The Medusa Frequency

by Russell Hoban

  It wasn’t at all surprising that I should fall in love with Luise; I’d been divorced not long before that, I was alone, and I’d never met a woman like her: she was quite calm just being herself, she had none of the desperation that produces art, she commanded attention without producing a product. I asked her to lunch and she said yes. I took her to Mr Chow in Knightsbridge. I haven’t been there for years now but that was back when I bathed and shaved every morning and sometimes did that sort of thing at lunchtime. I asked if Fallok was a special friend of hers and she told me they’d been together for two years but it was over now. ‘I kept my bedsit in Kilburn the whole time,’ she said, ‘I never moved in with him.’

  ‘You knew it wasn’t going to last?’

  ‘One woman’s not enough for Istvan,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t imagine being with you and wanting anyone else,’ I said.

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because you’re everything I’ve ever wanted in a woman.’

  ‘Are you sure? I’m not clever, you know - I don’t write or paint or anything like that, I’m not an intellectual type.’

  ‘An intellectual type isn’t what I’m after.’

  ‘What are you after then?’

  ‘You,’ I said. ‘You’re what I’m after.’ The world at that moment was so various, so beautiful, so new, the very air was electric with good luck and happy promise, I could feel her responding to the excitement in me. I was thirty-eight then; I was in a heightened state of mating behaviour, able to catch the waiter’s eye, to find taxis or parking spaces without frustration, to get interval drinks at the theatre without groaning, to buy tickets for concerts and recitals - nothing was burdensome to me, nothing was too much trouble, and she was the woman who would make everything all right. I imagined waking up and finding her there every morning, I imagined page after page coming out of the typewriter. I wrote poems, gave presents, wooed early and late, and within two months she’d left her Kilburn bedsit and was living with me.

  ‘Are you there?’ said the shadowy female voice on the telephone.

  ‘I’m ringing about a flyer I got through my letterbox,’ I said.

  ‘Hang on,’ she said.

  ‘Hello,’ said a man’s voice.

  ‘Is that Istvan Fallok?’

  ‘Yes. Who’s this?’

  ‘Herman Orff.’

  ‘Ah, art trouble. Stuck, are we?’

  ‘It happens. I seem to remember that it’s even happened to you on occasion.’

  ‘Lots of occasions. Funny, I’ve got that Hermes theme on the Revox now, you can probably hear it. Seen Luise lately?’

  ‘No, it’s been more than nine years. Have you?’

  ‘No. Our lost Eurydice.’

  ‘Are you still composing electronic music?’

  ‘Sure. I did the track for Codename Orpheus. Have you seen it?’

  ‘No. Is it a spy film?’

  ‘More of an existential exploration of the nature of reality.’

  ‘Listen, what’s this HEAD FOR IT thing?’

  ‘It’s an EEG technique with a few refinements.’

  ‘Will it get me to places in my head that I haven’t been able to get to?’

  ‘Maybe you’ve already been to all the places there are in your head.’

  ‘I’ll take that chance. Has it got you anywhere you hadn’t got to before?’

  ‘Yes, it has. But it mightn’t be a place you want to get to.’

  ‘How much are you charging for it?’

  ‘Fifty quid for the first hour, twenty-five for every hour after that.’

  ‘How soon can we do it?’

  ‘Can you come between three and four this afternoon?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right. See you then.’

  ‘See you.’

  Strange, talking to Fallok after all those years. I wondered if he still had any hard feelings about me and Luise. He’d said at the time that he’d known she was going to leave him sooner or later. She was a loyal woman but very proud.

  The Vermeer girl was looking at me from the two books, the postcard, and the print over the fireplace. I had no idea where Luise was now.

  In the afternoon I left for Soho. Fulham Broadway is one of those underground stations that look like aeroplane hangars, airy and light and full of lift and more so on a rainy day. People made their entrances and took their places on the platform, each of them more or less in character for the day’s performance. I was playing Herman Orff in The Quest.

