The Hollow Man

by Dan Simmons

  He sometimes wished that Jacob Goldmann were alive so that the old man could have shared this all-too-physical realization of their research—a place where probability waves were colliding and collapsing every second of every day and where reality was as insubstantial as the human mind could make it.

  Bremen spent a week in the desert town and loved every greedy, foul-minded, belly-ruling-the-mind second of it. Here he could be born again.

  He had sold the Jeep to an Iranian guy out on East Sahara Avenue. The Iranian was deliriously happy to get transportation for his last two hundred and eighty-six dollars and made no demands for little things such as a pink slip or registration.

  Bremen used forty-six of the dollars to check into the Travel Inn near the downtown. He slept fourteen straight hours and then showered, shaved the last of his beard off, dressed in his cleanest shirt and jeans, and then began working his way through the downtown casinos: the Lady Luck, the Sundance, the Horseshoe, the Four Queens, ending up in the old Golden Nugget. He had started the evening with a hundred forty-one dollars and sixty cents. He ended the night with a little over six thousand dollars.

  Bremen hadn’t played cards since his college days—and that had been mostly bridge—but he remembered the rules of poker. What he had not remembered was the Zen-deep concentration that the game demanded. The razor slashes of outside neurobabble were dulled here at the poker table because of the laser intensity of the concentration surrounding him, by the near-total absorption with the mathematical permutations that every bid and new card brought, and by the concentration demanded of Bremen himself in sorting everything out. Playing five-card stud was not like trying to pay attention to six televisions tuned to different stations; it was more like attempting to read half a dozen highly technical books simultaneously while the pages were being turned.

  The other players ran the gamut: professional poker players whose livelihoods depended upon their skill and whose minds were as disciplined as those of any research mathematicians Bremen had ever met, gifted amateurs who blended real enjoyment of the high-stakes game with their quest for luck, and even the occasional pigeon sitting there fat, happy, and stupid … not even aware that he was being played like a cheap fiddle by the professionals at the table. Bremen took them all on.

  During his second week in Las Vegas Bremen moved through the casinos on the Strip, checking into each with enough money to deposit in the safe to have his room comped and generally to be treated as a high roller. Then he would wander down to the card room and stand in line, occasionally watching the closed-circuit videos that explained how the game was played. To look the part, Bremen purchased Armani jackets that could be worn with open-collared silk shirts, three-hundred-dollar linen slacks that wrinkled if he looked at them hard, not one but two gold Rolexes, Gucci loafers, and a steel carrying case to hold his cash. He did not even have to leave the hotels to outfit himself.

  Bremen tried his luck and found it good at Circus-Circus, Dunes, Caesar’s Palace, the Las Vegas Hilton, the Aladdin, the Riviera, Bally’s Grand, Sam’s Town, and the Sands. Sometimes he saw the familiar faces of the professionals who moved from casino to casino, but more often the players at the hundred-dollar tables preferred to play at their favorite casino. The mood in the card room was as intense as that of a hospital operating room, with only the loud voice of the occasional boisterous amateur breaking the low-murmured concentration. Amateur or professional, Bremen won, taking care as he did so to win and lose with the slow accretion of gain that might be attributed to luck. Soon the professionals avoided his table. Bremen continued winning, knowing now that luck favored the telepathic mind. The Frontier, El Rancho, the Desert Inn, Castaways, Showboat, the Holiday Inn Casino. Bremen moved through the town like a vacuum sweeper, being careful not to sweep up too much from any one table.

  Unlike the other games, even blackjack, where the player was pitted against the house and security against cheating, card counting, or some “system” was heavy, only the house-provided dealer usually monitored the poker players. Occasionally Bremen would glance at the mirrored ceiling where the “eye in the sky” was certainly videotaping proceedings, but since the house took its profit from a share of the winner’s pot, he knew there would be little suspicion here.

  Besides, he was not cheating. At least not by any measurable standards.

  Occasionally Bremen felt guilty about taking money from the other players, but usually his mindtouch with the professionals at the table showed them to be similar to the casino dealers themselves—smugly confident that time would average out the winnings in their favor. Some of the amateurs were experiencing an almost sexual thrill at playing with the big boys, and Bremen felt he was doing some of these pigeons a favor by retiring them early.

