The Hollow Man

Rat’s Coat, Crowskin, Crossed Staves

Bremen lived in a cardboard box under the Twenty-Third Street overpass and learned the litany of survival: rise before sunrise, wait, breakfast at the Nineteenth Street Salvation Army outlet, after waiting at least an hour for the minister to arrive and cajole them with motivation, then another half an hour for the prewarmed food to arrive … then, out by 10:30, shuffle twenty blocks to the Lighthouse for lunch, but not before more waiting. There is a job call at the Lighthouse and Bremen must line up for work in order to line up for lunch. Usually only five or six out of the sixty or so men and women are tagged for work, but Bremen is chosen more than once in April. Perhaps it is because he is relatively young. Usually it is unskilled, mindless work—cleaning up around the Convention Center, perhaps, or sweeping out the Lighthouse itself—and Bremen does it uncomplainingly, pleased to have something fill his hours other than the endless waiting and walking from meal to meal.

Dinner is at the JeSus Saves! near the train station or back at the Salvation Army storefront on Nineteenth. JeSus Saves! is actually the Christian Community Service Center, but everyone knows it by the name on the cross-shaped sign out front where the middle S on the horizontal JeSus is the beginning s on the vertical Saves! Bremen often stares at the empty area above the S on the vertical stem of the cross and wants to write something in there.

The food is much better at JeSus Saves!, but the preaching is longer, sometimes running so late that most of the waiting audience is asleep, their snores mixing with the rumbles of their bellies, before Reverend Billy Scott and the Marvell Sisters allow them to queue up for dinner.

Bremen usually joins some of the others for a walk along the Sixteenth Street Mall before returning to his box by eleven P.M. He never panhandles, but by staying near Soul Dad or Mister Paulie or Carrie T. and her kids, he sometimes receives the benefit of their begging. Once a black man in an expensive Merino wool overcoat gave Bremen a ten-dollar bill.

That night, and most nights, he stops by AlNite Liquor and picks up a bottle of Thunderbird, carrying it with him back to his box.

April had been a bitch in the Mile High City. Bremen realized later that he had almost died during those last weeks of Denver’s winter, especially during his first night out from the hospital. It had been snowing. Bremen wandered through a cityscape of black alleys and slush-filled streets, the buildings dark. Finally he had found himself in a block of burned-out row houses and had crawled in among the blackened timbers to sleep. He hurt everywhere, but his battered mouth, fractured ribs, and dislocated shoulder were like volcanic peaks of pain rising above an ocean of generalized ache. The shot he’d received hours earlier no longer diminished the pain, but still served to make him sleepy.

Bremen found a niche between a brick chimney and a fire-blackened beam and had crawled in to sleep when he awoke to a vigorous shaking.

“Man, you ain’t got no fucking coat. You stay here, you gonna fucking die and that the flat truth of it.”

Bremen had swum up to semiconsciousness. He blinked at the face scarcely illuminated by a distant streetlight. A black face, wrinkled and lined above an unkempt, twin-spiked beard, dark eyes just visible below the soiled stocking cap. The man wore at least four layers of outer clothing and they all stank. He was pulling Bremen to his feet.

“Lemmelone,” Bremen managed. His few moments of sleep, while not dreamless, had been more free of neurobabble than any time since Gail had died. “Lemmefuckalone.” He pulled his arm free and tried to curl into the niche again. Snow was falling softly through a hole in the shattered ceiling.

“Uh-uh, no way Soul Dad lettin’ you die jes’ ’cause you a stupid little honkie fuck.” The black man’s voice was strangely gentle, somehow appropriate to the softening night and the silent sweep of snowflakes against black beams.

Bremen let himself be lifted, moved toward the loose boards of the doorway.

“You got a place?” the man was asking over and over. Or perhaps he asked it only once and his thoughts echoed in both their skulls … Bremen was not sure. He shook his head.

“All right, this once you stay with Soul Dad. But just till the sun’s out and you got your brains back in your head. Okay?”

