by Dan Simmons
She’d insisted on going into Orlando that evening, saying the pains were starting in earnest now, but Donnie had left her wedged in one of the TV chairs in the bus station while he checked out the hospitals by phone. They were worse than Huntsville or Atlanta or St. Louis about their payment policies.
Donnie had used the last of Dickie’s credit card to get them tickets from Orlando to Oklahoma City. A toothless old fart sitting near the phone banks in the bus station had overheard Donnie’s angry queries on the phone and—after Donnie had slammed the phone down for the last time—had suggested Oklahoma City. “Best goddamn place in the goddamn country to get born for free,” the old fart had said, showing an expanse of gums. “Had me two sisters and one of my wives who calved there. Them Oklahoma City hospitals just put it on Medicare and don’t bother you none.”
So they were off to Houston with connecting tickets for Fort Worth and Oklahoma City. Donna was whimpering more than a little now, saying that the contractions were just a few minutes apart, but as Donnie drank more sour mash he grew increasingly certain that she was lying just to ruin his trip.
Donna was not lying.
Bremen felt her pain as if it were his own. He had timed the contractions with his watch, and they had moved from almost seven minutes apart in Tallahassee to less than two minutes separating them by the time they crossed the state line into Alabama. Donna would whimper at Donnie, tugging at his sleeve in the dark and hissing invective, but he would shove her away. He was busy talking with the man across the aisle, Meredith Soloman, the toothless old fart who had suggested Oklahoma City. Donnie had shared his sour mash until Gainesville, and Meredith Soloman had shared his own flask of something even stronger from there onward.
Just before the tunnel to Mobile, Donna had said, loud enough for the entire bus to hear, “Goddamn you to hell, Donnie Ackley, if you’re gonna make me drop this goddamn kid here on this bus, at least give me a swig of what you’re drinkin’ with that toothless old fart.”
Donnie had shushed her, knowing they’d be thrown off the bus if the driver heard too much about the drinking, had apologized to Meredith Soloman, and had let her drink heavily from the flask. Incredibly, her contractions slowed and returned to pre-Tallahassee intervals. Donna fell asleep, her dimmed consciousness rising and falling on the waves of cramping that flowed through her for the next few hours.
Donnie continued to apologize to Meredith Soloman, but the old man had shown his gums again, reached into his soiled ditty bag, and brought out another unlabeled bottle of white lightning.
Donnie and Meredith took turns drinking the fierce booze and sharing views on the worst way to die.
Meredith Soloman was sure that a cave-in or gas explosion was the worst way to go. As long as it didn’t kill you right away. It was the layin’ there and waitin’, in the cold and dank and dark a mile beneath the surface with the helmet lights fadin’ and the air getting foul … that had to be the worst way to go. He should know, Meredith Soloman explained, since he’d worked in the deep mines of West Virginia as man and boy long before Donnie’d been born. Meredith’s pap had died down in the mines, as had his brother Tucker and his brother-in-law Phillip P. Argent. Meredith allowed as how it was a terrible shame about his pap and brother Tucker, but no cave-in had served humanity better than the one that took that low-life, foulmouthed, mean-spirited Phillip P. in 1972. As for sixty-eight-year-old Meredith Soloman, he’d been caved in on three times and blown up twice, but they’d always dug him out. Each time, though, he’d sworn he was never goin’ down again … no one could make him go down again. Not his wives … he’d had four, one after the other, y’understand, even the young things don’t last too long back in the hollers of West Virginia, what with pneumonia and childbirth and all … not his wives, or his kin … real kin, not bastards-in-law like Phillip P.… nor even his own children, them grown up nor them still in bare feet, could talk him into goin’ back down.
But he did, finally, talk himself into goin’ back down. And he’d continued goin’ down until the company its own self made him retire early at age fifty-nine just because his lungs were filling up with coal dust. Well, hell, he explained to Donnie Ackley as they passed the bottle back and forth, everybody who worked down there had lungs clogged black like one of them old Hoover vacuum bags that hadn’t been changed in years, everyone knew that.
