Extract from The Butterfly Zone,
by Christen Clifford & McKenzie Wark

Chapter One Ken / February -- June

A breath expels, at the moment of climax, and lingers in the still air of the apartment, sealed drum tight on a cold New York winter morning. A body stirs, in recognition of the sound. My body, I think. It registers Christen's absence beside me, and I remember that she slipped off after fucking and returned to her end of the apartment.

Awake now, I hear that sound again, and know it is something else. She is not jerking off with her vibrator, she is crying uncontrollably, over the phone. Wrong feeling, wrong appliance Ñ and yet the sound I sensed seemed at first like it could have gone with either.

Still lagging a little behind myself, I get up, slip on a t-shirt and approach her room. She hunches naked on the couch, phone squashed to her face. Instantly, I form a new theory. Something has happened to him. Him, Chris O'Neill, the Irish actor, her first and last love.

Holding her, a little awkwardly, pressing my body against hers as it presses against the phone, as if it took the compression of two bodies against it to contain the shudder of bad news.

Practicalities: ripping the covers off her bed and bunching them around her. Brewing a nice calming cup of chamomile tea. Sitting still while she holds me; holding her back.

Why do we do this, in the clinch of the moment of shock and loss? Holding a body to compose our own body, at the moment when it decomposes into sobs and quivers and shrieks.

"Do you want me to stay with you or would you like to be by yourself?" "I think I need to be by myself." "What would you like me to do for you?" "Can you make me some soup?" "Of course." And then it occurs to me, that I've been through this before, and she hasn't. In my mid-30s, I've become custodian to memories of several dead loves. In her mid-20s, this could be (please not...) her first. As he comes close to passing away, so she comes closer to the passing of time. She still thinks she might live forever. I feel time passing, passing, each breath. Suddenly, I no longer pass the time Ñ time passes me.

But sometimes, something pins a body to the present: something that just seems to arrive, like bad news, like morning; something that seems to whisk time away. A sudden rush or drop in pressure. Mostly, when this happens, its just enough to endure.

First impressions last. A hand print pressed in wet cement. What impressed me when I first arrived at the apartment was... what? Words fail. Words typecast. What impressed me was something singular, my incapacity to contain her in a thought or an image.

I feel like I need to write this down before it all hardens into memory. Its a funny process, getting to know someone. It can be a story about getting beneath a surface to a secret. Or it can be a story about bending surfaces, one against the other. The origami of intimacy.

I wanted to leave Sydney for a while. I wanted to be back in New York. I wanted to be alone, at some remove from my home town, which felt like it was closing in on me. I had a sublet lined up in the Chelsea district, but that fell through just before Christmas. So it looked like I would not come at all. Then someone I met in Fremantle, Western Australia who emailed to say he'd heard of a sublet going out in Brooklyn.

So there I was, in early February, in that apartment, guided by email and phone calls, from one side of the world to the other. Hold a globe of the earth in your hands. Put an index finger on Fremantle, on the western edge of Australia. Put the other on New York, New York. Spin this turvy world.

I arrived late at night, and after a day of flights and transits, felt like a crushed fag pack from a truck driver's back pocket. After lugging my bag up the stairs, we got our first look at each other, in the kitchen. She sat on the edge of the sink, legs dangling wide in blue denim, a fern of blondish hair hiding a round face and liquid hazel eyes.

"Hi, I'm Christen."
"Yeah, hi, Ken."

With the grace of mammals, we make some noises, place our bodies in space for each other to see, sniff the air, and feel that each means the other no harm. But a thing or two is left in the air, as it is with humans.

I'm funny about other people's space. Cat-padding around the edges at first, getting to know the objects, feeling out where to sit, where to stand, where to lie, when to lie. After I've been some place in the flat, I immediately clean it, as if to leave no trace.

I unpack my bags, set up my computer and books, get into the rhythm of working, paring down the distractions, one by one, until there is only the book to write, my second, the difficult second book, and Christen, bustling around.

But first, there's New York to explore! I love this town, keep coming back to it. Lost my heart here -- twice -- but those are other stories.

