Medusa Frequency

by Russell Hoban

  To Gundel

  ZIP … POW … LOVES ME

  George Herriman, ‘Krazy Kat’

  Same old story, same old song;

  it goes all right till it goes all wrong.

  Will Jennings, ‘Same Old Story (Same Old Song)’

  Contents

  1 Art is a Tough Business

  2 First Appearance of the Kraken

  3 The Vermeer Girl

  4 Hermes Soundways

  5 The Head of Orpheus Begins Its Story

  6 We’re not Talking about a Bloke with Winged Sandals

  7 Nnngghh, Zurff, Kruljjj

  8 Tower Hill and the Cheshire Cheese

  9 The Thinking Man’s Cabbage

  10 All Hallows by the Tower

  11 The Big Rain

  12 In the Morning

  13 The Hague

  14 No Balls

  15 Life after Death?

  16 Blvgsvo

  17 Where Do We Go from Here?

  18 Louisa, not Luise

  19 Still Three O’Clock in the Morning

  20 The Visit

  21 The Seeker from Nexo Vollma

  22 Questions

  23 I Mention This

  24 Not Rubbish

  25 Longer than the Moment

  26 Roughage

  27 To Borrow the World

  28 No More Klage

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  1 Art is a Tough Business

  I was shocked but I can’t honestly say I was surprised when Istvan Fallok told me about Gösta Kraken. It could have been any one of us; art is a tough business.

  I’m going to tell about what happened last November and early December. Whether it’ll be of any use to anybody I don’t know but I’ve been getting it all down on paper as it happened so here it is, beginning with the night when the flyer came through the letterbox.

  2 First Appearance of the Kraken

  Nnvsnu Tsrungh, said the green letters on the monitor screen of my Apple II computer that rainy night in November. This screen isn’t like a piece of paper; the words come out of a green dancing and the excitation of phosphors. I’m the one who makes the words appear but I don’t always know who or what is speaking.

  Who’s there? I said letter by letter on the screen.

  No answer.

  Speak up, I said. What are you afraid of?

  NNVSNU TSRUNGH, it said.

  You’re afraid that you exist.

  NNVSNU NNGH.

  You don’t want to exist.

  NNVSNU RRNDU TS’IRNH TS’IRNH TS’IRNH NNGRH.

  An existence such as yours is too dreadful to be thought of. Is this the Kraken speaking?

  DON’T THINK OF ME. IF YOU THINK OF ME I MAY BE REAL. LET ME NOT BE REAL.

  What was I to say to it? The reality of the Kraken isn’t up to me, I’m not the final authority on such things. With its first words this creature was already as real to me as anything else; it was more real than the VAT figures that had appeared on this same screen the day before. The Customs and Excise Office isn’t real to me in any way that really matters, it isn’t there at three o’clock in the morning when the words come out of the green dancing and the singing comes from thousands of miles away.

  No, what passes for reality seems to me mostly a load of old rubbish invented by not very inventive minds. The reality that interests me is strange and flickering and haunting. For example:

  987 A SUPERB FIGURE OF A FISHERGIRL WITH A GIANT SQUID, the girl reclining with a contented expression as she embraces the huge beast, whose skin is stippled, giving a mottled effect, its eyes inlaid in pearl with dark pupils, the group forming a long flat composition, the details are finely carved and the slightly worn ivory has a remarkable colour and patina, early 19th century. Ex F. Meinertzhagen collection. This is a magnificent Netsuke of a smooth compact form, ideal for its use.

  There’s a drawing of it in the book as well: the fishergirl entranced as with her left hand she grips the mantle of the squid whose eyes look up at her. She speaks to me, this fishergirl, and not simply as herself. Letter by letter words appear on the monitor screen:

  Always in the dream are

  the sea and the dream of the sea.

  In the dream I am the fishergirl in

  the twining embrace of the giant squid,

  its dark eyes are on me as

  it penetrates and inseminates me.

  The giant squid has been dreaming of me age-long,

  rising in the black night,

  rising in the moony ocean night and never, never finding,

  never until now finding

  the mystery of me so long dreamt of, so long lusted after.

  Eurydice, whispers the long sea, Eurydice, Eurydice, and the giant squid is frightened by the beauty of me, it trembles as it holds me in its twined embrace.

