The Hollow Man

EYES I DARE NOT

Together they pass out of the forest just as the morning mists are burning away. In the rich light the grassy hillsides beyond the woods give the impression of being part of a tanned and velvety human torso. Gail reaches out one hand as if to stroke the distant hills.

They speak softly, occasionally intertwining fingers. They have discovered that full mindtouch brings on the blinding headaches that have plagued each of them since awakening, so they talk … and touch … and make love in the soft grass with only the golden eye of the sun watching them. Afterward, they hold each other and whisper small things, each knowing that mindtouch is possible through means other than telepathy.

Later, they walk on, and in midafternoon they cross a rise and look past a small orchard at a vertical glare of white clapboard.

“The farm!” cries Gail, wonder in her voice. “How can it be?”

Jeremy feels no surprise. His equilibrium remains as they pass the barn and other outbuildings and approach the farmhouse itself. The building is silent but intact, with no signs of fire or disturbance. The driveway still needs new gravel, but now it goes nowhere, for there is no highway at the end of it. The long row of wire fence that used to parallel the road now borders only more high grass and another gentle hillside. There is no sign of the neighbors’ distant homes or of the intrusive power lines that had been set in behind the orchard.

Gail steps onto the back porch and peers in the window with the slightly guilty manner of a weekend house browser who has found a home that might or might not still be lived in. She opens the screen door and jumps a bit as the hinge squeaks.

“Sorry,” says Jeremy. “I know I promised to oil that.”

It is cool inside, and dark. The rooms are as they had left them—not as Jeremy had left them after his weeks of solitude while Gail was in the hospital—but as they had left them before their first visit to the specialist that autumn a year ago, an eternity ago. Upstairs, the afternoon sunlight falls from the skylight he and Gail had wrestled to install that distant August. Jeremy pokes his head into the study and sees the chaos abstracts still stacked on the oak desk and a long-forgotten transform still scrawled on the chalkboard.

Gail goes from room to room, sometimes making small noises of appreciation, more often just touching things gently. The bedroom is as orderly as ever, the blue blanket pulled tight and her grandmother’s patchwork quilt folded across the foot of the bed.

After making love again, they fall asleep between the cool sheets. Occasionally a wisp of breeze billows the curtains. Gail turns and mumbles in her sleep, frequently reaching out to touch him. Bremen awakes just after dark, although the sky outside the bedroom window holds the lingering twilight of late summer.

There has been a sound downstairs.

Jeremy lies motionless for a full moment, trying not to disturb the stillness even by breathing. For the time being no breeze stirs. He hears a sound.

Jeremy slides from the bed without waking Gail. She is curled on her side with one hand lifted to her cheek; she is smiling ever so slightly. Jeremy walks barefoot to the study, crosses to his desk, and carefully opens the lower right-hand drawer. It is there, wrapped in old rags, under the empty folders he had laid atop it the day his brother-in-law had given it to him. The .38 Smith & Wesson is the same one Jeremy had thrown into the water that morning when he had come across Vanni Fucci in Florida—the nick in the stock and dullness along the lower part of the barrel is the same—but it is here now. He lifts it, breaks the cylinder, and sees the brass circles of the six cartridges firmly in place. The roughened grip is firm against his palm, the metal of the trigger guard slightly cool.

Jeremy tries to make no sound as he moves from the study to the head of the stairway, from the stairway through the dining room to the door to the kitchen. It is very dim, but his eyes have adapted. From where he stands he can make out the pale white phantom of the refrigerator and he jumps when its recycling pump chunks on. Jeremy lowers the revolver to his side again and waits.

The screen door is slightly ajar and now it swings open and then closed again. A shadow slips across the tile.

The movement startles Jeremy and he takes a step forward and lifts the .38 a second before he lowers it again. Gernisavien, the tough-minded little calico, crosses the floor to brush against his legs impatiently. Then she twitches her tail, paces back to the refrigerator, looks up at Jeremy meaningfully, and crosses back to brush against him with even less patience.

Jeremy kneels to rub her neck. The pistol looks idiotic in his hand. Taking a long breath, he sets the weapon on the kitchen counter and uses both hands to pet his cat.

The moon is rising the next evening by the time they have a late dinner. Electric lights in the house do not work, but all other electricity seems to be flowing. The steaks come from the freezer in the basement, the ice-cold beers from the refrigerator, and the charcoal from one of several bags left in the garage. They sit out back near the old pump while the steaks sizzle on the grill. Gernisavien crouches expectantly at the foot of one of the big, old wooden lawn chairs despite the fact that she has been well fed only moments earlier.

