The Hollow Man

by Dan Simmons

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?” asked the lieutenant.

  “No.”

  “Any experience flying light aircraft?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Then what were you doing at the yoke of that Piper Cheyenne?” Burchill’s voice was as flat and unrelenting as a rapier thrust.

  Bremen sighed. “Trying to land it, Lieutenant. The pilot was shot. Is he alive? Did any of the others survive?”

  The thin sergeant leaned forward. “Mr. Bremen, we advised you of your rights some time ago and that Mirandizing was videotaped, but we’re not sure you were completely conscious. Are you aware of those rights? Do you wish an attorney to be present at this time?”

  “An attorney?” repeated Bremen. Whatever medication was in the IV drip was making his vision foggy and causing a dull roar in his ears and a fuzziness in his mindtouch. “Why’dIneed’n’torney? Didn’t do anything …”

  The sergeant let out a breath, took a laminated card from his coat pocket, and went into the Miranda litany that was so familiar from a million TV cop shows. Gail had always wondered whether police were too stupid to memorize those few lines; she said that the audience had them memorized.

  When the sergeant finished and asked again whether Bremen wanted an attorney, Bremen moaned and said, “No. Are the others dead?”

  Dead as week-old horsemeat, thought Lieutenant Burchill. The homicide detective said, “Let me ask the questions, okay, Mr. Bremen?”

  Bremen closed his eyes in lieu of a nod.

  “Who shot who, Mr. Bremen?”

  Whom. It was Gail’s voice through the fuzziness. “I shot the one named Bert with his own gun,” said Bremen. “Then all hell broke loose … everybody except the pilot was shooting. Then the pilot was hit and I got up front and tried to land it. Obviously I didn’t do too good a job.”

  Burchill glanced at his partner. “You flew a twin-engine turboprop with a damaged engine over a hundred miles, got it into the pattern at Lambert International, and almost landed the sucker. The tower guys say that if the right engine hadn’t quit on you, you would’ve had it down okay. Are you sure you haven’t flown before, Mr. Bremen?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Then how do you account for the—”

  “Luck,” said Bremen. “Desperation. I was all alone up there. Plus the controls are really sort of simple with all of the automation.” Plus reading the pilot’s mind almost every second of the ten hours or so flying from Las Vegas, added Bremen silently. Too bad he wasn’t there when I needed him.

  “Why were you in the plane, Mr. Bremen?”

  “First, Lieutenant, tell me how you know my name.”

  Burchill stared a moment, blinked, and said, “Your fingerprints are on file.”

  “Really?” Bremen said stupidly. The fuzziness of the medication was less now, but the static of pain was rising. “Didn’t know I’d been fingerprinted.”

  “Your Massachusetts driver’s license,” said the sergeant. His voice was as close to a monotone as a human voice could come.

  “Why were you in the plane, Mr. Bremen?” said Burchill.

  Bremen licked his dry lips and told them. He told them about the fishing camp in Florida, the body, Vanni Fucci … everything except the nightmare with Miz Morgan and his weeks in Denver. He assumed that if they had his fingerprints, they would eventually connect him to Miz Morgan’s murder. That was not in the lieutenant’s or sergeant’s thoughts at the moment, but Bremen knew that someone would make the connections before long.

  Burchill leveled his basilisk stare at him. “So they were flying you back to New Jersey so that the don himself could whack … could execute you. They told you this?”

  “I picked it up from things they said. They evidently didn’t mind talking in front of me … I guess they assumed I wasn’t going to be telling anyone.”

  “And what about the money, Mr. Bremen?”

  “Money?”

  “The money in the steel attaché case.” Four hundred thousand some, schmuck. Some drug money you know something about? Maybe we’re talking about a deal that went wrong at twenty thousand feet?

  Bremen just shook his head.

  Sergeant Kearny leaned closer. “Do you gamble in Las Vegas very often?”

  “First time,” mumbled Bremen. His exhilaration at awakening still alive and relatively in one piece was being replaced by pain and a renewed emptiness. Everything was over. Everything had been over since Gail had died, but Bremen now had to acknowledge the end of his flight, his mindless, brainless, fruitless, heartless attempt to escape the inescapable.