Donnie disagreed. Donnie thought that dying underground in a cave-in or gas explosion wasn’t nearly the worst way to go. Donnie started listing terrible ways he’d seen and been around. The time when that biker, Jack Coe, the one him and the others called the Hog, had been working for the highway department and had rolled backward off his mower on an incline and gone under the blades. Jack Coe’d lived on in the hospital for another three months until pneumonia’d got him, but Donnie didn’t hardly call it living what with the paralysis and the drooling and all the tubes carrying stuff into him and carrying stuff out.
Then there’d been Donnie’s first girlfriend, Farah, who’d gone down into niggertown to a bar and gotten gang-raped by a bunch of black bucks who ended up using things other than their dicks on her—their fists and broom handles and Coke bottles and even the sharp end of a tire iron, according to Farah’s sister—and …
“Don’t tell me she died’a gettin’ raped,” said Meredith Soloman, leaning across the aisle and taking the bottle back. His voice was soft and slurry, but Bremen could hear him as if in an echo chamber … first the slow, drunken structuring of the words in Meredith’s mind, then the slow, drunken words themselves. “Hell no, she didn’t die of getting raped,” said Donnie, and laughed at the idea. “Farah killed herself with Jack Coe’s sawed-off shotgun a couple of months later … she was living with the Hog then … and that’s what made Jack go and get a job with the highway people. Neither one of them never had no luck.”
“Well, a shotgun ain’t a bad way to go,” whispered Meredith Soloman, wiping the mouth of the bottle, drinking, and then wiping his own mouth as some of the moonshine dribbled out onto his sharp chin. “The tire iron an’ stuff don’t count ’cause none of that ain’t what killed her. And none of the shit you’re talkin’ about’s near as bad as layin’ there in the dark a mile underground with your air runnin’ out. It’s like bein’ buried alive an’ lastin’ for days.”
Donnie started to protest but Donna whimpered and tugged at his arm. “Donnie, hon, these pains’re coming real close now.”
Donnie handed her the bottle, pulled it back after she had taken a long drink, and leaned across the aisle to get back to his conversation. Bremen noticed that the pains were only a minute or so apart now.
Meredith Soloman, it turned out, was on a quest not terribly dissimilar from Donnie and Donna’s. The old man was trying to find a decent place in the country to die: someplace where the authorities would give his old bones a decent burial at county expense. He’d tried going home, back to West Virginia, but most of his kin were dead or moved away or didn’t want to see him. His children—all eleven if you counted the two illegitimate ones by little Bonnie Maybone—fell into the last category. So Meredith Soloman had been on a quest to find some hospitable state and county where an old boy with his lungs clogged as thick as two Glad bags full of black dust could spend a few weeks or months duty free in a hospital somewhere and … when the time came … have his bones treated with the respect due to bones belonging to a white Christian man.
Donnie began an argument about what happens to the soul once you die … he had specific views on reincarnation that he’d got from Donna’s brother-in-law with the credit card … and the two men’s urgent whispers turned into urgent shouts as Meredith explained that heaven was heaven, no niggers or animals or insects allowed.
Four rows in front of the arguing drunks, a quiet man named Kushwat Singh sat reading a paperback by the light of the small reading light above him. Singh was not concentrating on the words in the book; he was thinking about the slaughter at the Golden Temple a few years before—the
rampage of Indian government troops that had killed Singh’s wife, twenty-three-year-old son, and his three best friends. The officials had said that the radical Sikhs had been planning to overthrow the government. The officials had been right. Now Kushwat Singh’s mind, tired from twenty hours of traveling and sleepless nights before that, ran over the list of things he was going to buy at that certain warehouse near the Houston airport: Semtex plastic explosive, fragmentation grenades, Japanese electronic timing devices, and … with a little luck … several Stinger-type, shoulder-launched ground-to-air missiles. Enough matériel to level a police station, to cut down a gaggle of politicians like a sharp blade scything wheat … enough killing technology to bring down a fully loaded 747 …
Bremen stuffed his fists tight against his ears, but the babble continued and grew louder as the mercury vapor lamps switched on along the darkening interstate exchanges. Donna went into labor in earnest just as they crossed the Texas line and Bremen’s last glimpse of the couple was in the Beaumont bus station just after midnight, Donna curled up on a bench in great pain as the contractions racked her, Donnie standing with boots planted wide apart, weaving, the empty bottle of Meredith’s moonshine still in his right fist. Bremen actually looked into Donnie’s mind then, extending his telepathic probe through the surrounding neurobabble, but pulled it back quickly. Except for the drunken fragments of the earlier argument with Meredith still rattling around in there, there was nothing in Donnie Ackley’s mind. No plan. No suggestion of what to do with his wife and the infant trying to be born. Nothing.
