These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

She’s shocked at herself. She doesn’t know herself at this moment, or what to make of the person she is right now; she’s never done this before or anything remotely like it, even in her rock and roll life in L.A. and London where she was conspicuous for her sexual reserve. Istanbul hashish ground to a fine powder, she thinks, whispering, “Jim, Jim, you bastard,” in the dark from one bed or the other in one room or the other, and someone whispers back, How’s that, luv? or is it the Professor, whom she immediately knows in the intuition born of such wickedness is the most depraved of all. “That you?” she murmurs again but can’t be certain to whom. As the song that snakes up the center of her to the back of her mouth shifts from the alien’s croon to the iguana’s deeper baritone, the touch must be the time traveler’s, fingers spinning her red dial forward to the future — or perhaps she succumbs to her assumptions too easily, perhaps the Professor sings and the alien touches. . until in the dark she’s only confused. When it’s over, swollen from their occupation and listening to the cascade of white waves inside her like the lapping of the Spree at the garage below, she muses dreamily ah well they’ll sort it all out down there, won’t they? and a few hours later, all tides receded, Schöneberg streets revealing barely a drop of the night’s flood, she wanders the flat in blue morning light looking at each of the three men passed out on their beds in their rooms and wondering which of them made it across the Wall first, when she already knows quite certainly that she’s pregnant with Molly.