Russell Hoban - Medusa Frequency

‘Seven years ago, with my sound man.’

‘What do you suppose she heard in him?’

‘Other music.’

‘And what did she ever see in you?’

‘Flickering images.’

‘Of what?’

‘It doesn’t matter, it’s the flickering that gives the excitement. Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion with the revolving of the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we experience the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four pictures per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop, rrks?’

‘Luise saw all that in you, did she?’

‘It isn’t only that I make films, I am in myself a big flickerer and women respond to this. I’m so much there/not there/there/not there. Very exciting. It stimulates a woman’s natural holding-on reflex.’

‘And yet Luise seems to have let go of you.’

‘Nothing is for ever.’

‘Fallok composes electronic music; I write novels; you direct films; the one after you (whom she probably left five years ago) was a sound engineer. Before Fallok she was with a man who ran a restaurant.’

‘By now it’s a computer programmer or a doctor; into the arts she came and out of the arts she has gone, vnnvvzzz. What did we do wrong?’

‘You don’t know? You don’t know what you did wrong?’

‘My behaviour was impeccable. When she was with me she moved among top-class people — film stars, composers, painters, writers; we went to all the best restaurants, we had friends with yachts and villas on the Côte d’Azur and in the Greek islands: the whole thing was conducted in the style one would expect of me.’

‘Were you faithful to her?’

‘Faithful!’ His large face leapt back as if I had hit him with a pizza. ‘Faithful! I can only be faithful to the flickering; more than that I don’t accept the moral authority of.’

‘Two years with you. I can’t understand it. I’m rotten but you’re a real creep.’

‘Were you faithful to her?’

‘No.’

‘Then why do you look at me as if you’ve just come down from the mountain with stone tablets in your hands?’

‘Because I know I’m rotten and you don’t know that you are.’

‘You make a virtue of necessity; being a self-confessed rotten you are aware of your rottenness. Being unrotten I have not such an awareness.’

‘Why don’t you flicker off and manifest your sound and picture somewhere else.’

‘You’re a very troubled person, znnzz?’

‘I can live with it.’

‘Are you certain of that?’

‘Don’t let me keep you; you must have many urgent demands on your time.’

‘I assure you that only a charitable impulse has kept me in your company this long; ordinarily I don’t like to get too close to obscurity, it’s like quicksand.’

‘You’d better back off then before you get swallowed up.’

‘Are you working on a novel now?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Good luck with it, I hope you resolve your difficulties.’

‘What makes you think I’m having difficulties?’

‘You seem to be falling into the spaces between the successive appearances of yourself. If you’re not careful you’ll disappear.’

‘If I stop thinking you it might well be you that disappears.’

‘I’m disappearing now,’ he said, ‘but you will continue to think of me,’ and he withdrew.

Thinking of him I went upstairs and stood in front of a painting by Frans Post (1612-80), Catalogue No. 915, Gezicht op het Eiland Tamaraca. It was a strange painting, a little on the naif side — as apparently artless in its composition as a snapshot, as if the painter had sat himself down on the beach, aimed himself at the island across the water, and painted whatever came between him and it: two black men; two white men; two horses; an expanse of pinky dawn-looking water; two small boats moored by the island; in the foliage of the island was a naked place that looked bitten out by a giant. One of the black men balanced a basket on his head with one hand. He wore nothing but a pair of short white trousers. The other black man, also in white shorts, had put down his basket of yellow fruit and stood holding the reins of a white horse. One of the burdensomely clothed white men stood on the beach waving at or pointing towards the island while the other sat his chestnut horse which had a white blaze on its face and a white sock on the offside hind leg. He did not look at the island.

Perhaps the actual time in the painting was not dawn. But here in the Johan de Witthuis the water across which the Island Tamaraca was seen was dawn water. I could feel in this dawn a presence looking out at me, I could feel in it the buzzing and the swarming of what was gathering itself. I could feel myself approaching the correct frequency, I held myself carefully tuned to it when it came.

Out of the pinky dawn water, naked and shining in the dawn, rose Luise, quivering like a mirage between the beach and the island seen across the water. Quivering, shimmering, her body becoming, becoming, becoming a face loosely grinning, with hissing snakes writhing round it in the shining dawn. Around me ceased the sounds of the day; the stone of me cracked and I came out of myself quite clean, like a snake out of an egg, nothing obscuring my sight or my hearing. The Gorgon’s head, the face of Medusa, shimmered luminous in a silence that crackled with its brilliance. Her mouth was moving.

What? I said. What are you saying?

You have found me, she said. I trust you with the idea of me.

You, I said.

Yes and yes and yes and yes, she said. Look and know me. Hold the idea of me in you by night and by day, never lose it.

Yes and yes and yes and yes, I said, I look and I know you. I will hold the idea of you in me by night and by day, I will never lose it.

She was gone in the pinky dawn water between the beach and the Island Tamaraca.

I went out of the Johan de Witthuis and looked all around at the unimpeachable objectivity of the Dutch daylight. One would be ashamed to draw badly in that light.

Moving carefully so as not to disturb the unknown idea I had lunch in some sunny windowed place that looked out on the street. Then I walked back to the station, noticed a little hotel opposite with its name in quotation marks, ‘Du Commerce’, took a room for the hours remaining until the departure of the boat train at 2200, was shown upstairs, lay down, fell asleep, and dreamed of a secret cave behind a waterfall.

It was between four and five in the afternoon when I woke up. Careful not to ask myself any questions, I had a shower, went down to the bar, drank beer, drank gin, brought a second beer up to my room and looked out of the window at the early evening. The light had gone a grainy purple-blue. Beyond the station stood white office blocks, fluorescent-lit against the sky, looking as if they belonged to memory and time long past. Yes, I thought, there were people then; they too were happy and sad, they too looked out upon just such a purple-blue evening. Through the glass sides of the Pieter de Hooch railway station I saw the yellow carriages slide in and out.

I switched on the overhead room light, it was a little flame-shaped bulb in an electrified oil-lamp. Somewhere such bulbs are manufactured; what does it say on the box? 10 w ETERNA-FLAME DEPRESSION perhaps. Outside the window a double street lamp stood up like a luminous pinky-orange hibiscus. Beyond the lamps the yellow trains arrived and departed with a soft and rapid dinging of bells in the grainy purple-blue evening. Passing under my window was Luise walking slowly away towards the station in a yellow mac the same colour as the trains.