The Waiting Room

by Wilson Harris

  She replaced the receiver upon the hook. Abruptly (like someone anticipating another ring), for even as the replacement provided her with the old insensible order and crew, “deaf” monument, attention, she was aware once again how it stripped her of something she had refused but entirely wanted to grasp … accept … as hers by truth whose shadow still moved over or against her.

  *

  The sea of traffic in the street suddenly appeared to rise and she felt a faint dry wave or shudder strike the wreck of the room: a blow not unlike the sound of her own fist dislodging itself from its shadow pressing into the eye of each finger-tip. Rolling “log”-book. Stranded telephone within the dust of memory. Toppling skull, ornamental ear and mouthpiece. Half-trailing, half-knotted signal and line. Watchman. THIEF.

  Nothing moved. It was the strangest discordant flight of consequences she experienced—agitated body (vacant structure), nerve-end, string (bodiless splinter), tautness of sail stiff as a comb upon whose giant brow nothing moved as if “nothing” were “something”. So obscure this shift or severance was it seemed little more than the prick of an eye-tooth, the pressure of a finger-nail upon the palm of one hand. Nothing still moved—a faint shadow perhaps against the banality and monument of solipsis: phantom erection and ejection of parts issuing from the solid tyranny of proportion to swing into new clockwise mouth and head, anti-clockwise defiant trunk and limb.

  “He” addressed her from within his new spiral—oracle and orbit, buoyant vessel, hieroglyph of space—declaring art is the phenomenon of freedom. “His” voice and their “log” book rang and struck her ears like a song. The “deaf” within her stirred and listened. The “dumb” she cherished began to speak. Susan started, grasped crew and ally she had thought—in a moment of acute self-knowledge and deprivation—to smash upon the floor. The dry-rot features of the past broke into fertile drum or ear, living mouth or tongue—What does one mean by phenomenon? they cried.

  “They” had hardly uttered the words through “her”, when “he” responded by summoning “them” to make an inventory of the broken pieces, skin as well as wood, flung amidst the shattered telephone wires distended upon the floor. He had gone to great pains and expense, she recalled, to assemble these—and it seemed now, in the end, a sovereign principle that they should appear to endure and incorporate her features with each “dead” figure of the past which swung into new account and life.

  “What do I mean by phenomenon? The hole in the monument, that’s what I mean.” He paused. She waited, tense. He could be so shattering, so severe. “There’s an ungraspable scale to nature and appearance. Remember that when you come to tackle the mess we’ve made of our economic affairs. In fact it was always beyond our control, even when the whole collection we’d scraped together seemed most obedient in relays of supply and demand.”

  She was stung by the memory of crises they had suffered, some of which he had precipitated by temperamental recklessness. “But I don’t see,” she cried. “I don’t understand why you profess to care at one moment—and still say in the same breath it doesn’t matter at all. Are you saying that there are hidden forces …?” She was lost. She listened for the lightning rustle of vessel and “log”-book. But his or their reply was harsh as stone, “no. I never said that.”

  “What then?” she pleaded.

  “Appearances cannot be grasped in their entirety. That’s all I said. Not a word about hidden forces. Let me put it this way—every commission of fact involves an omission of intensity.” He paused. She waited. “Let me put it in still another way—execute something, quite naturally or unnaturally, as one imagines, isolate something in order to examine it properly, as one thinks, and one arrests—or appears to arrest—a web of processes. There’s always this “negative” race with or against something in which one is involved from beginning to end and all the way back again. And one can never keep dead in step. A little bit ahead, who knows (even this clairvoyant leap one may appear to accomplish), or a little bit behind. But never dead in step. Every apparent execution of the swift runner of life involves a loss in true pace and intensity or flight, even if it seems but a shade this way or that. And it is this fluid distinction which turns ultimately into the annihilation of forced premises. Herein lies an explosive and incalculable web upon which and out of which emerges the “equal” stride and fiction of reality.”

  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.

  THREE

  Fruit of the Lips

  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.

  FOUR

  Blast

  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.

  He recalled how secretively she used to move within her small body of Indian companions and how his impulses of recognition—as if she had belonged to him within another frame and place and circumstance—faded time after time into nothingness with each step he made. He excused himself now for every inroad of imagination he visualized upon her, with the reflection that it was all in the involuntary nature of fantasy. She was woman and he was man, situated in bewildering circumstances of unpredictable light or shade bordering upon the density of the remainder of the world. Fantasy indeed. How could he dream of such a thing. And in the presence of her husband, then still at her side. She had not yet suffered bereavement. Four guides in all: herself, her husband, another man, his wife.

