The Hollow Man (7 page)

“Get in the fuckin’ boat, motherfucker,” hissed Vanni Fucci.

Bremen blinked again, honestly not understanding. Fucci’s thoughts were white-hot, a torrent of heated obscenities and surges of fears, and for a long moment
Bremen did not know that Vanni Fucci had spoken aloud.

“I said, get in the fucking boat, you motherfucker!” cried Vanni Fucci, and fired his pistol into the air.

Bremen sighed, lowered his hands, and stepped carefully into the skiff. Vanni Fucci waved him into the front of the flat-bottomed craft, gestured him to a sitting position, and then clumsily began poling with one hand while the other held the pistol.

Silently except for the cry of birds disturbed into flight by the single shot, they moved toward the opposite shore.

I
am interested in death. It is a new concept to me. The idea that one could simply
cease
is perhaps the most startling and fascinating idea that Jeremy has brought to me.

I am fairly certain that Jeremy’s own first realization of mortality is a particularly brutal one: the death of his mother when he was four. His telepathic ability is rare and undisciplined then—little more than the intrusion of certain thoughts and nightmares he would later realize are not his own—but the talent takes on a rare and unkind focus the night his mother died.

Her name is Elizabeth Susskind Bremen and she is twenty-nine years old on the night she dies. She is returning home from a “girls’ night out” that they have renamed poker night in deference to the prissy sound of the earlier name. This group of six to ten women have been meeting once a month for years, most since before
they were married, and this night they have gone into Philadelphia to catch a Wednesday-evening opening at the art museum and to go out to listen to jazz afterward. They are careful to appoint a designated driver, even though that name has not yet come into popular use, and Elizabeth’s lifelong friend Carrie has not had any alcohol before the drive home. Four of the friends live within a half hour’s drive of one another near where the Bremen home is in Bucks County, and they are carpooling in Carrie’s Chevy station wagon the night the drunk jumps the median on the Schuylkill Expressway.

The traffic is heavy, the station wagon is in the leftmost lane, and there is no more than two seconds of warning as the drunk comes over the median in a stretch where the guardrail is being repaired. The collision is head-on. Jeremy’s mother, her friend Carrie, and another woman named Margie Sheerson are killed instantly. The fourth woman, a new friend of Carrie’s who has attended poker night for the first time that night, is thrown from the car and survives, although she remains paralyzed from that day on. The drunk—a man whose name Jeremy is never to recall no matter how many times he sees it written in years to come—survives with minor injuries.

Jeremy slams awake and begins screaming, bringing his father running upstairs. The boy is still screaming when the highway patrol calls twenty-five minutes later.

Jeremy remembers every detail of the following few hours: being brought to the hospital with his father, where no one seems to know where Elizabeth Bremen’s body had been sent; being made to stand next to his father as John Bremen is told to look at female corpse after female corpse in the hospital morgue in order to “identify” the missing Jane Doe; then being told that the body has never been brought in with the other victims’,
but has been transferred directly to a morgue in an adjoining county. Jeremy remembers the long drive through the rain in the middle of the night, his father’s face, reflected in the mirror, lighted from the dashboard instruments, and the song on the radio—Pat Boone singing “April Love”—and then the confusion of trying to find the morgue in what seems an abandoned industrial section of Philadelphia.

Finally, Jeremy remembers staring at his mother’s face and body. There is no discreet sheet to raise, as in the movies Jeremy watches in years to come, only a clear plastic bag, rather like a clear shower curtain, through which Elizabeth Susskind Bremen’s battered face and broken body gleam almost milkily. The sleepy morgue attendant unzips the bag with a rude motion and accidentally pulls the plastic down until Jeremy’s dead mother’s breasts are exposed. They are still caked with not-quite-dry blood. John Bremen pulls the plastic higher in a motion familiar to Jeremy from hundreds of tucking-ins, and his father says nothing, only nods identification. His mother’s eyes are open slightly, as if she is peeking at them, playing some game of hide-and-seek.

