The Medusa Frequency

by Russell Hoban

  I put down the hammer. Maybe we can work something out, I said. After all, they’re even doing Shakespeare in comics nowadays. And I’m sure it’s what Shakespeare would’ve wanted, he was a popular writer in his time.

  Shakespeare was what he was and you’re what you are, said the current account: you’re a miserable no-talent coward.

  One day you’re going to push me too far, I said.

  That’ll be the day, it said.

  ‘Herman?’ said Sol. ‘Are you there?’

  ‘Sol, I haven’t been able to get started on Orpheus yet.’

  ‘Herman, what are you telling me? Just the other day you said, - hang on, I’ve got it right here - you said, “GNGGX.” You said, “NNZVNGGGG,” you said, “NNVLL.” And you said you’d have something for me to look at on FNURRN, which is today in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘Sol, there’s a lot more to this Orpheus thing than you might think.’

  ‘Please, spare me the song and dance. When can you have something for me?’

  ‘Can I ring you up tonight?’

  ‘I’ll ring you. Tell me when.’

  ‘Late. Round about midnight.’

  ‘Right, talk to you then.’

  What I like about you, said the current account, is that you’re reliable. You can always be relied on to have no balls.

  I’m not sure what I’m going to do, I said. I’ve got to think about it.

  Right, said the current account. We’ll talk again soon, OK? We’ll have lunch.

  I rang up Istvan Fallok. ‘I’ve just come back from The Hague,’ I said. ‘I ran into Luise there.’

  ‘Luise! What’s she doing?’

  ‘She’s married, big bearded husband named Lars. They go skiing and they have a forty-foot ketch, it’s called Eurydike. They have a year-old daughter named Ursula. They live in Oslo and Lars installs computer systems. How’s that grab you.’

  ‘You needed me to know about it, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘OK, I know about it. Bye-bye.’

  ‘Wait. Did you know about Luise and Kraken?’

  ‘Yes, I knew about that. Bye-bye again.’

  I sat there with the telephone in my hand thinking of Melanie. No, I thought, wait a little.

  I put on the tape of the Blue Note Thelonious Monk Volume One that begins with ‘Round about Midnight’. Beyond my window the grey wind rattled the brown leaves and two boys ran past kicking a football that thumped and skittered among the parked cars. Sheltered in Monk’s midnight dome, his caves of nice, I typed on to the screen:

  THE STORY OF ORPHEUS

  Something hit the front door with a sodden smack. I opened it and the head of Orpheus leaped up and fastened its teeth in my arm. Filthy and battered, its features flattened as if it had been rolling through the streets for years, it hummed and buzzed its blind rage.

  ‘Nice to see you again,’ I said. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?’

  The head continued biting. Blood was running down my arm.

  ‘Something’s bothering you, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘Is it anything I’ve done?’

  The head jerked itself towards the monitor and THE STORY OF ORPHEUS.

  ‘Is that it?’ I said.

  The head nodded.

  ‘I’ve told you that Sol Mazzaroth wanted something in the Orpheus line,’ I said. ‘I was about to see what I could do with it.’

  The head shifted its jaws and got a better bite.

  ‘You’d rather I didn’t. That’s a bit dog-in-the-manger, isn’t it? You won’t finish your version and you don’t want me to make up my own.’

  The head opened its mouth to speak and I caught it as it fell. ‘You keep making me appear,’ it said, ‘and I’m so tired.’

  ‘You’re tired? What about me? Life wasn’t hard enough so I had to go to The Hague and find Luise with a big bearded husband and a daughter and a forty-foot ketch.’

  ‘Wide Justice,’ said the head.

  ‘What do you mean, “Wide Justice”?’

  ‘That’s what the Greek name Eurydike means.’

  ‘I can handle Wide Justice; it’s the forty-foot ketch that gets up my nose. I can see the husband all bearded and fearless at the helm, his name is Lars. The boat’s name is Eurydike.’

  ‘Bastard.’