  It had been his expressed intention at the outset to employ only two—both men—but the women arrived before long. He greeted them with anger and consternation but secretly was glad they had come. It was good for the morale of the men to have their women with them. And in fact he was quick to point out that they possessed no alternative now but to remain with the party and go on. Far into the interior droghing their rations on their back which they supplemented with fish and game.

  ENTRY FOUND IN HIS DIARY. Encamped by nameless creek. Propose to stop for a while. Curious Amerindian woman—SUSAN?

  FURTHER ENTRY illustrated by long jagged line (written in strange hand though this may have been due to violent emotional stress).

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: The above entries with others pertaining to come from “his” diary were pasted into the log-book as if to confirm a shadow of participation and identity involving all the “characters” of the log-book—a shattered witness of events running like a species of remarkable fiction.

  *

  LIKE A FLASH THE BUSH MASTER ROSE AND STRUCK. Out of the blue. Stood high on its tail, writhed, spat. And it was Amerindian Susan’s husband upon whom sprang the mark of the venomous fangs, holes in his skin….

  HORROR. Stupefaction. Intimate course of the poison in his veins. The tooth of the cayman alligator was placed on the wound. Nothing prevailed—neither civilization’s first aid chest nor mesmeric tooth of the wild, remnant of the skull…. THE MAN DIED.

  It had happened at very close quarters—as close as she (Susan) now stood to him whom, she believed, in her primitive reckoning—since he happened to be their employer, living employer of consciousness—to be obscurely responsible for the fate of each member of his party (and therefore the death of her husband). Dream and capacity. WAITING ROOM.

  All at once “he” could hardly believe his ears and eyes as if these had truly returned to him out of the cavern of death—to guard her equally in himself. As if he—and not his Amerindian servant and guide—had suffered the fangs of the snake. He recalled now the lightning stroke of the bushmaster which seemed to marry the sun as it earlier stood poised and still racing, fiery luminous ball, glowing feast of eyes upon the crumb of place. A great burning tooth was administered to the holes in “his” skin—puncture of memory—and converted and swallowed by a pinprick of blood. Poison as well as antidote.

  He saw her now in a light he had never seen, since he had not been thus healed and safeguarded before. Her hair, black and glinting, piled high like a coil of dreams where the head of the snaking sun had been fierce and wild. Her eyes, black as a pit. He recalled the flight of the stream where it fell like a beam of light from the torch of sun. Self-division of elements he began to witness on his voyage in pursuit of the nameless river of the world where it descended into the ground at his feet to where he visualized its emergence—crack of illumination—upon cliff or stone. Two indistinct points these were (when seen from the middle obscure distance of the cavern). The glare of the torch in his hand blew out as if a cloud had sealed entrance and exit and shattered every skylight and clearing. But the faint stunned eyes within the subterranean cave of Susan grew brighter still, stars of consciousness blown by the very fist of night.

  He had been walking upon a skeleton framework on the bank of the stream but now descended into the water and made his way forward within the very body of the current. The hidden river was suddenly colder than he imagined it could be at the heart of the tropics. The seal of the sun was upheld and splintered again and again—idiosyncratic purity and flaw of the landsca
pe like an explosion of memory, jungle of nights, inset of days. The black eyelid of nature flickered with each stroke of enlightenment, stamp of flame, ice….

  *

  It was a journey which he felt had begun in the very obscurity of ages, as if at one time fire had sealed the cavern—at another time ice. And these seals were the peculiar stamp of insulation from total disaster upon a living crew of fate who were deprived of the extremity of experiencing the very function of death they performed. Cloud or seal, blocking of ears, blinding of sight which rendered one and all immune and faithful guides or servants of each other through the unenviable passage of the underworld. Vessel of reality. Bond of translation.

  Each relic “he” touched—antique skull, tooth, fluid object—was instinct with paradox; chafe of fury on one hand and insensible freedom of proportion or function on the other.

  Each constellation of properties he visualized—sacrificial litter, dog or snake, ancient, newborn—was both “alive” and “dead” within the crucial operations of the nameless cavern, middle way, middle passage—astronomical man and slave, doctor and patient, lover and mistress, captain and instrument, artist and model. And the ghostly sun which now seemed to glare at him existed both within its own naked right, indescribable, pure, and in another sacred anthropomorphic skin, masthead and shroud of reality. Furnace of blindness as well as blackness of vision. Bound to the stars as well as indestructibly alien—free from total ordeal and attraction within an operative seal and design. Unendurable canvas of fire save for each insulation portrait. Multiple impress and circuit of compassion within the transit of the “living” and the “dead”.