Medusa Frequency

by Russell Hoban

  ‘Are you talking to Persephone?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. She’s been telling me about the underworld; it isn’t what people think it is, it isn’t just a place for the dead. What we call world is only that little bit of each moment that we know about - underworld is everything else that we don’t know but we need it. Underworld is like the good darkness where the olive tree has its roots. Did you know that?’

  ‘I suppose I did.’

  ‘But what if it’s a bad darkness? What if it’s a darkness in which people tell lies and are deceitful? How does one live then, Herman?’

  ‘What are you getting at?’ But I knew.

  ‘You know very well what I’m getting at. I was looking in your writing folder for stamps and I found a letter.’

  ‘Can you say something about the olive tree?’ said Fallok.

  ‘Persephone lives in it,’ I said.

  Paper came out of the printer in perfect silence like a mystic arm from the water. Fallok studied it.

  ‘Have you got your reading?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I’ve got it.’ He was busy with the Fairlight while the Hermes that was not foot powder danced in the electronic twilight not as a picture in the mind but as a mode of event, a shift in the relativities of the moment, a new disposition of probabilities. The music that drifted through the dusk and the little coloured lights seemed a way through the olive grove to the tree that stood open as if a naked woman or a goddess had parted the wrinkled greenish-grey bark with her hands and stepped out into the greenlit shade.

  I turned to the Vermeer girl on the corkboard. The look on her face was a look that made no attempt to avert anything. The music in my headphones, while still moving forward, seemed never to depart; other shapes configured themselves to it in a moire that shimmered in my head like a watered silk of sound.

  ‘OK,’ said Fallok. ‘Here it comes.’ He pushed a button. The dusk poured itself into darkness, the darkness inside the tree, the dark entrance. I saw into the darkness, saw down into the earth where all around me, as if the dark were silvered like a mirror, I saw a face, a face not mine, a face not clear but almost recognizable, with a speaking mouth saying words almost intelligible.

  ‘Persephone?’ I said, dropping, dropping, faster and faster through the darkness, down, down into the blackness at the bottom of the sea. The blackness thickened crushingly, became millstones of blackness grinding my brain. The eyes of the Vermeer girl, of Luise, of Melanie Falsepercy dilated enormously and disappeared into the vast pulpy head that shuddered for ever in the chill of the ultimate deep.

  Blackness, blackness, black water pressing down on me for ever, all the sunlight, all the daylight gone for ever into ancient night. The tentacles convulsed in vast and writhing tremors; widening in clangorous circles came the waves of terror spreading from the brute bell of the first great terror of Creation. Ah, that the possible should burst out of the blackness! That there should be no rest, no ease, no comfort! That there should be life and world and that all, all, should return to the blackness, even the sun itself gone cold and dead and shrunken back to blackness. Drowning, I gasped and shuddered in the moment that would not depart, ascending through black, blue-black, deep blue, blue-green, deep green, sunlit green. With me rose the great head of the Kraken, terror in its eyes. We broke the surface, there was sunlight hot on my face, dancing in a million sunpoints on the rocking ocean, dazzling in my eyes.

  Rolling in the rocking sea, green-slimed and barnacled, the great head filled my vision. It was a human head, rotting and eyeless. It was enormous, a floating island over which seabirds wheeled crying under the heartless blue of the sky. I tried to climb on to it as it rolled but my fingers slipped on the green slime and I scraped my flesh bloody on the barnacles as I fell back into the water. The great cavern of the mouth opened and showed its white teeth, its red tongue, its cry was like the rending of mountains. ‘Eurydice!’ it bellowed, ‘Eurydice!’ as the seabirds rose up screaming.

  I clung to the hair that floated round the head and undulated with the swell. Looking down into the water I saw rising a vast and ivory nakedness and a woman’s face of terrifying beauty. Her red-gold hair streamed round her, her green eyes were open wide, her pale silent mouth was open.

