Empire of the Senseless

A Novel

Kathy Acker

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780802146571
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Fantascienza

A cyborg and her pirate lover travel through a violent Paris in this "apocalyptic tale that makes A Clockwork Orange look tame" ( Publishers Weekly ). Originally published in 1988, Empire of the Senseless marked a turning point in Acker's wild, inimitable style. Considered one of her more accessible works, here Acker candidly addresses her lifelong obsessions: childhood and trauma, language and sexuality, criminality and corruption, oppression and rebellion. Abhor (part human, part robot) and her lover Thivai (a pirate) traverse Paris in a dystopian future, in search of a mysterious drug that Thivai needs in order to maintain his ability to love. Navigating the chaotic city, they encounter mad doctors, prisoners, bikers, sailors, tattooists, terrorists, and prostitutes, while a band of Algerian revolutionaries take over, and the CIA plots to thwart them all. Sexually explicit, graphically violent, Empire of the Senseless resists the desensitizing of cultural consciousness and the disintegration of interpersonal communication. A timeless, prescient parable, it speaks profoundly to our social and political history as well as our present reality. Praise for Empire of the Senseless "[A] complex, high-speed, intensely intellectual, intensely offensive, post-modernist, pained and painful, punk, fantastic, fictional construct and elaborate tattoo of a novel." — New York Times " Empire of the Senseless is a family romance turned inside out, a twisted re-creation of quest sagas and Bildungsroman and TV sitcoms." — Philadelphia Enquirer "A world of ugly truths, beautifully expressed. If you care to learn why Kathy Acker is such an important writer, I suggest you put aside your preconceptions, stop making sense, and read this book immediately." —Alan Moore

Alone

I Child Sex

(Thivai speaks)

In front of their parents’ former homes two teenage hoods held on to each other with affection. Then they let go.

The door to a squat opened. Dawn flowed in along the carpet and the tiles of its entrance. A naked boy and a naked girl lay on the floor. The sun of blood and egg-yoke fascinated their almost dead eyes into waking.

For a few hours, a young woman who had been a maid had been sleeping in a large straw chair. A ray of sun, like a pigeon, walked up and down the tiles, then climbed up the hairy leg. She awoke, half stood up, stumbled to the kitchen sink, tucked the rags which were partly covering her thighs into another rag which served as a belt, took hold of what used to be a dishrag and scrubbed her face and cunt lips with icewater. The cold made her shake while the water streamed down her fat thighs. Under the rags, her two pillars of fat chafed each other into a heat which resembled the sun’s.

In the evenings, the revolutionary Algerian soldiers drank themselves almost to death in the brothels. The houses stood on the boulevard in front of the sea. There, teenage hoods searched for soldiers. When they found one, awed they beat the mother-fucker up. At least they tried. The ones who couldn’t beat up soldiers, most of them, ran after the few girls they saw, though they didn’t care about girls. Whenever they got hold of a bunch of girls, they tied them up with ropes and gagged them. Then they rubbed them in dirt.

Certain of the guys were able to rape a girl without having to kneel or fall on the ground. They could standing up rape a girl, feet planted firmly on the street and their hands on their hips as if they were sailors. The other hoods admired them.

These boys weren’t nice. They beat up those younger than themselves. They had killed one or two. They knocked about those who were still babies and then slapped at their tiny cocks. They cut off young girls’ hair with switchblades. They ripped up their delicate blouses, and tore the heels off their shoes, and cut through the tight blue-jeans to the flesh.

It was after the revolution.

Six jeeps of The New Revolutionary Arab Police

braked in front of a group of young children. The cops butted at them with the ends of their pistols. The kids surrounded the slow, heavy police and forced them on to the tops of their own jeeps. Then the black-and-blue-and-bloody children crammed themselves between the jeeps. They had nothing else to do, so they returned to their former nurses who would still wash their knees cut their hair mend their socks right through this never-ending night.

Half-naked and Mercurochrome-dotted on his chest, a child sat on his bed.

Somewhere else, St Bubu, wearing only a white cotton slip, slept on his back. His knees were tucked into his stomach.

Audry who was Abhor’s sister was sleeping right next to the boy. Her right hand was lying on his thigh. It slipped under the slip. Then it fell on his ass. Though he was still asleep, St Bubu opened one eye and rolled over Aud.

Audry woke up and consciously stuck her hand under his slip. She wangled it between their bodies, heavy and hot from sleep, until St Bubu caught the hand as if it was a wiggling fish. His weight alone spread apart the young girl’s thighs. To do this, his hands held on to her white bra.

