Obsession

Kathy Acker

 
 

My Father

 

Kathy says, For finally my father was coming back. As soon as the night turned black as the cunts of witches, he walked through our door.

 

Once he had settled down inside, with his pint and slippers, the cat nodding drowsily against his shoulder, he told me that he hadn’t brought back what he had promised me, my own whip. Instead he had come back with a non-white brat, outcast, orphan.

 

This devil’s child who was nameless was a pale, skinny male. His hairs were blacker than a witch’s vagina. When I smelled him, there was a reek of sheepdog who had never been taught anything.

 

I spent the night, sleepless, weeping into my pillow, and so did he.

 

I wasn’t a good child. Or, the same thing, they (the males in my family) told me that I wasn’t a good child. I didn’t know how to react to this identity, this reification, other than by throwing my badness, which my shyness always wants to keep hidden, into their faces.

 

But openly I loved the night. Whenever it was black, outside, I talked to those animals who sat around me and I knew they had languages and I began to learn their languages.

 

Then father tried to make the gipsy brat into something less than outcast by giving him the name of a child who had already died. Day after day I watched the brat. Unlike me he wasn’t bad because he was being told that he was bad; nameless, from as deep as his self or sea went, all he wanted to do was to spit at the world. The human world that seemed nonhuman. I admired his ability; it didn’t matter to him, as nothing mattered to him, that I did.

 

Even though he was only six years old, he would have stolen everything from this father’s house, but there was nowhere to go with it.

 

Though I never spoke to him openly, I would have done the same thing.

 

My father loved his false son. Hindley, my father’s real son, hated the new Heathcliff.

 

My father knew that I saw that all that I couldn’t and wanted to do, Heathcliff did. “Why can’t you be a good child, Kathy?”

 

“Why can’t you be a good father, father?”

 

Outside The Family

 

Soon after these questions had taken place, Kathy’s father died. He would never return.

 

Both Heathcliff and Kathy grieved. Hindley didn’t give a shit because his father had hated him.

 

Heathcliff and Kathy sobbed out each other’s eyes, then ate each other’s tongues.

 

Hindley (Hideous) inHeirited the House so Kathy and Heathcliff moved out into tracks beyond and for them the human world went away. Their only adulthood, before begun, was gone. The world gone, there was only nature.

 

The days of grief, the days without shelter, announce to all old maids and to all those who are maimed and who maim that the actual churches are open.

 

Remained outside. Remained outside the family. How Hindley became the father, for the true father is nowadays President Bush, so all the rest are orphans.

 

This was how Kathy began to want all that lay outside: nature and, most violent of all, the sun. Crags who wait under the sun.

 

Kathy announced, “I will not come.” Heathcliff never announced anything. Heathcliff was naturally unapproachable.

 

In The Beginning, Heathcliff Didn’t Matter To Me

 

Kathy says,

 

“One day I will never come back and on that day I will keep coming back and coming back.”

 

My nurse’s name was Ellen.

 

“Hurry, Ellen, hurry. “I know exactly where I want to go. I want to go to where a colony of moorgame are settled; blue and purple feathers more aflame with green than any sun; I want to see whether they have made their nests yet; I want to see.”

 

The sun.

 

My nurse replied that the birds didn’t breed on this side of Penniston Crags.

 

“Oh yes, they do. I’ve been there.”

 

“You’re too young to travel.”

 

“Only a little farther, I’ve got to go a little further than I’ve ever been, climb to a certain hillock that I’ll know, pass by a bank that I’ve smelled, leaves of certain rust and one pile of shit, I know there are tracks, and by the time I get to the other side without noticing it, I will have met the birds.” Going to the other side and not dying. Whether or not I died.

 

My nurse didn’t bother getting angry with me because she knew I was wild. Not wild enough. She just sighed as if she was swallowing her breath and whispered the only whisper of a socially good woman: “It’s a pity that you’re never going to be content.”

 

I didn’t hear anything. Not Heathcliff.

 

The next morning the first thing I heard was the outside. I woke up to the shrieking rain. The winds begin to tear. Juice ran down the insides of my legs. Don’t forget? How can I ever, even when dead? For I’m always holding an orphan’s hand.

