Padgett Powell - Hologram - A Novel

— What kind of gizmo?

— High-tech gizmo.

— I am not worried about no high-tech gizmo.

— Well, these are pretty low-tech-looking boys wielding the gizmo, if that makes any difference.

— Might. Just might.

— I CAINT QUITE TELL if she can see him or not, Hod. I know he can.

— Whyont you run Forrest now?

— Shit, Hod, em nappy pappys already actin spooked. I run him right through them last time, they so whooped by it one of em says he smellin bream beddin!

— Naw.

— Swear to God.

— Well, all right. We got what we want anyway. If she can see him too, that a extra. Mr. Turner gone be very pleased with his field hands, I’d say. The New Southerner to order! Man who caint remember who he is, one; caint forget who he supposed to be, two; can see Forrest and be spooked by it and have half a idea what the hell it is, three: that was our orders. And to boot, to judge from the looks a her, he aint queer—

— That’s a miracle, way it going.

— Theys more wrong in the world than being queer, Rape.

— They is? Like what? You hidin something from me, Hod?

— No. It aint nothing but a thang. Now see can she really see him. Put him on Talk. I bleve we in position for a bonus, Rape, Mr. Turner find out we got him a mating pair. Don’t run him through them old men no more. No telling what this does to people.

— Fuck people up when they see it, I’d say.

— Yeah, but I mean when they don’t.

— Make em smell bream when they don’t. That much we know.

— Yeah, Rape. We a couple reglar scientists.

THE WOMAN WHO NO longer is Sally, if she ever was, pays oblique attention to the two men under the awning who are pointing something around the square. Those are as solid a pair of ne’er-do-wells ever scuffed shoes, she says to the man.

— I’m tired.

— I’m tired too, love. But it’s Ted Bundy and Lee Harvey Oswald down there aiming a ray gun at this window or I’m a coot on duck day.

And then she sees Forrest — of this, from her expression, there is no doubt in the minds of those who witness her seeing him.

Forrest appears unmounted, natty in shirt garters and whipcord trousers, not his riding attire, and wearing silver spurs. He takes a position near a granite pedestal bearing a likeness of himself. He disregards it. He says, in a voice surprisingly high and piercing, “I jingle when I walk in these things. They become me, if I am a dandy, and I become a dandy when I walk. That is why I ride fist skull stomp gouge and resent the everliving shit out of appointed leaders who dick around with cigars and bury boys. The bones of boys, mark me, will mark us forever. I am fire.”

Forrest turns to fire, his mouth a monalisa. His spurs melt into the ground like mercury.

God damn, the woman says.

IT OCCURRED TO MRS. Hollingsworth that she should do something with herself other than make this preposterous grocery list that was getting preposterouser with every item she added. It was taking on a powerful vigor of its own. The Bundy and Oswald figures, for example, had appeared on the list without her direct intention, it seemed. This equipment they had she could not properly identify except to know that it made holograms and was more technical than she was and appeared way more technical than this Bundy and Oswald who were charged with operating it. It was one thing to have a preposterous grocery list, she thought, and another to have a list you did not control.

So to do something other than the list she went out in the country for a drive and saw some cows and two white doves in a very green field. Then she went back home and organized the floor of her closet, matching shoes to boxes and noting that she had three expensive leather train bags and had not been on a train for twenty-five years. She did not in fact think a train bag was necessarily intended to go on a train. Then she sat back down at her kitchen table to resume the list. It was becoming obsessive, she told herself. She then told herself it was probably the absence, not the presence, of some good salubrious obsessions in a life that made it unsatisfying. What else did she have, really? In the end, a list like this one was better on the antibourgeois scale than one you actually went to the store with, wasn’t it? That, going to the store, would result in tuna casserole and a marriage with Joy of Cooking in its background, which was precisely what she had and was precisely what had inspired her to sit down in this fugue about Forrest in the first place. So she listed on.

ONLY BOY BACK AIR with Bobby Lee what could I hear fight ate lemons, believed in Jesus, and got hisself shot by his own men. And I am walkin round on spurs made from melted thimbles. We are in a spot.

The fair ladies of Memphis have done made me a pair of silver spurs and now caint sew. When they get what men back they gone get back from this fight, it aint gone matter. The woman is gone pay for this for the rest of her everliving life. She gone put up with shanks and heroes what wasn’t there and the luckiest of fools what was. It aint gone make for no high cotton.

— REASON SHE SEEN FISH in the room, Rape, and em boys smelt em, and that dude saw a pompano in the lake, is you aint know how to run that thang. A yellertail in the lake! We lucky Forrest aint come over here and kilt us.

— Hod, excuse me, Hod, excuse me, but did you see a operator’s manual? No, Hod, you did not. You did not see a operators manual with this ray gun, Hod. That woman is perfectly right in calling it that, because this is what it is. And ray guns just appear without no manuals, like in the movies, people just knowing how to run them. If you have a quarrel, take it up with Mr. Turner. I suppose he knows how to run it.

— If it’s really his, he might. Maybe he found it.

— Christ Almighty, Hod, you are not rational. Mr. Turner does not find shit. He makes it or he buys it. The last thing he found was himself in a position to make millions of dollars acause his daddy—

— Rape, he found us, didn’t he?

— Point well taken. We don’t count. What counts is him up there in that room, and we found him, and that does count.

— Read me them orders again.

— I caint.

— Why not?

— Lost em.

— Well, how we know we found what Turner wants, then?

— I committed the orders to memory, like General Longstreet.

— Remember them to me, then.

— I caint.

— Why not?

— I forgot what they said. Before you say anything stupid, let me inform you that no, committing something to memory is not the same thing as remembering what it said. Horse of a entirely nother color.

THE MAN HAS HIS arm across his eyes because the glare from the floor, while comforting in its warm gold clarity and cleanness, is bright. He is tired. The woman has told him the room was full of fish, a matter he remembers now as one remembers sweet improbable lunatic moments from childhood when things did not depend on verisimilitude for their ratification. He is tired. He cannot remember not remembering Sally at the funeral of his father. He cannot remember that there is any connection between Sally and the woman in the room, or if he thought there was. He can remember only, and only sometimes, the citrusy heavy feel of her breast in his mouth, that last moment he fancied he knew who he was, well before he thought he knew who he really was, either then or now thinking of the way he must have thought then … he is tired. Sally? he says to the woman on the chair.