Padgett Powell - Hologram - A Novel

Mrs. Hollingsworth was dazed by this, but snapped to at “cookbooks”: was she perhaps, she wondered, already extrapolating theory from a grocery list? Maybe she had already written her paper for the course, if she could induce the professor to include grocery lists in the catalogue of extrapolatable genres. That odd phrase rolled in her brain a moment until she became aware that there was a man in sandals and socks speaking very softly and very self-assuredly at the head of the long table that they — she and some much younger students — were sitting at.

He was saying, “… the interactions of discourse and ideology — that is, how the work of the poet operates within a variety of prevalent romantic cultural discourses — e.g., romantic, amatory, religious, hedonist, colonialist — in order to collaborate with, challenge, oppose, or, in rare cases, subvert them.” Here, at “subvert,” the professor raised his eyebrows several times until everyone at the table chuckled, which it seemed to Mrs. Hollingsworth was the actual requirement so far of the course. She had failed to chuckle. At the same moment that she perceived everyone in the room to be staring at her very politely, she noticed in her hand a button of the pin-on political variety that said on it FRIEND.

Into the silence that apparently awaited something from her, Mrs. Hollingsworth said, “Are we going to read ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’?”

“You mean theorize diaspora, adjudicate hybridity?” the professor asked, with more of the eyebrow hydraulics.

She could not respond, so the professor, whose role seemed to be that of helping out the obtuse, went on: “We will focus on the ways in which diasporan subjectivity complicates and problematizes the relationship between theory and identity, on the one hand, and representation and collectivity, on the other.”

This remark had the effect of liberating the other students from staring politely at her. When they resumed their fond gaze at the professor, Mrs. Hollingsworth left the room. In her one hand was the FRIEND button, in her other hand her purse. She had a headache and was breathing hard.

Now she understood a few things: that the American academy, which one might have thought the place to defend freedom of speech, had been the seat and soul of abrogating freedom of speech, if the first assault on its freedom can be said to be restricting, or handcuffing, speech. “Handicapped” had become there “physically challenged” and, ultimately, “differently abled.” A student body of mixed race had become one that was diverse. The diverse engendered something around it called pluralism. Pluralism was the high good, a kind of manna that was supposed to feed the bees and nourish them into new heavenly forms that would not sting each other. Pluralism was going to stop race riots. Saying “the N word” was going to make the black man happy. We could still say “redneck,” she had noticed. The day she heard it on NPR, she turned NPR off, not because broadcasters were still using the term, but because she knew one day they would not be. In fact, she had a vision of the quiet moment backstage at a Boston studio when a good, surprised correspondent was let go for saying “redneck” the last time it would be said.

Her getting stranger had something to do with this truly getting stranger the nation was about. She wanted to be somewhere else, so she was making her list.

— BOBBY LEE, LET ME ast you, friend, what you boys upair in the high cotton wrapping up cigars in you battle orders and droppin em behind enemy lines for? I find fightin hard enough without that.

— That? That warnt but a thang.

— Warn’t but a thang? Put some boy bones in the ground, dint it?

— Yeah. Yeah it did.

— Well then it warn’t just no thang, Bobby E. Lee. I got outright queers on my back down here and it cost me boy bones all day long and it ain’t just a thang. We ain’t got no cigars down here. And it ain’t just a thang down here.

— You do go on, Genel.

— Do I, Genel? Where boy bones is concerned, I don’t hold with the luxury of cigars.

— I take your point, Genel. I take your point.

— You keep on takin it, Genel.

Mrs. Hollingsworth wondered if this item were not too obscure for even a hungry fool to understand. That is probably because it is real, she thought. Few people could credit that the War might have been over had not battle orders from Lee been found wrapped around cigars and given to McClellan in time to avert Lee’s annihilation of him in the Valley campaign. That was harder to believe, she thought, than that, say, Ted Turner might try to produce a species of media baby and fight the War again. She was having these vague visions of television technology and Forrest and a new soldier, a New Southerner. All of this, she thought, more probable than battle orders wrapping up cigars in enemy territory, a sad and ineluctable fact of history. She liked the day that allowed you to say “ineluctable,” and also “eponymous.”

THE MAN WHO COULD see Forrest and who would see a yellowtail in a lake and who had known love when he was Lonnie and saw Sally, and who had not known it later, went to the funerals, one hard upon another, of his mother and his father. Both of them were held in desertlike heat.

At the funeral of his father, to which he was late, he had to have them open the coffin at the cemetery so he could see him. He had never seen a dead man before. He said to his father, “Hey, bud,” a thing his father had said to him, which he had never himself said. He held his hand. He kissed him on the cold meat of his forehead. No one at the cemetery saw this. In the heat they were now concentrating on trying to leave. Deer flies and sportcoats and good cars and some women who had liked his handsome father were by the cars, ready to leave. He could have joined his father in the expensive box that was designed to turn his father into slime and for which he felt most sorry for his father, and they would not have seen this either.

At the funeral of his mother, he was not late, and he did not have to have the coffin opened because it had not yet been closed. He said, “Hey, Mom.” He did not touch her. If he did, he cannot remember, but he can remember thinking he was probably not going to want to, and he does not remember any change of emotion when he saw her, so his memory that he did not touch her is probably correct.

Inside the funeral home at his father’s affair, where he discovered his father already removed to the cemetery, was a vulgar employee whom he should have assaulted but did not. The man said, “Y’all come back now, y’heah?” and got away with it.

He walked out into the heat then, and saw Forrest for the first time. Forrest slapped at a prickly pear cactus with the flat of his saber, and the man might have thought of his father’s mother slapping his father with the flat of her carving knife, but he did not. It was too hot to think. He then saw Sally at the grave and did not remember her. She introduced herself, and he said, “Oh, yes. Of course.”

THE WOMAN WITH TAUT vanilla flesh sits on the black chair and regards the courthouse lawn. I don’t see them, she says.

— Who?

— The redhorse suckers.

— Why should you?

— They went out this window.

— Oh.

She watches the square. Something odd catches her eye in the shadows. She looks at the black men, who see her. She looks back to the odd thing, under a store awning.

— There are two men watching this window.

— The sages?

— No. These are criminals of some sort. White. Looking at us with a gizmo.