They were waiting to be admitted. They wanted to come upstairs and enter her present life. Djuna herself did not understand why this should be such an intolerable idea. Perhaps not so much their coming back, if they came for a visit and sat in a chair and talked. But they might act like a sea rushing forward and sweeping her back again into the undertows of early darkness. Surely she had thrown them out with the broken toys, but they sat there, threatening to sweep her back. Stuffed, with glass eyes, from a slower world, they look at her on this other level of swifter rhythms, and they reach with dead arms around her. She wanted to escape them in elevators which flew up and down like great, swift birds of variety and change. Moving among many rooms, many people, among great secrets and feverish happenings. Their tentacles like the tentacles of earth waiting for the return to where she came from. Could all escape be an illusion? That was her fear, seeing duplicates of the people who had filled her early world.
She would go and have her hair washed, which was as good as weeping. The water runs softly through the roots of the being, like warm rain, and washes away everything. One falls into rhythm again. She would have her hair washed and feel this simple flow of life through the hair. She passed into the hair-washer’s cubicle, out of the lobby of the waiting past.
Djuna was soon poised again on the threshold, suspended, faced with the same fear of traversing the lobby. There was a moment of extraordinary silence in the enormous hotel; she could not tell if it was in her. A moment of extraordinary slowness of motion. Then came a dull, powerful sound outside. A heavy sound but dull, without echo. Djuna felt the shock in her body. The shock traversed the entire hotel, the silence and the panic was communicated, transmitted with miraculous speed. All at once, it seemed, without words, everyone knew what had happened. A woman had thrown herself from a window and fallen on the garage roof. Thrown herself from the twenty fifth floor. She was dead, of course, dead, and with a five month child inside her. She had taken a room in the hotel in the morning, given a false name. Had stayed five hours without moving from the room. And then thrown herself out with this child in her. The sound, the dead heavy body sound, resonant still in the structure of the hotel, in the bodies of the people communicating this image one to another. Djuna could see her bleeding and open. The impact. Fallen, fallen so quickly back to the bottom. Birds fell this way when they died in the air. Had she died in the air? When had she died? Ascension high, to fall from greater heights and be sure of death. Loneliness, for five hours in a room with this child who could not answer her if she talked, if she questioned, if she doubted, if she feared…
The radios were turned on again. People moved fast again, normally. The silence had been in every one, for one second. Then everyone had closed his eyes and moved faster, up and down. One must get dizzy. Move. Move.
Djuna sat in the room of the Voice. The little man no one ever saw, he was standing by the window.
“Look,” he said, “they are skating in the Park. It is Sunday. The band is playing. I could be walking in the snow with the band playing. That is happiness. When I had happiness I did not recognize it, or feel it. It was too simple. I did not know I had it. I only know it when I am sitting here strapped to this armchair and listening to confessions and obsessions. My body is cramped. I want to do the things they do. At most I am allowed to watch. I am condemned to see through a perpetual keyhole every intimate scene of their life. But I am left out. Sometimes I want to be taken in. I want to be desired, possessed, tortured too.”
Djuna said: “You can’t stop confessing them, you can’t stop. A woman killed herself, right there, under your window; that noise you heard was the fall of her body. She was pregnant. And she was alone. That is why she killed herself.”
“I listen to them all. They keep coming and coming. I thought at first that only a few of them were sick. I did not know that they were all sick and bursting with secrets. I didn’t know there was no end to their coming. Did you ever walk through the lobby? I have a feeling down there that they are all waiting to be confessed. They all have more to say than I have time to hear. I could sit here until I die and even then there will be women throwing themselves out of the window on the same floor on which I live.mes ;
White lights! Going up! Hans opening his door, laughing: “I was just lying in bed and thinking of you, and wanting you.”
It was always different. Sometimes it was like a little tongue of fire inside her that flicked out towards his thrusts, enveloped him like a little tongue of fire circling the thrust that touched the kernel of sweet acid in her, disrupting a current of silver fire passing through the veins. The nerves slept as under an enchantment, the eyes closed, slipping down sand dunes of warm waves lapping over each other. Great pulsations, like the very heart of ecstasy, breaking open a river of pulsations, the body resonant with the heavy horsehoofing gongs against the walls of feeling. Pleasure curling inside of her like leaves burned. In this tumult of blood, wine, incense, the kernel in her quietly opening like a fruit. A gasp in the veins, when the white blood spurts against the soft wall of fruit flesh in which it rolls, the womb breathing it in, flicking its tongue of flame, panting around each turn and flicker, reaching for the hardness with an infinite thirst, like a mouth opening and closing.
She remained full of echoes. Reverberations in the flesh, prolongations. The body still resounding. He, his desire being like a thrust into the woman, reached a finality. He could rise free, and alone again. In her the blood remained. She was impregnated. She awakened filled. She could not detach herself. He could awaken lighter, having passed the weight of his desire into her, without webs or threads around him. His desire a knife, a thrust that had reached its end. Her desire like a casket. She loved with necklaces, with bracelets, with chains, with sediments, with residues. Her spongy antennae had not only drunk like the stems of plants, but the branches had folded themselves around the miracle to perpetuate it. She loved as woman, with echoes, with infinite layers of repetitions, with caves of mysterious deposits, with scars, with mirrors, with a labyrinthian retention. She was, as all women, the perpetually abandoned one. She had a greater difficulty in shifting, in turning away. Every morning, it was the mandragore pulled out of the earth, it was the seed torn out of its fur pockets, it was a return to the void, a tear in the spider web of unity. Her continuity was born of echoes: she was a mirror and an ocean in which he bathed and which she could not reject on the shore of daylight; she was the night enfolding, enwrapping, lulling, encompassing, and she could not thrust out, as he did, into the daylight.
He awakened, and she did not. He passed into other realms. The longer his stay in the enfolding whirls the greater his leap into space again. He awakened, talking of mysticism. He awakened as Laotse, sitting with eyes closed with laughter, laughter sitting on the edge of his high cheeks, laughter in the corners of the mouth, the laughter of great knowingness, but also the laughter of great separateness. The man without wound, sitting on the humorous bull, contemplating the sacrifice of sperm and honey with the great simplicity of a ceremony, a ritual.
She did not awaken. She lay in the darkness of the blood marshes, feeling the tearing between day and night. An ocean bearing nothing on its heavy waves: waves hollowed out in emptiness, waiting for his return. A night hung like a damask ciborium, waiting fo pressure, for a rent in the indigo silk, for an explosion. A plant weighed down by the sap. No laughter runs through plants.