The Waiting Room Read online

  The subterranean cave of Susan. It was as if he had spoken her name aloud and the echoes combined into a crumbling fixture, property of the imagination. There was no price he would not pay to grasp such an ultimate seal of freedom and conviction within the borderline capacities of nature.

  The cavern shook once again and rumbled—not with the same echoes this time but with a new distant faint blast. Incredible … surprise … revelation. He knew (as surely as if he had been told) that the blast he now heard had actually occurred ages ago: and that, at long last, it was able to reach him in an echo long muffled and nurtured and preserved (like the sound of the sea in a shell) by its very sovereign stamp of irruption—persona of “deafness” to the original catastrophe and, in fact, “blindness” (until a moment ago) to the ancient shroud of the sun. Shroud of love. Ancient metamorphosis, endless creation, gods, species of fiction within whose mask of death one endured the essential phenomenon of crisis and translation.

  Delayed blast. Short circuit. Reaction. Within the radius of which “he” felt himself begin to relive—with new awareness—his descent through the door of the middle passage (down the nameless river of the underworld) as one who had been smitten by the bushmaster of space until “he” and “it” fell through a common skin into a naked darkness they had never dreamt would heal and safeguard them.

  There swam before him ghost and bride, armature of love, explosive anatomy he cherished at the end of ages of pursuit within the delayed recognitions of the present in the past, the past in the future….

  Page 17.

  * 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.*

  Copyright

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © Wilson Harris, 1967

  The right of Wilson Harris to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–29787–0