Russell Hoban - Fremder

‘I’m thinking about yesterday when Pythia went deep with me and you fainted. Why didn’t you tell me what it was in the after-session room?’

‘The first time we made love I didn’t want you thinking of me as someone whose head was bugged. Do you blame me?’

‘How can I blame you for anything, Katya? I love you.’

She kissed me. ‘Are you sure about that?’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

‘That’s good because there’s no knowing how much time we’ve got and I don’t want you to be sorry later.’

‘What do you know that I don’t about how much time we’ve got?’

‘Nothing, but it was easy enough to see from that session that Pythia isn’t through with you yet; that means that Top Exec wants something more from you; and that means we should make the most of today which is my day off. Let’s have a picnic on the Red Mountain.’ She opened the fridge. ‘I’ve got a tin of sardines, half a French bread, and a bottle of red.’

‘Maybe we could do a little shopping on the way.’

‘Let’s just go, let’s give ourselves some memories before something happens.’

‘Don’t say that, it’s unlucky.’

‘Sorry. I never expect anything good to last.’

‘Try not to think that way; expectation is part of the reality envelope — you’re transmitting event configurations that are searching for receptors.’

‘Don’t tell me any more, I don’t want to know about the reality envelope; life is hard enough.’

We wired to the Ziggurat, went up to the flight pad, got a Red Zone day pass on Katya’s ID, and signed out a microhopper. Then we flew out to Red Mountain Park. The mountain stood up before us roseate and golden with rust and green with copper oxides like something in a Max Ernst painting, a scanty matting of grass covering the compacted wreckage of ancient roaders, choppers, hovers, skimmers, tankers, bombers, fighters, freighters, and other vehicles arrested in a state of romantic ruin and kept from further decay by many coatings of permalin. A bronze plaque said:

THIS MOUNTAIN OF DEAD NOISE IS DEDICATED

BY THE SHEELA-NA-GIG TO THE USES OF TRANQUILLITY.

1 April 2010

The electronic sign below it said:

TODAY’S AIR IS RED 3 — OZONE IS RED 2

BREATHERS AND U-V PROTEX MUST BE WORN!

Our pass got us on to the top level and we had it to ourselves except for a young Exec couple with a small son named Bert. This child had a toy terminator beam that emitted a nasty little whine every time he pulled the trigger. Bert terminated us many times, each time yelling, ‘You’re terminated!’

‘Stop that, Bert! Stop bothering those people,’ shouted his smiling parents. Whatever noise there was below us was muffled by the barrier screen and the polariser cut off visibility so that the mountaintop we sat on had no apparent bottom. Beyond the quivering air that marked the limit of the screen London lay sweltering under its grey November sky through which circles of bright emptiness looked out at me. Wirecars and microhoppers buzzed like flies in the heavy air. The Ziggurat stood glowing its dull purple against the grey with circlings of crows marking the plaza where the dead still lay.

We put some distance between Bert and us and ate our sardines and bread and drank our wine while the dreary shouts of Prongs and Arseholes came up small and quiet through the barrier screen. I hadn’t thought about happiness for a long time but suddenly I recognised it and in the same moment tried not to — I didn’t want to be caught out in the open with it on that junkyard mountain. My wristphone was heavy with silence and the grey sky seemed full of menace. I wanted twilight and shadowy rooms and mazurkas. We were loading a memory into our heads and I wondered how long I’d be around to remember it.

Katya squeezed my hand. ‘Worrying won’t help,’ she said. ‘All we can do is try to be ready for anything.’

‘Are you ready for anything?’

She rubbed her hair against my face and said nothing for a while, then, ‘Look at this grass we’re sitting on.’

‘What about it?’

‘Look how it’s growing on this old iron, how it found a way to do it. It started with moss growing on the wreckage, the spores found a way of penetrating the permalin so they could feed on the rust and break down the metal and make moss to catch the dust from the wind until it made earth out of iron for the grass to grow on. Wasn’t that clever of the moss? It didn’t know that it couldn’t do it so it did it.’

‘Yes, that was clever of the moss.’ We took off our breathers and goggles long enough to kiss sardinefully. ‘You think we can do it?’ I said.

‘Yes, I think we can.’

‘Do what, though? That’s the question.’

‘It doesn’t matter what the question is — we’re the answer. Look at me.’

I looked.

‘Remember how it was when you first saw me?’

‘Yes, I remember it.’

‘When I was walking ahead of you I could feel your eyes on my bum. I could feel your eyes lighting up like a neon sign that spelled out THIS IS THE ONE. Tell me I’m wrong.’

‘You’re not wrong.’

‘And am I the one?’

‘Yes, Katya, you are the one.’

‘Very good. And I’m very superstitious, so I won’t use the H word…’

‘What’s the H word?’

‘It’s the opposite of sad. I won’t use that word but right now you’re not utterly miserable, are you?’

‘Not utterly, no.’

‘And nobody can take that away from us, can they?’

‘No, they can’t.’

‘Well, there you are then.’

I was looking over her shoulder when she said that and I saw a tawny owl cruising low over the mountain. I didn’t believe it at first but I turned Katya around and we saw it together. She was going to speak but I put my finger over her breather mesh and we kept the owl in us unspoken then and in the hopper and the wirecar going back.

We bought a bottle of gin and back at Katya’s place in the violet dusk we sat in the viewbubble drinking it and listening to Ilse Bak playing Chopin nocturnes. Katya had put on a hologram of a relief carving of Perseus killing the Gorgon; DETAIL OF METOPE FROM SELINUS, PALERMO MUSEUM, said the label. Of Perseus, only the left hand gripping Medusa’s hair was visible, and under her chin, held by his right hand, the blade that was decapitating her. The Gorgon’s head was the conventionalised one with the round face, mad grin, vampire-like canine teeth, and loosely hanging tongue, here broken off short. It was a plate that was in my collection as well and it was a face that was often in my thoughts — this was not a human Medusa but rather the mask worn by something not to be named. There’s a second plate of that metope that shows the full figures of both Perseus and Medusa and includes the winged horse Pegasus that was born of Medusa’s blood. Again Katya hadn’t switched on any lamps; in the darkening room the stone rictus of the Gorgon’s head seemed to quiver, seemed urgent with misery and message. ‘That’s an interesting sequence,’ I said: ‘B-Z to Vermeer girl to Gorgon’s head.’

‘They’re all looking out of one another’s eyes.’

I looked into her eyes, dark in the dimness of the room. At that moment we were hearing the Nocturne in B Flat Minor, Op. 9, No. 1. The first time I heard that music it was the same recording, played by one of those philosophising late-night disc jockeys; with that nocturne behind him he’d read something — I don’t remember what but I remember that it had a Proustian flavour — about an orange grove. Ever since then when I hear that nocturne I think of an orange grove by moonlight, the scent of the silvered oranges. ‘Are the B-Z and the Vermeer girl and the Gorgon’s head looking out of your eyes as well?’ I said.