The Medusa Frequency

by Russell Hoban

  ‘Plus the fifty pounds I didn’t pay you yesterday.’

  ‘Forget it, this one’s on me.’

  ‘No it isn’t, it’s on me now.’

  ‘That’s how it goes. Has the head had much to say to you so far?’

  ‘It’s begun to tell me its story.’

  ‘Ah, it would do, wouldn’t it. Music with me and a story with you. Well, good luck with it,’ and he rang off.

  A low panic thrilled along the wires of my nervous system. The day was becoming hard and sunny with a high wind blowing the brown leaves against the wire mesh fence of the football pitch. The District Line trains rumbled past westbound to Parsons Green, Putney Bridge, Wimbledon, east-bound to Upminster, Tower Hill, Dagenham East with passengers, the sea, mountains and death. I looked at the postcard of the Vermeer girl. Afraid but seeking to avert nothing Luise looked back at me in the November daylight. The first time I saw that look on her face was about seven o’clock on a Sunday morning at the house in Kilburn where she had the bedsit. It was a few days after our first evening together, we hadn’t yet made love; I’d kissed her and she smelled of honey, she said it was cough sweets. I’d been thinking about her all the time so I drove up there and rang her bell. She came to the door in pyjamas, no eyebrows, and that look that sought to avert nothing but was questioning, uncertain, and afraid. What was there to be afraid of?

  We went up to her room and she made coffee. On the wall was an old clock she’d brought with her from Germany, it was stopped. It had a round wooden case and a sad white face with delicate black roman numerals. I opened the back and released the escapement; the works unwound with a great whirring; then I wound it up and started it running again. When she came to live with me in Fulham its pale white moonface rose over our lovemaking, over the smooth and shining sea of our pleasure. Then it stopped and wouldn’t go again however much I tinkered with it. There wasn’t a wall in our bedroom that clock was happy on; it hung there staring with its pendulum dead and the little door at the bottom of the case dropped open like the jaw of a skeleton.

  My unfinished adaptation of Dracula lay on the desk. I opened the folder and looked at where I’d left off:

  DOWN AMONG THE SHADOWY TOMBS PROFESSOR VAN HELSING OPENS THE COFFIN OF ONE OF THE VAMPIRE BRIDES OF DRACULA …

  Van Helsing: How beautiful she is in her Vampire sleep!

  In her silk-lined coffin Melanie Falsepercy, the Vermeer girl, lay with her eyes open, her red lips slightly parted, her long hair loose about her. Van Helsing’s speech balloon throbbed with the old man’s lust.

  The telephone rang. I picked it up and said hello.

  ‘Herman?’ said the voice of Sol Mazzaroth. His damp and sweaty hand came out of the telephone and touched my arm.

  ‘I should have Dracula wound up tonight,’ I said. ‘Van Helsing’s down among the tombs now finishing off the vampire ladies.’

  ‘Not to worry,’ said Mazzaroth. ‘You’ve got time on that. Can you come in tomorrow afternoon around half-past three? I’ve got something really exciting to tell you.’

  ‘OK, I’ll be there.’

  I switched on the radio and got Radio Moscow at 12020 kHz with Alla Pugachova singing Harlekino. Is there a story of me? I asked myself. Am I in it? I typed:

  SOME DRAMATIS PERSONAE IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE

  The Kraken, the underhead: by its own account it came into existence when the human mind needed another mind to hold the original terror but it may well be of earlier origin. Eurydice claims to be its mother by a giant squid.

  Eurydice, mother? of the Kraken; the vast and ivory nakedness of her rising from the deeps. Luise von Himmelbett and Melanie Falsepercy are the Eurydice of this story, the lost one, the gone one, the one who cannot stay. Dike or Dice is Justice or Natural Law. Eurydice is Wide Justice, justice everywhere, universal natural law. What, the loss of her?

  The Giant Squid, an aspect of Orpheus, also (in a non-gigantic way) of Orff. Lusting after fishergirls.

  The Vermeer Girl, an aspect of the Mother Goddess, the female principle that manifests itself as Eurydice or Persephone or Luise or Melanie Falsepercy or Medusa. I have in mind the face of the composite Eurydice loosely grinning, becoming, becoming … ?

