Linger Awhile

by Russell Hoban

  ‘Common frogs,’ said the man at the other end.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘I assume these were … ?’

  ‘Laboratory-quality specimens in formaldehyde,’ said the man.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘Now I remember the project. Thanks very much.’

  The next thing was a handwritten recipe for primordial soup which included 20 gallons of chicken noodle, 500 Oxo cubes, 500 mg of polypeptides, 40 bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree (an obvious codename) plus quantities of ginseng and assorted multivitamins.

  It was the polypeptides that convinced me that I was well out of my depth so I rang up Irv and asked him to come over. He came with a new bottle, sensitive human being that he is, and we looked the whole lot over togezzer. Together. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s a good thing that I have a nephew who’s a polymath. He knows everything.’

  ‘I don’t care if he’s a merphradomite,’ I said. ‘Bring him on.’

  So the next day or some other day Artie Nussbaum turned up. He’s at the Guy’s, King’s & St Thomas’ School of Medicine and he’s good with chemistry, biology and computers. He’s a little guy and he looks as if you added water you’d have four or five Charlie Sheens.

  ‘Oho,’ he said when he looked through what we had. ‘Is this legal?’

  ‘Artie,’ said Irv, ‘are you going to ask dumb questions or are you going to help your uncle?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. To me he said, ‘Have you got a computer with a modem?’

  I led him to the computer and he sighed and said, ‘If you could order me a pizza with pepperoni and a six-pack of John Smith?’

  ‘No prob,’ I said. I got him what he needed and we left him to it. He had to go to lectures from time to time but after three days he gave us a shopping list for all kinds of things plus three Rana temporaria. We ordered the laser gear, the extra computer software, the oil drum and the rest of it. For the primordial soup there was the matter of the forty bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree. Artie was not bothered about that. ‘What we’re doing here,’ he said, ‘is creating a suspension of disbelief in which the visual particles of Justine Two will be held pending the zapping which will precipitate the whole woman. For Ring-Bo-Ree read any high-calorie filler that will enhance the body of the soup, say John Smith, forty cans of.’

  ‘Julv,’ said Irv.

  ‘Sorry?’ said Artie.

  ‘Just thinking out loud,’ said Irv. ‘I agree that John Smith can go in for Ring-Bo-Ree.’

  I did too, so that was one less problem. When we got to Rana temporaria Thierson & Bates said, ‘Sorry, we’re temporarily out of frogs. Would you like some other batrachian?’

  ‘Like what?’ I said.

  ‘Toads?’ said the man. ‘I can do you some nice Bufo bufo in formaldehyde.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, going all goosepimply, ‘those will do nicely.’

  24

  Artie Nussbaum

  30 January 2004. OK, so I didn’t ask dumb questions. Actually, after a while I became completely involved in what I was doing and I stopped worrying about legality and morality. Like the guys who worked on the first atom bomb, I guess. Once you see that something is possible, you’re damn well going to make it happen if you can.

  After I gave Irv and Grace my shopping list they handed me one: a whole blood transfusion kit. Irv put the cash in my hand for the necessaries and I got everything at Chiron Medical Supplies near Middlesex Hospital. ‘We’ll need it for when she comes out of the soup,’ said Grace.

  When our preparations were complete there was nothing to do but Justine Two. Irv and Grace assured me that Justine One had been created by this procedure so we did the same thing with isolating the image, lasering it through the diffraction grating, printing the interference pattern, then reducing the pattern to its particles and putting the particles into the soup in the drum. ‘There’s our suspension of disbelief,’ said Irv.

  Grace said, ‘Please don’t say, “This is the moment of truth”.’

  ‘I’m not sure what kind of a moment it is,’ said Irv, ‘so I’m saying nothing.’ He handed Grace the 240-volt zapper we’d rigged up. ‘You do it,’ he said to her.

