The Waiting Room

by Wilson Harris

  THE OPERATION HAD BEEN TECHNICALLY SUCCESSFUL—and though the progress one face made towards the other (slice of darkness towards pinpoint of light) appeared like a voyage of immaterial consolidation, it was equally consistent with a focus of flitting or submerged, even subservient, members of one body sometimes dense and reflective, streaming glass; sometimes bordering upon native crowd and crouch—the brute soul of solipsis: and if indeed “he” (the scaffolding of illusion she erected) appeared now to be in process of freeing her within a melting body, spiriting her towards him across a void of conception, deck, seal, lip of the abyss—it was because her fluttering breath became his flag of recension within capital and hieroglyph of flesh.

  And his fluttering breath in turn—so curiously and indissolubly nailed to hers—could not fail to signal the community of herself in another raining and moving light of infinite sharpness allied to flight and dispersal, a crumpled knife or ball of flesh, a rag to be worn for its ultimate edge and frailty of condition. And this—in the very act of its being discarded, consigned to the domestic rubbish heap, as it were—served to wipe the monument of her eyes … clean…. Misconception of god … man … beast. It was a whisper, half-prayer, half-curse, which crossed her lips like fracture or paint. Blessing invoked as well as omen recalled. How had she once tricked herself into believing that he had been nothing from the very beginning but her tool and plaything?

  TOOL. She shuddered with the gesture of one coveted and disrobed by an artist of death whom she had created at the heart of obsession: as if she had so habituated herself to manipulating him to mechanical perfection, erosive design—technical spirit, blood—that it was she who became addicted to his ground of nothingness—derelict machinery and salvage of response … serial puppet. Ironical master, passive mistress. Unseen hand shaped by and shaping the grind of the elements. Craft of possession and dispossession. It seemed now the pregnant compass, waiting room, she occupied—strewn by the ruined poles and messengers of love—had been freed and inscribed by him, after all, within and upon accumulative agency (material of destiny) so that, in clinging to him as to a bank of emotion, she grew to wait upon him—as upon the mill of god—for the denigration of all impoverishment and force—even if he were still her heraldic plaything … swine … signal load: and thus became the cargo and crew of what he was—minutiae of dense participation (representative divinity), terrifying oracle—degenerate snout and transcendental grain, heart of wood supporting him, since it discerned itself to be part and parcel of every involuntary member of his singing frame in a deaf universe.

  Dr. Sage to Susan. Penelope. Circe. SOMETHING FLED. Shattered log-book. Jigsaw of the affections….

  SIX

  Thing

  It was a curious vessel—mnemonic device—within the medium of which each “face” clung to the other like unwitting companions of ageless community. She it was who had descended into (or risen out of) his “deaf” crew and all things now appeared to have been wound into him as though to a voice above and below which exercised one soul of conviction. Resonance…. Bond…. Thing…. It was the only thread of ascent and descent into the hold of creation she knew to prompt him to bear the echoing coil of “herself” she drew like the snake of time in itself around “him”.

  Thing…. And he knew himself truly bound … enmeshed in her wild close plea and spirit as he fled … to the greatest operative distance imaginable: the leash upon himself grew into such a mechanical fiend of proportion he dared to lean as never before (without actually falling) upon the abyss of invention and confront the technical blast and hollow within which she stood … mistress of the skull, “blind” socket.

  They were now inextricably involved with the “dead” choirs of vision they had inflicted upon each other—tied together by one insensible crew of fate: one apparent vessel of flight through which they chose … struggled to escape from each other—he from the chain of lust she had ground into him until he grew aware how he still conceived it his sole harness and protection—she from the sovereign role and animal conversion with which he had invested her until she grew aware how she still conceived it her maternal shell … womb of fruition…. Thus it was that their very state of brutal relation began to usher in the fantastic irony of a common flesh.