Bremen actually sensed the panic and pain of the baby itself as it … she … approached her final struggle to be born. The infant’s consciousness burned through the gray shiftings of the bus station neurobabble like a searchlight through a thin fog.
Bremen stayed aboard the bus again, too exhausted to flee the cauldron of images and emotions boiling around him. At least Burk and Alice Jean, the horny Marine just out of the brig and the equally horny WAF, had disembarked to find a room somewhere near the bus station. Bremen wished them well.
Meredith Soloman was snoring, his gums gleaming in the reflection from sodium vapor lamps as they pulled out of Beaumont at midnight. The old man was dreaming of the mines, of men shouting in the cold damp air, and of a clean, white, painless death. Donna’s birthing pains receded in Bremen’s mind as they left the downtown and climbed onto the interstate access ramp. Kushwat Singh touched his money belt where the hundred and thirty thousand dollars in Sikh cash waited to be converted into vengeance.
The seat next to Bremen’s was empty. He pulled the armrest back and curled up in a fetal position, drawing his legs up onto the seats and hugging his fists against his temples. At that second he wished that he had his brother-in-law’s .38 back; he wished that Vanni Fucci had succeeded in delivering him to Sal and Bert and Ernie.
Bremen wished—with no melodrama, with no shred of self-consciousness or regret—that he was dead. The silence. The peacefulness. The perfect stillness.
But, for now, trapped in his living body and tortured mind, the roar and onslaught of mindrape continued, even as the bus moved southwest on causeways above swampland and pine forest, tires hissing on wet pavement now as the late-night rains came down in earnest. Bremen felt himself slowly being released to sleep now that the others slept, the small universe of sleeping humanity within the bus falling with him in the night, their muted dreams flickering like snippets of old film projected on an unwatched wall, the entire sealed cabin of them tumbling like the shattered Challenger shuttle in midnight free-fall together toward Houston and Denver and the deeper regions of darkness that Bremen knew that he was, for some reason he could not fathom, condemned to live to see.
EYES
Of all the new concepts that Jeremy has brought to me, the two most intriguing are love and mathematics.
These two sets would seem to have few common elements, but, in truth, the comparisons and similarities are powerful to someone who has experienced neither. Both pure mathematics and pure love are completely observer dependent—one might say observer generated—and although I see in Jeremy’s memory the assertion by a few mathematicians like Kurt Gödel that mathematical entities exist independently of the human mind, rather like stars that would persist in shining even if there are no astronomers to study them—I choose to reject Gödel’s Platonism in favor of Jeremy’s stance of formalism: i.e., numbers and their mathematical relationships are merely a set of human-generated abstracts and the rules with which to manipulate these symbols. Love seems to me to be a similar set of abstracts and relation-of-abstracts, despite their frequent relationship with things in the real world. (2 apples + 2 apples did indeed = 4 apples, but the apples are not needed for the equation to be true. Similarly, the complex set of equations governing the flow of love does not seem dependent upon either the giver or recipient of that love. In a real sense I have rejected the Platonic idea of love, in its original sense, in favor of a formalist approach to the topic.)
