Russell Hoban - Medusa Frequency

‘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.