The Gift
In my middle age, I was the fortunate recipient of an unusual gift. The delivery men arrived at twilight one evening. One of them, very stern, had me sign his clipboard, while the other rolled a large crate out of the back of a van. A squat, cumbersome box.
Twilight is the time when the dusty mountains are struck obliquely by amber sunlight, dying rays refracted dreamily through airy lenses of drowsy honey. Commuters drift soundlessly, cocooned in their cars, over highways that push furiously through the mountains. Then, softly, the dusty earth tones of day transform into the orange onset of evening.
They left me there at my home overlooking the San Fernando Valley, twilight bleeding the last light out of the day.
I went inside to the living room where they had left the package. No sender named. The only message: “To William Shapely. For your birthday. Love C.” Perplexing. Who was C? True, that day had been my 44th birthday.
I crossed the living room to the wet bar and poured myself a drink. I looked out over the houses far bellow in the valley. Hazy smog choked the view, but I could still make out the tall palms, the dusty scrubs, and throngs of two-story households, topped with Spanish tile, homes 180-degree reflections of one another. The property lines were invisible mirrors between edifices. The terrain unzipped. The developments exploded frenziedly into the mountains, bristled out of the landscape as if it had cracked open, like DNA, recombining with itself and replicating and fanning out.
My house, up on stilts high above the city was like a crystal cave, a kind of half-cylinder of glass and metal. The front hallway was all of glass, supported beneath by thick, shining metal columns and above by tense metal chords. Some panes of glass had a halcyon blue tint to them.
A successful architectural career had provided well for me. I appreciated the unconventional. I collaborated with Pei on his ambitious Shinto Museum and did a stint with the Rodgers Group when they forged the hall of justice in Antwerp.
The criss-cross of cables threaded up the spire between the two hemispheres of the roof like the laces of a corset, a strict steeple, metal bodice primed to burst. I tried to build my house in the suburbs, but the neighbors got pissed. So I moved up into the mountains. You don’t get much unconventional architecture around here.
I closed the bottle and stepped down to get into the living room, which had a large curved window made of glass and a glass floor, blue carpeting. The floor was such that, looking down, one felt as though they might drop through it into the rocks and brush beneath. It was thick enough so that would never happen, of course.
Everything, the bar, the seats, shelves, all had a very squat rectangular slate blue or silver shape, so that in a way the interior looked like regimented piles of stones, but of ice and metal. In a way, it was like living in a Scandinavian Ice Castle.
I looked out through the window and made my way over to the perplexing box. Crouched beside it. I swirled the auburn fluid in my glass, then took a sip. I stood and circled the package before bending down and pulling back a board. I felt around through the foam packaging, brushed it off something that glinted momentarily. It must be a mirror.
Someone sent me this mirror on my 44th birthday, some sick sort of attempt at irony, perhaps a cruel Over the Hill joke.
It was true. In this house of glass, where an image was never far off, I had watched the lines deepen in my face like grooves once cut by rivers on alien worlds, now dry and lifeless. JPL was just down the road. Maybe we could arrange a probe to terraform this old face.
The sagging of my jowls, sunken eyes and double-chinning had accelerated since the death of my parents.
My mother died rather unceremoniously when I was thirty-nine. I remembered my father calling me on the telephone. I was lying in bed. It was hammering rain outside the panes of my then-apartment in Boston. I was looking out the window. I had apparently been lying there for hours, feeling nothing for no particular reason. I work twelve hours most days, so this was unusual. In retrospect, it should have been the first sign that something was amiss.
I sat up and answered the telephone. I remembered my father’s normally powerful voice had dwindled into a hushed and somber whisper. Father died last year. It would be exactly a year eleven days from now, as a matter of fact.
Looking up, I wondered if my eyes were so momentarily dazzled by the glint of mirror-light that I was seeing spots. A faint line, very faint, a gentle curve, floated in space before me.
It had a slight lavender tinge. Was this a trick of the light from a window or reflected through the many mirrors in my house? I looked up and to the sides. There were more of these strings, abstract shapes hovering faintly in space.
I looked at the one directly before me again. I was looking at some kind of object like the outline of a hand. I took a step back and squinted, peered into the half-light. I froze.