One hand rubbed one cup. It pulled it slightly down. The hand discovered a small breast. Touched it. Held the animal. It awoke it.

The young girl’s cunt juices had already run down his right knee.

With his teeth, St Bubu unhooked her training bra. Two were adult teeth. The bra, slipping beneath one tit, tickled his tummy. When she felt the results of this tickling, the young girl’s face turned as white as the corneas of her eyes: she understood. ‘Don,’ she said. ‘I forgot about him.’ She went white enough to not exist. ‘Don’t mention him again. That … Then was the time of true morality and affection. Before the war. Now morality and affection are dead. Now I no longer see now I no longer cry now I no longer love. Anyone. Even you. I won’t cry or smile again because I’m concrete.’

The boy kissed this war-time face, this sun of blood, this milk, these tingling ants. His lips aspired to this transparency. His right hand tugged at, then pulled away the slip when had slipped between his and the young girl’s sexes.

The young girl pulled him down to her foot; the boy pulled himself up until his hands took hold of the head, shook it; the blue hair rolled, and rolled over the pillow. In the next apartment, some girls were talking with their former maids. One of the ex-maids bit a thread she was holding between her teeth to break it. The coldness of the thimble she was balancing between her teeth made her lips tremble. St Bubu licked the hairs, on the right and on the left, of Aud’s cheeks. Hairs stuck to his lips.

‘Bub … sometimes I think about my mommy. She’s the only one who could make me warm.

‘That memory’s almost gone … Maybe that memory’s false … That memory’s almost gone …’

‘Don. He’s my brother. He shouts his head off in front of the sea. He’s uppitty. He’s foul-mouthed. He even made up a dictionary for the foul-mouthed. On the beach he and I used to coat our bodies in sand. For a while we lived in a tiny cabin which we had found. We didn’t have to eat and we didn’t have to sleep. We loved each other. Since we loved each other, we weren’t going to die.

‘All other children and the soldiers left us alone.

‘Our clothes were seaweed and tatters of blue-jeans, slips, shells, bras, and condoms. We were naked kids.

‘As for daddy, daddy’s dead now. He’s probably in Hell, the old shit. At last at least he’s got a real home; as for me with the war I went from place to place. In each place I met some boy and he did whatever he wanted to me; I survived by not caring about myself. Hookers understand me. And I understand them. I haven’t been a prostitute, understand, but there’s one thing life’s taught me:’ Abhor’s younger sister explained. ‘I can always find a home in a whore-house. I can stay alive as long as I don’t care about anything or anyone: what other people say about me. How many hands touch my body. The physical pain I feel. What happens to me.

‘With you, Bubu, I’ve allowed myself to feel something. But that’s wrong,’ the young girl said.

‘Being a whore means you separate sex and feeling. Sex is an activity as meaningless as is money. I’d be a great whore, I’d even make a fortune,’ she cried out, ‘if my cunt didn’t get so sore! Physically. I can hardly bear to fuck: if I fuck more than once in a row, my cunt bruises and then I get an infection. If I was a whore, I’d die.’

St Bubu didn’t reply.

‘My brother, Don, used to try to pull my hair out. Then he’d push me with his knee. He believed his knee was a gun. The top of my body would fall forward. The gun would slide into my legs. As if I was now his prisoner, he coldly informed me that if I didn’t do exactly as he said I’d be shot. I took my clothes off. But I wasn’t able to entice this real commander away from his commands with just my body because he didn’t care about sensuality. Both of us were unable to touch a person physically. In order to touch he had to command. He commanded me; he commanded positions; he invented a world. When I became too tired to play anymore, to obey him: he put his arms around me and stuck his nostrils into my armpits. Then he rubbed his sweat-soaked nose into my cheeks. I pinched the tip of his cock in my teeth. I laughed when he cried out from the pain.

‘As my brother and I form one person, now like mine his heart is gone because it’s been cut out. Like me, Don obsessively stares at his dead heart. We’re gonna be free, Bubu, when we shit on it, on ourselves.’

The children such as St Bubu and Audry, and a sailor and a gypsy, in this time after the war all lived in the section of Paris of the rats.

Throughout the night, after the revolution, all I wanted to do was get my rocks off With whomever I could find.

There were only prostitutes; the women had all become prostitutes. I didn’t understand why.

But I found, for I’m consistently losing myself, myself seated in the middle of the fur of white wolves. We, a young girl and I, nibbled cherries which reminded us of our blood. Red dripped on to white. The fruit at least was fresh. A mutant who was singing a rock-n-roll memory began to cry. There was a past, somewhere. I took my weapon, rose up, and walked to the front of the squat.