  At three o’clock in the morning Eurydice is bound to come into it. After all, why did I sit here like a telegrapher at a lost outpost if not to receive messages from everywhere about the lost Eurydice who was never mine to begin with but whom I lamented and sought continually both professionally and amateurishly. This is not a digression. Where I am at three o’clock in the morning – and by now every hour is three o’clock in the morning – there are no digressions, it’s all one thing.

  LET ME NOT BE REAL, the Kraken said again.

  There was nothing I could do about that and I didn’t know what to say so I said nothing.

  YOU DON’T TELL ME THAT I’M NOT REAL.

  Again I didn’t say anything.

  THEN I AM REAL. I HAVE BEEN THOUGHT OF TOO MANY TIMES UNTIL THERE HAS COME TO BE SUCH A THING AS I, THE KRAKEN, LIVING WHERE I LIVE AND PERCIPIENT ALWAYS.

  Tell me about your beginning.

  IN THE BEGINNING OF ALL THINGS WAS MY BEGINNING, IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE TERROR.

  Whose was the terror?

  THE TERROR WAS ITSELF AND THE TERROR WAS OF ITSELF. THERE WAS NOTHING ELSE, THERE WAS NO ONE TO HOLD THE TERROR, THERE WAS ONLY THE TERROR.

  Terror of what?

  TERROR OF WHAT MIGHT BE, OF UNIVERSES AND WORLDS THAT MIGHT BE, AND THE ILLUSION OF TIME.

  What came then?

  FROM THE TERROR CAME THE AWARENESS OF IT. FROM THE TERROR CAME A TREMBLING AND A WRINKLING OF THE SILENCE THAT LISTENED.

  Nothing else? No one to listen with the silence?

  NO ONE TO LISTEN, NO ONE TO HOLD THE TERROR; ONLY THE ELECTRIC SILENCE THAT SHOOK AND WRINKLED AS IT BECAME YOUR MIND.

  My mind holding the terror, my mind alone.

  YOUR MIND HOLDING THE TERROR BUT IT WAS TOO MUCH FOR YOU TO HOLD ALONE. YOU THOUGHT OF ME AND YOU MADE ME HOLD THE TERROR THAT YOU COULD NOT HOLD. YOU THINK OF ME STILL, YOU THINK OF ME NOW.

  I have always thought of you, have always had you in mind, have always heard the circles of your terror widening in the deeps. I think of you as the great cephalopod, ancient of the deeps, great thinking head in the blackness of the ultimate deep. I think of you as the Kraken. Even little children have an idea of you, they draw a great head with all the limbs growing out of it.

  I AM THE KRAKEN, ANCIENT OF THE DEEPS, MONSTROUS CEPHALOPOD, GREAT HEAD AT THE CENTRE OF MY MILES OF WRITHING TENTACLES IN THE BLACKNESS OF THE ULTIMATE DEEP; THE KRAKEN, MY DARK MIND WILD WITH THE TERROR OF ITSELF, SHUDDERING, WRITHING, AFRAID TO SLEEP, AFRAID TO DREAM BUT SLEEPING AGE-LONG AND DREAMING OF IMMENSITIES, OF BURSTINGS AND TRANSITIONS AND UNIMAGINABLE STATES OF BEING, DREAMING A UNIVERSE IN WHICH THERE IS SUCH A THING AS THE KRAKEN, DREAMING THAT I AM THE KRAKEN.

  Will you show yourself to me?

  I WILL SHOW MYSELF TO YOU IN SEVERAL WAYS AND WITH SEVERAL FACES.

  Have you so many faces?

  The Kr
aken said no more that night. But Eurydice has said in those three-o’clock-in-the-morning dancing green phosphors:

  Of me the terror, I squatted and gave birth:

  born of me the Kraken in its terror

  at the bottom of the sea. Born of me

  its terror of Eurydice.

  3 The Vermeer Girl

  My name is Herman Orff. At parties when people ask me what I do I say I’m a novelist and then they say, ‘Oh, should I have heard of you?’ and I say, ‘I think not.’ Then we both find somebody else to talk to.