Over the box stood a faint figure, an apparition. It was totally ephemeral, almost invisible. It was entirely motionless. I waited a few moments poised to run at the slightest indication of motion, but when nothing happened, I ventured to exit slowly, walking backwards into the hallway. I touched the light sensor, and peeked around the corner, slowly increasing the light intensity in the room.
The figure became more distinct, though still faint. I could discern eyes now, and the style of dress. A youthful man, very clean cut, short, straight hair parted on the left side. He wore a collared dress shirt, the top two buttons left casually open. His arms rested at his sides and he stood very straight.
I varied the lighting. The clarity of the figure intensified when the light intensified. The apparition became fainter in dim light, nearly invisible, and bold under the full light.
I marched back into the living room and tore away the remainder of the planks. A shinning, tinted disk lay on a bed of foam packaging. Before me, above the disk, stood a purplish pink phantasm, a man. He looked very familiar.
He was me. This was an image of myself. The eyes, the whole visage, carried a look of serenity to the point of complacency. I circled him, myself, in awe. I had never seen myself — not like this. Not from without.
Only from reflections, in mirrors and photographs, could I have extrapolated a form, an image, as robust as this. But I had become familiar with an inverted me, rotated 180 degrees around the plane of the mirror.
I had only the vantage of innumerable shards of images, half-ascertained peripheral glances, photographs — the deceiving two-dimensionality of the reproductions — to draw from.
I had a video catalogue of years of change. This comprised a strange, accelerated evolution, adolescent time-lapse tadpole, the boyish head, torso, and limbs fattening and extruding with disquieting speed. It was a mental claymation, a digital morphing, a compendium of bathroom mornings.
Yet, here was myself. Me, but shifted just a few feet, as though I had walked through that space, and left behind some kind of light-residue in one of the paces, like a visual echo.
Who was I to thank for this? My first thought was that someone must have lifted this from an old photograph.
I darted a look out the window. I tried to recall a photograph in which I had posed this way, a happiest moment perhaps that a friend decided to immortalize.
I waved my hand through myself and caught an eerie thrill. Did I even recognize those clothes?
I couldn’t sleep that night. I wasn’t certain where the disk of the hologram belonged. I could hide it away inside my desk drawer, but somehow that was insecure. I could sequester it in my safe. That way it would be protected, and better, no light would get to it. I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable doing even that.
Light filters in everywhere. It pervades even the darkest recesses, a stray photon here and there. What’s the average population for deep space, one photon per meter cubed?
Photons leak in through the crevices of the safe door. Worse, opacity is only a cancellation of light by a standing matter wave of the surface 180 degrees out of phase. Light hits the surface, some is reflected, some is absorbed and converted to heat. Some small percent, fifteen percent maybe, actually passes. I seem to recall this from college physics. It’s that fifteen percent that is rendered invisible by phase shift. Something like that: I was never a physics person. The feeling was something like leaving the television playing all night while no one was home. It didn’t sit right.
So I didn’t sleep that night. I stayed up, watching the hologram to make sure it didn’t try anything funny. I didn’t even bother to close the windows that night. I stretched my legs out on the couch and sat up very straight. I kept the lights up to maximum.
I stared so long, the image started to ripple. Perhaps it was phantasmagoria, perhaps a trick of the eye, but I swore I saw the hand twitch, or the expression alter slightly, edges of the lips curve upward from their perpetual near-smile.
The eyes, worst of all, now and again would flare, and I started to wonder if the fearsome shift was not entirely from my imagination, but had some exterior existence in and of itself. The eyes, half-mast, widened instantaneously, so that I thought I could see real flesh and blood orbs behind the translucent lids. They turned toward me. I must have momentarily nodded off, or blinked my eyes.
Dawn came slowly, and slowly the light of day replaced the artificial light of luminescent patches along the glass walls.
Weariness overwhelmed me, but I knew I had work to do. I went into my study and got out some plans for the most recent project I’d been commissioned to work on: a private home for a wealthy businesswoman living in the desert fifty miles outside of Albequerque. She told me she wanted the structure to look like the desiccated ribcage — a carcass — of some gigantic, land-going beast.
