The Waiting Room

T
HE WAITING ROOM
is based on the disjointed diary of the Forrestals which came into my hands many years ago. Susan Forrestal described this diary in one section as “her husband’s log book” but it would appear that she and possibly others were engaged in an art of fiction peculiar to themselves.

By
fiction
I do not mean to deny certain literal
foundations
but rather to affirm these absolutely as a mutual bank or living construction of events; those who
collaborated
accepted the enigma of such self-proportion and sought therefore to discover themselves concretely, as well as brokenly, in the mystery of a common vanishing life, day to day, year to year.

Susan suffered from an incurable complaint of the eyes and after three operations became almost totally blind at the age of forty. She was the mistress of a man who left her suddenly, it would appear, after a violent quarrel, and disappeared without trace. He remained nameless in the log book, though he may have, at one time, contributed certain entries which give details of his remarkable
collection; 
ornaments and pieces of interest. Susan actually married someone else some time after this, who—from all that can be gleaned—was extremely solicitous for her well-being, but her original lover (with whom she obviously had had much in common) continued to haunt her (to put it in her own words) and to arouse within her a “living” crew or presence. And in fact “he” became—according to a peculiar entry in the diary—“hieroglyph and vessel of experience, the supreme positive fiction for me of nothingness.” By which she seemed to imply that a fiction which appears to grasp
nothingness
runs close to a freedom of reality which is
somethingness.

Susan and her husband (mention of whom does not clearly occur until BOOK 2) died in an explosion which wrecked their home and much of their belongings, antiques, ornaments, etc. The log book survived, though certain sections were half-obliterated…. But this—while apparently depleting continuity—only served to enhance the essential composition of the manuscript that involved accidental deletions or deliberate erasures, reappraisals, marginal notes, dissociations of likely material (as well as associations of unlikely material) to confirm, and blend into, a natural medium of invocation in its own right.

And this disproportionate, sometimes shocking,
condition
, was the world in particular of Susan Forrestal, whose “operations” led her to accept her own “weakness” as a normal state which needed to confess its own broken existence to plumb and visualize its true relationship to a capacity for freedom.

I am only too well aware of my own shortcomings in attempting to uncover the curious unity I myself felt as existing between essential spirit or form and actual
content
of the log book.

W.H.      

S
usan
Forrestal
was
blind.
She
drew
the
palm
of
her
hand
slowly
across
her
face
as
if
to
darken
her
own
image,
and
to
discover
therein
another
sun
of
personality.
“
He
”
it
was
whom
she
began
to
discern
like
the
ancient
seal
—
the
ancient
soul
of
love.

The sun fell on the slumbering brickwork of her flesh. Through the blind or curtained window where “he” sat and watched
FROM WITHIN HER SKULL
, the tops of vehicles could be seen as they passed, and still beyond—upon the pavement at the opposite side of the street—passersby were reflected in a shop window.

The life of one’s time affected one, “he” thought, like a restless image or span which seemed to pass within and beyond oneself and overlap each flickering stalemate of apprehension.

The sun burned and faded like a rag on fire, intensity, luminous paint, stone, canvas: a shred of emotion which gleamed for an instant and grew into an address one felt one had made or actually deciphered in the heart of chaos. It was a borrowed shelter of vision, flaked, holed, animated façade, instinctive shock of recognition, number, letter of gravity. It was the minted incongruous mask one wore, whose features as they stared through glass into the street were equally stamped with a bodily and ghostly design shared by immediate figures of acquaintance and remote figures of antiquity. This was “his” main legend and business, the business of preserving someone (like and unlike himself), of disguising someone whose proximity to himself was as nebulous as dust and adamant as stone.

“His” relationship then to himself (and to her) was baffling. And if it appeared at times to spark into being a certain solid community, there were other times when it all seemed to hang together by the veriest shred of
fellowship
, emotional relief as well as entanglement. It was a question of the marriage of roots as well as branches and arms of dispersal.

The day was now darkening as “he” appeared to reside within and yet adventure throughout her skull of the world. The mushroom of an umbrella swam within the shop window above the pavement. And thus—almost against “his” will—began “his” transportation into her subject and object, alteration in the proliferate colour of living and dead relationships, animation and inanimation, the shadow within the moved stone and without the immovable flesh. “He” had been seized by her fear of “him”. As if “he” stood naked and receptive within the room above the thoroughfare. And the growing shelter and embrace he began to suffer turned, as the clock died and still ticked, into a total presence he regained and knew. Like a garment—necessary and binding and absurd—“he” had forgotten he still carried or wore, whose pliant
arms held him in the void of time until they became charged with constriction and feeling. To be naked and still clothed (as he felt himself to be) was to cling to a stem … extremity….

She sat now beside him in the waiting room (
Susan
drew
the
palm
of
her
hand
slowly
across
her
face
as
if
it
had
turned
to
stone
)
naked as he in the poverty of existence. *She drew him closer still within the skin of another incongruous skeleton they shared, flesh or wood, swimming in the glass of their shop window within and without. Antique display. Waiting room.*

It was the ornamental structure of her calves and a curious gravity of frame which appeared to strip her and give him bone and currency, blunt shadow, pregnant reality…. He felt he was being drawn into a revelation of unique and terrifying possession on entering the room and taking his place beside her. Was it the most curious rigidity of the past or most intimate fantasy of the present she fought and entertained?

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
Forres
tal
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….