The Waiting Room (2 page)

T
he early afternoon faded and turned to gloom and twilight, faint ash, dust. The waiting room was now apparently empty save for its own instinctive burden of settlement: was it the blindness of Susan Forrestal which remained like a stumbling block upon which one fell and was stunned into deafness, archaic lover, sound proof wall? Was it
absence,
an absent mind one endured or a third nameless person still, voluminous cloak, clinging arm, whose abstract
presence
now encircled one in the ruin of all atmospheres? The waiting room was saturated with warm blood and chill: the dim senses of birth, the remote senses of death, the cold and hungry senses of love. A room one shared with the thief of all ages whose passage now was but a reflection one sees and even hears—the most intimate light footfall of nature; winter and spring. Thief. Thief. One stopped and listened to the emergent, the enraged, outcry of one’s blood, the blow of love, the transport of terror and reason by which one had been affected. Thief. Thief. One stopped again and
stumbled
upon feather and flood and listened for another
disposition
of assault. But now all was silent as the grave. One stretched one’s fingertips into the dark upon the flesh of things, animate wood or stone it seemed. Thief. The cry came shrill and clear like a whistling kettle on the boil within one’s skull. A faint tremor shook the room as if one’s naked metallic flesh had begun to glow against another’sp ark violent skin into the very thief of such brilliancy and harsh light, selfsame features of concussion. Thief. The cry spent itself again but the vapour of longing in each dying accent to appropriate (or steal) new breath, impulse, was everywhere in the grip of hollow memory. It was a holy, unholy alliance in which one had begun to lose and find oneself—looking, as it were, in all directions of the universal waiting room for the master thief of love, whose tool one was, the master stroke one had experienced of absent bitterness and ancient fury. One had tripped and been robbed of senseless sight and sound it seemed. Thief. Thief. One found oneself repeating the mechanical outcry as if one stood perhaps within true measure of overcoming all echo of catastrophe…. It was as if one were beginning to emerge at last out of the wild intransigent impulses of the waiting room (which had been clothed in numbness and loss) into the spirit of an age that was ONE (but how could one dare to breathe of such intimacy, flesh and unity…?)

F
or Susan Forrestal the intimate waiting room she discerned as she touched the walls around her carried “his” reflection: blur, unpredictable stove, hot, sometimes cold to touch. She occasionally shrank from herself (or himself), started or stopped … sparks of fire…. Three eye operations within the past seven years left her upon a curious threshold, ledge of night, edge of dawn. The waiting room became his cinder of imagination and this alphabet of flame shone where she drew each outline with her darkest pencil.

All things and persons—however remote and
apprehensive
—now grew to be tipped by his spirit. Whether indeed it was he who had stolen the blaze of light from her, or she who had stricken him down unawares so that he tasted unconscious rage, like the truly anthropomorphic deaf and dumb, was the blunt issue on which they were joined. Constellated. Like blotting paper, eaten at the edges with black absorption but lucid in the middle where it soaked the drawn film of the sky, astronomical book, discontents of air, earth, water.

Pregnant silhouette. He saw she now addressed him—in fact accused him of being the one who had raped her. The One…. It was grotesque quarry, coincidence, feature of conception, line and riddle, hunter as well as hunted, down the years.

Pregnant.
He read the self-portrait of accusation with acute difficulty. For she drew him and yet appeared, at the same time, to draw away from him into the very reticence of fury.
Pregnant,
thief,
love.

Susan lit a cigarette, burnt a hole in the page. She felt the fertile ash on her fingers (and of her fingers), primitive and mnemonic device like seed or grain which clung to her even as it fell on the floor into instinctive shapes or presentiments, intricate design, flower and leaf. Potent violent mysterious plunge…. She tried to conceive her almost intangible cloud of images as a dense broadcast in which she too was minutely and remotely involved, until this seemed to glow again into the sun inadvertently planted upon her own flesh: naked brilliancy and hollow illusion, outward presence and sunken conviction—a sliced apple which had been cut to remove declivities in the surface. Susan felt all at once the sharpest prick of the knife and with each drop of blood there grew a transfusion of energy from her veins into his stamp or die. She wanted to conceive such an extreme but true vision of him. And in point of fact—there it was—
Pregnant
again
after
all
these
years.

