Empire of the Senseless. Кэти Акер

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