Russell Hoban - Fremder

‘There might be a little more to this than you’d expect. Helen and I made up some code signatures just in case we ever needed to authenticate communications between us — nonsense groups that could be inserted in a page of calculations. This is one of them.’ He wrote something on the back of an envelope and showed it to me: (**)+<0>%. ‘Now here’s part of a printout from Irene Heale’s lab dated ten days after Helen’s death.’ In a thicket of numbers, symbols, and Greek letters I saw what was unmistakably the same group.

‘You’re trying to tell me she was alive ten days after being reported dead,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘Maybe it’s not quite that simple.’ He looked up, stuck a card in my hand, and collapsed as a wire-thin beam of blue light hit him and a hovering peeper dwindled into the night.

Lowell Sixe’s troubles in this world were over; mine weren’t and I didn’t even know what all of them were. The terminators in the peeper could just as easily have closed my account when they hit Sixe; that they hadn’t seemed to indicate that for the moment nobody important wanted me dead; perhaps, even, somebody important wanted me alive. But it clearly wasn’t safe for anybody to stand too close to me.

‘Well,’ I said to the crumpled figure. ‘At least once in your life you had the feeling of running ahead of the chariot.’ Probably I seem insensitive in not making more of his death but I’d sensed that he himself had felt that his life was behind him; and as ends go his was a quick and painless one. I emptied his pockets and took the contents with me. The disposal of his body I left to the sweeper that would follow the peeper. The card Sixe had given me was quietly elegant in its typography:

PICCADILLY RELIEF

‘ You ’ ll come again and again .’

37 The Maze, King’s Cross

All tastes catered for .

On the back of the card was written the name Marie Demska. It was a name that meant nothing to me but since earliest childhood I had lived in constant expectation of messages and revelations from the unknown; much of the time I felt lost in a labyrinth, and now here was a name from The Maze. A clew?

By the time I came down from the roof it was after four in the morning. There was a sweaty dampness in the air but no freshness, only the stench of too many years of Fungames and Maxiburgers. Katya was sleeping soundly — no talking or singing — lying on her back with her mouth slightly open, like a child completely empty after the action of the day. I wondered what she was dreaming; if there was any trouble in her mind it didn’t show in her face.

I went into the kitchen and looked at the photocopies I’d taken from Sixe’s pocket. Most of them were of Helen Gorn’s notebook pages:

14.8.16

Waiting for the rain. Parched earth waiting for rain. Elijah the Tishbite: ‘As the Lord, the God of Israel, liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.’ Elijah with his face between his knees, waiting. Sometimes full of certainty, sometimes full of doubt.

15.8.16

Elijah. Eliyahu. ‘A man who is called a hairy man in his signs, a man whose loins were girded with leather,’ says the song. ‘A man who rose on horses of fire in the wind. A man who did not taste the taste of death and burial.’ The only prophet who was a runner. Seventeen miles from Mount Carmel to Jezreel. Where did the ravens get the bread and the meat they fed him? Midrash says from the table of Jehoshaphat but that answer doesn’t satisfy me. Darkness in the shape of a bird. Noah ‘sent forth a raven and it went forth to and fro until the waters were dried up from off the earth.’ Darkness as the finder. This was the ancestor of the ravens who were commanded by the Lord to feed Elijah. Bread and flesh of darkness. Darkness is what kept Elijah alive: the black. To be Elijah he had to be able to live on blackness; that was how the Lord tested him.

21.8.16 Seventh anniversary of E and S’s death .

Dream : Fragment of 16th-Cent. Ushak carpet, Father’s study. Father naked, sitting cross-legged on it. Try to look away but can’t. His body & limbs become vine & leaf patterns — he slowly sinks into carpet — mouth shapes word I can’t read. Carpet not flat but infinitely deep space — blue-green primordial sea of consciousness — proto-red of world-mind — gold of its thought — black womb of silence. Vine of world-mind-thought growing, twisting — new shoots, new leaves out of womb of silence. Pattern whispers word I can’t hear. Word becomes stone, becomes ziggurats, pyramids, circles of standing beckons, places of broken columns. Stone becomes thought — thought becomes self — self becomes proto-red.

22.8.16

Big storm — Izzy afraid of thunder and lightning, asked if he could get into bed with me. I said yes. Izzy afraid of what’s behind the lightning, ‘the bright emptiness’. After a while he quieted down. This/not this.

23.8.16

Elijah in the cave on the mountain of God. Not the wind, not the earthquake, not the fire. A still small voice, a soft murmuring. The cave is the place of becoming, the female darkness waiting to be seeded, womb of transition. From the air around the mountain comes an invisible shape that fills the cave where Elijah is hiding.

Not male or female, the Elijah condition. A conjunction of both. A merging and an emergence. The rain at last.

Elijah is more than a specific individual; Elijah is a state of things, a condition, a convergence of probabilities, a coming together of scattered possibilities that manifest themselves as sudden and unpredicted action. Oh yes, here is Elijah, here is the rain. Now, now, now. At last.

24.8.16

Dream : a rushing in the air behind the visible world.

Isaiah 17, 12

Ah, the uproar of many peoples,

That roar like the roaring of the seas,

And the rushing of nations, that rush

Like the rushing of mighty waters!

Thinking again of Elijah with his face between his knees, waiting for the world in which there will be rain. Waiting for the world in which under a black sky he will run before Ahab’s chariot. Thinking how it was when at last the rain.

A chariot of fire and a whirlwind took him up into heaven. Or another world.

From ‘The Anthropic Principle’, George Gale, Scientific American , December 1981:

It is necessary to suppose there are infinitely many worlds,

in each one of which the particle has a definite position.

What happens during a measurement is that one world is

selected from among the infinite range of possibilities.

Can electrical impulses from the brain precipitate possibility? Leibniz says the world is as it is because God is as He is. But what if God is as He is because we are as we are? Then the world is as it is because we are as we are.