  My first novel, Slope of Hell (Mumchance Press, 1977), sold 1,731 copies before being remaindered. The Times found the writing ‘a little slippery’; the Guardian noted that the story was ‘a downhill sort of thing’. My second one, World of Shadows (Reedham & Weap, 1978), sold 1,247 copies before the publisher went into receivership. What I do for a living is write comics. I came to that via an advertising agency called Slithe & Tovey where I used to write copy for Orpheus Men’s Toiletries, Hermes Foot Powder, Pluto Drain Magic, and several non-classical accounts. When we lost Hermes I was sacked and so was Sol Mazzaroth the account executive. Soon after that he became Editor in Chief of Classic Comics and that was the beginning of my freelance comic career. Classic Comics became for Sol Mazzaroth the earthen ramp by which he reached higher things, namely his own hardback imprint, the Avernus Press, where he published such rising talents as Boumboume Letunga, Hermione Thrust, and Juan de Fulmé. It was understood between us that my non-comic writing was not quite the thing for the Avernus list; I hewed wood and drew water at Classic Comics but I led my muse into insolvency elsewhere.

  Working for Classic Comics wasn’t too bad; it wasn’t all that different from Slithe & Tovey: it was one of many bright and tastefully decorated places in London where people can neither speak nor write English and they say concept when they mean idea. The building was a posh little Bauhaus-style thing in High Holborn with a genuine Calder and a pseudo-Rothko in the waiting-room. Sol Mazzaroth had a big office full of layouts and proofs pinned up on corkboard and a lightbox littered with transparencies. It was better than Slithe & Tovey because I only had to be there when Sol wanted to talk to me about the work or when I delivered the finished adaptation of Treasure Island or Ivanhoe or whatever. After a few years of it I tended to see all speech in balloons and hear all sounds in expressionistic capital letters but that seemed a small price to pay for having the hours of my days under my own control.

  Not having done terribly well with my first two novels I thought I might be third time lucky and I tried very hard to write another one but nothing came. Every afternoon I worked on my comics and every morning and night I tried to get a novel started. I could feel that there was life in my head, there were all sorts of things going on in it but nothing that could be made to act like a story for two or three hundred pages. Eight years had passed since I’d finished World of Shadows and so far page one of the next novel hadn’t turned up. I thought of giving up writing but I didn’t know how to do without that rush of panic and well-being that comes when I sit down at the word machine.

  The night is my best time. At my lost outpost in Fulham I listen to my Drake R7 shortwave receiver while I work; it’s a proper three-o-clock-in-the-morning radio, a black longdistance machine with two blue illuminated windows and a frequency counter with luminous red numbers. By now the two blue windows have gone dark and only the red numbers light up. As my thoughts appear letter by letter on the screen the voices come in from All India Radio or Radio Moscow or the Voice of Greece or Rias in Berlin or whoever’s transmitting the music I crave at the time. I seldom listen to English broadcasts; I don’t want to know what the words mean – I just want to hear those voices coming from far away in the night, coming round the curving ionosphere and the great globe-encircling miles, night miles, ocean miles where the deep fish glide in the deep, deep dark and the Kraken waits in the uttermost deep with its dark mind wild with the terror of itself and of Eurydice.

  I tape a lot of the music that comes in; I seldom get a really clean recording of Bismillah Khan or Tatiana Petrova or whoever it might be but I like to hear the crackling, the twittering and tweetling and whispering, the sudden storms and surges of that particular transmission as it comes to me in the night. Far, far away in the darkness are live human beings whose breathing can be heard as they speak and they’re looking at their illuminated dials as I look at mine at this end of the thousands of great globe-encircling miles, ocean miles in the night, the heave and swell and the deep fish gliding in the dark. And always on the night air sweet women singing in all the tongues of humankind, singing to the accompaniment of strange instruments, strange rhythms in places unseen but existing at this very moment, perhaps with red dust rising on the plains or monsoon rains beating down or snow on mountain peaks impassable. And while I hear those sweet voices singing words that I cannot understand I watch my thoughts appear letter by letter in the green dancing of the phosphors on the monitor screen.

  My desk is a clutter of stones written upon and not; seashells, acorns and oak leaves, china mermaids from long-gone aquaria, postcards of medieval carven lions, clockwork frogs and photographs of distant moments. It’s a good desk, there’s a lot of action even when I’m not there. Propped up amongst the stones and clutter are two books open at colour plates of Vermeer’s Head of a Young Girl; there are also a postcard of it stuck on the edge of the monitor screen and a large print over the fireplace. Night and day in all weathers she looks out at me from her hereness and her goneness. Even the ageing of the painting seems organic to it; one can see in the reproductions how the reticulation of fine cracks in the paint follows lovingly from light into shadow the curve of her cheek, the softness of her mouth, the glisten of her eyes, the fineness of brow and nose, the delicacy of her chin.