Jeremy is wearing his favorite pair of cotton chinos and his light blue work shirt; Gail has slipped into the loose, white cotton dress she often wears on trips. The sounds tonight are the same they have heard from this backyard so many times before: crickets, night birds from the orchard, variations of frog sounds from the darkness near the stream, and an occasional flutter of sparrows from the barn. They set one of their two kerosene lanterns on the picnic table as they prepare the meal, and Gail lights candles as well. Later, as they eat, they douse the lantern so as to better see the stars.

Jeremy has served the steaks on thick paper plates and their knives make crisscross patterns on the white. Their meal consists of the steaks, wine from the still-well-stocked basement, and a simple salad from the garden with ample fresh radishes and onions.

Even with the crescent moon rising, the stars are incredibly clear. Jeremy remembers the night they had lain out in the hammock together and waited to catch a glimpse of the space shuttle floating across the sky like a windblown ember. He realizes that the stars are even clearer tonight because there are no reflected lights from Philadelphia or the tollway to dim the sky’s glory.

Gail leans forward even before the meal is finished. Where are we, Jerry? Her mindtouch is as gentle as possible so as not to bring on the headaches.

Jeremy takes a sip of wine. “What’s wrong with just being home, kiddo?”

There’s nothing wrong with being home. But where are we?

Jeremy concentrates on turning a radish in his fingers. It had tasted salty and cool.

Gail looks toward the dark line of trees at the edge of the orchard. Fireflies blink there. What is this place?

Gail, what’s the last thing you remember?

“I remember dying,” she says softly.

The words hit Jeremy like a blow to the solar plexus. For a moment he cannot frame his thoughts.

Gail continues, although her soft voice is husky. “We’ve never believed in an afterlife, Jerry.” Uncle Buddy … “After we’re dead we help the grass and flowers grow, Beanie. Everything else is a crock of shit.”

“No, no, kiddo,” says Jeremy, and moves his dish and glass aside. He leans forward and touches her arm. “There’s another explanation.…” Before he can begin it, the floodgates give way and they are inundated with the images he has held from her: burning the house … the fishing shack in Florida … Vanni Fucci … the dead days on the streets of Denver … Miz Morgan and the cold house …

“Oh, Jerry, my God … my God …” Gail has recoiled in her seat and now covers her face with her hands.

Jeremy comes around the table, grips her upper arms firmly, and lowers his cheek to hers. Miz Morgan … the steel teeth … the cold house … the anesthesia of poker … the flight east with Don Leoni’s thugs … the hospital … the dying child … a moment’s contact … falling.

“Oh, Jerry!” Gail sobs against his shoulder. She has suffered his months of hell in a violent moment of pain. She is suffering his own grief and the echoed insanity of that grief. Now they weep together for a moment. Then Jeremy kisses her tears away, wipes her face with the loose tail of his work shirt, and moves away to pour them each some more wine.

Where are we, Jerry?

He hands her a glass and takes a moment to sip from his. Insects chorus from out behind the barn. Their home glows pale in the moonlight, the kitchen windows warm with the light from their other kerosene lantern inside. He whispers, “What do you remember about waking up here, kiddo?”

They have already shared some of the images, but trying to put it into words sharpens their memories. “Darkness,” whispers Gail. “Then the soft light. The empty place. Rocking. Being rocked. Being held. And then walking. The sunrise. Finding you.”

Jeremy nods. He runs his finger around the rim of the wineglass. I think we’re with Robby. The boy. I think we’re in his mind.

Gail’s head snaps back as if she has been slapped. The blind boy …???????? She looks around her and then extends a shaking hand toward the table. She grips the edge tightly and the glasses vibrate. When she lets go, it is only to raise her hand to touch her own cheek. “Then nothing here is real? We’re in a dream?” I’m really dead and you’re only dreaming that I’m here?

“No,” says Jeremy loudly enough that Gernisavien moves quickly under a chair. He can see her tail twitching in the soft light from candles and stars. “No,” he says more softly, “that’s not it. I’m sure that’s not it. Remember Jacob’s research?”

Gail is too shaken to speak aloud. Yes. Even her mindtouch is tiny, almost lost in the low night sounds.

Well, continues Jeremy, holding her attention with the force of his will, you remember then that Jacob was sure that my analysis was correct … that the human personality was a complex standing wavefront … a sort of metahologram holding a few million smaller holograms.…

Jerry, I don’t see how this can help—

“Damn it, kiddo, it does help!” He leans closer again and rubs her upper arms, feeling the goose bumps there. “Listen, please.…”

Okay.

“If Jacob and I were right … that the personality is this complex wavefront which interprets a reality consisting of collapsing probability wavefronts, then the personality certainly couldn’t survive brain death. The mind may work as both generator and interferometer all in one, but both of those functions would be extinguished with the death of the brain.…”

Then how … how can I …?

