Linger Awhile Read online

  Linger Awhile

  RUSSELL HOBAN

  To Jüri and Lynette

  ‘I’ve something to tell you, so linger awhile.’

  ‘Linger Awhile’

  Contents

  1 Irving Goodman

  2 Istvan Fallok

  3 Irving Goodman

  4 Chauncey Lim

  5 Istvan Fallok

  6 Irving Goodman

  7 Grace Kowalski

  8 Chauncey Lim

  9 Justine Trimble

  10 Istvan Fallok

  11 Chauncey Lim

  12 Detective Inspector Hunter

  13 Istvan Fallok

  14 Chauncey Lim

  15 Irving Goodman

  16 Justine Trimble

  17 Detective Inspector Hunter

  18 Irving Goodman

  19 Medical Examiner Harrison Burke

  20 Grace Kowalski

  21 Irving Goodman

  22 Detective Inspector Hunter

  23 Grace Kowalski

  24 Artie Nussbaum

  25 Detective Inspector Hunter

  26 Istvan Fallok

  27 Justine Two

  28 Grace Kowalski

  29 Detective Inspector Hunter

  30 Dr Wilbur Flood

  31 Medical Examiner Harrison Burke

  32 Detective Inspector Hunter

  33 Grace Kowalski

  34 Detective Inspector Hunter

  35 Irving Goodman

  36 Chauncey Lim

  37 Irving Goodman

  38 Justine Trimble

  39 Ralph Darling

  40 Detective Inspector Hunter

  41 Grace Kowalski

  42 Artie Nussbaum

  43 Detective Inspector Hunter

  44 Grace Kowalski

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  1

  Irving Goodman

  13 November 2003. I fell in love with Charlotte Burton the first time I heard her voice, months before I actually met her. This was back in 1966 when she was at Radio Essex, Britain’s Better Music Station on Knock John in the Thames Estuary. Her voice had an elegant eroticism that was effortless; that it came to me via pirate radio gave it the added charm of the forbidden. I bought the nautical chart of the estuary and revelled in its esoterica. The unseen Charlotte became for me a princess hedged about with buoys and soundings and magical names. Knock John Tower, the old World War II fort where she worked, was shown, with the eponymous sandbank and channel as well as Barrow, Long Sand, Fisherman’s Gat Precautionary Area, and other names that sang in my mind while my fantasies rose and fell with the tides.

  When I finally met Charlotte she was exactly as she sounded and from the first moment everything was as I hoped it would be. We were married and had ten good years together. We were faithful to each other and I had no mid-life crisis. Then she died. Nobody talks about end-of-life crises but they do happen and twenty-seven years after Charlotte’s death I fell into one at the age of eighty-three. I needed some technical help with it so I bought a bottle of expensive whisky and went to see Istvan Fallok at Hermes Soundways in Soho.

  I handed him the bottle and he read the label. ‘Bowmore Cask Strength Islay Single Malt Scotch Whisky. Thank you, I’m deeply moved.’ He found two cloudy glasses somewhere; maybe he washed them every six months, I don’t know. He poured for us both and I added water from a kettle that was sitting on some sheet music. He tried his neat. ‘Here’s to whatever,’ he said, and swallowed a little. Then he coughed, blew out a big breath, wiped his eyes, added water, and said, ‘This must be serious.’

  ‘It is,’ I said. We were in the deep-sea grotto of his basement sound studio off Broadwick Street. November rain was pinging on the steel stairs that led down to his door. Little red and yellow and green eyes winked while a humming silence listened. Dim shapes crouched and towered and unheard decibels rose and fell in blue columns on screens.

  ‘Don’t be bashful,’ he said. ‘Blurt it out.’

  ‘OK,’ I blurted. ‘I’m in love.’

  ‘Mazel tov. What’re you now, ninety-five?’ He was only in his early sixties.

  ‘Eighty-three.’

  ‘You look older. Still get it up?’

