The Waiting Room

by Wilson Harris

  She groped for a match, lit another blind cigarette, reflecting that “he” had instinctively raped her like a man who beheld nothing but the apple of his eye tricked out in his own illumination and deceptive colours, flesh-tinted, beautiful.

  IT WAS NIGHT. The scene had not merely changed but assumed its true and literal (mutual) proportions. NIGHT.

  On the other hand, on the other side of the kingdom of space where he stood observing her—the other side of the waiting room—a hair’s breadth away from her—IT WAS MORNING.

  MORNING. A cool wind, transparent skirts, blew along the paradoxical street, self-deceptive bubble within which at that early fluid but constellated hour no one yet truly stood in the body of “his” room and proud constitution but the daily ornament in her sky blue dress kneeling to scrub the floor. Morning woman. Antique pail. Dripping cloth. In the street beneath him where she kneeled like a self-created fetish—half-human, half-edifice—the traffic of solipsis began to pour as if it instinctively conceived itself a glittering extension of her drapery and arm.

  The shop window against the pavement Susan knew—or thought she knew from past experience—as she touched the sights of her own world, now shone with a curious awakening look, transparent eyelid, half-dreaming lust still within the imaginations of night. One almost felt oneself looking through and beyond a monumental spell—with his eyes of morning as well as hers of night—into a cloud, half-shadow, half-substance, late room, early capacity. But which it was no one could tell save that this was an unburdened place within which one saw oneself transcribed, translated, in an instant of arousal: nodding without a trace of doubt to the other unassuming self, unenviable reflection…. Unenviable reflection. There lay outcry and snag, element of impersonality, uncertainty, anonymity which had not apparently registered before. And one shrank all at once from what could be an aspect of obliteration—obliteration of the bubble of personality in the ornament of love. Obliteration of the bubble of pride in the ornament of glory. It was as if a subtle explosion—orgasm—had rent both the dark and light flesh of the waiting-room and the flotsam and jetsam one endured became a tributary offering, spiritual reversal, mainstream whose course enveloped one in the very gulf of presence. The broken reflective ornament one saw—unenviable, climacteric, unassuming, close as one’s skin, one’s sun—was the ambivalent reflection of a servant within which to endure awakening flood, traffic, divine summons, necessity, freedom or servitude which one dreamt to uphold or shatter, and through which one was being religiously and obscurely stripped and confronted by the fetish of the void….

  FOUR

  Silence Please

  Susan placed one finger upon her lips to invoke silence and to remind “him” that in the realm of things he once claimed to govern he, too, had been imposed upon by himself to reflect a sphere of growing deafness within, stone deafness without, after all. And further (she declared) it must surely now dawn on him, as the most disturbing feature of all, that he was becoming literally deaf, in a clamorous way, to the very distinction of silence he first thought to treasure and contain within the hieroglyphics of space, living room.

  SILENCE PLEASE. But even as she uttered the words her material command turned into distraught echoes of old, his study of persuasion and withdrawal. Battering ram.

  Once again—as though to prove something to himself—“he” shut his eyes in a compulsive attempt to blot out the siege of reflection in morning creature and night’s room, the siege of distraction in feminine mould, drawn curtain, but discerned in the depths of such stony indulgence on his part—such rigid assumption of himself—what looked like a frail but monumental light, the insane clatter of silk as it fell to the floor; stocking; manuscript or flesh.

  Articles of memory. Lion of the void. Antelope of wood. Horn of the desert upon which had been carved the fauna and flora of lust. Was it his emblematic bristle, green model and tree, or her innocent crest, toppling trunk, flag and leaf, which deflected them—and him once again—from containing silence and fulfilment? It was as if he embraced her still in his own loud echoing and continuous stamp or fall—sexual rage of the skin within which he recalled exercising a razor upon himself until the bark of adolescence cracked and vanished (as though it had never truly existed save as a mirage of consciousness) and a darker prickly mask emerged—an irritable conjunction of roots which fired his expression (or hers?) into treacherous lines, subsidence … stranger … older … stranger…. What treachery … decline … resided in one’s appearance, what degeneracy of feature, alienation, colour, hair, bone…. He smiled nevertheless at himself as at the blast of pleasure and promise he had become. Her clinging substitute. Pilot of maturity. Hirsute tower, bearded premises. Cliff-top. Stone and vessel of flesh. And the debris of the universal waiting room—traffic of restraint and potency—acquired a new rough note, harsh glare, gear, slant, expression.