Every day I put on two coats, and walk from the apartment, down the streets of two storey homes and three storey apartments, all clad in green and blue siding. It's an old Italian neighbourhood. Plastic saints peer out of lacy curtains. I get the L train into Manhattan and go see things. I can't help revisiting places I went with Cathy, or with Kathy. But the scale of Manhattan, its abstract grid of coral reef buildings, somehow it warms me, even when it snows.

February passed us by. Christen rehearsed her play; I wrote my book. I mopped; she vacuumed. And late in the evening we share a nightcap of duty free Lagavulin and talk about nothing.

She told me about her part, and the play, The Beekeeper's Daughter. She asked if I'd like to see it and I felt I had to say yes. It's a distraction, a day lost from the writing, but I feel like I should go.

The day of the preview performance, I linger around the apartment and get on the subway. The L train to Union Square, the 4 train uptown. Only the off, off Broadway theatre is way over on the west side, and I've come up on the east side train. I'm hurrying, but I'm going to be late. I contemplate going home instead, but now I feel I've wasted so much time getting uptown that I might as well get to the theatre.

Clambering into the backrow, the warmth of the theatre invades me, and I shed layers, acclimatising. The play seems to be about a bunch of Americans talking about their problems, but in the middle of it all is Christen, playing a Bosnian woman raped in the war. The Americans all seemed ridiculous. I'm reminded of my difference, my unAmerican heart.

Long and white, corrugating around breast and hip, the dress makes me see Christen in a way I've resisted seeing her. I see her as form, as movement. And I see her step out of her dress, as out of skin, clad in the light and the heat of the stage.

Christen's character wants to murder herself and her unborn child. The Americans flap and fuss. They natter about the stage, while she stands in the middle. In black now, in mourning, starving her self and her unborn child, or so I've come to feel, in this theatre. She holds a big block of chocolate in her had, holding it away from her body.

A slow, silent movement unfurls, against much emotional resistance, the hand pushing against a wellspring of repugnance, raising chocolate to mouth, until the crossed brow ticks straight, and the starving woman cracks open in an idiot grin, a wide eyed, wide mouthed rash of simple, selfless joy. Up in the back row, I'm crying.

After the performance, I'm not sure what to do. I stick around for a bit, but I don't really want to be near people. I want to be alone with the writing, with the job of writing. I'm hiding in it.

Then on her opening night, Christen comes home late, drunk, horny, charged with the erotics of performing, of opening night party flirtations. We drink in the kitchen again. Those hazel eyes challenge me. I brush my fingers across her long neck.

I find myself thinking, as I hold her body for the first time, sheathed in a long black Betsey Johnson dress Ñ if we do this, there will be consequences, if we don't do this, there will be consequences. To hell with the consequences. Kissing in the kitchen, I feel an intuition that's been circling in the back of my mind for weeks confirm.

Since she claims not to remember, I'll be selective with the details. But this is what she said next: "I'm going to the bathroom, and then I want to find you naked in my bed."

Sheer black fabric on long white thighs. Smoke taste and musk sweat. Bodies that need bodies to smooth their surfaces out by pressing against another, before folding together along the lines where they bend.

I can't do this. The first time with anyone is always a disaster. I'm flushed, tingling, I want to explore, skin to skin. She wants to be fucked, but that's not going to happen. Anxiety and alcohol mix to keep me limp and aimless. After a bit of thrashing about, we hold each other in defeat.

In the kitchen again, the next evening, chatting about this and that. Chat that means what it means, which is not much, but also means that we can chat. And then: "Is there, like a protocol, or something?" she asks. "How do you mean?" "For when you fuck your flatmate. Is it like with friends?" "Well.... we can pretend nothing happened. Or we can just acknowledge what happened. I don't see any need for regret, or embarrassment." "Neither do I...." "So do we have a problem?" "Guess not..." "Well.... good night then..." "Good night." If nothing changed, how come it is just afterwards that I am emboldened to borrow her television?

Two days later, things uncoil. I'm watching crap on TV, in my end of the apartment. She comes home, and decides to join me. We watch a teleplay together about a guy who takes a TV talk show hostage. "Are you hungry?" "I guess so." We improvised a reheat of lentil soup with additional vegies and pasta. Our movements, in the kitchen, seem perfectly coordinated, like a well crafted sex-act, each body instinctively knowing where the other is, where to move. We eat soup and talk about theatre and books and growing up. She presses her foot against the inside of my thigh.