  ‘Don’t be coarse. “Love is not love / Which alters where it alteration finds.”’

  ‘So it’s all in your mind then.’

  ‘So are you, so is everything. I experience the world through my cerebral cortex.’

  ‘Please, no fancy talk. What’s her name?’

  ‘Justine Trimble.’

  ‘And she’s what, twenty-five?’

  ‘She was. Now she’s dead.’

  ‘Great. You’re old and she’s dead. So what do you want from me?’

  ‘Get me to her. Or her to me, I don’t care which.’

  ‘You want to go to her, no problem: slash your wrists, throw yourself under a train, whatever.’

  ‘Come on, you know what I mean.’

  ‘No, I don’t. If you’re going to have a mid-life crisis at the age of eighty-three at least do it with a woman who’s available. Who is this Justine Trimble anyhow?’

  ‘Here, look at this.’ I’d brought a video with me, Last Stage to El Paso. The Internet Movie Database showed that she’d been in fourteen films but there were only four on commercial videotape and I had them all. I stuck it in the machine and we watched it. Justine Trimble was pretty in a 1950s black-and-white western kind of way but she was more than just pretty – she had something about her that made me fall in love with her the first time I saw her swing into the saddle. In several of her films she co-starred with Dawson Chase, a much bigger star than she was. Westerns back then had not yet achieved political correctness. Justine Trimble had what it took for the time. You could tie her to a post and leave her out in the rain for two or three days and she’d come out of it freshly laundered, make-up unsmudged, and with dry knickers. When the action required it she loaded guns, bandaged wounds (nobody bled but they would hold themselves where they were shot) and she said, ‘Look out, here they come,’ as necessary. In Last Stage to El Paso they actually let her rescue Dawson Chase. She had an exemplary figure, a modestly unassailable bosom, and was an expert horsewoman much admired for her seat. When she and Dawson kissed they didn’t use their tongues and when they embraced he kept his hands above her waist. She was wasted on him. Why did I love her? Why not someone my own age from a similar background? I have nothing against eighty-three-year-old women but love isn’t rational, it isn’t correct. It can strike like lightning anywhere, any time. Wham, that’s it. The first time I saw her I knew she was the one I’d been waiting for through my years of loneliness.

  Fallok was watching the film attentively. In the scene where Justine goes after the bad guys she was wearing what would have been jeans if they’d been made by Levi Strauss but these had been run up by the wardrobe department and although lycra hadn’t yet been invented they brought out the best in Justine. As she swung into the saddle Fallok backed up the tape, then made her swing into the saddle again. ‘Why’d you do that?’ I said.

  ‘Just checking something.’

  ‘Checking her ass, you mean.’

  ‘Oh, and I suppose you fell in love with her mind?’ He behaved himself for the rest of the film. Dawson saved the gold shipment, Justine saved Dawson, they kissed with closed mouths and it was THE END.

  ‘OK,’ said Fallok, ‘now I know who she is. Was. What am I expected to do about it?’

  ‘I told you – get me to her or her to me.’

  ‘What her? You’ve got her on video and the real Justine is an ex-her. What her are you talking about?’

  ‘Don’t play dumb – I want the whole flesh-and-blood Justine in 3-D where I ca
n get my hands on her.’

  ‘Where is this 3-D Justine supposed to come from?’

  ‘From the video. She’s in there in the form of magnetised particles or whatever. In those particles you must be able to find her visual DNA.’

  ‘Visual DNA! Did you read this or are you making it up as you go along?’

  ‘It just came out of my mouth. Is there such a thing?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never done anything with image enhancement or reconstruction. I’m not the man for the job.’

  ‘Sure you are, you can do anything with technology. I know you can do it.’ He was smart and he was weird and that made me believe in him.

  He didn’t say anything for a bit and I could see that he was mentally replaying Justine as she swung into the saddle. Then, ‘Let me think about this for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘Try to think fast. I haven’t been feeling all that well and I might be checking out pretty soon.’