  SILENCE PLEASE. The time had come to insert key into lock. Shut the metallic disembowelled stranger in. Bell and voice. Gaoler of and gaoled sensibilities. It was an architecture of baffled, indeed baffling, emotional authority in which he was involved, trapped far back by his own devices in the shout and gold of person and thing.

  He drew close to her—stricken by an ornamental blur of faces—none of which truly resembled hers—faceless public. He was filled all at once with rage at his own incapacity. Might as well strike out. Rape in broad daylight. Susan shook—as if she suffered, once again, his assault upon her—half-shuddering, half-contemptuous nod like one who welcomed her own pencil of fate—blind man’s buff, the perverse game of love.

  A stone’s throw from the cottage in which she lived (was it twelve or twenty years ago … adamant centuries past or still to come … in an unexplored present, unbroken future) one came abruptly upon the edge of the land. He inserted his hearing aid and grew slowly aware of the sound of the depths, coming, it seemed, from an inestimable distance, a universe of muffled, muffling direction. The sea was the blueness of the sky, foaming white far under him around each black penis of rock constellated in the uncanny wilderness of space. He felt himself quiver like a bat’s wing upon sheer cliff—radar fantasy—and discovered a flowering plant lying crushed beneath him, blue petal, dark veins, stars, spatula of mesmerism, the minute grasp of hand and fingers, intimate overwhelming design.

  Rape in broad daylight. Had she, in fact, inveigled him to dwell within her—within his assault upon her, crushed petal, living room, so that now, long after the obscure kinship of event, he still found himself suspended in her filament of reverie, spider’s root, blind web, ear of memory? The phenomenal page of the past upon which he was drawn to peer, grew into the very present chest of cliff upon which he had followed her along a compulsive path before prostrating himself upon the very brink, lip, heart in mouth, rage, hallucination, nerves of the sea. He turned and tried to shout but where he lay flat on the ground it was no longer possible to see the elusive echo, mound or house into which she (the one he stalked) had vanished as if into the ground—wave of land beneath him. Her sweat—not his—began to roll into his eyes: subtle prominence, configuration, landscape, globe or bead of moisture in himself whose translucency or transparency … recollection … was chained to a surf of elements.

  The agonizing inconsistency was the way she dissolved into everything and nothing but existed still to remonstrate with him. Sound of fate (echo sounder rather than bellow), sightless outcry, fathom rather than ascendancy. One moment she would be there—actively here (and he knew, every time, it would all happen again and again in numerous guises, disguises)—large as life, instinct with blood, incarnation of desire—but in another void or shape she would retire into the broken texture of himself and he would come to know himself deprived of everything he possessed, and empty of the rigid datum or value within her at which he flung himself, introspective, retrospective line, grasp. Rape in broad daylight.

  SILENCE PLEASE. How he longed to hold her within the dearest conviction of abandonment of the sens
es, as something utterly priceless and beyond the self-advertisements of beauty or the shop window of the universe. But even as he dreamed to succumb to the self-surrender of everything she drew him still to her as before along a vulgar track, cement of consciousness … pricked … reflected … out of the depths. Echo sounder. Defective hearing aid. One’s poor involuntary humanity—what ambivalent props, tap, cane, adventitious root one grew to clutch, stand in need of … until these became in turn a senseless soul, barrier.

  *

  He leaned on his elbow (as upon a crooked stick). The sky was turning misty as glass and the clouds flitted like milk dissolving upon a window-pane though still occupying their own grain of pallor, destiny, soul of light. She summoned him still, the flitting command of vanished youth, mushroom of sensibility. Now “he” shrank from her in the waiting room—as from brooding ornament, prison, hell—but then (long ago) he could have sworn he knew what it was she justly and truly and freely saw in him. He could have sworn she was the reciprocal one he would follow to the ends of the earth, pick out of every crowd, every street, every age. And that it was she—silhouetted against time—who expressed her choice of fulfilment in him, even though he lay on the very tip of inconsistency and isolation … buried in her and his lengthening cruel design, self-deceptive wraith of desire upon bottomless wraith…. WHEN DARKNESS FELL HE WOULD ARISE AND SMASH THE DEVIL OF A DOOR.

