Читать книгу Empire of the Senseless - Кэти Акер - Страница 13

I asked Abhor what she wanted with me. Did she also want to destroy my identity?

‘I work for this man. I’m collecting for him.’ As if I understood what she meant, blindly, I followed her out of my room. They say love’s also blind, but, for me, love has equalled pain.

Her boss’s name was Schreber. ‘I’ve never seen you before, have I?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘I’m going to tell you something about yourself.’ Finally perhaps I’d learn something about myself. ‘You’re masochistic to the point of suicidal and, actually, physically damaged. You believe that, and the neurological and hormonal damage probably is, permanent.’

‘Yes.’

He wasn’t going to let me interrupt him. ‘You were … disrupted in your childhood by the usual causes. I’m not the least bit interested in psychological interpretations. They’re passé. But there’s one thing.’

I interrupted him. ‘I don’t give a damn. Not only about psychology. About myself.’ I continued, ‘You’re fat and ugly, sir, but I’m dead. Psychology and my psychology’s a dead issue.’ There were a lot of dead bodies floating around the world. ‘All I want to know from you is what you want from me.’ Otherwise, I wanted to be alone.

Because, for me, desire and pain’re the same.

I didn’t want her. I couldn’t so I didn’t want. Frigidity was a way of life. I didn’t know if phenomena such as desires which’re fleeting even mattered. Psychology isn’t here a dead issue. I decided I would keep her because I had to because she said I had to be hers.

Is reality always this unknown?

My friends informed me that the boss’s real name was Schreber. Dr Schreber. He’s honest enough, they said, as bosses are honest, to pay me for my work. So I could pay off my last boss so he wouldn’t off me. Of course there’s no money. Money’s flimsy paper people who don’t have power carry on them. What they do with money I don’t know. I needed drugs.

‘Your neurological and hormonal damage is making you degenerate so fast, faster than if you had AIDS,’ the fat man informed me in front of the cunt, ‘that within a couple of months you’re going to be a mongoloid, even stupider than a lobotomy case, due to all the hatred which is festering in you, unless I inject a certain enzyme into your bloodstream and then enable you to receive a full blood transfusion. You will get this enzyme, your saviour, flea, only if you do what I want.’

‘What do you want?’

‘For you to do exactly what I want until that time.’

The trouble was I had no way of knowing if he meant to keep his part of the deal. I couldn’t ask the cunt I thought I loved. Since I was thus dragging my tail through unknowable territory, my memory was useless. My memory was as dead as my desire used to be.

The next day, on a street, a garbage dump in front of the river, my former boss himself cut the throat of the fuck who informed on me in front of me. He slaughtered her because it was a practical way of making room for a fresh employee. Capitalism needs new territory or fresh blood.

I saw: blood sprayed from a jugular.

I needed my drug.

For a long time I had remained apathetic. So sure that my words meant nothing to anyone that I no longer spoke unless circumstances forced me to. So sure that my relations to the world were null that it didn’t matter to what I said ‘yes’. When I was young frivolity and trivia had been my weapons; now I did whatever I was told because I was no longer me. That is, the I who was acting was theirs, separate from the I who knew and whom I had known. Lots of eyes were watching me.

That is, the I who had SEXUAL DESIRES had nothing to do with the high IQ/understanding. This IQ used to be high but, since now was corrupted blinded covered over, wants seemed more capable and intelligent than I had known. I found myself at that point, that bottom.

I thought all I could know about was human separation; all I couldn’t know, naturally, was death. Moreover, since the I who desired and the eye who perceived had nothing to do with each other and at the same time existed in the same body – mine: I was not possible. I, in fact, was more than diseased. But Schreber had given me hope of a possible solution. A hope of eradicating disease. Schreber had the enzyme which could change all my blood.

When all that’s known is sick, the unknown has to look better. I, whoever I was, had no choice but to go along with Schreber. I, whoever I was, was going to be a construct.

The sky faded to blood, to the colour of blood. After I left the doctor and returned home, what I called home, which was better than I had ever had, Abhor had gotten there before me and was waiting for me, so to speak. Asleep. Naked. I saw her. A transparent cast ran from her knee to a few millimetres below her crotch, the skin mottled by blue purple and green patches which looked like bruises but weren’t. Black spots on the nails, finger and toe, shaded into gold. Eight derms, each a different colour size and form, ran in a neat line down her right wrist and down the vein of the right upper thigh. A transdermal unit, separated from her body, connected to the input trodes under the cast by means of thin red leads. A construct.

In my imagination we were always fucking: the black whip crawls across her back. A red cock rises.

