Russell Hoban - Medusa Frequency

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.

I’d said that I’d never lose the idea of Medusa but I wasn’t at all sure that I knew what the idea was. The head had said, ‘Behind Medusa lie wisdom and the dark womb hidden like a secret cave behind a waterfall. Behind Medusa lies Eurydice unlost.’ ‘Let it be,’ I’d said, ‘you’re wording it to death.’ It was a mystery and I hadn’t wanted it explained to me. Now I needed to know where I was with it.

‘Will you excuse me for a moment, please?’ I said to the brain.

Kraken, I typed, can you tell me anything about this mystery?

THIS MYSTERY, said the Kraken, SHOWS ITS MEDUSA FACE TO COMPEL RECOGNITION, TO WARN THAT UNDERSTANDING STOPS BEFORE IT AND GOES NO FURTHER. THIS IS THE FACE OF MEDUSA WHO CANNOT BE IGNORED, CANNOT BE INTRUDED UPON, CANNOT BE POSSESSED. YOU HAVE NEVER GIVEN YOURSELF TO THIS ONE WHO WILL NOT GIVE HERSELF TO YOU, YOU HAVE WANTED ONLY THE SWEETNESS OF EURYDICE TO LOVE AND TO BETRAY. THIS IS THE FACE OF WHAT CANNOT BE BETRAYED. LOVE CAN BE LOST AND BEAUTY, BUT NOT THIS FACE OF DARKNESS MADE BRIGHT. THIS IS THE ONE TO WHOM YOU CAN BE FAITHFUL.

Nobody said anything for a while. I went to the kitchen, made myself a Nescafé, and brought it back to my desk where I found half a grapefruit sitting on a napkin. That happens to me often: I’ll find an old coffee on the bookshelf or a banana on the mantelpiece or myself halfway up the ladder to the attic and not know how the old coffee, the banana, or I arrived at those places. I went back to the kitchen, got a bowl and spoon, put the half-grapefruit in the bowl, and ate it.

Ring, ring, said the telephone.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘what is it?’

‘Herman,’ said Hilary Forthryte, ‘are you all right? We were all wondering why you wrapped your grapefruit in a napkin and rushed out of the restaurant.’

‘That grapefruit! Oh my God, I’ve eaten it.’

‘You artists. Look, Herman, we’ve got to have a little think session soon to get this Eurydice-Orpheus thing off the ground. How’s next Wednesday for you? Can I pencil you in?’

‘GNGG, NDZNX, MMPH,’ I said as what felt like an iron fist pushed heavily against my sternum.

‘Friday any better?’

‘Can I phone you back later?’ I was already sitting so I thought I’d lie down. There were too many papers, books, cassettes and floppy disks on the couch so I tried the floor and was amazed at the amount of dust, fuzz, and crumbs. There was a coffee about three weeks old under the couch, my favourite mug, I’d wondered where it had got to.

‘Try to make it soon,’ she said. ‘Everybody’s busy and I’m stuck with organizing the whole thing.’

My left arm was very leaden; the iron fist had gone but now I seemed to have swallowed an iron box which was stuck in my chest. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ll make it soon.’

The local surgery was close by so I stood up, walked there very slowly, told the receptionist about the leaden arm and the iron box, and took my place in the waiting-room with five people being patient and seven National-Health-looking fish being aerated by a stream of bubbles. That’s how it is, I thought: a little stream of bubbles till the pump shuts down. I picked up a two-year-old copy of Harpers & Queen which fell open to a photo of Gösta Kraken and the headline FROM THE DEEPS: KRAKEN RISING. The corners of the iron box sharpened up a little.

Dr Carnevale looked into the room and called my name and I followed him into his office. ‘Pains in your chest and left arm?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘At first it was like an iron fist but now it’s as if I’ve swallowed an iron box. And my left arm feels leaden.’

‘Let’s have your shirt off.’ He unlimbered his stethoscope. ‘I guess by now you’ve finished the novel you were working on when I saw you last year. Breathe in.’

‘No, actually I haven’t.’

‘Breathe in again. Very stressful occupation, novel-writing, so I’m told. Do you happen to know Rupert Gripwell? Lean forward.’

‘No. Is he a novelist?’

‘Undertaker. He says they don’t last as long as journalists.’

‘Undertakers?’

‘Novelists.’

‘Why is that?’ I said, as he took my blood pressure.

‘Says they drink alone too much. People drink faster when they drink alone. You drink alone much?’

‘Well, I can’t be bothered to go looking for people every time I want a drink, can I.’

‘I suppose not. I spend a lot of time in the garden. You’ve got to have some way of unwinding or everything gets to be too much. How’s the pain?’

‘It’s gone.’

‘I don’t think it’s anything more than angina but I’ll book you into St Stephen’s so they can have a look at you.’

Watchful in her space of light the night sister sits at the edge of the dark ward. At three o’clock in the morning the moments patter like rain on the roof of night; the silence is a road to anywhere.

At the far end of the ward someone cries out, ‘Luise!’ There is a rush of nurses, a trundling of apparatus; the fluorescent lights flicker on; the curtains around the bed are drawn; the curtains are opened, a man is wheeled away.

The name he cried out must have been Louisa, not Luise. Yes, it must have been Louisa. The bed remains empty, the man hasn’t come back. What did he look like? I hadn’t noticed the occupant of that bed earlier, he must have been in the day room or asleep or hidden behind a newspaper.

He never did come back. Later they cleared away his things, stripped the bed, and put on fresh sheets and pillowcases. I asked the night sister whether he’d had a snake-and-dagger tattoo and the name Louisa on his left arm.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Did you know him?’

‘We chatted sometimes but I never knew his name. Who was he?’

‘Gombert Yawncher.’

‘Do you know what he did for a living?’

‘He was an actor but I don’t think he’d been in work for quite a long time. He told me he used to do the voice for the old Pluto Drain Magic ads on TV, the cartoon ones where Pluto hurled himself down the drain like Superman.’

I remembered those ads, they were done before the account came to Slithe & Tovey. Back then their slogan was ‘PLUTO GETS THE DIRT UNDER THE DIRT’.

‘His heart gave out, didn’t it?’ I said.

‘Yes, it was a coronary thrombosis. He said to me this morning, “It’ll be tonight,” and I said, “What’ll be tonight?” and he just looked at me and said, “I can’t remember my lines any more.’”

‘It could happen to anybody,’ I said.

I went to the day room and stood there in the dark at the sliding glass door that opened on to the balcony. From where I was on the fourth floor I could see, beyond the roofs and dormers of the old part of the hospital, the upper parts of houses on the far side of the Fulham Road. The road itself was not to be seen.

Looking towards the unseen road in that three o’clock in the morning of the November night I imagined Orpheus running, running, saying to the night, ‘I have no name but the one you give me, no face but the one you see.’ Orpheus as athlete, his limbs and motion graceful in the darkness; Orpheus seen from a distance on the dim Fulham Road under cold November lamps, on the dim Thracian road wending into darkness, the dim white of the road that runs behind the eyes to otherwhere. Orpheus running, running night into day, day into the long road, night into the long world’s music. I’d never thought of his body before, only the head.