  The Olive Tree, Luise and I called it a Persephone door but mainly it’s the flickering of Thing-in-Itself.

  The Head of Orpheus, the overhead. It isn’t to be trusted, I know that: music with Fallok and a story with me, and the one likely to end up as badly as the other. All the same I have to trust it - we’re in this together, it and I, for as long as it continues to think of me.

  Aristaeus, what is he in the story, why is he being so pretentiously The Mysterious Stranger? Is there something about him that reminds me of people who get there before I do, who know something I don’t know? Or is it simply that he’s an inconvenient witness to the killing of the tortoise? Why am I afraid that he’ll take something away from me?

  Here the DRAMATIS PERSONAE came to an end. I had lunch and a kip, stuck the Dracula disk in the Apple II, turned on the monitor, and sank into a reverie.

  The afternoon immersed itself in dusk and the dusk deepened into night. District Line trains with golden windows rumbled townwards and homewards; the football pitch was illuminated, the lower leaves of the plane trees on the common became brilliant and theatrical; I heard the cries of the players, the thudding of the ball as the figures moved under the chalky whiteness of the lights; along the footpaths on either side of the pitch homegoers passed with quickened footsteps. I looked at the Vermeer girl, saw Melanie Falsepercy, remembered Luise. In the window my lamplit face was reflected on the darkness; I pulled down the blinds and saw the following appear on the monitor as I typed:

  EURYDICE

  The sea is full of marvels but there are no answers in it. There are remote beaches where certain things are insisted upon. There are crabs whose bodies are like human faces, angry and disappointed faces with mouth parts gabbling silently, urgently. These faces are carried on jointed legs, they hurry along the tidal edge drivenly surviving from one moment to the next; there is no time to lose if their line of angry and disappointed faces is to continue.

  In the spring tides the female crab releases her ten thousand eggs, each one a potential angry and disappointed face and most of them will be eaten by the creatures of the sea. The female stands not like a face on legs, she stands huge, heroic and technological, like a spacecraft poised on elaborately articulated legs; she stands like the most modern thing in the world and she expels into the sea these ten thousand ancient faces.

  There’s no end to me, no limit, no way to define or measure me, no way of knowing what I am or how much of me there is. There is an endless surging and undulating of me, an endless cycle of ebb and flow: that is called the sea. Little moments of me have lines drawn before and after and these moments are given names like Orpheus and Eurydice and they become stories. But I am wordless, heaving in the ocean night of me, stirring in the dark trees, breathing in and breathing out my soul.

  I resumed the unfinished Dracula page. Van Helsing drove a stake into the heart of the beautiful vampire. NNYURGHLLGHHhhaaaaah! shrieked the Vermeer girl.

  7 Nnngghh, Zurff, Kruljjj

  When I arrived at Classic Comics the next afternoon I noticed a little more liveliness, a little more motion in the place than usual; there was that unmistakable quickening that comes with the smell of new business. In Sol Mazzaroth’s office I saw a full-page four-colour proof of an old newspaper ad for Orpheus Men’s Toiletries pinned up on the corkboard. They’d reproduced the pastel drawing by Redon with the golden lyre-head of Orpheus, the blue-green lyre, the golden mountainscape, the violet sky. Overlapping a corner of the Redon was a photograph of a chunky amphora-shaped imitation clay bottle with pseudo-Greek letters incised on it. CLASSIQUE: ETERNAL MAGIC BY ORPHEUS, said the headline I’d written years ago.

  ‘Takes you back, doesn’t it,’ said Mazzaroth.

  ‘I don’t want to be taken back,’ I sa
id.

  ‘It’s all happening,’ he said, swivelling excitedly in his black leather chair. ‘We’re going glossy and we’re merging with He. No more of this kid shit with one-inch single-column ads for catapults and model steam engines - we’re talking full-page four-colour Yves St Laurent and Alpha Romeo and Orpheus. What I want to do now is get into real classics, I mean your actual Greek ones, I don’t know why I never thought of it before. This is a chance to broaden and deepen our parameters.’ He picked up a copy of Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary.‘Listen to this:

  … the Thracian women, whom he had offended by his coldness to their amorous passion, or, according to others, by his unnatural gratifications and impure indulgences, attacked him while they celebrated the orgies of Bacchus, and after they had torn his body to pieces, they threw his head into the Hebrus, where it still articulated the words ‘Eurydice! Eurydice!’ as it was carried down the stream into the Aegean Sea.