Bodies know what to do, if we let them. They know what we don't, about the little vibrations, scent of skin, catch of breath. And so it was, those nights, in my tiny bedroom, warm light reflecting sweat on skin. The little fan heater I bought humming to itself. And here is this beautiful woman, unfolding her long body, here with me. As the hormones rush and ease bodies into repose, it becomes clearer and clearer, to the body in the mind, that the mind in the body was right. This is good.

But, oh, the performance anxiety! Every erection seems a brittle strand, ready to break at the first touch. And hers is a body that moves slowly toward the plateaux, rising and falling, rising and falling. Lying on my back, I look up at her, not looking, just moving, writhing, my cock hard, arcing into her, she manoeuvres around it, circling, touching herself with it, where it tingles. I can't hold on, a tense spurt into the condom. She lists against the fading point of it.

Days go by, days acquiring a rhythm. March passes February. Christen goes to rehearse; I stay home, for this felt like home, and wrote. A little midnight love-making, in my tiny bed, and then Christen retires to her end of the apartment. There is time and a space, my space, to be close, but we have our own zones, our own lives, unconnected and distinct. Then came that phone call, the news, that Chris was ill. Some mysterious disease, intensive care in Florida. Tense and tearful phone calls. And I become nothing but this duty, this will, this commitment to care.

The hardest thing, is choosing the words to say. I hold her, in her bed. My arm pins and needles me, but I don't move. My whole body is searching itself for words. Even my toes, my navel, my nipples, everything is straining toward words. But my throat moves so slowly, resisting any word it might have to fake. I can't bring myself to say it will be OK, that Chris will live. Hearing the doctor's reports second or third hand, I can't find an honest word of hope in them. Love can be crueller than death. Death never lies. I hold her body in silence.

"Tell me a story."

The only stories that will come out are of dead friends, lost loves, stories that offer no comfort, stories that refuse to lie. Best be silent. Here it is, that wordless mourning; that wordless love. How close they seem, how intimately related. True love is the love of death in the other and the other in death.

The mornings now are shallow sleep, consciousness close to the surface, tuned for signs of distress. I hear bustle, the clang and jam of frantic business. Christen is trying to pack and phone and cry all at the same time. She is flying to Florida, only the town car is late and the flight awaits. "Do you have any money?" I extract the greenback wad from my wallet and hand it over. I'm crying too now, at this pathetic gift of soiled paper.

With Christen gone, I feel amputated. My self shaped itself around another's loss, and is now lost, with her gone to Florida. I try to work, but it's no good. I can only do the most mechanical things. I fiddle with a few phrases, print the chapter out, fiddle and print, fiddle and print, chewing through reams of paper and ink.

Walking is better. Catching subway trains to favourite parts of Manhattan and walking, walking. Walking around Washington Square, my own feelings return to me, now that my body is no longer needed as a surrogate shell for the overflow of her feelings for him.

Reason shapes feeling, but it takes time. With a little time, I shape my sense and sentiment of Christen. But there is something else. Love is singular. What we love in each love is what defines each as not being another. But there are other feelings, or another resonance between feelings. Its not that the same things happen with people, or that I feel the same way about things that happen, but that one thing that happens seems to pick right up where something else that happened, sometimes years ago, with someone else, left off.

I'm in another, parallel time, where this moment of Christen's fear for Chris comes straight after my own fear for Helen, when she lay -- her last days -- unconscious in a hospital in Columbia. That was ten years earlier. But this moment, and that, they come straight after my mother's death. That was thirty years ago, but now it is just two moments past. All rational though ceases. I am just this feeling, this movement, even the pink-tipped trees and yellow taxis share this mood.

Pacing around Washington Square on an almost-spring day, one foot in front of the next. It seems so easy, but as my body pivots from one foot to the other, I sense for the first time that there is a moment between movements where nothing in my body knows that comes next. One leg launches the body across space, and for a moment, freefall, before the other extends to catch its fall. One foot slips on a patch of muddy snow. The other changes trajectory and catches my body as it falls, unexpectedly far to the right.