  *

  But before darkness fell with his explosive assault on her, they would retrace their steps farther back still in time towards another potential threshold of the kingdom (or territory) of love. Promissory unit. Razor’s edge—sculpture and renaissance of youth. Would it ever be possible to say when it was he had given her, or been given by her, the very first vivid confused stab upon which overlapping present and past—meaningful presence—suddenly became an acute convergence of reality, an obsession with distance which she now appeared to abolish?

  Was it upon his descending wave, her trough, his unlikely perch, fugitive epitaph, cliff-top? Was it an antique face they equally shared, groomed, polished to perfection upon the timeless meteoric landscape of the dead—their common step towards ancient self-portrait and vessel … cargo and pathos of fashion, rage for—indeed quest of—immortal youth? She was the earliest trigger he recalled he possessed—emotional target, residual goal within an immemorial span, phenomenal pursuit…. She drew him now so close to her he could see once again the light on her face—the faintest shudder of her lips, a kind of crackling, even wooden, darkness issuing from her mouth which made the reflection of her skin—neck and cheek—glow like a shade which was neither the coal of breath nor the fire of spirit.

  He wanted to touch her, caress her but she became all of a sudden (to his astonishment) a fury he had not expected to find, a trigger of fury he had himself sprung into existence and yet not truly bargained for. The soul of love. Had she actually spoken the words out aloud like a creature of curious motivation, robot of spirit? The soul of love. Such unearthly venom, self-abandon, self-hate. Such an expression—ancient and devouring—such an aim and assumption of being—was incredible, archaic: was it the daemon of all possession (and dispossession) at her side in the faceless throng of the universe whom he had overlooked and to whom she spoke? For how could he dare to believe it was he, rather than another, whom she dreamt to invest with the blast of memory? Was it the purest ricochet of fantasy? Had he misread the frame of her lips? Was he merely her ironical substitute—SILENCE PLEASE—shattering and loud like the ornamental cultivation of the deaf, hammer of deity, consciousness?

  Susan made an involuntary gesture upon the page of her book to her slave and god as though to push him away from her at the very moment of explosive climax: it was she after all who feared him—not “he” her—feared infection by him (or impregnation by him) with an instrument of alarm, a train of consequences she had herself engendered. She warned him with all the force at her command to stay away from her, as if to confirm once again within him the trigger of fury he had not bargained for.

  The time for an ultimate target of invocation within her was not yet ripe. The bark of upheaval—hollow stress of unity, trunk of ages—was adamant as stone. The thaw was still to come. The fruit was still hard and green, buried in the rind, antique muse of the field, punishment of the wheat, corn, rice. The scythe of the sun flashed—dumb flare, cannon, instrument—but the harvest remained an enigma.

  A famine of spirits blazed in their very facile resemblances whether skin, leaf, petal, brow, eye, lake. And even as he beheld her—or thought he beheld her in a glimmering crowd of stars—he was doubly conscious of her withdrawal into his ignorance of her naked material, immaterial proportions. She had just crossed a dent and crack in sky or pavement, hesitated, caught, forced to struggle: bend forward abruptly, like a woman in the fields, intent on a furrow and plant—the terrestrial root and model of which she had herself half-driven, half-ground into him until it almost seemed to grip him like her hallucination and plea, elongated heel, spur, compulsive arch, half-branch, half-step, inverted privilege of community to which he clung. And which he now sought to depict as the phenomenal circuit of fear and love engendered by her in him. Technology of the soul. Hearing aid or pickaxe. Scythe or gun. Rust of the senses. Invention. Madonna of the fields. Thus did it dawn on him that he had suffered a partial eclipse, the eclipse of god, and that this was the humiliating design she imposed on him as a kind of salutary rebuff and accommodation of incapacity at the same time. It was as if in pushing him away she still continued to draw him up into her compromise with reality. She knew she was blind and must learn to conceive of him in a manner consistent with a true rehearsal of her own limited powers of freedom and explosive actuality.

