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The Quiet Man > When You Walk Through Me
He went out of the house; walking to the rented room where he was assembling tokens he'd come across over the years. He'd gathered them from flea markets and junk stalls across the cities, only obtaining an item if it possessed that subtle magnetism he was searching for: a lock of hair, items of clothing, a diary; address books, letters, photographs and postcards. He relied as much as possible on instinct - deliberately attempting to bypass any intellectual process, because what he was pursuing could not depend upon any identifiable sort of logic. It was an attempt to access those other streams that he believed run behind and beneath everything: the subtext, the hidden framework, the concealed structures.

And he had a purpose. That room above the florist's shop was on a route he habitually used when walking from Islington to Store Street in the West End of London. He'd recently managed to obtain a lease on it after waiting patiently for several years. Such places were also divined by instinct. They must possess the same quiet resonance as the collected objects. These were places he felt had somehow escaped the accepted, recognized timestream, and were therefore removed from it. Store Street, for instance, had sections he remembered from when he was eight years old, in 1956. This was a point of entry, and there were many others he'd discovered in his walks around the city.

He carefully arranged the final selection of objects on the bed. They formed a female figure, by inference. Gloves, stockings, dress, shoes, hat. A lock of hair, a sprinkle of face powder, a spray of faint perfume, earrings, a silver watch. All in place. even a half-smoked, gold-tipped cigarette in an ashtray. Around these he'd placed a second circle of postcards, letters, photographs. And beyond these, he'd arranged four polished wooden boxes containing electrical apparatus, around the bed. And then he waited for a few months, until exactly the right day and the right time. A Wednesday afternoon in Autumn, just before dusk. The time of day, the time of year, the weather and all the peripherals must be entirely right in order to generate a useful field. There was also a need for magnetism and smaller electrical fields to inform and consolidate the wider ones. These were generated naturally from layers of metals, fats, acids and other materials layered in glass jars he had placed on the floor, behind the bed head.

So, as dusk gathered, he waited calmly, standing by the windows, music playing quietly on a gramophone, until he felt all the resonances beginning to liaise, to harmonise. The dusk, the season, the light, the weather, the room and its location and of course his own desires all began to merge into some other entity: the Gestalt - the total frequency of the place. And as this became denser and more consolidated, he could feel a faint tingling sensation begin across the skin of his hands and his face. And things began to happen in the twilight room.

At first, a faint mist began to form over the bed. Grey-blue, and faintly electrical. The objects upon it became partly obscured. Then some were gradually buoyed up on it, as a vague figure began to emerge. Almost there. Still blurred.

He waited some hours, hardly daring to move, until the figure began to coalesce a little. It looked like a woman, made from smoke. When he thought she looked solid enough, he very gently applied lipstick onto her blurred lips, and this seemed to focus her a little more. Some hours later, he reached over and very gently took her hands. She reacted only slightly, as someone might if touched in sleep. He drew her up with great care, until she was standing. As he gazed at her face, he began to realise she was not quite the woman he had imagined. Instead, she appeared to be a sort of approximation. A version. Even though the experiment had succeeded, it seemed that some element of it must not have been precise enough, and through this marginal inaccuracy another woman appeared to be manifesting. A stranger.

She remained suspended in a sort of trance, like someone trying to wake but unable to get beyond a certain point. At times, she also appeared to become restless, even momentarily distressed. She was beautiful though, and lost.

Now he began to experience a mixture of sadness and regret, almost wishing he'd never begun. Because now he realised he was unsure how to resolve the situation. He felt completely responsible for this half-formed woman. He couldn't possibly leave her alone here, nor could he seek any sort of medical help. Her manifestation seemed to be arrested close to the final stages, but he'd exhausted all the resources he had gathered and was now at a loss to know what else he could do. He sat down in an armchair by the bed, feeling defeated. And then he felt a great stillness and lucidity descend, as sometimes happens in moments of confusion.

