Medusa Frequency

6 We’re not Talking about a Bloke with Winged Sandals

I came home feeling altogether used up and worn out but I typed up the whole episode while it was still fresh in my mind, put it on disk, and printed it out. On the far side of the common the plane trees swayed their tops against the morning sky. The telephone rang.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Are you all right?’ said Istvan Fallok. ‘I tried to get you last night but your line was always engaged.’

‘Why shouldn’t I be all right?’

‘You seemed to be in some kind of a state when you left here; you knocked me down and tore out of here with electrodes all over your head and you left your anorak behind. How are you feeling now?’

‘I’ve just been chatting to a rotting head.’

‘That isn’t just any rotting head, it’s the head of Orpheus.’

‘So it tells me. Have you known each other long, you and it?’

‘A year or so, I suppose, but I doubt that we’ll be seeing each other again, it and I.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Did you have a little angina during your chat?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Did the head sing to you?’

‘Yes, it did.’

‘Did you hear anything?’

‘No. Did you?’

‘Yes. It sang in a barely audible sort of wheezing whisper and it did some supernaturally complex variations on a spooky theme for about twenty minutes. I kept thinking, Oh yes, I’ve got it, then the next moment I’d forgotten it. We were outdoors at the time, I’d no recording gear. When it finished it said to me, “There, you see?”

‘“Could you sing it again?” I said. “I seem to have missed a lot of it.”

‘“Sing what?” it said.

‘“What you just sang,” I said.

‘“Did I sing something?” it said.

‘“Yes,” I said, “just now.”

‘“I don’t remember singing anything,” it said. “Maybe if you give me the parts you remember we can put it together.” So that’s what we began to do. Every now and then the head would turn up and if we were at the studio I’d play what I’d done and we’d do a little more or if I was out somewhere I’d have a little keyboard with me. Month after month I worked on that music and I never could get it to come right, it just wouldn’t hold still — I’d have a couple of minutes of it pretty well laid down and I’d think, well, now I’ve got something to work with, something I can develop; and then when I tried to develop it the whole thing fell apart like ropes of sand and I’d have to start all over again. Eventually I found myself in hospital with a myocardial infarction and I finally got some rest. It was wonderful, they let me stop there for a fortnight. Nurses are the nicest people there are; there was a lady who brought cups of tea at six in the morning and another with a book trolley and another with a little shop on wheels. They did ECGs and X-rays, tested my blood and my urine, recommended a low fat, low cholesterol diet, told me to take daily exercise and stop smoking, gave me a little bottle of glyceryl trinitrate tablets, and put me out on the street again.’

‘How are you feeling now?’

‘Now that I’ve put the head on to you I feel terrific.’

‘You’ve never forgiven me for Luise, have you?’

‘Did you expect me to?’

‘She was leaving you anyhow; if it hadn’t been me it would’ve been somebody else.’

‘And if it weren’t the head of Orpheus bothering you now it’d be something else.’

‘What happened after you got out of hospital? Did you see the head again?’

‘I was hoping not to but a kind of madness came on me and I bought a large Edam cheese and when I took it out of the bag there was the head of Orpheus continuing its variations on the same spooky theme. I dropped it off Westminster Bridge at three o’clock in the morning and stuck a flyer through your letterbox.’

‘You haven’t told me how you first met the head of Orpheus.’

‘It started with the Hermes music. The client said it didn’t sound like foot powder and of course he was right; it wasn’t foot-powder music, it was straight Hermes. Foot powder was what I was honestly trying for but what I got was the thief-god, the god of roadways and night journeys, the god of here-and-gone, the easer through the shadows, the finder in the dark. Hermes is like that, you know: it’ll do as it likes.’

‘You say “it” not “he”.’

‘Well, we’re not talking about a bloke with winged sandals and a staff with two snakes twined around it, are we.’

‘What are we talking about?’

