Dan Simmons - The Hollow Man

Mmmm . Gail’s attention was thin. Already the black fingers of panic were creeping around the edge of her awareness as the pain began to overwhelm the painkiller. The thin needle behind her eye seemed to grow hotter.

Bremen tried to send memory images of Chuck Gilpen’s party a decade earlier, of their first meeting, of that first second when their minds had opened to one another and they had realized I am not alone . And then the corollary realization, I am not a freak . There, in Chuck Gilpen’s crowded town house, amid the tense babble and even tenser neurobabble of mingling teachers and graduate students, their lives had been changed forever.

Bremen was just inside the door—someone had pressed a drink in his hand—when suddenly he had sensed another mindshield quite near him. He had put out a gentle probe, and immediately Gail’s thoughts had swept across him like a searchlight in a dark room.

Both were stunned. Their first reaction had been to increase the strength of their mindshields, to roll up like frightened armadillos. Each soon found that useless against the unconscious and almost involuntary probes of the other. Neither had ever encountered another telepath of more than primitive, untapped ability. Each had assumed that he or she was a freak—unique and unassailable. Now they stood naked before each other in an empty place. A second later, almost without volition, they flooded each other’s mind with a torrent of images, self-images, half memories, secrets, sensations, preferences, perceptions, hidden shames, half-formed longings, and fully formed fears. Nothing was held back. Every petty cruelty committed, sexual experiment experienced, and prejudice harbored poured out along with thoughts of past birthday parties, former lovers, parents, and an endless stream of trivia. Rarely had two people known each other as well after fifty years of marriage.

A minute later they met for the first time.

The beacon from Barnegat Light passed over Bremen’s head every twenty-four seconds. There were more lights burning out at sea now than along the dark line of beach. The wind had come up after midnight, and Bremen clutched the blanket around himself tightly. Gail had refused the needle when the nurse had last made her rounds, but her mindtouch was still clouded. Bremen forced the contact through sheer strength of will.

Gail had always been afraid of the dark. Many were the times during their nine years of marriage that he had reached out in the night with his mind or arm to reassure her. Now she was the frightened little girl again, left alone upstairs in the big old house on Burlingame Avenue. There were things in the darkness beneath her bed.

Bremen reached through her pain and confusion to share the sound of the sea with her. He told her stories about that day’s antics of Gernisavien, their calico cat. He lay in the hollow of the sand to match his body with hers on the hospital bed. Slowly she began to relax, to surrender her thoughts to his. She even managed to doze a few times without the morphine, and her dreams were the movement of stars between clouds and the sharp smell of the Atlantic.

Bremen described the week’s work at the farm—what little work he had done between hospital vigils—and shared the subtle beauty of the Fourier equations across the chalkboard in his study and the sunlit satisfaction of planting a peach tree by the front drive. He shared memories of their ski trip to Aspen the year before and the sudden shock of a searchlight reaching in to the beach from an unseen ship out at sea. He shared what little poetry he had memorized, but the words kept sliding into pure images and purer feelings.

The night drew on, and Bremen shared the cold clarity of it with his wife, adding to each image the warm overlay of his love. He shared trivia and hopes for the future. From seventy-five miles away he reached out and touched her hand with his. When he drifted off to sleep for only a few minutes, he sent her his dreams.

Gail died just before the first false light of dawn touched the sky.

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?”