Russell Hoban - Medusa Frequency

When I looked around again I saw Melanie Falsepercy just taking off her coat as she sat down in a corner by one of the red-shaded lamps. Her face seemed to have been called up on the evening air by the hibiscus lamplight, the clear bright darkness, the smell of roasting chestnuts, the winter-sharp woodland of the year that she brought in with her. Istvan Fallok was with her; without seeing me he sat down with his back to me.

She hadn’t noticed me. I moved around to the other side of the table so that my back was to her and Fallok. All of it is happening now, I thought, and any part of it contains the whole of it, the pictures needn’t be looked at in any particular order. I turned around and found Melanie Falsepercy looking straight at me. I looked away, finished my drink quickly, and slunk out of the Cheshire Cheese without looking back.

The morning after seeing Melanie Falsepercy and Istvan Fallok at the Cheshire Cheese I crossed Putney Bridge at a little after seven and went to the place where the head had first appeared to me.

The sky grew pale, a crow flew over the river, shouting and flaunting its blackness.

‘Head of Orpheus,’ I said, ‘are you there?’

Nothing in the river but the boats at their moorings, nothing on the shore but me. Traffic hissing and rushing over the bridge and on the Lower Richmond Road. I could feel that it was going to be one of those hard blue-sky sunny days and my heart sank.

‘Sol Mazzaroth wants me to do an upmarket Orpheus story,’ I said, ‘but I don’t want to do it. I want to hear what you have to tell me, we have to finish your story.’

Nothing. A second crow flew over the river shouting and flaunting like the other. A third crow followed the second. The sky was hard and blue like painted steel.

‘Thank you very much indeed,’ I said, and went home.

‘Mr Orff?’ said the telephone.

‘This is we.’

‘I have a call for you from Sol Mazzaroth,’ said the voice of the Classic Comics telephonist. Her name was Lucretia and she was a perfectly respectable woman of fifty or so whose voice had in it just the slightest hint of high boots and a whip.

‘Hi, Sol,’ I said.

‘Just a moment,’ she said, ‘I haven’t put him on yet.’

‘Ring me back when he’s on then,’ I said, and hung up. Ring, ring, said the telephone.

‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘I have a call for Sol Mazzaroth from Herman Orff.’

‘I was just calling you,’ said Lucretia. ‘I have Sol Mazzaroth for you.’

‘Hi, Sol.’

‘Just a moment, please,’ she said.

‘Then you haven’t really got him, have you.’ I hung up again. This time I took the phone off the hook.

After a while I rang up Istvan Fallok. Behind him I heard the Hermes music again. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I need another fix.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you mean you don’t know?’

‘The way you freaked out the first time, there’s no telling what a second jolt might trigger off. And for all I know I could be had up for practising EEG without a licence.’

‘You’re the one that got me hooked. Don’t chicken out on me now.’

‘You’ve got funny ideas about what constitutes chickening out. Some people might say you were chickening out when you tried to get a novel out of your head with a machine.’

‘At least I’m man enough not to lay off the Orpheus action on somebody else and give them angina.’

‘Then I’m sure you’re man enough to carry on alone. Now if you don’t mind I have to get back to what I’m doing.’

‘Don’t we all,’ I said as I stared at the wordless monitor.

THINK OF ME AS I THINK OF YOU, said the Kraken.

Last time you didn’t want me to think of you. You were afraid you might be real.

I AM REAL. I KNOW NOW THAT IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO EXIST WITHOUT BEING REAL. THINK OF ME.

Why do you want me to think of you?

I WANT TO BE MORE REAL.

Why?

IT’S IN THE NATURE OF THINGS.

I do think of you. I have always thought of you, I’ve told you that before.

HOW HAVE YOU THOUGHT OF ME? WHAT IS THE FORM OF ME IN YOUR THOUGHTS?

I told you that the first time we spoke.

TELL ME AGAIN.

I think of you as the great cephalopod, ancient of the deeps. I think of you as the great thinking head in the blackness of the ultimate deep, I think of you as the Kraken.

AND THE LITTLE CHILDREN? YOU SPOKE OF LITTLE CHILDREN THE FIRST TIME.

Even little children have an idea of you in their minds. They draw a great head with all the limbs growing out of it.

VAST AND WRITHING.

Actually they mostly draw your limbs thin and gangling.

BUT I AM VAST AND WRITHING.

Yes, of course.

WHEN DID YOU BEGIN TO THINK OF ME?

For as long as my mind has been you have been in my mind. Always have I heard the circles of your terror widening in the deeps but it was the head of Orpheus I wanted to talk to really.

YOU KNOW THAT I’M THE UNDERHEAD, I’M DEEPER THAN THE HEAD OF ORPHEUS.

Yes. I have to go out now. We’ll talk soon.

I switched off the monitor. Whenever the Kraken and I spoke in words on the screen I experienced a surge of terror at the centre of me that was comfortable and familiar, I felt as if I’d always known the Kraken and I knew that we always told each other the truth. With the head of Orpheus things were always awkward and it was by its own admission unreliable but I felt a strong need to talk to it. I couldn’t think of any reason to go out but there weren’t any bananas in the house so I went to the North End Road market.

‘Look, look!’ shouted a man. ‘Look at this cabbage! Get yourself a head, you never know when you’ll need one!’ It was the gom yawncher man from the Cheshire Cheese who’d also been the broken-brimmed-hat man in the underground. ‘Look, look!’ he shouted.

I looked. There it was, green-slimed and barnacled among the lawful fruit and vegetables on the barrow. Its mouth was open and speaking. ‘Swaying, swaying their tops against the sky the trees came down to the water’s edge,’ said the head of Orpheus, ‘and I found her there in the mottled sunlight and the leafy shade by the river.’

‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘not here!’ To the gom yawncher man I said, ‘I’ll have this one.’

‘Sixty-five p for the thinking man’s cabbage head,’ he said as he weighed it and wrapped it up in page three of the Sun, ‘with a visual treat thrown in.’

‘You remember me, don’t you?’ I said. ‘From the underground and the Cheshire Cheese?’

‘How could I forget?’ he said.

As I hurried home through the people and the traffic the head continued its story. I had to hold it close to my ear to hear what it was saying, ‘In the leafy shade she lay all huddled and forlorn, the red-gold hair, the ivory of her in the cool and leafy shade by the river, her garments all disordered offering to the eye her shapeliness, her long and rounded limbs; splendid and sculptural she was, like a broken winged victory. The honeyed air droned and sang; the ivory of her, the pathetic and savage splendour of her beauty sang in my eyes as I knelt beside her. Gone she was and lost to me for ever, Eurydice! Eurydice!’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ I said. ‘How can she be gone and lost to you for ever when you haven’t even met her yet?’

‘Where was I?’ said the head. ‘Where did I leave off last time?’

‘You heard the unseen woman weeping by the river and you became the world-child and the tortoise you’d killed. Underworld opened to you and you sang and blood came out of your mouth and your nose.’

‘Yes. Weeping, weeping in the golden afternoon her voice came to me in the mottled sunlight by the river and I went to where she lay all huddled and forlorn, the red-gold hair, the ivory of her in the cool and leafy shade by the river, her garments all disordered offering to the eye her shapeliness, her long and rounded limbs; splendid and sculptural she was, like a broken winged victory. The honeyed air droned and sang, the ivory of her, the pathetic and savage splendour of her beauty sang in my eyes as I knelt beside her. She looked at me not as one looks at a stranger but as if she expected me to comfort her. Full of desire and uncertainty I took her in my arms. She smelled of honey, it was like a dream, there was no strangeness in it; there already seemed to be a long history between us.’ The head lapsed into silence.