Russell Hoban - Medusa Frequency

‘It did it for you, right?’

‘Oh yes, it did it for me.’

‘How many times have you done it?’

‘Just once.’

‘Just once. And that was …’

‘All I needed.’

‘Did it help with your music?’

‘Hard to say.’

‘But at least it didn’t do any harm?’

‘Do I look as if it’s done me any harm?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. He looked as if something had done him harm, but then so did I, I supposed.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘shall we do it?’

I’d better not, I thought. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’ He was still twisting the piece of wire. ‘Where’s your Golden Virginia?’ I said. ‘Why aren’t you smoking?’

‘I stopped.’ He dabbed electrolytic cream on the thirty-six locations and with great precision harnessed up my head with the thirty-six electrodes and put the headphones on me. Then he switched on the frequency counter and the computer-printer. Various new red and green and yellow lights winked on, adding to the watchfulness of the already attentive room.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘we’re operational; is there a particular place in your head you’re trying to get to?’

I’d been listening to the Hermes music that had become a field charged with energies not of this moment. My mouth opened and I heard it say, ‘The olive tree.’ I hadn’t intended to say that.

‘Right, the olive tree. Can you say a little more about it? I want to see what kind of a reading we get.’

In the Hermes music the particles of time past coalesced into sunlight on the island of Paxos, the summer air warm on my face, and Luise and I walking to the beach. It was our second summer and our last. The road that led from the hills down into the town passed between terraces of olive groves dry-walled with grey and white stones. There were empty blue plastic mineral-water bottles everywhere, there were thrown-away cookers and meat-grinders rusting in the olive groves. The trees had been planted long, long ago before there were such things as plastic mineral-water bottles; for hundreds of years they had twisted their roots into the stony earth of their stone-walled terraces. The tree that I was thinking of was one that we always stopped to look at. Often there was a black donkey tethered to it, sometimes there was a black-and-white goat nearby. When the donkey opened wide its jaws and brayed it made the most tremendous heehaw, it was like the creaking of the door of the world. It was much too big a sound for a donkey to make, it was as if something else was making itself heard through the donkey. When the goat was there it looked calmly at us with its strange eyes that were like tawny grey stones in which were set oblongs of black stone. Most of the time there was a cock crowing somewhere amongst the mineral-water bottles. The tree was alive, the sunlight sang and twittered in the silvery leaves and the olives made black dots against the sky. Yet the trunk was empty, it was only the shell of a tree with darkness inside the ancient lithe and ardent shape of it. The greenish-grey thick bark all ridged and wrinkled stood open as if two hands had parted it, as if a woman or a goddess had stepped naked out of it into the greenlit shade of the olive grove.

Luise and I had often talked about this tree; we agreed that it was an entrance to the underworld, a Persephone door. Now on this particular morning she went to the tree and stood before it with her hands on the two sides of the opening. The skirt of her little white beach dress stirred in the warm air; the August sunlight was elegiac through the whispering leaves.

‘Are you talking to Persephone?’ I said.

‘Yes. She’s been telling me about the underworld; it isn’t what people think it is, it isn’t just a place for the dead. What we call world is only that little bit of each moment that we know about — underworld is everything else that we don’t know but we need it. Underworld is like the good darkness where the olive tree has its roots. Did you know that?’

‘I suppose I did.’

‘But what if it’s a bad darkness? What if it’s a darkness in which people tell lies and are deceitful? How does one live then, Herman?’

‘What are you getting at?’ But I knew.

‘You know very well what I’m getting at. I was looking in your writing folder for stamps and I found a letter.’

‘ Can you say something about the olive tree?’ said Fallok.

‘Persephone lives in it,’ I said.

Paper came out of the printer in perfect silence like a mystic arm from the water. Fallok studied it.

‘Have you got your reading?’ I said.

‘Yes, I’ve got it.’ He was busy with the Fairlight while the Hermes that was not foot powder danced in the electronic twilight not as a picture in the mind but as a mode of event, a shift in the relativities of the moment, a new disposition of probabilities. The music that drifted through the dusk and the little coloured lights seemed a way through the olive grove to the tree that stood open as if a naked woman or a goddess had parted the wrinkled greenish-grey bark with her hands and stepped out into the greenlit shade.

I turned to the Vermeer girl on the corkboard. The look on her face was a look that made no attempt to avert anything. The music in my headphones, while still moving forward, seemed never to depart; other shapes configured themselves to it in a moire that shimmered in my head like a watered silk of sound.

‘OK,’ said Fallok. ‘Here it comes.’ He pushed a button. The dusk poured itself into darkness, the darkness inside the tree, the dark entrance. I saw into the darkness, saw down into the earth where all around me, as if the dark were silvered like a mirror, I saw a face, a face not mine, a face not clear but almost recognizable, with a speaking mouth saying words almost intelligible.

‘Persephone?’ I said, dropping, dropping, faster and faster through the darkness, down, down into the blackness at the bottom of the sea. The blackness thickened crushingly, became millstones of blackness grinding my brain. The eyes of the Vermeer girl, of Luise, of Melanie Falsepercy dilated enormously and disappeared into the vast pulpy head that shuddered for ever in the chill of the ultimate deep.

Blackness, blackness, black water pressing down on me for ever, all the sunlight, all the daylight gone for ever into ancient night. The tentacles convulsed in vast and writhing tremors; widening in clangorous circles came the waves of terror spreading from the brute bell of the first great terror of Creation. Ah, that the possible should burst out of the blackness! That there should be no rest, no ease, no comfort! That there should be life and world and that all, all, should return to the blackness, even the sun itself gone cold and dead and shrunken back to blackness. Drowning, I gasped and shuddered in the moment that would not depart, ascending through black, blue-black, deep blue, blue-green, deep green, sunlit green. With me rose the great head of the Kraken, terror in its eyes. We broke the surface, there was sunlight hot on my face, dancing in a million sunpoints on the rocking ocean, dazzling in my eyes.

Rolling in the rocking sea, green-slimed and barnacled, the great head filled my vision. It was a human head, rotting and eyeless. It was enormous, a floating island over which seabirds wheeled crying under the heartless blue of the sky. I tried to climb on to it as it rolled but my fingers slipped on the green slime and I scraped my flesh bloody on the barnacles as I fell back into the water. The great cavern of the mouth opened and showed its white teeth, its red tongue, its cry was like the rending of mountains. ‘Eurydice!’ it bellowed, ‘Eurydice!’ as the seabirds rose up screaming.

I clung to the hair that floated round the head and undulated with the swell. Looking down into the water I saw rising a vast and ivory nakedness and a woman’s face of terrifying beauty. Her red-gold hair streamed round her, her green eyes were open wide, her pale silent mouth was open.