Bremen staggered alongside the black man for countless blocks, past brick buildings illuminated by the hellish orange light of the city reflected back from low storm clouds. Finally they came to a tall highway bridge and slid down a frozen slope of weeds to the darkness beneath. There were packing crates there, and sheets of plastic spread like tarps, and the ashen remains of campfires between abandoned autos. Soul Dad led Bremen into one of the larger structures—a veritable shack of plastic and packing crate, with the concrete buttress of the overpass serving as one wall and a sheet of tin as the door.

He led Bremen to a pile of smelly rags and blankets. Bremen was shaking so fiercely now that he could not warm himself, no matter how deep in the pile he burrowed. Sighing, Soul Dad removed his outer two layers of topcoat, draped them over Bremen, and curled close himself. He smelled of wine and urine, but his human warmth came through the rags.

Still shaking, but less fiercely now, Bremen fled again to dreams.

April had been cruel, but May was little better. Winter seemed reluctant to leave Denver, and even on the milder days the night air was cold at 5,280 feet of altitude. To the west, occasionally glimpsed between buildings, the real mountains rose steeply, their ridges and foothills less white from day to day, but their summits snowy into June.

And then, suddenly, summer was there and Bremen made his food rounds with Soul Dad and Carrie T. and the others through a haze of heat waves from the sidewalks. Some days they all stayed in the shade of the overpasses near their plastic tent village far across the tracks near the Platte River—the cops had rousted their more comfortable village under the Twenty-Third Street overpass in mid-May, “spring cleaning” Mister Paulie had called it—and ventured out only after dark to one of the open-late missions up beyond the state capitol building.

The alcohol did not cure the curse of Bremen’s enhanced mindtouch, but it dulled it a bit. At least he believed that he dulled it. The wine gave him terrible headaches, and perhaps the headaches themselves dulled the neurobabble. He had been drunk all the time by late April—it had been a type of self-destruction that neither Soul Dad nor the usually solicitous Carrie T. seemed to care about, since they also practiced it—but, using the illogic that if a little bit of addiction is good, more would be better, he had almost killed himself, physically and psychically, by buying crack from one of the teenage dealers down near the Auraria campus.

Bremen had gotten the cash from two days on the Lighthouse work program, and he returned to his box with great anticipation.

“What you smiling through your poor honkie excuse for a beard for, anyway?” Soul Dad had asked, but Bremen ignored the old man and scuttled into his box. Bremen had not smoked since his teenage years, but now he lighted the pipe he’d bought from the kid near Auraria, flipped the glass bubble over the end of the pipe as instructed, and inhaled deeply.

For a few seconds there had been peace. Then there was only hell.

Jerry, please … can you hear me? Jerry!

Gail?

Help me, Jerry! Help me get out of here. Images of the last thing she had seen: the hospital room, IV stand, the blue blanket at the end of her bed. Several nurses were gathered around. The pain was worse than Bremen had remembered … worse than the hours and days after his beating as bones healed poorly and bruises bled into his flesh … Gail’s pain was beyond description.

Help me, Jerry! Please.

“Gail!” Bremen screamed aloud in his box. He writhed to and fro, battering the cardboard walls with his fists until they ruptured and he was battering concrete. “Gail!”

Bremen screamed and pounded for almost two hours on that waning April day. No one came to check on him. The next morning, shuffling to Nineteenth Street, none of the rest of them would meet his eyes.

Bremen did not try crack again.

Soul Dad’s thoughts were a haven of slow harmony in a sea of mental chaos. Bremen stayed around the old man as much as possible, trying not to eavesdrop on the other’s thoughts, but always calmed when Soul Dad’s slow, rhythmic, almost wordless musings came through Bremen’s ineffective mindshield and curtains of alcohol-induced stupor.

Soul Dad, Bremen discovered, was named after a prison the old man had spent more than a third of the century in. In his youth Soul Dad had been filled with a fierce violence—a street-gang member decades ahead of his time: knife carrying, grudge holding, confrontation seeking. One of those confrontations in the late 1940s in Los Angeles had left three younger men dead and Soul Dad serving a life sentence.

It had been a life sentence in the truest sense of the word: conferring life. Soul Dad had shaken off his street mannerisms, the false bravado, the zoot-suit shallowness, the sense of worthlessness and self-pity. While quickly acquiring the deep toughness needed to survive in the toughest wing of the toughest penitentiary in America—a willingness to fight to the death rather than be trespassed upon in the slightest way—Soul Dad had gained a sense of peace, almost serenity, there in the midst of that penitentiary madness.

