Russell Hoban - Angelica Lost and Found

‘All elephant childs learn this. Now I make for you some borscht, yes?’

I want to reach Angelica and I don’t know how to do it. I can only proceed by trial and error. It was in this way that I chanced upon the mind of Alexander Zhabotinsky. An interesting habitat in which the proprietor appeared riding through a jungle on the back of a painted and bejewelled elephant, reclining in a gilded howdah with an attractive woman who was wearing only a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. Entertainment was provided by a band of orang-utans in Cossack dress backing a parrot in a sequinned gown who sang, in English, tangos from Finland.

The mahout in charge of the elephant was described in Zhabotinsky’s thoughts as ‘dirtified pubic and counting’. This was of little interest to me until that individual turned and revealed himself to be none other than Vassily Baby, brother to Alexander.

‘Aha! Vassily Baby! Well met!’ Slipping into the mind I found in his head along with a cloud of Stolichnaya, I saw a tall building on which the name Jarley Goode Ltd was inscribed on a brass plate at the entrance.

The name had a moneyed sound, so I flew to the financial district of San Francisco. There stood Jarley Goode Ltd, where Vassily Baby was employed as a certified public accountant. In his thoughts as he studied a database on his computer I found that he had promised his widowed mother to look after his unworldly younger brother. So here was the source of the miserable pittance that kept Alyosha in beets and potatoes.

Recalling what a tight squeeze it had been to get into Vassily’s mind that first time I wondered why it was so easy this time. Was Vassily weaker now? Was I stronger? Drifting through the barren and dusty attic of his largely unused brain I realised that I was much the stronger one. Vassily had never been in love, while I, loving Angelica steadfastly through thick and thin, had acquired mental and spiritual muscle that took me through his feeble defences easily.

It is said that revenge is a dish best served cold. Mine had had plenty of time to cool and I was looking forward to a long-deferred feast. Hovering high above him, I watched him leave his office. He stopped at a nearby delicatessen, bought a sandwich and a six-pack of beer, took them to his Mercedes and, with me following, drove to the Fort Point parking spot I remembered from our last meeting. From there he walked to the overlook, taking with him Stolichnaya from the glove compartment, and sat down to eat his sandwich and drink his beer while waiting, I suppose, for his next beautiful stranger, or possibly hoping for a return engagement with Angelica.

Vassily waited and I waited, hovering high above him while the evening opened to that time that always catches in my throat; the sky was still light but the bridge lamps had come on and those in the houses across the bay. I descended to twenty feet above Vassily’s head — I wanted him to see me grow suddenly huge as I dropped on him from that height.

‘Vassily Baby,’ I yelled down to him, ‘here is Volatore!’

He looked up and screamed but I was on him like an owl on a mouse and there was nothing he could do, my talons had him pinned.

‘Call of nature! Trousers down!’ I commanded, exposing his nether parts to the cool evening air while he whimpered piteously.

Then I thought a little smaller but not too much, and really gave him something to scream about when I achieved ingress by that same passage from which he had evicted me one evening not so long ago. He was moaning, possibly not from pleasure, when I left him there and flew away. Vassily could not have imagined a hippogriff but Ariosto did, so an eventful evening was had by all.

The doubleness, always the doubleness! And so little certainty. None, in fact. For the present I seemed not to be subject to Ariosto’s words. Wait, I thought, as an almost-idea rose to the surface: a something, a what? The almost-idea of a key, an action, a repositioning of mind, a placing of myself in a new relation to my situation. The bitten biting? The doubled unifying? The lost finding? Hang on!

Orlando Furioso is fiction, right? Ludovico Ariosto made it up out of his head. OK, it’s a classic. I’m not saying that I, Angelica Greenberg, can write a classic, but maybe I can invent my own story and live into it. Why not? Maybe even octave stanzas. Here goes:

Angelica, now from Ariosto freed,

Thinks of her Volatore, wandering far;

To find him is her first and foremost need,

To seek him underneath his guiding star.

She knows not what Dame Fortune has decreed;

She’ll carry on, whate’er her chances are.

On the other hand:

Let me now bring my rhyming to a close

And what I have to say I’ll say in prose.

Because looking for a rhyme can drag you away from where you want to go. So I’ll start again by setting out my objective. Which is what? Well, I want to hook up with Volatore again.

I’ll do a little Q and A:

Q: How do you want to hook up with him, on all fours?

A: Let’s leave sex out of it for the moment, OK?

Q: So in what form do you want him, beast or human?

A: The problem is that when he’s human he’s someone else.

And when he’s a beast he’s not really a suitable lover. I mean, I couldn’t take him home to meet my parents. If I had any parents at home.

Q: Did you think your love was going to break an enchantment and reveal him as a handsome prince?

A: Spare me your sarcasm, OK?

Q: In the past you’ve had Volatore as idea without visible form. Want to try that again?

A: It’s too much like hearing voices in my head. I was able to do it for a little while but longer would drive me crazy. Besides, he’s got to be available for that to work.

Let’s back up a little. Why am I attracted to Volatore? Attraction is too weak a word — I am drawn to him as the ocean is drawn to the full moon. Why? Is it the animal of me being pulled by the animal of him? Like Pangaea that was one continent until the tectonic plates moved apart; now sea turtles have in them the cellular memory that drives them across the far, far ocean miles to the place that once was whole. In illo tempore . Do I believe that Volatore and I were once one? That we were parted so that a sea of emptiness appeared between us? Yes, I think I do believe that. I believe in the primal animalness of all of us. I believe in the imagined reality of us coupled with the ordinary reality. We walk on our hind legs and wear clothes but in our being are the almost-remembered selves that went naked and speechless on all fours.

With all due respect — not all that much, actually — I think the Beards and the Levys of this world have no idea how to come to grips with my problem(s). Maybe I’ll have to go it alone. All right then, I’ll see what I can do with the story of me by me. No Ariosto.

At first there was just one place which was everyplace. One thing which was everything. One body which was everybody.

Later there was one thing which was two, one double thing, one thing with two parts. Then the two separated. They became two ones. They were Volatore and Angelica and sometimes they were together but mostly they weren’t. Then they disappeared from each other. Each could feel the presence of the other somewhere, but where?

Angelica tried to send her thoughts to Volatore. She sent this: Volatore, come to me! If you can’t come to me, talk to me however you can!

Then she waited.

I looked at the two of them in my mind: a woman and a hippogriff. What if the woman became a hippogriff? No, I wouldn’t like that. And if the hippogriff became a man he’d have to take over some human’s body and there are too many problems with that.