The Hollow Man (14 page)

Their tastes, complementary in so many important areas, are flatly divergent on some equally important things. Gail loves reading and lives for the written word; Jeremy rarely reads anything outside his field and considers novels a waste of time. Jeremy will come down from the study at three
A.M
. and happily plop down in front of a documentary; Gail has little time for documentaries. Gail loves sports and would spend every fall weekend at a football game if she could; Jeremy is bored by sports and agrees with George Will’s definition of football as the “desecration of autumn.”

With music, Gail plays the piano, French horn, clarinet, and guitar; Jeremy cannot hold a tune. When listening to music, Jeremy admires the mathematical baroqueness of Bach; Gail enjoys the unprogrammable humanity of Mozart. Each enjoys art, but their visits to galleries and art museums become telepathic battlefields: Jeremy admiring the abstract exactitude of Josef Albers’s
Homage to the Square
series; Gail indulging in the Impressionists and early Picasso. Once, for her birthday, Jeremy spends all of his savings and most of hers to buy a small painting by Fritz Glarner—
Relational Painting, No. 57—
and Gail’s response, upon seeing it in Jeremy’s mind as he drives the Triumph up the drive with the painting in the boot, is
My God, Jerry, you spent all our money on those … those …
squares?

On political issues Gail is hopeful, Jeremy is cynical.
On social issues Gail is liberal in the finest tradition of the word, Jeremy is indifferent.

Don’t you want to end homelessness, Jerry?
Gail asks one day.

Not especially
.

Why on earth not?

Look, I didn’t make these people homeless, I can’t make them not-homeless. Besides, most of them are refugees from asylums anyway … tossed out by a liberal do-goodism that condemns them to a life on the streets
.

Some of them aren’t crazy, Jerry. Some are just down on their luck
.

Come on, kiddo. You’re talking to an expert on probability here. I may know more about why luck doesn’t exist than anyone in the commonwealth
.

Perhaps, Jer … but you don’t know much about people
.

Agreed, kiddo. And I don’t especially want to. Do
you
want to go deeper into that morass of confusion that most people call thoughts?

They’re people, Jerry. Like us
.

Uh-uh, kiddo. Not like us. And even if they were, I wouldn’t want to spend time brooding about them. And what would you spend time brooding about?

Gail gleans what the equation is all about by patiently waiting for some language-equivalent translation to cross Jeremy’s mind.
Big deal
, she sends, honestly angry,
you and some guy named Dirac can do a relativistic wave equation. How does that help anyone?

It helps us understand the universe, kiddo. Which is more
than you can say for eavesdropping on the confused mullings of all those “common folk” you’re so hot to understand
.

Gail’s anger is unfiltered now. It washes over Jeremy like a black wind.
God, you can be arrogant sometimes, Jeremy Bremen. Why do you think electrons are more worthy of study than human beings?

Jeremy pauses.
That’s a good question
. He closes his eyes a second and ponders the thought, excluding Gail as much as possible from his deliberations.
People are predictable
, he sends at last.
Electrons aren’t
. Before Gail can respond, he continues.
I don’t mean that people’s actions are all that predictable, kiddo … we
know how perverse people’s actions can be … but the
motivations
for their actions make up a very finite set, as does the range of the actions resulting from those motivations. In that sense, the uncertainty principle applies much less to people than to electrons. In a real sense, people are boring
.

Gail forms an angry response, but then stifles it.
You’re serious, aren’t you, Jerry?

He forms an image of himself nodding.

Gail raises her mindshield to think about this. She does not shut herself off from Jeremy, but the contact is less intimate, less immediate. Jeremy considers following up on the exchange, trying to explain further, if not justify, but he can feel her absorption with her own thoughts and he decides to save the conversation until later.

“Mr. Bremen?”

He opens his eyes and looks out at his class of math students. The young man, Arnie, has stepped back from the chalkboard. It is a simple differential equation, but Arnie has missed it completely.

Jeremy sighs, swivels in his chair, and proceeds to explain the function.

B
remen lived in a cardboard box under the Twenty-Third Street overpass and learned the litany of survival: rise before sunrise, wait, breakfast at the Nineteenth Street Salvation Army outlet, after waiting at least an hour for the minister to arrive and cajole them with motivation, then another half an hour for the prewarmed food to arrive … then, out by 10:30, shuffle twenty blocks to the Lighthouse for lunch, but not before more waiting. There is a job call at the Lighthouse and Bremen must line up for work in order to line up for lunch. Usually only five or six out of the sixty or so men and women are tagged for work, but Bremen is chosen more than once in April. Perhaps it is because he is relatively young. Usually it is unskilled, mindless work—cleaning up around the Convention Center, perhaps, or sweeping out the Lighthouse itself—and Bremen does it uncomplainingly,
pleased to have something fill his hours other than the endless waiting and walking from meal to meal.

Dinner is at the JeSus Saves! near the train station or back at the Salvation Army storefront on Nineteenth. JeSus Saves! is actually the Christian Community Service Center, but everyone knows it by the name on the cross-shaped sign out front where the middle
S
on the horizontal
JeSus
is the beginning s on the vertical
Saves!
Bremen often stares at the empty area above the S on the vertical stem of the cross and wants to write something in there.

The food is much better at JeSus Saves!, but the preaching is longer, sometimes running so late that most of the waiting audience is asleep, their snores mixing with the rumbles of their bellies, before Reverend Billy Scott and the Marvell Sisters allow them to queue up for dinner.

Bremen usually joins some of the others for a walk along the Sixteenth Street Mall before returning to his box by eleven
P.M
. He never panhandles, but by staying near Soul Dad or Mister Paulie or Carrie T. and her kids, he sometimes receives the benefit of their begging. Once a black man in an expensive Merino wool overcoat gave Bremen a ten-dollar bill.