  *

  BLIND. She drew her hand across her eyes all at once with an exploratory gesture, and the arch of visionary time upon which “he” still clung to her—as she stood transfixed above him—shook with the administration of her vicarious blow that seemed to dismantle the very mould of appearances around her.

  The premature die of the waiting room turned into a mint of shadow, broken ornament, crumpled bedclothes. Susan lit a match and placed it against the eyes of the “living” doll still lying at her feet. She felt the sharp flame clutch at the sensitive rim of his flesh and let a burnt splinter fall which matched the shudder of lips that had grown dumb. If she was blind it was fitting that he should be dumb: the equal blow of necessity which illuminates the frontier between the human and the divine—between man and god—in every familiar, now unfamiliar, prison of circumstance, art or labour.

  Susan let her hand fall again with brutal resignation upon the blackened fetish of the log-book. It seemed to her that “his” anatomy parted instantly and ceased to be the belly of cloth she still remembered lying against her feet—pillow or doll: in fact nothing stood there now but a handful of mere skinny sailing pages half-torn from their covers—broken lines which one surmised had been ruled for rib and bone. And furthermore—upon receiving her blow of circumstance—his hallucinated blood, that had hardened at one stage into original ink over the passage of time, could do no more now but outline a frail residue of brittleness which permitted each word of flesh to crumble into dust.

  Yet even so Susan did not mourn their (or his) material departure: if she were to be held guilty and responsible for incapsulating some portion of her log-book into the void it seemed she had done the right and true thing, after all, and that this shattered fragment and image would return and grow ultimately to express a genuine faintness of spirit like the rarest body of atmosphere imaginable to confirm those immaterial and conflicting rumours of relationship between creatures whose bodily similarity and uniformity—profession or status—served to divide (whereas one would have thought it would have united) them in their interests….

  There was the vestige of a sneer on her lips. BITCH! “He” spat the word at her. The heartlessness and rage she exhibited, he knew, was, on one hand, a blow struck at a certain noti
on (which had long exercised their minds)—curious superstructure of love and prestige—and, on the other, it remained a compulsive invitation to him to grapple with her (and liberate her) within a world of possibilities—a most real and unpretentious waiting room of self-surrender or community which was beginning to intoxicate her, mind and limb. Almost, without perceiving it, she was drunk. Drunk with the conquest and constellation of herself—the marriage of “his” undreamt-of freedom to the living fact of her helplessness. But (this was the trap)—in endeavouring to rehearse such a unique framework of possibilities—she overemphasized the role of domination, target of fascination from which she sought to distance herself like the devil’s conceit with what seemed now not hers but entirely his creation—a puppet whose need to admire and be admired elevated one, and therefore led one into a repudiation of scale, the perversity of gift or function.

  SHARP THUNDERING KNOCK ON THE DOOR. Ancient cottage. Blow of the void. Was it a storm hammering the cliff, battering ram? SILENCE PLEASE. Listen…. Drunk, Lurched into the room. She lifted her fist and struck—as he had—was it ten or twelve or twenty years ago? … AS HE HAD…. Log-book. Vessel. Captain of memory. IT WAS HE.

  *

  His eyes glistened with something of the sky they had absorbed. The clouds fitted like milk dissolving upon a window-pane…. His expression darkened into the reproach of years (it was not he who had broken in upon her but she who had enveloped him)—darkened into her own breath—an emotional shade whose self-contained vapour of blindness ascended from the soles of her feet where she wished to inveigle him to lie, in the womb of time, misshapen and submissive—obscure constellation: ascended and occupied both the boot of the present hour and the crown or violent ridge of past years.

  The constellation of storm, no longer concealed, burst upon her: living air—“his” shadow of cloud which she drew within its ephemeral landscape of fact. Dust in her nostrils, paint, frail burning odour, skin, flesh (pores upon one’s own hand). SHARP THUNDERING KNOCK ON THE DOOR. Such a blast it threatened to capsize every image of control.