Empire of the Senseless. Кэти Акер

the tent’s main peg a lantern was barely balancing. My blood flowed into my hands. The sailors telephoned, held my hands in theirs, covered my face, They tore the khaki posters and bills open …

      After the jeeps and the lorries left, wounded on the forehead now by the rising sun, I placed my sackcloth jacket over my face. The rest was naked. The flies in the toilet and the wine-press the soldiers had for their own convenience were gnawing at the barrier wires’ edges; they darted forward, leapt over my cock, sunk into the mop of hair below, scurted over the curly locks, so I trembled, opened my thighs. The morning breeze cooled down the thighs and the sexual mass. The flies stole …

      Again Véronique tosses her hairs behind her; I take hold of this hair and throw my face into it; Véronique turns around and places my head in her hands:

      ‘Xaintrilles wet-kissed me in the garden.’

      I throw my arms around her waist, then I eat at her mouth; revolving her thighs rub and press themselves against my stomach; though she’s pushing back my arms, I kiss her eyelids; her hand rubs my back my waist; her eyelids taste of mud; the sweat wets my opened shirt.

      As soon as she laughs, I turn her over under me on the armchair.

      The wind bangs the books on the table shut. My hand burrows like a mole in her clothes. Over a teat. Trembles. Under my hand the teat is hot. I stroke the other teat. With the second hand I unhook the dress. And tongue the teat’s tip. ‘And me,’ she pants. She crushes my mouth by her breast. Wide open the windows look over the park. Xaintrilles walks through the thick grass, his gun erect.

      ‘Don’t be so hard,’ he tells me. ‘You’re breaking my legs.’

      I crawl over him. Sirens stain the distance.

      Today there’s no more pirates therefore I can’t be a pirate. I know I can’t be a pirate because there’re no more pirate ships.

      In 1574 there were pirate ships.

      By that time the total halt of legal, or national, European wars forced the French and German soldiers either to disappear or to become illegal – pirates. Being free of both nationalistic and religious concerns and restrictions, privateering’s only limitation was economic. Piracy was the most anarchic form of private enterprise.

      Thus, at that time, in one sense, the modern economic world began. In anarchic times, when anyone could become any one and thing, corsairs, free enterprisers roamed everywhere more and more …

      Murderers killed murderers …

      Human beings are good by nature. This is the credo of those who are liberals, even pacifists, during times of national and nationalistic wars.

      But in 1574, when regular, regulated war, that is, national war, which the nations involved had maintained at huge expense only via authoritarian expansion, ceased: the sailors the soldiers the poor people the disenfranchized the sexually different waged illegal wars on land and sea.

      War, if not the begetter of all things, certainly the hope of all begetting and pleasures. For the rich and especially for the poor. War, you mirror of our sexuality.

      I who would have and would be a pirate: I cannot. I who live in my mind which is my imagination as everything – wanderer adventurer fighter Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces – I am nothing in these times.

       Nightmare City

       1. The Psychosis Which Resulted From Gonorrhoea

      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.

       2. Suicide

      My mother’s