilight and sipped their equally warm beers.

Later, after his guide had left, Bremen sat on the dock and fished. Not worrying about choice of bait or strength of line or what kind of fish he was going after, he had dangled his legs off the rough planks, listened to the swamp and river come alive with bullfrogs in the fading light, and caught more fish than he had ever dreamed of. Bremen knew that some were catfish from their whiskers, that several were longer, thinner, and tougher fighters, and that one actually looked like a rainbow trout, although he considered that unlikely … but he threw them all back. He had enough for three nights’ dinners and he needed no fish. It was the process of fishing that was therapeutic; it was fishing that lulled his mind into some vestige of peace after the madness of the preceding days and weeks.

Later on that first day’s night, sometime after it grew dark (Bremen did not consult his watch), he had gone into the shack, prepared a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich for dinner, washed it down with another beer, cleaned the dishes and then himself, and had gone to bed, to sleep for the first time in four days, and to sleep, without dreaming, for the first time in many weeks.

On the second day Bremen slept late and fished from the dock through the morning, caught nothing at all, and was as satisfied as he had been the night before. After an early lunch he had walked along the bank almost to a point where the river drained into the swamp, or vice versa … he could not tell, and fished for a few hours from a bank. Again, he threw back everything he caught, but he saw a snake swimming lazily between the half-submerged cypress and for the first time in his life was not afraid of the serpent.

On the evening of the second day Verge came put-putting upriver, coasted into the dock, and let Bremen know through simple signs that he was there to take him fishing back in the swamp. Bremen had hesitated a moment—he did not know if he was ready for the swamp—but then had lowered his rod and reel to the old man and jumped carefully into the front of the boat.

The swamp had been dark and overhung with Spanish moss, and Bremen had spent less time paying attention to his fishing than in watching the huge birds flapping lazily overhead to their nests, or listening to the evening calls of a thousand varieties of frogs, and even watching two alligators move lazily through the dusk-tinted water. Verge’s thoughts were almost one with the rhythms of the boat and swamp, and Bremen found it infinitely soothing to surrender the turmoil of his own consciousness to the damaged clarity of his fishing partner’s damaged mind. Through some strange way Bremen had fathomed that Verge, although poorly educated and far from being a learned man, had been a kind of poet in his earlier days. Now, since the stroke, that poetry showed itself as a gentle cadence of wordless memories and as a willingness to surrender memory itself to the more demanding cadence of now.

Neither of them had caught anything worth keeping, so they came out of the swamp into a lighter darkness —a full moon was rising above cypress to the east—and tied up to the little dock at Bremen’s shack. A breeze kept the mosquitoes away as they sat in companionable silence on the porch and finished the last of Bremen’s beers.

Now, on the third morning, Bremen rose and came out into the light, blinking at the sunrise and wanting to get a little fishing in before breakfast. Bremen jumped down from the dock and walked a hundred yards south along the bank to a grassy place he had found the previous afternoon. Mist rose from the river and the birds filled the air with urgent cries. Bremen walked carefully, one eye out for snakes or alligators in the weeds along the bank, feeling the air warm quickly as the sun rose free of the trees. There was something very close to happiness turning slowly in his chest.

The Big Two-Hearted River, came Gail’s thought.

Bremen stopped and almost stumbled. He stood, panting slightly, closing his eyes to concentrate. It had been Gail but had not been Gail: a phantom echo, as chilling as if her actual voice had whispered to him. For a minute the dizziness grew worse, and Bremen had to sit down quickly on a hummock of grass. He lowered his head between his knees and tried to breathe slowly. After a while the humming in his ears lessened, the pounding in his chest moderated, and the wave of déjà vu bordering on nausea passed.

Bremen raised his face to the sun, tried to smile, and lifted his rod and reel.

He did not have his rod and reel. This morning he had carried out the 38-caliber pistol instead.

Bremen sat on the warming riverbank and considered the weapon. The blue steel looked almost black in the bright light. He found the lever that released the cylinder and looked at the six brass circles. He clicked the cylinder shut and lifted the weapon higher, raising it almost to his face. The hammer clicked back with surprising ease and locked into place. Bremen set the short barrel against his temple and closed his eyes, feeling the warm sunlight on his face and listening to the buzz of insects.

Bremen did not fantasize that the bullet entering his skull would free him … would send him to some other plane of existence. Neither he nor Gail had ever believed in any life but this one. But he did realize that the gun, that the single bullet, were instruments of release. His finger had found the trigger, and now Bremen knew with absolute certainty that the slightest additional pressure would bring an end to the bottomless chasm of sorrow that lay under even this brief flash of happiness. The slightest additional pressure would end forever the incessant encroachment of other people’s thoughts that even now buzzed around the periphery of his consciousness like a million bluebottle flies around rotted meat.

Bremen began to apply that additional pressure, feeling the perfect arc of metal under his finger, and, despite himself, converted that tactile sense of arc as a mathematical construct. He visualized the latent kinetic energy lying in the gunpowder, the sudden translation of that energy into motion, and the ensuing collapse of a much more intricate structure as the complex dance of sine waves and standing wavefronts in his skull died with the dying of the brain that generated them.

It was the thought of destroying that beautiful mathematical construct, of smashing forever the wavefront equations that were so much more beautiful to Bremen than the flawed and injured human psyche they