The Ghostwriter

My first instinct, to be honest, is always to break them. When Evan Chen and his latest holographic man appear near the entrance of the fruit aisle of Vegetale Market, my hand twitches on my tablet, my desire itching to the surface. I repress the sensation, always keeping my composure. Evan waves at me, twenty feet away. The grocery store is unusually packed for a Saturday night in Pacific Heights. Costumed children run in front of their parents, who are carrying green baskets full of last-minute organic Halloween candy. With each step, Evan’s petite frame keeps getting pushed back as though he is swimming against a current of zombies, clowns, presidents, and aliens. Finally, he gets close enough to me that I can observe his holographic man clearly, uninterrupted. In leather boots caked with mud, the holographic man clomps toward me and the banana rack. He releases patches of fake, glowing, translucent dirt with each step as though he has just emerged out of a grave, or rather, dug himself out of one. He reminds me of a skeleton. I can see his collarbones and ribs protruding from under his nearly-translucent skin, exposed by a loose collared shirt missing several buttons. He has a long, thin beard. He can’t be older than twenty-five, at least fifteen years younger than Evan and I.

“Good casting, great wardrobe,” I tell Evan.

Evan stands a good ten feet back, projecting the hologram from his belt buckle. With his hands resting on his hips and his elbows back behind him, he juts his crotch out toward me as though trying to say, check out my big dick energy. He hasn’t changed since we met at USC almost twenty years ago. Sometimes I think he followed me to the Bay when I first moved here after college. He stands shorter than the hologram by about a foot. His greasy salt and pepper hair sticks to his forehead.

To get a better look and get the hair out of my eyes, I put my long dark hair into a low ponytail. I inspect the hologram more closely. His thumbs remain hooked around the straps of a bag, which looks more like a large potato sack with straps than a backpack. The large metallic pans tied to his sack clang as he finally drops the bag at my feet.

“Wow,” I say. “Nice sound engineering.”

“Do you want to hear it again?” Evan asks and, before I can answer, he presses a button on his watch so that the hologram picks up the sack again and drops it down.

My instinct is always, how can I fool this machine?

Logically, I know that Evan is likely transmitting the sound from a device he’s wearing, his belt or watch, but the way the sound hits my ear enables my mind to play a trick on me and make my body believe that the sound is coming directly from the image right in front of me. I reach down to touch the sack, and my hand goes straight through it.

Sweat stains rim the shoulders of the hologram’s collarless, long-sleeved shirt, which remind me of long underwear. The man’s shirt is so abused it is difficult to tell what the original color had been. He wipes his face with a kerchief from his jeans pocket, the legacy brand Cohn’s broadly displayed.

A few customers pause to watch, and Evan smiles from ear to ear. An elderly customer tries to walk in front of him to grab some local grapes, and Evan blocks him, grabbing a bunch for him so that the projection of the hologram isn’t disrupted. In doing so, Evan sets off one of my sensors, and my holographic actor impersonating Cesar Chavez appears, flickering, projected from lights running along the ceiling of the grocery store. He was one of my first and few designs to go state-wide;