  For the implement (or substitute) they shared had become a secret transmission of energies (masked from and yet involved in the structure of each other)—energies they wished both to contain and set free within menaces which drew them to wrestle with each other in the heart of a fearful and apparent immunity from, and yet fearful and apparent attachment to, the instrument of their condition.

  Mast of love, half-animal, half-human (saddle of earth, car of sky)—mnemonic cloud—“ground” of flight … compass of origins—convergence upon “concrete” travail—flesh—THING….

  As if all one’s nature had been seized by a phenomenon of explosive self-containment, undivided area of tension but broken tyranny of response, contraction and exposure on one hand, relief and submission on the other, merciful unawareness and merciless awareness of a fleet ally, within which to sound and digest an essential stroke of duty and conception which bound one still to the fortunes and fortress of the past, in order to hold one and release one in the identical drill of the present from a most burdensome prison, perspective, monumental evasion of reality, fixture and administration of the gulf, insensible clasp….

  Common flesh…. Instinctive bond like a great tightening … valley of constraint … singing in one’s ears…. Had the phenomenal mechanism of one’s world, fathom, hearing aid, sounding line, truly struck the shell of recollection, echo and choir of elements, macrocosm one had never dreamt existed in the wave-length of silence?

  The “waiting” room—part-present, part-past, part-future, it seemed—was falling through the dust of space, axe of memory, chopping sea, flying chip or vessel whose strain, leash, trough and course had become participle of its own crust and loaf—headless plunge … ocean … devouring perspective, joint, ground (mill of the gods), “vanished” species, felled season.

  MOUTH OF THE VOID…. Shroud of “subjective” fate torn by the irony and compulsion of freedom: two edged sword, teeth, which in exercising (while appearing to uphold every reinforcement and mistress of nature such as … mute skull … beloved flesh) sang for the first pointed incredible time, it seemed, out of its round and garment which had long appeared to demolish every miraculous bone and horn of protest in sheer animal voluptuousness: sang for the first incredible pointed time, it seemed; and one was drawn by the skin of the vortex into the other’s rent and beauty of consciousness….

  Book 2 The Vortex

  ONE

  Image of Conquest

  Susan Forrestal stroked the curious horns of the antelope upon the wall of the room. They seemed to twist and wind their way through the palms of her hand as if they were intent on plucking her from their living grave and vortex. The sensation drew her into his arms again: the man she had loved who had abandoned and betrayed her a long time ago. Was it ten years or as many centuries ago? It was his gift which stood upon the wall like blades of water.

  The vessel of the room was almost pitch black save for the spiralling light of the horns—the glowing constellations of flesh which rose and exploded within the dark premises of memory restraining them. The axes of the horns drew her both sharply and gently down into the vicinity of the animal’s cured skin—holes for eyes—until she trembled with the new senses of an alien figure of conquest. It did not seem to matter whether it was she who lived to cast aft echoing net about him, or he—horn and cane she grasped—who lived to tap each sound along the way and propel her into the ghostly music of the stars.

  And in fact—as she stroked the “blind” and “deaf” beast that had been flayed and pinned to the wall, it gave her, in tune with everything else, the thrill all over again of pursuer and pursued, the thrill of execution: the sensation of catching him again and again and compensating the defeat of herself
within the pregnant fold and field he still inflicted upon her; the magical womb of the hunt was now hers to confer upon him as she wished (shroud or skin or sail) to silence the clamour of bruised instinct he had once aroused within her like an orchestra of fury, and which she now calculated she had repaid by rendering him senseless as stone, mute and void.

  She felt an enormous desire to puncture him again and again as “he” had once punctured her: holes for eyes within waiting room, half-sanctuary, half-confessional—masked “seeing” eyes against a torn “speaking” mouth, and she drew the nail of one finger across her lips (as if embarrassed at the thought of being converted into his cloth and vision—half-curse, half-blessing or prayer) like the breath of a sceptical axe upon his neck where he stood pinned to the wall.

