Padgett Powell - Hologram - A Novel

MY EXISTENCE IS FAIRLY tenuous, if you would have no objection to a man called Rape, whose demeanor and rhetoric thence would not allow you to anticipate it, using such a word. My tenuosity (there, that’s better, isn’t it?) is in fact what allows me to be, well, tenuous even in speech. I am in one sense but a figment, and a figment is nothing if not unstable. I can as easily, at her whim, say, “I only exist, you want to put it that way, by just keepin on keepin on.”

I am fortunate she likes me, or liked me. It came to that rather capital evening in which I got to eat with Jane and sleep with the hostess. It was a heady evening. No one could have predicted Turner crying like that. There are two explanations for that, or let us say one explanation in two forms: he was under considerable pressure, and everybody has their limit.

She was hot, I can say that. She got what she wanted out of me, and done quit me. That is not a behavioral pattern in women with which I am unfamiliar with it. They regular animals it comes to getting what they want. They have learned to weep and coo to mask it. We buy it. Or let me elevate that: enthralled within the tyranny of desire, we pay all our cash and then apply for credit. We see no practical end to what we will pay. The pedestal philosophy was a shrewd business intended to get the lioness off the ground. Give us some time to lick ourself in between rounds, in other words, moreso, so to speak, per se — I can be as ridiculous as you please. She preferred me that way, and I cannot maintain I mind it altogether. The labor of being colorful does not exceed that of being sane.

But I would have you note that she prefers the other old boy to me, a matter on which even she is clear. This should surprise no one. To my publicly masturbating, a scene she lifts from one in her own life that she witnessed at a mental health hospital, over the unattainable and ineffably beautiful woman she tyrannized me with — I the only man articulate enough to come up with “tyranny of pussy,” therefore the one to pay — she prefers and allows numbnut’s having the woman, first, and then his lying there in a contemplative fugue so long he loses her. He loses her because he shows evidence that he is not fully under the tyranny of desire. He gets away, as it were. So it is he who must be pursued. I am thrown a cursory sexual favor, fed, given a bad haircut, and dismissed. There is nothing end a shaky relationship like a bad haircut in my experience, in other words.

But cot boy, he gets off with a bad shirt. He limps on. She don’t know exactly where he’s at. He don’t either — to be precise, she would have you believe he doesn’t know what he is about. I have other information on this, which I will not share. Suffice it to say, before I leave here — which I am doing it as quick as I can (because after you have seen me sleep with the master you are not going to see me masturbate on a sidewalk again, which was not as fun as it looked) — that cot boy finds the labor required to be in a father dither and mother muddle and life limbo to not exceed that of being undithered, unmuddled, and walking tall.

I believe it a tenable proposition that people in books or life do not do more work than is required of them.

GIVE ME SOME OF your foo-foo water, lieutenant. I have a date. Should I go acourtin when Grant is out there at large? No, I should not. If that sumbitch is drunk, hope to God he don’t sober up. They’d a had his butt in charge sooner we’d be resting now. Wrong people fought this thing, lieutenant. Saved ourself some boys, we could have been bettern what we were. Got to go to this address here in Holly Springs. I’ll ride over alone. It’s a note on this purple paper, parfumy.

Find out what that new boy’s name is. Worries me. Still think he might be a Floyd, even a Buckner. Come up to me today with that lemon dog and a brace of rabbit he’d got, and I congratulated him, you know, and suddenly the fool is saying, “General, my daddy didn’t even teach me how to play cards.” All I could do not to laugh.

Lieutenant, I confess the boy had me stumped there. I had to resort to the Leader Act. I leaned down to him and looked at him with the electric fightin eye and said, deep-like, “Boy, I’mone teach you how to play cards and raise God.” Boy fell back teary and grateful from the horse like I’d done christened him. Made me blush. This Leader thang get on your nerves. I sprung off before it got any worser. Make sure he aint a Floyd — or related to anyone in command.

How you tie these things? Women. I wouldn’t even go if people wouldn’t say maybe I’m gettin like Davis and Bragg. Don’t wait up. You in charge. Anything happens, fight. That don’t work, run.

WHEN FORREST COMES IN the door, Mrs. Hollingsworth is wearing the same cologne he got from his lieutenant. She and Forrest smell so much alike they are put at ease and think themselves more familiar with each other than they are. Mrs. Hollingsworth has Jimi Hendrix playing, loud. Mrs. Hollingsworth is moving about in a strange, contortional way. “Do you frug, general?”

“What is that shit?” Forrest says, holding his ears.

Mrs. Hollingsworth begins laughing hysterically at this. Forrest himself begins to laugh. He has a slightly impish look unlike any Mrs. Hollingsworth has heretofore conceived. She has only seen the grim look and the electric look. He is putting her on!

He has picked up the Hendrix album cover. “I be damn.”

Mrs. Hollingsworth decides this business will be funny but predictable, and cuts it off.

“Have a seat, general.”

Forrest takes an order as well as he gives one. He notices the fabric of the sofa. It is a nubbly nylon that is utterly alien to his hand. He passes his hands absently over it for some time. Mrs. Hollingsworth has time to regard him: a man who will have fought so hard that he will wither away once this conflict is over and die, of nothing more certain than atrophy, at age fifty-six. A man this strong who can collapse.

“General, have you found the woman you love?”

“That has never occurred to me.”

“Does it interest you?”

“No, it does not. Not the way you put it.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not a bad answer.”

“That’s a relief.”

“General, you mock me.”

“Ma’am, why not?”

“That’s not bad either.”

“Well, we all do-si-do then.”

While it was true that she could do with Forrest what she wanted, it was also not true. He was difficult. But this too, his difficulty, she had given him, she thought. She wasn’t sure. The uncertainty was thrilling. He did not need a nurse — a peculiar man, in this respect. She had not known a man who did not need a nurse. The only man she could have imagined before this who did not need a nurse was a dead man. And the dead man would have needed a nurse, desperately, right up until he died.

The proposition of having a man who did not need you was a bit frightening. It should not be, but it was. The thing she thought she had failed at was precisely this: waiting for the man who did not need her but wanted her. She had been afraid to wait for that, then, and when she saw it before her, now, the thing itself, it too scared her. Perhaps she was merely afraid of everything. Most people, she thought, were, and she was perhaps finally not any better. It had been pretty to think so, she thought. A woman was not to be faulted for her pretty thoughts.

“Is a woman to be faulted for her pretty thoughts, general?”