Читать книгу The Healer - Greg Hollingshead - Страница 12

Caroline Troyer was sitting behind Crooked Hand’s counter. She was reading. Something was bothering her, and as she went on reading she half-thought it must be the man who had just been in looking for property (so he said), how his half-turn to the past and the habits of blindness and deception cultivated by that in him had muddied and compromised his nature, but then she realized that it was not him, at least not only him, but her own immediate state of intending to do something she wasn’t doing. Of knowing there was something but not knowing what it was. Like knowing something is there before you turn your head. Before you recognize it, it’s there as a husk, as the ghost of itself, waiting to be known. And then the sun had reached the cellophaned window, and the office did not get hotter, not yet, but the patch of bright amber light on the linoleum at the corner of her eye caused her, even as she continued to read, to think of heat, and that was how she remembered that she’d been meaning to plug in the fan, which she had unplugged when she went upstairs for lunch, right after the man had come in, and that’s what it was she wasn’t doing.

Now it seemed to her there must be a way to act that would not, like this, like him, be confused, half hidden to yourself, half backward-turned, your timing always that little bit late. And she decided to see if it would be possible to know the right time to get up and go over and plug in the fan. She knew she could just do it. Decide to do it, then get down off her stool and walk over and do it. But it seemed to her that that would only be acting according to an idea of what she should do. Acting to fit an idea of acting. And she wondered if there could be some other way to do it. So she sat up straight and she waited, and before she knew it she was springing up to go and do it. But instead she sat down again, because it seemed to her that doing it that way, without thinking, was even more mechanical than doing it according to some idea. So she waited. Again she sprang up to do it, and again she sat down and waited.

And then it happened. She saw when to get up and go and plug in the fan, and in the exact same action of seeing it she got down off the stool and walked over and she plugged in the fan. And this was another kind of action altogether, a third kind, completely different from the other two. It was a harmony, a grace of movement, and she wondered if a person’s whole life could be this way. And how this would be different from the other ways. How it might change how she was able to know. Whether she could live in order to act out of seeing and not according to an old reflex or the last idea. And she knew that it would be easy to think you were doing it when you were not, believing in it as an idea but not doing it. Or doing it in love with the person you wanted to be. But the thing was, she knew that she knew this, and she knew that she didn’t have to stop there, because she understood that knowing this was also part of what she could see, and all she had to do was to try to find out how far this thing was possible to be done.

In this way, moment by moment, not gradually but all at once, at each moment, she would empty herself, if she could, she would empty herself of the slave.