Tours of the Black Clock

91

LYING HERE IN THIS particular burial, she is at once in three separate moments. She’s lying beneath the leaves of the Sudanese forest, she’s lying in her bed in Vienna, she’s lying in the bottom of a rowboat on the shores of Davenhall Island. She’s not asleep or dreaming, she’s perfectly wakefully aware and conscious. She remembers. She remembers last night the shorthaired silver buffalo, she remembers this afternoon the riot in the street outside her window, she remembers running to the beach in the early hours of morning to see the small wooden shack burning on its pillars over the river. In each of these moments she’s waiting for a lover. She’s waiting for the man she loved in the jungle, Dr. Reimes. She’s waiting for the man she loved in the city, a dancer by the name of Joaquin Young. She’s waiting on the island for the man who’s always loved her across time and space. The rain beats down on the African leaves, on the Austrian rooftop, on the tarpaulin that shields the boat. It’s the same rain in three different moments, all of which she lives in at once. Her head pounds. It aches with the thunder of buffalo from the night before. It aches from the stone that struck her in the window this afternoon. It aches from the guilt and confusion of a woman old before she’s thirty, in the chinatown on the other side of the river Rubicon that has no other side. She can’t stand it anymore and sits up in her bed. Outside her window she watches the lights of Vienna. Her father snores like an old man in the other room. She feels the side of her face, thinking the swollen pain is what’s awakened her. Had she not turned from the stone when she did, it would have struck her in the mouth and broken the flesh; she might have lost a tooth or even scarred her lip. She would have at least bled. She’s thinking these things, believing they’re what have awakened her, when she realizes these are not the things that have awakened her, she realizes it’s something else. She realizes someone is here in the room. She looks for him in the dark, she’d call to him if she knew what to call. She doesn’t believe she’s imagining it, she can practically see him. He’s big. He’s very big. He makes her shiver with the way he looms. He’s not any lover she would have expected. She cannot decide whether to rebel against the anonymity of this first lover or revel in it. She isn’t sure she’s ready for him. He tears into her. She hasn’t even had time to grab tight the knobs of the bedposts, she’s gasping from the presence of him up inside her before she completely understands what’s happening. He fucks her till she’s ripe with him; holding onto the bedposts she never gets the chance to touch his face, so that she might know what he looks like. In the morning when she wakes she would almost believe she’s dreamed it except for the way she’s torn and the way her thighs are crusted with her blood and the glue of him. She’ll wash herself before her father awakes. In her Viennese bed among the dishevelment she’s amazed to find the white leaves of the Pnduul Crater, as though she grew them herself in uterine savagery.