He sits next to her again, keeping one arm firmly around her. Gernisavien comes out from under the chair and jumps on Gail’s lap, eager to share their warmth. They both keep one hand busy petting the calico while Jeremy continues talking softly.

“Okay, let’s just think about this a minute. You weren’t just a memory or a sense impression to me, kiddo. For over nine years we were essentially one person with two bodies. That’s why when you … that’s why I went crazy afterward, tried to shut my ability down completely. Only I couldn’t do it. It’s as if I was tuned to darker and darker wavelengths of human thought, just spiraling down through …”

Gail glances up from petting Gernisavien. She looks fearfully at the darkness down by the stream. The dark under the bed. “But how can it be so real if it’s just a dream?”

Jeremy touches her cheek. “Gail, it’s not just a dream. Listen. You were in my mind, but not just as a memory. You were there. The night you … that night when I was at Barnegat Light … the night your body died … you joined me, you leaped to my mind as if it were a lifeboat.”

No, how could …

“Think, Gail. Our ability was working well. It was the ultimate mindtouch. That complex hologram that’s you didn’t have to perish … you just leaped to the only other interferometer in the universe that could contain it … my mind. Only my ego sense or id or superego or whatever the hell keeps us sane and separate from all the barrage of our senses, not to mention separating us from the babble of all those minds, that part of me kept telling me that I was only sensing a memory of you.”

They sat in silence for a moment, each remembering. Big Two-Hearted River, offered Gail. Jeremy could see that she did remember fragments of the time he was at the Florida fishing camp.

“You were a figment of my imagination,” he said aloud, “but only in the way that our own personalities are figments of our own imaginations.” Probability waves collapsing on a beach of pure space-time. Schrödinger curves, their plots speaking in a language purer than speech. Vague Attractors of Kolmogorov winding around resonance islands of quasi-periodic sanity amid foaming layers of chaos.

“Think in a human language,” whispers Gail. She pinches his side.

Jeremy jumps away from the pinch, smiles, and holds the cat down as it prepares to leap away. “I mean,” he says softly, “that we were both dead until a blind, deaf, retarded child ripped us out of one world and offered us another in its place.”

Gail frowns slightly. The candles have burned out, but her white dress and pale skin continue to glow in the starlight and moonlight. “You mean we’re in Robby’s mind and it’s as real as the real world?” She frowns again at the sound of that.

He shakes his head. “Not quite. When I broke through to Robby, I tapped into a closed system. The poor bastard had almost no data to use in constructing a model of the real world … touch, I guess, scent, and a hell of a lot of pain, from what the nurses knew about his past … so he probably didn’t depend much on what little he could sense of the external world in defining his interior universe.”

Gernisavien leaped away and trotted off into the darkness as if she had urgent business somewhere. Knowing cats, Gail and Jeremy both guessed that she did. Jeremy also could stay still no longer; he stood and began pacing back and forth in the dark, never getting so far from Gail that he could not reach out and touch her.

My mistake, he continued, was in underestimating … no, in never really thinking about the power that Robby might have in that world. This world. When I broke through to him … planning just to share a few sight and sound images … he pulled me in, kiddo. And with me, you.

The wind comes up a bit and moves the leaves of the orchard. Their soft rustling has the edge of a sad, end-of-summer sound to it.

“All right,” Gail says after a moment. “We’re both existing as a couple of your squiggly personality holograms in this child’s mind.” She taps the table hard. “And it feels real. But why is our house here? And the garage? And …” She gestures helplessly at the night around them and the stars overhead.

I think Robby liked what he saw in our minds, kiddo. I think he preferred our polluted old Pennsylvania countryside to the landscape he’d built for himself during his lonely years.

Gail nods slowly. “But it’s not really our countryside, is it? I mean, we can’t drive into Philadelphia in the morning, right? Chuck Gilpen’s not going to show up with one of his new girlfriends, is he?”

I don’t know, kiddo. I don’t think so. My guess is that there’s been some judicious editing going on. We’re “real” because our holographic structure is intact, but all the rest of this is an artifact that Robby allows.

Gail rubs her arms again. An artifact that Robby allows. You make him sound like God, Jerry.

He clears his throat and glances skyward. The stars are still there. “Well,” he whispers, “in a real sense he is God right now. At least for us.”

Gail’s thoughts are scurrying like the field mice that Gernisavien is probably out chasing. “All right, he’s God, and I’m alive, and we’re both here … but what do we do now, Jerry?”

We go to bed, sent Jeremy, and he took her hand and led her into their home.