Medusa Frequency

25 Longer than the Moment

So The Seeker from Nexo Vollma wasn’t rubbish and I was going to have a go with it. The next morning I was at my desk early and keen to begin.

It’s funny, though, how the odd detail will stick in the mind and give you no peace. I found myself remembering the morning when Melanie and I had first met at Hermes Soundways; she’d left a tape cassette with Istvan Fallok. I’d always wondered what was on that cassette. It was certainly none of my business but it was just one of those little things that I wanted to know about.

So I rang her up at home. No answer. Just then the post arrived and I went to get it. Among the bills and letters was a little padded brown envelope with a cassette inside. On the cassette was written:

Herman, this is from me.

M

I knew what it was before I played it but I played it anyhow.

‘Herman,’ said her voice, ‘I don’t want this to be just words on a piece of paper but I’m too much of a coward to look you in the eye and say what I’m going to say and the telephone is no good either.’

Hearing her voice like that without seeing her there in front of me I found her oddly more real to me than she had been. This was Melanie who was a mystery to me and, as everyone is, to herself, whose thoughts I didn’t know, whose being had its own spacetime and its own world line separate from mine. We had talked intimately, had been lovers briefly, yet her voice came to me as strange and distant as those many voices from far away reflected from the ionosphere and expressed digitally on my radio’s frequency counter.

‘Death is longer than life,’ she said, ‘and the death of each moment is longer than the moment. The goneness is what we’re left with, maybe some of us more than others. It’s very hard to have anything, isn’t it? Like our blue-black shining rainy night, when I call it to mind it’s the going-awayness of it, the goneness of it that I taste. I’ve always been a sort of phoney percy, you see — Persephone more than Eurydice, with my own little dark realm. Or I’m like Rilke’s Eurydike, so full of my large death that I understand nothing. I suppose that’s why I need, how shall I put it, more of a red-pyjama type than you are. I lied to you about General Sphincter’s mistress, I was with Sol that weekend and I was with him the other night when you rang up at three o’clock in the morning to tell him you wouldn’t do the Orpheus thing for Classique. So at least you don’t have to feel guilty about me, I did it to you before you did it to me. Goodbye, Herman. We’ll undoubtedly see each other here and there in the normal course of things and I don’t expect it’ll be awkward. I have a feeling that now you’ll be able to write again, better than before. And it was nice, that blue-black shining rainy night, it really was.’