‘I don’t know who’s backing him.’ Abhor turned around to face me. She must have woken up. ‘All I know is we call him “boss” and he gets his orders. Like you and me.’

‘Somebody knows something. Whoever he is, the knower, must be the big boss.’

‘Look.’ Abhor raised herself up on one arm. She smelled warm, as if from kisses, but to my knowledge no kisses had taken place. ‘All I know is that we have to reach this construct. And her name’s Kathy.’

‘That’s a nice name. Who is she?’

‘It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘If it doesn’t mean anything, it’s dead. The cunt must be dead.’ My puns were dead.

‘Look. All I know is we have to reach this construct. I don’t know anything else.’

‘We have the capacities for understanding and, at the same time, we understand nothing,’ I replied. I understood we had to find some construct.

She told me again. ‘All I know is we’re looking for a certain construct. Somewhere. Nothing else matters.’ A pulsing red then black cursor crept through the outline of a doorway. With enough endorphin analogue, Abhor could walk on a pair of bloody stumps. ‘You don’t matter and reality doesn’t matter.’ The road away from the airport, which became a series of roads, had been dead straight, like neat incisions, into the open body of the city. Poverty was writhing in pink. I had watched, here and there, a machine glide by, bound by fog and grey. Later on there were tenements called ‘council housing’, walls of mottled aluminium, prison guards’ cocks sticking in order to piss through unarranged holes in the brick, more plyboard and corrugated iron walls. The lucky poor had playgrounds. I remembered Abhor was a construct.

Imagination was both a dead business and the only business left to the dead.

In such a world which was non-reality terrorism made a lot of sense.

The modern Terrorists are a new version, a modern version, so to speak, of the hoboes of the 1930s USA. Just as those haters of all work, (work being that situation in which they were being totally controlled; the controllers didn’t work), as far as they were able took over their contemporary lines of communication, so these Terrorists, being aware of the huge extent to which the media now divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent, were not so much nihilists as fetishists. I had worked with them before in some way which I couldn’t quite remember.

Two days after I had met the doctor, I found myself knocking on the door of a record shop somewhere. Terrorism is always a place to start because one has to start somewhere. A boy, or rather a skull, whose teeth were pointed red, as if skulls eat meat, opened the door which was falling apart so badly it was cracking open. I half crawled through a gap, half walked through the door, into a middle-sized record shop store room. Discs lay shattered on the floor. A celluloid nun moved her eyes horizontally as if a hand was moving her eyeballs. Smiley with one hand bone pointed me to a couch on which a freezer was sitting.

‘Among the American international corporations the practice of setting up mixed affiliates is most widespread in chemicals and petrochemicals, rubber and the extractive industries. These ICs combine production on an international scale and organize the vertical and/or horizontal integration of their plants and thus, finally, control the whole product cycle …’

‘I’m not interested.’

‘Du Pont and Union Carbide, Goodyear and Uniroyal, Exxon and Kaiser, for example, organize the supply of semi-finished products from overseas enterprises to others on a wide scale, gain access to sources of raw …’

‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘I need to find a code for a certain construct. I know you’re planning to knock over the CIA library and the code is there.’

Smiley smiled at me again. I remembered we had once been lovers; I had forgotten. We still are, I thought, in that his nastiness and inability to do anything but bite in the face of fear – any human presence triggered fear – matches my deeper nastiness. I never actually worked with the Moderns, but then I only work with people out of my need. Things are always the same.

The fact was that the Moderns talked too much. Their talk, or rhetoric, was blab: they didn’t care who heard them; they would happily explain anything to the tiny parrots who shitted on the record discs as they flew around. The Moderns had the same relation to their work, terrorism: they didn’t give a damn. They just wanted to have fun. Like parrots, they became easily bored.

On this operation the Moderns planned with great glee to reach Washington DC, the location of the library, via chickenwire. The chickenwire was sets of satellite and radio connectives. Like kids gone mad the Terrorists zoomed through the green purple yellow flashlights which are Manhattan, that absence of people, by using epoxy as they touched the midnight glass to control their movements. Then, over black ghettoes.

Except for Manhattan, which had been left to the rich, all of the eastern American urban centres had been left to the packs of wild dogs, wild cats, and blacks who lived in and under the streets. There were no more whites there except for gays.

The library was the American Intelligence’s central control network, its memory, what constituted its perception and understanding. (A hypothesis of the political uses of culture.) It was called MAINLINE. The perception based on culture is a drug, a necessity for sociopolitical control.