Outside, next to the purple steps, roses stood in the witchlike winds.

I went back in to get something to eat. While I was choking on some nuts, the girl sat on my shoulders so that her cunt juice ran down my neck. The skin at the back of my neck and my eyes felt allergic. My eyes were burning as they should be.

I took hold of her thighs. I ran my hands around them. I put my mouth on them. I bent her forward so I could run my hands up and into the ass. Red head backwards, she kissed me on the lips. I had her ass.

Dinosaur, who was a stuffed animal, was sitting next to us. Dinosaur was female therefore a prostitute. I could see her cunt. Cherries were sitting on top of her thighs. One of her gigantic paws as if she was a wild cat grazed my knee in affection. The buzzing of a mad bee caught prisoner in the bathroom resounded from tile floor to tile floor. When I managed to get my head up, the red-head rubbed her thighs into the back of my neck.

There was a gun-shot. In one leap I managed to grab the PM and jump on to the front steps. Still, my nostrils opened as wide as possible, moonlight resting on my face and hands, I looked out over the sea, to the port. The girl knocked on the window glass: ‘You have to eat, Thivai. You can’t remain on guard all night. Abhor’ll return. C’mon. What do you want to eat? There’re dead hamburgers there’s whipped cream.’

When I opened the door, wind blew through the room. The whore was hugging her stuffed animal to her tits. ‘… that mouth you’ve got down there below …’ I stuck my hand into the hole between her wet thighs. For a second I reached the clit … though she was a whore, she was too sensitive to be touched … I reached for her stuffed animal’s clit … that little nothing of a tongue …

I, shivering in anticipation, walked back into the cold. Car lights flashed blue along the bay. There was nowhere, for me, to go. From the squat.

I walked back inside. Inside the whore. I pushed her under me. I threw myself down on her. She sang out like a blues singer … I didn’t know why. Dinosaur poured about a cup of her whipped cream down her open mouth. I stuck my tongue between the cliffs of the lips into foaming cream. I became a ship, sailing. I tried to suck it up.

Dinosaur tugged at my army belt. Excited beyond belief by her touch, I threw myself on the animal. The young girl, excited beyond control, threw herself on me. I reached over for her and she, whore-like, rejected me. Her hand rose out of the fur and slapped my red cock.

‘Don’t touch me but whip my cunt,’ the young whore said to me.

‘I’m not a brute:’ I told her. ‘It’s wrong for any human to hurt or kill another human. Even to reject to the point of banishment another human. Corporate executives commit atrocities. Must we act like them, sexually, in order to fight them successfully? No.’ I was answering myself. ‘Acting like shits will only make us become shit. Greedy and maniacal. Of course we have to use force to fight for our freedom. For forceless humans are dead. We should use force to fight representations which are idols, idolized images; we must use force to annihilate erase eradicate terminate destroy slaughter slay nullify neutralize break down get rid of obliterate move out destruct end all the representations which exist for purposes other than enjoyment. In such a war, a war against idolatry, ridicule’ll be our best tool. Remember, whore: Julien’s sarcasms did more damage than Nero’s tortures.’

‘Decomposing flesh moves me the most:’ the young whore said. ‘Give me hell.’

I laughed at myself and gave her what she wanted. I pierced myself through her belly-button. I thrust and pushed her own blood up her womb. As her red head rose out of the white fur, her mouth opened: monstrous scarlet. Tiny white shells appeared in that monster sea. ‘My little dead shark. Better than dead fish.’ I whispered to her while I fucked her in her asshole.

Stray sprays of my sperm streamed down the stuffed animal’s left leg. Our fucking had made her less fearful for the moment. She actually touched my arm and left her paw there. Then this paw pulled my arm to her monstrous body, lifted it and placed it on her swollen belly. Then she stuck the hand in and squeezed it between her two hot hide thighs. I thought that my hand was going to break.

I had already stopped fucking the whore. I was rolled to, almost over, the dinosaur by the dinosaur. My soft gluey cock pulsed against her thigh which was made out of sackcloth. She looked at me. She licked my eyelids which looked pale to her. I turned away from the monster, back to the whore.

I took her in my arms. I adored her. I separated her arms into my cross. I placed my cross down on the white. Her red cunt was the center of the cross. I fucked her, not it.

I raised myself up into the night. I buttoned up my canvas pants, I rebuckled my belt, I reached for a glass of red wine which was on a nearby table, bolted down the wine, took my gun,...