disambiguation

We agree to meet at a nearby railway station but the traffic is heavier than I thought it would be and I am late for the rendezvous. I park the car and hurry into the tunnel under the platforms which is strangely deserted - not only can I not see Samsara, it seems as if, on an otherwise busy Friday evening, all other travellers and sojourners have disappeared as well. I come back out by the other ramp and see, past the waiting taxis, her standing with a suitcase beside her in the small park that adjoins the station, looking up into the green leaves of the trees. The cacophony of birds is so loud that she does not hear me when I call out to her and, since she is looking upwards transfixed by the enormous sound of the rainbow lorikeets going to their roost, nor does she see me approach. Although there are now many people about I have a curious impression of her standing alone in the midst of the plane trees, which I have never before realised are disposed in a circle as if in a sacred grove ... she cries out as I touch her arm but the sound of her momentary alarm is also drowned by the noise of the birds. We go back to the car and drive the short distance to my place listening to trance music on the radio and talking of what I do not remember. I am nervous because I know that certain recessive, perhaps inverted aspects of my personality are expressed in the way my apartment is arranged, the things I have decided to display, the manner in which I live, and that these aspects of the self I am necessarily blind towards will undoubtedly appear to her with peculiar force. I know too that what is most familiar to me will look most strange to her and vice versa, also that I can never really see what she will see, know what she will come to know. She is intrigued but not intimidated by the mask of Anubis that I have set upon a high black bookshelf; she surprises me by re-calibrating the alignments of the various stones that I have placed on the wooden window sills in the sitting room; she takes the small blue bottle of volcanic ash I keep on my desk and lays it in a small, red-lined box made out of native woods; she replaces the broken off arm of the Caroline Islands idol standing in the bathroom. I don't ask why she does these things; I think perhaps it is because she is afraid of being pursued by Moksha or his agents and believes that the re-alignments will confuse, disorient or otherwise keep them away for us. Naturally she is tired from her journey, hungry and thirsty, so I serve dinner and afterwards run her a bath. The next two days pass in a blur during which she shows me aspects of the city I have never seen before. We visit a dance academy where the Rumba, the Samba, the Paso Doble, the Cha Cha Cha, the Jive and and other Latin American dances are taught and where I learn that she is a mistress of the Tango and would like the master of the studio, a man by the name of Da Silva, to give me lessons in how to do it; in the evening we go to a club in the city called the Men's Gallery so she can check out the dancers there, who have names like Brianna, Hunter, Shanika and Tenielle, where the ambience is louche and a little sad, even though both staff and clientele are universally cheerful, as if by decree, and where the notes of an alternative currency known as tricky dollars are purchased by punters and then tucked into the garters of dancers they like or admire. Later, stumbling down George Street in the aftermath of a violent electrical storm that has halted the rail system, outside the Hilton Hotel we almost join a party of Japanese getting into a stretch Humvee but instead are swept by crowds of stranded revellers down to Town Hall and into a #50 bus that takes us home. Her mysterious agenda also includes a concert of the music of John Dowland that we go to hear in the Opera House on the night of the day after its creator, Jørn Oberg Utzon, who never saw the epochal building he made, dies in Copenhagen. The two lute players and their lutes are a revelation so intense and various and beautiful that I will not even try to describe what it was like except to say I heard fairgrounds, I heard barrel organs, I heard the continuos of small Salzberg ensembles, I heard chains, I heard towers, I heard the lonely call of marsh birds across misty swamps in the antediluvian night, I heard Spain, I heard gold, I heard the sounds that drift between the stars ... and after all this and much that I will not speak of here, a little more than 48 hours later we are back in the park outside the station at dawn where the cacophony of lorikeets waking up to the day resembles exactly their previous cacophonous roosting two days or two minutes ago. As the train gets ready to pull out of the station I realise we have not once discussed the Eureka Stockade but before I can even begin to mention it Samsara leans from the door of her carriage and whispers something in my ear. This message is coincident with the guard's whistle blowing, the station master's white flag dropping, so I cannot be entirely sure that what she said was a re-statement, perhaps a disambiguation, of a phrase formerly used between us when we were speaking of the lost letters of the Dark Lady: the beatitudes, she said or seemed to say, her breath as sweet as honey mead, of erotic love raised to a higher power ...