Numbers are an astonishing revelation to me. In my former existence, prior to Jeremy, I understand the concept of thing but never dream that a thing—or several things—have the ghost echo of numerical values sewn to them like Peter Pan’s shadow. If I am allowed three glasses of apple juice at lunch, for instance, for me there is only juice … juice … juice, and no hint of quantification. My mind no more counts the juices than my stomach would. Similarly, the shadow of love, so attached to a physical object yet simultaneously so separate, never occurs to me. I find that property connected to only one thing in my universe—my teddy bear—and my reaction to that one thing has been in the form of pleasure / pain response with the bias toward the pleasurable, so that I “miss” teddy when he is lost. The concept of “love” simply never enters the equation.
Jeremy’s worlds of mathematics and love, so often overlapped before he comes to me, strike me like powerful lightning bolts, illuminating new reaches to my world.
From simple one-to-one correspondence and counting, to basic equations such as 2 + 2 = 4, to the equally basic (for Jeremy) Schrödinger wave equation that had been the starting point for his evaluation of Goldmann’s neurological studies:
All is revealed to me simultaneously. Mathematics descends upon me like a thunderclap, like the Voice of God in the biblical story of Saul of Tarsus being knocked off his horse. More importantly, perhaps, is that I can use what Jeremy knows to learn things that Jeremy does not consciously know. Thus, Jeremy’s basic knowledge of the logical calculus of neural nets, almost too elementary for him to remember, allows me to understand the way that neurons can “learn”:
Not my neurons, perhaps, given Jeremy’s rather frightening understanding of holographic learning functions in the human mind, but the neurons of … let’s say … a laboratory rat: some simple form of life that responds almost exclusively to pleasure and pain, reward and punishment.
Me. Or at least me, pre-Jeremy.
Gail does not care about mathematics. No, that is not quite accurate, I realize now, because Gail cares immeasurably about Jeremy, and much of Jeremy’s life and personality and deepest musings are about mathematics. Gail loves that aspect of Jeremy’s love of mathematics, but the realm of numbers itself holds no innate appeal for her. Gail’s perception of the universe is best expressed through language and music, through dance and photography, and through her thoughtful and often forgiving appraisal of other human beings.
Jeremy’s appraisal of other people—when he takes time to appraise them at all—is frequently less forgiving and often downright dismissive. Other people’s thoughts, on the whole, bore him … not out of innate arrogance or self-interest, but due to the simple fact that most people think about boring things. Back when his mindshield—his and Gail’s combined mindshields—could separate him from the random neurobabble around them, he did so. It was no more a value judgment on his part than if another person in deep and fruitful concentration had risen to close a window to shut out distractin
g street sounds.
Gail once shared her analysis of Jeremy’s distance from the common herd of thoughts. He is working up in his study on a summer evening; Gail is reading a biography of Bobby Kennedy down on the couch by the front window. The thick evening light comes through the white cotton curtains and paints rich stripes on the couch and hardwood floor.
Jerry, here’s something I want you to see.
??? Mild irritation at being removed from the flow of the equation he is scrawling on the chalkboard. He pauses.
Bobby Kennedy’s friend Robert McNamara said that Kennedy thought the world was divided into three groups of people—
The world’s divided into two groups of people, Jeremy interrupts. Those who think the world’s divided into groups, and those who are smart enough to know better.
Shut up a minute. Images of the pages fluttering and Gail’s left hand as she searches for her place again. The breeze through the screen smells of newly mown grass. The thick light deepens the flesh tones of her fingers and gleams on her simple gold band. Here it is … no, don’t read it! She closes the book.
Jeremy reads the sentences in her memory as she begins to structure her thoughts into words.
Jerry, stop it! She concentrates fiercely on the memory of root-canal work she’d suffered the summer before.
Jeremy retreats a bit, allows the slight fuzziness of perception that passes for a mindshield between them, and waits for her to finish framing her message.
McNamara used to go to those evening “seminars” at Hickory Hill … you know, Bobby’s home? Bobby ran them. They were sort of like informal discussion sessions … bull sessions … only Kennedy would have some of the best people in whatever field there when they talked about things.
Jeremy glances back at his equation, holding the next transform in his mind.
This won’t take long, Jerry. Anyway, Robert McNamara said that Bobby used to sort of separate people into three groups.…