Russell Hoban - Turtle Diary

The place was in St John’s Wood. Big bright spacious flat, high ceilings. The kind of flat that so many young Americans seem to have found or inherited from expatriate uncles before rents went up and unfurnished flats became impossible to find. Mattresses on the floor with Indian spreads, many colourful cushions, some modern things, some rattan. Home-made abstractions and blown-up photos on the walls. Lots of shelves, lots of books. Expensive sound-equipment, speakers about four feet high.

The young man with the Bio-Feedback machine was a sleek and healthy beard-and-sandals American with a wonderful head of hair that looked as if it might charge him like a battery pack. Very peaceful and serene-looking, looked as if there were mostly alpha waves in his head. Cheques from home, I thought. Very likely never worked a day in his life. Family man too, the bathroom was full of toys and infant gear.

The alpha-wave detector was quite a modest little plastic-box affair that didn’t look as if it had more than £ 5 worth of parts and labour in it. He’d set it up on an impressive scaffolding of planks and pipes but it still didn’t look like more than £5.

‘What do you do for a living?’ I said.

‘This,’ he said peacefully. ‘And I’m the company’s representative for the machines so I’ll be selling them too.’

I sank into one of those big plastic hassocks that look like overripe tomatoes that have hit the ground and somehow not burst.

‘You?’ he said while he dabbed electrolytic jelly on the side and back of my head and fitted the electrodes. I felt ashamed of my dandruff.

‘Assistant in a bookshop,’ I said.

‘I thought it might be something literary in one way or another,’ he said. He turned on the machine, set the volume. ‘It’s a wave frequency filter and amplifier,’ he said. ‘You’ll hear the alpha waves.’

I listened. Dead silence.

‘Close your eyes,’ he said.

‘I don’t think I’ve got any alpha waves,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I’ve got anything but noise and static in my head.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ he said. ‘Everybody has alpha waves. Are you into meditation at all?’

‘No,’ I said. I closed my eyes. Silence from the machine. I thought of a grey heron I’d seen once flying over a marsh flapping very slowly. A nice serene thought. Silence from the machine. I let go of the heron, let myself sink back into whatever there might be to sink back into in my mind.

Cluck cluck cluck, said the machine quietly.

‘That’s alpha waves,’ said the young man.

I drifted into it again. Cluck cluck cluck cluck, said the machine in another little burst of chicken talk.

I went on with it for a while, I’d paid £2 for the hour. Sometimes I got bursts of ten or fifteen clucks together and was quite pleased with myself. That accounts for my not having gone mad, I thought. There must be quiet places in my head where I get a little rest now and then without knowing about it. A cheering thought.

I took off the electrodes. ‘What about your alpha waves?’ I said. ‘Are you good at it?’

‘Don’t you want to keep going?’ he said. ‘You still have more time.’

‘I don’t think I have the patience for a whole hour of it,’ I said. ‘I’d like to hear you do it.’

He wired himself up with the electrodes, closed his eyes and looked even more serene than before. Cluck cluck cluck cluck cluck cluck, went the machine steadily and smoothly like a Geiger counter next to a piece of uranium. It clucked almost continuously, with only the briefest of pauses.

I shook my head. What was there to say? He wiped the jelly off my dandruff.

‘Thank you,’ I said, and got up to leave.

‘Do you think you’d like to do it again?’ he said.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘But it’s nice to know the alpha waves are there sometimes.’

As I was going out he said, ‘I didn’t give you quite a straight answer when you asked me what I did for a living.’

‘Please,’ I said, ‘there’s no need to, I only asked out of curiosity.’

‘Actually I’ve been living on money from the States,’ he said. ‘But I hope to get going with this.’

I went home with my alpha waves. You never know what you’ve got going for you. Who knows what other kinds of waves are clucking along inside me, maybe homing me in on something good somewhere, sometime.

I didn’t go straight home. When I changed from the Bakerloo Line at Paddington I went up into the Main Line Station. I felt like being with a lot of people in a big open place. Ordinarily I don’t like pigeons but I like them under the glass roof of Paddington Station. Mingling with the rush of people the pigeons are quite different from the way they are when plodding about in squares and being fed by people who have nothing better to feed. Intolerant of me to think that. Pigeons, turtles, what’s the odds.

So much purposeful movement at Paddington, so many individual directions crossing one another, so many different lines of action! I always think that everyone else has good places to go to, they all seem so eager to get there. I sat on the low flat wooden railing by the Track One buffers and watched the figures passing in front of the light from the news-stand and under the grey glass sky of the roof. So many pretty girls! They were never so pretty when I was twenty. Two men were talking and one of them taking some change from his pocket dropped a ½p. While looking to see what he’d dropped he kicked it without seeing it. I watched it roll along the floor to be kicked in the opposite direction by another man who didn’t see it. By then the man who’d dropped it had moved on and when the ½p stopped rolling I went over and picked it up, put it in my pocket and went home.

In this morning’s Times I read that the astronauts on Skylab-2 have got two spiders with them. One of the spiders, named Arabella, has spun something like a normal web. ‘Weightlessness disorientated her at the start,’ says the news item from Houston, ‘and her first attempts produced only a few wisps, mainly in the corners of her cage. But today, on the thirteenth day of the Skylab-2 flight, Dr Owen Garriott was quite pleased with the work done by the spider. “This time the web is essentially, at first glance, like one you would find on the ground,” Dr Garriott said.’

That Arabella should have spun any sort of web, should have made the effort at all, overwhelms me. In her place I should have sulked or been sick I am sure. She didn’t even know which way was up let alone where she was or why and yet she spun a reasonably workable web out there in space. I hope they had the decency to bring some flies for her to catch, I can’t think they’d make her eat tiny frozen dinners squeezed out of tubes or whatever astronauts subsist on. And if they did bring flies those flies must appear somewhere on Skylab-2’s manifest: Flies, 12 doz. If there are flies up there no mention is made of them or how they adapted to weightlessness. Perhaps they’d use dead flies just as they use dead mice to feed the owls at the Zoo. In any case Arabella deserves a plaque on Skylab-2. But of course she doesn’t need one, hasn’t got the sort of mind that thinks about plaques. She needs no recognition, can recognize herself and spin a web wherever she may be. What good things instincts are!

Last night I had a dream thought that I held on to carefully until this morning. It was: Those who know it have forgotten every part of it, those who don’t know it remember it completely. Aggravating. Those who know or don’t know what? I haven’t a clue and what’s most annoying is that something in me knows what was meant.