A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [66]
The layers of dream are so many, so many false membranes grown around the mind, that I don’t even know they are there until some knifing reality cuts through, and I see the sight of my other eyes for what it has been, distorted, bizarre, grotesque, unbearably a joke if viewed from the outside.
This I cannot take. This I could argue with You (if You were there) until doomsday. How dare You? My trouble, perhaps, is that I have expected justice. Without being able to give it.
I’m evading again. Anything to put off the moment when I have to rise and do what now seems necessary. I can’t. I cannot. Oh yes, you can Rachel. Repugnance is for those who can afford luxuries. You’re not that wealthy now.
NINE
Why? What I can’t understand is why. What purpose was there in it? What was he afraid of? I wouldn’t have had the right to argue. Maybe he thought I’d splinter like a shattered mirror, create some unlucky scene, scatter sharp fragments which he could only stand and look at with embarrassment. I wouldn’t have. I never would have done that. Perhaps I would have, though. I don’t know any longer what I might or might not do.
I waited ten days and then I phoned. I thought – I don’t care whether he is married or not. It occurred to me that he hadn’t phoned because he thought I’d mind too much and wouldn’t want to see him. I had to let him know. A woman’s voice answered, faintly familiar to me, his mother.
“Hello.”
“Oh, hello. May I speak to Nick, please?”
“Nick’s not here. He went back a week ago.”
“Oh. I see. Well – thanks very much.”
“Who is speaking, please?”
But I didn’t say. I put down the receiver and walked out of the phone booth in the bus station. I had the absurd thought – at least they can’t trace the call. As if they would have tried, anyway. I did not notice whether there was anyone in the bus station who knew me. People were sitting there, waiting, suitcases at their feet, but they had no faces. I had the conviction that since their faces were unfocused and hidden to me, I would be faceless to them as well.
I noticed I had quite a severe headache, and I thought it must be due to the sun, although the day was nearly evening now. I stopped at the cigarette and candy counter and bought a small packet of aspirins. I don’t know why I did that, because we had plenty of aspirins at home. I was not thinking, I guess, or perhaps I knew I wouldn’t be going home for a while. I went to the Ladies. The machine that dispenses paper cups had run out, so I took a paper towel and folded it carefully to make a cup. My father showed me how to do that a long time ago. “You never know when it might come in handy,” he said, “but you have to drink quickly or it soaks through and gets wasted.” Probably he wasn’t meaning plain water by itself, now I come to think of it. I drank some water quickly and took three aspirins. I remember thinking I must get my eyes examined because maybe the headache wasn’t the sun.
Maybe it wasn’t the sun.
Two girls had just come in. One was in a toilet cubicle and the other was applying orange lipstick, holding her face close to the mirror as though she wanted to enter it like Alice and go through into an image world. Then I saw she was staring at me, in the mirror.
“What did you say, Helen?” The voice from the cubicle.
“I never said a thing,” the mirror girl replied.
Then they both began giggling, and it was only then that I realized it was I who had spoken aloud. I dropped the paper towel-cup on the floor, and ran. In the long wall mirror I saw myself running, the