Of course, his father does not take him along that night. Jeremy has been left with a neighbor, tucked into a sofa bed in the neighbor’s guest room smelling of carpet cleanser, and has shared each second of his father’s nightmare ordeal while lying between clean sheets and staring, wide-eyed, at the slowly moving bands of light on the neighbor’s guest-room ceiling as passing cars hiss by on wet pavement. It is more than twenty years later, after he has married Gail, that Jeremy realizes this. In truth, it is Gail who realizes it—who interrupts Jeremy’s bitter telling of that evening’s events—it is Gail who has access to parts of Jeremy’s memory that not even he can reach.

Jeremy did not weep when he was four, but he does this night twenty-one years later: he weeps on Gail’s shoulder for almost an hour. Weeps for his mother and for his father, now gone, who has died of cancer un-forgiven by his son. Jeremy weeps for himself.

I am not so sure about Gail’s first telepathic encounter with death. There are memories of burying her cat Leo when she is five, but the remembered mindtouch during that animal’s final hours after being struck by a car might be more a mourning for the absence of purring and furry warmth than any real contact with the cat’s consciousness.

Gail’s parents are fundamentalist Christians, increasingly fundamentalist as Gail grows older, and she rarely hears death spoken of in any terms other than “passing over” to Christ’s kingdom. When she is eight and her grandmother dies—she has been a stiff, formal, and odd-smelling old lady whom Gail rarely visits—Gail is lifted up to view the body in the funeral home while her father whispers in her ear, “That’s not really Grams … Grams is in heaven.”

Gail has decided early, even before Grams’s passing over, that heaven is almost certainly a crock of shit. Those are her Great-Uncle Buddy’s words—”All this holy-roller stuff, Beanie, it’s all a crock of shit. This heaven and choirs-of-angels stuff … all a crock of shit. We die and fertilize the ground, just like Leo Puss is doing out in the backyard right now. The only thing we know that happens after we’re dead is that we help the grass and flowers grow, everything else is a crock of shit.” Gail has never been sure why Great-Uncle Buddy called her Beanie, but she thinks it has to do with a sister of his who died when they were children.

Death, she decides early, is simple. One dies and
makes the grass and flowers grow. Everything else is a crock of shit.

Gail’s mother hears her sharing this philosophy with a playmate—they are burying a hamster who has died—and Gail’s mother sends the playmate home and harangues Gail for over an hour about what the Bible says, how the Bible is God’s Word on earth, and how stupid it is to think that a person simply ceases to be. Gail, stubborn, stares and listens, but refuses to recant. Her mother says that Great-Uncle Buddy is an alcoholic.

So are you
, the nine-year-old Gail thinks, but does not say aloud. She does not know this through her mindtouch ability—that will come under her control four years later when she enters puberty—but has deduced it through finding the can opener under the towels in the bathroom, from hearing her mother’s usually precise diction slurred and loud late at night, and from listening to the voices rising up the stairs from the parties her parents throw for their born-again friends.

Ironically, the first person close to Gail to die after she comes into the true birthright of her telepathic ability is her Great-Uncle Buddy. She has taken the bus all the way across Chicago to visit Uncle Buddy in the hospital where he lies dying. He has been unable to talk, his throat catheterized for the breathing tubes that keep air flowing past the cancer-ridden throat into the cancer-riddled lungs, but fifteen-year-old Gail remains there for six hours, long past visiting hours, holding his hand and trying to project her own thoughts to his through the shifting veils of pain and painkillers. There is no sense that he hears her mindtouch messages, although she is all but overwhelmed by the complex tapestry of his daydreamed memories. Through them all there has been a sense of
sadness and loss, much of it centered around the sister, Beanie, who was Uncle Buddy’s one friend in a hostile world.

Uncle Buddy
, Gail sent over and over,
if it’s not all a crock of shit … heaven and all … send me a sign. Send me a thought
. The experiment thrills and terrifies her. She lies awake for three nights wishing she had not sent the thought to her dying friend, half expecting his ghost to awaken her each night, but on the fourth night after Buddy died, there is nothing in the night—no whisper of his husky voice or warm thoughts, no sense of his presence “elsewhere”—only silence and a void.

Silence and a void. It remains Gail’s conviction of death’s dominion through the rest of her life, including these final weeks when she cannot hide the bleakness of her thoughts from Jeremy. He does not try to dissuade her from that view, although he shares sunlight and hope with her even while he sees little of the former and feels nothing of the latter.

