Perhaps all the while I was probing inside the closet, all the while I was trying to decipher in the darkness of that hole the meaning of the gesture that pushed me there, the answer was elsewhere, in the other room, the room full of light, for it was not dark in that room, it was light in that room, where they told me to wait after I emerged from the dark hole of the closet, and it is in the light of that room, of that waiting room, in that antechamber of departure that it all started ...
In that room there was a bed and a wooden table, I cannot remember if there was a chair to sit at the table, perhaps the table was not a table but a desk, this is not clear, in any case, a bed, a table or desk, and on the wall, the wall against which the bed was pushed, a picture tagged to the wall with punaises, yes in French, of course, and that picture, a representation of a sexy scene advertising a play, a movie, a spectacle of sorts, a glossy picture depicting a nude pale female body, long and slim, stretched on a couch in rumpled sheets, a voluptuous young woman with black hair, her left hand suspended in mid-air reaching for her breasts, her right hand touching the black hole between her thighs, yes that's exactly how it was, and there, in that room full of light, with the bed, the table, and the sexy picture on the wall, there as I replayed the fear in the closet, I saw myself crouched like a sphinx defecating on an old newspaper, and I burst into laughter, the laugh laughing at the l augh, I was laughing at myself over there shitting in the dark hole, and I knew then that it would have to be told in laughter and scatology, in laughter and sex, that it would have to be written, when the time comes, from the light of the bedroom rather than from the darkness of the toilet, yes I understood this as I stood naked between the bed and the desk looking at the naked girl in the picture and reached with one hand for my head, and with the other for my cock.
It is that gesture, that duplicitous gesture that has guided me to here and now, and not the undecipherable gesture that pushed me into the closet which will remain forever undeciphered.
Copyright © 1996 Raymond Federman