For five years Soul Dad spoke to no one. After that he spoke only when necessary, preferring to keep his thoughts to himself. And his thoughts were active. Even in the bits of accidental mindtouch, Bremen saw the remnants of those days and months and years of Soul Dad’s working in the prison library, reading in his prison cell: the philosophy he had studied—beginning with a brief conversion to Christianity, and then, in the sixties with its influx of a new breed of black criminal, a second conversion to the Black Muslim creed, and then moving beyond dogma into real theology, real philosophy. Soul Dad had read and studied Berkeley and Hume and Kant and Heidegger. Soul Dad had reconciled Aquinas with the ethical imperatives of the mean streets and had discarded Nietzsche as just another pimp-rolling, self-justifying zoot suiter with a chip on his shoulder.

Soul Dad’s own philosophy was one beyond words and images. It was something closer to Zen or to the elegant nonsense of nonlinear mathematics than to anything else Bremen had ever encountered. Soul Dad had rejected a world rampant with racism and sexism and hatred of every sort, but he had not rejected it with anger. He moved through it with a kind of stately grace—an elegant Egyptian barge floating amid the carnage of some wild naval battle between Greeks and Persians—and as long as his peaceful and wordless reverie was not invaded, he allowed the world to tend to the world while he tended to his garden.

Soul Dad had read Candide.

Bremen sometimes sought out the haven of the old man’s slow thoughts in much the same way that a small ship would seek shelter in the lee of a solid island when ocean seas grew too wild.

And usually the seas were too wild. Too wild even for Soul Dad’s solipsistic musings to offer shelter for long.

Bremen knew better than anyone alive that the mind was not a radio—neither receiver nor transmitter—but as the summer passed in the underbelly of Denver, Colorado, Bremen felt as if someone had tuned his mind to darker and darker wavelengths. Wavelengths of fear and flight. Wavelengths of power and self-induced potency.

Wavelengths of violence.

He drank more as the neurobabble turned to neuroshouts. The fuzziness helped a bit; the headaches distracted him. Soul Dad’s stolid presence was an even better shield than the drinking.

But the violent shouting continued around him and above him.

Crips and Bloods, showing their colors, cruising by in vans looking for trouble out here beyond their turfs, or pimp-strutting across the overpass in groups of three and five. Armed. Carrying little .32 revolvers and heavy .45 automatics and sawed-off shotguns and even some plastic-feeling Uzis and Mac-10s. Out looking for trouble, seeking an excuse to be enraged.

Bremen rolled into his box and drank and held his aching head between his hands, but the violence surged in him and through him like a shot of evil adrenaline.

The lust to inflict pain. The yearning for violent action. The pornographic intensity of street violence, experienced in a rush of images and shouts, replayed in slow motion like a favorite video.

Bremen shared the powerlessness turned to power by the simple act of squeezing a trigger, of slipping a blade into his palm. He felt the vicarious thrill of a victim’s fear, the taste of a victim’s pain. Pain was something one offered to others.

Most of the violent people Bremen touched with his mind were stupid … many amazingly stupid, many compounding their stupidity with drugs … but the haze of their thought and memory centers was nothing compared with the blood-scent clarity of the now, the heart-pounding, penis-raising immediacy of those seconds of violence they had sought and savored. The memory of these acts was not so much in their minds as in their hands and muscles and loins. Violence validated. It balanced all the banal hours of waiting and suffering insults and inaction, of watching television and knowing that one could not have any of the bright baubles paraded there … not the cars, not the houses, not the clothes, not the beautiful women, not even the white skin … and, more important, these seconds of violence were the envy of those TV faces and movie-star faces … faces that could only pretend to violence, faces that could only go through the white-bread motions of sanitized television violence and the fakery of motion-picture blood bags.

In his fitful dreams Bremen pimp-strutted down dark alleys, the pistol in his waistband, searching for someone with the wrong color, the wrong expression on his or her face. He became the Giver of Pain.

Others in the plastic-tarp village ignored Bremen’s cries and moans in the night.

