The Hollow Man

EYES

In the beginning was not the Word.

Not for me, at least.

As hard as it is to believe, and harder yet to understand, there are universes of experience that do not depend upon the Word. Such was mine. The fact that I was God there … or at least a god … is not yet relevant.

I am not Jeremy, or Gail, although someday I would share all that they had known and been and wished to become. But that does not make me them any more than watching a television show makes you that stream of electromagnetic pulses that is the show. Neither am I God, nor god, although I was both until that unanticipated intersection of events and personalities, that meeting of parallel lines that cannot meet.

I am beginning to think in mathematics, like Jeremy. Actually, in the beginning there was not the Number, either. Not for me. No such concept existed … neither counting nor adding nor subtracting, nor any of the supernatural divinations that constitute mathematics … for what is a number other than a ghost of the mind?

I’ll cease the coyness before I begin to sound like some disembodied, alien intelligence from outer space. (Actually, that would not be too far from the mark, even though the concept of outer space did not exist for me then … and even now seems an absurd thought. And as far as alien intelligences go, we do not have to seek for them in outer space, as I can attest and Jeremy Bremen is soon to learn. There are alien intelligences enough among you on this earth, ignored or misunderstood.)

But on this morning in April when Gail dies, none of this means anything to me. The concept of death itself means nothing to me, much less its multifoliate subtleties and variations.

But I know this now—that however innocent and transparent Jeremy’s soul and emotions seem on this April morning, there is a darkness already abiding there. A darkness born of deception and deep (if unintentional) cruelty. Jeremy is not a cruel man—cruelty is as alien to his nature as it is to mine—but the fact that he has kept a secret from Gail for years when neither thought that he or she could keep a secret from the other, and the fact that this secret is essential to the denial of their shared wishes and desires for so many years—this secret in and of itself constitutes a cruelty. One that has hurt Gail even when she does not know it is hurting her.

The mindshield that Jeremy thinks he has lost as he boards his airplane to a random destination is not exactly lost—he still has the same ability as ever to shield his mind from the random telepathic surges of others—but that mindshield is no longer capable of protecting him from those “dark wavelengths” he must now endure. It had not been the “shared mindshield,” merely the shared life with Gail that had protected him from this cruel underside of things.

And as Jeremy begins his descent into hell he carries another secret—this one hidden even from himself. And it is this second secret, a hidden pregnancy in him as opposed to an earlier hidden sterility there, that will mean so much to me later.

So much to all three of us.

But first let me tell you of someone else. On the morning that Jeremy boards his aircraft to nowhere, Robby Bustamante is being picked up at the usual time by the van from the East St. Louis Day School for the Blind. Robby is more than blind—he has been blind, deaf, and retarded since birth. If he had been a more normal child physically, the diagnosis would have included the term “autistic,” but with the terminally blind, deaf, and retarded, the word “autism” is a redundancy.

Robby is thirteen years old, but already weighs one hundred and seventy-five pounds. His eyes, if one can call them that, are the sunken, darkened caverns of the irrevocably blind. The pupils, barely visible under drooping, mismatched lids, track separately in random movements. The boy’s lips are loose and blubbery, his teeth gapped and carious. At thirteen, he already has the dark down of a mustache on his upper lip. His black hair stands out in violent tufts; his eyebrows meet above the bridge of his broad nose.

Robby’s obese body balances precariously on grub-white, emaciated legs. He learned to walk at age eleven, but still will stagger only a few paces before toppling over. When he does move, it is in a series of pigeon-toed lurches, his pudgy arms pulled in as tight as two broken wings, wrists cocked at an improbable angle, fingers separate and extended. As with so many of the retarded blind, his favorite motion is a perpetual rocking with his hand fanning above his sunken eyes as if to cast shadows into the pits of darkness there.

He does not speak. Robby’s only sounds are animallike grunts, occasional, meaningless giggles, and a rare squeal of protest that sounds like nothing so much as an operatic falsetto.

As I mentioned earlier, Robby has been blind, deaf, and retarded since birth. His mother’s drug addiction during pregnancy and an additional placental malfunction had shut off Robby’s senses as surely as a sinking ship condemns compartment after compartment to the sea by the automatic shutting of watertight doors.

The boy has been coming to the East St. Louis Day School for the Blind for six years. His life before that is largely unknown. The authorities had taken notice of Robby’s mother’s addiction in the hospital and had ordered social-worker follow-ups in the home, but through some bureaucratic oversight, none of these had occurred for seven years after the boy’s birth. As it turned out, the social worker who did finally make a home visit was doing so in relation to a court-ordered methadone-treatment program for the mother rather than out of any solicitude for the child. In truth, the courts, the authorities, the hospital … everyone … had forgotten that the child existed.

The door to the apartment had been left open, and the social worker heard noises. The social worker said later that she would not have entered, except that it sounded like some small animal was in distress. In a very real sense, that was the fact of it.

Robby had been sealed into the bathroom by the nailing of a piece of plywood over the bottom half of the door. His small arms and legs were so atrophied that he could not walk and could barely crawl. He was seven years old. There were wet papers on the tile floor, but Robby was naked and smeared with his own excrement. It was obvious that the boy had been sealed in there for several days, perhaps longer. A tap had been left on, and water filled the room to the depth of three inches. Robby was rolling fitfully in the mess, making mewling noises and trying to keep his face above water.

Robby was hospitalized for four months, spent five weeks in a county home, and was then returned to the custody of his mother. In accordance with further court orders, he was dutifully bused to the Day School for the Blind for five hours of treatment a day, six days a week.

When Jeremy boards the airplane on this April morning, he is thirty-five years old and his future is as predictable as the elegant and ellipsoid mathematics of a yo-yo’s path. On this same morning, eight hundred-some miles away, as thirteen-year-old Robby Bustamante is lifted aboard his van for the short voyage to the Day School for the Blind, his future is as flat and featureless as a line extending nowhere, holding no hope of intersection with anyone or anything.