  There was a leggy young woman in a short black skirt, black leather jacket, black tights, and little black boots, clip-clop, clip-clop. She turned as she passed, her eyes seemed wide with surprise. Her hair was brown and thick - she was altogether urban but she looked as if she might vanish behind a tree. Her eyes were remarkable: dark eyes darkly outlined, open wide so that when she looked at me there was white all round the pupil. Her eyes were not like the eyes of women on Greek vases but there came the thought of a shady grove. The grove became more shadowy, became wild woodland. Her face had a sudden woodland look, as if she might just that moment have heard the baying of hounds.

  Don’t be ridiculous, I said to myself as I drifted along to where she was. She was leaning against a pillar reading a book; it was a proof copy. With some casual twisting and bending I was able to make out the title: The Mountains of Orgasma by Juan de Fulmé, published by Avernus. Juan de Fulmé had won last year’s Booker Prize with The Valley of Pudenda. O God! I thought: to explore the valley of her pudenda! To climb with her the mountains of Orgasma! Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself again but it was no use whatever.

  I reminded myself that I was forty-nine and wondered how old this woman of the wood might be: about twenty-seven, I thought. Beauty that passes! Transience! Was I going to be foolish? It looked as if I was. I didn’t want to be old and wise, wisdom seemed unsporting; I wanted to be more foolish than when I was young, I’d never been foolish enough. What is it but foolishness that brings the giant squid and Eurydice together? Non-giants also are subject to it.

  From far off in the blackness came a moving light, the wincing of the rails ran towards us ahead of the rumble and clatter of the train. Doors opened before us, closed behind us, we swayed and shook as one in Transports of Darkness by Herman Orff; Caverns of Iron by Herman Orff; Upward the Light, a trilogy? NOTTING HILL GATE, said the sign outside the window. Doors opened, we got out. Ahead of me with forms of walking world between us she clip-clopped through that buskerless corridor to the Central Line escalators. No pipes, no timbrels; only the pattering clock of footsteps measuring multitudes of separate mortalities.

  Her quiet reading face replayed itself in my mind as her legs beckoned before me, descending to the platform where we stood and looked into the tunnel for a light. ORPHEUS TRAVEL, said a poster in pseudo-Greek lettering. I will, I answered in pseudo-Greek.

  Again we shook together, swayed together, were entranced together in our space of light that rumbled through the darkness. We both got off at Oxford Circus. On Argyll Street I saw her before me, umbrellaless and vivid in the greyness and the rain. What a pleasure it must be for her to walk around in her body, I thought as I watched the glisten of the street flashing at her swift dark heels. She crossed Great Marlborough Street, went into Carnaby and over to Marshall which was the way I was legitimately going: Hermes Soundways was off Broadwick Street round the corner from Cranks Wholefood Restaurant. The rain intensified the colours of the present and called up the past that always waits, the colours of it unremembered, the light of it strange on my eyes. Luise and I used to drink rose-hip tea at Cranks.

  This new woman of the rainy afternoon continued ahead of me to the alley where Hermes Soundways was. Very Soho, the little alley of Istvan Fallok. Full of little businesses looked in upon by dusty windows. Little hidden businesses in the rain, in the greyness, ledgers and invoices unknown, services unrecognized. There were many gaunt and angular scaffoldings suggestive of Piranesi’s prison fantasies,
dark against the grey sky. Dark pipes and planking in the rainlight of Soho, in the greylight of Istvan Fallok’s little corner of the world where she was obviously going.

  A flight of steps led down to his place, through the windows I could see a shadowy interior glowing with illuminated dials and little eyes of red and green and yellow light; she clip-clopped down the steps ahead of me without looking round. When he opened the door I heard, veiled and flickering, the same music I’d heard on the telephone; this place lived in the half-light of its music and in the music of its half-light, it swam in sound like a long-drowned city in a sea of dreams.

  Here sleeps the Kraken, I thought:

  Unnumber’d and enormous polypi

  Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.

