The Waiting Room by Wilson Harris Read Free Book Online Page A

encircled by a spirit of control, apotheosis and birth of a fiction—electrified, as a consequence, into accepting the shock of diminished perspective, ancient of days as well as infancy of nights, infidelity of monument ceaselessly curdling and branching into something less than one feared or loved.
    She drew close to the open door—located and gripped the knob—pulled fast. But even as she did so, a nerveless sensation, running water, swept along her arm as if the door had not been moved by her at all but had slammed shut of its own crooked spring and accord and her presence was but a curious agent of eternity within malformation , disfiguration, living and abandoned fluid tissue. She knew she stood on the threshold of resigning herself, even before she properly knew it, to the imbalance of season and eternity, a third seeing vessel and party—the displacement of which—lying between “him” on one hand, and “herself” on the other—she could not fathom save that here sailed the riddle and clasp of the chase seen through “pilot” eyes (holes for eyes) of a fiction which exercised upon her an uncanny demolition of premises, power of concentration and penetration, “drain” of attention, scrutiny beyond every apparent cloak to the essential fabric of freedom which “they”—in spite of a marriage of weakness, half-hunter, half-hunted, half-nothing, half-something, half-besieger, half-besieged—had become.

TWO
     

Watchman. Watchman
     
     
    T he church clock, a stone’s throw away, struck three: Susan turned, made her way back into the room towards a table with a book upon it. Ancient “log-book”. It seemed to her as she touched it that the fluid tie she had sensed within the room a moment ago, subsided into a pool at her feet, part and parcel of an aridity of vision, the unemotional stricken watch of place. Bond of freedom through which she felt herself related to a desert of expectation .
    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