  Grace closed her eyes and did it. There was a flash, a primordial electrical smell and somebody belched loudly. Then there she was rising out of the soup, all black-and-white in her sopping wet western clothes: Justine Two. ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘where’s my fucking horse? Am I supposed to walk to El Paso?’ Then she stared wildly around and clambered out of the drum so violently that the three of us had to hold it to keep from spilling the primordial soup all over Grace’s studio. As it was, there was a big puddle and Justine Two stepped into it, sat down, and belched. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I don’t see anybody I know, so what kind of party is this?’

  ‘It’s not a party,’ said Grace.

  ‘Why are you talking funny?’ said J Two.

  ‘I’m English,’ said Grace. ‘You’re in London.’

  ‘That’s a crock of shit,’ said J Two. ‘There aren’t any London locations in this picture.’

  ‘You’re not in a picture now,’ said Irv. ‘This is reality.’

  ‘That’ll be the day,’ said J Two, and she fainted and fell back into the puddle.

  ‘I wonder if Istvan’s Justine started out like this,’ said Grace.

  ‘I wasn’t there so I couldn’t say,’ said Irv.

  She was really an awful-looking thing in black-and-white, and when we got her out of her wet clothes it was even worse. ‘I forgot about clothes,’ said Grace. ‘We’ll have to get her other things to wear. Underthings as well, tights, shoes, whatever.’

  ‘Then what?’ said Irv.

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ said Grace. We’d been working for a couple of weeks to bring this creature into the world but Grace was looking at it, at her I should say, as if the whole thing was totally unexpected.

  ‘Well,’ said Irv to Grace, ‘while you’re thinking about it you know what we have to do.’

  ‘I know,’ said Grace, ‘and I’ll go first. Bleed me, Artie.’

  ‘I don’t want to take too much,’ I said. ‘Let’s just get her into full colour so we can see where we are with this.’ Mind you, while we were doing all this the rest of London was going on as usual. Some trains were running, some weren’t. The streets were full of buses and cars and pedestrians, the pubs were full of drinkers, and we were putting blood into this thing that had climbed out of our suspension of disbelief. Great.

  As J Two filled up with colour I felt a little stirring of interest. She was a good-looking woman, you had to give her that. ‘Hello, honey,’ she said as she came round. ‘Why don’t you get naked with me.’ She stuck out her tongue which was quite a long one and gave me the wettest kiss I’d ever had. She tasted like a swamp full of incontinent crocodiles. My head went round, the room tilted several different ways, and the wall opened up to let some huge hopping thing into the room. ‘Mmmmm!’ said J Two. ‘Oh yes, gimme that old-time religion, do it, do it, do it.’

  ‘Are you talking to me or the huge hopping thing?’ I said. ‘I don’t usually tilt this much on the first date.’

  ‘Artie, try to come down a little if you can,’ said Grace. ‘Justine, you’ll have to slow down if you want to hang out with us. We’re actually a pretty quiet crowd.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ said J Two. ‘Who died and left you in charge, Grandma?’

  ‘Watch your mouth,’ said Irv.

  ‘Up yours, Grandad,’ said J Two.

  The room was heaving around and the thing that had hopped out of the wall was making obscene gestures but I still couldn’t see its face. Maybe I’m St Anthony, I thought. Is this a temptation?

  25

  Detective Inspector Hunter

  3 February 2004. I don’t read much poetry any more but there are some poems that I go back to. There’s one by Yeats that’s certainly short enough to stay in my memory but I never get it exactly right and I have to turn to the page in his Collected Poems where the bookmark is:


  MEMORY

  One had a lovely face,

  And two or three had charm,

  But charm and face were in vain

  Because the mountain grass

  Cannot but keep the form

  Where the mountain hare has lain.

  The form where the hare slept is emptiness in the shape of the hare. Last night I dreamt that Rose Harland came to my bed. I was lying on my side and she shaped herself to my back and pressed herself against me. In the dream I woke up and said, ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, ‘I didn’t mean to wake you, I only wanted to get warm.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said as I woke up out of the dream. I put my hand where she’d been but her side of the bed was cold.