I see someone coming towards me who I know and want to greet, but now I'm thinking about every step, each after the other. So many happenstances, unnoticed in the everyday. Each step, each love, each feeling, linked to the next, not by being the same, but simply by catching the falling body, launched into space by the last.

She's back! And I've missed her, although the break has done me good, allowed the turbulence in me to taper off. Long stories about Florida, about the people there, about Chris. I listen. Searching for clues, only I don't know what they might be clues to.

It's time to do things, keep busy, ramp up distraction. We plan a big day out, and leave the house arm-linked, in matching black leather, we're a four-legged black-legged beast, rustling as it strides, taking in the neighbourhood, flourishing its matt flanks for the neighbourhood to see.

We take in a show at the Guggenheim in Soho. The Hugo Boss prize winners, lots of ostentatious installations, and some discreet framed photos from Matthew Barney's Cremaster, stills from the movie, of some stylish, stylised, deathless, lifeless world. Classical camp.

We take in a reading of a play called Wit in the Village. A woman confronts her cancer armed with John Donne's poems. I hold Christen's hand and am tensely present, worried, maybe this wasn't a good play to hear right now. But then maybe it is. It has some glint of wisdom in it's eye.

We take in dinner with the playwright who wrote Beekeeper's Daughter and her actor husband in some Italian place in the Village. The food, undistinguished, but I grow to like these people, anarchists with a streak of vanity. Making words against the world.

After all this taking in, time to give it up, let it out. Lining up outside Pyramid in the Lower East Side, we strike up a conversation with two pretty boys in their early 20s. Strange, its an eighties retro night, and while I'm here for the music of my twenties, these boys and Christen are here for their teens. The same soundtrack, different moments of being in the body, dancing to it.

Dancing to music, this body knows these beats, and rises to revisit them. Beats and body weave textures of rhythm around each other, hips swaying to the bass, shoulders shuttling to the hi-hat, the whole punctuated by extraneous gestures, carved in honour of the brass section. Dancing in time to the rhythm, in mood with the bodies jamming the room, stepping out of myself, into movement, into time itself, into life itself, the joy of this heat, this pain, these bodies.

Dancing to Christen, catching glimpses of her body in motion, the articulation of a hip stretching leather, swerving sharp beneath the crease into that long thigh. Those shoulders, wide and straight, an easy curve tucking her back in behind and prompting forward these breasts, and how she moves! The joy of this movement, hot yet sharp, confident in its posture in a way my body never is. I dance and I watch her dance, my dancing burns my sugars, her dancing burns my eye.

Eyes meet eyes, bodies dance closer, matching movements, leather rubs to leather, a four legged animal sutures itself together. Flesh and skin, flesh and leather, this second skin, flesh and leather and movement, dancing, rhythm, the third skin making bodies blur and bump and ignite in friction, Cock hard, and hard pressed against thigh, faces full flushed and nerves aflame, a hand -- is this my hand? -- curves a full round cheek of ass in its palm, fingers pressing cunt against leather, hand held still against a body beating itself off against its wedge. Come seeps quietly, gently from a disgorging cock, as a long, slow orgasm swirls from centre to periphery, remixing the cocktail on which this body, which I now repossess as my own, fuels its frantic movements.

I have to go home now, home with Christen. Back over the waters to Brooklyn, fatigued raw, with senses losing their edges. But with the feeling that this day, this single day has been lived, that we were present in it, and that we expended it, this day, rather than having it expend a bit of us, wearing down a bit more life in its duration.

I think guiltily of Chris, and my certainty that he won't live. I start to suspect my motives, start to trust the instinct to live, to shrug off time. I pause over the appropriateness of dancing in the knowledge of death. Not death in the abstract but death up close, in the family, death with a name and face and memories. I pause, but I don't look back. Except to marvel at the rightness of living hard in the knowledge of death, in the knowledge that it comes, hard or soft, fast or slow.

Awake, before time to wake. Aware, before sense to aware. Lying in bed, listening. I hear her. I hear her reading to herself, in the kitchen. Reading Samuel BeckettÕs ÔCascandoÕ, over and over to herself, and I know right away that Chris is dead.

