Читать книгу Empire of the Senseless - Кэти Акер - Страница 11

My life began when I had gonorrhoea. I was eighteen years old. Or rather, it began when the gonorrhoea ended, if such things ever end. For the foul disease had completely incapacitated me: I became dependent on other people even for the necessities of life.

I’m now not only useless, as are all human beings and as most human beings, the ones who aren’t rich, believe they are. I’m also physically and mentally damaged because my only desire is to suicide.

I’m living on Chiba. My current fuck is always telling me that I ought to kill myself but, more significantly, that everyone wants to kill me.

‘Who in particular wants to kill me? Why’re you always putting me down?’ I know they want to kill me.

‘Why’re you always starting a war? A man.’

‘My drug supplier?’ I need drugs in order to maintain precarious stability.

‘A man wants to kill you,’ she informed me right after I had orgasmed. Then, I knew.

I didn’t bother saying anything. It’s a policy of mine: Don’t believe in human speech as anything but a stuffer of time. I would, and I would have, run away, but there’s no place to which to run, so the only safety is psychosis and drugs.

Without paying any attention to me, as if I was dead, she continued speaking. ‘Perception has become a philosophical problem.’

Because we had become too close the fuck could read my mind. But I had an answer. ‘It’s possible to perceive yourself just as you’ld perceive anything else,’ I informed her. ‘This is how strippers perceive their bodies.’

‘How can you know about normal people?’ Someone, probably her, had torn out the sleeves of her jumpsuit to her shoulders. The colours of her eyes matched those of her fingernails and of another part of her body.

‘Before I had gonorrhoea I was normal.’ I thought. ‘But now the memory of normal living is only a dream. My business in life has become infantile neurosis. When I was young, over and over again, I dreamed I was being followed. The people following me were bad. I couldn’t run away fast enough to get away from them.’

I didn’t bother telling her the particular dreams because she was just a fuck. Instead I watched her personality fragment, over a period of time, calving like an iceberg or space, splinters of identity drifting away, until finally I saw her raw need, obsession which is addiction. I was scared. I wanted to run away.

‘How do you know they want to kill me?’ I asked.

‘A birdie told me.’

I looked down at a head which was bodiless. Through my shock, I saw it was a head. Or, I remembered. Nothing lasts forever.

Sleep or ease is a priority the way love used to be. Before I was psychotic, before I stopped sleeping, my dreams told me someone was trying to kill me. My fuck told me someone was trying to kill me.

When I reached the bar I was accustomed to, the man behind the bar told me nobody was trying to kill me. Nothing bad was going to happen to me as long as I didn’t fall asleep.

My boss didn’t want to hurt me.

Then the bartender told me that the woman I had been fucking had squelched on me to the boss because, addicted, she needed the money. RAM – whoever that was – would pay her for my death. They were chasing me.

When I fuck women, they always ask me why I don’t trust anyone …

‘Why don’t you trust me?’ spreading her legs.

Since I’m a gentleman, I don’t spit where I should. Even if I don’t know who’s my boss.

I walked into my apartment. Another cunt was pointing a Luger at me. They were chasing me. I could believe the actuality of hatred now it had become an actuality.

‘Who are you? RAM? Are you the ones who’ve been chasing me? Now I know who you are,’ I informed her.

She told me she didn’t work for any bosses, she was a free woman, her name was Abhor. Why should I believe what a cunt tells me?

If reality isn’t my picture of it, I’m lost.