As he looked across at the beautiful shadow he'd called into the room, he became aware of a new element stealing softly into the atmosphere, and it took some time before he recognised the faintest tinge of Desire. Equally he recognised that this was not simply his. It was shared. And this led to another realisation - that her manifestation could only be completed through sexuality, and this was what she desired. Already he could feel the mutual electricity permeating the room, but he was still assailed by doubt, not the least his distinctive feeling that any intimacy with her must be entirely wrong. She seemed too vulnerable and helpless. He couldn't even be sure how aware of her own situation she might be. But his instincts had guided him this far, and he didn't mean to abandon them now. On the other hand, he was aware that time was passing and she seemed trapped in this incomplete state. He wasn't sure how long it could be maintained, nor what might happen later. She looked so incredibly fragile. He felt that if he even moved quickly too close by her, she might disperse, like a pool of smoke in a still room. But how could he begin to communicate with her if she didn't become more complete? And if all this didn't succeed, what then? Might she remain in this ghostly, half-manifested state for ever? What could he possibly do then? He could never simply abandon her.

But she supplied the answer to all this. While he was looking out of the window distracted by such thoughts, she had moved close behind him unobserved, and her arms slid around his waist, then into his clothing, like a flow of smoke. He was startled into awareness by the electrical sensation of her touch on his skin. He turned slowly. They remained motionless like this for a long time, conscious of the gathering electrical flow between them. It surrounded them, radiating outwards, burning the dust in the air. This contact seemed to complete her a little more. She seemed enormously beautiful now, a sort of living vapour, luminous and flowing. She began to whisper close to his ear, in an abstracted sort of way. "Breathe me in. I'll breathe you out." The first words he heard her speak. So he breathed as slowly and gently as her could, still afraid that he might inadvertently disperse her. And she slowly inhaled, and exhaled, their lips barely touching as he enjoyed the long, lingering sensation of joining with her through this exchange of breath. Desire began to flow between them freely now, and as she gathered round him he gradually lost any sense of his own boundaries. They moved together, exchanging and reforming and dispersing. Again and again. At times he seemed to participate in her vapourous glowing state, as if their substance was now shared and without boundary. At one point he looked in the mirror and he saw that he was the blurred one, and that she was real and solid. He heard her voice and now it seemed familiar and they both experienced a deep pleasure in mixing themselves together like some miraculous new substance, both becoming increasingly joyous and buoyant and abandoned.

Each time they made love, she gained definition, solidity, focus and so they made love many times that night.
Towards dawn they both became helpless against an inexorable tide of sleep. When he opened his eyes, morning light was coming in and the room was empty. He rose and went over to the window, looking out along the avenues hoping to catch some glimpse of her, growing increasingly alarmed at the thought of her wandering alone in the city in such a vulnerable state. He felt terribly afraid. He must find her.

He went out and searched the streets of the city for days. Weeks. Months. Years. But he never succeeded in finding a single trace of her. What he had failed to understand was that she had always been there, right beside him. All the time. But he had never even noticed her. He passed her several times a day without even realising. Also, he had been vain enough to assume that it was he who manifested her, when all the time she had been guiding him, subtly and invisibly. She was there now. So close that he might have reached out and touched her, if only he could have seen. If only he had known.

So that is how she returned to being the face glimpsed in a crowd; the passing stranger. Someone almost there. The shadow on the stairs. He would forget about her altogether, for days at a time, then remember her with force in dreams. He had tried to get back to the room, to the time, and could not. He walked constantly. He telephoned across the city. He looked out from his windows.

She had a room in his apartment but he had never realised it. In passing, he'd vaguely noticed a door that seemed to appear in different places, resolving to see what was behind it one day. One morning, he even tried the door. But it was locked. He made a mental note to search for the key in the cupboard, or get a locksmith in, but he never did.

Occasionally he would notice her shadow on the wall, or a movement in the doorway behind him as he read a newspaper, or listened to music in the evening. But he dismissed this as imagination, or coincidence. Sometimes he found an indentation on the pillow, as if someone else had lain there beside him, but he rationalised that he had simply changed position during the night. Once or twice he awoke to hear a gentle breathing beside him in the darkness, and being half asleep he dismissed this as a dream. And this at last was the way they lived together. They never met. They were always very near to each other, and he was always searching for her.
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