Again, ÔCascandoÕ, again, from the book with this last loved oneÕs name hand written on the first page. But there is a last time for last words. Even the words that seem to come close donÕt come close enough. Even the silence between the words grapples uselessly at the empty air. There is not silence enough in words to still the rush of stillness, engulfing, in the moment when grief is the closest thing, closer to the self even than the sense of self itself.

Again, ÔCascandoÕ, this perfect, useless ritual, fated now to love him and not be loved by him. Loving him this last time, ÔCascandoÕ. Loving him forever in his absence until another loves her, in her absence, forever, and so on, forever. ÔCascandoÕ churning the Òunalterable whey of words.Ó Reading but not touching the mark. There is nothing inside the text.

Days go by, extruded from intensity. Intensity of love, loss, the fierce tenacity of sadness. We've seen behind the veil of words, sensing too much, to soon, the blind, palpable nothing behind words. Love and mourning mingle in memory, death and sex curve away from each other, but curve back around silently and meet.

This is what I am now, this loving of Christen, and this Christen is a mourning of Chris. These two streams of being, where they meet, become, for me at least, this alertness to detail, trying to intuit mood and tone through taste and touch. The angle of an elbow or the temperature of the room informs me of where to place myself, where to commit love in relation to things as they pass. Time passes, as we clutch and are quiet. Time passes and the feeling of it passing is pure. No word, no movement does it justice.

That sound again. Only this time I know the cause. A held breath, a clenched tendon, a seized jaw, a crashed mind, all unbundling towards me, pushing raw cunt against my mouth, her asshole swallowing my thumb. That howl again, a self dissolving.

The wordless cry is the body voicing. The things that cause these tactile sounds are related kinds of experience. Perhaps this is why that strong feeling of melancholy that goes with mourning need not preclude an almost equally strong desire to fuck.

That final quiver, as the body expels the I Ñ that is as close as you would usually want to get to the final drift towards loss. The body catches up with time. No longer too early in anticipation, or lingering too late in memory, the body abandoned on the lip of the instant. But afterwards, memory laps about its edges, defining them again.

Her body hugs itself in its hormones. Mine too, right alongside. Inside mine, a past occurs, a crystal residue. I turn away from the hard past, to the fluid present. I lick the salt from the crook of her elbow.

Sitting around the kitchen table reading the papers, perched on stools, cigarette smoke teasing the air, she lights upon an ad in the entertainment pages. Barry Manilow is coming to town. I think of Barry and those corny songs, soundtrack to an awkward adolescence, its not a memory toward which I willingly go, but Christen is rummaging through the record collection, slipping Barry from his sleeve.

As the notes hit the air she merges into them, into their clear, clean world of solid feelings. Here she is now, my child, my dreamer, swaying to pure affect uncut by doubt or diversion. This simple delight makes me want to bestow something, give something in return for the simple pleasure of being present with her in the throes of such a simple pleasure. Next thing I know I'm rummaging for my credit card and we're buying tickets over the phone, guaranteed on the Amex.

But before Barry comes the funeral, in Ireland, and with Christen gone, for three days I am nothing, no-one, feeding the cat and like the cat, listless, sleepy. This time of waiting exists only to be followed by the time of her return. And I exist, in this time, only as waiting, enduring time, powerless to make it go.

The concert is on the same day as Christen's return. Anxious, nervous, waiting, pacing. Will she be back in time? I so want to do something for her, create a time that is just for her. Finally, I hear the familiar sound of the front door.

No time to talk, only to get ready. I put on a charcoal turtleneck and my new blue suit, my Alexander McQueen suit in shark fin blue. Christen decides she must iron her dress I check myself from becoming too too anxious. Such a paradox -- tempted to scold someone for holding up something supposedly for their benefit.

Christen hauls the long shiny black sheath up over her head, revealing endless legs in sheer black stocking. She emerges, naked but for the black sheen of legs and I'm struck dumb, motionless by the erotic friction between body covering and uncovered nothingness, but before I can utter a peep, the dress is ironed and its curtain cascades down the form of flesh again.

