The Hollow Man (22 page)

Bremen knew from the first day’s tour that the cold house had its own generator, and he could sometimes hear it chugging in the night. Miz Morgan explained that she liked to dress out her own beef and the game that she brought back from her weekly hunting forays into the hills, and that the cold house held thousands of dollars’ worth of prime meat. She had had problems—first with power outages that ruined a fortune’s worth of beef, then with hired hands who felt that they could help themselves to a side or two of beef before departing in the night. Miz Morgan allowed no one to approach the cold house now, she said, and the dogs were trained to attack
any intruder who even went up the stone walk toward the heavily padlocked doors.

Days blended into weeks for Bremen, and he soon fell into a mindless cycle of toil and sleep, punctuated only by his silent meals and his ritual of watching the sunset from the front porch of the bunkhouse. The few forays into town grew increasingly unpleasant because he was out of range of Miz Morgan’s white noise and the razor blades of random thought slashed at his mind. As if sensing this, Miz Morgan began doing the Thursday shopping herself, and after his third week there Bremen never left the ranch.

One day, seeking one of the belted Galloways that had not come down to the main pasture, Bremen came upon the abandoned chapel. It sat up behind the hogback ridge, its flesh-colored walls half-hidden among flesh-colored rocks. The roof was gone—not merely tumbled in, but gone—and the wooden shutters, wooden doors, and wooden pews had rotted to dry dust and largely blown away.

The wind blew through the paneless window sockets. A tumbleweed moved across the pile of bones where the altar once had been.

Bones
.

Bremen moved closer, crouching in the shifting dust to study the pile of bright, white artifacts. Bones, brittle and pitted and near petrified. Bremen was fairly sure that most of them were the bones of cattle—he saw a heifer-sized rib cage here, a cow-length xylophone of vertebrae there, even a Georgia O’Keeffe clichéd skull sunken in the tumble—but there were so
many
of them. It was as if someone had piled the corpses here, on the altar, until
the altar collapsed under the weight of so much dead and decaying meat.

Bremen shook his head and walked back to the Jeep. The wind rattled dry twigs over the unmarked graves out behind the chapel.

Returning from the south range in the Jeep that same late-summer evening, Bremen saw someone up by the cold house. He slowed while driving by the barn, not approaching the cold house itself, but curious. There were no dogs out.

Fifteen yards away, along the side of the cold house where the array of hoses ran down from the water tank, Miz Fayette Morgan was bathing under a shower arranged from the fire hose on low with a sprinkler head attached. For a second Bremen did not recognize her with her hair wet and plastered back and her face turned to the spray. Her arms and throat were tanned; the rest of her was very, very white. Droplets of water on her pale skin and dark pubic hair caught the evening light. As he watched, Miz Morgan turned off the water and reached for a towel. She saw Bremen in his Jeep and she froze, one hand on the towel, half-turned toward him. She said nothing. She did not cover herself with the towel.

Embarrassed, Bremen nodded and drove on. In the side mirror of the Jeep he caught a glimpse of Miz Morgan still standing there, her skin very white against the flaked green of the cold house. She had not yet covered herself and she was watching him.

Bremen drove on.

That night Bremen drifted to sleep, the air-conditioning off, the screenless windows open to let the dead desert air creep in, and awoke to the first of the visions.

He awoke to the sound of violin strings being stretched and scratched at by carious teeth. Bremen sat up in bed and blinked at the violet light flooding the room through the swinging shutters.

The shadows near the ceiling were whispering. At first Bremen thought it was neurobabble slicing through the protective blanket of Miz Morgan’s white noise, but this was not mindtouch sound, merely … 
sound
. The shadows near the ceiling were whispering.

Bremen pulled the damp sheet up over himself, knuckles white against white cotton. The shadows were moving, separating themselves from the whispers and sliding lower along walls gone suddenly and totally black in the violent surges of stormlight through the windows.

Bats came down the walls. Bats with baby faces and obsidian eyes. They whistled and beat their wings as they came.

Outside, in the violet rage, bells tolled and a multitude of voices sang dirges from empty cisterns. Somewhere close by, perhaps from under Bremen’s bed, a rooster crowed, and then the sound died off to the rattle of bones in a dry cup.

The bats with baby faces crawled head downward until they tumbled onto Bremen’s bed like so many wriggling rats with leathery wings and sharp infant smiles.

Bremen screamed as the lightning stirred and the thunder dragged ahead of the rain like a heavy curtain scraping across old boards.

The next day Bremen did not eat, as if fasting would cure a feverish mind. There was no phone call from Miz Morgan, no morning note tacked to the bulletin board outside.

Bremen went south to the edge of the ranch, as far
from the hacienda as he could get, and dug postholes for the new stretch of fence that would run between the woods and the pond. White noise roared around him.

On the eleventh hole, almost three feet down, his postholer bit into a face.

Bremen dropped to his knees. The dirt in the jaws of the postholer was soft, red clay. There was a bit of brown flesh and white bone there, too. Bremen took his spade and spread the hole wider, opening it out into a cone-shaped pit.

The face and skull were arched backward, almost separated from the white-wedged bones of neck and collar, as if the buried man had been trying to swim up through the soil toward air. Bremen dug out the grave as carefully as any archaeologist who had ever widened an excavation. There were tatters of brown cloth across the crushed rib cage. Bremen found bits and pieces of the left hand where the swimmer had raised it; the right hand was missing.

Bremen set the skull in the back of the Jeep and drove back toward the ranch, changing his mind just before coming into sight of the hacienda and heading up and around the hogback ridge to sit awhile and listen to the wind through the chapel windows.

