Russell Hoban - Medusa Frequency

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 said.

‘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.

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.