Russell Hoban - Fremder

‘No, I won’t.’

‘Even better — you’ll forget me.’

‘You know I won’t.’

‘Sure, Frem, let’s have lunch sometime. Here comes Mikhail’s Snackdome again. Time to go.’

Maybe for some people the business of knowing who and what and when and where they are is simple; not for me. The past and the present flicker together in my mind and it isn’t easy to sort through the different strands of story to find one that is only mine. Here’s an extract from one of Helen Gorn’s notebooks of 2022, the year of her suicide and my birth:

18.08.22

‘I know death hath ten thousand several doors for men to take their exits.’ Going out is easy, coming in is a labour. Hold it up by the ankles and smack its bottom. Cry — you’re in the world. Nobody asks to be born. Lots of people ask for the other.

And yet another transcript, this one from one of my mother’s therapy sessions (which I, the as yet unborn Gorn, attended) after her first suicide attempt later that same August:

SNG REST AND REASSESSMENT CENTRE

GORN, HELEN — SESSION 12–15:30 — 22.08.22

THERAPISTD. SCHWARTZ, DIRECTOR, PHYSIO/PSYCHO

(GORN IS WEARING HEADPHONES AND LISTENING TO AN AUDIOBOY)

S : What are you listening to?

G : Bloody cheek!

S : Why do you say that?

G : (MOCKING ME) ‘Why do you say that?’ I never saw you before in my life and here you come with your face and your spectacles and your beard and you want to know what I’m listening to. I don’t ask you what you’re listening to, do I?

S : I’m not listening to anything.

G : That’s your problem — you don’t listen.

S : I meant that I’m not listening to music.

G : Never mind. Those that can’t hear, let them not listen.

S : What can you hear?

G : The black.

S : By?

G : Johann Sebastian Schwarz.

S : Do you mean Bach?

G : I mean Black. That’s your name too — Schwarz. But you don’t listen.

S : Which of Schwarz’s compositions are you listening to?

G: The Art of Frog . I hate it.

S : Why?

G : No hop.

S : What about you? Have you got hop?

G : Don’t be stupid. If I had I wouldn’t be here, would I. Would you like to disappear?

S : I’m interested in why you tried to disappear.

G : ‘If I should take a notion to jump right into the ocean, ain’t nobody’s business if I do.’ Know that song?

S : No.

G : Neither do I, because whatever I do is Corporation business. If I weren’t who I am you wouldn’t be interested in me.

S : I’m interested because what you’ve done is my business now.

G : You really care about me, do you? (PUTS HER HAND BETWEEN HER LEGS) Do you fancy me?

S : Can you remember what you were thinking when you took the Lethenil tablets?

G : Life is a dis-integration.

S : Can you say more about that?

G : Before we’re born we’re integrated with the black. Birth tears us loose from that and dis-integrates us into life. So I thought, why not re-integrate. Haven’t you ever thought that, Dr Black? You’re quite hairy, aren’t you.

S : No, I haven’t ever thought that.

G : What — never thought that you’re quite hairy?

S : Never thought of re-integrating with the black. When you took the tablets were you mindful of the fact that another life besides your own was involved?

G : It was in my mind, yes.

S : Can you say a little more about that?

G : How can I say more to someone who’s never thought about re-integrating with the black?

S : Two other lives, I should have said — there’s the father, isn’t there?

G : You’re right, this was not an immaculate conception. That’s a very shrewd insight.

S : Physio says you’re about six months pregnant. Does the father know?

G : Now I know what happened: I died and went to hell and my punishment is to spend eternity talking to arseholes.

S : You haven’t answered my question.

G : Who the hell are you, that all your questions must be answered? You think all my questions get answered?

S : Do you know who the father is?

G : Do you know who yours was?

S : Yes, I do.

G : Was he an arsehole too?

S : We were talking about the father of the child you’re carrying.

G : You were, I wasn’t. I don’t think I can give you any more time just now. (GORN LEAVES THE ROOM)

That session followed Helen Gorn’s first attempt at reintegration with the black. A month later she made a better job of it.

In Izzy’s notebooks the handwriting was different but the voice is pretty much the same. Here’s one of his entries about two months before his death:

10.02.22

The black is all there is. That’s why if you build your house on the black it’ll last for ever.

There’s an asteroid in the Sixth Galaxy called A373 — it hasn’t even got a name, just a number. It’s a supply dump for the Thoth cluster, a desert-coloured rock with nothing on it but an open-frame warehouse with an oxybubble in one corner. There’s an automatic coffee shop and a robot modelled on Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring . Her questioning eyes are the same as those that look out of the painting. A plate in her back says that she’s donated by the Sixth Galaxy Poetry Society. Her catalogue includes everything from Sappho to T. P. Stumm. They haven’t named her but I call her Pearl. She’s strictly for poetry, with a contact-activated shielding circuit so there’s no fooling around. You can take her outside the bubble — she doesn’t need air — and you just tell her what you want to hear.

I was on A373 for an inventory a couple of years ago and Pearl recited the first of Rilke’s Duino Elegies for me as we sat on a rock outside the warehouse:

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel

Who, were I to cry, would hear me out of the angelic

Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme

orders? and suppose even that one were to take

einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem

me suddenly to his heart: I should perish through his

stärkeren Dasein. Denn das Schöne ist nichts als des

stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the

Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen ,

beginning of terror, which we only barely endure,

und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht

and we admire it so, because it calmly disdains

uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich .

to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.

She spoke the poem in the original German. The voice that came out of her was what I think of as a Eurydice voice, low and breathy and full of shadows. We sat there on a tawny rock, the strange and beautiful Pearl in her seventeenth-century costume and I, looking at a red moon called Isis (there’s a red sun called Osiris in that system) and I heard that voice and Rilke’s words and the sound of my own breathing in my helmet. Nobody but the two of us on the asteroid and nothing happening but Rilke’s words coming alive out of her mouth. Pearl’s lips moved as she spoke but the voice was that of my mother. Pearl spoke in many voices; this was a recording made by Helen Gorn for Amnesty International in November of 2019, three months after she was raped and Izzy crippled by the Shorties and the Clowns.