  ‘Leave the video and I’ll see what I can do. Mind you, I can’t promise anything and I might have to damage the tape.’

  ‘That’s OK, I’ve got a copy. I know you’ll figure something out. When can I call you?’

  ‘Don’t call me, I’ll call you when I have anything to report.’

  14 November 2003. It was Herman Orff who put me on to Istvan Fallok. Orff was in his sixties by then. He and Fallok were both famous among the people I knew, writers, painters, composers, and various others on the way up or the way down or treading water in the arts. Between fifteen and twenty years ago Orff, who got very small advances and whose books never earned back those advances, was suffering from what we in the trade call blighter’s rock. He was totally rocked and couldn’t get anything useful down on paper. While in that state he received a handbill through his letterbox in which Istvan Fallok claimed that he could unrock anyone. The rest (among a rather small circle) is history.

  By means of thirty-six electrodes and who knows what computerised mumbo-jumbo, Orff had his head zapped by Fallok and had a number of encounters with the head of Orpheus. Eventually he found his way into cereal boxes, the backs of, and eked out a living in that medium while developing a character called Nnvsnu the Tsrungh which he copyrighted as a computer game that made him almost wealthy.

  Orff was white-haired and rosy-faced, and he was what you might call a successful failure. He had failed as a novelist and he had failed to regain his lost love, Luise von Himmelbett, (see his novel, The Medusa Frequency) but he could smile (ruefully) and say that really he had no complaints. ‘Life is a one-way trip,’ he said to me. ‘If someone nice sits next to you for a while, that’s as much as you have a right to expect.’ It was at a publisher’s party that he told me this, the occasion being the launch of Geoffrey Thrust’s novel, Love’s Labia, at the Horse Hospital behind Russell Square tube station. Neither of us knew Thrust but we were on the Palinurus mailing list.

  ‘Do you think Istvan Fallok could do anything with a visual problem?’ I said. Having drunk more red wine than I should have I outlined my situation at length.

  ‘Fallok can do all kinds of things,’ said Orff. ‘Try him and see. The worst that can happen is that it will cost you your sanity and maybe your life but you’ll probably be sorry if you don’t ring him up.’

  Who could say no to a proposition like that? Orff gave me Fallok’s number and I rang him up. When I met him I was impressed by his appearance. How a man could look so worn-out without being dead was a real head-shaker. I’m told that his hair used to be red but it was white now. His face hung loosely from his watery blue eyes but he looked sharp in an almost extinct way and this was the man to whom I confided my cask strength whisky and my hopes.

  13 December 2003. I tried to be patient. I fully appreciated that I’d asked Fallok to do something that, as far as I knew, had never been done and very likely couldn’t be done. When I was a child we had a large mirror that took up most of the width of the rear wall in the front room. It had no frame and was fastened flush against the wall. It showed what was in front of it but I used to put my face against the very edge and try to see around it to what it wasn’t showing. I never could but I knew that the mirror wasn’t giving me the whole picture. I’m still trying to see around the edge. That’s where Justine was and I believed that Istvan Fallok could get me there.

  I waited a week, then a month. I watched my copy of Last Stage to El Paso again and again, straining my eyes in an effort to pull her out of the screen and out of death into my world.

  My eyesight was failing. Age-related macular degeneration was the diagnosis. The macula is that part of the eye which gives detail and depth perception. I frequently mistook flat surfaces for raised ones and shadows for substance. I always drank most of a bottle of red wine at dinner and that didn’t help. In the evening it was difficult for me to read with my reading glasses and images on the TV screen lost sharpness. In a surprising number of films there’s a bit where someone holds up a letter and I couldn’t read it unless I got up very close. If it was a video I could pause the tape but if it wasn’t I often missed crucial information. Sometimes people killed themselves or someone else after reading a letter.