I struggled with it for an hour, then put it aside. I organized my CD’s for a while, putting them in alphabetical order, admiring the completeness of the set, from Ryuichi Sakamoto to Radiohead, I had distilled my musical tastes down to a handful of important albums. If I were to die tomorrow, I supposed, my body could be shot out into space and this small compendium along with it, the perfect cultural jettison, perfect representation of a demographic, of one small man living in Santa Barbara on early 21st Century Earth.
What a sad little thought that was. Sitting at my drafting board, I gazed out the rectangular plane of the window. No glass walls in here. In the brushed metal of the desk light, blurred and grainy, I saw a luminous figure standing in the doorway behind me.
I turned. There was no one there. Upon turning, I had the distinct impression I had lurched up from the desk. Had I had my head down? Did I collapse onto the desktop and wake with a start?
I got up and made coffee. In the light of day, the hologram existed faintly there in my living room. Like eyes from out of a painting, it turned to follow and face me wherever I moved.
The phone picked up.
“Dave.”
“Bill, hello. I haven’t heard from you in some time. How have you been doing?”
“I’ve been okay. A little sordid, but okay.”
“I’m sorry about your father.”
“You heard? Thanks. It’s been kind of rough on me. How are things back in the Northeast?”
“Recession. Taxes on the rise and no guarantee of relief.”
“Did you send me a package recently?”
“No. Was it your birthday recently?”
“Yeah, 44 now. I’ve just been wracking my brain trying to figure out who could have sent this to me. I was pretty certain it was you. You’re the only person I know with a PhD in optical engineering.”
There was a silence at the other end of the line. “What do you mean by that, Bill?”
“Dave, did you lift an image of me from an old photograph and have a hologram made up for my birthday?”
“No. No I didn’t do anything like that. I don’t even know how that would be possible. What are we talking about here, Bill, a full-blown 3-D image?”
“Yeah. I’m pacing around it right now.”
“And it turns with you?”
“No. It’s a real image, front and back.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. To make a hologram like that, a person would have to take you into a laboratory. Or work from a series of pictures taken in tandem 360 degrees around you.”
“All at once?”
“Either that or go through the painstaking process of piecing together images that appeared seamless from different pictures taken at different times. That would be nearly impossible. Very tedious.”
I came around to the front of the hologram and stopped. I could see him. I could see his eyes.
“Are you telling me you received something like that and you don’t know who it came from?”
“Afraid so.”
“Well, what, do you think you’re being stalked?”
A stalker, eh? No, I certainly hoped not, though the thought had crossed my mind. “To tell you the truth, I had hoped that maybe some pretty young thing had taken a fancy to me. One of the ladies in the office, or maybe someone I worked with once. You know, there was that girl on that holographic project, for a museum, cable systems, really thick glass fiber optics. The one in Reno.”
“Yeah, um. Julie. Do you think it could have been her?”
“Nah. I had a thing for her. I think I came on too strong. She’d never have given me a second look.”
“Um. Are you sure? Maybe she changed her mind. Still haven’t gotten married. No wife, no kids?”
“Hey, no divorce!”
“Got me there.”
“Hell, no. Are you kidding Dave? Do you have any idea how much that would cost? Well, heh, I guess you do.”
“Yeah, but Melanie and I are pretty happy. Well, for the most part. Can you keep a secret?”
“Okay.”
“I had an affair at a conference I went to recently. A pretty intern for a rival industry group. Our two teams went out for Vietnamese, and seventeen beers later we were both crawling around on all fours under the table.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Oh my God. She even gave me a blowjob.”
“Wow. Look, I think I’d better get back to what I was doing, Dave.”
“Not even a girlfriend? That’s not healthy. Nope. C’mon: think of all the fun you’re missing out on. You’re going to regret this when you’re an old man.”
“Listen, do you have Jen’s number?”
“Jen? Aw, Jesus, man, I can’t fucking believe you. How old are you? 44 now? And you’re still hung up? Get over it. For the love of God. Yeah. She’s still here, but she’s married.”
“It’s okay. Just give me her number.”
“Why would she have sent it? She left you, remember?”
“Call it intuition.”
I wanted to hold off on calling Jennifer. Now was not the time.