I am pride itself, striding down the avenue, with Christen. Steps locked in sync. The step of people whose rhythms match when they fuck, match also when they walk. I am pride itself also when I look at her in the seat opposite me on the subway, as the train rattles through the tunnel, the East River above us.

Radio City Music Hall is abuzz with couples. Barry Manilow plays tonight, This is a show to which women take their men. I can't say he means much to me, this tinpan alley warbler. But it means something to me that it means something to Christen. I desire for her what she desires.

The show is corny, sentimental, but its time to put away that critical self. I watch the man in the endless parade of elegant stage suits charm us into cutting our feelings to the simple templates of his songs.

After the show, we walk about Midtown, talking, but not much, and not about much, just dwelling in the moment, together, the Radio City Music Hall popcorn bucket making me feel like a tourist. But for once I don't care.

Its not far from Radio City to the Royalton. The restaurant is full. I curse my lack of foresight in not booking somewhere in advance. We stop for drinks, our bodies washed up on an ottoman. The waitresses here are gazelles on sedatives, delicate, elongated, moving with a precise twitch but not too much speed.

Time is running out for us. The sense of loss hangs about, always there before we arrive, no matter where we go.

So few days left. They must be devoted to living and loving well. A party at Andrew's. I'm not used to this -- being in public with Christen, with people I know. I seem to be aware at all times where she is, whether her drink is empty, whether she has someone to talk to. But I too am being observed. "She's gorgeous", says my old friend Shelly. I know, I tell her, I know.

Later, in a basement bar on 10th street called Element Zero, we colonise a corner, my expatriate Australian friends, their American friends, and I. Sahara brought an old friend from her neighbourhood, I couldn't catch his name. Telling tales of painting graffiti on subway cars, a life lived in the margins of the city's spaces.

He limpets himself to Christen. They dance close in the corner, while I watch, while Christen watches me watching. He's smooth, but not subtle. I can watch her with another man who wants her, watch him want in my place. But not for long. I extract her body from his and connect it to mine, move it with mine, dancing in a small dark basement corner of a bar without a Cabaret licence, flagrantly flouting the law. Only in Mayor Giulianni's New York could there be speakeasys for dancing.

As our last days together while on by, we spiral in, closer together, with abrupt moments of anticipatory separateness. We catch an early movie at 20th street, then home, where I cook South Asian food, improvising with New York winter ingredients. I'm missing the taste and colour and warmth of Sydney, emerald harbour of temperate life. But otherwise, I feel at home with myself, with Christen.

Lying on the raft of her bed, the room seems far away, on a distant horizon. I see our reflection on the mirrored doors of the wardrobe. The complimentary angles of our bodies, the contrasting swatches of hair, hanging lank while we fuck, doggie style. Her thighs spread wide, sculpting a continuous, undulating shape from thigh to hip to waist. Palming ass or hip or breast, tasting each shape as it moves beneath my fingers. Always I am coming too soon.

Retrieving the condom with its wasted payload, I tie a knot in it and throw it on the floor. This cock might be spent, but this body is high on hormones, drugged into cool complicity with this other body. Mouth attached to cunt, tongue and clit dance close, chasing rhythms beating hard in the halls of skin. Its a slow dance, a long slow dance. One body slaves for another, touching and tasting and teasing it to fly.

I love this. I love this service, this devotion of a body's patience, committing its endurance to making another fly, fly by the power of its own juice. Sometimes it seems endless, eternal, gliding on warm currents, up and away, but then down, slow and cool, circling for the thermal uprush. And then, finally, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, level, slowing, change pace, tongue stroking a new groove, up ,up, up, up -- and all muscles lock, all nerves collide, breath explodes from a fuselage in freefall.

Nothing makes me more horny. Gorged on the scent of sweat, sex, panting for breath, hard again. Christen's body, served and serviced, tendered with endless touches and twitches, switches from being the subject of my selfless attention to the object of a counter thrust. Turning it over, hauling its ass into position, levelling cunt for the convenience of cock, pushing one home, into the other, home, the home of fucking. Breathing, moving, fucking, turning out turning in turning on this double body of love, now revolving around a different centre, the centre of cock and cunt, not clit and tongue. This fuck is long, deliberate, urged.