  26

  Istvan Fallok

  23 January 2004. I went up to Golders Green out of curiosity; I wanted to see how Chauncey and Justine were getting on. I didn’t phone ahead, I thought I’d just drop in and catch them unawares. Not knowing where I’d find an off-licence in Golders Green I bought a bottle of Glenfiddich at Nicolas in Berwick Street. I like the red Nicolas sign with its yellow lettering, it has spiritual uplift.

  I was standing on the Northern Line platform at Tottenham Court Road when I noticed a rat down among the cables by the tracks. I remembered reading somewhere that in London you’re never more than ten feet away from a rat. That’s about how far I was from this one when it turned and looked at me. ‘You looking at me?’ I said. It didn’t say anything but its nose was twitching. Then it went back to its cable run. I did a few bars of rat music in my head. I hate their naked tails and their superior attitude, their behind-the-scenes cynicism. Cockroaches too – you can scrunch as many as you like but they’re laughing because they know they’ll win in the end.

  Justine. What made Irv Goodman and Chauncey Lim and me suddenly fall in love with her? Love, shit. Irv is eighty-three and he’s got no business falling in love. I’m sixty-five and Chauncey’s only in his forties but all of us are old enough to know better. Irv started it. Almost at the end of his life and wanting something impossible he comes to me and flings down the gauntlet: ‘You can do it, Istvan.’

  When I first saw the interference pattern on the white card I thought,Well, yes, I am interfering. Maybe she wants to stop in the video, maybe she wants to stay dead. But I was hot for her and I wanted her alive and I was in charge. Now she was with Chauncey Lim and for the most part I was glad to have her off my hands. Maybe I was a little jealous. Dead people! I wonder what Lazarus did when he came out of the tomb. Must have had a hell of a thirst. Did he head for the nearest pub? If he did, they probably gave him plenty of room at the bar.

  The train came and I found a seat by the doors. A woman sat down next to me but at Goodge Street she moved to another seat. Did I still smell of primordial soup? Or maybe I just looked crazy. Whatever. So many different faces in the Underground. Chinese, Japanese, Pakistani, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-African, and a few white American and English ones. All of them had necks, some exposed by open coats or jackets, others hidden. Faces staring into space, faces reading, faces looking inward at the stories inside them.

  It’s a long ride to Golders Green and I had to change at Camden Town to the Edgware train. Up the steps and across through a crush of faces and footsteps and down again to the other platform. There was an Edgware train with its doors open and in I went. Not very many people this time. Chalk Farm, Belsize Park, Hampstead. Hampstead Heath was where I once walked with Luise von Himmelbett. We sat on a bench high up on the Heath with a view of London down below us. There are ghosts of me all over this town.

  When next I looked out of the window we were above ground, in a long grey stretch of railroad-yard looking things and wintry afternoon daylight. Then here came Golders Green station. The last time I’d been there was years ago when I needed some Jewish records from Jerusalem the Golden.

  I went down the stairs and out into the winter sky (very high and open, with gold-tinted clouds) and the last part of the day. Brightly lit newsagents and snack shops led me out of the station into lights and traffic and crossings and railings and the Finchley Road. After the cramped closeness of Soho it all seemed very wide and spread out and strange to me. Elijah’s Lucky Dragon was only a short walk from the station, between Leverton and Sons Ltd, Independent Funeral Directors since 1789, and The Gate Lodge pub. I wouldn’t have minded dropping in for a quick one but The Gate Lodge sounded like designer beers and careful drinkers and the pub front was red with hanging plants and yellow outlines on the panels and windows, all very charming. I don’t like charming and I don’t like careful drinkers. I like pubs plain and dark and old-fashioned with names like The Hand of Glory, The Spade and Coffin and The Jolly Sandboys. With serious drinkers. There was a bus stop nearby with dark huddles of people and buses coming and going. In this cold northern twilight the buses looked larger and redder than the ones in my part of town.

  The sign on Rosalie Chun’s restaurant was a green neon dragon wearing a yarmulke. The red neon lettering was that Chu-Chin-Chow cuneiform they used in movie titles back in the 1930s and it was still being used as recently as The World of Suzie Wong in the 1950s.