Being a bit behind their times the Moderns only wanted to destruct. On the other hand my construct (a cunt) and I had to find the code. The Modernists planned to shoot misinformation into MAINLINE’s internal video. Due to the misinformation each video screen would strobe for twenty seconds in a frequency that would cause the constructs and other robot viewers to have seizures. Pale green apartments strobed emerald at midnight. Simultaneously the audio portion of MAINLINE’s internal video, speeding double, would inform its listeners about the army’s use of a certain endomorphin, at this moment being tested, to throw human skeletal growth into one thousand per cent overkill. The red lights in the brothel tenements strobed blood eyes of Haiti.

The Terrorists would be happy when two minutes later their infiltrated message ended with the main system’s end in white noise.

The Terrorists were happy.

In the white noise the cops arrived so that they could kill everybody. Round revolving cars emitted sonar waves. Certain sonar vibrations blinded those not in the cars; other levels numbing effectively chopped off limbs; other levels caused blood to spurt out of the mouths nostrils and eyes. The buildings were pink. Preferring mutilation the families who lived in bed-sits ran out into the streets. Outside the black ghettoes, through the waters, sea-cruise missiles with two hundred kt. nuclear warheads swam like dolphins. Carrying at least twelve ALCMs on extended pylons and eight on internal rotary launchers, B-52 bombers rode on cars whose trunks held various nerve gases which seeped out through the city atmosphere at designated intervals. ‘Homing-and-kill’ vehicles, upon sensing the presence of any living thing with their infra-red sensors, unfurled two-metre-long metal ribs. Metallic weights studded the metal ribs. The insect life moved on. The cops’ faces, as they killed off the poor people, as they were supposed to, were masks of human beings. And the faces of the politicians are death. A young boy who lay in the street had hollowed-out eye sockets, skinless arms, and a smile due to the large amounts of acid rain in the air. Red and black deco staircases from the magenta tops of buildings bridged building to building.

Inside the library’s research department, the construct cunt inserted a sub-programme into that part of the video network. The sub-programme altered certain core custodial commands so that she could retrieve the code.

The code said: GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.

The code would lead me to the human construct who would lead me to, or allow me, my drug.

Dead Love

I must have passed out because I had a nightmare: that the world is full of people who no longer feel. They are carrying on their businesses as usual, in fact better than usual, because they no longer feel. In the dream I felt my whole being struck still, as if I had died.

The cunt was hurt. I realized that when I awoke. The terrorists said. Six thousand micrograms of endorphin analogue, however, were coming, down on the pain like a hammer, shattering it. Her back, like a cat’s, was arching in convulsions. Pink warm waves were lapping her thighs.

Bodies were piled six deep in the library’s halls. The latest body, shot through the neck on Black’s road. But he is not dead …

I must have passed out because I had a nightmare: To my dead sister, dream somehow of paradise. It’s the only thing that can now keep us alive. The sweetness of your mouth. Coming while not being bruised by the hatred of the one who’s making you come. You no longer don’t have to not exist.

Look, my sister: the eyes are gone. The suns. No one’s looking. You can now do whatever you want: Crying out; teasing the thickness of thighs; smouldering by smiling. Since the world has disappeared: there’s nothing; no one looks at anyone.

Since the world has disappeared: rather than objects, there exists that smouldering within time where and when subject meets object. This voluptuousness of your thighs. Odours seeping out of cunt juice and semen. Since the only mirrors are distorted; all is secret. Please come back to my arms. Without you I am nothing.

It’s winter. Winter is dead time. I don’t have any life now that my sister is dead. Raise us from the dead.

Raze.

But no one looks like Abhor. Everyone looks like the female who ratted on me. The boss, the terrorist leader, the terrorists – they all had the face of the female who ratted on me. It was the dead of winter. Or it was the winter of us, dead. The code I had gotten read ‘WINTER’. It was the winter of death.

I was safe: outside. ‘What does WINTER mean?’ I asked the Modern Terrorist leader.

‘WINTER’S a recognition code for an AI. This particular AI is, that is his money is located in Berne. Money is a kind of citizenship. Americans are world citizens.’

‘Does my boss know about WINTER?’

‘Does a doctor know about death?’ the terrorist replied. ‘Let me tell you a story:

‘A certain fence was living, well, he was fencing off of the corner of Bowery and Houston Street. Around the corner from the bum bar in which the one-eyed Irish sang,

The Powers whose name and shape no living creature knows

Have pulled …

and then cried into whatever whisky he could beg from someone. Life’s a waste of booze.’

I thought about dead cunts. ‘Life’s a waste.’

‘Some of the fences sold real clothing such as rubber jackets and army leather. Others, being less conventional, at least in their business, more like the bums who wipe windshields, dealt in prosynthetic limbs and other works of art. Mommy, the off-the-corner man, was an art dealer.