Silence and a void. It is Gail’s sense of death.

Now it is Jeremy’s.

V
anni Fucci led Bremen from the skiff to the shore, from the shore through the screen of trees, and from the trees to the roadside where a white Cadillac was parked. The man kept the revolver down at his side, but visible, as he opened the car door on the passenger side and waved Bremen in. Bremen did not protest or speak. Through the shield of cypress he could see the small store where Norm Sr. was drinking his second cup of coffee and where Verge was sitting and smoking his pipe.

Fucci slid into the driver’s seat, started the Caddy with a roar, and peeled onto the tarmac, leaving a cloud of dust and a pattering of gravel on foliage behind them. There was no other traffic. The low morning light touched treetops and telephone poles. Sunlight glinted on water to their right. The gangster set the pistol near his left leg on the plush leather seat. “You say one fucking
word,” he said in an urgent whisper, “and I’ll blow your fucking head off right here.”

Bremen had no urge to say anything. As they continued to drive west, the Cadillac idling along at an easy fifty-five, he settled back into the cushions and watched the scenery go by to his right. They left the swamp and forest behind and entered an open area of saw grass and scrub pine. Weathered farmhouses sat back in the fields and, closer to the highway, perched the occasional roadside stands, empty of produce and people. Vanni Fucci muttered something and turned on the radio, punching buttons until he found a station with the right blend of rock and roll.

Bremen’s problem was that he hated melodrama. He did not believe in it. Gail had been the one to enjoy books and television and movies; Bremen always found the situations unlikely to the point of absurdity, the action and characters’ reactions unbelievable, and the melodrama banal in the extreme. Occasionally Bremen would argue that human beings’ lives revolved around carrying out the garbage, or setting the table, or watching TV—not around car chases and threatening others with guns. Gail would nod, smile, and say for the hundredth time, “Jerry, you’ve got the imagination of a doorknob.”

Bremen had imagination, but he disliked melodrama and did not believe in the fictional worlds that depended upon it. He did not believe all that much in Vanni Fucci, although the gangster’s thoughts were clear enough. Unstructured and frenzied, but clear.

It was a shame, Bremen thought, that people’s minds were not like a computer, that one could not call up information at will. “Reading people’s minds” was more analogous to trying to read hasty scrawls on scraps of paper scattered on a bobbing sea than calling up clean
lines of information on a VDT. People did not go around thinking about themselves in neat flashbacks for the benefit of any telepath who might encounter their thoughts; at least the people whom Bremen had met did not.

Nor did Vanni Fucci, although Bremen had learned the man’s name easily enough. Fucci
did
think of himself in the third person, in a totally self-absorbed but strangely removed way, as if the petty gangster’s life were a movie that only he was watching.
Well, Vanni Fucci got rid of that miserable fuck
had been the gist of the first thought Bremen had encountered on the island. The clothes and hair of Chico Tartugian had still been sending bubbles of trapped air to the surface.

Bremen closed his eyes and concentrated as they drove west, then north, then west again. It seemed an important thing to do, concentrate, although Bremen’s heart was not in it. He disliked melodrama.

Vanni Fucci’s thoughts jumped around like an insect on a hot griddle. He was in some turmoil, although his emotions were not touched by the dumping of Chico’s body or the probability that this stranger would have to be killed as well. It was just that he, Vanni Fucci, did not want to have to do the killing.

Fucci was a thief. Bremen caught enough images and shreds of images to glean the difference. In what seemed to be a long career as a thief—Bremen caught an image of Fucci in a mirror with long sideburns and the polyester leisure suit of the seventies—Vanni Fucci had never fired his gun at a person except for that time when Donni Capaletto, his so-called partner, had tried to rip him off after the Glendale Jeweler job and Fucci had taken away the punk’s .45 automatic and shot him in the kneecap with it. His own gun. But Fucci had been angry. That
wasn’t a professional thing to do. And Vanni Fucci prided himself on being a professional.

Bremen blinked, fought back nausea at trying to read these flittering shards on the sea of Fucci’s turbulent thoughts, and closed his eyes again.