Empire of the Senseless. Кэти Акер
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my grandmother loved him, she saw no reason to teach him anything or that he should learn anything.
This substitution of primitivism which must be anarchic (in its non-political sense) for morality gave my father his charm. His charm blinded not only his parents but even every old farty schoolteacher to both his complete lack of social awareness and of education. Politics, for my father, was, always, a hole. Parents and teachers scolded him only in the way a child reprimands a favourite fat cat; when my father was being punished, he knew he was really being praised for being unlike other humans. When he was ten years old and unlearned, my grandfather, who everyone considered a saint, and Nana together killed themselves: they couldn’t live without each other.
Daddy was coming into puberty. He inherited six million dollars. These two – money and sex – must have had something to do with each other, cause from the night he lost his virginity, daddy never had trouble finding lovers. Lovers were men and women to whom he gave gifts, not love or need. Daddy, being daddy, needed no one. He wouldn’t consider, just cause of sex, being tied to any other human being.
As he got older, he got even better looking. When he was forty, he got married because he wanted to propagate himself once. Sex was joined to money. She married him because her mother desired this marriage because his family was wealthier than theirs. She was fifteen. Like my father, she worshipped her mother.
The only man she ever worshipped was my father. He didn’t care about her. He married her to have me. He cared about me. By him. His. He educated me. I was educated the way he had been educated.
I looked like him. I smelled like him. I learned like him. My father had propagated.
As a result of this education I don’t know anything about politics and I never read newspapers. As a result of this education I just like trouble. As a result of this education I don’t know anything about the world. As a result of this education I’m dumb.
My mother hated the way I was. I felt she hated me. I felt she wanted to kill me and I felt since she was my mother she must love me.
Out of confusion which resembled nausea, I complained to daddy that my mother didn’t love me and was a cold. He informed me coldly, in front of her, that she loved me of course because she was my mother. Since he was glaring at her, she had enough intelligence to know that she should never open her dumb mouth again.
Daddy played all sorts of games with me. He taught me how to throw a real football. He taught me gymnastics. He trained me into total physical perfection.
Then he taught me a final trick. He showed me how to insert a razor blade into my wrist just for fun. Not for any other reason. Thus, I learned how to approach and understand nature, how to make gargantuan red flowers, like roses, blooming, drops of blood, so full and dripping the earth under them, my body, shook for hours afterwards. During those afterhours, I fantasized my blood pouring outwards. This was relief that there were no decisions left.
Daddy left me no possibility of easiness. He forced me to live among nerves sharper than razor blades, to have no certainties. There was only roaming. My nerves hurt more and more. I despised those people, like my mother, who accepted easiness – morality, social rules. Daddy taught me to live in pain, to know there’s nothing else. I trusted him for this complexity.
Otherwise I was innocent. I actually thought a man and woman got a baby by rubbing their asses together. What this looked like I didn’t actually know. The woman would do something like shitting. Dong this or having a child was something I certainly didn’t want to do. Ever. The only person I wanted was my father.
One day daddy said he had something to tell me.
‘What do you have to tell me?’ I was so quiet, I was dead. My nerves were as sharp as razors.
‘You know your mother?’
I didn’t want to know my mother.
‘Your mother isn’t your real mother.’
I didn’t care. ‘Who’s my mother?’ I asked without caring.
‘You don’t remember her. As soon as you dropped out of her cunt, she gave you to the hospital. Nana and I took you. She never tried to see you. Ever again.’
‘We don’t talk about her,’ said my mother who was now fake.
‘We don’t talk about her because she was mad, Abhor. She was the only woman I’ve ever loved. You look exactly like her. You remind me of the woman I loved, Abhorra.’
This mother who was fake no longer existed. I existed.
I realized that my father hated and loved me because he had to. This mixture of total attraction and disgust calmed my natural fears and drew me more and more toward him. I was his mirror. I was his knight. I was strong daring loyal questioning. I would do anything to be loved as long as love or adoration didn’t involve closeness. The fake mother had long been banished to her bourgeois summer house.
When did I start to fuck? Oh, I started to fuck, Thivai, when I was fourteen. At that age I didn’t give a damn who I fucked cause any boy who fucked me loved me. Fucking was love. Since I don’t think it is anymore, I don’t fuck around anymore. Now I know that we, all of us, know more than we know we know, this is human knowledge, cause I still didn’t exactly know what fucking was and I didn’t know how my parents felt about my fucking and yet I knew I was evil cause I was fucking. So I knew daddy would kill me if he caught me fucking. I don’t know how I knew this.
I was in the bathroom, fucking some boy. Daddy came home. I heard the front door close. I threw on my clothes and ran up to daddy. ‘Hi! Hi!’ I kissed him. There’s only one picture I have left of me as a kid. I’m three years old. My arms close around my father’s thighs. ‘Shall I get you some Jack Daniels?’
Daddy wasn’t an alcoholic. He drank the usual six martinis at night and mommy, she was a moralist, kept telling him he was an alky.
I knew he’d say ‘Yes’. Daddy could never reject Jacky Daniels. They were a bunch of homosexuals. When daddy went off to his bedroom, I opened the front door and snuck the boy I’d been fucking out.
I returned to their Parisian apartment with the J.D. I handed it to daddy. He was holding up a boy’s tie which he’d found in the bathtub. He didn’t believe my lies. He sat down on his bed where he always sat. My daddy was almost crying.
‘Abhor.’
My limbs were frozen with tension.
‘Abhor, I know what you’ve been doing.’ Lies never work except as lies. Like language and love. My mother taught me this. Like love. ‘These men don’t respect you, Abhor.’
How could I explain that I cared neither if they respected me nor who they were.
‘Abhor,’ daddy explained, ‘I’m the only man who’ll ever take care of you properly.’ His hands were reaching for my breasts while tears were coming out of his eyes.
‘Why don’t you do it with mommy, daddy?’
‘We’re too old. We don’t do it anymore.’ His right hand was rubbing my breast.
‘I’m going to phone mommy.’ Over the phone, I told her that her husband was trying to do something to me. I didn’t use the word ‘fuck’.
She said, ‘Let me speak to him.’
‘Daddy, mommy wants to speak to you.’
I don’t remember if his hand left my nipple. I don’t know what they said to each other.
After he put the phone receiver down on the table, he put his cock up me. There was no more blood than in a period.
Part of me wanted him and part of me wanted to kill him.
So I stayed in their apartment and that night I dreamed that the blood lying over the ocean in front of my eyes was light. The light by which I could see. The fishing boats sink or stink.
The German Romantics