  ‘That’s what I call a story with possibilities,’ he said. ‘I want you to work this up into something we can run as a serial in the first six issues.’

  ‘There’s not a lot to work up, is there,’ I said. ‘All we know about Orpheus is what a great musician he was and how Eurydice was bitten by a snake while being chased by Aristaeus and she died and Orpheus went to the underworld to bring her back and so on.’

  ‘Come on, Herman, this is an X-rated magazine. You can easily get one instalment out of the Thracian women and their amorous passion and another out of the unnatural gratifications. And of course there’s Eurydice and all that underworld action, maybe a big fight between Orpheus and Hades before he gets her out of there. Or maybe Persephone gets the hots for him and there’s a heavy scene with her, there’s no end to the underworld possibilities. You’ll think of something good to start it off, like how he gets the magic lyre, maybe some thunder and lightning on a mountaintop or he’s got to wrestle somebody for it or kill a monster or whatever. This isn’t going to be some little wimp Orpheus, what we want is a really hunky guy, we’ll use Pektoralis for the art, he’ll give it that heroic sci-fi look. And we’re not doing it comic-style, either - no speech balloons, it’s going to be strictly quality stuff with the text under the pictures. Here, have a look at the dummy.’

  CLASSIQUE, it said on the cover in pseudo-Greek lettering. The cover photo was a bronzed youth leaping out of the sea with shining drops of water scattering from him. Over the sky and the water were listed the contents:

  CRUISING THE AEGEAN

  THE TREATS OF SAN FRANCISCO

  AIDS: GHETTO OF FEAR

  GREAT SALADS OF THE WORLD

  GÖSTA KRAKEN, EYE OF DARKNESS

  ORPHEUS: SIX-PART PICTURE SERIES

  ‘Gösta Kraken,’ I said. ‘Didn’t he do a film called Quagmires?’

  ‘Bogs,’ said Sol. ‘He’s the hottest thing since Tarkovsky. His latest film is Codename Orpheus. What do you think of the dummy?’

  ‘Looks glossy.’

  ‘Classique, same as the after-shave. Orpheus is running a special full page.’ He opened the dummy to it. There was a detail of the Redon drawing but most of the page was taken up by a discreetly shadowy photograph of two nude men.

  CLASSIQUE BY ORPHEUS:

  MAGIC EVER NEW FROM THE GOLDEN AGE

  ‘How does that grab you?’ he said.

  ‘NNNGGHH,’ I said. ‘ZURFF, KRULJJJ.’

  ‘It’s a big, big market; this merger is going to mean a five million increase in circulation and an estimated twelve million pounds in advertising revenue. What it means for you is four big ones.’

  ‘Four thousand pounds!’ I was only getting six hundred for Dracula.

  ‘You’re in the big time now and it’s only the beginning. Theseus and the Minotaur - what really happened in the labyrinth, eh? Talk about unnatural practices. Pasiphaë and the bull before that, naturally. But first let’s get Orpheus off the ground.’

  ‘Or on it, face down.’

  ‘That’s it. I’m going to need your finished adaptation in a month so give this your best upmarket thinking and get back to me in the next couple of days with your outline.’

  ‘Sol,’ said his classically endowed secretary, ‘I have Kuwait for you.’

  Mazzaroth squeezed my hand. ‘We’ll talk soon, OK? Let’s have lunch.’

  ‘What about Dracula? I finished it this morning.’

  He took the envelope from me. ‘This’ll run in the last issue of Classic Comics. Ciao.’

  ‘Bye-bye,’ said his secretary, her name was Kim. I found myself in the waiting-room looking up at the Calder that stirred silently like speech balloons from God. I was going down in the lift; the doors opened; the building was behind me; the sounds of High Holborn closed around me; I was out in the street feeling unlucky and walking in such a manner that oncoming pedestrians found me opposing them like a mirror image, sidestepping with them in perfect synchrony to do the same again. I sensed that something that until now had taken no notice of me had slowly lifted up its head and was watching me. There leaped into my mind those lines from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’:

  Like one, that on a lonesome road

  Doth walk in fear and dread,

  And having once turn’d round walks on,

  And turns no more his head;

  Because he knows, a frightful fiend

  Doth close behind him tread.

