The Hollow Man

In Rats’ Alley

Bremen was beaten and robbed fifteen minutes after he had gotten off the bus in downtown Denver.

They had arrived late, after midnight of the third day, and Bremen had wandered away from the lights of the bus station, hunkering into snow flurries from the west, wondering at how cold it was here in mid-April, his hands in his pockets and his head down against the cold wind from the west, when suddenly the gang was around him.

It was not a real gang, only five black and Hispanic boys—none of them yet twenty—but in the seconds before their fists and boots flew, Bremen saw their intention, felt their panic and hunger for his money, but—more than that—sensed their eagerness to give pain. It was an almost sexual thrill, and if he had been attentive to the tone of the nighttime neurobabble surging around him, he would have felt the knife-edge intensity of their anticipation. Instead, he was taken by numbed surprise as they surrounded him and moved in, herding him into an alley mouth. Through the cascade of their half-articulated thoughts and adrenaline-rushed eagerness, Bremen could see their plan—get him into the alley to beat and rob him, kill him if he made too much of an outcry—but there was nothing he could do but back into the darkness there.

Bremen went down quickly when the fists lashed at him, tossing his remaining bills at them and curling into a tight ball. “It’s all I have!” he cried, but even as he spoke he read their lack of caring. The money was incidental now. It was the giving of pain that preoccupied them.

They did that well. Bremen tried to roll away from the boy with the blade … even though the knife was still in the youth’s hip pocket … but each way he rolled, a boot met him solidly. Bremen tried to cover his face and they kicked him in the kidneys. The pain was beyond anything Bremen had experienced. He tried covering his back and they kicked him in the face. Blood gushed from his broken nose and Bremen raised one hand to cover his face again. They kicked him in the scrotum. Then their fists returned, knuckles and the heels of their hands pummeling him in the skull, neck, shoulders, and ribs.

Bremen heard something crack, then something else crack, and then they were pulling off his shirt, ripping at his pants’ pockets. Bremen felt the blade slash at his lower belly, but the boy who wielded the knife had done so while backing away and the cut was a shallow one. Bremen did not know that at the moment. He knew very little at that moment … then he knew nothing at all.

It was an hour until someone found him, two hours more until someone took the trouble to call the police. The police arrived when Bremen was struggling up to a half-conscious state; they seemed surprised to find him alive. Bremen heard the car radio squawk as one of the officers called for an ambulance, he closed his eyes for a brief second, and when he opened them, there were paramedics around him and they were lifting him onto a wheeled stretcher. The paramedics wore clear plastic gloves and Bremen noticed how they worked to keep from getting his blood on themselves. He did not remember the ride to the hospital.

The emergency room was crowded. A team consisting of a Pakistani doctor and two exhausted interns dealt with his knife slash, gave him a hurried injection, and began stitching before the local anesthetic took effect. Then they left him to deal with some other patient. Bremen drifted in and out of consciousness for an hour and a half while he waited for them to return. When they did, the Pakistani doctor was gone, replaced by a young black doctor with rings of exhaustion under her heavy-lidded eyes, but the interns were the same.

They pronounced his nose broken, set a metal bar in place there with tape, found two broken ribs and taped them, prodded his bruised kidneys until he almost fainted with the pain, and then had him urinate into a plastic bedpan. Bremen opened his eyes long enough to see that his urine was pink. One of the interns told him that his left arm was dislocated and made him hold it up while they rigged a sling. The doctor returned and peered in Bremen’s mouth. His lips were so swollen that the touch of the tongue depressor made him stifle a cry of pain. The doctor announced that he had been lucky—only one tooth had actually been knocked out. Did he have a dentist?

Bremen grunted an answer made more vague by his swollen lips. They gave him another shot. Bremen could feel the medics’ fatigue as palpable as a thick tent canvas covering them all. None of the three had slept more than five hours during the past thirty. Their exhaustion made Bremen sleepier than the shot had.

He opened his eyes to find a police officer there. She was stolid, her gunbelt, belt radio, flashlight, and other items swinging from heavy hips. She had smudged eyes and blotchy skin. She asked Bremen again for his name and address.

Bremen blinked, thought of the authorities and Vanni Fucci, although he had to strain to remember through the painkiller haze who Vanni Fucci was. He gave the officer the name and address of Frank Lowell, the head of his department at Haverford. His buddy who was busy saving Bremen’s job for him.

“You’re a long way from home, Mr. Lowell,” said the officer. Bremen’s left eye was swollen shut and his right one was too blurry to read the name tag over her badge. He mumbled something.

“Can you describe the assailants?” she asked, rooting in her blouse pocket for a pencil. Bremen’s vision focused long enough for him to make out the childish scrawls in her notebook. She dotted her i’s with small circles, like the less mature students he had taught at Haverford. He described his assailants.

“I heard one of them call the other … the tallest … Red,” he said, knowing that they called each other nothing during the attack. But one of them had been Red, he had garnered that.

Suddenly Bremen realized that the neurobabble around him was a distant thing. Even the surges of pain and panic from the other patients in the emergency room, the mental cries and catcalls from the dark rooms stacked above him like crates of misery … all were muted. Bremen smiled at the officer and blessed the painkiller, whatever it had been.

“Your wallet is missing,” said the cop. “Your ID is gone, your insurance card, everything.…” The officer eyed him, and even through the fog of medication Bremen could feel her suspicion: he looked like a derelict, but they had checked his arms, thighs, and feet … no track marks … and while his urine had held ample blood, there had been no immediate trace of drugs or alcohol. Bremen felt her decide to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“You’ll spend the night here in observation, Mr. Lowell,” she said. “You told Dr. Chalbatt that you had no one to call here in the Denver area, so Dr. Elkhart isn’t too keen on turning you loose tonight without supervision. They’ll book you in as soon as there’s a room available, monitor the bruised kidney overnight, and take another look at you tomorrow. We’ll send someone over in the morning to go over the assault and battery with you.”

Bremen closed his eyes and nodded slowly, but when he opened his eyes again, he was alone on a gurney in an echoing hallway. The clock read 4:23. A woman in a pink sweater came by, adjusted his blanket, and said, “There should be a room available anytime now.” Then she was gone and Bremen fought going back to sleep.

He had been an idiot to give the police officer Frank Lowell’s name and address. Someone would call Frank’s home in the morning, a description would be given, and Bremen would be sitting in custody, answering questions about his burned farmhouse … and possibly about a body found in a Florida swamp.

Bremen moaned and sat up, swinging his legs off the edge of the gurney. He almost fell off. He stared at his bare toes and realized that he was in a paper-thin gown; there was a plastic hospital bracelet on his left wrist.

Gail. Oh, God, Gail.

He slid off the cart, went to his knees, and used his good hand to feel around on the shelf under the cart. His clothes were stacked there, bloodstained and ripped though they were. Bremen checked the hall … it was still empty, although rubber soles squeaked just out of sight around the corner … and then he was hobbling to a supply closet down the hall, dressing painfully … finally giving up and draping the shirt over his slinged arm like a cape … and then out. Before he left the supply closet, he rummaged in a hamper of soiled clothing, came up with a white cotton intern’s jacket, and tugged it on, knowing how little warmth it would give out in the streets.

He checked the hall, waited until there was no noise, and moved as quickly as he could to a side door.

It was snowing outside. Bremen scurried way down an alley, not knowing where he was or where he was headed. Overhead, between the dark cliffs c buildings, the sky showed no hint of dawn.