Ah, but even better, sometimes, maybe every time, is lying low, exhausted, selves expelled and expunged, clinging to the husk of sex, the exhausted body of sex itself, the drugging body on which love flourishes, sweet hallucination that it is, or that, in such times, it can become.

The memory of pure sex, pure, deep and transforming, dogs my days and nights, making me at peace with my body, but jarring my body loose from social intercourse. I'm propped at the bar at the Coffee Shop on Union Square. I've been drinking and dining with Gregory, my old friend. I don't have to tell him how this feels. He can read it. He knows. The friendship of men means not even having to mention what's understood.

Christen arrives, and although I'm drunk I can't resist another drink with her. The days are passing. Every second seems like a lost opportunity. We sip Lagavulins, neat. Sitting on bar stools, leaning close as conspirators, talking elliptically about unexplored continents of sex, a language into which to displace what smells strongly of love.

The journey up to Princeton in New Jersey, a lulling train ride through industrial junkyards, gives me time to gather my self, my wayward fringes. I meet my friend Tom from the English department and we talk shop. His students are a pleasant surprise to me, they nearly all have copies of my first book in front of them, and they probe it, and me, with their questions. I feel like they see straight through me. In three days I leave for Sydney, and that's all that matters.

Packing all the books I've bought, most of which I read in my first few weeks in Brooklyn. They are the used up husks of another kind of love. They are a weight to which I am tied, my books, my papers, my reading and writing life, but it seems so ephemeral now, in spite of their weight. A concentrated nothingness.

I'm leaving today. The town car comes and takes us to the Brooklyn post office, where the books, in their boxes, are encased in turn in an old canvas mail bag. Some day, months from now, they will arrive in Sydney and I'll be there waiting for them, waiting for their encoded memories of where and when I read them.

Christen writes little notes in the front of her books, noting where and when they come into her life, how she felt that day. But she is also someone who keeps a diary, noting places, dates and times. Whereas I remember things in the abstract, extracting and abstracting affection, perception, from time. I wonder how these books will make me feel when they catch me up, catch me out, on the other side of the world.

An hour before I have to leave for the airport. I just want to lie naked with Christen. Don't speak. I'm listening. I hear her body, living. I'm trying to press her against me so I can inhale into memory the way her body lives. The way it goes about going about.

This makes me horny again and I fuck her again. This makes her horny again and she fucks me again. This makes me horny again and I fuck her again. This makes her horny again and she fucks me again. This makes me horny again and I fuck her again. This makes her horny again and she fucks me again. This makes me horny again and I fuck her again. This makes her horny again and she fucks me again. How am I ever going to get up, get ready, and catch that plane?

Crying quietly to myself in the airport lounge. A mood askew against the grain of the cheery muzak. I am not here at present. I am two hours ago. Memory grabs at time, like trying to hold on to breath.

Memory grasps at the most incorrigible details. A wave, a wink, a shrug of sun on a Brooklyn street, as we walk arm in arm, along it. My hip pressed against yours. The sense of our bodies arcing and falling on all four feet.

But this love is not forever. Its not until the end of the world. It is not even until the end of the week. Love is always and only now. The pure intensity of now. The absolute intensity of now. Memory belches out the spent gas of now Ñ as then.

Back in Sydney, everything seems strange, new, unwrapped. I've left New York Spring and arrived in Sydney autumn, or 'fall', as the Americans say. I have to watch what I say, the first tiny shoots of an American self were sprouting out of me. But whatever was growing has come home with me and cooled. Cooled, but not gone cold. The diamond edge of love cuts against me.

It's expensive, but sometimes its all there is, the endless phone call where each gets to hear the other breathe again, long distance. The words hardly matter. Even in the lo-fi of telephony, the resonance in her voice brings me back to the scene of desire in me. There are voices that seem otherworldly, expressions of spirit trapped in flesh. Hers is not one of those. Its a voice that has the body in it, in which you can hear thighs and toes and shoulders and heart and spleen and muscle and cunt.

It won't go away, this love, this distance, these loses, these prizes won from time. I'm tied to her now, but I don't know what for, or with what, or to what end, but the phone line snakes around the world to encircle us, joining me and her into us.