Russell Hoban - Angelica Lost and Found

‘I told the bees and they stayed with us until the summer of 1938. I saw them swarm away out of the orchard and I cried a lot but we heard nothing until a year later when one of his comrades sent us a letter saying that my man had died at a place called Teruel. I couldn’t find it on the globe but it was in the big atlas.

‘There was a plaster bust of Lenin on top of the grandfather clock in the front room. I was dusting it when we got the letter and I knocked it on to the floor where it smashed into smithereens. “Well,” I said, “I guess it was your time to go.” ’

Why does her story come to me so vividly now? Back when she told it I had never heard of a hippogriff. What’s the connection? Then it rises like a golden carp glimmering. The bees. They existed in their time and space in our orchard but they partook of that other time and space where men with bolt-action rifles were saving the world. Telling the bees was folklore but it worked with real bees.

Two kinds of reality — it happens.

I began to dream of Volatore. Always we were flying in a greyness. Not like fog but the absence of everything. I felt the heat of his body between my bare legs and the rhythmic tensing of his great wing muscles but there was no sound. I looked for a rift in the silence and the greyness through which I might see the world but there was none.

I said, ‘I don’t think we’re getting anywhere.’

No answer and the silence woke me up.

It was true enough that we weren’t getting anywhere but I could feel that the connection between us was unbroken. And Volatore was still flying, I was sure of that. Lost perhaps and lonely but still flying. Think of me, Volatore! Think of your Angelica!

With the stress of two realities, one of which was not officially allowed to non-crazies, my head was badly in need of reorganisation. I didn’t think I was crazy but I wasn’t too sure of my sanity. I had abandoned Professor Beard and I was with a new psychotherapist, recommended by Olivia, Dr Levy. He was short, bald, wore very thick glasses and a Wyatt Earp moustache.

‘So,’ he said, ‘what’s the problem?’

‘I seem to be living in two kinds of reality,’ I said. ‘Two kinds of time. Do you know what a hippogriff is?’

‘Yes, it’s an imaginary animal.’

‘Well, I have a kind of relationship with one.’

‘Sexual?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you dream about him?’

‘Yes.’

‘What are you doing in the dream?’

‘Sitting on his back while we fly through a greyness.’

‘To where?’

‘Nowhere, I told him that we weren’t getting anywhere.’

‘Is your father alive?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him for a long time and I don’t know where he is.’

‘Do you miss him?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘This hippogriff may very well be a displacement of sexual longings for your father. Have you read my comparative study of the Ghost Dance and the Cargo Cults?’

He took a book with that title off his desk and thrust it into my hands. On the back cover was a large photograph of him dressed more or less like Wyatt Earp.

‘No,’ I said. ‘What have the Ghost Dance and the Cargo Cults to do with me?’

‘Imaginative displacement and believing that wishing will make it so.’

He looked at his watch, wrote a prescription and gave it to me.

‘What’s this?’ I said.

‘It’s a placebo, extra-strength. Take two with water as required.’

‘But a placebo’s all in the mind. The word is the Latin for “I shall please”. If you think it’ll work, it will.’

‘There you go. Get my secretary to book a session for you for next week.’

Is there a placebo effect, I wondered, for ‘Everything is OK’? So if you think it is, it is? I tried it but I didn’t really think it was and it wasn’t.

What? Where? No, how? How is this that I am … what? A ghost? A revenant? I was Volatore, yes? So what am I now? The ghost of myself? No, this is really too much! To be the ghost of an imaginary self! If indeed I am a ghost I am not one of those who clanks his chains, no! I dance with rage!

Dr Levy had compared my ‘imaginative displacement’ to the Ghost Dance of the Southwest Indians. My curiosity was piqued but instead of reading his book I went to Google, which took me to the massacre at Wounded Knee. I cry easily, and I wept as I read the words and images on my computer screen. To this small excitation of phosphors have the Sioux warriors of the plains come at last!

I was still at the office computer when I saw two figures at the gallery doors. By their in-your-face humble posture I recognised them as Jehovah’s Witnesses and went to meet them. One was a young woman, the other a middle-aged man. The woman was modestly frumped-up but she was pretty in a way that made me think her name might have been Tiffany or Amber before she went into the witnessing business. The man had painfully sincere horn-rimmed glasses and grey hair.

‘Hello,’ said the woman. ‘My name is Ruth and this is my father Jonathan.’

‘How do you do,’ I said.

We shook hands.

‘We’ve been going around,’ said Ruthany, ‘asking folks how they feel about the world today. Would you say you feel optimistic about it?’

‘Definitely pessimistic,’ I said.

‘Many people tell us that,’ she assured me without placing a hand on my arm, ‘and Scripture gives us an answer in Isaiah, Chapter 65, Verse 17.’ Her fast-draw Bible appeared open in her hands before my reply had cleared the holster.

I read, ‘For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.’

‘But that’s imaginative displacement,’ I said, ‘and believing that wishing will make it so. It’s a Ghost Dance!’

‘Say what?’ said Ruthany.

‘Wovoka, the Paiute holy man from Nebraska, in 1888 had a vision during a solar eclipse, and he started the Ghost Dance Religion.’ I read off my computer printout: ‘ “He claimed that the earth would soon perish and then come alive again in a pure, aboriginal state, replete with lush green prairie grass, large buffalo herds and Indian ancestors.”

‘He told the Indians how to earn this new reality, with prayer and meditation and especially dancing “through which one might briefly die and catch a glimpse of the Paradise to come”.

‘The government banned the Ghost Dance, the Indians didn’t stop, so on the morning of 29 December 1890, at Wounded Knee, the soldiers killed a hundred and fifty Indians and wounded fifty, all of them wearing Ghost Shirts to stop the bullets.’ By this time I was crying again.

‘She’s upset,’ said Jonathan to Ruth. ‘We’ll talk about this another time,’ he said to me as I sat there in my Ghost Shirt, weeping by the rivers of Babylon.

Sometimes I listen to gospel songs. I like the way they sound. There’s one called ‘Far Side Bank of Jordan’ in the Alison Krauss and the Cox Family album, I Know Who Holds Tomorrow . Willard Cox sings of leaving this world before his wife and waiting for her by the River Jordan while drawing pictures in the sand.

Listening to that song I see, beyond the Jordan, vast herds of buffalo grazing on the lush green grass. And I see the tents of the ancestors and the smoke of their fires. Frying fish from the Jordan, maybe. Rainbow trout, big ones.