Russell Hoban - Angelica Lost and Found

What about the hidden messages in her collection of drawings and paintings by autistic savants? Forget it. Concentrating on them until her eyes bulge out of her head and her brain is pulsing like a jellyfish, she can extract nothing from them but squadrons of meaningless numbers and drifts of recondite architectural detail.

So, when Angelica phones, a little trickle of saliva runs down Phyllis’s chin, and Chow Yun Thin, her driver, is holding open the door of the raspberry-ripple Lamborghini before you can say Chow Yun Fat. He puts the pedal to the medal, and as streets and houses and her life flash by she feels the fickle finger of Fate doing the right thing for once and she senses that this day is not going to be like other days.

Arrived at the girders and skylights and high places, she is drawn, like iron filings to a magnet, to the shadowy corner from which issues the Siberian bass of Alexander Zhabotinsky.

‘You have,’ he bellows softly.

‘Come,’ she breathes.

‘Big autist me,’ he says. ‘Vroom. Four on the.’

‘Floor, dear,’ sighs Phyllis as Angelica and Chow Yun Thin retire to the kitchen where Angelica fills two cracked mugs with tea from her flask.

Among the canvases, Phyllis and Alyosha crouch close enough together to inhale each other’s pheromones as he guides her through The Beeriodic Fable of the Elephants . Phyllis is by now realising that she is smelling the hidden message she has been seeking. It is large and shabby and scruffy and its name is Alyosha. She needs some adjectives to fill out that name, and must get a Russian dictionary.

So, breathing in and out in sync, with Phyllis’s cheque-book wet with anticipation, these two recede from view, leaving us to reflect that the Drang nach Osten is a faster pull than it used to be. Maybe it’s the global warming.

All of a sudden there he was. Dad, on the outside looking in through the glass doors of the gallery. I went to meet him with the ache in my throat predicting tears. I opened the door and he came in hesitantly.

‘Would you like to hug me?’ I said. ‘There’s a small charge but you can run a tab.’

We hugged, I inhaled the Dad plus Old No. 7 Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey smell, we cried a little, wiped our tears, blew our noses, stepped back and looked at each other. He wasn’t in bad shape for a fifty-nine-year-old unshaven type. White hair, some wear and tear but not too much. We hugged again, stepped back again.

‘Carmencita,’ he said, and kissed the top of my head.

‘Did you listen to my request?’ I asked him.

‘My name is Whoever.’

‘Before “ Va, pensiero ” did you hear Garanca do the seguidilla?’

‘Sure I did. That’s some dynamite mezzo! I’ve just heard that she does Carmen on DVD and I’m definitely going to get it as soon as I can.’

‘So has the train pulled out and left Agnes Baltsa on the empty station platform?’

‘Later loves come along, but a first love is the one that took you to a place you never knew before, so it’ll always be part of you.’

‘Way to go, Dad. You’re a classy guy.’

‘Well, you know, a man is either a gentleman or he’s something to put out with the garbage.’

‘I’ve seen some of your graphic novels and they’re very good — really I think they’re your best work.’

‘Thank you, Carmencita. It’s a whole new quality market that’s opened up. I’m so much in demand that I’m actually turning down work.’

‘Good for you, Dad, and I’m glad to smell that it’s keeping you in Jack Daniel’s.’

‘You know it! And that Tennessee Sour Mash keeps my hand steady.’

‘So tell me, do you always listen for messages from me on the Morning Show ?’

‘Of course.’

‘Why?’

‘Why does a salmon swim upstream?’

‘To get to the other side?’

‘That’s it, and here I am. Can you forgive me?’

‘Yes, I can.’

‘I wasn’t sure you would.’

‘For a long time I couldn’t but now I’m fifteen years older than I was when you left and I’ve learned one or two things. Sometimes a demon drives us to do what everybody wants us not to do and even we ourselves might want not to do it but we’ll do it anyhow. That’s just how people are.’

‘About my not very original mid-life crisis — the girl I went off with was working at the Crazy Horse …’

‘They have lap dancers there?’

‘Nikki wasn’t a lap dancer. She danced nude in the Crazy Horse revues.’

‘You went to the Crazy Horse?’

‘No. I met her at City College, in front of the Rivera mural. She was doing a course in the history of art at UCLA. She was only twenty, she was pretty and she was very easy to be with.’

‘You were forty-four at the time and not quite in the Sean Connery class of pulling power. Why do you think she fell into your lap, so to speak?’

‘I struck up a conversation with her, she liked talking to me and one thing led to another.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘Moved in with her history of art lecturer.’

‘Aren’t they usually married?’

‘Or divorced.’ He’d begun to look around at the walls. ‘Not a bad painter. Lydia. Not very original but not bad. And looking at that Interior with Sleeping Cat , you’d think butter wouldn’t melt in that woman’s mouth.’

‘But cool she wasn’t, your wife and my mom.’

‘Definitely not. What’s this with multicoloured numbers copulating, Ah, Love, Let Us Be the Square Root of True or Something Other ?’

‘My cousin Phyllis is unloading some of the older autisic savants in her collection.’

‘And this with the nude on a motorcycle, Harley No. 7 .’

‘Ossip Przewalski, he’s a steady seller. Where are you living these days?’

‘Furnished apartment in the Mission. Very Edward Hopper.’

‘Feel like a classic pizza at Marco’s?’

‘If you let it be my treat, Carmencita.’

‘You got it, Pops.’

Olivia, who had stayed in the office to give us privacy, now emerged for introductions.

‘Olivia Partridge,’ I said, ‘this is my dad, the infamous Herman Greenberg.’

‘Famous too,’ she said to Dad. ‘Didn’t you do Worlds without Worlds , words and pictures?’

‘Yup,’ said the graphically novel parent, shuffling his feet modestly. ‘Lettering’s the hardest part. Olivia, could you join us for pizza at Marco’s?’

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she said, blushing prettily while Dad admired her legs.

Off we went then, into a smiling spring evening, each of us wearing a smile.

‘Such wonderful pictures!’ says Phyllis. ‘And they’re all done autistically?’

‘New gearbox every time,’ says Alyosha. ‘Also valve job.’

‘Take me through The Beeriodic Fable of the Elephants again, Alyosha. Here’s the beginning of it, with an elephant dozing in a hammock slung between two trees.’

‘Is Dimitri Pyotr Elephantovitch, ZZZZZZZ peacefully.’

‘When suddenly …’

‘Suddenly TSADSABAM!’

‘Lightning strikes the tree WHAM!’

‘Flaming fire bursting out SSWEEUUU!’

‘But Dimitri Pyotr is ready for it.’

‘With trunkful of beer squirting SSSSQUIRSHHH! Out goes fire tssss.’

‘And the elephants tell this Beeriodic Fable to …’

‘Elephant childs. Moral of fable: Always have trunkful of beer in case of stricken with lightning.’

‘Why not water, Alyosha?’

‘Is oral tradition, always beer.’

‘Love that fable, Alyosha.’