Angelica's Grotto by Russell Hoban Read Free Book Online Page A

other hand,’ noting the counter that showed him to be Visitor No. 973,472 to the site, ‘I’ve got a lot of company.’ Lamenting that he was no longer a player, he consoled himself manually. ‘
And there are no exceptions to the rule
…’ sang Connie Francis (afraid of silence, he had put the CD on REPEAT)
‘Yes, everybody’s somebody’s fool.’

12

The Gorgon Smile
    Many of the views of Angelica in action were confined to the sexual organs, seen from only a few inches away and suitable for gynaecological study. After a time these images became abstract; a kind of visual dyslexia set in, and Klein didn’t always know what he was looking at. He was confused, disoriented, and baffled in his quest for solitary satisfaction; nonetheless he persevered, achieving tiny climaxes that were little better than footnotes referring him to the
op. cit
. of his youth.
‘Ibid,’
he said.
‘q.v.
Call me Ozymandias.’
    In photographs of anal intercourse Angelica was often seen sitting or lying supine on her partner and spreading the lips of her vagina while he sodomised her. In that view her genitalia and anus seemed an ancient and savage face from which protruded the curved penis ‘Like the tongue of the Gorgon,’ said Klein. ‘Hundreds of thousands of fools like me are staring at screens where this face laughs at them. Hundreds of thousands of pounds – no, millions! – are spent on this demonstration of… what? A mystery?
    ‘Her genitals (he knew them intimately now) no longer seem firm and fresh. The monster that menaces Angelica has by now mounted her many times. Maybe she neverwanted to be rescued, maybe she lusted after the monster. What will she give birth to? What is the mystery behind the Gorgon face? Why do I sit here for hours with my nose up the bottoms of strangers? Bottoms in cyberspace, for God’s sake, slick with lubricant! Surrogates, stuntmen and women for the stunts I can’t do any more. Or never did in the first place. I wonder what her voice is like? I wonder if she’s read Ariosto? Not likely. Am I going to ring her up?’ He picked up the telephone, put it down again.
    He noticed that he was still connected to the Internet. ‘Lucifer,’ he said as the name came into his mind. He put the Yahoo search engine on it and went down the list of matches until he came to a painting with that title by Zdenek Polach. He clicked on it and got something bluish-white, blurred and spinning, tilting on its axis. ‘Confusion,’ he said. Unlike the soaring Lucifer in the Rorshach blot it made him uncomfortable. He clicked on Next Painting and got
The Confusion
in which a dim and malevolent face looked out of a noxious yellowish-white bafflement. ‘I’m sorry I asked,’ he said.
    Klein disconnected from the Internet and switched off the modem and the monitor. It was quarter past nine on a rainy evening in September. Across the common a District Line train rumbled towards town. His mind gave him the red telephone box outside the block of flats in Beaufort Street where he and Hannelore had lived from 1970 to 1972. ‘The red telephone box in the rain under the drooping white blossoms of a chestnut tree,’ he said, ‘the red telephone box all fresh and juicy in the rain with the white petals scattered on it.’ He’d never made a call from that telephone box but he’d always passed it going to and from the flat and it stood in his memory like anilluminated gatehouse to his love. ‘
Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott’
he sang: her favourite hymn. ‘All gone,’ he said. He went down to the kitchen, poured himself a large Glenfiddich.

13

Night Side
    ‘When the world was young,’ he heard himself saying, and his voice woke him up. ‘What?’ he asked himself, trying to hold the fugitive thought. ‘When the world was young the movies were black-and-white, the people in them spoke in short snappy sentences. At restaurants and getting out of taxis they paid with banknotes and never received any change.