Russell Hoban - Fremder

‘She’s got to be Aphrodite,’ said Lovecraft. ‘She couldn’t be anyone else.’

‘I think you’re right. Sometimes it took four or five tries before I could walk away from her.’

Lovecraft had been sorting through some videodiscs but now she paused, took off the horn-rims, and gave me a long look. ‘That’s how it is with Aphrodite,’ she said. She picked up several discs. ‘Let’s start with the automatic flicker-break transmission that came in to Traffic Control from Clever Daughter at 04:06:03 on 4 November.’ On her way to the video she passed close to me. The continually recycled air of Hubble Straits Station is moist and jungly; her smell was that of a strong healthy woman just out of the shower and sweating a little. She passed me again going back to her desk and I closed my eyes and felt the breeze of her on my face.

FLICK, FLICK, FLICK AND FADE, JOHN, sang my head, ON THE PLANET WHERE YOU ARE.

‘… hear me?’ said Lovecraft.

‘What?’

‘Those green spirals and circles we’re seeing on the screen, what are they?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said as circles of bright emptiness expanded in my vision. The other circles, the ones on the screen, seemed strange but familiar. ‘Interference, maybe?’

‘You trying to scramble me, John?’ Had she heard the song in my head?

‘Why? What did I say?’

‘You said interference but that’s not like any interference I ever saw. Those circles are like ringed eyes.’

On the screen the circles were widening, growing larger, becoming great eyes of becoming that became vast nodes of possibility and archipelagos of being constantly expanding and mutually annihilating as they slowly faded into blankness. ‘I’ve seen something like that before,’ said Lovecraft: ‘it’s like the chemical oscillation in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction.’

‘I don’t know what that is,’ I said as the circles faded into darkness and my head began The Art of Fugue , its voices tracing the vaultings of terror and the windings of its desolation. Forgetting myself I became the music, became the action of it and the joy at the heart of the terror. Yes! I thought, I must remember how to do this, how to be the music.

‘What?’ said Lovecraft.

‘Nothing.’

‘Listen, Fremder, all this constipated Q and A is boring me to death. Let’s talk fragic, yes? Darkly me, whisper me, echoes and murmurs.’

I hadn’t talked fragic since Judith. ‘I don’t think I can go loose just like that.’

‘Sure you can. Whisper me, whisper me, deeply the shadows.’

‘Shadows and places,’ I said. ‘O the horror.’ I could feel my head going slanty.

‘Horror me, horror me, infinite vortex whisper me urgently, dark without end.’

‘Only the horror, only the onliness.’ It was hard to resist her.

‘More than the onliness, more than the every.’ She seemed full of desire as she leant towards me.

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I can’t keep up with you. Could we just continue in the ordinary way for now?’

‘Right — I know I’m pushy.’ She sighed, rolled her chair back a little, expelled some breath, looked out of the window for a while, then took a crystal out of her pocket and stuck it in the audio beam. A man’s voice hummed, somewhat flat, the opening of Contrapunctus One of The Art of Fugue . ‘That’s Bill Charteris the other morning,’ she said, ‘humming Bach as you came into view.’ She was looking down as she stopped the audio beam, then she caught me with a swift upward glance. ‘Bill’s not into Bach — he had the feeling that it was coming from you. Can you receive as well? Can you tell me what I’m thinking?’

‘I’d rather not say — if I’m wrong it could be awkward.’

She laughed. ‘Never mind. Let’s go back to the first time you spoke to me, while you were still in Intensive Care: you said, “If you can hold on to the terror you can hold on to the world.”’

‘I don’t remember that conversation.’

She ejected the flicker-break disc and as the next one slid into place and started she froze-frame on a cross-section of a human brain in computerised colour. At the bottom I read: F. Gorn 04:22:16 IGT 04.11.52 .

‘You’re looking at a domicilium scan of your brain,’ she said. ‘Domicilium is the collective name for those temporal-lobe systems that are the seat of the identity. This scan was done shortly after your admission to Intensive Care. The purple dot you see there is a peak of biochemical activity. Now see what happens when I unfreeze the frame.’

I watched as the purple dot jumped from one point to another in an anti-clockwise circle; around it went again and again.

‘That’s known as mandalic circuitry,’ she said. ‘You see it sometimes in autistics and in cult believers like the Sons of Osiris and the Sisters of Lorena. It’s a closed loop of self-reinforcing perception that locks out external stimuli. Your brain kept it up with diminishing intensity for most of three days. By the time you could speak intelligibly it had quieted down and there were only occasional bursts of it.’

‘Interesting.’

‘Isn’t it. So what kind of shape were you in that morning? In your head, I mean.’

‘Nothing out of the ordinary.’

‘And what is the ordinary?’

‘Nothing special.’

‘Mr Gorn — my job is to find out what I can about what happened. Have you decided that your job is to keep me from finding out?’

‘I remember flickering out of Nova Central and the next thing I remember is waking up in the room I have now. I don’t remember anything in between.’

‘And you don’t want to, right?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Look,’ she said, and her breezy professional manner was gone; her voice was low and quiet, ‘I can’t even imagine what happened to you out there — probably it was indescribable. Holding on to the world isn’t easy; some mornings when I have to open my eyes and be me I almost can’t do it, everything seems to be slipping away. But you did it drifting in deep space at 3 Kelvin with no spacesuit, no helmet, and no oxygen. I’ve looked at the Sun Ra video and I can’t get it out of my mind. The Level 4 is what I’m assigned to and they want official answers but now I’m talking to you just as one person to another. Somewhere in your mind is the total recall of what happened. I can feel your terror and I want to be in that terror with you. Talk to me, for God’s sake — I’ve been waiting in my house at R’lyeh for such a long time!’

‘You want to be in the terror with me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’ Her face was close to mine, her eyes seemed full of fear and doubt, her pupils wide and dark and ringed with green, eyes of becoming, and all around us a blackness that tilted and beckoned with eyes of becoming, becoming …

‘Careful!’ she said, and caught me as I almost fell out of my chair. Then we were holding on to each other and kissing. ‘Oh yes,’ she murmured, ‘whisper me, whisper me, whisper me!’ I was shaking all over as we let go long enough to clear the books and papers off the couch while the dead whooped and hollered and my head sang hoarsely:

ANOTHER BRIDE, ANOTHER JUNE,

ANOTHER SUNNY HONEYMOON,

ANOTHER SEASON, ANOTHER REASON

FOR MAKIN’ WHOOPEE.

Then the singing faded into black sky, thunder, lightning, and rain. And I, Elijah, was running, running ahead of the chariot, being Elijah, being my whole self.

*

‘How do you feel now?’ said Caroline while I was getting my breath back.

‘Less alone.’ There were still circles of emptiness in my vision. ‘Did you get into the terror with me?’

‘Wherever I was, it felt good.’ She hugged me.