  Closer and closer came the face of Eurydice, her mouth open and grinning, her tongue hanging out. Larger and larger grew her face, widening in my vision until I saw it all around me, this great and loosely grinning face of the Vermeer girl and Melanie Falsepercy and Luise becoming, becoming… Who were they becoming?

  ‘Luise,’ I said, ‘Luise, Luise.’

  ‘I used to know a Louisa,’ said the man on my right as the sunlit sea slid past the window. LANCASTER GATE appeared and was gone. He had an unsure look and was wearing a broken-brimmed hat.

  ‘How do you spell it?’ I said.

  He pulled up his jacket sleeve and his shirt sleeve and showed me a tattoo on his forearm, a snake twined around a dagger. On a little banner above it was the name Louisa. ‘Like that,’ he said.

  ‘Not the same,’ I said. ‘Why the snake and the dagger?’

  ‘Symbolic.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘I don’t know, I was drunk when I had it done.’

  ‘Where’s Louisa now?’

  ‘No idea, no idea at all. Snows of yesteryear. She may have become a lion-tamer, she may have joined the Navy. You break out of the bin?’

  ‘Why? Do I look like a loony?’

  ‘Look like you been plugged into the wall or something.’

  It was then that I became aware of the wires trailing from the electrodes on my head. I unwired myself and was going to put everything into the pocket of my anorak but I wasn’t wearing my anorak and now that I noticed it I was cold. I stuffed the wires and the electrodes into a trouser pocket.

  ‘You been getting some kind of ECT,’ he said. ‘They done that to me, they said the voices would go away.’

  ‘Did they?’

  ‘Yes. Now I’ve got nothing. There’s only a kind of ringing emptiness. I never asked them to take away the voices but there it is, you see: who am I? Nobody. I’m not entitled to hear voices unless it’s somebody asking me questions and taking down what I say. You showed them though, you just walked away wires and all. Don’t let them empty you out, they’ve got nothing better to offer. Best of luck to you is what I say.’ He shook my hand warmly and gave me a thumbs-up sign when I got off at Notting Hill Gate.

  When I was alone the sea came back to me again, I could feel the running of the tide as I went up the escalators, through the corridor and up the stairs to the District and Circle Line platforms. Everything seemed much darker than it ought to be. I went to the end of the platform where I always wait for the Wimbledon train and stood looking at a narrow vertical sign that said A162, a light that showed sometimes red and sometimes green, and a distorting mirror. In the mirror the tracks rippled as if straightness were not the truth of the black tunnels. The unseen olive tree and the sea flickered their sunlight in the November dark.

  A bright stillness approached, on the front of it the illuminated word WIMBLEDON. Listening to the sea I entered it, was borne home through November dark and moving lights, poured myself a large gin, was very tired, took the phone off the hook, fell asleep on the couch.

  It was between six and seven in the morning. The moon was low in the sky. It was a waxing moon, a gibbous one; it was a particular moon. I raised the window-blind. The pinky-orange hibiscus street lamp outside the window was the same as always. I opened the front door and went out into the foredawn, into the hissing of the silence and the humming of the underground trains standing empty with lighted windows on the far side of the common. Unseen birds twittered but there was no crow to shout and flaunt its blackness.

  I heard my footsteps; I saw under the lamps my shadow first before me, then behind. ‘Nothing to declare,’ I said.

  I crossed the common and headed down the New King’s Road. The Belisha beacons clicked as they blinked
in the coldness of the morning. Cars at intervals hissed past me, in each one a face as questionable as the faces printed on the tin windows of toy cars from Japan. The shops stood like sleeping horses.

  The lamps on Putney Bridge were still lit, the bridge stood in simple astonishment over the water, a stonelike creature of overness, of parapets and ghostly pale cool tones of blue, of grey, of dim whiteness in the foredawn with its lamps lit against a sky growing light. Far below lay the river; slack-water it was, turn of the tide, the low-tide river narrow between expanses of mud, the moored boats rocking on the stillness.

