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

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 pre caution , 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