Padgett Powell - Hologram - A Novel

Bundy has wrenched the ray gun from Oswald, love, the woman said. I believe Oswald is exposing himself to me. It’s picking up out here on the square. The nightlife is setting in.

The warm golden light of the room, which was even warmer and more golden as the sun set in the west and shone in the window at this time of day, suddenly flared into something else. It was an electric-feeling light, like that before a tornado, with an odd pastel lilt to its edges, or where it illuminated the edges of things. The black-lacquered chair on which the woman sat looked as if it had been wet with gasoline. A caustic-looking rainbow of color shone from it.

A turbulent tan-colored air pressed up against the window, forcing the woman back from the chair. She had somehow felt a roughness from this air, as if it were strong wind, but it did not appear to be moving, or blowing, much. Nor was it like smoke, though there was a quality of semi-opacity about it. She could still see Bundy and Oswald on the square, though not clearly. Bundy had dropped the ray gun and stood aghast. Oswald was on the ground, masturbating, unless she had altogether lost her senses. She had never seen a man do that on the ground in public. The light made you unsure of things, as if you had taken drugs and now could not be sure whether things were suddenly strange in themselves — this happens, after all — or strange merely in your altered perception of them.

There was a noise almost surflike at the window, loud and abradant. A huge voice sounded outside. It had the impact of bombs, the woman thought. Or perhaps bombs would be sharper, but not as loud, she thought. The voice said, “I’d not have picked you wiggers, but you is volunteered, and you, I see, like to ride. Let’s us see how well wiggers ride. Mount your boards, boys!” And the roughened air got rougher, and the bombing noises more bombing, and the town dissolved in the brown, tortured, tearing air.

— WHAT THE HELL YOU doin, Oswald?

— Whippin puddin, what it look like. Better pay attention to your boy Forrest there. Sumbitch biggern a drive-in pitcher show. Looks like the goddamn Wizard of Oz.

— You look like a kid down there. I don’t believe you layin there on a sidewalk wanking.

— The mood struck. What, you only do it in bed? You romantic?

— I don’t do it period.

— Oh. John Effing Kennedy. You are entirely fucking with my hard.

Forrest is five stories tall and on a skateboard. His dirty duster is backed up against the window, strafing it when he gestures to the crowd of hundreds of boys in great blooming pedal pushers in the town square. Each holds a skateboard at parade rest. Girls come from the edges of the square and give, each girl to each boy, a silver thimble. “These is non-issue helmets, boys,” Forrest says, “like my spurs. They will protect the pinky bone, but only the pinky bone. Your other bones you are to protect yourself at all times. I do not trade in the bones of boys, but some what I know do. So watch yourself. Now mount up. Ride, fist, skull, stomp, gouge, slay, skate!”

The giant leader wheels out first before the improbable parade of gangly and game boys buzzing after him like bees.

THE LAST ITEM ON her list sat Mrs. Hollingsworth down for a good hard look at what she was doing. It occurred to her that a woman who entertained herself with a fifty-foot hologram of Nathan Bedford Forrest and a man named Rape abusing himself on a sidewalk was demented. It had come to a point beyond her contemplating setting a plumber on fire, which if she recalled correctly had been the initial engine for all of this. That looked comparatively sane now. What was dementia, she wondered, really? She had always regarded it as a bourgeois slur, a handy putdown of one’s mental inferiors that allowed one momentarily to pretend to comprehend mental diseases while doing the putdown. Now, looking at her list, realizing that this is what she had been about, for days now, or weeks, it was tenable that something real was meant by the term — which was Greek, she assumed, after all, so it had to have some root in reality, somewhere, sometime— dementia. The Greeks had been solid thinkers, hadn’t they? People were or had been demented, and maybe she was one of them. She was now fully fond of Oswald and company, Forrest five stories tall, sweeping the land with his boys.

