The Hollow Man Read Free

think …”
    Bremen attempted a smile. “Just a while to sort things out. I’d feel better if Gernisavien were with you rather than at the vet’s or that cat boarding place on ConestogaRoad. I could drop her off in the morning, if that’d be okay.”
    “Yeah,” said Bob, shaking Bremen’s hand again.
Five minutes until the pregame show
.
    Bremen waved as they turned their Honda around and disappeared down the gravel drive. Then he went into the house and walked slowly from room to room.
    Gernisavien was sleeping on the blue blanket at the foot of their bed. The calico’s head twitched as Bremen entered the room and her yellow eyes squinted accusingly at him for awakening her. Bremen touched her neck and went to the closet. He lifted one of Gail’s blouses and held it to his cheek a second, then covered his face with it, breathing deeply. He went out of the room and down the hall to his study. Student test booklets remained stacked where he had left them a month earlier. His Fourier equations lay scrawled where he had chalked them in a burst of two A.M . inspiration the week before Gail had been diagnosed. Heaps of manuscripts and unread journals covered every surface.
    Bremen stood for a minute in the center of the room, rubbing his temples. Even here, a half mile from the nearest neighbor and nine miles from town or the expressway, his head buzzed and crackled with neurobabble. It was as if all of his life he had heard a radio tuned softly in another room and now someone had buried a boom box in his skull and turned the volume to full. Ever since the morning Gail had died.
    And the babble was not only louder, it was
darker
. Bremen knew that it now came from a deeper and more malevolent source than the random skimming of thoughts and emotions he had held access to since he was thirteen. It was as if his almost symbiotic relationship with Gail had been a shield, a buffer between his mindand the razor-edged slashings of a million unstructured thoughts. Before last Friday, he would have had to concentrate to pick up the mélange of images, feelings, and half-formed language phrases that constituted Frank’s thoughts, or Dorothy’s, or Bob and Barbara’s. But now there was no shielding himself from the onslaught. What he and Gail had thought of as their
mindshields
—simple barriers to mute the background hiss and crackle of neurobabble—were simply no longer there.
    Bremen touched the chalkboard as if he were going to erase the equation there, then set down the eraser and went downstairs. After a while Gernisavien joined him in the kitchen and brushed up against his legs. Bremen realized that it had grown dark while he was sitting at the table, but he did not turn on the light as he opened a fresh can of cat food and fed the calico. Gernisavien looked up at him as if in disapproval of his not eating or turning on a light.
    Later, when he went in to lie on the couch in the living room to wait for morning, the calico lay on his chest and purred.
    Bremen found that closing his eyes brought on the dizziness and impending sense of terror … the sure knowledge that Gail was here somewhere, in the next room, outside on the lawn, and that she was calling for him. Her voice was almost audible. Bremen knew that if he slept, he would miss the instant when her voice reached the threshold of his hearing. So he lay awake and waited as the night passed and the house creaked and moaned in its own restlessness, and his sixth night without sleep passed into the gray chill of his seventh morning without her.
    At seven A.M . Bremen rose, fed the cat again, turned the kitchen radio on full, shaved, showered, and had threecups of coffee. He called a cab company and told them to have a taxi meet him at the Import Repair garage on Conestoga Road in forty-five minutes. Then he set Gernisavien in her travel cage—her tail thrashed since the cage had been used only for trips to the vet in the two years since her disastrous flight out