She recalled the entry she had herself made in the log book a long time ago. One signal word:
pregnant.
to which now she added …
again
after
all
these
years.
Pressure of a fingernail upon a blank sheet …
after
all
these
years.

She groped for a match, lit another blind cigarette, reflecting that “he” had instinctively raped her like a man who beheld nothing but the apple of his eye tricked out in his own illumination and deceptive colours,
flesh-tinted
, beautiful.

IT WAS NIGHT
. The scene had not merely changed but assumed its true and literal (mutual) proportions.
NIGHT
.

On the other hand, on the other side of the kingdom of space where he stood observing her—the other side of the waiting room—a hair’s breadth away from her—
IT WAS MORNING
.

MORNING
. A cool wind, transparent skirts, blew along the paradoxical street, self-deceptive bubble within which at that early fluid but constellated hour no one yet truly stood in the body of “his” room and proud constitution but the daily ornament in her sky blue dress kneeling to scrub the floor. Morning woman. Antique pail. Dripping cloth. In the street beneath him where she kneeled like a self-created fetish—half-human, half-edifice—the traffic of solipsis began to pour as if it instinctively conceived itself a glittering extension of her drapery and arm.

The shop window against the pavement Susan knew—or thought she knew from past experience—as she touched the sights of her own world, now shone with a curious awakening look, transparent eyelid, half-dreaming lust still within the imaginations of night. One almost felt oneself looking through and beyond a monumental spell—with his eyes of morning as well as hers of night—into a cloud, half-shadow, half-substance, late room, early capacity. But which it was no one could tell save that this was an unburdened place within which one saw oneself transcribed, translated, in an instant of arousal: nodding without a trace of doubt to the other unassuming self, unenviable reflection….
Unenviable
reflection.
There lay outcry and snag, element of impersonality, uncertainty, anonymity which had not apparently registered before. And one shrank all at once from what could be an aspect of obliteration—obliteration of the bubble of personality in the ornament of love. Obliteration of the bubble of pride in the ornament of glory. It was as if a subtle
explosion
—orgasm—had rent both the dark and light flesh of the waiting-room and the flotsam and jetsam one endured became a tributary offering, spiritual reversal, mainstream whose course enveloped one in the very gulf of
presence.
The broken reflective ornament one saw—
unenviable
, climacteric, unassuming, close as one’s skin, one’s sun—was the ambivalent reflection of a servant within which to endure awakening flood, traffic, divine summons, necessity, freedom or servitude which one dreamt to uphold or shatter, and through which one was being religiously and obscurely stripped and confronted by the fetish of the void….

S
usan placed one finger upon her lips to invoke silence and to remind “him” that in the realm of things he once claimed to govern he, too, had been imposed upon by himself to reflect a sphere of growing deafness within, stone deafness without, after all. And further (she declared) it must surely now dawn on him, as the most disturbing feature of all, that he was becoming literally
deaf
, in a clamorous way, to the very distinction of
silence
he first thought to treasure and contain within the hieroglyphics of space, living room.

SILENCE PLEASE
. But even as she uttered the words her material command turned into distraught echoes of old, his study of persuasion and withdrawal. Battering ram.

Once again—as though to prove something to himself—“he” shut his eyes in a compulsive attempt to blot out the siege of reflection in morning creature and night’s room, the siege of distraction in feminine mould, drawn curtain, but discerned in the depths of such stony
indulgence
on his part—such rigid assumption of himself—what looked like a frail but monumental light, the insane clatter of silk as it fell to the floor; stocking; manuscript or flesh.

Articles of memory. Lion of the void. Antelope of wood. Horn of the desert upon which had been carved the fauna and flora of lust. Was it his emblematic bristle, green model and tree, or her innocent crest, toppling trunk, flag and leaf, which deflected them—and
him
once again—from containing silence and fulfilment? It was as if he embraced her still in his own loud echoing and
continuous
stamp or fall—sexual rage of the skin within which he recalled exercising a razor upon himself until the bark of adolescence cracked and vanished (as though it had never truly existed save as a mirage of
consciousness
) and a darker prickly mask emerged—an irritable conjunction of roots which fired his expression (or hers?) into treacherous lines, subsidence … stranger … older … stranger…. What treachery … decline … resided in one’s appearance, what degeneracy of feature,
alienation
, colour, hair, bone…. He smiled nevertheless at himself as at the blast of pleasure and promise he had
become
. Her clinging substitute. Pilot of maturity. Hirsute tower, bearded premises. Cliff-top. Stone and vessel of flesh. And the debris of the universal waiting room—traffic of restraint and potency—acquired a new rough note, harsh glare, gear, slant, expression.

