The Hollow Man

EYES

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.