‘Obviously it’s nothing you can see: it’s a mode of event, a shift in the relativities of the moment, a new disposition of energies. There’s what you might call a frequency of probability when complementary equivalents offer and anything can be anything.’

‘For example?’

‘Like all of a sudden you could be Luise’s lover and I could be out.’

‘Ah.’

‘That’s one word for it.’

‘And you’re saying that’s Hermes?’

‘Hermes acting on a certain kind of material.’

‘And how did the head of Orpheus come into it?’

‘I’d been in the kind of state you’re in now — I’d been trying to get to places in my head I hadn’t been to before. I was fooling around with sonically configured EEG enhancement and I tried the Hermes music with it. When I had a nice alpha rhythm going and some interesting frequencies from some of the electrodes I tried jump-starting my head with capacitor discharges; I upped the voltage in easy stages with a 50-microsecond time constant until it put me where I saw the head of Orpheus. I saw it far away on a calm and shining sea and I was swimming towards it but I never got any closer. Later I went to Berwick Street and there it was on a barrow amongst some melons. I’ve got to ring off now. Don’t forget to pick up your anorak and please bring the electrodes with you.’

‘Plus the fifty pounds I didn’t pay you yesterday.’

‘Forget it, this one’s on me.’

‘No it isn’t, it’s on me now.’

‘That’s how it goes. Has the head had much to say to you so far?’

‘It’s begun to tell me its story.’

‘Ah, it would do, wouldn’t it. Music with me and a story with you. Well, good luck with it,’ and he rang off.

A low panic thrilled along the wires of my nervous system. The day was becoming hard and sunny with a high wind blowing the brown leaves against the wire mesh fence of the football pitch. The District Line trains rumbled past westbound to Parsons Green, Putney Bridge, Wimbledon, east-bound to Upminster, Tower Hill, Dagenham East with passengers, the sea, mountains and death. I looked at the postcard of the Vermeer girl. Afraid but seeking to avert nothing Luise looked back at me in the November daylight. The first time I saw that look on her face was about seven o’clock on a Sunday morning at the house in Kilburn where she had the bedsit. It was a few days after our first evening together, we hadn’t yet made love; I’d kissed her and she smelled of honey, she said it was cough sweets. I’d been thinking about her all the time so I drove up there and rang her bell. She came to the door in pyjamas, no eyebrows, and that look that sought to avert nothing but was questioning, uncertain, and afraid. What was there to be afraid of?

We went up to her room and she made coffee. On the wall was an old clock she’d brought with her from Germany, it was stopped. It had a round wooden case and a sad white face with delicate black roman numerals. I opened the back and released the escapement; the works unwound with a great whirring; then I wound it up and started it running again. When she came to live with me in Fulham its pale white moonface rose over our lovemaking, over the smooth and shining sea of our pleasure. Then it stopped and wouldn’t go again however much I tinkered with it. There wasn’t a wall in our bedroom that clock was happy on; it hung there staring with its pendulum dead and the little door at the bottom of the case dropped open like the jaw of a skeleton.

My unfinished adaptation of Dracula lay on the desk. I opened the folder and looked at where I’d left off:

DOWN AMONG THE SHADOWY TOMBS PROFESSOR VAN HELSING OPENS THE COFFIN OF ONE OF THE VAMPIRE BRIDES OF DRACULA …

Van Helsing: How beautiful she is in her Vampire sleep!

In her silk-lined coffin Melanie Falsepercy, the Vermeer girl, lay with her eyes open, her red lips slightly parted, her long hair loose about her. Van Helsing’s speech balloon throbbed with the old man’s lust.

The telephone rang. I picked it up and said hello.

‘Herman?’ said the voice of Sol Mazzaroth. His damp and sweaty hand came out of the telephone and touched my arm.

‘I should have Dracula wound up tonight,’ I said. ‘Van Helsing’s down among the tombs now finishing off the vampire ladies.’