It was not merely gang members and the inner-city poor who fueled Bremen’s nightmares. As he sat in the cool shade of an alley mouth on an evening in late June, Bremen suffered the thoughts of the shoppers strolling by on the Sixteenth Street Mall.

White. Middle class. Neurotic, psychotic, paranoid, fueled by an anger and frustration as real as the impotent rage of the crack-charged Blood or Crip. Everyone was angry at someone and that anger smoldered on, fogging minds like smoke from a slow flame.

Bremen drank his wine from a brown bag, nursed his ever-present headache, and occasionally glanced out of the alley at passing forms. Sometimes it was hard to match up the blazing beacons of their angry thoughts with the gray shades of their bodies.

That middle-aged white woman in shorts and a too-tight blouse, Maxine: she had twice tried to poison her sister for the title to their father’s unused land in the mountains. Twice the sister had survived and twice Maxine had rushed to her side in the hospital, bemoaning the bad luck of botulism. The next time, thought Maxine, she would take her sister up to the old house on Daddy’s property, feed her an ounce of arsenic in her chili, and stay there with her until she was cold.

The short man in the elevator shoes and Armani suit: Charles Ludlow Pierce. He was a lawyer, a defender of the civil rights of minorities, a contributor to half a dozen Denver charities, a frequent face, alongside that of his beaming wife Deirdre, in the photos of the Denver Post society page. And Charles Ludlow Pierce was a wife-beater, extinguishing his pyre of periodic anger with his fists. Deirdre’s face did not show the bruises because Charles Ludlow Pierce was careful not to administer one of his “lessons” when a charity ball or other public event was imminent … or if he did have to teach Deirdre a lesson then, it was, by silent assent, done with the sand in the sock and restricted to her body.

But it was the all-out, fists-in-the-face, orgasm-inducing, full-tilt “lessons” that Charles Ludlow Pierce credited with saving their marriage and his sanity. On those occasions Deirdre would be on “retreat” for a week or more at their home above Aspen.

Bremen lowered his eyes and drank his wine.

Suddenly he snapped his head up and stared out at the passing crowd until he picked out a man walking briskly by. Bremen left his bottle and brown bag behind and followed him.

The man continued east on Sixteenth Street, pausing in front of the glass-and-steel shopping concourse that was Tabor Center. The man deliberated going in to look at the suits in Brooks Brothers, decided against it, and continued east across Lawrence Street and onward down the open mall. An evening breeze from the foothills stirred the saplings along the bricked bus lane and cooled the city heat a bit. The man strolled on, taking no note of the bearded panhandler shuffling along half a block behind.

Bremen did not get his name. He did not care to know it. The rest was clear enough.

Bonnie will be eleven this September, but she looks thirteen. Shit, she looks sixteen! Her tits are filling out nicely. Her pussy hair’s been in since a year last May. Carla says that Bonnie had her period last month … that now our little girl’s a woman … little does Carla know!

The man was dressed in a wrinkled gray suit. He had come from one of the office buildings on Fifteenth and was waiting for his bus to Cherry Creek. It would be another eighteen minutes before he could get the bus two blocks south at the mall terminus. The man was tall, six-three or six-four, and he carried his extra weight well. His hair was tied back in a queue, one of those middle-aged male ponytails that Gail had called a dork knob.

He went into the Brass Rail, a wood-and-brass yuppie bar across from the north end of Tabor Center. Bremen found a shady place between two buildings where he could watch the wall-to-ceiling windows of the bar. Rich light streamed down Sixteenth Street and turned the glass opaque.

It did not matter. Bremen knew precisely where the man sat, what he drank.

Two years now with Bonnie and that dumb bitch Carla doesn’t suspect a thing. She thinks the kid’s stomachaches and tears are just adolescence. Adolescence! God bless adolescence! He raised another glass of Dewar’s. He always specified Dewar’s so he didn’t get the crummy bar scotch these places tried to pawn off on you.

Tonight’s another special night. A bonnie night. A bonnie lassie night. He laughed and waved his hand for a refill. Of course, it’s not like the first time, but what is? That first time … Images of velvet skin, a coppery stubbling of hair on his daughter’s small mound, the breasts … little more than buds then … and her weeping softly into the pillow. He had whispered, “If you don’t tell, it’ll be all right. If you tell, they’ll take you away and put you in an orphanage.”