  ‘Indeed. I travelled over land and sea to find the Vermeer girl and what did I get for my trouble? Bearded Larses and forty-foot ketches and Gösta Kraken.’

  ‘Who’s Gösta Kraken?’

  ‘He’s one of the Luise old boys. He did a film called Codename Orpheus.’

  ‘Ponce. Who’s the Vermeer girl?’

  I told the head about the Vermeer girl.

  ‘She’s another Eurydice,’ said the head.

  ‘What else is new?’

  ‘You can’t go looking for Eurydice.’

  ‘Look who’s talking.’

  ‘My perceptions and my understanding change from moment to moment,’ said the head. ‘What I mean is that you don’t find Eurydice by looking for her.’

  ‘I found the Vermeer girl gone,’ I said. ‘I found a dark wood, I found the Island Tamaraca, I found Medusa. And I found Luise definitively gone. Standing before me and gone for ever.’

  ‘You found Medusa?’

  ‘Shimmering and luminous above the pinky dawn water.’

  ‘I never found Medusa,’ said the head.

  ‘Were you looking for her?’

  ‘Every man is, I know that now. Do you know what the idea of her is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Behind Medusa lie wisdom and the dark womb hidden like a secret cave behind a waterfall. Behind Medusa lies Eurydice unlost.’

  ‘Let it be, you’re wording it to death.’

  ‘Perhaps you don’t need me any more,’ said the head, as my arms began to feel leaden. ‘Don’t be offended, please, we still have the story to finish.’

  ‘I wonder if I can sing now.’

  ‘Please don’t. When you tried to sing that first morning by the river the silence was awful, I don’t want to hear it again.’

  ‘Don’t be so delicate. As long as I have any kind of being I have to keep trying.’

  ‘Surely there’s a time for singing and a time for silence.’

  ‘My business is singing, not discretion. Be quiet and listen. What time of day is it now?’

  ‘Afternoon. Hang on, if you’re going to sing I might as well record it this time.’ I put the head on my desk and plugged a microphone into the tape deck.

  ‘I’ll sing an evening song,’ said the head. Just as the mouth opened an aeroplane passed overhead. The lips and tongue moved but again I heard nothing. I touched the head but wasn’t sure whether I felt any vibration or not. After the plane had gone the mouth continued to move in silence for quite a long time, then it closed. There was a little pause, then the head said, ‘Well?’

  ‘I didn’t hear anything, although it’s hard to be sure, there was so much noise from the aeroplane.’

  There was a boy’s face at the window. His hand appeared, pointing at the head of Orpheus on my desk. I went to the front door and found two boys on the steps. ‘Can we have our football back?’ said the first one. ‘We didn’t mean to kick it at your door.’

  ‘I haven’t got your football.’

  ‘Yes you have. You picked it up and took it inside and it’s on your desk now. We’ve been ringing your bell for a long time.’

  ‘The bell’s disconnected.’

  ‘We’ve been knocking as well,’ said the second boy.

  ‘I never heard it.’

  ‘Well, anyhow, give us back our ball,’ said the first boy.

  ‘What did your ball cost you?’

  The first boy looked at the second boy. ‘Ten quid.’

  ‘There’s a sports shop in the Broadway near the bus stop; you can buy another ball there, OK?’ I gave him ten pounds and both boys disappeared.

  ‘Where were we?’ I said to the head.
r />   ‘I’ve sung for you twice,’ it said, ‘and both times you’ve said you haven’t heard me.’

  ‘This time the microphone was listening too; let’s see whether it heard anything.’ I rewound the tape, put on headphones, and played it back. It was surprising at first to hear the head speaking in my voice but there was of course nothing extraordinary in it; if it could use a football for manifesting itself there was no reason why it shouldn’t use my voice to speak with. When it said on the tape that it was going to sing I turned up the volume and watched the level meters. There went the aeroplane. The cooling fan of the Apple II was audible, and above it there was a faint high-pitched humming that went up and down in a halting and uncertain tune that was just loud enough to move the luminous bars on the level meters a stroke or two past the –20 decibel mark. Faint and distant it struggled to reach me like some broken melody coming round the ionosphere through the storms and surges of the shortwave night to my lost outpost in Fulham. It was of course my own voice but I hadn’t remembered humming at the time; it sounded as if I might have been trying to follow something that I was straining to hear.