So instead I turned my thoughts to clients who might have been pleased enough with what I’d done to send me this little bomb. Why would one of my clients send me this hologram? Of course, Margaret Fleischer, the most recent client, was first.
I got a flight out the next day from LAX to San Francisco International, early in the morning, so I could catch her by lunchtime. She actually lived high on the mountains in Sausalito, so it was a little hike to get up there.
I got out of the cab and paid the fair. Here was a series of terraces, kind of like rice steppes in China, leading up to a house that looked something like a Picasso. Really, I could only compare it to Nude Descending a Staircase. That was the closest thing I was able ever to link to his vision for the house. It was much more colorful, lots of lime greens and bright reds.
As I approached the gate I stopped. Though there was no actual grill, there would be alarms going off if I got much closer. I got out my cell. So much for surprising her.
She came out onto the lawn and waved to come up to the house. Margaret wore a bright green cotton dress, mother of pearl, and wore a straw hat with a pink band around it. In her arms, she cradled a black cat with white paws and yellow eyes. The cat’s lower jaw was also white, and it meowed in absent-minded protest when she withdrew one hand to greet me.
“And to what do I owe the honor of this pleasant surprise?”
She poured us both some Tibetan tea into china on a silver tray, cucumber sandwiches brought in by a Mexican in a tuxedo. Very nice.
“Well, I’d been meaning to come and pay you a visit, Margaret. How have you been getting on?”
“Oh, splendidly. Charles and I, well, you remember Charles,” indicating the cat surreptitiously, so Charles would not notice and be offended, “have been assisting with the renaissance of the Beaux Arts Academy in the Castro district. It’s so lovely. You know they have a really lovely 18th century theater there they found in boxes stored in the Duke D’Chambord’s estate in Ludon.”
“Really, I must see that sometime. I’m sure it’s splendid.”
“Truly, it is. We’re holding fundraisers all this week at the Ritz and other locations, in the Met. Do you think you would have any time to attend?”
“No, I’m very busy with work, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, dear, what a shame. I know a number of people who would just love to meet you. Thank you, Jose,” taking a petifor from a new tray. “Cucumber sandwich?”
“Margaret, you are too kind. I wanted to ask you, actually, because I remembered you had said that one day you’d do something to repay me for the designs…”
“Ah, I see, the young man has come to call.”
“Well, actually, I was wondering if perhaps you already had. I received in the mail the other day, um, a rather unusual gift. It was my 44th birthday, you see.”
“To be 44 again. No, I’m afraid I didn’t even know it was your birthday, William.”
Recrossing the bridge, the double-decker, earthquake-shy bridge, I could see the afternoon fog like a wall pouring in up through the harbor. All the bustle of the Mission, in its squalor, posters peeling from splintering fences, the hap-hazard streets winding like forgotten ducts deep within a building, and elbows, the Pyramid back beyond, red-brown-black soot on concrete, desert soot and emissions, Latino’s in tank tops and broken down transmissions.
I got home an immediately put on Arvo Pärt, the quieter parts, made myself a white Russian (with some cookies and cream ice cream in it). I had developed this sickeningly sweet tooth in the past couple of years. I had never really cared that much for sweets before, but now the desire was undeniable. Maybe I was diabetic. I lay back on the couch and rubbed my eyes. How many days had it been since I had slept comfortably, or even at all?
I looked at the hologram, and thought myself lucky to even have one person recall my birthday, no matter how strange or sinister the gift.
Then I thought of my friend Leo in Hollywood. He was a producer working for an independent film company that had had surprising success in recent days. Maybe this was his idea of a kind of sick joke. He was really into graven images, after all. That was his tabernacle.
The odd channels, the strange web Hollywood produced. Take any actor, like Tom Cruise, DeNiro, any second rate actor who was just able to make it by on the meager salary his passion afforded him, and I could point to a different, finite set of human archetypes embodied in each.
I once said to Leo: “Why the hell would anybody ever finish making a b-rated film. You’d think they’d realize how bad it was and scratch the whole thing.”
He seemed kind of snubbed by this comment. “You’ve got to understand that each one of us feels honored just to be able to work in this industry. From the star actor to the guy who drives the lunch-wagon.”