  I was having difficulty with colour too; the scene before my eyes sometimes seemed pale. It wasn’t cataracts – I’d already had implants for those. Dr Luzhin is my eye doctor. He looks like Lenin and strokes his goatee a lot. When I asked him about the colour problem he put drops in my eyes, sent me back to the waiting room for fifteen minutes, then led me to the apparatus where you put your chin on the chin rest, shone lights of various colours into one eye and the other, and stroked his goatee. ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘There’s no change in your eyes since six months ago,’ he said. ‘This business with loss of colour, there is no defence against it. What you see is what the brain tells you you’re seeing. If the brain decides that the colour is going out of the world you’re going to see everything paler than before.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do about it?’

  ‘Get yourself a girlfriend.’

  I waited and waited for word from Istvan but there was no news day after day. Then I began to see Justine Trimble where she wasn’t. If I looked out of the corner of my eye I saw her in the street, in the Underground and on buses in black-and-white. She always looked back at me as if she wanted to say something. When I looked straight ahead she wasn’t there.

  2

  Istvan Fallok

  24 November 2003. ‘They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother. When they said that man could fly …’ Right? General disbelief. But the Wright brothers suspended their disbelief. They believed that man could fly and the rest of it followed from that. Suspension of disbelief is the first step in doing anything hitherto thought impossible. Yes. I keep telling myself that. I’m Istvan Fallok and I believe that I’m going to reconstitute Justine Trimble from the magnetised particles of a videotape. I believe it because when I saw her on that video it hit me like a bolt of lightning. Wham, I was in love. Irving Goodman’s an OK guy and he’s in love with Justine too but if I can make this happen she’s going to be mine, not his.

  Right, let’s get practical. Google tells me that videotape is composed primarily of three components: magnetic (metal oxide) particles, a polyurethane-based binder, and a polyester base material. Particles yes. Particles and waves. Diffraction gratings. Particles in suspension. Particles in a suspension of disbelief. Waves of aggravation and frustration. Light comes through the grating as waves or particles. Interference patterns. Light. Justine on the video is made of light.

  Wait a minute. Let’s think this thing through. Do I want to bring Justine to me or do I want to go to her? Not dead Justine but the waves and/or particles of her on the video? So if I go there, what then? Will I be the sixty-five-year-old me or will I be young like Justine? And western? With a pistol and a horse?

  There was a name in my mind: Gösta Kraken. I had a copy of his book, Perception Perceived. I went to my shelves, stuck out my arm, and it l
eapt into my hand. So I knew it wanted to help. I’d flagged the page where he talks about being:

  Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion on the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we find the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four stillnesses per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop; but below the threshold of conscious thought the eye sees and the mind savours the flickering of the black.

  Thank you, Gösta. So it’s light and motion, blackness and stillness. Waves or particles? Waves and particles? Still, I’m thinking of it from her end. What about my getting to where she is? No good. Even if I could work out the translation of me into magnetised particles all I’d have is me stuck in Last Stage to El Paso. Endlessly. No, I’ve got to bring her to me. First I’ll have to scan the stillnesses and calibrate an electronic suspension of the black. Film runs at twenty-four frames per second; video at twenty-five and the black … Hang on, do I want the black? No, I don’t. Let’s back up and start again.

  25.11.03. Sorry, Gösta. Can’t use you this time but maybe some other time. We’re talking about light here, not blackness. Justine on screen is particles of light. Or waves, whichever. OK, so I’ve got to get a frame with a good full-length shot of Justine, then I isolate her for transmission. How the fuck do I do that?

  Went to see Chauncey Lim in D’Arblay Street. Optical novelties. All kinds of pocket-size things with lenses, keyrings that talk and buttonhole cameras. On the wall an acupuncture chart and a calendar with a photograph of a black rooster from Aunt Zophrania’s Herbals & Dreambooks Est. 1925 ‘Harlem’s Best’. The place was pretty fuggy and there was the kind of smell you might get if you opened a box of Transylvanian earth. You have to take Chauncey as you find him. I bought a fountain pen that projects a photo of Virginia Mayo (still big in Morocco) to put him in a good mood.