  Impossible to know what her look might have been a response to; presumably Vermeer sat down at the easel and said something like, ‘Turn your body to the side but turn your face to me. No, back a little – like that. Hold it like that.’ And she’d held it like that, her face full of questioning and uncertainty. Was there also fear? Fear of what? What had she to fear from him? Was the giant squid in her thoughts or in her dreams? What was her name? Maybe it will come to me, the story of what happened between them. Here it comes, no research -straight story:

  THE PAINTING OF HEAD OF A YOUNG GIRL

  Vermeer when he painted this picture was forty-five. He’d been married for a quarter of a century and had seven children when there sat down in front of him this girl of seventeen. Her name was Ursula; they called her Ursel, Oor-zl. When you say her name it isn’t like saying Miranda for example; it’s a simpler utterance.

  Ursel, he used to say in his mind as she went her ways about the house. She was a servant; he paid her money and she lived in his house, slept under his roof. He imagined her lying in the darkness at the top of the house; he imagined the smell of her warmth and the sound of her breathing in the darkness.

  When he said, ‘Will you sit for me, Ursel?’ she said, ‘Yes, Mynheer.’ There was no question of getting her to take her clothes off, he wanted her nakedness so much that he couldn’t ask for it, he had to put more clothes on her. ‘Try this,’ he said, handing her the blue and gold scarf. He stood watching as she wound it round her head. ‘Yes,’ he said, hearing the sound of her breathing in the darkness, ‘that’s good. Now turn and look at me the way you did before. Like that. Hold it like that.’

  She sat that day and the next and the next while he painted. Looked at her and painted. The look on her face is her answer to his look. That was all that happened.

  After writing the above I looked at the back of the postcard of the painting and noted that Vermeer only lived to be forty-three.

  I went down to the kitchen and made myself a sardine sandwich. While I ate it I leafed through Personal Computer World looking at the various ads for hardware and software. There were so many software packages for spreadsheets and databases and comp
uter adventure games, why couldn’t there be one called Third Novel?

  On my way back to my desk I noticed something lying on the floor by the front door where I always find cards and notices from radio cars and estate agents, carpet cleaners, palmists, and Chinese takeaways. This one was typed on yellow paper, the same kind I use:

  ART TROUBLE?

  COMPOSERS, WRITERS, FILM-MAKERS –

  STUCK? NOTHING HAPPENING? NO IDEAS?

  WHY NOT

  HEAD FOR IT?

  Write orph one

  HERMES

  Write orph one? There were a Soho address and telephone number. I sat down at my desk, put a stone from Paxos on the HERMES flyer, and looked at the Vermeer girl in the postcard, the two books, and the print over the fireplace. The look on her face always made me think of Luise von Himmelbett who lived with me for two years and left me nine years ago. There’s a photograph of an olive tree among the stones on my desk; when Luise left she wrote on the back of it:

  I trusted you with the idea of me

  and you lost it.

  4 Hermes Soundways

  Later that Monday when I’d had some sleep and the day was open for business I looked out of the window and saw that it was grey and glistening and rainy. Good, I thought; more things happen when it’s grey and glistening and rainy.

  When I rang the HERMES number a breathy female voice, shadowy and warm, said, ‘Hermes Soundways’. In the background there was music, veiled and flickering but familiar.

  ‘Hermes Soundways,’ I said as I remembered. Hermes Soundways was Istvan Fallok, he’d been Luise von Himmelbett’s lover before me. Back then Luise was working at the Netherworld Bookshop in Kensington Church Street around the corner from Slithe & Tovey; I went in there for a classical dictionary and that was the first time I saw her.

  She was twenty-seven then, taller than I, with the sort of old-fashioned beauty one sees in antique dolls; she had a long shining plait of blonde hair, a lovely voice, a very short skirt, and wonderful legs. She sold me The Oxford Classical Dictionary as well as eight other books of which the last was Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition; I still haven’t read it and I don’t ever expect to but I’d have bought whatever she showed me. When I told her I was going to be writing copy for Orpheus and Hermes she said that she knew a composer who was obsessed with those particular themes and that’s how I came to meet Istvan Fallok.