  Bremen did not really think about what he was going to do with the money; acquiring it had been his goal, his desert epiphany, and the details of how he was going to spend it could be deferred for a while. Another week here, he thought, and he could lease a Learjet to take him anyplace in the world he wanted to go.

  He did not really want to go anywhere. Here, in this deepest of the tunnels he had traveled, he found some solace in the intensity of greed and lust and shallowness that surrounded him.

  Walking the halls in one of the casino hotels reminded Bremen of watching the Mayor Marion Barry videotape of a few years earlier: a boring exercise in banality, ego, and frustrated sexuality. Even the high rollers in their shag-carpeted suites, rolling around in their Jacuzzis with one or more showgirls, ended up feeling hollow and frustrated, wanting more experience than the experience itself offered. Bremen found the entire town symbolized perfectly by the chrome troughs of its always-open buffets offering up heaps of underpriced, mediocre food, and by the mindtouch glimpses of its hundreds of solitary men and women alone in their hotel rooms, emotionally viscerated by the day or night’s gambling, masturbating in solitude to the “adult” videos piped to their rooms.

  But the five-card-stud poker tables were places of forgetting, temporary nirvanas reached through concentration rather than meditation, and Bremen spent his waking hours there, accumulating money in small but never-faltering increments. By the time he had worked his way through the larger casinos on the Strip, his steel carrying case held almost three hundred thousand dollars in cash. Bremen went to the Mirage Hotel, admired its working volcano outside and its tank of live sharks inside, and almost doubled his money in four nights of ten-thousand-dollar-entry-fee tournament play.

  He decided that one more casino would be the icing on the cake and decided to finish up in a huge, castlelike structure near the airport. The card room was busy. Bremen waited like the other pigeons, bought his hundred-dollar chips, nodded hellos to the other six players—four men and two women, only one of them a pro—and settled into the night’s haze of mathematics.

  He was four hours and several thousand dollars up when the dealer called a halt and a short, powerfully built man in the blue-blazered uniform of the casino whispered in Bremen’s ear, “Excuse me, sir, but could you come with me, please?”

  Bremen saw only the command to bring this lucky player to the manager’s office in the flunky’s mind, but he also saw that the command would be obeyed under any circumstances. The flunky carried a .45 automatic in a holster on his left hip. Bremen went with him to the office.

  The neurobabble distracted him, all those surges of lust and greed and disappointment and renewed lust adding to the background mindnoise, so that Bremen was not warned until he was waved into the inner office.

  The five men were watching the video monitors when Bremen entered and they looked up with an almost quizzical humor, as if surprised to see the image on the television standing live and three-dimensional among them. Sal Empori was sitting on the long leather couch with the thugs named Bert and Ernie on either side of him. Vanni Fucci was seated behind the manager’s desk, his hands clasped behind his head and a huge Cuban cigar clenched between his teeth.

  “Come on
in, civilian,” said Vanni Fucci around the cigar. He nodded for the flunky to close the door and wait outside. Vanni Fucci gestured toward an empty chair. “Siddown.”

  Bremen remained standing. He saw it all in their minds. The steel case by Bert Cappi’s leg was Bremen’s; they had searched his room and found the cash. It was their hotel, their casino. Or, rather, it was the absent Don Leoni’s casino. And it had been the thief Vanni Fucci, here on another deal entirely, who had seen Bremen’s image on the video monitor in the manager’s office. Vanni Fucci had ordered the manager to take a two-day vacation, and then the thief had called Don Leoni and settled back to wait for Sal and the boys to arrive.

  Bremen saw all this clearly. And he saw, even more clearly, precisely what the aging Don Leoni was going to have done to the upstart civilian who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. First, Mr. Leoni was going to talk to Bremen back in New Jersey, where they would find out whether this civilian was really a civilian, or whether he worked for one of the Miami Families. It did not matter too much, because Bremen would then be loaded aboard a garbage truck and taken out to their favorite place in the Pine Barrens, where they would blow Bremen’s brains out, put his body in the truck’s compactor, and dump the parcel in the usual place.

