Wilson Harris - The Waiting Room

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.

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?