  I looked through the glass door and saw the chairs up on the tables and a black man mopping the floor. I tapped on the glass and he came to the door shaking his head. ‘Shabbas,’ he said. ‘We’re closed.’

  ‘You’re working,’ I said.

  ‘I’m the schwartzer,’ he said.

  ‘Can you tell me where the Chuns live?’ I asked him.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m a friend of Chauncey Lim’s, he’s staying with them. Justine Trimble too.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Istvan Fallok.’

  ‘Wait here,’ he said, and disappeared. I turned around and watched the traffic. There wasn’t much. After about five minutes he came back. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Go to the side entrance and ring the bell.’

  ‘You’re very careful,’ I said. ‘Been having any trouble here?’

  He shook his head and went back to his mopping.

  I went round and found two bells, one above the other. No names. It was a three-storey building. I rang the bottom bell. ‘Yes?’ said a man’s voice.

  I told him who I was and said I’d come to see Justine.

  ‘Ring the other bell,’ he said.

  This time Chauncey Lim answered. ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘It’s me,’ I said, ‘Istvan.’

  He buzzed me in and I went up the stairs to the second floor. There was a mezuzah on the doorpost so I touched my fingers first to my lips, then to the little metal cylinder. When Chauncey opened the door he didn’t seem very glad to see me. ‘Did you kiss the mezuzah?’ he said.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’m a multicultural kind of goy. Why? Have you converted to Judaism?’

  ‘No, but you needn’t be flippant. When the Lord smote all the firstborns in the land of Egypt, he passed over the houses of the children of Israel where they’d smeared the blood of the Paschal lamb on the doorposts as instructed by Moses. The mezuzah is a reminder of that.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Did you read that in a fortune cookie?’

  ‘All right,’ said Chauncey, ‘you can make jokes all you like but blood is a serious thing.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ I said.

  ‘Hear, O Israel!’ said a strange voice. There was a parrot in a large cage in a corner of the room.

  ‘That’s Elijah,’ said Chauncey. ‘He’s a member of the Chun family.’

  ‘Handsome bird,’ I said. ‘African grey?’

  ‘Tishbite,’ said Elijah. ‘First Kings, not dew nor rain.’

  ‘Rosalie does Bible readings with him,’ said Chauncey.

  ‘My word,’ said Elijah.

  ‘OK already,’ said Chauncey.

  ‘Some of my best friends are goyim,’ said Elijah.

  ‘Great,’ I said, ‘but I still wouldn’t want my sister to marry a parrot.’ />
  ‘Why didn’t you phone before coming?’ said Chauncey. ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ I said. ‘I just didn’t want you to make any preparations.’ I gave him the whisky.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. He turned his back on Elijah and lowered his voice. ‘Has H-U-N-T-E-R been around again?’

  ‘Not yet. Where’s Justine?’

  ‘Napping. She sleeps a lot.’ He looked as if he might say more but didn’t. He got two glasses and poured the Glenfiddich.

  ‘L’haim,’ said Elijah.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Chauncey without much enthusiasm.

  ‘Here’s to romance,’ I said.

  He laughed in a small way. ‘That’s right: all you need is love.’

  ‘How is she?’ I said. ‘Are you topping her up or is she hunting?’

  ‘Neither. Rosalie’s been feeding her kosher Chinese plus Golem broth and gosky patties Ba’al Shem Tov and she seems to be thriving on it – she’s even put on a pound or two.’

  ‘Wonderful! And she’s not losing colour?’

  ‘No, she’s looking great.’

  ‘Phwoarr,’ said Elijah.

  ‘When do I get to see her?’ I said to Chauncey.

  ‘She’ll be out in a minute or two. Have you been around to my place at all?’

  ‘Yes. Couple of messages on your door.’ I gave them to him.

  ‘Customers wanting to know about their orders,’ he said. ‘I’ll get back to work soon.’

  ‘And Justine? What’s our next move with her?’

  ‘Rosalie says she can stop here indefinitely. She and Justine have become great chums.’

  ‘What about Rosalie’s husband? Does he mind Justine’s being here indefinitely?’