SILENCE PLEASE
. The time had come to insert key into lock. Shut the metallic disembowelled stranger in. Bell and voice. Gaoler of and gaoled sensibilities.
It
was
an
architecture
of
baffled,
indeed
baffling,
emotional
authority
in
which
he
was
involved,
trapped
far
back
by
his
own
devices
in
the
shout
and
gold
of
person
and
thing.

He drew close to her—stricken by an ornamental blur of faces—none of which truly resembled hers—faceless public. He was filled all at once with rage at his own
incapacity
.
Might
as
well
strike
out.
R
ape
in
broad
daylight.
Susan
shook
—
as
if
she
suffered,
once
again,
his
assault
upon
her
—
half-shuddering,
half-contemptuous
nod
like
one
who
welcomed
her
own
pencil
of
fate
—
blind
man’s
buff
,
the
perverse
game
of
love.

A stone’s throw from the cottage in which she lived (was it twelve or twenty years ago … adamant centuries past or still to come … in an unexplored present,
unbroken
future) one came abruptly upon the edge of the land. He inserted his hearing aid and grew slowly aware of the sound of the depths, coming, it seemed, from an inestimable distance, a universe of muffled, muffling direction. The sea was the blueness of the sky, foaming white far under him around each black penis of rock
constellated
in the uncanny wilderness of space. He felt
himself
quiver like a bat’s wing upon sheer cliff—radar
fantasy
—and discovered a flowering plant lying crushed beneath him, blue petal, dark veins, stars, spatula of
mesmerism
, the minute grasp of hand and fingers, intimate overwhelming design.

Rape
in
broad
daylight.
Had she, in fact, inveigled him to dwell within her—within his assault upon her, crushed petal, living room, so that
now,
long after the obscure
kinship
of event, he still found himself suspended in her filament of reverie, spider’s root, blind web, ear of memory? The phenomenal page of the past upon which he was drawn to peer, grew into the very present chest of cliff upon which he had followed her along a compulsive path before prostrating himself upon the very brink, lip, heart in mouth, rage, hallucination, nerves of the sea. He turned and tried to shout but where he lay flat on the ground it was no longer possible to
see
the elusive echo, mound or house into which
she
(the one he stalked) had vanished as if into the ground—wave of land beneath him. Her sweat—not his—began to roll into his eyes: subtle prominence, configuration, landscape, globe or bead of moisture in himself whose translucency or
transparency
… recollection … was chained to a surf of elements.

The agonizing inconsistency was the way she dissolved into everything and nothing but existed still to
remonstrate
with him. Sound of fate (echo sounder rather than bellow), sightless outcry, fathom rather than ascendancy. One moment she would be there—actively
here
(and he
knew,
every time, it would all happen again and again in numerous guises, disguises)—large as life, instinct with blood, incarnation of desire—but in another void or shape she would retire into the broken texture of himself and he would come to know himself deprived of
everything
he possessed, and empty of the rigid datum or value within her at which he flung himself, introspective, retrospective line,
grasp.
Rape
in
broad
daylight.

SILENCE PLEASE
. How he longed to hold her within the dearest conviction of abandonment of the senses, as something utterly priceless and beyond the self-
advertisements
of beauty or the shop window of the universe. But even as he dreamed to succumb to the self-surrender of everything she drew him still to her as before along a vulgar track, cement of consciousness … pricked … reflected … out of the depths. Echo sounder. Defective hearing aid. One’s poor involuntary humanity—what ambivalent props, tap, cane, adventitious root one grew to clutch, stand in need of … until these became in turn a senseless soul, barrier.

*

He leaned on his elbow (as upon a crooked stick). The sky was turning misty as glass and the clouds flitted like milk dissolving upon a window-pane though still
occupying
their own grain of pallor, destiny, soul of light. She summoned him still, the flitting command of vanished youth, mushroom of sensibility.
Now
“he” shrank from her in the waiting room—as from brooding ornament, prison, hell—but
then
(long ago) he could have sworn he
knew
what it was she justly and truly and freely saw in him. He could have sworn she was the reciprocal one he would follow to the ends of the earth, pick out of every crowd, every street, every age. And that it was she—silhouetted against time—who expressed her choice of fulfilment in him, even though he lay on the very tip of inconsistency and isolation … buried in
her
and
his
lengthening cruel design, self-deceptive wraith of desire upon bottomless wraith….
WHEN DARKNESS FELL HE WOULD ARISE AND SMASH THE DEVIL OF A DOOR
.