  In truth—had she not long since lost all desire but to preserve an eternity of jealous distance from him? And thus—as if in fear of a “broken” contest (wherein he had invoked the voice of fiends within her breast)—she fell on her knees and addressed him as god of fair weather and foul. No wonder she wanted to participate his own defenceless crew and grow deaf, prostrate beneath masthead, figure-head, to whom she yielded pride of place in the end, token of godhead she insisted all must pay for flying from and still overshadowing her.

  This hieroglyph of storm—seizure of reality—was the literal vessel she half-worshipped, which became part and parcel of the medium of history upon the deck of which she froze to dwell—despite all movement—like the sovereign mistress of both the apparent flux of love and the apparent flux of fate, maelstrom and passion.

  Perhaps it was only natural that void and vortex should sound and exist within creatures whose original lust and desire inevitably drained them within a confluence of times, of the music and fever of the chase, until all that remained was but an imprisoned echo in a shell—the hollow conversion of each other’s compulsion and reflection into each other’s god, or into each other’s muse of god….

  Upon the floor of the waiting room of fetishes where Susan knelt—half-pinned herself, it seemed to her more clearly than ever now in the “eyes” of another, stone-deaf lover, as he had been pinned by her against a wall of flight—the low hum of traffic from the street of memory without (like an ocean of enterprise) died and rose again with the curl of each wave to enclose her and spin her round, up, down, until the fantastic spiral of horns ceased and seemed not to grip her at all but to return to becoming part and parcel of “his” abandonment of her all over again in the end…. And yet it left her with the taste of the vortex in her blood….

  There was a sudden movement in the room. Susan rose to her feet. She began to drift after a while in search of whatever it was—propelled by a springing concert of need towards the magnet of the void, the open door of the room she vaguely recalled she had forgotten to close. A draught struck her and she moved against this, pinpointed and encircled by a spirit of control, apotheosis and birth of a fiction—electrified, as a consequence, into accepting the shock of diminished perspective, ancient of days as well as infancy of nights, infidelity of monument ceaselessly curdling and branching into something less than one feared or loved.

  She drew close to the open door—located and gripped the knob—pulled fast. But even as she did so, a nerveless sensation, running water, swept along her arm as if the door had not been moved by her at all but had slammed shut of its own crooked spring and accord and her presence was but a curious agent of eternity within malformation, disfiguration, living and abandoned fluid tissue. She knew she stood on the threshold of resigning herself, even before she properly knew it, to the imbalance of season and eternity, a third seeing vessel and party—the displacement of which—lying between “him” on one hand, and “herself” on the other—she could not fathom save that here sailed the riddle and clasp of the chase seen through “pilot” eyes (holes for eyes) of a fiction which exercised upon her an uncanny demolition of premises, power of concentration and penetration, “drain” of attention, scrutiny beyond every apparent cloak to the essential fabric of freedom which “they”—in spite of a marriage of weakness, half-hunter, half-hunted, half-nothing, half-something, half-besieger, half-besieged—had become.

  TWO

  Watchman. Watchman

  The church clock, a stone’s throw away, struck three: Susan turned, made her way back into the room towards a table with a book upon it. Ancient “log-book”. It seemed to her as she touched it that the fluid tie she had sensed within the room a moment ago, subsided into a pool at her feet, part and parcel of an aridity of vision, the unemotional stricken watch of place. Bond of freedom through which she felt herself related to a desert of expectation.

  Susan knew her husband would return in an hour or two. Yet though she realized he was within arm’s reach (or stone’s throw) as it were—an admirable and patient companion at all times—his flesh and blood seemed to fade into an unpretentious obscurity and to become more remote than the stranded pages of the book in her hand which, as she turned them over, floated across their sea of memory until they were hooked upon the dry horns of the vessel that had been shored against them.

  And in fact sometimes it appeared to her that time had grown to design the log-book to achieve this very end in time—to assume the symbolic proportions of a raft which she was grateful to the past and the present for establishing in the phenomenal tide of a medium of cleavage existing in its own true abandoned structure and right.

