Wilson Harris - The Waiting Room

*

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 notion (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.

And yet it was not simply this: not merely the loss of control she now began to suffer — the loss of individual elements and powers. It was the repudiation of everything she once thought she knew or had created for herself — the repudiation of every basis and pattern of one-sided reference — the eclipse she had invoked (eclipse of her judgment this time, not his), counter-thrust of the void.

Susan fished for the glasses which she had laid aside an hour or two ago. She wanted to cover the singular nakedness of her eyes. It was a grotesque confession: the plunge she had made into a unique theatre of rehearsal, explosive rehearsal, had set up a displacement of fluid bodies akin to vortices of memory she had not fully anticipated. The ebony spectacles she donned once again — in the light of his sudden thrust at her, mesmerism of nakedness, naked bone, naked brow — gleamed with skeletal surfaces upon which the faintest lightnings of time ran and still glowed out of the storm of the heart….

Ran and still glowed within the black sky and the black sea. The frame of the sky was as black as the pool of the sea. Susan moved — inclined her head a little and listened to the sudden disconcerting impact of silence — savage as a blowin itself — which had fallen all at once upon her in the waiting room. Where in Christ’s name was he? The storm raged but the void of distance, the joint spectacle of inner and outer sensation, became so enormous it translated the language of action into species of metamorphosis. Species of fiction and freedom whose blood ran into the storm which now possessed an unearthly stillness: macrocosmic outlines they were — naked breast, naked bone — whose reduction to lightning filaments of memory broke the coarse spell and clamour of the senses as well as the psychological rigidity and ultimatum of space.

The sea and the sky became his spectacles as well as hers within which a new intercourse of the gods began, involving and dismantling every former blockade of vision. He indeed had instinctively seen her in this overwhelming but transcendental light — the buried light of the muse — and she (within the mutual shadow of eclipse) had seen him in the selfsame circuit of conviction — the light of a god. It was this which drew him to her in the very beginning — the lightning of breath— the faintest shudder of her lips, a kind of crackling, even wooden, darkness issuing from her mouth which made the reflection of her skin — neckand cheek — glow like a shade which was neither the coal of breath nor the fire of spirit.

And it was as if in that original and indelible beginning — in the heartless crumb and melting-pot of the world — that he sought to grapple with her still and constrain her to a function of demand she resisted now with all the fury on earth at her command. Now and within the ancient spiral of her breath (half-curse, half-prayer) he discerned afresh the drapery of the past through which he sought to exercise the ritual of brute force upon her and she the stroke of bestial eclipse upon him.