  Then of course my cruel picture-shuffling mind gave me Luise as an albatross soaring on a boundless marine sky. There was a leaden feeling in my arms and in my chest; I wished from the bottom of my heart that Sol Mazzaroth had never mentioned Orpheus to me.

  In the underground I looked up and found the pseudo-Greek ORPHEUS TRAVEL card staring at me. The light in the carriage was like the light in someone else’s bathroom when you’re sick at a party.

  Trying to walk naturally and be invisible I surfaced at Oxford Circus and made my way to Istvan Fallok’s Piranesi corner of Soho. There he was in his electronic twilight with his veiled music going and all his little eyes glowing their different colours around him in the dusk.

  ‘How’s it going?’ he said.

  ‘It’s too soon to say.’ I gave him the electrodes and the wires and a cheque for fifty pounds and he tore up the cheque and gave me my anorak.

  ‘Want a coffee?’ he said.

  ‘Not now, thanks.’ I almost said, ‘I’m being followed.’

  ‘You look as if you were about to say something.’

  ‘I often look that way. I’ll be going now. See you.’

  ‘See you,’ said Fallok, and receded into his musical twilight.

  8 Tower Hill and the Cheshire

  Cheese

  When I got home I sat at my desk but I couldn’t bear the thought of making words appear on the screen. I looked up Orpheus in the telephone directory. There were only Orpheus Travel in the Fulham Road, Orpheus Wines, Impt & Whlslrs in SE16, and the Orpheus & Tower Bridge Club in Savage Gardens, EC3.

  Savage Gardens! I dialled the number and after four or five rings a woman answered, ‘Orpheus and Tower Bridge Club; can I help you?’ In the background I could hear the clatter of cutlery and crockery.

  ‘Can you tell me what sort of a club it is?’ I said.

  ‘It’s a members’ club.’ She sounded busy.

  ‘You mean, people just come there to eat and drink?’

  ‘Yes, it’s just a members’ club.’

  ‘There’s no musical activity of any kind?’

  ‘Oh no, nothing like that.’

  ‘How does one become a member?’

  ‘There’s a form to fill in.’

  ‘Haven’t I got to be proposed by somebody?’

  ‘Oh yes, you’ve got to be proposed and seconded by members of the club.’

  ‘I don’t know anybody who’s a member.’

  ‘What company or firm are you with?’

  ‘I’m not with anyone, I’m a freelance writer.’

  ‘Just a minute.’ She consulted briefly with
someone. ‘Yes, that’s all right. Come along.’

  ‘What are your hours?’

  ‘We’re here from nine to seven.’

  ‘You don’t do suppers then.’

  ‘Oh no, we only do lunches.’

  The idea of a club of people eating lunches was frightening to me. Orphic action seemed unlikely in such a setting. Still, I thought, a place called Savage Gardens must have significance.

  I looked it up in my A to Z. It was just by the Tower Hill tube station, close to Trinity House and Trinity Square, near Seething Lane, Hart Street, and Crutched Friars. South of it were the river and Tower Bridge.

  I left the house at about five o’clock. It was novembering hard outside; the dark air sang with the dwindle of the year, the sharpening of it to the goneness that was drawing nearer, nearer with every moment. Pinky-orange shone the electrical-hibiscus street lamps; almost their light had a fragrance; the brown leaves underfoot insisted on the ghosts of dark trees standing in the place of lamps and houses; the pinky-orange globes hung mingled with the swaying dark and winter branches; the winter lights and traffic, the winter walkers in the dark street all moved through the ghostly wood and went their way upon the ancient leafy track.

  Fulham Broadway station, its platforms half indoors, half out in the weather and the winter dark, was lit up and festive looking, the people moving down the stairs to the platforms seemed each of them the forward edge of a fascinating story urgent to be told. The first train was an Edgware Road one; I got on and changed to an Upminster train at Earl’s Court.