Wilson Harris - The Waiting Room

He stopped as if he had indeed turned upon her — in her pursuit of him — caught her and felled her to the ground in order to demonstrate to her, beyond a shadow of doubt, the truth of illusion — a marriage to the nemesis of freedom. She in turn sought to grind him into her — the racing pinnacle or beginning of things he had operated upon until all grew fanatical and still and strange. Watchman. THIEF, Sliced in half … antagonistic mating.

The “gap” which remained between them (as between doctor and patient, husband and wife, lover and mistress) made her cry on awaking upon the knife-edge of illusion, anaesthesia, solid bliss. She was blind. Yet she could see “his” lips move to address the apple of his eye. Eyeball of curious wood painted green stars and red. She remembered how he had fiercely cut and chiselled … their Universe…. Globe…. She flung it at him now across the room. Violent storm. He was on the point of leaving her. Was it ten years or twenty ago? Sunset. Blood. Green and red.

“Why don’t you leave me and go?” she cried. “You’ve done your worst. Now you stand there like a dolt … idiot. Dress it up as you like: the truth is — you revolve this way and that … vacillate. Always on the move. Why can’t you make up your mind whether you want to stay or go? I know what I want: security, marriage, a home. Not just roaming like your pupil to the ends of the earth. No use, I tell you. Can’t live like that any more. Can’t you see what you’re doing to me? For the last time: make up your mind….”

Susan was overwhelmed by her own outcry. It had been a brutal year for her. Still she was mad to speak like that. And in fact it sounded incredibly strange in her own ears after all this time (moments or years?) as if it had never occurred save as a dream centuries old. The last straw…. And when she realized he had indeed taken her at her word and gone, she felt she had died in truth within “his” operating theatre — blown to bits, sky-high. The end of the world. The shattering of the globe they once possessed. Why had she — without thinking — flung it at him? All because of one fantastic theory of freedom which he spouted at her until it triggered off an accumulative burden … resentment … pride. Ironic feud. One always read too much into everything at a particular moment. For what remained after each explosion of habit or circumstance was never an identical character within the present and past.

Was it ten years or twenty ago one relationship had died and another begun? In our end is our beginning. Phenomenon of nature. She flung the last burning straw at him out of the declining sun — bonfire of memory. It illuminated shred and circumstance — his departure all over again. He appeared once more to seize the glistening dying fury of recollection within her like a ball in space (though how could she swear it was truly so?): in that instant of recall her eyes splintered. Spiritual horizon. Shower of sparks. OPERATION SUCCESSFUL. Theatre of darkness. Black. His face grew BLACK but not with clinical rage (as she had dreamt) but with irony and submission … irony of fate … submission…. One must not read too much into the night of things. She rounded upon him like all the midnight paradoxical furies of old: there was nothing she wanted to save to clasp him gently to her breast. Let him stay in spite of the bitterness and freedom of option she thrust at him. The truth was she wanted him to stay; not go. She wanted to bind him to her in spite of anything spoken to the contrary. How could he take her literally at her word? How could he dare to involve her (and dissolve all her craft of subtle persuasion) in one action of destiny — ultimatum of choice, motive sphere, dialectic of the vortex?

She cried to him of an essential treaty of sensibility they shared he could never break however far he professed he was at liberty to go. And yet in abandoning her was he not acting to fulfil the range and depth of both precipitate choice and agreement? Was he not freeing her — as well as himself — from the burden of hidden motive (one thing openly said, another secretly meant), with each step he took which made her see the necessary life of the soul within the material cult of dismissive opinion? She was blind, but she saw this collective treaty of feud for the first unravelling time of stars upon an eyeball of wood: sensitive borderline of a fetish they shared in which every dumb particle of conviction, splintered statement and motive, combined into deed and sphere. She had actually cried to him — stay or go. And he chose to go. But she secretly intended him to stay. No wonder she saw him still in the light of one she had not truly relinquished, quicksilver of obsession, barometer residing within her. Upon which she rode — as upon his pointer or scale — since she knew, or felt she knew, that he — in spite of his open dismissal of her — secretly desired her to leave all and follow him. Broken and cemented journey around the globe. Northern Lights. Shield of the sun. Holes for eyes. Through which they broke into Orinoco. Their first journey together long ago.

Now —after twenty years — was it still too late to recover an essential trace of their last — as if she had indeed overtaken him in the end — hypothesis and realm, river of gold? Fantasy of Eldorado?

He beckoned to her — frozen sea — wave and boulder. The strands of her life spun toward him — one form or another, conception or deformity of conception. Inventory of concrete and mystical instruments. Pursuer and pursued. Elusive pregnant model. Half-human, half-brute. Half-skin, half-wood. Half-song, half-silence. ENDLESS CREW OF FATE.

It was as if he had partly escaped her within ears that were deaf to her plea, and she was on the point of regaining him within eyes that were blind to her peril — sleep of the sun.

The sun appeared in the sky overhead. Then writhed, flashed, vanished across the minute clearing he possessed in the astronomical, glittering and cruel wealth of the jungle.

It may never have stood above him after all and the very clearing around and beneath him turned unreal as though its very isolation made it enormous and the immensity of space and bush surrounding it shrank into a uniform indistinct province.

He was waiting for his Amerindian guides to return and she (Susan) was turning into one of these. Skin of metamorphosis. She often felt his eyes upon her back but she knew herself masked by an ornamental stillness and indifference, catlike, slumbrous, smooth as stone….

He looked up suddenly and there she was — naked (his eyes knew) beneath the cloth she wore, bereaved and entrenched, alone.

She had come to sleep with him — both abstractly and intimately. To make herself known. Casual and reflective, yet deadly shadow upon his heart and lips. He could hardly believe his ears and eyes which may well and truly have been blotted out at this moment; and he knew he needed, as a consequence, to be on his guard as never before against the unreality and conquest of space.

The camp he possessed in the tiny clearing stood very close to a nameless creek which he had followed once for miles until the hills closed in all around and the water descended into a hole in the ground, to emerge a mile or two away upon the face of a cliff. The great casual boulders at the mouth of the cavern and within the subterranean gallery of the creek may, for all he knew, have been flung into position by some ancient explosion of the sun — they seemed to him so utterly remote from the very earth on which they stood.

He, too, and she, at this moment, as they faced each other, might have been equally alien sculptures of affection. He was suddenly filled with an obscure motive but fearful determination which drew him closer still to her.