Gibson / Kadrey Hologram Fragments

that summer Parker had trouble sleeping.

three in the morning.
Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when you pour the boiling water. Morning’s recorded dream, fading: through other eyes, dark plume of a Cuban freighter—fading with the horizon it navigates across the mind’s gray screen.

Let yesterday arrange itself around you in flat schematic images. What you said—what she said—watching her pack—dialing the cab. However you shuffle them they form the same printed circuit, hieroglyphs converging on a central component; you, standing in the rain, screaming at the cabby.

In the bedroom, Parker prods the brushed-aluminum face of his Sendai Sleep-Master. Its pilot light flickers, then lapses into darkness. Coffee in hand, he crosses the carpet to the closet she emptied the day before. The flashlight’s beam probes the bare shelves for evidence of love, finding a broken leather sandal strap, an ASP cassette, and a postcard. The postcard is a white light reflection hologram of a rose.
At the kitchen sink, he feeds the sandal strap to the disposal unit. Sluggish in the brown-out, it complains, but swallows and digests. Holding it carefully between thumb and forefinger, he lowers the hologram toward the hidden rotating jaws. The unit emits a thin scream as steel teeth slash laminated plastic and the rose is shredded into a thousand fragments.
Later he sits on the unmade bed, smoking. Her cassette is in the deck ready for playback. Some women’s tapes disorient him, but he doubts this is the reason he now hesitates to start the machine.

the first three quarters of the cassette have been erased; you punch yourself fast-forward through a static haze of wiped tape, where taste and scent blur into a single channel. The audio input is white sound—the no-sound of the first dark sea. . . . (Prolonged input from wiped tape can induce hypnagogic hallucination.)

Parker lies in darkness, recalling the thousand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram has this quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing a whole he’ll never know—stolen credit cards—a burned-out suburb—planetary conjunctions of a stranger—a tank burning on a highway—a flat packet of drugs—a switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain.

She had helped him get his papers, found him his first job in ASP. Was that their history? No, history was the black face of the delta-inducer, the empty closet, and the unmade bed. History was his loathing for the perfect body he woke in if the juice dropped, his fury at the pedal-cab driver, and her refusal to look back through the contaminated rain.

Even so, without the booze to wash the pills down, Preston knows he would never get to sleep.

Within a half hour it becomes clear that the pills are not working. The blinking cursors on a dozen computer terminals are about to drive him crazy. Preston takes two more pills and gulps them down with vodka from a plastic cup. He goes to the bedroom to get his coat but pauses to close the door of his wife's empty closet.


Four A.M., Berlin time. Outside the computer bunker a metallic-smelling fog drifts through the city. Preston needs a drink. Six pills to the wind, and he isn't even drowsy yet. The beam of his flashlight plays over the unlit ruins. Each day the Army busies itself clearing the street, pushing pulverized buildings back onto the blasted foundations from which they have fallen.

Preston moves the beam of his flashlight over the empty buildings, hoping for some romantic sense of connection with the ruins, as if among the shattered stones might lie the antidote to all his unnamed fears. He finds a pair of sunglasses, some sheets of scorched piano music, and the acid fog.
It has only been a few days since she left, but already he has forgotten her face, what he said to her, what she said to him. She is gone; that is the only truth. He watched her cross the tarmac; watched her board the military transport for New York.

When she was walking up the boarding ramp to the plane and Preston was standing on the other side of a barbed-wire fence, he screamed out her name. Just once. Everybody on the airstrip turned to stare at him. Preston hurried back to his bunker and got drunk. Later, when he was sober, he discovered gashes on his hands where he had gripped the barbed wire.

He takes two more hits of speed. From his seat at the console, Preston can see the unmade bed across the hall. He has not slept in the bed since his wife left. He has not slept at all. He is, in fact, afraid of the room. The contours of the rumpled sheets, the stark geometry of the empty closet imply an end a thousand times more terrifying than all the rubble overhead.

Taped to the side of the slave drive is a wallet-size hologram of Preston's wife. He rips the rectangle of plastic from the drive and holds his lighter to it. In the wedge of flame the hologram melts, his wife's face twisting, turning in on itself, liquefying, and finally fading completely as the hologram drips away.

His wife's voice, thin and shot through with static, crackles out of a tiny speaker over his console.
Her conversation is nothing; it is ordinary. She is speaking with a friend whose name Preston remembers as being something like Judy or Julie. He fast-forwards the tape. The conversation is the same. The mundane life of the city. The price of eggs, the refugees trom Europe who crowd the subways, a day on the beach at Coney Island. Preston listens for his name, but no one mentions him. He plays the whole thing through again before shutting down the override. Something burns in Preston's throat. A sudden wave of drowsiness engulfs him, but it's too late. He does not want the pills to work. Preston stumbles to his dresser, puHs out a bottle of amphetamines, downs a handful.

When he is alone, Preston goes through his papers, emptying his desk and collecting reams of printouts. Spreading the papers around himself, he sits on the floor and reads, reconstructing his past with hard data. He keeps lists - things like his mother's maiden name, computers he has owned, and the color of his first car - which he tapes to the walls of the bunker. When he is working and can't concentrate, the lists form a sort of mantra for him: Boyle, IBM, NEC, red Riviera, and Nina's eyes.

There are terrifying mathematical possibilities in the dimensions of empty closets and vacant dresser drawers. The sheets of an unmade bed reveal clues to a whole landscape of conflict; the crease in a blanket, the trajectory of shadows on a pillow imply the flow of armies in the shapes left by two bodies moving together.

Turning to the pilot, Preston almost tells her he loves her, but he knows that is not true. He loves what she might have been, what she could have been, under different circumstances. But none of that matters now. Preston thinks of unmade beds and empty closets. The foolish icons of love. It occurs to Preston vaguely, for the first time, that he, too, might be a victim. He thinks of this and can almost smell his wife's body but they are all burned away before he can recall her face.