  ‘Well?’ said the head. ‘Can you hear yourself hearing me?’

  ‘Yes, but why can’t I hear your voice, the voice of Orpheus singing?’

  ‘Let’s be realistic; I’m a hallucination.’

  ‘Right, that’s why the tape recorder hears only my voice. But if I hallucinate an Orpheus voice when you talk to me why can’t I do it when you sing?’

  ‘Maybe I’m not real enough to you.’

  ‘Maybe nothing is. Maybe the third novel isn’t real enough to me, maybe Luise wasn’t real enough to me.’

  ‘Maybe you yourself aren’t real enough to you.’

  ‘How does the world-child do it? How does the world-child hold the world together and keep it real?’

  ‘The world-child has been told that this is a world,’ said the head, ‘and it believes it; it is the energy of this belief that binds the world together. The world-child holds in its mind the idea of every single thing: root and stone, tree and mountain, river and ocean and every living thing. The world-child holds in its mind the idea of woman and man, the idea of love.’

  ‘Who told the world-child all this that it now believes?’

  ‘Each thing told itself to the world-child: the tree; the mountain; the ocean; the woman; the man. You and I, we have told ourselves to it.’

  ‘And the idea of love? Who told that to the world-child?’

  ‘It didn’t have to be told,’ said the head. ‘This idea arises of itself from that energy of belief that keeps the mountains from exploding and the seas from going up in steam. It’s only a kind of cohesion that binds together possibilities that have spun together out of the blackness.’

  ‘Like you and Eurydice.’

  ‘It didn’t hold us together long.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Even the beginning wasn’t very auspicious, was it,’ said the head. ‘The first I ever heard of Eurydice was the sound of her weeping.’

  ‘That was because she dreamed she was the world-child and she was afraid; that was nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Yes, it was,’ said the head. ‘She was weeping because she knew that the world-child is always betrayed.’

  ‘And that was in your song?’

  ‘Of course it was; it was in the strange and many colours of the death of love.’

  ‘Her weeping came before your singing,’ I said. ‘Maybe those strange and many colours in your song came from the weeping that started you singing.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘What’s so obvious about it?’

  ‘Don’t you understand?’ said the head. ‘There’s only one.’

  ‘Only one what?’

  ‘Only one femaleness, whether it’s called Eurydice or Medusa or Persephone or Luise. As Eurydice/Persephone she opened underworld for me, the world under the world, the moment under the moment. And from underworld came my song of love’s beginning and the betraying of the world-child and the death of love that made her weep.’

  ‘Oh God,’ I said, ‘it just keeps going round in a circle.’

  ‘She never liked my singing,’ said the head, ‘I’ve told you that. Once she took the lyre out of my hands and said, “Love is its own music.” But that doesn’t really mean anything, does it? I mean, if music is what you do then that’s what you’ll do, isn’t it. Then she said to me, “You emptied the tortoise-shell for your music and now you’re emptying us.’”

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t only the music that was bothering her.’

  ‘You’re thinking of other women.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I remember how their eyes shone in the firelight,’ said the head, ‘and beyond the firelight the wild beasts crouched and black trees nodded in the night. I remember the dawns when I found myself in strange places encircled by trees and stones and sleeping figures wet with dew. I remember the tops of the trees swaying in the dawn wind, how the night was still in them like a cat biting the neck of its mate.’

  ‘Groupies.’

  ‘I never said I was any better than anyone else,’ said the head.

  ‘And yet,’ I said, ‘I suppose the world-child is greedy for sweets as all children are.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. The world-child perceives the lover as the whole world, the world-child is greedy for the sea and the mountains and the death that live in that one person who is loved.’

