Padgett Powell - Hologram - A Novel

She had worked herself up into a state. She found her daughter, off the phone, and said to her, “Lawnboy and I never slept with each other, love, because he could not contain himself when I kissed him — a young thing who could not leave his mother.” Then she went back in the kitchen and removed the phone from the hook so that the girl would have to contain this thickening of the surreal fog by herself for a while. She looked at her prodigious list, her meal for the hungriest largest fool alive. She was in love with the fool who would eat this meal, and digest it, and profit from it, and know what it was.

Forrest was the purest of foolish heroes, riding hard. He was canvas and light, leather and speed, and he did not abide instruction, moral or immoral.

Oswald was the boy. Oswald was the boy listening only to himself, and to her. Oswald was hungry, and a fool, and hers.

WHEN OSWALD ENTERED THE room, Mrs. Hollingsworth said, “Hi, Ray.” He looked at her with a tilt to his head, and then straightened it, as if he had taken her meaning. He had: Rape was a nickname that had done him no good. It had come from a blending of Ray Payne, his first and middle names. A girl in high school had thought his name was Rape Hayne Oswald, and the business had stuck. How the woman handing him the drink she was handing him, in the house in which she was handing it to him, knew his real name, if she did, was beyond him. He was in one of those zones where what you knew, and even what you thought you knew, was far exceeded by what you could not possibly know. He sensed this. It happened more and more to him, rather than less and less, as he perceived was the normal expectation in human life. His had not been the normal life. This losing it agreed with him. There was no profit in saying to someone who somehow knew your real name, “How do you know my real name?” There was so much work involved in determining how she did, if she did — it was possible she mistakenly thought this his name, as had the girl in high school thought it else, for example — that he had learned over time not to try. This kind of indeterminacy had been hard for him to accept at first. He had fought it. The fight had given him hemorrhoids, literal and figurative.

So he had a drink in his hand before a nice-looking woman, a scene that was surrounded by no meaningful frame — who she was, why he was here — and he was going with it. She was not the beauty he had recently watched for hire, but no one but that woman was, and his affair with her, conducted alone and on a sidewalk, was over. He pronounced, in fact, just that when he got up off the ground: “Baby, it’s been fun, but it’s over.” And now he was here. He thought he could advise presidents in the matter of conducting their illicit affairs, this recent one of his having been such a model of economy and uncomplication.

A younger woman was emerging from deeper in the house. Showing her the door, the woman who had greeted him said to her, “The immediate forecast is for a deepening of the surreal fog. No need to let the door hit you in the ass.” Ray Payne had never heard a woman tell anyone not to let the door hit her in the ass. He liked her — the one speaking. The one leaving was acting somewhat trembly for him.

Seating them in the kitchen, the woman said, “Turner’s coming over to dinner. Bring this thing to a head.”

“Turner’s coming?”

“Yes.”

“Bringing Jane?”

“You like Jane?”

“She aint a tire patch on my last girlfriend,” he said, “but I will admit her eyes are distracting to a man under the tyranny of …”

“Ray, you can speak your mind with me. Under the tyranny of pussy. It’s a fair phrase.”

This was precisely the kind of thing you could not inquire into and still lead a hemorrhoid-free life — how she knew he was going to say that. “I have some questions for Mr. Turner,” he said.

“I do too,” the woman said. “Like what’s to become of Forrest, and what the plan is for the New Southerner.”

Ray looked at her hard, started to question, and gave up. Resisting the urge to ask left him in a happy prospect. He recalled a thing a child had told him once: “At the fish market with Mommy I see big flat fish with pimples on them. They are huge and fat and I wish I had never seen them.”

He told the woman: “Running the machine was hard. I pressed Thimble and then Melt, without pressing both at once and Control, which I now think was necessary to show the ladies melting the thimbles. It made Forrest talk about thimbles and melt into the ground. My bud Hod thew Forrest fifty foot high and on a skateboard. They is no telling what will become of him. He is indestructible, though. I know that. No matter what you push, you get something.”

The woman did not bat an eye. She was in the zone too, apparently. “I know all that. But what about the new boy who would save the South?”

“Dweeb with the girl?”

“Yes. Man on the bed.”

“He a pistol ball.”

“You liked that woman, didn’t you?”

“You know, my bud Hod took exception to a man pleasuring hisself over her, and he all the time saying these Queer okay, I’m okay things. He got something against kids, dogs … I don’t know about him.”

“You don’t need him.”

“I know I don’t need him.”

“Ray, do you have a headache?”

“Headache?”

“John F. Kennedy told Harold Wilson that he, John F. Kennedy, got a headache if he didn’t have a woman every three days.”

“Oh, that kind of headache. John Effing Kennedy.”

“Let me get a smell of you, Ray, see about fixing that headache of yours.”

“Smell me? You want to smell me?”

“Ray, at this point in life, everyone can more or less run his equipment. It’s what a man smells like, not what he does. I about know what you are going to do.”

In the action that followed in the bedroom, Ray had occasion to think of the rest of what the child had told him about the fish: “They are ugly and very weird. I do not like them.” There was an element of that in sex, Ray thought. Part of it was ugly and weird and not likable, but the firestorm of hormones kept you liking it. He and the woman wrestled well together, it seemed, for a first time. She seemed very comfortable with him. He entered a fog of flesh and got lost in her for a while. When he emerged, looking for air, he found her gasping too, saying, “Hodhawmighty damn. Son!” This was somewhat like hearing her tell the other woman not to let the door hit her in the ass — he had only ever heard a man say “hodhawmighty” and “son” that way. Yet it struck him as perfectly correct and fitting. He felt he had known this woman all his life.

When Turner and Jane got there, they sat down to dinner, and the woman who was familiar to him now in two ways got right to it. She said to Turner: “The man too tired to get up from the bed for fantodding all the live-long day about failing his father, even though Helen of Troy is in the room with him, has now decided that his problems with his father stem from not going out for the track team in the tenth grade when a coach at Nathan Bedford Forrest High School invited him to. That was the invisible point of failure, he now thinks. He can’t understand why he did not go out, other than that he did not like to run for its own sake, and his conviction that the coach was a sadist or pederast of some sort, which does not seem to him now sufficient grounds for disregarding the coach. Is this man, immobile on a bed in a rented room in Holly Springs Mississippi, truly the New Southerner?”

Turner looked at the woman and at Ray. “Oswald indicates he is the only man they found who was properly undone by the visions of Forrest.”