Hadn’t it been at that moment Bill realized just how dire life really is, that people scramble over one another like insects drowning in a pool for a mere ounce of recognition, happiness and peace.
Then he had felt ashamed of himself, of course, because his natural talents had surely spoiled him and allowed him to pamper himself. The thought of this community of people and their goddamned starving lives living and working together to accomplish something that was even not all that great, but together. There was something desperate in it, yes, but there was also something real, he decided. Yes, something very down to earth and humble.
That embodiment of archetypes, then, of the actor in the hierarchy of Hollywood: one director working on one production catches wind of a young actor in a role similar to the one he is trying to fill. Hmm. Well, yes, then, he will do fine. And invites the young actor to try for his film. The actor gets the part, and their persona is permuted.
There are only certain faces a man can wear. Larger than life Hollywood actors wear at most a handful in their lifetimes. Millions of eyes project upon them their own faces, to wonder what would happen if…
Dialing Leo, I wondered what kinds of eerie coincidences must happen in Hollywood, in the minds of directors, when they realize that another director is working on a similar project at the same time. Great ideas seem to occur independently to about five or six people at a time, as a rule throughout history, and the spoils go to but one.
What does it mean to say that these actors embody different facets of the mass consciousness of a nation, if not the world? From where do these cinematic pastiche emerge in the universe? They are the brainchildren of imagination, and imagination perhaps outpaces light. Imagination bridges the gap somehow between space-like events, and so the roles that we see on the large screen are the time-like emanations of another configuration of our reality, of simultaneity on different axes.
Our reality becomes merely a shattered set of broken projections of objects and images reconfigured and disoriented in another and totally alien universe of alternate physics.
Like a mechanical puzzle box, our waking lives are unlocked and reconfigured into a new shape. Hollywood acts like a receiver of transmissions and beacons from these other worlds.
Leo seemed to have this to say to me:
“Well, I really think you’re way off base about that. They’re just moving pictures. And no, I didn’t have any holographic sculpture made up to send to you on your birthday. Maybe, though, if your theory proves right, then what you are saying is your image has been lifted out of its place in time and sent to you now. If you want to look at it as a window into the past, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It’s like a cosmic hiccup, or an echo of some kind. But what about this: what if it’s you in the past catching a glimpse of yourself in the future. Did you ever have a premonition of yourself at middle age ogling yourself from out of a futuristic living room?”
“No.”
“Well, then I suppose in some system, this one, for instance, there’s a snapshot of the two you’s together, and then that could be sent to a third you, for ever and ever, Amen. Whatever the case, it’s all your mind’s eye anyway. What do you think memories are made up of? Light, after all. Who would have thought that by the end of the 20th century that the living would be largely entertained by the dead?
“And you know, aliens, if they ever made contact, would probably make psychic contact first. Yeah, no joke. Something about the microtubules in the brain being about the right size for quantum resonance, um, faster-than-light effect, EPR phenomenon or something. Read about it in SciAm. Maybe I’ll make a film.”
Dinnertime boasts non-event status around my house. No ceremony really associated with it, not like there used to be. The French have a saying, “He who eats alone is dead.” I can’t say I agree when I prefer to eat alone. Knowing other people are watching makes me uncomfortable when I eat in a way I can only compare to being watched while I go to the bathroom. I sat on the couch eating a chicken breast and white rice, and tried to think of people to call who might know something about this.
I decided to take a shower. Afterwards, I went into the dark bedroom. I went to my desk and picked up the scrap of paper with Jennifer’s number on it. I fondled it for a while, staring out the window. No, not yet. I put it in the drawer and slammed it shut.
I pushed back the mirrored doors, and pulled out an old phonebook from the upper shelf of the closet. I could see the hallway light reflected in the plane of the door. Peripherally, I kept my eye on it. I know it was silly. Just in case.
Every night after dusk, because I wouldn’t only be eating, but reading, or walking around semi-nude after a shower, essentially, with the lights on, I had the option to shift the house into ‘night-mode’. I needed only say the word, and the pigmented windows tinted the glass one way to camouflage. It was a design I borrowed from squids, actually.
I settled back into the couch, toweling my hair, and flipped open the phonebook. It must have been twenty years old at least. I thumbed through. The pages had yellowed at the edges. ‘C’ for Carson, Chen, Cindy, Calaall.
