The Waiting Room (3 page)

*

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
blow
in
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
—
neck
and
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.

The extraordinary fascination allied to curious terror of the ancient storm sprang from a peculiar
helplessness,
an order of helplessness which matched, like instantaneous stroke and flare, the involuntary conversion and
obliteration
of every role, fixture and preconception within
himself
. For even as she lay beneath him (or appeared to lie beneath him) in lightning upheaval and distress—he could not yet bring himself to believe that it was he who had inflicted this explosive burden upon her. And in fact he knew he was as helpless as she and in process of being
informed
by her about himself as if she were his most
intimate
victim or soul and companion in debauchery, whose visualization of the spectacle of the past made him feel he had no alternative but to shrink in ultimate horror from himself.

She it was who sought to address him and inform him of another which was, after all, no one but himself yet whom he still could not recall…. It was she indeed whose design it was to spare him nothing of the incredible role he had played.
Drunk.
Lurched
into
the
room.

Incredible because the very conception of himself in such a void of memory seemed a compulsion to endorse the worst suspicions of himself he could entertain, chronic and violent assumption of himself in all eternity—bewildering pre-judgment as well as post-judgment of one’s own unfamiliar conduct. What principle was there, after all, he asked himself, which would take inevitable ascendancy over one—in the absence of one’s self-
possession
or grip or control—but the exercise of debauchery, degeneracy of conduct?

He was utterly convinced of the degradation and
hopelessness
of ultimate exposure which now lay before him, when there began to flash into view
the
very
recklessness
of
grace,
species of grace, blood of the elements, rage for beauty beyond every mould of refinement he had once assiduously cultivated that now lay shattered on the floor.

Drunk.
Lurched
into
the
room.
THE VERY RECKLESS SPECIES OF GRACE
. His countenance grew now almost
black
with astonishment at its own revelation of the beauty of freedom residing at the very heart of the storm: he felt himself part of the wildest glow upon the spectacles of air and water, like an incalculable and neutral maternal vessel of all the ages within whom and which an indestructible wave of emotion broke his chain (as well as hers)—
shattered
his role (as well as hers) of indispensable ruling function they shared and worshipped—
broke in some
uncertain
degree the grip
of such an assumption and ushered him with a magnanimity and authority he fleetingly glimpsed into her void of colour—their void of the crowd of instinct—broken mould of cruel refinement—sheer precipice of action upon the timeless thrust and crest of which he ran like a white fire, whiter than snow. Or rather she it was who sped before him in the waiting room upon each black wave….

SUSAN DREW HIS FINGERTIPS ACROSS THE GLASS OF HER EYES
to erase the trail of hallucination, cloven ground of the sea, within each stricken ornament on the floor, fractured member and crew.
INCREDIBLE THAT IN THE MIDST OF AN EXPLOSION—EXPLOSION OF PREMISES
—such involuntary remorse and tenderness (on his part as well as hers) became the cradle of fantasy, paint of restoration, instinct for depth and survival: uncanny depth, living distance, joints of catastrophe, the
mesmerism
of being fractured and remaining whole. She drew closer to him now, it seemed, than ever before, to substantiate an economic and viable truth or unity within a supreme fiction, annihilation: food of the gods: morsels of divinity. Mill of the gods whose trail—common (or was it uncommon?)
ground,
iota of landscape and skyscape—evoked now the living grain of reality. She began to recall, in limitless, ambivalent detail, all over again, the feud with him she had endured….