  A sort of singing filled my head; it seemed an aspect of the particles of light and colour that made in my eyes the picture of this time just before dawn. I thought of the dew on the grass where the olive tree stood. There seemed to be a question in the air.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I will.’ I spoke aloud because I wanted my answer to be recorded on the early air.

  I was walking on the Putney side of the river, walking on the low-tide beach, hearing the lapping of the water on the stones. I was seeing the moon-glints on the water, I was smelling the low-tide smell of the mud and the stones by the river.

  The singing in my head became the slowly spreading circles of an intolerable clangour; it was as if the brute bell of the universe were caged in my mind and bursting my skull. ‘Eurydice!’ whispered a voice from the mud, from the stones. ‘Eurydice!’

  5 The Head of Orpheus Begins Its Story

  It was an eyeless and bloated human head, sodden, covered with green slime and heavy with barnacles. I took it in my hands; where the flesh had been eaten away I could feel the ancient skull.

  I could feel the head humming and buzzing in my hands, then it began to speak. Its voice was more elemental, more profound than human voices are; the way it spoke seemed more animal than human; it was as if speech had suddenly become possible for an animal, as if the creature were for the first time putting thoughts into words. ‘Who are you?’ said the head.

  ‘Nobody, really. Nobody you’d know.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be seeing me if I didn’t know you. What’s your name?’

  I didn’t want to tell it my name.

  ‘Speak up,’ said the head. ‘What are you afraid of?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘No you aren’t, you came to the river and you said, “Yes, I will.’”

  ‘I don’t know why I said that.’

  ‘Tell me your name.’

  ‘Herman Orff.’

  ‘Is that really your name?’

  ‘Yes, it really is.’

  ‘Do you know who I am?’

  ‘No. Who are you?’

  ‘I’m the head of Orpheus.’

  ‘How do you do.’

  ‘You sound as if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘Why aren’t you speaking Greek?’

  ‘The words that I’m speaking are what I find in your mind. Is there any Greek there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s why I’m not speaking Greek.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘You still don’t believe me. Do you want me to sing for you?’

  ‘All right, sing for me.’

  The head opened its mouth, its lips and tongue moved, I félt it vibrate in my hands but I heard nothing. After a long time the vibration stopped. ‘Well?’ said the head.

  ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

  The head began to weep, it shook in my hands with great wild racking sobs. After a while it quieted down.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘it’s all right, I believe you without the singing.’

  ‘You don’t believe me the way I want you to believe me, I can hear it in your voice - you don’t believe I’m the real head of Orpheus.’

  ‘In the first place I do believe you, and in the second place how much difference does it make if you aren’t the real head of Orpheus? I’m not sure I’m the real head of Herman Orff but I get up every morning and get on with it. You’re what you are and I’m what I am and let’s leave it at that.’

  ‘All right, you believe that I’m the head of Orpheus. But do you believe that I’m real?’

  ‘Real how?’

  ‘Like the river, like the stones and the mud.’

  ‘I believe you’re real in your way.’

  ‘What way is that?’

  ‘You’re real in my mind; you’re a hallucination.’

  ‘Do you think I’ll go away if you stop thinking me?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘And what if I stop thinking you?’

  ‘I think I’ll still be here.’

  ‘Let’s try it,’ said the head, and was gone; in my hands I held a slime-covered stone. There was a greyness all around me, a tightness across my chest, a heaviness coming to a point on each side of the base of my throat, the veins and arteries of my arms seemed filled with lead. The pain grew harder and heavier; I thought I was going to collapse there in the mud by the river. Then the head was back in my hands, the greyness and the pain receded.

  ‘That’s what happens if I stop thinking you,’ said the head of Orpheus. ‘Do you know what I am to you?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘I am the first of your line. I am the first singer, the one who invented the lyre, the one to whom Hermes brought Eurydice and perpetual guilt. I am your progenitor, I am the endlessly voyaging sorrow that is always in you, I am that astonishment from which you write in those brief moments when you can write.’

  ‘Endlessly voyaging sorrow and astonishment. Yes, I have those from you, I know that. Perpetual guilt, you said.’

