The Hollow Man

EYES

It is hard for me to understand, even now, the concept of mortality as Jeremy and Gail brought it to me.

Dying, ending, ceasing to be, is simply not an idea that had existed for me previous to their dark revelation. Even now it disturbs me with its black, irrational imperative. At the same time it intrigues me, even beckons me, and I cannot help but wonder if the true fruit of the tree denied to Adam and Eve in the fairy tales that Gail’s parents taught her so assiduously when she was young had been not knowledge, as the folktale insists, but death itself. Death can be an appealing notion to a deity who has been denied even sleep while tending to His creation.

It is not an appealing notion to Gail.

In the first hours and days after the discovery of the inoperable tumor behind her eye, she is the essence of bravery, sharing her confidence with Jeremy through language and mindtouch. She is sure that the radiation treatments will help … or the chemo … or some sort of remission. Having found the enemy, identified it, she is less afraid of the darkness under her bed than she has been.

But then, as the illness and terrible ordeal of medical treatment wear her down, filling her nights with apprehensions and her afternoons with nausea, Gail begins to despair. She realizes that the darkness under the bed is not the cancer but the death it brings.

Gail dreams that she is in the backseat of her Volvo and it is hurtling toward the edge of a cliff. No one is in the driver’s seat and she cannot reach forward to grab the steering wheel because of a clear Plexiglas wall separating her from the front seat. Jeremy is running along behind the Volvo, unable to catch up, shouting and waving his arms, but Gail cannot hear him.

Gail and Jeremy both awake from the nightmare just as the car hurtles over the cliff. Each has seen that there are no rocks below, no cliff face, no beach, no ocean … nothing but a terrible darkness that assures an eternity of sickening fall.

Jeremy helps her through the winter months, holding tightly with mindtouch and real touch as they share the terrible roller coaster of the illness—hope and suggestion of remission one day, small bits of promising medical news the next, then the spate of days with the growing pain and weakness and no glimmer of hope.

In the last weeks and days it is Gail again who provides the strength, diverting their thoughts to other things when she can, bravely confronting what needs to be confronted when she must. Jeremy draws farther and farther into himself, rocked by her pain and her growing distance from the reassuring absorption of mundane things.

Gail is hurtling toward the cliff edge, but Jeremy is there with her until the last few yards. Even when she is too ill to be physically close, embarrassed by the loss of her hair and the pain that makes her live only for the shots that help for so few minutes, there are islands of clarity where their mindtouch holds the bantering intimacy of their long time together.

Gail knows that there is something in the core of Jeremy’s thoughts that he is not sharing with her—she can see it only through the absence his scarred-over mindshield leaves there—but there have been many things that he has been reluctant to share with her since the medical nightmare began, and she assumes that this is another sad prognosis.

On Jeremy’s part, the long-hidden and shameful fact of the variocele has become so encysted that it is difficult to imagine sharing now. Also, there is no reason to share it now … they will have no children together.

Still, on the night that Jeremy drives alone to Barnegat Light to share the ocean and stars with Gail lying in her hospital room, he has decided to share it with her. To share all of the small slights and shames he has hidden over the years, like opening the doors and windows to a musty room that has been sealed for far too long. He does not know how she will react, but knows that those final days they are to have together cannot be what they must be unless he is totally honest with her. Jeremy has hours to prepare his revelation since Gail spends so much time sleeping, medicated, beyond mindtouch.

But then he falls asleep in the weak hours before sunrise on that Easter weekend morning, and when he wakes, there is no future of even a few more final days with her. The cliff had been reached while he slept.

While she was alone. And frightened. And unable to touch him a final time.

Yes, this idea of death interests me very much. I see it as Gail saw it … as the whisper from the dark under the bed … and I see it as the warm embrace of forgetfulness and surcease of pain.

And I see it as something close and drawing closer.

It interests me, but now, with so much opening up, the curtain opening so wide, it seems vaguely disappointing that everything might cease to be and the theater be emptied before the final act.