The Hollow Man

EYES

I do not mean to suggest that Jeremy and Gail are the perfect couple, never disagreeing, never arguing, never disappointing one another. It is true that sometimes their mindtouch is more of an invitation to discord than a binding force.

Their closeness acts like a magnifying mirror for their smallest faults. Gail’s temper is fast to ignite and even faster to burn; Jeremy grows quickly tired of that. She cannot stand his slow, Scandinavian evenness in the face of even the most absurd provocation. Sometimes they fight about his refusal to fight.

Each decides early in the marriage that couples should be given biorhythm exams before the wedding rather than blood tests. Gail is an early-to-bed, early-to-rise type who enjoys the morning above all else. Jeremy loves the late night and does his best work at the chalkboard after one A.M. Mornings are anathema to him, and on those days when he does not have classes, he rarely stirs before 9:30. Gail does not enjoy mindtouch with him before his second cup of coffee, and even then says that it is like achieving telepathy with a surly bear half-risen from hibernation.

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.