  Burchill was saying something. “… to get his weapon?”

  Bremen filled in the rest of the lieutenant’s question from the echo of mindtouch. “I grabbed Bert Cappi’s pistol when he fell asleep. I guess they didn’t think that I’d try anything while we were flying.”

  Only a madman would try something with so many guns in a light plane, thought Lieutenant Burchill. He said, “Why did you try it?”

  Bremen made the mistake of attempting to shrug. His cast and taped ribs stopped him from completing the motion. “What was the alternative?” he rasped. “Lieutenant, I’m hurting like hell and I haven’t seen a doctor or nurse yet. Can we do this later?”

  Burchill looked at a small notebook in his left hand, returned his flat gaze to Bremen, and then nodded.

  “Am I being charged with something?” asked Bremen. His voice was too weak to hold any real outrage. All he heard was tiredness.

  Burchill’s face seemed to sag into even more folds and wrinkles. The only intensity there was in the eyes; they did not miss anything. “Five men are dead, Mr. Bremen. Four of them are known criminals, and it looks as if the pilot was also connected with organized crime. Your rap sheet is clear, but there is the question of your disappearance after your wife’s death … and the fire.”

  Bremen could see the shifting vectors of the lieutenant’s thoughts, as ordered and precise in their way as the laser-intense concentration of the poker professionals he had been playing with less than two days before. This guy burns his house down and disappears after his wife kicks it, Burchill is thinking. Then he just happens to be in Florida when Chico Tartugian is getting whacked. And then he just happens to be in Las Vegas when Chico’s killer and the other Leoni boys are making a money run. Uh-huh. The pattern’s not clear yet, but the elements are there—insurance money, drug money, blackmail … and this so-called civilian says he pulled Bert Cappi’s .45 and started blazing away. Some weird shit here, but it’ll sort itself out soon enough.

  “Am I being charged with something?” Bremen repeated. He felt himself sliding sideways, slipping into the haze of pained neurobabble that filled the hospital: consternation, outright fear, defiance, depression, and—from many of the visitors—guilty relief that they were not the ones lying in the beds with plastic bracelets on their wrists.

  “Not yet,” said Burchill, rising. He nodded the sergeant toward the door. “If what you say is true, Mr. Bremen, then we’ll be doing some more talking soon, probably with an FBI agent present. In the meantime we’ll post a guard on the room so none of Don Leoni’s people can get at you.” Burchill’s image of the uniformed police officer who has been posted down the hall for the past eighteen hours. This Mr. Bremen is going nowhere, either as witness or arraigned murderer or both.

  The doctor and two nurses entered as the homicide detectives left, but Bremen was fuzzy enough that he could barely concentrate on the man’s terse medical chatter. He learned what Burchill’s eyes had already told him—learned also that the compound fracture of the left arm was more serious than the lieutenant had known—but the rest was detail.

  Bremen let himself slide away into emptiness.

  EYES

  At the moment Jeremy is lying in the St. Louis hospital, I am mere hours away from watching my carefully constructed universe collapse forever. I do not know this.

  I do not know that Jeremy is lying in the hospital. I
do not know that Gail exists or has ever existed. I do not know the paradise of shared experience or the perfect hell that this ability has brought Jeremy.

  At this moment I know only the continued pain of existence and the difficulty of fleeing from it. At this moment I know only the despair of separation from the one thing that has given me solace in the past.

  At this moment I am dying … but I am also hours away from being born.

  Sightless, Unless

  Bremen dreamed of ice and bodies writhing in the ice.

  He dreamed of a great beast rendering flesh, and of terrible cries rising from a sulfurous night. Bremen dreamed of a thousand thousand voices calling to him in pain and terror and the loneliness of human despair, and when he awoke, the voices were still there: the neurobabble of a modern hospital filled with suffering souls.

  All that day Bremen lay abed, rode the waves of pain from his injuries, and thought about what he might do next. Nothing much came to mind.

