Arc d'X

41

THE WOMAN IN THE DARK says, Everything is humming. The night hums, the city. Everything is seconds ahead of itself, I can feel the whirring of the room. Walking to the hotel tonight I heard the growl of animals in the cellars all along the street, they’re disturbed by the hum. They perk up to the sound of time. The dark glows with their eyes. The solstice rushes to catch up with the light of the west. Rudi must be home by now. He’s wondering where I am and looking over the loft. Maybe he’s found the package from Prague, what will I tell him when he asks about it? What will I tell him when he asks where I was tonight? I don’t care any longer. Maybe I won’t go back. If I stay tonight in this room, will the American lover stay with me, and what then? It wasn’t supposed to be a whole night together. I knew sooner or later he’d say, Not on the phone anymore. I knew sooner or later he’d insist on this. I admit I wanted to as well but I might have waited if I hadn’t heard the power in his voice. I might have waited until the end of summer or the beginning of autumn. I might have waited until the eve of the New Year to go into the black hole of X-Tag on my hands and knees being fucked from behind rather than with Rudi, I’d rather feel my tits in the hands of a stranger I cannot see than be with Rudi’s dead heart. It doesn’t matter. By the New Year Rudi and I won’t be together anyway. Rudi and I won’t be together by the end of the week. The American lover hums with the night. I could taste on the end of his cock the drop that anticipated his satisfaction. On the New Year I’ll pop him at midnight like a champagne bottle, his splash will precede us into the future. Perhaps he won’t be here on the New Year. Perhaps he won’t be in Berlin anymore. Perhaps the power in his voice on the phone was because he’s leaving. But I don’t believe he’s leaving. I don’t believe he has anywhere to go. I believe he’s come to Berlin for the New Year, it’s the only reason to come to Berlin, for what’s to come. Otherwise you get out of Berlin. Otherwise you’re me and still in Berlin calling one number after another listening for the voice of what you need. He was shy for a moment when he first arrived, I saw his form hesitate in the doorway. I was surprised that he’d already taken off his shirt, he must have started undressing in the hallway. He must have begun undressing on the stairs, loosening the first buttons in the street. When I cry out, I feel his excitement. He’s a beast, of course. I might have known. From the wound in his voice on the phone. From the sound of his orgasm the first time I called, the groan at the end. I’ve come to learn that nothing can be defiled anymore. I part my legs and open myself at the junction of my soul. It’s the ping of freedom in my mind, like the tap of a wine glass that rings through the house, when the first tiny white drop of him falls into the pool of me and ripples outward. When the heart is broken and the dream is gone, annihilation is delicious. I find in it my last place of peace on the journey into the whirl. The only bastion left me before the siege of what I remember, a flash of red across the black in the distance, a kind of deliverance or, even, a miracle.