Empire of the Senseless. Кэти Акер
some time, the time it takes for desire to overcome shyness and distance, since there is always time, the boy and Nana would walk down the streets, hands tightly clenched, so that in that heat sweat dripped on to the ragged street, in between her jobs of walking the streets, in between her bloody periods of hard labour. According to Karl Marx, this continent opened up a hundred years ago. What continent? The continent of the end of the capitalistic or teleological world. In the nineteenth-century Western world the people who ventured into this new continent were the militants of revolutionary class struggle. Knowing this the Vice-Squad Captain who patrolled these streets thought that both Nana and the boy, since he was her pimp, were terrorists.
Actually Alexander, the boy, was innocent. When he had been about six, he had naturally fantasized that his great-great-great-great … grandfather had been Alexander the Great. He loved snakes. His mother, a real snake, had been a lousy mother. She had mistreated him by alternately screeching everywhere and as loudly as possible whatever she felt at the time, a thoroughly narcissistic bitch, and by smothering Alexander as if he had just died with all the weepy affection which he didn’t want. Just as two warriors fight to death, he had to adore her to death. He grew up in this war. He grew up in war. He grew up or, rather, refused to grow up both totally suspicious and as unformed, as open as a wild animal. This was why Alexander resembled a young fox whose I’s are permanently crossed.
Being simultaneously unable to perceive anyone other than himself and overly romantic, Alexander loved my grandmother by hating her. He loved her by wanting to kill her: to carry her out of the slum which is prostitution.
Nana and this kid walked through the sun-burnt, brain-burnt streets, holding hands tightly. If they could have, they would have killed each other.
The Vice-Squad cop did it first. One night, since he needed that day to fill his arrest quota in order to keep his creepy job, he busted my grandmother. And busted what, not whom, he thought was her pimp. Bust the whole lot. Scum. Get poverty off the streets and back where it belongs. Dead.
Now Nana was in business: her real pimp got her out of jail. After twenty-four hours, just so that she remembered her place in the scheme of things. If there is a scheme of things. My grandmother never forgot anything. Since Alexander was innocent or not a businessman, there was no pimp to buy him out of jail.
Alexander was innocent beyond the point of real innocence to that of stupidity. For he believed that he was innocent. Perhaps he was, but he had this world wrong. He believed that since he was innocent of pimping and the courts were just, he didn’t need to give a lawyer money. He believed that lawyers earn money only off of guilt. The court forced a Legal Aid lawyer on the boy. But since the Legal Aid never showed up in Court, or for that matter never anywhere else, Alexander was able to plead his own innocence. Then the Vice-Squad swore whatever the Vice-Squad swears in order to maintain the scheme of things. Which might or might not exist.
The whole thing, case, took exactly five minutes: the judge said numbers to the prosecution; the prosecution said numbers to the judge; back and forth for five minutes. Finally the judge said some numbers. A man who should have been more than an extra in a monster movie ushered, to put it politely, Alexander through several doors and into an empty prison cell.
After several weeks he was ushered out of the prison cell and on to the street. On another street he bought a sawed-off shotgun off a pawn, then stuck some sharpened kitchen knives in his belt, and walked back on the street. He went for the whole Vice-Squad. He tried to kill every Vice-Squad. He was nineteen years old. A romantic. He managed to kill four of them. Literally the cops had to nail him to a wall in order to keep him: madness had made his strength so great.
They (the courts) condemned the boy to death.
It was one of the final nineteenth-century revolts of the non-existent against their economic controllers. In a sense, Nana when she was a whore had been one of its final causes.
Parts of the police’s duty has always been to combine against all who aren’t them and their own. For a cop, duty’s nature. The flics made sure that the judge, who was one of their own, condemned the boy to as an immediate death as possible.
The light on the night of the boy’s execution, the only light, was pink chair light green violet violent flesh. All the people haunted by crime and misery, living in the Section of Desolation, converged upon that spot: the jail in which they made their electrocutions. On two sides of the jail, bourgeois houses, unable to see with their eyes anything which wasn’t on television, were holding their eyes tightly shut. They said: ‘What you don’t see, you don’t know.’ Beyond the prison’s other two sides, walls reached up into the centres of the god’s eyes. If there are gods when there are poor people. Beneath the walls, the cripples and the mentally crippled, the lonely, shuffled their huge feet.
Cops sitting on monstrous black horses forced the desolate back against the walls. But the mass was too pissed-on and pissed to be controllable. Neither black beast nor human beast could break through the throng of human filth.
When the light was the water, at dawn, there was no water, when instant electrical waves cursed and coursed like water through the boy’s body: the mass like a tidal wave roared. ‘Murder. We are murdered.’
The cops moved in on them like a wall which moves. Everything becomes something else. In blood and change, my childhood began.
Being poor, Nana had learned that society is only a filthy trick. Being totally stubborn and determined not to become a filthy trick of the rich, dead, for death is not a human life, according to her own lights Nana succeeded. She married a rich man who owned part of the garment district. The poor can reply to the crime of society, to their economic deprivation retardation primitivism lunacy boredom hopelessness, only by collective crime or war. One form collective crime takes is marriage.
I think that because I perceived what marriage was for my grandmother and because I love her, I am not able to sexually love another human being or accept another human being’s love. If I have to love, out of desperation or desperately, I know love only when it’s allied with hate.
Daddy
Thivai. The beginning of any person must be the beginning of the world. To that person.
That’s how it is for me.
First, Thivai, there were no animals. That is, no wild animals. Oh there were cats and dogs who are somewhere between humans and real animals. The cats were so thin they looked like knives. Predatory knives ran down the streets. Just like in Detroit. No human could walk on the streets without blood covering her limbs.
The streets were really one street, a bit of pavement running parallel to the coast almost all the way down its bay.
Behind broken bits of pavement, shrubbery dense from being all different shapes without any possible passageways for humans, twisted out of the rock which was the only earth and harder than anything: this rock-earth occasionally rose right up into mountains, and then to and into air.
Rock became sky.
The first light which was air sat on the sea. It appeared to be weird. Or a haze which resembled human nausea. Then the tops of the water, as if they were and there were waves, but there weren’t, were light. These tops were dapples of changing colour; there was no other light.
Not in the way rock had become sky, the light moved into water.
The tops of the water were valueless jewels. In the distance the risen rock was haze. All was hazy and resembled human nausea.
The day after the beginning of this disgusting world, the rock formed a cave. The cave was big enough for lots of people. There were several large black worms and their feet were white. They crawled into the holes at the ocean floor’s bottom. In the full late sun, a burro had fallen asleep. His large head lay next to a sleeping dog’s larger head. The bees were bigger than horses.
Daddy was Nana’s only kid. She adored him. She gave him everything she could. He, in turn, turned to her as a mother turns to her child. They formed a closed world.
By the time daddy was born, Nana was very wealthy. He was a beautiful