  Detective Burchill returned in the early afternoon with the promised FBI special agent, but Bremen feigned sleep and the two acceded to the head nurse’s insistence and left after half an hour. Bremen did sleep then, and his dreams were of ice and writhing bodies in the ice and of cries from the pain-racked darkness around him.

  When he awoke again later that night, Bremen focused his mindtouch through the babble and rasp to find the uniformed officer left to guard him. Patrolman Duane B. Everett was forty-eight, seven months away from retirement, and suffered from hemorrhoids, fallen arches, insomnia, and what his doctors had called irritable bowel syndrome. This did not stop Patrolman Everett from drinking as much coffee as he wanted, although it meant long trips to the rest room on this floor. Patrolman Everett didn’t mind alternating this guard duty with the other two officers working eight-hour shifts, nor did he mind taking the graveyard shift. It was quiet at night, it allowed him to read his Robert B. Parker novel, he could banter with the nurses, and there was always fresh coffee in the lounge he was allowed to use.

  It was almost sunrise. Alone now in his room except for the comatose patient in the next bed, Bremen rose painfully, pulled the IV drip free, and hobbled to the window. He sat there a moment, the cold draft from the air-conditioning vent chilling him under his thin gown, and stared out the window.

  If he was leaving, he should leave now. They had cut away his clothes after pulling him from the wrecked Piper Cheyenne—Bremen had seen through one of the emergency-room medics’ eyes that they considered it a miracle that there had been no fire after the plane plowed into a muddy field half a mile from the airport—but Bremen knew where there were extra clothes that would fit him. He would just have to get to the interns’ locker room down one flight of stairs.

  He also knew from his eavesdropping that day which of the interns kept their car keys in which lockers … and what the combinations for those lockers were. Bremen had decided to “borrow” an almost new and fueled-up Volvo belonging to an intern named Bradley Montrose; Bradley was an emergency-room intern and probably would not notice that his Volvo was gone until he got off duty seventy-two hours from now.

  Bremen leaned back against the wall and groaned slightly. His arm hurt like hell, his head ached with an improbable ferocity, his ribs felt as if splinters of broken bone were pressing against his lungs, and there were countless other pains queuing up to get his attention. Even the bites on his hip and thigh from Miz Morgan’s ranch had not yet healed completely.

  Can I do this? Get to the clothes? Drive the car? Stay ahead of the cops?

  Probably.

  Are you really going to steal the six hundred dollars in Bradley’s wallet?

  Probably. His mother will make up the difference before Bradley has time to tell the cops what happened.

  Do you know where the fuck you’re going?

  No.

  Bremen sighed and opened his eyes. Through the small part in the curtains here he could see the head and shoulders of the dying kid who shared his room. The boy looked terrible, although Bremen understood from the nurses’ and doctors’ thoughts during the day that not all of the child’s dismal appearance was from his injuries. The boy—Robby something—had been blind, deaf, and retarded even before the assault that had brought him here.

  Part of Bremen’s nightmare that afternoon had been an echo of the anger and disgust from one of the nurses who took extra care in watching over Robby. The boy had been brought in after being discovered in an outhouse pit across the river in East St. Louis. Three boys playing in an abandoned field had heard weird cries coming from the outhouse and had told their parents. By the time paramedics had removed Robby from the flooded pit of feces, authorities estimated, the boy had been lying there for more than two days. He had been beaten viciously and the prognosis for his survival was poor. The nurse found herself weeping for Robby … and praying to Jesus that he would die soon.

  As far as the nurses or doctors knew, the police had not found the boy’s mother or stepfather. The doctor in charge of Robby did not think that the authorities were looking very hard.

  Bremen set his cheek against the glass and thought about the boy. He thought about the terminally ill children he had seen in Walt Disney World and of the brief peace he had given some of them with the help of his mindtouch. During his entire purposeless, self-centered flight from himself, those few minutes were the only time that he had helped anyone, done anything except feel sorry for himself. He remembered those moments now and glanced over at Robby.

