The truth was she now believed he had been cornered and pursued by something or someone which paradoxically seemed to have vanished long before in the dust of the waiting room but now came trailing after. Ancient flesh or newborn shadow? Mushroom of sensibility? Or insensibility? He shuddered a little turning to glance at her…. Susan Forrestal. He spoke her name aloud as he endeavoured to keep her still at arm’s length. Arm’s length. Duel of the emotions. Thrust and counterthrust. He had last touched her ten or twelve years ago as if she had been indeed a painted cornerstone of wood. She was changed (Susan drew a rigid hand across the marble of her eyes) but not so changed he did not partly remember her. If he had failed to answer or come it might have been different but now it was too late. She drew him into her twin apparition, embodiment of hate and of love she felt he still imposed upon her — deformity of all conception — from the world within and the world without (one man’s tax of despair, another’s theft of love).
The extraordinary thing was that on seeing a reflection for sale—“he” himself had once skilfully engineered — pause for an instant in the shop window within and without, he could hardly believe his eyes that she was his and could have sworn it was a trick, livid brush stroke of imagination — invention of the waiting room. Why should it be … indeed if it were the one endless skull why should “he” dream that it—his own fiction, disembodied light ning feature — was intent in the heart of the street on finding “him” half-cowering in this shell of a room?
The staring rims of her dark glasses as she retreated within the waiting room were endowed now with devastation in turning toward him and he was on the point of protesting when he realized…. BLIND. He should have known but he had forgotten so many things which pinned him still to her in agony or relief. It flashed on him now why she had paused at the edge of memory (street of memory) as if to solicit him, head bowed a little so that he failed to detect in the uneven spaces of light the blank focus of her gaze … sightlessness he dreamed was sight: each fold of her flesh was but the inhibition of another garment drawn around her in bitter community of fantasy. BLIND. There was now no shade of uncertainty about it. He had forgotten so many landmarks he once knew.
TWO naked women she seemed to him now — one, signal of flesh he had himself half-forgotten and endured, the other, despair of stone he had himself long projected and dreamt. Blind tall hallucinated mistress or sail and intimate squat fetish or deck plunged and addressed each other as if they shared a drunken tide of self-commiseration — running in the veins of their world — for “him,” the substitute gender and vessel whose stern and transported shadow they now were, standing, it seemed, both above and below to crush him ultimately into any shape they desired.
But surely it was “he”, stone-deaf and forgetful within the maelstrom of years, who would crush “them” to vanishing point or silence, even though, in the self-same instant of immersion, he discerned the finger of lightning protest, conviction and conversion on every reflective line and lip.
Mill of the gods, storm, cripple, address, wrist of fog, fist of cloud: chemistry of fury which curled and singed the appearances of conceit and the shattered memory of the waiting room. For they—the naked women of dead fantasy — were staring at him now from within vanishing point, beam, pole, inflicted on them long, long ago. It was he, they declared, who was drunk and obscene, solipsistic. Not they. In fact it was he who had robbed them and broken them down into “his” image and crew and engrafted likeness. Ironic displacement. Thief. Thief. Thief of their womanhead. Metallic. Flinty. Their parts may have been glued to “his” person for all they knew. And yet he would have them believe he was indestructible. Erect. Capable of overshadowing them and offering them the only accommodation they desired, tangent and repose, liaison with a god.
Susan Forrestal indicted him out of her sightless eyes. Every other creature of consciousness moved and turned away into one ground of buried existence. But she — invested now by a phenomenon of illusion and uniform reserve or strength — put him, or raised him with her hand, into the dock … convertible void of the waiting room … harbour … courtroom….
TWO. Thief. Thief
The 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 chilclass="underline" 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…?)
THREE. Apple of the Eye
For 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.