Richard Calaall. Hmm. Now there was a possibility. He was always something of a practical joker. I picked up the phone and held it against my ear. I looked up, startled, having forgotten the hologram was there. I took the opportunity to say, “Lights Maximum”, to make sure my visitor stayed in one place.
Dial tone in my ear, I sat there staring at the number. What were the chances this number would still be good after twenty years?
The paper itself was faded in that way I recalled my parents’ address books being when I was a child: fading seventies pages, neatly handwritten, the discolored photographs of family reunions with the faces faded out.
“Hello, you have reached the Law Offices of Calaall and Whitney. If you know the extension of the party you’d like to — ”
I cut the recording off rather indignantly, pressing the extension for Richard. Well, well, looked as though Richard was doing rather well for himself. His name was now first on the roster.
“Calaall here.”
“Richard. Hey, it’s William Shapely.”
“William? Hey, how are you doing?”
“Fine, and you?”
“Not bad. Look, Bill, I’m waiting on a very important call here. What’s this about? You need some consultation? I can take a number and I’ll call you back. Does this have anything to do with your wife? She’s a real firecracker, isn’t she? What’s her name, ah, Julianna, Juniper — ”
“Jennifer. No, she’s not my wife. Hasn’t been for years. Jesus, how long has it been since we last spoke?”
“Oh, ah, alimony, palimony?”
“No, ah, actually I wanted to ask you if you had sent me a present recently.”
“No. Well, unless maybe you’ve been a client. Let me check with my secretary.”
“I live in California now, Dick.”
“We do consulting out there. Look, I’ve got your number here. I can read it on my screen. Let me give you a call back when I’m less busy.”
I hung up. Most likely, I would never call back.
I frequently got that sense of being primed to walk into myself. I stood at times directly before or behind myself, staring into my own eyes. They struck me as vacant and uncomprehending. I took a step and plunged myself into the figure. Viewed from a mirror, myself superimposed onto myself, I had to move but the slightest to produce a most distorted interference pattern. The mirage was a version of myself oddly blurred and disfigured.
I was out at the office all day on Wednesday. When I got back, it was very late. I was anxious to get back inside and study the hologram. I put my key in the lock. I could see in through the front of the glass enclosure of the hallway. The LED’s, which lit the house, gradually came on each evening with dusk, so by now they were fairly blazing.
I could see through the margin between the door and the wall, warping the interior of my home. A strange index of refraction ruled there: if you closed one eye and looked edge-on into the chiseled glass, you saw a greenish, aqua continuum of holographic phantasmagoria.
What I saw immediately made me drop my hand from the lock. A figure escorted by an entourage of spectral after-images, walked into the darkness of the far hallway door, his back to me, and vanished.
I backed away from the door a little, looked down at my keys, then down over the lights of the city, where a thick layer of orange haze hovered.
There was an intruder in my house. However, if this were the case, then I would have been notified immediately. It was a part of the programming of the security systems, the design of which I oversaw personally.
So as far as I knew, there was no one in my house.
Cautiously, I pushed my key back into the door and felt it click softly, then eased it open and slipped inside.
The hologram was right where I left it, standing stock-still. I grabbed a fire poker and walked through every room of the house, opening up closets, behind doors. Nothing. No one was there.
Unless somehow the intruder was able to slip soundlessly from one room to another as I walked through, there could be no mistake. I made a second round just in case. Besides, I told the house to run a security scan, and it confirmed that I was the only one there. I had been hallucinating after all. The omnipresence of the hologram made me exceptionally paranoid.
I told the house to go into night-mode, then got a bottle of mineral water out of the fridge and sat down at the counter. There were mirrors everywhere. I kept half-expecting to look into one and see another face besides my own, perhaps just behind my own.
But it never happened. No, things like that only happen when you’re fumbling with your keys and you lose track of yourself for a moment. You can’t anticipate that sort of thing, and basically the only reason you’re thinking about the fact that it’s synchronistic is because it happened by coincidence.
Like the time recently I got a hotel room and it just happened to be the year I was born. The only reason I ended up thinking about it was because it was my year of birth. If it hadn’t been, if it had just been another hotel room, then I wouldn’t have given it any thought.