  Pregnant. She wrote the word with a vacant finger upon a page of the book and watched it sail out of sight upon crippled mast or mask. Features unknown. Angel (or beast?) in disguise. Rod of the depths.

  Pregnant. Rather a late pregnancy for a woman of her age, early forties. She tried to focus her thoughts upon “him” but her finger moved and stuck upon the very daemon of abstraction. Blank. Black. Yes, she had to confess she did not really know what the father of her unborn child looked like. Anyone or anything in disguise. She was already blind when she met him. Blind as the fertile day or first night she slept beside him.

  Amazing how much he actually knew about her. It disconcerted her because he seemed in the end to deprive her of an obsessional fruit of knowledge she cherished … hallucinated immortal flesh-and-blood…. Was it all a dream compounded of instinctive dry-rot, a fiction compounded of nothingness, to imply a reality of freedom—somethingness?

  How could she begin to accept and relinquish at the same time a conception of appearances she had come to believe she had once and truly adopted and loved, long, long ago, and whose stature of repudiation (or flight from her) she found equally diminishing in preconceived matter or content as nourishing in unconditional unity—being and spirit?

  And indeed which cubit was less real (or more concrete) than the other? Might not her proud flesh-and-blood, her illusion of strength, prove so adamant it became equally worthless?

  It was the first baffling sentence “he” had written in the log-book—baffling because as she traced it from memory she found herself both banished and reclaimed within an intimate structure of relationship….

  She began to trace the narrative title upon a further page of the log-book——THIEF. THIEF, but found herself now, unwittingly perhaps, half-erasing, half-converting this—with every stroke of a vacant finger—into the shadow of another continuous vigil WATCHMAN. WATCHMAN…. The borderline features which she summoned, part-veiled, part-exposed, were half-subject, half-object of each other—displaced by each other within “living” room, “waiting” room, equally substantial as frail, animate as inanimate within a yielding train of capacity that erected “objective” goals, “subjective” barriers, whose “inner” openness or “outer” obduracy of conviction was but one involuntary spectre.

  Thief. Thief. WATCHMAN. WATCHMAN. The telephone in the room began to ring. Her husband was calling to say he would be half an hour late. Was there anything she would like him to get her?

  Nothing. Her voice and reply seemed perfectly normal and self-possessed in her own ear
s. But in his, at the other end, came a sharp note, rebuke, accusation…. What was she accusing him of …? It was not the first time he felt this. Was he robbing her, depriving her (within the very care and attention he lavished upon her) of something she desperately needed? Was it a bond of friction he cultivated and she resented?

  Was he over-exacting, over-scrupulous, too solicitous—unchanging, identical in compulsion and manner? Was he pushing her to the brink of exhaustion?

  The helplessness of his situation began to assume the sharpest and yet most arid proportions. Was there nothing, after all, he could do for her? Susan hesitated with a curious sensation of crumbling within his ultimatum and ring of light.

  She knew she was beginning to slip, in spite of his every precaution, into a depth of self-knowledge, a depth of isolation from which he guarded her. But who was he, after all, to guard her in one thing and confess himself ignorant and fearful of relative desolation in another? How did “he” see her in the ultimate corruption of flesh at the ghostly end of the line upon which she seemed to pull both close at hand and yet utterly removed? Could he husband within himself a distant and faint spiritual body of resources while bending himself upon it with all the material strength at his command, to exorcise the very fiend of estrangement and love?

  Tension of the “dead” in the living, and of the “living” in the dead, as a consequence of which there glided a shadow of complexity (Susan knew), an intangible cloud or fiction, rain and drought. The line suddenly went “dead” in her hands. Merely the sputter of space now. The gibberish of the stars. The naïveté of eternity. “His” true gift perhaps in the end. Nothing. Instantaneous unpredictable relief within every “given” body of terror in flight from unnatural fears and responsibilities…. Thief. Thief. WATCHMAN. WATCHMAN.