The Waiting Room by Wilson Harris Read Free Book Online

horns—the glowing constellations of flesh which rose and exploded within the dark premises of memory restraining them. The axes of the horns drew her both sharply and gently down into the vicinity of the animal’s cured skin—holes for eyes—until she trembled with the new senses of an alien figure of conquest. It did not seem to matter whether it was she who lived to cast aft echoing net about him, or he —horn and cane she grasped—who lived to tap each sound along the way and propel her into the ghostly music of the stars.
    And in fact—as she stroked the “blind” and “deaf” beast that had been flayed and pinned to the wall, it gave her, in tune with everything else, the thrill all over again of pursuer and pursued, the thrill of execution: the sensation of catching him again and again and compensating the defeat of herself within the pregnant fold and field he still inflicted upon her; the magical womb of the hunt was now hers to confer upon him as she wished (shroud or skin or sail) to silence the clamour of bruised instinct he had once aroused within her like an orchestra of fury, and which she now calculated she had repaid by rendering him senseless as stone, mute and void.
    She felt an enormous desire to puncture him again and again as “he” had once punctured her: holes for eyes within waiting room, half-sanctuary, half-confessional—masked “seeing” eyes against a torn “speaking” mouth, and she drew the nail of one finger across her lips (as if embarrassed at the thought of being converted into his cloth and vision—half-curse, half-blessing or prayer) like the breath of a sceptical axe upon his neck where he stood pinned to the wall.
    In truth—had she not long since lost all desire but to preserve an eternity of jealous distance from him? And thus—as if in fear of a “broken” contest (wherein he had invoked the voice of fiends within her breast)—she fell on her knees and addressed him as god of fair weather and foul. No wonder she wanted to participate his own defenceless crew and grow deaf, prostrate beneath masthead, figure-head, to whom she yielded pride of place in the end, token of godhead she insisted all must pay for flying from and still overshadowing her.
    This hieroglyph of storm—seizure of reality—was the literal vessel she half-worshipped, which became part and parcel of the medium of history upon the deck of which she froze to dwell—despite all movement—like the sovereign mistress of both the apparent flux of love and the apparent flux of fate, maelstrom and passion.
    Perhaps it was only natural that void and vortex should sound and exist within creatures whose original lust and desire inevitably drained them within a confluence of times, of the music and fever of the chase, until all that remained was but an imprisoned echo in a shell—the hollow conversion of each other’s compulsion and reflection into each other’s god, or into each other’s muse of god ….
    Upon the floor of the waiting room of fetishes where Susan knelt—half-pinned herself, it seemed to her more clearly than ever now in the “eyes” of another, stone-deaf lover, as he had been pinned by her against a wall of flight—the low hum of traffic from the street of memory without (like an ocean of enterprise) died and rose again with the curl of each wave to enclose her and spin her round, up, down, until the fantastic spiral of horns ceased and seemed not to grip her at all but to return to becoming part and parcel of “his” abandonment of her all over again in the end…. And yet it left her with the taste of the vortex in her blood….
    There was a sudden movement in the room. Susan rose to her feet. She began to drift after a while in search of whatever it was—propelled by a springing concert of need towards the magnet of the void, the open door of the room she vaguely recalled she had forgotten to close. A draught struck her and she moved against this, pinpointed and