Ladders to Fire
Page 13
Fatal phrase, like a black magic potion which annihilated the present. Instantly she was outside, locked out, thrust out by no one but herself, by a mood which cut her off from fraternity.
Merely by wishing to be elsewhere, where it might be more marvelous, made the near, the palpable seem then like an obstruction, a delay to the more marvelous place awaiting her, the more wonderful personage kept waiting. The present was murdered by this insistent, whispering, interfering cream, this invisible map constantly pointing to unexplored countries, a compass pointing to mirage.
But as quickly as she was deprived of ears, eyes, touch and placed adrift in space, as quickly as warm contact broke, she was granted another kind of ear, eye, touch, and contact.
She no longer saw the Chess Player as made of wood directed by a delicate geometric inner apparatus, as everyone saw him. She saw him before his crystallization, saw the incident which alchemized him into wood, into a chess player of geometric patterns. There, where a blighted love had made its first incision and the blood had turned to tree sap to become wood and move with geometric carefulness, there she placed her words calling to his warmth before it had congealed.
But the Chess Player was irritated. He addressed a man he did not recognize.
From the glass bastions of her city of the interior she could see all the excrescences, deformities, disguises, but as she moved among their hidden selves she incurred great angers.
“You demand we shed our greatest protections!”
“I demand nothing. I wanted to attend a Party. But the Party had dissolved in this strange acid of awareness which only dissolves the calluses, and I see the beginning.”
“Stand on your square,” said the Chess Player. “I shall bring you someone who will make you dance.”
“Bring me one who will rescue me! Am I dreaming or dying? Bring me one who knows that between the dream and death there is only one frail step, one who senses that between this murder of the present by a dream, and death, there is only one shallow breath. Bring me one who knows that the dream without exit, without explosion, without awakening, is the passageway to the world of the dead! I want my dress torn and stained!”
A drunken man came up to her with a chair. Of all the chairs in the entire house he had selected a gold one with a red brocade top.
Why couldn’t he bring me an ordinary chair?
To single her out for this hierarchic offering was to condemn her.
Now it was going to happen, inevitably.
The night and the Party had barely begun and she was being whisked away on a gold chair with a red brocade top by an abductor who would carry her back to the dark room of her adolescence, to the long white nightgown and hair brush, and to dream of a Party that she could never attend.
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