Tours of the Black Clock

71

ONE NIGHT AT THE end of summer I wake in the early hours of the morning. I have the sense that something’s on the rooftop waiting; lying there next to Megan I try to dismiss the feeling. I turn to Megan and, in her sleep, I take her. But while my back’s to the ceiling, and while I’m inside her, I can’t get over the feeling of something trapped on the roof above me. I finally withdraw from her still hard. I get out of bed; sleepily she calls for me. It’s nothing, I say to her; I turn in the moonlight so she can’t see I’m still hard. I walk out of the bedroom, I walk past Courtney’s cradle. I open the door and step out onto the stairs naked; I open the door leading up to the rooftop. My erection hasn’t passed and I climb the stairs until, at the top step, I stop and listen; I can hear something on the roof. I step out onto the roof now. Vienna’s glazed with light; the roof is white and angular; a wave of familiarity rushes over me. I feel that soon I’ll drown in this wave, sinking to some bottom, drifting in the wake of some tide; and I can barely wait for it, it can’t happen soon enough. I climb over the peaks of the rooftop; it seems to me, drowned and frozen, I might splinter against an empty pier. In the corner of an alcove on the roof is a bird, the sound I’ve heard. I reach for it and then there’s another sound, and I turn. You step from behind the building’s steeple, coy and distant. I deserve it, I guess. I deserve it for sending you away. I guess you’ve been sleeping here on the roof above the bed in the room below where I’ve been with my wife: I have a wife, I say, I have a daughter. “I never wanted to be your wife,” you answer, “I never wanted to be your daughter.” You come toward me and stop at the chimney that rises between us; you writhe before me bent over the chimney. The dark center of you opens to me. “Call me wife if you want,” you whisper, “call me daughter.” I can barely breathe until I’m inside you; somewhere before us Vienna winks and groans in a haze. “Call me anything you like.” Oh Geli, I say into your hair spun like sunlight. I take you by the hips and pull you closer; your gasp slithers to the ground below. Oh Geli, I say it again, to your eyes of blue. I clasp your breasts, my hands run to your neck and shoulders. My fingers touch your face; at the corner of your mouth is a scar. Semen swims out of me in confusion. But where, I can only moan, touching the scar, did you get this?

T.O.T.B.C.—9