  ‘In the stories they always say I turned around to look at her too soon but that isn’t how it was: I turned away too soon, turned away before I’d ever looked long enough, before I’d ever fully perceived her.’

  With those words there came into my mind Luise. Once when we were living together I was on a 22 bus and I saw her unexpectedly in Sloane Street. The bus was moving slowly north in heavy traffic and she was walking south. She was wearing a long black coat and as she approached she was smiling to herself and walking slowly, lingeringly, as if lost in thought. Then the bus passed her and I turned and saw her going away. After that I sometimes imagined her seen from a distance walking away slowly, lingeringly, not coming back.

  ‘Does anyone ever fully perceive anyone else?’ I said. I began to cry.

  ‘Cry on my face,’ said the head, ‘maybe my eyes will grow back.’

  ‘Is there healing in my tears?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’ll try anything.’

  ‘Maybe you ought to stop trying. You’re old, you’re blind and rotten, you can’t sing any more. Why don’t you just pack it in?’

  ‘I haven’t that choice, there’s no way for me to cease to be. I’m manifesting myself to you as a rotting head but there’s no picture for what I am: I am that which sings the world, I am the response that never dies. Fidelity is what’s wanted.’

  ‘Fidelity. I got my head zapped looking for a novel and here I am listening to homilies from a rotting head.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re looking for,’ said the head. ‘Alone and blind and endlessly voyaging I think constantly of fidelity. Fidelity is a matter of perception; nobody is unfaithful to the sea or to mountains or to death: once recognized they fill the heart. In love or in terror or in loathing one responds to them with the true self; fidelity is not an act of the will: the soul is compelled by recognitions. Anyone who loves, anyone who perceives the other person fully can only be faithful, can never be unfaithful to the sea and the mountains and the death in that person, so pitiful and heroic is it to be a human being.’

  Again I felt the pain across my chest and down my left arm. ‘If you’re going to take a high moral tone you’d better find someone else to talk to,’ I said, ‘I’m not up to it.’

  ‘Do you think about fidelity sometimes?’ said the head.

  ‘Sometimes.’ Years after Luise had gone I found inside a copy of Rilke’s
Neue Gedichte her recipe for bread; I’d never seen her use a written-down recipe but there it was in her writing on a folded-up feint-ruled notebook page marking ‘Orpheus, Eurydike, Hermes’:

  1·5 kg granary flour

  2 dessertsp oil

  1 ” salt

  1 tblesp caraway seeds

  2 ” dried yeast

  1½ pts water, bloodwarm

  1 teasp sugar

  Put flour in a bowl, add oil & caraway seeds. Put sugar & yeast in a jug, add a little of the warm water. Leave for 10-15 mins in a warm place to froth, add salt to warm water. When yeast dissolved, add to the flour and water. Stir, then turn on to a floured board & knead 10-15 mins until it is elastic. Put back in bowl, cover, leave to rise in warm place. When doubled in size, take out, divide into 2, knead & thump, shape into loaves and put in greased tins. Cover, leave for 10 mins in a warm place, then put in oven & bake at 220° for 40-5 mins.

  The smell of the brown loaves was like fidelity.

  Luise had an accordion and she liked to play hymns on it. Her favourite was ‘Aus Tiefer Not’, ‘From Deep Distress’:

  Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir,

  Herr Gott, erhör mein Rufen.

  From deep distress cry I to thee,

  Lord God, hear thou my calling.

  This is Psalm 130, ‘De profundis’, and the Book of Common Prayer renders it:

  Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord:

  Lord, hear my voice.

  She sang it in German of course, in a deep and distant Thirty Years’ War soprano while the accordion marched on in a minor key like a troop of pikemen with dinted helmets. Luise’s mother had bought her the accordion and paid for the lessons; her father had died in the Ardennes in 1944.

  She farted like a woman who carries a spear and drives a chariot. ‘What kind of piety is that?’ I said. ‘With your upper part you’re singing hymns and with your lower part you’re making Götterdämmerung. You’re making tiefe Not for the rest of the world.’