The Waiting Room 

Slow, orbital, courtshiplike in its dance, the dust molecule floated by in flushed and darkening demarcations of descendence. Rectangular plots of light assaulted and defined the floor, the blank expanse of carpet rolling in great, green sea-like rows of risers right up to the peeling, mahogany-painted walls. 

Nothing else moved. In that room, the silent, sweeping sobbing of the b;lack-hatted man there (there was a black-hatted man there) proceeded without motion. He sat as steady as a lighthouse above a fiber-fingered sea. The small white-washed tangle of his hands received the sparkling high-watt rays of his eyes without complaint. Without moving to the right or to the left with the excess energy of the blind, or up and down with the classical, grievy f;licker of a wail, the small black-hatted man simply, quietly cried. 

Contemporary and tearless as the room his breath filled, the man jerked his head swiftly (with the speed of cool doves) to face the unstained panes of the windows. The intricate frames of window-filled wall were so white that if a cloud-crowded sky or an intensely bright fog sidled up to the house you'd swear that the frame and the wall weren't there. It was as if someone had come by (on a day suddenly cold) and pulled his hand out of a pocket of frost and thrown, with the full measure of his weight for direction, a full fist of that frost, and that frost had then stuck in a pattern on the hard air of the glass. 

Nothing was to be made of this change in his gaze, unless it was that one was to notice how now there appeared the tiny, chipped, slate-blue apparition of a glaze in the horizontal, rowboat shaped, skies of his eyes. The charge of the emotion tethered to the event (of seeing the windows in webs wrapping the world) was too big for the heart of this diminutive man. His lungs rubbed his stomach against the inside fuzz of his shirt; his lips wrapped the notes of an invisible song; the hairs in his nostrils were humming with the ease of a grief. He denied a sigh. 

Small, bright flags of light glinted from the sides of his shoes, demanding attention, begging salute-- or at least the soft acknowledgement that a dog will give to the hand that's slapped it. From the neat, shiny Buster Browns to the new felt Stetson at the peak of his head, the man was a scramble of slightly tightening and whirling lights. The nails of his thumbs and the lower curves of all of the buttons of his well-buttoned suit were slurred with light. His feet clapped the floor like black and hollow turtle-shells. His thumbs were crossed. 

Out past the stiff doily-work of the windows there was a set of (not less than five) evenly spaced, symmetrically standing celery stalk pillars. They did not bend in the light. The black-hatted man looked at his hands, and his body, and everything he could see, was trapped by thin, encroaching laceries of shadow. A large band of poison ivy flared and bubbled on the back of his left hand like a pot of yellow spaghetti left boiling. Each single rise on the back of his hand tried, like an angry hive, to escape from the immaculate, intricate overlay of darkness. Where the bubbles were low and skin colored, the attempted technique was camouflage; where higher and partly rouged with specks of lost blood, the method was anger, and made anger the cast of the entire left hand-- sloping with grace toward his knee like the limp of a leg; where highest, and clear, the thought of the poison seemed to be to grade into nothingness, as air into air. 

Molecules of dust were drowning all over the floor. The veins in his neck, under a collar quite tight, purpled themselves pleasantly into the frayed edge of his hair. The crest of his hat, unconsciously rakish and precariously set, was crushed in the center like a plumbline of thought aimed at his skull. The black aspect of the fabric of the hat was offset by the glow of the shiny black ribbon that wrapped it. It seemed that the light (implied by the clarity and density of black) was the natural opposite outcome of a void. The man let his fingers quiver like a madman's on a trumpet. The appearance of this quivering was so life-like and tense that one might have thought that the little igloo palaces that beset his lift hand were really and simply an exaggerated swag of sweat that clung on to hear the band. His hand turned silver as a mercury bath. 

The man's vision dissolved in an extremity of frost; his thighs and the guise of the rest of his form were lost in the terribly brambly frame of burnt-iron shadow that leapt from the clouds of the paper-white mesh. The abstract angle of his dangling hand absorbed and expressed every degree of expressible worry. His doom was as sealed and resolved as an unopenable sea. 

The door began knocking in the back of his head. The sounds it emitted were as bloated and liquid as a drowned sailor's eyes. He turned his head backwards (with the line of his eyes and the aim of the thought that cleft his black hat) to look at the door. The whole of the door, and most of the wall, sat flat and mottled as sheet music on the slightly dulled edge of his sight; the score was as complex as a tin ocean's song. The wait was finished. He began to move. His face above his neck turned red and green as christmas. 

As he rose, his rose face turned suddenly calm; an apoplexy of delight, or reason, had tenderly ambushed his brain in a rain of new apples. His left hand strummed his thigh with the conversionary process that turned rural penitentiaries to cow fields, his palm sweeping the pants like a cropduster's smoke, obliterating smoothly the minuscule furrows combed in the cloth. It was then that he noticed that the red on his hand was part golden-red too. Inside of his chest, he felt the hot, heavy dome of his heart rise and explode.