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?
How could she begin to accept and relinquish at the same time a conception of appearances she had come to believe she had once and truly adopted and loved, long, long ago, and whose stature of repudiation (or flight from her) she found equally diminishing in preconceived matter or content as nourishing in unconditional unity — being and spirit?
And indeed which cubit was less real (or more concrete) than the other? Might not her proud flesh-and-blood, her illusion of strength, prove so adamant it became equally worthless?
It was the first baffling sentence “he” had written in the log-book — baffling because as she traced it from memory she found herself both banished and reclaimed within an intimate structure of relationship….
She began to trace the narrative title upon a further page of the log-book — THIEF. THIEF, but found herself now, unwittingly perhaps, half-erasing, half-converting this — with every stroke of a vacant finger — into the shadow of another continuous vigil WATCHMAN. WATCHMAN…. The borderline features which she summoned, part-veiled, part-exposed, were half-subject, half-object of each other — displaced by each other within “living” room, “waiting” room, equally substantial as frail, animate as inanimate within a yielding train of capacity that erected “objective” goals, “subjective” barriers, whose “inner” openness or “outer” obduracy of conviction was but one involuntary spectre.
Thief. Thief. WATCHMAN. WATCHMAN. The telephone in the room began to ring. Her husband was calling to say he would be half an hour late. Was there anything she would like him to get her?
Nothing. Her voice and reply seemed perfectly normal and self-possessed in her own ears. But in his, at the other end, came a sharp note, rebuke, accusation…. What was she accusing him of …? It was not the first time he felt this. Was he robbing her, depriving her (within the very care and attention he lavished upon her) of something she desperately needed? Was it a bond of friction he cultivated and she resented?
Was he over-exacting, over-scrupulous, too solicitous — unchanging, identical in compulsion and manner? Was he pushing her to the brink of exhaustion?
The helplessness of his situation began to assume the sharpest and yet most arid proportions. Was there nothing, after all, he could do for her? Susan hesitated with a curious sensation of crumbling within his ultimatum and ring of light.
She knew she was beginning to slip, in spite of his every precaution, into a depth of self-knowledge, a depth of isolation from which he guarded her. But who was he, after all, to guard her in one thing and confess himself ignorant and fearful of relative desolation in another? How did “he” see her in the ultimate corruption of flesh at the ghostly end of the line upon which she seemed to pull both close at hand and yet utterly removed? Could he husband within himself a distant and faint spiritual body of resources while bending himself upon it with all the material strength at his command, to exorcise the very fiend of estrangement and love?
Tension of the “dead” in the living, and of the “living” in the dead, as a consequence of which there glided a shadow of complexity (Susan knew), an intangible cloud or fiction, rain and drought. The line suddenly went “dead” in her hands. Merely the sputter of space now. The gibberish of the stars. The naïveté of eternity. “His” true gift perhaps in the end. Nothing. Instantaneous unpredictable relief within every “given” body of terror in flight from unnatural fears and responsibilities…. Thief. Thief. WATCHMAN. WATCHMAN.
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.