It used to really puzzle me, the way phantasms, strange coincidences and synchronicities would always rear their ugly heads when you least expected them, but then again, that is part of their definition, isn’t it?
In a way, it’s like being stuck with a syringe. That’s not pain, exactly, because you can prepare yourself for it. You can learn to manage it. Now, cutting your finger while preparing dinner, that is painful — sudden, unexpected. But you can get used to being cut, too.
It is a symptom of the culture that we live in that we do not prepare ourselves to negotiate these inevitable instances of pain and terror, and that leads us to over react when they do crop up, totally unanticipated because we are not trained to anticipate them.
The same goes for fear. I gulped down some water. I was jumpy because I hadn’t trained myself to negotiate the sudden shock of an intruder, or ever considered what to do if I saw one.
Or a ghost. Well, who can honestly say they would be prepared for something like that? Maybe Hamlet, or Freud, or Carl Jung would have invested enough time thinking about the dead to handle that kind of situation. They would have been brave enough. Not me. I haven’t put any thought into how to deal with things of that nature.
A man alone in a house: what thoughts he will have. For instance, at that particular moment I pictured myself sitting at the counter, drinking my water, and from out of the side room, quietly, a man crept up behind me, too quickly for me to register his advance in the beveled glass. He slid his hands around my throat, and slit it open, blood squirting under high pressure all over the mirrored surfaces, all over the white walls, embedded with smart circuitry that anticipated my needs.
Or how about this one: I see myself at the counter, but I am slouched over. My face is rotting away, gangrenous and black, my eyes sunken, suppurated yolks. I’m clutching the same plastic bottle I am now. I have been dead for a while. No one has found me.
I had the thought, but it did not happen.
It never happened, did it? And even if it would, in the end, no matter how sublime the frisson, no matter how subtly the phenomenon crept up on me, like the phantom intruder drifting down the hallway splayed out in the total internal reflection of the glass of the front door, that break with sacrosanct silence was always kind of gauche in a way, kind of a cheap thrill as compared to the endless hours of waiting for something to crack out of the fabric of the every day.
For the silence was just that, wasn’t it: sacrosanct, or perhaps not. I couldn’t decide.
I turned around to view the hologram. Nothing had changed. Except that now a new thought tunneled its way into my head. Perhaps this image of myself was not so old that I had thought it initially.
Moving closer, I studied the face. Could it be that this was a more recent image than I had originally thought? Had my fear of aging run away with me, made me see myself as older in relation to the hologram than I truly was? While this was a form of self-flattery that made me feel a good deal better about my physical appearance, it called something else into question.
I went to my bedroom and changed clothes, something that approximated those worn by the figure. I went to the mirror and combed my hair differently in the style of the image.
Now we looked similar, the hologram and I. Now I seemed more youthful in my mind’s eye, more like the youth I had previously projected onto the hologram.
Looking in the mirror, though, I wondered. Who was this new man staring back at me from the glass?
What if it’s you in the past catching a glimpse of yourself in the future, Leo had said.
From out of where had this new man come?
“Hey, Bill. What’s new? Sorry, making dinner here for the kids.”
“How’s the divorce got you?”
“Not bad. I like being a single parent. It’s got its ups and downs. It costs a lot, but, well, she pays alimony. Hey, kids, get in here.”
I could hear him clattering pans and dishes, scraping food out of saucepans. I could picture the shining ladles and other utensils. That was just the way the man had always functioned: everything had to be in its place.
“Yeah, I miss her. Desert gets kind of lonely some nights.” He drifted a little. “Well, we find the heart to go on, you know.”
“Uh-huh. Say, did you send me a package recently.”
“No, why?”
“Nevermind. Just curious.”
The hologram did not speak its secrets. I set up a spotlight above it so I could sit contemplatively in darkness. At times, upon walking into the room I got the sense that I was about to assume the very stance of the figure. Perhaps it was not an image taken from my past. Perhaps it was from my future, a snapshot sent backwards in time. It could be from a killer, captured seconds before my murder.
A premonition. I firmly believe in the possibility. Symbols pulled out of the ether of the subconscious, future images. How was the hologram any different?
