The Hollow Man

A Banner There Upon the Mist

Two days after the funeral, Frank Lowell, the head of the mathematics department at Haverford, came to the house to assure Bremen that his job would be kept safe no matter what he decided to do in the coming months.

“Seriously, Jerry,” Frank was saying, “there’s nothing to worry about in that area. Do what you have to do to put things back together. Whenever you want it back, it’s yours.” Frank smiled his best little-boy smile and adjusted his rimless glasses. He seemed to have a chubby thirteen-year-old’s cheeks and chin behind the mat of beard. His blue eyes were open and guileless.

Satisfaction. A rival removed. Never really liked Bremen … too smart. The Goldmann research made him too much of a threat.

Images of the young blonde from MIT whom Frank had interviewed the summer before and slept with through the long winter.

Perfect. No more need for lying to Nell or inventing conferences to fly to over long weekends. Sheri can stay in town, near campus, and she’ll have the chair by next Christmas if Bremen stays away too long. Perfect.

“Seriously, Jer,” said Frank, and leaned forward to pat Bremen’s knee, “just take whatever time you need. We’ll consider it a sabbatical and keep the position open for you.”

Bremen looked up and nodded. Three days later he mailed in his letter of resignation to the college.

Dorothy Parks from the psychology department came on the third day after the funeral, insisted on making dinner for Bremen, and stayed until after dark, explaining the mechanisms of grief to him. They sat on the porch until darkness and chill drove them inside. It was beginning to feel like winter again.

“You have to understand, Jeremy, that stepping out of one’s usual environment is a common mistake made by people who’ve just suffered a serious loss. Taking too much time off from work, changing homes too quickly … it all seems like it might help, but it’s just another way to postpone the inevitable confrontation with grief.”

Bremen nodded and listened attentively.

“Denial is the stage you’re in now,” said Dorothy. “Just as Gail had to go through that stage with her cancer, now you have to go through it in your grief … go through it and get past it. Do you understand what I’m saying, Jeremy?”

Bremen lifted a knuckle to his lower lip and nodded slowly. Dorothy Parks was in her mid-forties but dressed like a much younger woman. This night she wore a man’s shirt, unbuttoned quite low, tucked into a long gaucho skirt. Her boots were at least twenty inches tall. The bracelets on her wrist jingled as she gestured. Her hair was cut short, dyed a red impinging on purple, and moussed into a cockscomb.

“Gail would have wanted you to deal with this denial as quickly as possible and get on with your life, Jeremy. You know that, don’t you?”

He’s listening. Looking at me. Perhaps I should have left that fourth button closed … just be the therapist tonight … worn the gray sweater. Well, shit with that. I’ve seen him looking at me in the lounge. He’s smaller than Darren was … not as strong looking … but that’s not so important. Wonder what he’s like in bed?

Images of a sandy-haired man … Darren … sliding his cheek lower on her belly.

It’s okay, he can learn what I like. Wonder where the bedroom is here? Second floor somewhere. No, my place … no, better a neutral place the first time. Clock ticking. Biological clock. Shit, whatever man came up with that phrase ought to have his balls cut off.

“… important that you share feelings with your friends, with someone close,” she was saying. “Denial can only go on for so long before it turns the pain inward. You’ll promise you’ll call? Talk?”

Bremen lifted his head and nodded. At that second he decided beyond any doubt that the farm could not be sold.

On the fourth day after Gail’s funeral, Bob and Barbara Sutton, neighbors and friends, called again to express their sympathies in private. Barbara wept easily. Bob shifted uneasily in his chair. He was a big man with a blond crew cut, a permanent flush to his round face, and fingers that looked as short and soft as a child’s. He was thinking about getting home in time to watch the Celtics game.

“You know that God doesn’t give us anything we can’t bear, Jerry,” Barbara said between bouts of weeping.

Bremen considered that. Barbara had a premature streak of gray in her dark hair and Bremen followed the sinuous line of it back from her forehead, under her barrette, and out of sight around the curve of her skull. The neurobabble from her was like a surge of superheated air from an open hearth.