  Vanni Fucci smiled broadly and removed the cigar. “Okay, stay standing. You been real lucky, kid. Real lucky. At least up to now.”

  Bremen blinked.

  Vanni Fucci nodded, Bert and Ernie moved more quickly than Bremen could react, he felt his arms pinned, and Sal Empori raised a hypodermic needle to the light and injected him in the arm through his seven-hundred-dollar Armani jacket.

  EYES

  Robby Bustamante is dying. The deaf, blind, retarded child slides in and out of coma like some sightless amphibian moving from water to air without finding sustenance in either element.

  The child is so terribly and obviously damaged that some nurses find reasons to avoid his room, while others spend extra time there, tending to the dying child while trying to ease his pain through the sheer unsensed fact of their presence. On the rare occasions when Robby rises close to consciousness and the monitors above his bed register something other than REM-state dream sleep, the boy moans fitfully and paws at the bed covers, splayed fingers and stiff splints scratching at the sheets.

  Sometimes the nurses gather round then, rubbing the child’s brow or increasing the dosage of painkiller in his IV drip, but no amount of touching or medicine stops Robby’s mewling and fevered scrabbling. It is as if he is searching for something.

  He is searching for something. Robby is desperately trying to find his teddy bear, the one companion he has had through the years. His tactile friend. His solace in the endless night punctuated only with pain.

  When Robby is semiconscious, he rolls and scrabbles, searching the bedclothes and wet sheets for his teddy bear. He cries out in his sleep, the falsetto croon moaning down dark hospital corridors like the cry of the damned.

  There is no teddy bear. His mother and “Uncle” had tossed it and the rest of the child’s possessions in the back of the car on the night they left, planning to get rid of them at the first Dumpster they passed.

  Robby turns and moans and claws at the sheets during those rare times he rises toward consciousness, searching for his teddy, but those times become fewer and fewer and finally cease.

  Geryon

  They took Bremen to the Las Vegas airport in the middle of the night. A twin-engine turboprop Piper Cheyenne was idling outside a darkened hangar, and it was taxiing for takeoff thirty seconds after the five men boarded. Bremen couldn’t tell a twin-engine turboprop Piper Cheyenne from the space shuttle, but the pilot could, and Bremen was disappointed to find that the pilot also knew exactly who his five passengers were and why they were flying back to New Jersey.

  All four of the hoodlums had weapons, and Bert Cappi had carried his .45 automatic under a jacket over his arm, the muzzle of the silencer sticking out far enough to touch Bremen’s right ribs. Bremen had watched enough television to know a silencer when he saw one.

  They took off to the west and climbed steeply, banking around to leave the mountains behind them as they headed east. The small aircraft had two seats on each side behind the pilot’s and empty copilot’s seats and a bench against a rear bulkhead. Sal Empori and Vanni Fucci sat across the narrow aisle from each other in the first two seats, nearest the door; the thug named Ernie sat across from Bremen in the second row; Bert Cappi sat buckled into the rear bench directly behind Bremen, his pistol out and on his lap.

  The aircraft droned eastward and Bremen set his face against the cool Plexiglas of the window and shut his eyes. The thoughts of the pilot were cool, crisp, and technical, but the four thugs offered a cauldron of dim-witted malevolence to Bremen’s mindtouch. Bert, the twenty-six-year-old killer and son-in-law to Don Leoni, was looking forward to whacking Bremen. Bert hoped that the civilian would try something before they got there so he could do the asshole en route.

  Wind gusts buffeted the small aircraft and Bremen felt the emptiness rise inside himself. The situation was ridiculous—cartoonish, TV stuff—but the inevitability of violence was as real as an imminent automobile crash. Until his moments of madness in Denver with the child abuser, Bremen had never hit anyone in anger. He had never bloodied anyone’s nose. To Bremen violence had always represented the last refuge of the intellectually and emotionally incompetent. And now he sat in this sealed machine, the seats and doors less substantial feeling than those of an American automobile, remembering Miz Morgan’s ice-filmed face while flying eastward to his fate, the violent thoughts of these violent men rubbing like sandpaper against his mind. Ironically, there was nothing personal in their eagerness to kill Bremen; it was their way of solving a problem, easing a minor potential threat. They would kill the man named Jeremy Bremen—a name they did not even know—with no more hesitation than Bremen would have in erasing a faulty transform to preserve an equation. But they would enjoy it more.

