Padgett Powell - Hologram - A Novel

— I told you, shh.

The hair on his arm he can feel on his eyelids. It is a well-and manly-haired arm, and women have liked his hair and his arm, including the woman on the chair, of whom he can’t remember why she reminds him of anyone at all, let alone Sally, and he doesn’t think it was a good idea to put hair all over the human body like this. Nor should a man, or a woman, be slick like a hairless dog, but there should have been better thinking going into this rampant hirsuteness, in his tired view, with his hairy arm across his eyes against the nice hurtful glare.

LOOKING AT THE BACK of his eyelids, the man saw not the colors he had read were called phosgenes and that some famous artist had said looking at was all he wanted to do; he saw a fast vivid replay of scenes with his father. These were both scenes he had witnessed and those he had only heard about. Once his father slept under wet sheets in a bathtub in Yulee Florida it was so hot. His father punched a relative of the state’s attorney general in the mouth at a country club in Tallahassee Florida once, and the attorney general, under whom his mother worked, and under whom she was afraid she would not work when it got out that her husband was punching his relatives at the country club, sent word by her to thank his father for punching the man. Once his father had his mother row them under a live oak while his father fished and they looked up and saw so many water moccasins that it scared not only his mother but his father too. His father said, “One or two, all right, but …,” and laughed. “He laughs now,” his mother said.

His father told him of how his own father had not let him quit high school football after three weeks just because he was getting hurt. You finish what you start. So his father said he decided to hurt somebody back, and did not quit, and became locally famous once he reversed the hurt ratio. Yet when Lonnie Sipple went out for high school football, his father took him off the field and informed the coach he would not be back. His father had been in the Pacific but would not say anything about the war, except late in life to tell him how comically bad a soldier he had been, playing poker and drinking beer and being put on unscheduled picket duty and falling asleep in a bamboo tower. Once when Lonnie was in college his father visited him, and when he saw that his father was carrying a pistol for the road, he remarked that it looked paranoid, and his father was gone, home, when he came out of the bathroom. And then his father died, more or less. In a box that cost $5000 and looked like NASA could do something with it, and in fact had had to be cranked open with a stainless steel tool and sounded like a refrigerator opening when he had them open it in the desert, his father was turning to slime. His arm across his eyelids felt comparatively acceptable now. The room was filled with the golden light, and the woman was alive. He was too. But he was tired.

MRS. HOLLINGSWORTH REGARDED HOD Bundy and Rape Oswald with misgivings beyond their unplanned presence on her list. Was she herself a wigger in a dress in an idle kitchen? Was she making fun of a history that should be hallowed? Was the entire business of corrupting the memory of Forrest a charged irreverence? This war that had come to haunt her: it was a colossal waste and shame, and her Forrest put it mildly when he said they were marked by the bones of boys. How could she make fun of the bones of boys? She sat there. She put on an egg to boil and sat there some more. How could she not make fun, she thought finally, of the bones of boys? They might otherwise kill you.

She was in this regard malaligned for proper reverent living, at least on bourgeois American earth, and she always had been. She wondered if malaligned was the same thing as maligned. You could not tell where elisions had obtained in English, unlike in French. She recalled the first instance, perhaps, of her irreverent malalignment, and it was in French class. The teacher asked them to translate le chat noir, and she had popped out with “He shat black.” The laughter was so immediate and forceful that she had had to go along with it and act as if she had fully intended this as a joke, and in fact it is true that in the middle of her answering she had seen that it was a joke, but in her impulse to speak the answer and to be first with the answer, she had not been aware of the egregious error that was coming with it. She in fact still wanted to read French articles as pronouns.

Her whole life, it seemed, had been this way: meaning no harm, she could say someone shat black. It got to be a force of habit, finally. She was the sort of person who did not say the cat is black if there was a chance, accidental or deliberate, not to. And it seemed a little late to put in for a character change. She was going to make her list for her meal for the largest fools starving on earth. “Come and get it, boys,” she said aloud to the egg rumbling on the stove. “Call me Mama.”

THE ONE CALLED HOD Bundy said to the one called Rape Oswald, “Read me the orders again. I was too nervous to hear them good when Turner read them. Plus that Jane is a distraction.”

Oswald put down his half of the equipment, which appeared to be a heavy power supply, connected by a large-gauge, multistrand umbilical to the half of the equipment carried by Bundy, which looked like a camera or radar gun. Bundy was jerked to a halt by the tautening of this umbilical, because he had kept walking after Oswald deposited the power supply.

— God damn, Rape.

— God damn what, Hod?

— You might give a warning signal.

— You said stop.

— I said read me the orders. I didn’t realize it was chewing gum and walking for you.

— The orders is tucked away.

— I see that now.

Oswald procured the orders in the form of a linty wad from his pants pocket. He procured two Swisher Sweet cigars from a box in his shirt pocket and handed one to Bundy and lit them both and read the orders aloud.

Locate a man who can recognize the hologram cast by this unit — which is charged out to your account and for which you are responsible — and moreover recognize the significance of the hologram (Bedford Forrest). My people in science tell me the emotionally disturbed man may prove most sensitive to this kind of image, but I do not want an unstable candidate. The successful candidate will serve as a prototype man for the New Southerner, a man, if I may say so, much like me, whom I will then have eugenically engineered to found a line of men in the New South who will perforce raise up the Old by eliminating the genetic dearth effected by the War, thereby eliminating contractor’s bottom and other ills. Bring him to me.

Mrs. Hollingsworth thought it funny having Turner say “contractor’s bottom.” She was perfectly aware it was a “manipulation” of Turner, putting “her” words in “his” mouth, also a laughable idea at this juncture. Turner would say “plumber’s ass,” and Jane would stop him, Hanoi Jane would stop him. How a girl like that got a stud like Turner who could make money and sail a boat was beyond Mrs. Hollingsworth.

Bundy said to Oswald, “You get all that?”

Oswald said, “What does ‘moreover’ mean?”

“It’s a word people like Turner use. I have no idea.”

Oswald discarded the Swisher Sweet box, took a bite from the corner of the hologram orders, made to chew it, made a face, spit the paper out, wrapped the remaining cigars in the orders, returned them to his shirt pocket, and then had the idea that he and Bundy should take the equipment just over the hill to the Jacksonville Memorial Gardens and aim it at bereaved men coming out of the viewing parlor until one of them reacted right. In silhouette against the dusking sky, they went over the horizon yanking at each other with the umbilical and cursing and stumbling. Sounds that suggested a fight drifted from their progress.