Witnessing. Wouldn’t Pastor Miller think it wonderful if I brought this college professor to the Lord. If I quote Scripture, I’m liable to lose him … oh, wouldn’t Darlene have a fit if I came to Wednesday-night services with this agnostic … atheist … whatever he is, ready to come to Christ!

“… He gives us the strength we need when we need it,” Barbara was saying. “Even when we can’t understand these things, there’s a reason. A reason for everything. Gail was called home for some reason the Good Lord will reveal when our time comes.”

Bremen nodded, distracted, and stood. Somewhat startled, Bob and Barbara stood also. He moved them toward the door.

“If there’s anything we can…” began Bob.

“Actually, there is,” said Bremen. “I wonder if you might take care of Gernisavien while I go away for a while.”

Barbara smiled and frowned at the same time. “The kitty? I mean, of course … Gerny gets along with my two Siamese … we’d be happy to … but how long do you think …”

Bremen attempted a smile. “Just a while to sort things out. I’d feel better if Gernisavien were with you rather than at the vet’s or that cat boarding place on Conestoga Road. I could drop her off in the morning, if that’d be okay.”

“Yeah,” said Bob, shaking Bremen’s hand again. Five minutes until the pregame show.

Bremen waved as they turned their Honda around and disappeared down the gravel drive. Then he went into the house and walked slowly from room to room.

Gernisavien was sleeping on the blue blanket at the foot of their bed. The calico’s head twitched as Bremen entered the room and her yellow eyes squinted accusingly at him for awakening her. Bremen touched her neck and went to the closet. He lifted one of Gail’s blouses and held it to his cheek a second, then covered his face with it, breathing deeply. He went out of the room and down the hall to his study. Student test booklets remained stacked where he had left them a month earlier. His Fourier equations lay scrawled where he had chalked them in a burst of two A.M. inspiration the week before Gail had been diagnosed. Heaps of manuscripts and unread journals covered every surface.

Bremen stood for a minute in the center of the room, rubbing his temples. Even here, a half mile from the nearest neighbor and nine miles from town or the expressway, his head buzzed and crackled with neurobabble. It was as if all of his life he had heard a radio tuned softly in another room and now someone had buried a boom box in his skull and turned the volume to full. Ever since the morning Gail had died.

And the babble was not only louder, it was darker. Bremen knew that it now came from a deeper and more malevolent source than the random skimming of thoughts and emotions he had held access to since he was thirteen. It was as if his almost symbiotic relationship with Gail had been a shield, a buffer between his mind and the razor-edged slashings of a million unstructured thoughts. Before last Friday, he would have had to concentrate to pick up the mélange of images, feelings, and half-formed language phrases that constituted Frank’s thoughts, or Dorothy’s, or Bob and Barbara’s. But now there was no shielding himself from the onslaught. What he and Gail had thought of as their mindshields—simple barriers to mute the background hiss and crackle of neurobabble—were simply no longer there.

Bremen touched the chalkboard as if he were going to erase the equation there, then set down the eraser and went downstairs. After a while Gernisavien joined him in the kitchen and brushed up against his legs. Bremen realized that it had grown dark while he was sitting at the table, but he did not turn on the light as he opened a fresh can of cat food and fed the calico. Gernisavien looked up at him as if in disapproval of his not eating or turning on a light.

Later, when he went in to lie on the couch in the living room to wait for morning, the calico lay on his chest and purred.

Bremen found that closing his eyes brought on the dizziness and impending sense of terror … the sure knowledge that Gail was here somewhere, in the next room, outside on the lawn, and that she was calling for him. Her voice was almost audible. Bremen knew that if he slept, he would miss the instant when her voice reached the threshold of his hearing. So he lay awake and waited as the night passed and the house creaked and moaned in its own restlessness, and his sixth night without sleep passed into the gray chill of his seventh morning without her.

