Russell Hoban - Medusa Frequency

‘The air itself seemed honeyed, and it was in that fragrance that I first heard her voice, the voice of the woman who became my story. I heard her weeping in the leafy shade while the dragonflies printed themselves gigantically on the transparent stillness over the river.

‘There rose in my throat a terrible ache and in that moment the world became me and I became the world-child who knows nothing and believes whatever it is told; I was the world-child whose innocence binds the world together, whose innocence betrayed will unfasten the world. Oh yes, I thought, and as I listened to the weeping of the unseen woman in that golden, golden afternoon I became the tortoise I had killed. I felt my own cruel knife enter me, felt my life spurting out, felt my still quivering body being dug out of my shell. In an explosion of brilliant colours I suffered the many pains of death as underworld opened to me, underworld and the moment under the moment. I suffered the many pains, the many colours of death and I knew everything. The colours were swallowed up in blackness, there came a stillness and I found myself weeping by the river with the lyre in one hand and the plectrum in the other. The strings were still sounding as a song died on the air and I could feel in my throat that the singing had come from me but I could remember nothing of it. I tasted blood in my mouth and there was blood coming out of my nose. On both sides of the river the trees came down to the water’s edge and swayed their tops against the sky.’

‘There opened to you underworld,’ I said, ‘and you knew everything. I remember how it was, I remember her weeping.’

‘Yes,’ said the head, ‘in the weeping of Eurydice there opened to me underworld.’

Here the voice of the head of Orpheus paused; the mottled sunlight and the leafy shade, the dragonflies and the river vanished into greyness. A desolation and a silence filled my mind. The sky was very pale. I wanted to keep the mottled sunlight and the leafy shade, the dragonflies, the honeyed air. I closed my eyes and waited for the voice to continue.

I heard the distant traffic on Putney Bridge, the rush of cars on the Lower Richmond Road. I opened my eyes. The water was lapping at my feet and the head was well out into the middle of the Thames moving downriver against the tide. I was surprised, I had expected the story to be finished in one telling. As I watched the head out of sight I felt abandoned and forlorn but there was no heart pain so I supposed in some way it was still with me.

I came home feeling altogether used up and worn out but I typed up the whole episode while it was still fresh in my mind, put it on disk, and printed it out. On the far side of the common the plane trees swayed their tops against the morning sky. The telephone rang.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Are you all right?’ said Istvan Fallok. ‘I tried to get you last night but your line was always engaged.’

‘Why shouldn’t I be all right?’

‘You seemed to be in some kind of a state when you left here; you knocked me down and tore out of here with electrodes all over your head and you left your anorak behind. How are you feeling now?’

‘I’ve just been chatting to a rotting head.’

‘That isn’t just any rotting head, it’s the head of Orpheus.’

‘So it tells me. Have you known each other long, you and it?’

‘A year or so, I suppose, but I doubt that we’ll be seeing each other again, it and I.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Did you have a little angina during your chat?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Did the head sing to you?’

‘Yes, it did.’

‘Did you hear anything?’

‘No. Did you?’

‘Yes. It sang in a barely audible sort of wheezing whisper and it did some supernaturally complex variations on a spooky theme for about twenty minutes. I kept thinking, Oh yes, I’ve got it, then the next moment I’d forgotten it. We were outdoors at the time, I’d no recording gear. When it finished it said to me, “There, you see?”

‘“Could you sing it again?” I said. “I seem to have missed a lot of it.”

‘“Sing what?” it said.

‘“What you just sang,” I said.

‘“Did I sing something?” it said.

‘“Yes,” I said, “just now.”

‘“I don’t remember singing anything,” it said. “Maybe if you give me the parts you remember we can put it together.” So that’s what we began to do. Every now and then the head would turn up and if we were at the studio I’d play what I’d done and we’d do a little more or if I was out somewhere I’d have a little keyboard with me. Month after month I worked on that music and I never could get it to come right, it just wouldn’t hold still — I’d have a couple of minutes of it pretty well laid down and I’d think, well, now I’ve got something to work with, something I can develop; and then when I tried to develop it the whole thing fell apart like ropes of sand and I’d have to start all over again. Eventually I found myself in hospital with a myocardial infarction and I finally got some rest. It was wonderful, they let me stop there for a fortnight. Nurses are the nicest people there are; there was a lady who brought cups of tea at six in the morning and another with a book trolley and another with a little shop on wheels. They did ECGs and X-rays, tested my blood and my urine, recommended a low fat, low cholesterol diet, told me to take daily exercise and stop smoking, gave me a little bottle of glyceryl trinitrate tablets, and put me out on the street again.’

‘How are you feeling now?’

‘Now that I’ve put the head on to you I feel terrific.’

‘You’ve never forgiven me for Luise, have you?’

‘Did you expect me to?’

‘She was leaving you anyhow; if it hadn’t been me it would’ve been somebody else.’

‘And if it weren’t the head of Orpheus bothering you now it’d be something else.’

‘What happened after you got out of hospital? Did you see the head again?’

‘I was hoping not to but a kind of madness came on me and I bought a large Edam cheese and when I took it out of the bag there was the head of Orpheus continuing its variations on the same spooky theme. I dropped it off Westminster Bridge at three o’clock in the morning and stuck a flyer through your letterbox.’

‘You haven’t told me how you first met the head of Orpheus.’

‘It started with the Hermes music. The client said it didn’t sound like foot powder and of course he was right; it wasn’t foot-powder music, it was straight Hermes. Foot powder was what I was honestly trying for but what I got was the thief-god, the god of roadways and night journeys, the god of here-and-gone, the easer through the shadows, the finder in the dark. Hermes is like that, you know: it’ll do as it likes.’

‘You say “it” not “he”.’

‘Well, we’re not talking about a bloke with winged sandals and a staff with two snakes twined around it, are we.’

‘What are we talking about?’

‘Obviously it’s nothing you can see: it’s a mode of event, a shift in the relativities of the moment, a new disposition of energies. There’s what you might call a frequency of probability when complementary equivalents offer and anything can be anything.’

‘For example?’

‘Like all of a sudden you could be Luise’s lover and I could be out.’

‘Ah.’

‘That’s one word for it.’

‘And you’re saying that’s Hermes?’

‘Hermes acting on a certain kind of material.’

‘And how did the head of Orpheus come into it?’

‘I’d been in the kind of state you’re in now — I’d been trying to get to places in my head I hadn’t been to before. I was fooling around with sonically configured EEG enhancement and I tried the Hermes music with it. When I had a nice alpha rhythm going and some interesting frequencies from some of the electrodes I tried jump-starting my head with capacitor discharges; I upped the voltage in easy stages with a 50-microsecond time constant until it put me where I saw the head of Orpheus. I saw it far away on a calm and shining sea and I was swimming towards it but I never got any closer. Later I went to Berwick Street and there it was on a barrow amongst some melons. I’ve got to ring off now. Don’t forget to pick up your anorak and please bring the electrodes with you.’