The Hollow Man

This Is the Way the World Ends

It took Bremen three days and three nights to drive the intern’s Volvo from St. Louis to the East Coast. He had to park frequently at rest stops along the Interstate, too exhausted to continue, too obsessed to sleep. Bradley had only three hundred dollars in his wallet when Bremen had opened his locker, but that was more than enough for gas. Bremen did not eat during the transit.

The Benjamin Franklin Bridge out of Philly was almost empty as he crossed it an hour before sunrise. The double strip of highway across New Jersey was quiet. Occasionally Bremen would lower his mindshield a bit, but always flinched and raised it again as the roar of neurobabble lashed at him.

Not yet.

He blinked away the migraine pain and concentrated on driving, occasionally glancing at the glove compartment and thinking of the rag-covered bundle there. It had been at a rest stop somewhere in Indiana … or perhaps Ohio … when the pickup had pulled in next to him and the sallow-faced little man had hurried in to the rest rooms. Bremen had flinched at the cloud of anger and distrust that had surrounded the man, but he had smiled when he was out of sight.

The .38-caliber pistol was hidden under the driver’s seat of the man’s pickup. It looked almost like the weapon that Bremen had thrown into the Florida swamp. There were extra bullets under the seat, but Bremen had left those. The one in the chamber would be all that he needed.

The sun was not up, but morning light was paling above the rooftops when he drove onto Long Beach Island and took the road north to Barnegat Light. He parked near the lighthouse, set the revolver in a brown bag, and carefully locked the car. He set a slip of paper with Bradley’s name and address under the windshield wiper.

The sand was still cool when it lopped over the tops of his sneakers. The beach was deserted. Bremen sat in the curl of a low dune so that he could see the water.

He took off his shirt, set it carefully on the sand behind him, and removed the pistol from the bag. It was lighter than he remembered and smelled faintly of oil.

No magic wand. No miracle worker. Only an absolute end to that mathematically perfect dance within. If there is anything else, Gail, my darling, you will have to help me find it.

Bremen dropped his mindshield.

The pain of a million aimless thoughts stabbed behind his eyes like the point of an ice pick. His mindshield rose automatically, as it had since he first knew he had the ability, so as to blunt the noise, ease the pain.

Bremen pushed down the barrier, and held it down when it tried to protect him. For the first time in his life Jeremy Bremen opened himself fully to the pain, to the world that inflicted it, and to the countless voices calling in their circles of isolation.

Gail. He called to her and the child, but he could not sense them, could not hear their voices as the great chorus struck him like a giant wind. To accept them he must accept all of them.

Bremen lifted the pistol, set the muzzle to his skull, and pulled back the hammer. There was little friction. His finger curled on the trigger.

All the circles of hell and desolation he had suffered.

All the petty meannesses, sordid urges, solitary vices, vicious thoughts. All the violence and betrayal and greed and self-centeredness.

Bremen let it flow through him and around him and out of him. He sought a single voice in the cacophony now rising around him until it threatened to fill the universe. The pain was beyond enduring, beyond believing.

And suddenly, through the avalanche of pain-noise, there came a whisper of the other voices, the voices that had been denied Bremen during his long descent through his psychic hell. These were the soft voices of reason and compassion, the encouraging voices of parents urging their children in their first steps, the hopeful voices of men and women of goodwill who—while far from being perfect human beings—spent each day trying to be a better person than nature and nurture may have designed them to be.

Even these soft voices carried their burden of pain: pain at the compromises life imposed, pain at the thoughts of their own mortality and the all-too-threatening mortality of their children, pain of suffering the arrogance of all the willing pain-givers such as those Bremen had encountered in his travels, and the final, ineluctable pain at the certainty of loss even in the midst of all the sustaining pleasures life offered.

But these soft voices—including Gail’s voice, Robby’s voice—gave Bremen some compass point in the darkness. He concentrated on hearing them even as they faded and were drowned by the cacophony of chaos and hurt around them.

Bremen realized again that to find the softer voices he would have to surrender himself totally to the painful cries for help. He would have to take it all in, absorb it all, swallow it like some razor-edged Communion wafer.

The muzzle of the pistol was a cool circle against his temple. His finger was taut against the curve of trigger.

The pain was beyond all imagining, beyond all experience. Bremen accepted it. He willed it. He took it into and through himself and opened himself wider to it.

Jeremy Bremen did not see the sun rise in front of him. His hearing dimmed to nothing. The messages of fear and fatigue from his body failed to register; the increasing pressure on the trigger became a distant, forgotten thing. He concentrated with enough force to move objects, to pulverize bricks, to halt birds in their flight. For that briefest of milliseconds he had the choice of wavefront or particle, the choice of which existence he would embrace. The world screamed at him in five billion pain-filled voices demanding to be heard, five billion lost children waiting to be held, and he opened himself wide enough to hold all of them.

Bremen squeezed the trigger.