  The Piper Cheyenne flew on, its turboprop engines providing a melodic counterpoint to the dark churnings coming from Vanni Fucci, Sal Empori, Bert, and Ernie. Vanni Fucci was absorbed with counting the cash in Bremen’s steel case; the thief had passed three hundred thousand dollars and had a third of the stacks of bills yet to count. Bremen noticed that Fucci’s excitement at holding and counting the cash throbbed like an almost sexual arousal.

  Bremen felt his depression deepen. The apathy that had governed him before his battle with Miz Morgan rose again, a cold, dark tide that threatened to sweep him away into the night.

  Into the darkness under the bed.

  Bremen blinked, opened his eyes, and began to fight through the sick neurobabble and lulling engine noise, concentrating on the memory of Gail that rose like a solid rock he could climb above the black tide. That memory was his North Star; rising anger goaded him on.

  They landed before dawn to refuel. Bremen saw in the pilot’s mind that the airfield was a private place north of Salt Lake, that Don Leoni owned an entire hangar there, and that there would be no chance for Bremen to escape.

  They took bathroom breaks with Bert and Ernie holding their silenced .45s at the ready while Bremen urinated. Then he was back in the plane with Bert holding the pistol’s muzzle against the back of his head while the others took their time in the rest room and getting coffee in the hangar office. Bremen saw that even if he somehow miraculously escaped Bert Cappi, the others would hunt him down with no worry about onlookers calling the police.

  Refueled, they took off and followed Interstate 80 across Wyoming, although Bremen knew this only from the pilot’s distracted thoughts; the ground itself was concealed beneath a solid cloak of clouds fifteen thousand feet below them. The only noise came from the engines and an occasional radio call or response from the pilot. The late-summer sunlight warmed the interior of the Piper Cheyenne, and one by one the thugs dozed off, except for Vanni Fucci, whose mind was still on the money and how muc
h of it Don Leoni might parcel out as a reward for grabbing the civilian.

  Act now! Bremen’s thought caused a surge of adrenaline; he could imagine himself grabbing a weapon from Bert Cappi or Ernie Sanza. He had touched enough of their memories to know how to use the .45 automatics.

  What then? Unfortunately, he had touched enough of their memories to know that the four thugs were tough enough and mean enough not to respond to an automatic pistol being waved around in a small aircraft flying at twenty thousand feet. If it had been just Bremen and the pilot, he might have convinced the man to divert from their route to land somewhere. The pilot—a man named Jesus Vigil—had flown drugs from Colombia and outrun DEA chase planes at treetop height before he came to work for Don Leoni, but he liked the sanity of working for the don and had no intention of dying young.

  But the four hoodlums, especially Bert Cappi and Ernie Sanza, were sunk much deeper into the imperatives of machismo—or at least their Italian and Sicilian versions of it—and could never let a civilian disarm them or escape their custody. Each would let the other man die before allowing that. Neither had enough intelligence or imagination to imagine dying himself.

  They landed again in late morning, this time near Omaha, but Bremen was not allowed to leave the aircraft and the other men were wide-awake now. Bremen could almost taste Bert and Ernie’s eagerness for the civilian—him—to try something. He stared at them impassively.

  After taking off again, Bremen catching a glimpse of a wide river before they climbed through clouds, he concentrated on the pilot’s thoughts and memories, including the memory of the flight plan he had just updated in Omaha. The Cheyenne would make one more refueling stop—this one at a private airfield in Ohio—and then would continue straight to Don Leoni’s own airfield a mile from his estate in New Jersey. The limousine would be waiting. There would be a very brief discussion with the don—mostly a monologue in which the man made sure that Bremen was not working for any of Chico Tartugian’s Miami friends, an interrogation that might well include the loss of several of Bremen’s fingers and one or both of his testicles—and then, when they were sure, Bert and Ernie and the Puerto Rican psychopath Roachclip would take Bremen to the Pine Barrens to do what had to be done. Afterward, the garbage truck would take its trash-compacted bundle to a landfill near Newark.