Russell Hoban - Angelica's Grotto

‘More to myself. As you see.’

‘I know this is a difficult time for you, Mr Klein. I can’t really imagine what it’s like to live without the constant companion of an inner voice but it must be a terrifying kind of aloneness. And I can understand how frightened you are of what you might do or say. What we categorise as normal behaviour is an unbelievably complex and fragile system of the most intricate checks and balances. I’m always amazed that it doesn’t break down more often than it does. Let’s go back to the moment when you lost your inner voice: can you remember the very last thing it said? After you read the Times piece, did it say something before it went silent?’

‘It said, “O God, what would happen to me if I lost my inner voice?”’

‘Some might say that your It wanted to plunge you into inner voicelessness.’

‘My It?’

DeVere opened a desk drawer, took out The Book of the It by Georg Groddeck, and handed it to Klein.

Klein held the book in his hands. It was a hardback, small and compact, heavy for its size. There came into his mind the Big Little Books of his small-town childhood in Pennsylvania. He used to buy them at the local Woolworth’s, called ‘the five-and-dime’. They were perfectly square little hardbacks about six by six inches and three inches thick with board covers. They were printed on coarse paper with text on one side and a black-and-white picture on the other of each spread: Mickey Mouse at Blaggard Castle; Terry and the Pirates; Dick Tracy. Unlike modern comic books, they had only the occasional speech balloon. He recalled the feel of them in the hand: pleasantly chunky.

‘Have you read this?’ said DeVere.

‘No, I haven’t.’ He turned the pages, came to LETTER II, and read:

I hold the view that man is animated by the Unknown, that there is within him an ‘Es’, an ‘It’, some wondrous force which directs both what he himself does, and what happens to him.

‘OK, I’m animated by the Unknown,’ said Klein as he closed the book. ‘What else is new?’

‘Groddeck was contemporary with Freud and Freud was so impressed by the It idea that he developed his theory of the Id from it. It’s the sort of book that got passed around when Ronnie Laing was doing his thing and lecturing barefoot in the seventies. A lot of what Groddeck says is utter bollocks but this idea of the mysterious It is a useful one, I think.’

‘What’re you leading up to, and should we burn some incense?’

‘I’m leading up to asking you if you’ve been friends with your It.’

‘I’ve been friends with my head, or I thought I was.’

‘All right — forget about Groddeck for now; do you think of your inner voice as coming from you or is there another entity that speaks those words?’

‘There’s nobody in my head but me, and the me in my head has gone silent.’

DeVere found nothing to say for a few moments while he rubbed the back of his skull as if to stimulate that part of his brain. Presently a light bulb appeared over his head.

‘What?’ said Klein.

‘If you were now to visualise a speaker in your head other than yourself, who or what would it be?’

Now it was Klein’s turn to rub his head. After a time he said, ‘I’ve just been looking at Oannes. Do you remember Number 14 in Redon’s lithographic series. Tentation de Sainte-Antoine? The god who’s half fish and half human: “I, the first consciousness of chaos, arose from the abyss to harden matter, to regulate forms.” He’s hovering half-seen in a sea of black, wearing a pharaonic headdress, observing us from the dimness. I think he’s the one I’d like to hear from.’

‘Oannes was the Babylonian god of wisdom.’

‘That’s what it says in the mythology books — science, writing, the arts, all that sort of thing, but Redon’s Oannes, the one that I visualise, is deeper and darker than wisdom — he’s nothing safe, nothing explicable.’

‘Is it possible that you’ve already heard from him?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Can you remember anything your inner voice said in the time shortly before it said, “O God, what would happen to me if I lost my inner voice?”’

‘OK, the afternoon before that morning I was walking down the Fulham Road and a good-looking young woman passed me walking a lot faster than I was: statuesque, classy walk, black suit, short skirt, great ass, wonderful legs, black stockings, shiny black high heels. I say stockings rather than tights because I imagined a suspender belt. I tried to keep her in good viewing distance but she kept pulling farther away and I was getting angina; so I had to stop and do some glyceryl trinitrate and rest a little while she got smaller and smaller and finally turned a corner and disappeared. And I said to myself or it said or he said, “One day you’ll drop dead while something like that walks away from you and out of sight.”’

‘What do you mean by “something like that”?’

‘I mean everything that I can’t have. I’m an old man but I want what I wanted when I was young and I want it maybe more than when I was young. And there’s not a lot I can do about it.’

‘Did the inner voice say anything more after that first observation?’

‘It said, “Well, that’s life, innit.”’

Dr DeVere scratched his head, massaged his face, cleared his throat. ‘Might that have been a more Oannes sort of utterance?’

‘Maybe; I don’t know. I hadn’t really been thinking about an Oannes voice until you asked me about a speaker in my head.’

‘Things change, you know. The fact that you visualised Oannes makes me think there might be an Oannes element in you that wants to be heard, an aspect of you that you haven’t been in good touch with. Maybe you’re going to have to meet it halfway. What do you think?’

‘I think,’ said Klein, ‘that if I hang out with you too long I could get more confused than I am now. Just tell me, do you think I’ll ever have an inner voice again?’

‘I doubt very much that the shutdown will be permanent. You can borrow Groddeck if you like.’

‘Thanks, but I’ll stay on standby for Oannes.’

‘That’ll have to be it for today. Good luck, mind how you go and watch your mouth.’ He made a note in Klein’s folder: Inner-voice shutdown — buffer lost?

‘Evening shadows make me blue,’ sang Connie Francis, ‘when each weary day is through. How I long to be with you, my happiness.’ The honey of her voice, the sweet sadness of the words and melody made his throat ache. Pictures riffled in his mind: rain streaming down windows; night roads unwinding in the headlamps’ beams; sunpoints dazzling on the sea; nakedness and firelight, glimpses, sounds and smells of youth and love and sorrow.

‘Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool’ was the next track on the CD. Klein sang along with it as he went to the bookshelves and took out Darkness and Light: the inner eye of Odilon Redon. He turned to the Oannes lithograph with its caption, ‘ I, the first consciousness of chaos, arose from the abyss to harden matter, to regulate forms.’ In the blackness where he hovered Oannes coiled and uncoiled the serpentine length of himself. Under his pharaonic headdress his face was dark in the dimness. Were his eyes open?

‘Oannes,’ said Klein, ‘can you see me? I know you can hear me because you live in my mind. Are you a god or are you something else? Will you speak to me?’

No answer.

Klein went back to his desk, where he sat facing the bookshelf-blocked fireplace. On the white wall above and to the left of the Meissen figure on the mantelpiece hung one of the few original works of art that he owned, a 1910 Pegase Noir by Redon, oil on canvas, 76 × 102 cm. Thirty years ago he’d brokered several profitable deals for a Swiss collector and this painting had been his fee. In earlier works Redon had shown his winged horses variously as captives and victims, unable to fly, defeated by forces that drained their energies and crippled their wings; but this Pegasus was a triumphant creature whose primal darkness contained the light of its resurgent vitality. Its black was suffused with purple, ultramarine blue, cerulean, crimson, subtleties of rose, and it reared up in an effulgence of reds and oranges, its wings full of lift and the gathered power of its haunches recalling Redon’s sun horses and hippogriffs. Hannelore had said, looking at it after the making-up that followed one of their rows, ‘It’s like our marriage — full of darkness but it flies.’ Klein shook his head and went to pour himself a drink.