I remember how it was that last Christmas Eve, or so it turned out to be. Instead of going to Church, I stayed at home with the dog. I opened up the front door to let the cold air in and the smell of fires burning, and let him run free, as the animals should be on Christmas Eve. Supposedly, they speak.
I watched the luminaries flicker through the window and out the open front door, watched him running intrepidly away, pushing his nose eagerly into dirt. I saw the white lights lining the window and the tree. I poured myself an Eggnog and rummaged through the presents.
I hadn’t known that was the last Christmas I would spend with my wife in my home, that she would leave me for another man.
I came home one day to the two of them sitting in the dining room. She told me very succinctly that she wanted a divorce and that she was in love with Tom, her boss. She wanted the house.
When I asked, rather stunned, for an explanation, she simply said we had grown apart. I wasn’t making enough money to suit her needs, but I could damn well still pay alimony. For whatever reason, I felt no shame, no humiliation, no rage, and no tears came.
I felt only shock, and a kind of empty coldness that has clung to my insides ever since.
Ah, yes, now the memory returned, flooded my senses like catching the scent of her perfume on the air, stirring ancient feelings. I remembered her walking toward me over the twilight field, the look of love on her face, of utter love. Her long, dark, wavy hair, the slight parting of her lips, arms and hands reaching out to hold me, to embrace me in the twilight of an autumn afternoon.
We were on a hill. I remembered it was autumn. She threaded her arms around my neck and it felt like being knighted or crowned, loved.
But I had already called UPS and they had told me the sender specifically requested they not disclose any identities. I felt melancholy at the sudden remembrance stirred by the mirage of the hologram. I rubbed the scrap of paper with her number between his fingers, then dropped it to the table. I dropped my head into my hands. How could I call?
Then I felt nothing but anger.
Angry at myself for having forgotten that moment with Jennifer, and angry at the simpleton standing across the room. The tranquil stare. I felt like yelling at it to speak, but it would not speak, so real sometimes it seemed as though it might at any second erupt into animation.
“But you won’t? Will you!” It just sat there, like a past memory, or a future memory, I didn’t know. Perfect, immutable, and I felt bitterness, and disdain for this thing that could outlast my memories, and even my love, for I had nothing left to give.
This was a specter sent to haunt and torture me. I felt a hatred for this thing because he didn’t realize what he was bound to lose, the things he would have to let go, and the despair as I remembered losing her, her rejection, and the tears.
Of course, I had once been in love, but that was ancient history by now. Once perhaps I thought of the past as a succession of events, with an external existence out there somewhere. Now, it was as if blackness swallowed up each passing moment. Life unfolded on a great sheet. Once gone, the experience, or person, was gone forever.
The hologram on the other side of the room begged to differ. He stood in silent, mocking defiance of this idea.
So I wept, now as then, picturing her in my mind, the bestowment of her gift, her loving gaze, as if I were again there. There was something alive after all, something immutable about my feelings. I still had it in me to weep, even after all the intervening years, my emotions like a specter forever frozen, preserved, these traces of my love. There was some hope to be found in that thought.
A cold hand touched me inside. The thought that somewhere in time this image had a place, as if taken from a photograph, this single image out of place, stolen from my past and delivered here to me as a message and as an obscene sign.
A gift from the past, or maybe from the future: the equivalence of myself at that long-ago moment and this ghost struck me, the feelings it reawakened, suggested the immutability of the spirit of that moment, so that the love embodied in that image was erased not by time-erosion, by forgetfulness, by entropy, but by the very permanence of the image before him, by its very refusal to die.
It filled him with a coldness, a terror, and a sorrow, a sense of continuum, and vertigo, that drove him instantly to smash the hologram, without second-thought, like an automaton, expressionless, eyes bulging under the weight of the continuum, and then with animal fury.
The shards crashing to the floor sounded like shattering crystals tinkling, or someone running her hands down piano keys — a piano slur sloshing backwards and forwards on a warped cassette ribbon — the sound of broken dreams.
But with every blow, a new, smaller, dimmer image was born, because you cannot destroy a hologram that way.
The image is contained in every part, so that he was surrounded by an infinite diminished array of himself, smashing and smashing again, but still the image would not speak.
-Summer, 2001