‘Not to worry,’ said Mazzaroth. ‘You’ve got time on that. Can you come in tomorrow afternoon around half-past three? I’ve got something really exciting to tell you.’

‘OK, I’ll be there.’

I switched on the radio and got Radio Moscow at 12020 kHz with Alla Pugachova singing Harlekino. Is there a story of me? I asked myself. Am I in it? I typed:

SOME DRAMATIS PERSONAE IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE

The Kraken, the underhead: by its own account it came into existence when the human mind needed another mind to hold the original terror but it may well be of earlier origin. Eurydice claims to be its mother by a giant squid.

Eurydice, mother? of the Kraken; the vast and ivory nakedness of her rising from the deeps. Luise von Himmelbett and Melanie Falsepercy are the Eurydice of this story, the lost one, the gone one, the one who cannot stay. Dike or Dice is Justice or Natural Law. Eurydice is Wide Justice, justice everywhere, universal natural law. What, the loss of her?

The Giant Squid, an aspect of Orpheus, also (in a non-gigantic way) of Orff. Lusting after fishergirls.

The Vermeer Girl, an aspect of the Mother Goddess, the female principle that manifests itself as Eurydice or Persephone or Luise or Melanie Falsepercy or Medusa. I have in mind the face of the composite Eurydice loosely grinning, becoming, becoming …?

The Olive Tree, Luise and I called it a Persephone door but mainly it’s the flickering of Thing-in-Itself.

The Head of Orpheus, the overhead. It isn’t to be trusted, I know that: music with Fallok and a story with me, and the one likely to end up as badly as the other. All the same I have to trust it — we’re in this together, it and I, for as long as it continues to think of me.

Aristaeus, what is he in the story, why is he being so pretentiously The Mysterious Stranger? Is there something about him that reminds me of people who get there before I do, who know something I don’t know? Or is it simply that he’s an inconvenient witness to the killing of the tortoise? Why am I afraid that he’ll take something away from me?

Here the DRAMATIS PERSONAE came to an end. I had lunch and a kip, stuck the Dracula disk in the Apple II, turned on the monitor, and sank into a reverie.

The afternoon immersed itself in dusk and the dusk deepened into night. District Line trains with golden windows rumbled townwards and homewards; the football pitch was illuminated, the lower leaves of the plane trees on the common became brilliant and theatrical; I heard the cries of the players, the thudding of the ball as the figures moved under the chalky whiteness of the lights; along the footpaths on either side of the pitch homegoers passed with quickened footsteps. I looked at the Vermeer girl, saw Melanie Falsepercy, remembered Luise. In the window my lamplit face was reflected on the darkness; I pulled down the blinds and saw the following appear on the monitor as I typed:

EURYDICE

The sea is full of marvels but there are no answers in it. There are remote beaches where certain things are insisted upon. There are crabs whose bodies are like human faces, angry and disappointed faces with mouth parts gabbling silently, urgently. These faces are carried on jointed legs, they hurry along the tidal edge drivenly surviving from one moment to the next; there is no time to lose if their line of angry and disappointed faces is to continue.

In the spring tides the female crab releases her ten thousand eggs, each one a potential angry and disappointed face and most of them will be eaten by the creatures of the sea. The female stands not like a face on legs, she stands huge, heroic and technological, like a spacecraft poised on elaborately articulated legs; she stands like the most modern thing in the world and she expels into the sea these ten thousand ancient faces.

There’s no end to me, no limit, no way to define or measure me, no way of knowing what I am or how much of me there is. There is an endless surging and undulating of me, an endless cycle of ebb and flow: that is called the sea. Little moments of me have lines drawn before and after and these moments are given names like Orpheus and Eurydice and they become stories. But I am wordless, heaving in the ocean night of me, stirring in the dark trees, breathing in and breathing out my soul.

I resumed the unfinished Dracula page. Van Helsing drove a stake into the heart of the beautiful vampire. NNYURGHLLGHHhhaaaaah! shrieked the Vermeer girl.