Padgett Powell - Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men

Ray was impressed at Mr. Mogul’s smooth delivery. He thought it might be good to learn to speak that way himself, and he certainly would have to consider it if he began wearing his hair in a way that made people expect that kind of sound to come out of a man. He thought he might, what the hell, try it right now: “These ideers might appear in congress with my haircut, sir, as far as blow-dry. I have oft pondered, moreso, more-over, why the brother does not have his own entire industries a national bank, for example. Prioritizing the brother. For all the fay-the-fair made about his soul food, one does too see a dearth of restaurants in the brother’s name, and certainly there is no national chain. And you would know best the opportunities in mass communications, which it has already brought us wrassling on TV and colored black-and-white movies. I mean, why should not the brother have not merely his own phone but his own net-work? His own satellites, even?”

Mr. Mogul looked at him in astonishment. "We have discussed these things in bunkers,” he said. “As part of the planning for the New South. You might be more of the team than I knew. Do you want to be more of the team than I knew?" At this, Roopit Mogul began weeping. It was a quiet, not very disturbed weeping, which suggested as many positive emotions as negative, Ray thought, rather as women may cry when they are happy fully as often, and often as fully, as when they are sad. Mrs. Mogul seemed also not much bothered by it, and made ready with a napkin as if to hand it to Mr. Mogul momentarily when he came up for air. Bay fingered the raw spots of his haircut and thought, Really.

He discovered that the hostess had left the room and was now returning with dessert on a tray. It looked very good, especially since he could not recall their having had anything else. It was not that he was particularly hungry, it was merely that this was the first food they had seen, and it looked particularly fetching for that reason alone. He jumped up to help the woman with the tray, saying to her, “Honey child!" This came out of his mouth as oddly as a small toad. The woman took no exception to the toad, in fact winked at him. She glanced at Mr. Mogul. “We are coming along nicely,” she said. Then to him, “You’re a good boy."

This compliment went into Ray as true as a pang on the pan of his heart. It had not been said to him in a long, long time. It made him want the woman again, in the bed room, and soon.

“I’m a voodoo chile,” he said.

“That you are,” the woman said. “Now watch this.”

The curtain behind Mr. Mogul opened. An image began to obtain, not unreminiscent of the way the Star Trek boys beamed into place, or the way closed-circuit TV sometimes grainily gathered itself in the early days of closed circuitry. “The artist Degas could talk any woman he wanted into taking her clothes off and bathing in front of him, apparently,” Ray said.

The woman said, "Shh."

On the screen Forrest appeared, hair shining, blowing in a wind. Violins blowing a violin wind. Moss blowing in a wind. Sir Walter Scott shook hands with Forrest. A guillotine tumbled by on the wind. "The French were of no help to us," Forrest said. Forrest appeared to be distracted. Ray had not seen him so before. He was fidgeting with his person, patting about himself as if checking for personal property in his pockets. The marvelous canvas coat was there, in its perfect disorder: dirty and yet spectral, rucked up and shot and torn and yet whole and sturdy and rugged as armor. Ray wanted a coat like that.

Some kind of commercial intervened in the filmstrip, or whatever it was. Ray had not heard the term “filmstrip” in a long time. He had not actually heard it now. It had been heard, he guessed, by his brain. The commercial was for Ronson lighter fluid. Ray had never seen a commercial, or any other kind of advertisement, for Ronson lighter fluid. “Ronson lighter fluid exists independently of the exigencies of commerce,” Ray said aloud, and they all told him by quiet gesture to be quiet. “And those yellow cards with the little red flints,” he pressed on, “they don’t have to advertise that.” They shushed him.

Forrest returned, his hair on fire. He was saying something indistinguishable. It sounded like “Someone get the phone,” but Ray thought what he was saying was cleverly designed to sound like indistinguishable talk. That is to say you could decide what he was saying for yourself and be no more inaccurate than your neighbor, because Forrest was not saying anything ai all. They had cleverly effected this phenomenon. It sounded like talk but wasn’t. It was like some poetry.

Ray closed his eyes. He wanted to see Forrest ride. He almost wanted to run the machine that projected him again himself because Forrest was not doing interesting things here in this professional film or whatever it was. Forrest could ride, list, skull, stomp, gouge, pistol ball in hip, mercury pouring from his feet where his thimble spurs melted back onto the fingers of the fair ladies who hoped for him and loved him

and loved then, still, too, themselves

and the woman was on him again, the fog of flesh that was her and that was him was on them again, and she was saying “Are you hungry?” and he was saying “Yes, ma’am, I am hungry," and she smiled at him, a sweet smile that took a long time and made him feel like… what?.. as if she were laughing at something, at him, but she was not, and she said “And are you a fool?” and he said “Oh, yes, ma’am, I am a fool," and she said "Then you are a hungry fool?” and he said nothing because it was obvious that he was, and the woman smiled again the long smile that made you think she was finding something funny about you but she was not.

Real Fog

When Mrs. Hollingsworth returned from her dinner with the Moguls and Ray and the irrepressible unredoubtable Forrest, as fine as an immortal graying hound, she felt marvelously refreshed and simplified. She felt she had traveled to a wonderful place, a sentiment that was suspiciously brochure-sounding but that she had no trouble holding anyway. I went to a place and I enjoyed it very much, she said to herself. Now that she was “back" — and she had some reservations about that terminology too, because she sensed you did not come all the way back and you did not ever really leave — she kept smacking her lips for some of that place again.

Here she was again in what her daughters would call, she supposed, the real fog — no, they wouldn’t, they were not that bright — and it looked immeasurably worse. The newspaper contained an item, among all the murders and barricadings and shooting sprees, about the curvature of the president’s member. He had a peyroni that did not, she read, get fully erect. The president of the United States. This was real. Tell her this was not also then a fog, and a worse one than the one she had learned to take lodgment in.

She had got to see a media mogul cry — where else might you see that? And he had wept so ambiguously, so endearingly, so unselfpityingly: She was already ready to go back. A phrase was toying with her head. She had had more of the phrase than she had now, and it had been better, meant more than the fragment of it she now possessed. She had lost part of the phrase in the collision with the real fog. The presidents limber peyroni had whapped it out of her head. Everyone could be Coleridge, she supposed. This was why They had taken laudiuium away from us, wasn’t it? They did not like us all being Coleridge. If she were caught selling laudanum from the back of a Volvo, she would do more time than if she shot someone.

What remained of the toying phrase was only this; "in the ghost of her lies.” Something something in the ghost of her lies. Maybe In the ghost of her; lies something something. No: the original meaning was along the lines of the phantom of her prevarications. The phantom of her prevarications, the ghost of her lies — she was in love with the ghost of her lies, her ghostly lies, and she would return to him, and to them, when she could. There was nothing quite like the clarity of the surreal fog when you came out of the muddy real.