  ‘I told you the first time we spoke’, I said, ‘that your morality might be too much for me.’

  ‘It’s too much for me as well,’ said the head. ‘My perceptions have always been beyond my capabilities.’

  ‘Then you accept that this world-child is some kind of an impossible ideal.’

  ‘Whatever it is,’ said the head, ‘it’s an idea that won’t let go of me.’

  ‘But you weren’t able to go on being the world-child,’ I said. ‘You lost it, and now you roam the world rotting and eyeless, telling your story to strangers like a drunk in a bar. Is this your punishment?’

  ‘Being Orpheus was my punishment.’

  ‘For what?’ I said.

  ‘For killing the tortoise.’

  ‘Can that one killing matter so much?’

  ‘Nothing matters more than anything else. Things arrange themselves in certain ways and it is left to us to make the connections.’

  ‘And what’s the connection between you and me? I know you’re the first of my line and all that but why are you telling me your story?’

  ‘I am that which responds,’ said the head, ‘I’ve told you that. You said yes three times and I was compelled to tell my story.’

  ‘Before I said yes three times you asked me three times if I wanted to hear the story.’

  ‘Well, it’s a story that wants to be told, isn’t it.’

  ‘And you made me take it on me that the story would be finished,’ I said. ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘The story is different every time,’ said the head, ‘and every time there are difficulties - I always need help with it and I’m always afraid it won’t go all the way to the end.’

  ‘Different each time. How can that be?’

  ‘How can it not be? A story is a thing that changes as it finds new perceptions, new ideas.’

  ‘Fallok was trying to do it with music,’ I said. ‘How far did he get?’

  ‘Not very.’

  ‘What do you think my chances are?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the head, ‘but if you can’t do it there’ll be somebody else.’

  ‘You mean if we can’t do it.’

  ‘Yes of course. Didn’t I say we?’

  ‘No, you didn’t. Why do you have to keep going through the story over and over?’

  ‘It’s got to come out differently one day,’ said the head.

  I looked away for a moment. When I looked back the head had become a football, one of those plastic ones they sell at Woolworth’s for thr
ee or four pounds.

  ‘Well, Herman,’ said Sol Mazzaroth, ‘here it is round about midnight.’ He hadn’t bothered to ring, he just jumped out of the telephone wearing red silk pyjamas and a black silk dressing-gown with a gold monogram and was pacing backwards and forwards through the clutter on my desk. ‘How’re we doing?’ he said. Pretending not to hear I stuffed him back into the receiver and took the phone off the hook.

  Hello, said my current account. I was just passing by and I thought I’d look in. You keeping well? Everything all right?

  You said I had no balls, I said.

  You know I was just kidding around, said the current account. I didn’t mean anything by it. What are you doing, where are you going?

  But I’d already jumped into the telephone and hurled myself through the circuits to Sol Mazzaroth asleep in his red silk pyjamas which were monogrammed the same as his dressing-gown. I shook him roughly, averting my eyes discreetly from whoever else was in the bed.

  ‘Herman!’ he said. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Three o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘I’m not going to do it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Orpheus wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘Herman, with respect, Orpheus was a wonderful musician but I doubt that he knew anything about magazine publishing. Stay with it and I’ll talk to you a little later in the morning, OK?’

  ‘Sol, I’m sorry but it’s not on. I really am not going to do it.’

  ‘Herman, you say you can’t do it but you still haven’t given me a reason I can understand.’

  ‘I can’t do it because it’s got to come out differently one day.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘It does to me.’ Through the dark and murmuring circuits I made my way back to my place. The current account lay dead on the floor, a thin trickle of blood coming from its mouth. From over the mantel the Vermeer girl smiled down on me.

  Herman, she said, you’re a hell of a guy.

  15 Life after Death?

  I went to bed and the next thing I knew I was awake again and it was getting on for ten o’clock in the morning. Ring, ring, said the telephone, ring ring. Seize him.

  ‘I’m right here,’ I said. ‘I’m tired of running. Here I stand.’