Russell Hoban - Medusa Frequency

‘You too, Sol,’ I said as he climbed back into the phone and was gone.

So here we are then, I thought. This is the first day of the rest of my life. I got dressed, had breakfast, hurried to my desk. The corpse of the current account was half-buried under discarded pages. I uncovered it, went through its pockets and found enough to live on for six months if I managed very carefully.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s get organized.’ My voice was frightening in the silence. I switched on the radio and got the Voice of Greece with male and female singers one after another singing songs with ‘S’agapo’ in the refrain. All of them sang the words soothingly, almost lullabyingly. S’agapo, s’agapo. I love you, I love you.

‘All right,’ I said again. The football was still on my desk. I took it to the usual place near Putney Bridge and dropped it into the river.

When I got back I sat down and typed on to the screen:

1 LOOK FOR FREELANCE COMIC WORK.

2 TRY TO FINISH ORPHEUS STORY WHEN HEAD TURNS UP AGAIN.

3 NO MORE OTHER PEOPLE’S ORPHEUS.

Ring, ring, said the telephone.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Hello,’ said a vigorous female voice, ‘this is Hilary Forthryte, I’m with Mythos Films. I hope you don’t mind my ringing you up out of the blue like this.’

‘Not at all.’

‘Can you talk for a moment or are you in full spate?’

‘Not yet, I’m a late spater.’

‘Ah! I know what you mean. What I’m phoning about is to ask you whether you might like to do a film with us. We’ve got Channel 4 funding for six one-hour films under the series title The Tale Retold; we’ll be doing new versions of old myths and legends with six different directors. The first one I’ve spoken to is Gösta Kraken and he said he wants to work with you and a composer called Istvan Fallok.’

There was a pause at my end.

‘Do you know Kraken well?’

‘No. I’ve only met him once.’

‘But you’re familiar with his work.’

‘I’ve heard about Codename Orpheus.’

‘But you haven’t seen it?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘We’ve got a print of it, I can arrange a screening any time you like. What’s interesting is his use of Orpheus as semiosis rather than as story.’

‘Ah.’

‘We’ve also got prints of Bogs and Quicksand — those were the last two before Codename Orpheus and you can see his obsessions developing, his preoccupation with wetness and ooze as primal mindscape and his vision of a discarded world. Anyhow, without committing yourself at this point, do you think you like the idea in principle?’

‘Have you got a subject in mind for our film?’

‘Eurydice and Orpheus.’

‘But he’s already had a shot at that.’

‘As I’ve said, he’s obsessive. He says it’s an inexhaustible theme and he’s got a lot of new ideas for another approach.’

‘What sort of money are we approaching it with?’

‘We’ve got a budget of £250,000 per film; that works out at £8,000 each for director, composer, and writer, plus residuals. That’s not a lot of money but you’d be completely free to do what you like and I should think it might be quite fun if you’ve got the time to take it on.’

‘All of us getting paid the same, I’m surprised that Kraken agreed to that.’

‘He looks on this as a necessary exploration and he’s particularly keen on an equal partnership with no ego trips. I thought perhaps the four of us could meet for lunch. Would Thursday be all right for you, one o’clock at L’Escargot?’

‘That sounds fine.’

‘Perhaps you’d like to see Bogs and Quicksand and Codename Orpheus first.’

‘I’ll just have a look at Bogs to begin with, I’ll save the others for later.’

Forthryte arranged a screening of Bogs at Mythos for the next day, Saturday. I rang up Melanie to ask her along.

‘Where’ve you been?’ she said. ‘I’ve been phoning you for days.’

Oh yes, I said in my mind. Did you phone me on Monday as you said you would? Did you phone on Tuesday? ‘I went to The Hague,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you about it when I see you. Would you like to see Bogs with me tomorrow?’

‘The Kraken film? Yes, please.’

The plain white gothic capitals on the flickering black said:

BOGS BLVGSVO

‘What language is that?’ I said to Melanie.

‘He makes it up,’ she said. ‘He likes the effect of subtitles. In his book, The Flickering, he says that under our ordinary speech there are always invisible subtitles in an unknown tongue. In all of his films since 1975 the actors speak in English and the subtitles are in Krakenspeak.’

There was music, something rather like the Bach B Minor Mass played backwards, as words appeared on the screen:

Between the dead city and the threshing floors lay the bogland.

NIM VUGMIS NIM DENGSVO ZOKNIS NA BLVGSVODMA.

Squelching and sucking sounds were heard and from a very low angle we saw, black against a dark sky, bulky figures in wellingtons crossing a boggy landscape:

Three times daily came the messengers.

TIMTAM TOM RIG SHOLDIK.

Over the music there came snippets of voices speaking in several languages at irregular intervals as the scene cross-dissolved to two bearded men, well wrapped up, inside a very dark hut:

One day…

TOMZO…

‘I’m going to the bogs,’ said the man on the left.

VLAJO BLVGSVO.

‘Why?’ said the one on the right.

ZOM?

‘Why not?’ said the one on the left.

DOMZOM?

The two men stared hard at each other and cross-dissolved to a bog under a dark sky. The camera moved in to look at some water. Under the water was a woman in a wedding dress. Her mouth moved as the water became ice. She seemed to be saying, ‘Never.’ There was no subtitle.

‘Did she say “Never”?’ I said to Melanie.

Melanie nodded.

A man sat by a blackboard with his head in his hands. ‘There is only one quintessential image,’ he said.

ZVEM NULZI LODZA NURVURLI

A little boy appeared and opened a newspaper-wrapped parcel to show a small severed hand. ‘Look what they gave me,’ he said to the camera.

NAL ZAL RIN DOMZI

A flight of white pigeons filled the dark sky as the camera tilted down to their reflection in the water which was no longer frozen.

‘The blackness is the ultimate dialectic,’ said the bearded man who had been on the left in the hut. He was sitting in the water.

LEVSNOK FURMIL SNEV.

‘I think I want to go now,’ I said.

‘I’ll see you later then,’ said Melanie. ‘I want to see the whole film.’

I sneaked out of the building without meeting anyone — the place was mostly empty — came out into the thin wintry sunlight of Wardour Street and went home.

The film had started around two o’clock in the afternoon. I was expecting Melanie by five or six at the latest but she didn’t turn up till well after eight.

‘I thought I’d get here sooner,’ she said, ‘but Gösta Kraken turned up at Mythos and we went for drinks after the screening.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Did he show you his ultimate dialectic?’

‘Ah. Here we go.’

‘No, there you went.’

‘That sounds rather final.’

‘There you went for drinks.’

‘Yes, there I went for drinks, I do that sometimes, I’m a drinkivorous person. Why’d you walk out of Bogs anyhow?’

‘I find that I don’t want to be with Gösta Kraken’s mind all that much.’

‘That’s going to be a problem if you’re working on a film with him, isn’t it?’