  The music was part of the look of the place and of Istvan Fallok; the music and the half-light clung to him like the smell of the roll-ups that he used to smoke continually when he and I were working on Hermes. He didn’t look like his name, didn’t look dark and eastern. He was forty-three, tall and thin, with lank red hair and a long white face and pale hard blue eyes with dark circles under them and he looked awful. He’d never been a very robust or healthy type but now he looked haunted. He was twisting a piece of red insulated wire in his hands. Maybe he’s just stopped smoking, I thought, nothing more than that. ‘Hi,’ he said and kissed the young woman, then he saw me and said ‘Hi’ again and we shook hands.

  ‘Nice to see you again,’ I said.

  ‘It’s been a while. You two know each other?’

  She turned around, looked at me and smiled. ‘No.’ I SAW YOU STARING AT ME, said her eyes.

  YOU KNOW WHAT I WANT, said my eyes.

  ‘Melanie Falsepercy; Herman Orff,’ said Fallok.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. For a moment her hand lay in mine. IT’S POSSIBLE, said her hand. Her face looked intently at my face. ‘You don’t look like your jacket photo.’

  ‘Time passes,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve read your books,’ she said. Her voice was the one that had answered Fallok’s telephone, breathy and shadowy and there was something heartbreaking in it: youth with the world before it; youth and the world passing, passing; stay yet awhile! She’ll be alive when I’m dead, I thought, but never mind, it’s a sporting proposition, go in to win. Was I in shape for it? Film stars ten years older than I ran lightly up the stairs but I’d found it hard to keep up with her walking from Oxford Circus to Fallok’s place. Was I going to need a rope for the Mountains of Orgasma? What about the Cliffs of Angina? Wouldn’t it have been simpler just to be born twenty years later? On the other hand, when I was twenty-nine I hadn’t yet written the books that had aroused her interest. Could I have been interesting at twenty-nine without the books?

  ‘I read World of Shadows three times,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I knew this was going to be a good day.’

  ‘I can’t stay,’ she said to Fallok, ‘I only wanted to drop off the tape.’ She gave him a cassette. I wondered what was on the tape, I wondered what was between them. ‘See you,’ she said to him. ‘Nice meeting you,’ she said to me, and her legs took her up the steps and away into the rain.

  I LOVE YOU, I transmitted with my mind. I PROMISE TO BE FOOLISH.

  YOU’LL BE SORRY, said her departing legs.

  ‘The place looks about the same,’ I said to Fallok as we went into the studio. ‘A little more technological maybe.’

  ‘Did her legs say something to you just now?’ he said.

  ‘I wasn’t really listening.’

  ‘That’ll be the day.’

  ‘Strange name, Falsepercy. Is it from the French: Fauxpercé, the false pierced?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t speak French.’

  ‘What does she do?’

  ‘She’s a reader at the Avernus Press.’

  ‘What a small world it is.’

  ‘And crowded,’ he said.

  All around in the dusk of the room watched and waited the little eyes of coloured light. An Anglepoise lamp on a drawing table in a corner made an island of bright warmth. Pinned up among notes, announcements, posters and photographs on an expanse of corkboard was a large print of Head of a Young Girl. There was a Melanie Falsepercy look in her eyes.

  On a table near the door was something that looked like a piano keyboard. On top of its housing sat a computer keyboard; to the right of it was a visual display unit from which hung a lightpen. Under the table was a box for the computer works and the double disk drive. On the screen in luminous green letters was a double row of names beginning with ORPHEUS and EURYDICE.

  ‘Is that a music computer?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, it’s a Fairlight.’

  ‘And ORPHEUS and EURYDICE are voices you’ve got loaded into it?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Is Luise the Eurydice voice?’

  ‘Yes. Anything else you need to know?’

  ‘Is that still the Hermes music I’m hearing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s really no foot powder at all in it, is there?’

  ‘That’s what the client said at the presentation. Shall we get started?’

  ‘How does it work?’