That night, and most nights, he stops by AlNite Liquor and picks up a bottle of Thunderbird, carrying it with him back to his box.

April had been a bitch in the Mile High City. Bremen realized later that he had almost died during those last weeks of Denver’s winter, especially during his first night out from the hospital. It had been snowing. Bremen wandered through a cityscape of black alleys and slush-filled streets, the buildings dark. Finally he had found himself in a block of burned-out row houses and had crawled in among the blackened timbers to sleep. He hurt everywhere,
but his battered mouth, fractured ribs, and dislocated shoulder were like volcanic peaks of pain rising above an ocean of generalized ache. The shot he’d received hours earlier no longer diminished the pain, but still served to make him sleepy.

Bremen found a niche between a brick chimney and a fire-blackened beam and had crawled in to sleep when he awoke to a vigorous shaking.

“Man, you ain’t got no fucking coat. You stay here, you gonna fucking die and that the flat truth of it.”

Bremen had swum up to semiconsciousness. He blinked at the face scarcely illuminated by a distant streetlight. A black face, wrinkled and lined above an unkempt, twin-spiked beard, dark eyes just visible below the soiled stocking cap. The man wore at least four layers of outer clothing and they all stank. He was pulling Bremen to his feet.

“Lemmelone,” Bremen managed. His few moments of sleep, while not dreamless, had been more free of neurobabble than any time since Gail had died. “Lemmefuckalone.” He pulled his arm free and tried to curl into the niche again. Snow was falling softly through a hole in the shattered ceiling.

“Uh-uh, no way Soul Dad lettin’ you die jes’ ’cause you a stupid little honkie fuck.” The black man’s voice was strangely gentle, somehow appropriate to the softening night and the silent sweep of snowflakes against black beams.

Bremen let himself be lifted, moved toward the loose boards of the doorway.

“You got a place?” the man was asking over and over. Or perhaps he asked it only once and his thoughts echoed in both their skulls … Bremen was not sure. He shook his head.

“All right, this once you stay with Soul Dad. But just till the sun’s out and you got your brains back in your head. Okay?”

Bremen staggered alongside the black man for countless blocks, past brick buildings illuminated by the hellish orange light of the city reflected back from low storm clouds. Finally they came to a tall highway bridge and slid down a frozen slope of weeds to the darkness beneath. There were packing crates there, and sheets of plastic spread like tarps, and the ashen remains of campfires between abandoned autos. Soul Dad led Bremen into one of the larger structures—a veritable shack of plastic and packing crate, with the concrete buttress of the overpass serving as one wall and a sheet of tin as the door.

He led Bremen to a pile of smelly rags and blankets. Bremen was shaking so fiercely now that he could not warm himself, no matter how deep in the pile he burrowed. Sighing, Soul Dad removed his outer two layers of topcoat, draped them over Bremen, and curled close himself. He smelled of wine and urine, but his human warmth came through the rags.

Still shaking, but less fiercely now, Bremen fled again to dreams.

April had been cruel, but May was little better. Winter seemed reluctant to leave Denver, and even on the milder days the night air was cold at 5,280 feet of altitude. To the west, occasionally glimpsed between buildings, the real mountains rose steeply, their ridges and foothills less white from day to day, but their summits snowy into June.

And then, suddenly, summer was there and Bremen made his food rounds with Soul Dad and Carrie T. and
the others through a haze of heat waves from the sidewalks. Some days they all stayed in the shade of the overpasses near their plastic tent village far across the tracks near the Platte River—the cops had rousted their more comfortable village under the Twenty-Third Street overpass in mid-May, “spring cleaning” Mister Paulie had called it—and ventured out only after dark to one of the open-late missions up beyond the state capitol building.

The alcohol did not cure the curse of Bremen’s enhanced mindtouch, but it dulled it a bit. At least he believed that he dulled it. The wine gave him terrible headaches, and perhaps the headaches themselves dulled the neurobabble. He had been drunk all the time by late April—it had been a type of self-destruction that neither Soul Dad nor the usually solicitous Carrie T. seemed to care about, since they also practiced it—but, using the illogic that if a little bit of addiction is good, more would be better, he had almost killed himself, physically and psychically, by buying crack from one of the teenage dealers down near the Auraria campus.

Bremen had gotten the cash from two days on the Lighthouse work program, and he returned to his box with great anticipation.

“What you smiling through your poor honkie excuse for a beard for, anyway?” Soul Dad had asked, but Bremen ignored the old man and scuttled into his box. Bremen had not smoked since his teenage years, but now he lighted the pipe he’d bought from the kid near Auraria, flipped the glass bubble over the end of the pipe as instructed, and inhaled deeply.

For a few seconds there had been peace. Then there was only hell.

Jerry, please … can you hear me? Jerry!

Gail?

Help me, Jerry! Help me get out of here
. Images of the last thing she had seen: the hospital room, IV stand, the blue blanket at the end of her bed. Several nurses were gathered around. The pain was worse than Bremen had remembered … worse than the hours and days after his beating as bones healed poorly and bruises bled into his flesh … Gail’s pain was beyond description.

Help me, Jerry! Please
.

“Gail!” Bremen screamed aloud in his box. He writhed to and fro, battering the cardboard walls with his fists until they ruptured and he was battering concrete. “Gail!”

Bremen screamed and pounded for almost two hours on that waning April day. No one came to check on him. The next morning, shuffling to Nineteenth Street, none of the rest of them would meet his eyes.

Bremen did not try crack again.