Authors: Dan Simmons
Bremen turned and went out of that place, taking care not to set his boot soles above any other sunken faces with staring eyes.
Bremen left at dark, releasing the dogs and setting out enough food and water to keep them comfortable around the hacienda for a week or more. He left the Toyota where it was parked and took the Jeep. The distributor cap had been sitting atop Miz Morgan’s dresser like some clumsy trophy. He took none of her money—not even the pay due him—but loaded the back of the Jeep with three shopping bags of food and several two-gallon plastic jugs of water. Bremen considered taking the .30-.06 or the pistol, but ended up wiping them clean and setting them back in the closet gun case. For a while
he went around with a dust rag cleaning surfaces in the bunkhouse as if he could eradicate all of his fingerprints, but then he shook his head, climbed into the Jeep, and drove away.
Bremen drove west through the night, letting the cool desert air bring him up out of the nightmare that he had been dwelling in for so long now. He went west because going back east was unthinkable to him. Sometime after ten
P.M
. he reached Interstate 70 and turned west again below Green River, half expecting Deputy Howard Collins’s cruiser to come roaring up behind him with all of its lights flashing. There were no lights. Bremen passed only a few cars as he drove west through the Utah night.
He had stopped in Salina to use the last of his cash to buy gas and was heading west out of town on Highway 50 when he found himself behind a slow-moving state patrol cruiser. Bremen waited until he found a road branching off—Highway 89 as it turned out—and turned south on it.
He drove a hundred and twenty-five miles south, cut west again at Long Valley Junction, passed through Cedar City and over Interstate 15 just before dawn, continued west on State Road 56, and found a place to park the Jeep out of sight behind some dry cottonwoods at a county rest stop east of Panaca, twenty miles across the state line into Nevada. Bremen made a breakfast of a bologna sandwich and water, spread his blanket out on some dust-dry leaves in the shade of the Jeep, and was asleep before his mind had time to dredge up any recent memories to keep him awake.
The next night, driving slowly south through the fringes of the Pharanagat National Wildlife Refuge on Highway 93, headed nowhere in particular, feeling the thrusts and
echoes of mindbabble from passing cars, but still being able to concentrate better in the still desert air than he had in many weeks, Bremen realized that in another seventy-five miles or so he would be out of gas and out of luck. He had no money to take a bus or train anywhere, not a cent to buy food when the groceries ran out, and no identification in his pocket.
He also had no ideas. His emotions, so spiked and exaggerated during the previous weeks, seemed to have been stored away somewhere for the duration. He felt strangely calm, comfortably
empty
, much as he had as a young child after a long, hard bout of crying.
Bremen tried to think about Gail, about Goldmann’s research and its implications, but all of that was from another world, from someplace left far above in the sunlight where sanity prevailed. He would not be going back there.
So Bremen drove south without thinking, the gas gauge hovering near empty, and suddenly found that Highway 93 ended at Interstate 15. Obediently, he followed the access ramp down and continued southwest across the desert.
Ten minutes later, coming across a small rise, expecting the Jeep to cough and glide to a stop any second, Bremen blinked in surprise as the desert exploded in light—rivers of light, flowing constellations of light—and in that second of electric epiphany, he knew precisely what he would do that night, and the next night, and the night after that. Solutions blossomed like the missing transform in some difficult equation suddenly coming to mind, shining as clearly as the oasis of brilliance ahead of him in the desert night.
The Jeep got him just far enough.
I
t is hard for me to understand, even now, the concept of mortality as Jeremy and Gail brought it to me.
Dying, ending,
ceasing to be
, is simply not an idea that had existed for me previous to their dark revelation. Even now it disturbs me with its black, irrational imperative. At the same time it intrigues me, even beckons me, and I cannot help but wonder if the true fruit of the tree denied to Adam and Eve in the fairy tales that Gail’s parents taught her so assiduously when she was young had been not knowledge, as the folktale insists, but death itself. Death can be an appealing notion to a deity who has been denied even sleep while tending to His creation.
It is not an appealing notion to Gail.
In the first hours and days after the discovery of the inoperable tumor behind her eye, she is the essence of bravery, sharing her confidence with Jeremy through language
and mindtouch. She is sure that the radiation treatments will help … or the chemo … or some sort of remission. Having found the enemy, identified it, she is less afraid of the darkness under her bed than she has been.
But then, as the illness and terrible ordeal of medical treatment wear her down, filling her nights with apprehensions and her afternoons with nausea, Gail begins to despair. She realizes that the darkness under the bed is not the cancer but the death it brings.
Gail dreams that she is in the backseat of her Volvo and it is hurtling toward the edge of a cliff. No one is in the driver’s seat and she cannot reach forward to grab the steering wheel because of a clear Plexiglas wall separating her from the front seat. Jeremy is running along behind the Volvo, unable to catch up, shouting and waving his arms, but Gail cannot hear him.
Gail and Jeremy both awake from the nightmare just as the car hurtles over the cliff. Each has seen that there are no rocks below, no cliff face, no beach, no ocean … nothing but a terrible darkness that assures an eternity of sickening fall.
Jeremy helps her through the winter months, holding tightly with mindtouch and real touch as they share the terrible roller coaster of the illness—hope and suggestion of remission one day, small bits of promising medical news the next, then the spate of days with the growing pain and weakness and no glimmer of hope.
In the last weeks and days it is Gail again who provides the strength, diverting their thoughts to other things when she can, bravely confronting what needs to be confronted when she must. Jeremy draws farther and farther into himself, rocked by her pain and her growing distance from the reassuring absorption of mundane things.
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.
B
remen 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.