  ‘I’ve got it set up over here.’ He indicated several circuit boards thick with condensers, transistors, resistors, silicon chips and vari-coloured wiring. On each was a fascia with authentic-looking gauges and dials; connected to one of them were leads to a harness obviously meant for the subject’s head; there were also a scientific sort of printer and a revolving drum with a pen for recording the brain waves. The whole thing looked reassuringly ordinary; I might possibly be electrocuted but other than that it seemed safe enough.

  ‘I use thirty-six electrodes to build up a reference grid,’ he said. ‘When you’re hooked up I’ll ask you to say a couple of words about what you’re after. From that this receiver will give me a digital printout of signal strength and frequencies from each of the thirty-six electrodes. With those data I can work out a complementary sonic pattern on the Fairlight and I’ll feed that into the headphones you’ll be wearing. When I get both patterns in sync I’ll send a low-powered charge to selected electrodes. It’s just a little more juice than your brain generates and it excites the neurons in such a way that it might or might not get you to those places in your head that you can’t get to on your own.’

  ‘It did it for you, right?’

  ‘Oh yes, it did it for me.’

  ‘How many times have you done it?’

  ‘Just once.’

  ‘Just once. And that was …’

  ‘All I needed.’

  ‘Did it help with your music?’

  ‘Hard to say.’

  ‘But at least it didn’t do any harm?’

  ‘Do I look as if it’s done me any harm?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. He looked as if something had done him harm, but then so did I, I supposed.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘shall we do it?’

  I’d better not, I thought. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’ He was still twisting the piece of wire. ‘Where’s your Golden Virginia?’ I said. ‘Why aren’t you smoking?’

  ‘I stopped.’ He dabbed electrolytic cream on the thirty-six locations and with great precision harnessed up my head with the thirty-six electrodes and put the headphones on me. Then he switched on the frequency counter and the computer-printer. Various new red and green and yellow lights winked on, adding to the watchfulness of the already attentive room.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘we’re operational; is there a particular place in your head you’re trying to get to?’

  I’d been listening to the Hermes music that had become a field charged with energies not of this moment. My mouth opened and I heard it say, ‘The olive tree.’ I hadn’t intended to say that.

  ‘Right, the olive tree. Can you say a little more about it? I want to see what kind of a reading we get.’

  In the Hermes music the particles of t
ime past coalesced into sunlight on the island of Paxos, the summer air warm on my face, and Luise and I walking to the beach. It was our second summer and our last. The road that led from the hills down into the town passed between terraces of olive groves dry-walled with grey and white stones. There were empty blue plastic mineral-water bottles everywhere, there were thrown-away cookers and meat-grinders rusting in the olive groves. The trees had been planted long, long ago before there were such things as plastic mineral-water bottles; for hundreds of years they had twisted their roots into the stony earth of their stone-walled terraces. The tree that I was thinking of was one that we always stopped to look at. Often there was a black donkey tethered to it, sometimes there was a black-and-white goat nearby. When the donkey opened wide its jaws and brayed it made the most tremendous heehaw, it was like the creaking of the door of the world. It was much too big a sound for a donkey to make, it was as if something else was making itself heard through the donkey. When the goat was there it looked calmly at us with its strange eyes that were like tawny grey stones in which were set oblongs of black stone. Most of the time there was a cock crowing somewhere amongst the mineral-water bottles. The tree was alive, the sunlight sang and twittered in the silvery leaves and the olives made black dots against the sky. Yet the trunk was empty, it was only the shell of a tree with darkness inside the ancient lithe and ardent shape of it. The greenish-grey thick bark all ridged and wrinkled stood open as if two hands had parted it, as if a woman or a goddess had stepped naked out of it into the greenlit shade of the olive grove.

  Luise and I had often talked about this tree; we agreed that it was an entrance to the underworld, a Persephone door. Now on this particular morning she went to the tree and stood before it with her hands on the two sides of the opening. The skirt of her little white beach dress stirred in the warm air; the August sunlight was elegiac through the whispering leaves.