  The boy lay half-uncovered on his side, his face and upper body illuminated by the medical monitors above his head. Robby’s clawlike hands were curled in bizarre contortions above the sheets, his wrists so thin that they looked strangely lizardlike. The boy’s head was tilted in a disturbing way, his tongue lolling from between pulped lips. His face was mottled and bruised, the nose obviously broken and flattened, but Bremen suspected that the eye sockets, which appeared the most damaged part of Robby’s face, had always looked this way—sunken, blackened, with heavy lids only half covering the useless white marbles of the eyes.

  Robby was unconscious. Bremen had picked up nothing from the boy—not even pain dreams—and had been shocked to learn from the nurses’ thoughts that there was another patient in the room. It was the most absence of neurobabble that Bremen had ever felt from another human being. Robby was just a void, although Bremen knew from the doctors’ thoughts that the monitors showed continuing brain activity. In fact, the EEG tracks showed very active REM activity—a busy dream sleep. Bremen was at a loss why he could not pick up the boy’s dreams.

  As if aware of being observed, Robby twitched in his sleep. His black hair rose from his skull in random tufts that Bremen might have found amusing in other circumstances. The dying boy’s breath rasped out between the damaged lips in a coarse rasping that was not quite a snore, and Bremen could smell it from eight feet away.

  Bremen shook his head and looked out at the night, feeling the broken-glass pain of things in the way that substituted for tears with him.

  Don’t wait for Burchill and the FBI man to come back in the morning with questions about Miz Morgan’s murder. Get out now.

  And go where?

  Worry about that later. Just get the fuck out.

  Bremen sighed. He would leave later, before the morning shift came in and the hospital got busy. He would take the intern’s Volvo and continue his quest to nowhere, arriving nowhere, wishing to be nowhere. He would continue to suffer life.

  Bremen glanced back at the boy in the bed. Something about the child’s posture and oversized head reminded him of a broken, bronze Buddha, tumbled from its pedestal, which Bremen and Gail had seen once in a monastery near Osaka. This child had been blind, deaf, and brain-damaged since birth. What if Robby harbored some deep wisdom born of his long seclusion from the world?

  Robby twitched, yellowed fingernails scrabbling slightly against the sheets, farted loudly, and resumed his snores.

  Bremen sighed, slid
back the curtains, and moved to a chair next to the boy’s bed.

  Patrolman Everett will be visiting the john in about three minutes. The floor nurses are preparing medications and the station nurse can’t see me if I take the back stairs. Bradley’s in ER and the locker room probably will be empty for another hour.

  Do it.

  Bremen nodded to himself, fighting the pain and the painkiller fatigue. He would drive north toward Chicago and then into Canada, find a place to rest up and recuperate … someplace where neither the police nor Don Leoni’s people would ever find him. He would use the mindtouch ability to stay ahead of them and to make money … but not by gambling … no more gambling.

  Bremen looked up at the boy again.

  There’s no time for this.

  Yes, there was. It would not take long. He need not even establish full contact. A one-way mindtouch would do it. It was possible. A moment of contact, even a few seconds, and he could share light and sound with the dying child. Perhaps go to the window and look at the traffic below, the lights of the city, find a star.

  Bremen knew that such reciprocal mindtouch was possible—not just with Gail, although that had been effortless—but with anyone who was receptive. And most people were receptive to a determined mindtouch probe, although Bremen had never known anyone but Gail who could control their latent telepathic abilities. The only problem was making sure that the person did not feel the mindtouch as mindtouch, did not become aware that the alien thoughts were actually alien. Once, after days of inability to convey the meaning of a simple calculus transform to a slow student, Bremen had just given it to him via mindtouch and left the student to congratulate himself on his insight.

  There need be no subtlety with this child. And no content. A few shared sensory impressions would be Bremen’s parting gift. Anonymous. Robby would never know who had shared these images.

  Robby’s snore caught, stopped for an agonizingly long time, and then started up again like a balky engine. He was drooling heavily. The pillowcase and sheet near his face were moist.