It’s not like the first time, but she’s learning tricks … my Bonnie … my darling Bonnie. Tonight I’ll make her use her mouth again.…

He finished his second scotch, glanced at his watch, and hurried out of the Brass Rail, walking at a rapid but unhurried clip west down Sixteenth. He was almost at the bus terminus when a wino came out of the shadows across from Gart Brothers and angled across the pavement toward him. He moved farther to the right, frowning his warning at the drunk. There was no one else in sight and the two of them were partially hidden by the berm of raised grass and concrete on the stairway below the bus stop.

“Beat it, pal,” he snapped, flicking his hand dismissively as the wino came within panhandling distance. The man had a wild, blond beard, wilder eyes behind tape-patched glasses, and was wearing a full raincoat despite the heat of the day. The wino did not move away.

He shook his head and moved to go around the wino.

“In a hurry?” asked the bum, his throat thick with phlegm. It was as if the man had not spoken for days.

“Fuck off,” he said, and turned toward the bus station.

Suddenly he was jerked backward, into the shadows of the stairs. He whirled around, pulling his suit free of the wino’s filthy fist. “What the fuck …” he began.

“Hurrying home to abuse Bonnie?” said the wino in a soft rasp. “Going to do it to her again tonight?”

He stared, jaw slack. A cold claw slid down his back. He felt sweat drip from his armpit and trickle downward under his blue oxford-cloth buttondown. “What?”

“You heard me, asshole. We know all about it. Everyone does. The police probably know, too. They’re probably waiting with Carla in your kitchen right now, asshole.”

He continued to stare, feeling the shock turn to pure anger and begin to burn like white kerosene. Whoever this mangy fuck was, however he … however he knew … he was six inches shorter and eighty pounds lighter. He could kill this wino fuck with one hand tied behind his back.…

“Why don’t you try to kill me then, child molester?” whispered the wino. Amazingly, the stairway and bit of sidewalk below it were still empty. The shadows were long.

“Goddamn fucking right I’ll …” he began, and stopped as the flame of anger grew stronger, then blossomed into an explosion of pure hate as the wino began grinning through his tangled beard at him. He balled his large hands into fists and took three steps toward the bum, telling himself to stop just short of killing the little fuck. He had almost killed the kid back in college. He’d try to stop before the wino fuck quit breathing, but it would feel so good to sink his fists into that scabby, filthy face.…

Jeremy Bremen took a step back as the man rushed him, fists rising. Bremen reached under his raincoat, swept out the two-by-four, and brought it around in a left-handed swing that had helped him bat .287 during his last year of college ball.

In the last possible second the man’s arms had come up to shield his face. Bremen smashed the long board into the man’s upper arms, again into his shoulders as he went down on the stairs.

The big man snarled something and struggled to his feet. Bremen hit him once in the solar plexus with the board and then smashed it over the back of the man’s head as he doubled over. He began rolling down the steps in awkward little jerks.

Someone near the bus terminus began shouting. Bremen did not look over his shoulder. Taking his time, he stepped closer, hefted the three-foot length of board still in his hand, and swung it like a golf club, the swing ending in the big man’s open mouth. Teeth caught the last of the sunlight as they arced out over the street.

The big man spat, sat up, raised his forearms to his face.

“This is for Bonnie,” said Bremen, or tried to say through his clenched jaws, and then he swung down, very hard, smashing the end of the board into the man’s crotch.

The big man screamed. Someone down the walking mall screamed.

Bremen stepped forward and smashed the board into the man’s head again, splintering the wood a final time. The big man began to topple forward; Bremen stepped back and kicked him, once, very hard, imagining his groin as a football held at a perfect angle for a field goal.

Somewhere close by on Larimer Street a siren wailed and fell back into silence. Bremen stepped back, let the last shard of splintered wood fall from his grubby hands, looked once at the whimpering man on the sidewalk, and turned and ran.

There were shouts and the sound of at least two people running after him.

Raincoat flying, beard flapping, eyes so wide that they appeared to be blank, white eggs set in a dirt-browned face, Bremen ran for the shadows of the railroad overpass.