*

But before darkness fell with his explosive assault on her, they would retrace their steps farther back still in time towards another potential threshold of the kingdom (or territory) of love. Promissory unit. Razor’s edge—sculpture and renaissance of youth. Would it ever be
possible
to say when it was he had given her, or been given by her, the very first vivid confused stab upon which
overlapping
present and past—meaningful
presence
—suddenly became an acute convergence of reality, an obsession with distance which she now appeared to abolish?

Was it upon his descending wave, her trough, his
unlikely
perch, fugitive epitaph, cliff-top? Was it an antique face they equally shared, groomed, polished to perfection upon the timeless meteoric landscape of the dead—their common step towards ancient self-portrait and vessel … cargo and pathos of fashion, rage for—indeed quest of—immortal youth? She was the earliest trigger he recalled he possessed—emotional target, residual goal within an immemorial span, phenomenal pursuit….
She
drew
him
now
so
close
to
her
he could see once again the light on her face—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.

He wanted to touch her, caress her but she became all of a sudden (to his astonishment) a fury he had not
expected
to find, a trigger of fury he had himself sprung into existence and yet not truly bargained for.
The
soul
of
love.
Had she actually spoken the words out aloud like a creature of curious motivation, robot of spirit?
The
soul
of
love.
Such unearthly venom, self-abandon, self-hate. Such an expression—ancient and devouring—such an aim and assumption of being—was incredible, archaic: was it the daemon of all possession (and dispossession) at her side in the faceless throng of the universe whom he had overlooked and to whom she spoke? For how could he dare to believe it was
he,
rather than another, whom she dreamt to invest with the blast of memory? Was it the purest ricochet of fantasy? Had he misread the frame of her lips? Was he merely her ironical substitute—
SILENCE
PLEASE
—shattering and loud like the ornamental
cultivation
of the deaf, hammer of deity, consciousness?

Susan
made
an
involuntary
gesture
upon
the
page
of
her
book
to her slave and god as though to push him away from her at the very moment of explosive climax: it was she after all who feared him—not “he” her—feared infection by him (or impregnation by him) with an instrument of alarm, a train of consequences she had herself engendered. She warned him with all the force at her command to stay away from her, as if to confirm once again within him the trigger of fury he had not bargained for.

The time for an ultimate target of invocation within her was not yet ripe. The bark of upheaval—hollow stress of unity, trunk of ages—was adamant as stone. The thaw was still to come. The fruit was still hard and green, buried in the rind, antique muse of the field, punishment of the wheat, corn, rice. The scythe of the sun flashed—dumb flare, cannon, instrument—but the harvest
remained
an enigma.

A famine of spirits blazed in their very facile
resemblances
whether skin, leaf, petal, brow, eye, lake. And even as he beheld her—or thought he beheld her in a glimmering crowd of stars—he was doubly conscious of her withdrawal into his ignorance of her naked material, immaterial proportions. She had just crossed a dent and crack in sky or pavement, hesitated, caught, forced to struggle: bend forward abruptly, like a woman in the fields, intent on a furrow and plant—the terrestrial root and model of which she had herself half-driven,
half-ground
into him until it almost seemed to grip him like her hallucination and plea, elongated heel, spur,
compulsive
arch, half-branch, half-step, inverted privilege of community to which he clung. And which he now sought to depict as the phenomenal circuit of fear and love
engendered
by her in him. Technology of the soul. Hearing aid or pickaxe. Scythe or gun. Rust of the senses.
Invention
.
Madonna
of
the
fields.
Thus did it dawn on him that he had suffered a partial eclipse, the eclipse of god, and that this was the humiliating design she imposed on him as a kind of salutary rebuff and accommodation of incapacity at the same time. It was as if in pushing him away she still continued to draw him up into her compromise with reality. She knew she was blind and must learn to conceive of him in a manner consistent with a true rehearsal of her own limited powers of freedom and explosive actuality.