At seven A.M. Bremen rose, fed the cat again, turned the kitchen radio on full, shaved, showered, and had three cups of coffee. He called a cab company and told them to have a taxi meet him at the Import Repair garage on Conestoga Road in forty-five minutes. Then he set Gernisavien in her travel cage—her tail thrashed since the cage had been used only for trips to the vet in the two years since her disastrous flight out to California on the visit to Gail’s sister there—and then he carried the cage out to the passenger seat of the Triumph.

He had bought the eight jerricans of kerosene on Monday, before dressing for the funeral. Now he lugged four of them to the back porch and twisted off their lids. The sharp fumes sliced through the cold morning air. The sky suggested rain before nightfall.

Bremen began with the second floor, dousing the bed, the quilt, the closets and their contents, the cedar chest, and then the bed again. He watched the white paper wrinkle and darken in the study as he slopped liquid from the second jerrican, and then he left a trail down the stairs, soaking the dark banisters that he and Gail had so painstakingly stripped and refinished five years before.

He used another two cans on the downstairs, sparing nothing—not even Gail’s barn coat still hanging on the hook by the door—and then he went around the outside of the house with the fifth can, soaking front and back porches, the Adirondack chairs out back, and the doorway lintels and screens. The final three cans were used on the outbuildings. Gail’s Volvo was still in the barn they used as a garage.

He parked the Triumph fifty yards down the drive toward the road and walked back to the house. He’d forgotten matches, so he had to go back into the kitchen and rummage in the junk drawer for them. The kerosene fumes made tears stream down his cheeks and seemed to cause the very air to ripple, as if the butcher-block table and Formica counter and tall, old refrigerator were as insubstantial as a heat mirage.

Then, as he retrieved the two books of matches from the tumble of stuff in the drawer, Bremen was suddenly and blissfully certain of what he should do.

Stand here. Light them. Go lie down on the couch.

He had actually removed two matches and was on the verge of striking them when the vertigo struck. It was not Gail’s voice denying him the act, but it was Gail. Like fingers scratching wildly on a pane of Plexiglas that separated them. Like fingers on the mahogany lid of a coffin.

You aren’t in a coffin, kiddo. You were cremated … as per your request when we drank too much three New Year’s Eves ago and got all weepy about mortality.

Bremen staggered to the table and closed the cover of the matchbook over the two matches, ready to strike them. The vertigo grew worse.

Cremated. Pleasant thought. Ashes for both of us. I spread yours in the orchard out beyond the barn … perhaps the wind will carry some of mine there.

Bremen started to strike the matches, but the scratching intensified, grew magnified, until it roared in his skull like a runaway migraine, shattering his vision into a thousand dots of light and darkness, filling his hearing with the scrabbling of rats’ feet on linoleum.

When Bremen opened his eyes, he was outside and the flames were already working on the kitchen and a second glow was visible in the front windows. For a moment he stood there, his headache throbbing with each pounding of his pulse, considering going back into the house, but when the flames became visible at the second-story windows and the smoke was billowing out through the screens of the back porch, he turned and walked quickly to the outbuildings instead. The garage went up with a muffled explosion that singed Bremen’s eyebrows and drove him back past the pyre of the farmhouse.

A line of crows from the orchard rose skyward, scolding and screeching at him. Bremen hopped in the idling Triumph, touched the cage as if to calm the agitated cat, and drove quickly away.

Barbara Sutton was red-eyed as he dropped the cat off. A line of trees blocked the sight of smoke rising from the valley he had left behind. Gernisavien crouched in her carry cage, slat-eyed and suspicious, trembling and glaring at Bremen. He cut through Barbara’s attempt at small talk, said that he had an appointment, drove quickly to the Import Repair shop on Conestoga Road, sold the Triumph to his former mechanic there at the price they had discussed, and then took a cab to the airport. Fire engines passed them as they drove toward the expressway to Philadelphia. He was only five minutes behind schedule.

Once at the airport, Bremen went to the United counter and bought a one-way ticket on the next flight out. The Boeing stretch 727 was airborne and Bremen was beginning to relax, seat reclined, beginning to feel that sleep might be permissible now, when the full force of everything struck him.

And then the nightmare began in earnest.