Padgett Powell - Hologram - A Novel

The man stepped lively onto the street. He had complemented the hick shirt with a pair of pants too short to conceal his brogans and white socks. He looked a perfect clodhopper. She liked him very much. She had not liked him much lately. Now that he was out of his moony phase he was looking okay. He had determined to get himself a job, any job, that day, right there in Holly Springs Mississippi. That was pluck. He wasn’t going to get a job that day, or probably any other day, in Holly Springs Mississippi, where he knew no one, and even he knew it, but that did not stop him or Mrs. Hollingsworth from seeing the possibility of it. What mattered was that he was taking himself in hand — this resolve was fairly pinned on him, like a blue ribbon he’d been conferred at 4-H. He’d won the prize for Taking Himself in Hand.

The impossible job he would not get that he would somehow get would be on the order of the lowest hand at the feed-store. He would carry fifty-pound bags of feed and fertilizer and seed to pickup trucks while his superiors at the store, some of them much younger than himself, handled the transactions at the counter. These would involve a total figure that was rarely particularized, a check that was never questioned, and some talk about cutworms, or bots, rust, whatever the hell the new rot-thing or bug was; the county agent might know, might not, would pretend to until it was too late. Was it true sixteen-gauge shells was going to disappear? No, not that we heard, anyway. What is this shit about not being able to vaccinate your own dog for rabies? I don’t know, that’s what they say. Well, they ain’t worth the powder it’d take to blow them.

The man lately from the bed would grunt all day beneath his loads in paper and burlap sacks, some of which smelled good enough to eat. A thick-necked, thick-shouldered high school football player, traditional holder of his position at the feedstore, would one day beat him up behind the feedstore. Or, more precisely, two other football players, on behalf of the jobless football player, themselves without feedstore aspirations, would beat him up. Whoever did it, they would not realize that the wild and lucky moves the man came up with in the hopeless defense of himself were inspired by fear. They would see only that he had the balls and the surprising skill to somehow nick them and so would not extinct him altogether but would leave him there and say, “Go on in there and tote your bags, old man,” and the man would notice that, wing them or not, he had not disturbed even the Skoal tucked in their lips. No one after this would ever bother the man again.

He crossed the street now in his red-plaid highwater nattiness and approached the council of elders in their herringbone and suspenders. They regarded him without cheer. He said to them, “Wondering where I might find work.”

They appeared not to have heard him. Finally one of them — the man could not tell which one — said, “Woik. Heah?”

“Yes.”

The elders looked off with far and indifferent gazes, each in a different direction away from the man, as if they expected something more interesting to appear over the horizon.

Mrs. Hollingsworth put the blueberries back down into the surreal fog of the freezer and left the store without buying the blueberries or the okra or anything at all. It was acceptable, leaving the grocery store empty-handed, the odd time.

WHEN SHE GOT HOME purchaseless from the store, nosing the Volvo through some boys on her street whom she had difficulty regarding as the backbone of Forrest’s final command, particularly given the horrendous postures of the boys, Mrs. Hollingsworth retook her kitchen, headquarters for her recent lovely campaign. The house had a thick and palpable quiet to it that was almost frightening; it allowed you to smell its emptiness. This stillness and smell of emptiness and quiet ticking space had in fact frightened her before her visit to the wonderful place of the list, before her list-making ride with Forrest. Now there was something thrilling about it, a challenge to defy it.

Something final had occurred as she held the blueberries just above the cool fog of the freezer. “I guess I had a goddamn epiphany,” she said to her egg pot, and put an egg on to boil. She understood that she had come to use this little gesture, boiling an egg, as a signal that she could, at will, cook a real meal.

There had been nothing like cooking that other one, though. Ray Oswald had saved her life — she tried that out in her mind, observed the hysterical stripe down it, like the line of white down a skunk, and thought the little skunky idea was fine. She had gone to a marvelous, improbable, at times profane and silly place, and it had been just what she needed. There was not a lot to be said for replacing your uncorrupted dull daily waste of living with a corrupted vital imaginary escape from it, perhaps, but it was a fact that she and others around her were living in stilled and stilted timid toadspawn conformity, afraid of something they could not identify except in particulars — their burglar bars, their life insurance policies, their options-weighing at every moment of their lives. This was a fearful fetid nothingness she could do nothing about. She had at least not escaped into the talk shows, or into part-time commercial self-actualizing (a 6 percent commission on a house made you whole), or into swooning at the disorders of environment management. She thought it funny how the poor environment had been raped just fine until there was a sufficient excess of the people who had effected the raping to produce sufficient numbers of themselves who were sufficiently idle that they might begin to protest the raping of the environment, which was irretrievably lost to the raping by that point. And this would be the great soothing cathedral music, the stopping of the chainsaws amid the patter of acid rain, that all good citizens would listen to for the quarter-century it took them all to wire up into cyberspace and forget about the lost hopeless runover gang-ridden land, reproducing madly still all the while, inside their bunkers listening to NPR. She wondered what Forrest might make of these tree and owl rebels. Forrest was the only man on earth who could ride against the forces of the NPR, stop the music of antidoom, tell them the music wasn’t going to cut it, they were doomed before the first idler picked up the first fiddle. Jesus been hard on all you, she could hear him say.

But she knew he wasn’t interested in that, because she wasn’t interested in that. The root cause of no trees left was no people to say too many people. And that was because, by hysterical reasoning, the Civil War had been lost, the Union perfected, and the perfect Union meant the most populous one you could make. Once the one population got on everyone’s nerves, as it had, it was a simple logical matter to assert the good of other populations; hence the loud, swiveling, clarion call extolling the endless virtues these days of what had come to be called, in exquisite euphemism, in the speech of the realm, diversity. Forrest had not meant to stop this nonsense, because he had not — no one had — had the sense to see nonsense like it coming, or even to conceive it, way back then when people were still sane, shooting each other over Sir Walter Scott.

She got her egg, cooled it in a stream of tapwater, and sat down to eat it. The man now up off the bed who had lost the most beautiful woman in the world and not got a job carrying grain and seed to be beaten by high school boys and ignored by old men was the man for her, after all. He was wounded, and none too custodial of his wounds, but who was any better? Her head was no clearer than his, his no more fogged than hers. In the surreal fog she could see him ask a plain woman to a real dance in Holly Springs Mississippi and begin again.