One of her daughters was home, precisely why she could not recall. It was not irregular. One or the other came for a bit and spent most of her time on the phone to the other reporting the deterioration of the home scene. This one, this time, already had phoned the other and said, within impudent earshot, as if she were convinced her mother was deaf or altogether unaware of her surroundings, “She’s in some kind of surreal fog.” And then, “No, not Lawnboy, she just sits there, writing.” “Lawnboy” was a code reference to a scandal involving Mrs. Hollingsworth and the boy who cut the lawn.

This condemnation had nothing to do, Mrs. Hollingsworth knew, with what was actually on this list. That whatever she was doing was not a real list — which was clear to anyone who looked at it from across the room, and given the time she spent on it — was sufficient grounds for the surreal-fog charge. She was not making a grocery list, she was not putting on her red ERA coat and selling a house, she was not watching soap operas (real fog? real not-fog? surreal clarity?), she was not housecleaning, she was not dolling up for Dad (whom the daughters despised but felt nonetheless she should seek to please), so she was, ergo, in a surreal fog.

She wondered how these things, her children, had come out of her. How had she borne into the world the Tupperware sisters? And square canisters at that. Her daughters were with the world, with the program. They had gotten aboard the wagon with the rest of the NPR Rockettes. There was a great crowd of folk out there who had assigned themselves the task of watching out for the surreal fog. These were the same folk who thought you were a better person if you could hum along to Mozart. Who elected themselves to all the proprietary boards, local, state, national, and now global, that they could. They were an army of presumers who presumed to legislate what everyone did, thought, felt, should do, should think, should feel. They were the three-headed dog guarding the boat of the sane. They called it, moreover, being human. She could see that this was what Forrest was riding against with his boys, who, unable to articulate the evil, could nonetheless dress up against it and slouch against it and ride their insolent sleighs in their insolent pants, showing their asses, over the hills and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go. Her daughters looked like the Doublemint twins in this cartoon. They had on matching lime-green sunsuits and cat’s-eye glasses and chewed confidently.

Mrs. Hollingsworth was ready to go on a date with Rape Oswald if he came through the door. The Oswald she had left on a sidewalk in Holly Springs Mississippi furiously pulling surreal fog out of himself. She liked his pluck and his mettle. Maybe he was the man for her. To the fog: en avant!

And was she demented if she wanted surreal-fog Rape Oswald more than her real-fog husband? There was nothing wrong with her husband, except two things. He was a human being, and after twenty-five years he resided indeed in a fog of familiarity next to her, as she presumed she resided in one next to him. When she had still had friends, she told one of them once, trying to put her finger on just what was wrong between them, “I don’t know — he’s just so … aloof.” She had felt ridiculous telling the woman this, watching her tsk her head in an expression of pity suggesting that she did not suffer the same aloofness at her familiar house. It got to where Mrs. Hollingsworth felt self-conscious telling anyone anything, actually, especially these Volvo tsk-tskers, all she or any of them had for friends, and she had gradually obtained an agreeable predicament wherein she did not say ridiculous self-conscious things to these women, because she stopped talking to them altogether. Was it demented to have no one to talk to? Or, more precisely, not to want to talk to anyone? She hardly thought so. Was it demented to want an imaginary man? Was that not the condition of all women, starting at about age thirteen? Did they not really keep on doing it all their lives? As did not men keep seeking imaginary women? What was so demented in wanting Rape Oswald if you looked at it this way? He beat hell out of the guy too tired to get off the cot for thinking he had somehow failed his father and because he was no longer in a transport of love, and he had the quintessential (imaginary) woman. Or was she imaginary? Let us posit she is real, by reason that she is quintessentially imaginary. She is so surreal that she enters a new dimension, of the real. And this woman is then, really, Mrs. Hollingsworth, who is getting tired of Lonnie Schmonnie on the cot and has been making eye contact with the man down on the square who wants her so bad he has swooned to the concrete and risked arrest in the most direct, most natural, least calculated expression of his desire for her that occurs to him. Let us say he is not a human being, even. The NPR Rockettes will not quarrel with that. The Tupperware ladies will admit, “Perhaps he wasn’t, um, fully human.” Everyone will be very satisfied with that generous consideration of Rape Oswald, on the ground with his need. Cerberus guarding the boat of the sane will bark approval, looking like the RCA dog.