Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban Page B

gone while Hermes for a joke sent me to find her. No, it wasn’t just Hermes - she herself had told me to come and find her and in some way not yet revealed to me this was the place where she would be found, I could feel it.
    I looked in my catalogue to see what it had to say about this dark wood painted by G. David. There was no mention of it whatever. I went to the man at the desk. ‘Those two panels by David,’ I said, ‘843a and 843b, they’re not in the catalogue.’
    ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘they’re not. They’re in the catalogue that’s in the shop.’
    ‘Where’s the shop?’
    ‘Through there.’
    I went to the shop and bought the
Mauritshuis Illustrated General Catalogue
and a postcard of the Vermeer girl. Two French schoolgirls were buying the same postcard. ‘But where is this painting?’ one of them asked the man at the counter. ‘We can’t find it.’
    ‘It’s in America.’
    ‘When does it return?’
    ‘Next year.’
    Turning in the catalogue to David, No. 843, I read:
    David, Gerard
Born ca 1460 in Oudewater, died 1523 in Bruges. Worked in Bruges, where he was the most important artist after the death of Memling.
Two forest scenes

P. each 90 × 30·5. The versos of the wings of a triptych; the left one with a donkey, the right one with two oxen. Ox and donkey recur in the middle panel. The latter, depicting the Adoration of the child and the rectos of the wings are in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
    I went back to Zaal A and stared at the two panels. A space suggested itself between them and I waited to see what would appear in the space.
    Someone was looking over my shoulder. I turned and saw a tall thin man with a large light-bulb-shaped bald head and those drooping oldtime-gunfighter moustaches much favoured by American television actors. From the hang of his face however I guessed him to be European, possibly Scandinavian. He seemed to be drawing himself up into his head preparatory to speaking, and as I was the only other person in the room I waited to hear what he would say.
    ‘Rectos no,’ he said. ‘Mmnvs? Everything is metaphor and metaphor is the only actuality. Here we have the versos of the wings of a triptych, here we have only the other sides of the missing rectos that when folded shut covered the Adoration of the child. Mmnvs. Nnvsnu rrndu.’
    ‘Did I understand you to say nnvsnu rrndu?’ I said.
    ‘Mmnvs.’
    ‘You’re thinking of existing?’
    His head seemed to grow larger and balder and more light-bulb-shaped. ‘You observe me, sir,’ he said. ‘You observe me consistently and three-dimensionally manifesting, with aplomb, myself both as picture and sound. Do you not?’
    ‘I do.’
    ‘I revert to the tremendour of this metaphor, the other-sideness of versos without rectos and the child gone missing, out of our sight, offering only its rejection of our potential adoration.’
    ‘“Tremendour.” I haven’t heard that before.’
    ‘Tsrungh. From its otherness of place it speaks the encrustation, the palimpsest, the ultimate dialectic of what Redon called “the deep health of the black”. This is where I get my jollies; I am a creature of the deeps.’
    ‘Says who?’
    ‘Says
Sight and Sound
for one. They did an eight-page piece about my work: “The Unslumbering Kraken”.’
    ‘I’ve stopped reading
Sight and Sound,
I don’t think film people should be allowed near words, it’s bad for everybody.’
    ‘I agree completely. I speak only in pictures. With me the image is everything, carrying within it as it does the protoimage, the after-image, and the anti-image. This is why here I have come to speak to the Vermeer girl and to hear what she will say to me but alas, she is gone over the water and here I stand looking at this enchanted wood with its missing rectos and its centre that could not be held. This utters to me most powerfully.’
    ‘What did you want with the Vermeer girl?’
    ‘I’m in love with her. She is that