Wilson Harris - The Waiting Room

Pregnant silhouette. He saw she now addressed him — in fact accused him of being the one who had raped her. The One…. It was grotesque quarry, coincidence, feature of conception, line and riddle, hunter as well as hunted, down the years.

Pregnant. He read the self-portrait of accusation with acute difficulty. For she drew him and yet appeared, at the same time, to draw away from him into the very reticence of fury. Pregnant, thief, love.

Susan lit a cigarette, burnt a hole in the page. She felt the fertile ash on her fingers (and of her fingers), primitive and mnemonic device like seed or grain which clung to her even as it fell on the floor into instinctive shapes or presentiments, intricate design, flower and leaf. Potent violent mysterious plunge…. She tried to conceive her almost intangible cloud of images as a dense broadcast in which she too was minutely and remotely involved, until this seemed to glow again into the sun inadvertently planted upon her own flesh: naked brilliancy and hollow illusion, outward presence and sunken conviction — a sliced apple which had been cut to remove declivities in the surface. Susan felt all at once the sharpest prick of the knife and with each drop of blood there grew a transfusion of energy from her veins into his stamp or die. She wanted to conceive such an extreme but true vision of him. And in point of fact — there it was— Pregnant again after all these years.

She recalled the entry she had herself made in the log book a long time ago. One signal word: pregnant. to which now she added … again after all these years. Pressure of a fingernail upon a blank sheet … after all these years.

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….

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-contemptuousnodlike one who welcomed her own pencil of fate — blind man’s buff, the perverse gameof love.