Russell Hoban - Linger Awhile

‘I put Rose Harland’s age at between twenty-five and thirty. Her womb shows scars of an abortion carried out approximately two months before time of death.’

11 January 2004. There isn’t just one reality, there are lots of them. No, there’s just the one and it contains all the others. It’s a polyhedron and each plane is a window to a different reality. What’s happening now is not the same kind of reality as some I remember.

When I was little we lived thirty miles away from Philadelphia and we used to drive in on Sundays to visit our relatives. My uncle Barney had a drug store at 12th and Poplar in what was then called a ‘colored’ neighborhood. There was a display window in which hung two amphora-shaped glass vessels suspended by chains. The one on the left contained a beautiful red liquid; the one on the right was filled with green. There is just such a drug store in a painting by Edward Hopper, with PRESCRIPTIONS DRUGS and EXLAX across the top of the window. There must have been a lot of constipation at that time. The Ex-Lax slogan was ‘When Nature forgets, remember Ex-Lax’. I don’t think Uncle Barney’s window said EX–LAX. He had many customers who came in with cuts from razor fights and said, ‘Fix me up, Doc.’

There was no soda fountain that I remember but I was often given chewing gum. The rooms behind and above the drug store were divided by bead curtains made of little pink and yellow glass sticks that clicked as you passed through them. They looked like candy. The lampshades also had little pink and yellow glass sticks hanging from them. In an upstairs bedroom lay my mother’s father whom we called Zayda (Grandfather). The room smelled medicinal. He spoke no English but gave me dimes. Tante Celia was Uncle Barney’s wife and Uncle Izzy, pronounced Easy, from my father’s side lived there also. Uncle Easy wore a truss. My cousins Daniel and Leonard and Bobby were there too. Did we play Parcheesi? There are flavours that one tastes not with the mouth but with the mind. I taste the flavour of those Sundays as I write this: the street lamps in the evening; the brilliant red and green vessels in the illuminated window. Their reality was not the same as what I have now.

My thoughts about Justine change from moment to moment. I was naturally offended by her rejection of me but I no longer am. To be called up out of the dead as she was must be a terrifying experience and her being must be an uneasy construct of shifting realities that might collapse at any moment into nothingness. I can’t imagine her memories.

13 January 2004. John Hunter said to me, ‘Harry, what are you saying?’

‘What’s in my report,’ I told him, ‘that’s what I’m saying.’

‘OK, so Istvan Fallok left saliva on Rose Harland’s neck?’

‘I didn’t say that, I only said there was a match with his 10th January sample.’

‘So how’d his saliva get on her neck? Did he suck her blood? Is he the murderer we’re looking for?’

‘I can’t answer that.’

‘And Justine Trimble’s 10th January sample matches Chauncey Lim’s of the same date? What about that? Heavy kissing?’

‘I have no explanation for that.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘Just what I’ve said.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it from me.’

13 January 2004. I don’t like being mucked about. Istvan Fallok and I aren’t a couple but we sleep together once in a while and we’re intimate in all kinds of practical ways that make people closer than sex does. And now he’s got this dead-meat video creature and Grace is out of the loop. Fine. Great. But maybe I can make him sorry for that. I’m not sure how but I’ll think of something.

14 January 2004. Somebody once said, ‘You get too soon old and too late smart.’ I’m eighty-three now. Maybe I’ll get smart when I’m dead. Today is Wednesday but it feels like the Sunday evenings of my boyhood. Darkness coming on and tomorrow is Monday and nothing to look forward to but school. Sunday evenings were the death of the weekend and here it is Sunday evening on Wednesday.

I was playing chess against myself and losing. What did I expect? I’m still opening with the Ruy Lopez just as I did at sixteen. While losing I was listening to Souad Massi’s album deb (heartbroken):

Oh! My heart, your wound deepens

Oh! My heart, who is responsible for that?

There she was on the album cover, young and beautiful with her guitar and her sweet seductive voice full of sadness. Any man hearing her sing would want to cuddle her and make her feel better but I’m pretty sure her heart isn’t broken. Mine is, and who is responsible for that? Justine? Not really. How could I think she would want me, what have I to offer? So here I was in the Sunday evening of my old age with a broken heart, all alone and being beaten at chess. I drank some cask strength with very little water and I felt terrible in a much classier way. Burning all the way down. ‘Parv,’ said the inner Irv.

‘I know,’ I replied. Inner Irv says words that are meaningless but I usually know what he means.

When the phone rang I picked it up and said, ‘At the third stroke, the time will be exactly Sunday evening.’

‘Irv?’ said Grace Kowalski.

‘Hi, Grace,’ I said. ‘What’s new?’

‘It’s Wednesday, Irv.’

‘Maybe it is where you are but here it’s Sunday evening.’

‘Are you drunk?’

‘Yes. Would you like to take advantage of me?’

‘Of course, but we have serious things to talk about as well. Can you come over or shall I come to you?’

‘I’ll come to you — your place smells strange and beautiful like the things you make and like you.’

‘Irv!’ she said. ‘Think serious.’

‘I’ll be very serious,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you shortly.’ Feeling almost middle-aged again, I went forth to Fulham Broadway, where millions have been spent to convert the old tube station into a Nowheresville shopping mall with Books Etc., Boots, a Virgin Megastore, Starbucks, Orange and other commercial enterprises set in a brilliantly illuminated desolation that is part of the greater programme to turn London into Noplace. Shaking my head as I do each time, I took the lift down to the District Line platform and got an Edgware Road train to Notting Hill Gate where I took the Central Line to Oxford Circus. The trains were not crowded and none of the passengers were talking into little telephones or smiling as they tapped out text messages. Some were reading books or newspapers. All of the faces, young, old, male, female, white and brown and black, were part of the many faces of the great sad thing that moves itself from here to there and back again in all forms of transport.

At Oxford Circus I came up to the surface and the squalor of Argyll Street and people buying things they’d be better off not eating. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was playing at the Palladium, starring Michael Ball. Well, I thought, it’s nice that he has the work. Long ago I read somewhere that all of the visible world is maya , illusion, but whatever you call it, it’s what you have to deal with. I carried on to Great Marlborough Street, then over to Berwick where I went well past Grace’s place to buy a bottle of Stolichnaya at Nicolas, then back to All That Glisters.

‘Yo, Grace,’ I said as I pressed the intercom button.

‘Yo, Irv,’ she said, and came down to let me in. A hug and a kiss and I gave her the latest Justine news as we went up to the studio and its professional smells. The unfinished piece on her workbench was a three-legged toad in green and orange stones with an I Ching coin in its mouth.