‘There was another art dealer who had once been a bum, but now was dealing in the junk for which the rich pay a lot of money. His name was Daddy.

‘Daddy came to Mommy to ask for a favour. New York City art dealers have their special codes.

‘Daddy said to Mommy: “My newest … supplier …”

‘ “Burglar.”

‘ “My newest burglar is a rat who goes by the name of Ratso. Since rats are very intelligent, Ratso has a fondness for art objects. The rat craves art. His latest work-of-art, his newest find, find-and-keep so-to-speak, is a head. Not any head. It’s a dead head and death is done up in pearls. Despite the obvious value of this work of art, its humanity, not being a humanist, I advised Ratso to get rid of it. These days times are so hard that heads are worthless.

‘ “At that moment I remembered I knew a head freak. A head freak who was rich. And liked to spend it.

‘ “I accepted the rat’s human head. Upon minute careful inspection, this head revealed the trademarks of the AI, American Intelligence, who’re backing the AMA. Next to the military, the American medical industry take in the largest amounts of legal profit in the western hemisphere. No wonder the head was dead.

‘ “At the very moment I realized this, a gulag came through my door. A block, a dunderhead, a lump of cement, a lobotomized mongoloid. A man who acted like he had all the muscle in the world because he owned everything in the world. A man who didn’t need to walk as if he owned the place because he owned the place. There are people like that. I don’t know them. I knew he was a real man because I knew I was staring into the eyes of death.

‘ “The weight-lifter carefully explained he had come for his head. I explained I don’t give head. He explained that he thought I might be able to give it to him.

‘ “Not having the desire to get closer to death, though I find lack of desire strange and inhuman, I produced my head.

““How much does a human head cost? These days?’ the owner of the world asked me.

‘ “I named the price of a masticated piece of bubble-gum. One piece, or stick; not two. I got what I asked for. On credit.

‘ “Two days later I learned the rat had gotten his price. Death.”

‘ “Extermination’s difficult.”

‘ “Death isn’t difficult. I don’t know why we fight each other since we’re all the same. Knowing this, I had nothing left but to understand.

“This’ why I’ve had to come to you, Mommy, even though I’m not used to turning to cunts. Mommy, I’m desperate.”

‘Out of the goodness of her heart Mommy did a little investigation. It just made her feel good to do good, especially for Daddy. But all she could learn was what she already knew: The AI control information. The AI control the medical mafia. Democracy controls its own death, its medical knowledge and praxis, just as we all control our own deaths,’ the terrorist said.

‘I know.’ My love, the cunt, was dead.

‘However,’ the terrorist told me, ‘there are particulars. Despite the media – not despite the media because the media exists to be wrong – democracy is an old quiet family. They don’t move around much. They’re stable. They’re so stable, they’ve now got their own genetic set-up.’

‘Who? Tell me who. Who controls himself, herself? Who doesn’t feel unending pain?’

The terrorist frowned. ‘That’s not a proper question.’

‘What’s a proper question? Now?’

‘Who can we kill?’

‘I don’t want to kill anyone because I don’t feel anger.’ I felt scared.

‘Look.’ The terrorist said to me with anger so deep that it couldn’t be expressed, ‘Knowing much information and not feeling anything doesn’t get you anywhere.’ He pointed his small bone at me. ‘The answer to your question is that democracy doesn’t get you anywhere.’

The cunt was dead. Afterwards I went down into the tube to wait for her. I had been a travelling man, but now it looked to me like I was to stop travelling. Besides, the tubes didn’t go anywhere. No government sinks money into dead tubes. I stood; I cried: I waited. Nothing. I cried; I cried. I would do anything to have her touch me again even though she was partially human and I hated my own wanting.

I looked for her burial place down there. I looked for the burial place of death. I looked for her whom I wanted. Because I wanted her, she was my demon. Dead and demonic.

Even though I knew she was dead – particles of soil and pieces of garbage and Thames water and whatever else humans are, that is become – I cried for her. I knew she was shit, but I cried because I would do anything to get her back!

(‘Oh sis,’ I cried in silent words which are tears, tears in the fabrics of reality, ‘I will become you: I will become as unreal as you.’)

Pieces of chopped-up snake tail. Using my tail as bait. Fuck me so I can hate you. Children are born by being shovelled out of wolves’ bodies, but who does the shovelling? Are all wolves, therefore, females; are all females, therefore, as vicious as wolves? Tell me, my heart, what reality is.

When I got home, which was like every other home, my love was waiting for me. She wasn’t dead, yet. She looked like a piece of red and dead meat. It was St Valentine’s Day.

She wasn’t dead. ‘I’m on your meat line now,’ I told her.

‘You’re what I make you,’ Abhor said.

Raze