When he got back to his bunkhouse at sunset, the phone was ringing.

Bremen crawled into bed, turned his face to the rough wall, and let it ring. After several minutes the noise stopped.

Bremen covered his ears with the palms of his hands, but the mindnoise continued like a great, white wind from nowhere. After it grew dark and the insect sounds from down by the stream and up by the cold house began
in earnest, Bremen rolled over, half expecting the phone to ring again.

It was silent. Next to it, oddly luminescent in a sliver of moonlight through the shutters, the skull watched him from its place on the plank table. Bremen did not remember carrying it in.

It was somewhere closer to midnight than dawn when the phone did ring. Bremen studied it a moment, only half-awake, thinking for a confused second that it was the skull that was calling him.

He padded across rough boards in bare feet. “Hello?”

“Come up to the house,” whispered Miz Morgan. In the background Bremen could hear a muffled stereo sounding like voices singing in dry cisterns. “Come up to the house now,” she said.

Bremen put down the phone and went out the door and up through the moonlight toward the sound of baying hounds.

J
eremy and Gail love each other with a passion that sometimes frightens them both.

Jeremy once suggests to her that their relationship is like one of the plutonium pellets imploded out at Lawrence Livermore Labs by a hundred lasers on a spherical shell firing inward simultaneously, driving the plutonium molecules closer and closer together until there is no more room between discrete atoms and the pellet first implodes and then explodes in hydrogen fusion. In theory, he says. Sustained fusion hasn’t actually been achieved, he says.

Gail suggests that he might find a more romantic metaphor.

But later, when thinking about it, she sees the accuracy of the comparison. Their love might have been a volatile, unstable thing without their ability, dying after a short
half-life, but the ultimate sharing of mindtouch and the “driving inward” of a thousand experiences shared daily has imploded their passion into a fiery intensity rarely found outside the cores of stars.

There are countless challenges to that closeness: the human urge for privacy that each of them must compromise to such a great extent, the balance of Gail’s emotional, artistic, intuitive personality with Jeremy’s stable, sometimes plodding outlook on things, and the friction of knowing too much about the person one loves.

Jeremy sees a beautiful young woman on the campus one spring day—she is bending over to lift some books when a breeze tugs and lifts her skirt—and that single, sharp erotic instant is as tangible to Gail four hours later as the lingering smell of perfume or a smudge of lipstick on a collar would have been to another wife.

They joke about it. But they do not joke when Gail forms a brief but obsessive attraction to a poet named Timothy the following winter. She tries to exorcise the feelings, or at least block them behind the small remnants of mindshield still left between her and Jeremy, but her emotional indiscretion might as well be a neon sign in a dark room. Jeremy senses it immediately and cannot hide his own feelings—hurt mostly, a certain morbid fascination secondly. For over a month the brief and rapidly fading attraction Gail has for the poet lies between her husband and her like a cold sword blade in the night.

Gail’s freedom with her emotions may well have saved Jeremy’s sanity—he says as much sometimes—but at other times the surges of feeling distract him from his teaching, his thinking, his work. Gail apologizes, but Jeremy still feels like he is a small boat on the turbulent sea of Gail’s strong emotions.

Not able to retrieve poetry from his own memory, Jeremy
searches Gail’s thoughts for images to describe her. He finds them frequently.

When she dies, it is one of those borrowed images that he shares silently as he spreads her ashes in the orchard by the stream. It is from a poem by Theodore Roethke:

Jacob Goldmann’s neural research sends Jeremy into realms of mathematics that he would otherwise have explored cursorily, if at all, and which now, during these last months before Gail’s illness begins, fill and change his life.

Chaos math and fractals.

As with most modern mathematicians, Jeremy has dabbled in nonlinear mathematics; as with most modern mathematicians, he prefers the classical, linear mode. The murky field of chaos mathematics, less than two decades old as a serious discipline, had seemed tentative and strangely sterile to Jeremy before the interpretation of Goldmann’s holographic data sent him plunging into the realms and study of chaos. Fractals had been those clever things applied mathematicians had used for their computer graphics—the brief scene in one of those
Star Trek
films Gail had dragged him to, occasional illustrations in
Scientific American
or in
Mathematical Intelligencer
.

Now he dreams chaos math and fractals.

Schrödinger wave equations and Fourier analyses of human holographic thought models had led him into this forest of chaos and now Jeremy finds that he is comfortable in these woods. For the first time in his life and career, Jeremy craves computer time: he finally brings a powerful CD-ROM-boosted 486 PC into the sanctum sanctorum of his study at home and begins petitioning for time on the university’s mainframe. It is not enough.

Jacob Goldmann says that he can get Jeremy’s chaos program run on one of the MIT Cray X-MPs, and Jeremy lies awake nights in anticipation. When the run is complete—forty-two minutes of computing time, a veritable eternity of a Cray’s precious time—the solutions are partial, incomplete, exhilarating, and terrifying in their potential. Jeremy realizes that they will need several Crays and more than one gifted programmer. “Give me three months,” says Jacob Goldmann.

The scientist convinces someone in the Bush administration that his work on neural pathways and holographic memory function has relevance to the air force’s longstanding
“virtual reality” improved-cockpit research, and within ten weeks he and Jeremy have their access to linked Crays and the programmers to prepare the data.

The returns are coded in pure mathematics—even the diagrams are unreadable by anyone below the status of research mathematician—and Jeremy spends summer evenings in his study, comparing his own equations with the elegant Cray diagrams of Vague Attractors of Kolmogorov looking like dissected tube worms from the Mindanao Trench, but showing the same quasi-periodic interferometer patterns, chaos seas, and resonance islands that his own feeble math had predicted.