 

I’m Perverse

 

In order to complete his bushy family, Hideous found himself (somewhere) a child bride so that there would be a mommy and a daddy. Substitute mommy and daddy more than equal mommy and daddy.

 

The child bride, like most humans, was a substitute, too, because, being frail and weak and a good wife, she actively detested Heathcliff even more than her husband (did) and threw him out of the house every time Heathcliff returned to snatch some food.

 

At this moment, Kathy began to act as her parents wanted her to. Precisely: instead of being with Heathcliff, she stayed home. Then blamed her parents for making her and Heathcliff separate.

 

Was she, like me, scared of men?

 

So now she had reason to detest Hideous. Cliche: “Dear Heathcliff,” she wrote, “I’m acting in such a way that the only relation we can have is that you’ll reject me. Once you’ve fully rejected me, I’ll be able to begin to love you.”

 

By refusing to run away with Heathcliff, Kathy began to gain all for which she longed: to perversely enter into being with Heathcliff.

 

Or: now that innocence was dead, she and Heathcliff again began to be the same through books. Living with her parents, Kathy was forced to go to school. Heathcliff was going nowhere outside. Kathy taught Heathcliff how to read; this teaching (creating hierarchy) poisoned her love, for identity is shit in the midst of childhood.

 

The kingdom of childhood is the kingdom of lust. Books, by replicating this or any phenomenon, cause perversity.

 

I’m not trying to destroy B, but to destroy how I continuously think about B, think about how our bodies burn together, by repeating these thoughts perversely.

The Unspeakable

 

Kathy says:

 

Where the sun and the black sky are.

 

They now consider Heathcliff less than a person. “Heath,” my new mother said, “if you must use the servants’ bathroom, do not do so during working hours.” But being nonhuman Heathcliff doesn’t need a bathroom.

 

I don’t care about Heathcliff. Who will I pick to be? A person whose canopy is that velvet in which the stars lie. My family can kick the dogs like Heathcliff out of the house every day of the week.

 

I can’t bear being without Heathcliff. Today Heathcliff and I ran into the fields which are wild. We’re never going to come back. I don’t want my brain to hurt and, when my hand is stuck up my cunt, my fingers are all full of juices. I want to be in the wild forever and I want to be Heathcliff and I don’t care about anything else. See. I’m breaking free.

 

When I’ve broken free, there’ll be no more such thing as loneliness which torments me all the time. Alone, without loneliness: all there are around me are leaves and branches and winds and fly through my hairs and everything living and moving each other and each vision, thing seen, is another living thing and I’m never going back to being lonely where I now am

 

I know what the society (my family) (here) is to which I’m never going to return. The inside of the family is a maze whose entrances and exits are lost to those caught in its entrails. The family is foul; garbage lies in its streets. Street sign, NO HUMANS EXIST HERE.

 

I can’t be other than Heathcliff because to be other than Heathcliff is to be human. Example: Hindley who is only himself beats up his servants or dogs who are all the same to him. His– this society is foul because it’s based on hypocrisy: it doesn’t recognize violence or death. Hindley tells me that he loves me and so, places me in his labyrinth. Hindley owns the house or labyrinths in which he’s also inside; every street or portion of this maze is foul, not by hypocrisy, but by possession.

 

I must die for Heathcliff so that I’m no longer a human. Only an outcast. Today the witch went to see the sea because she had to hear someone else’s voice. There was a dead person. The only way to raise the person from death is via the cunt. As it crashed waves against the rocks, the ocean began tossing up tiny fish and the swept, repeatedly, into the witch’s crotch. The sun fell down into the water. And I have made my allegiances, although all allegiances are hell. I saw two seals. The only way is to annihilate all that’s been written. That can be done only through writing. Such destruction leaves all that is essential intact; resembling the processes of time, such destruction allows only the traces of death to subsist.

 

I’m a dead person. Heathcliff says, “Down, dog, down.”

 

Story: The Beginning of the World

 

When the servant who was a FUNDAMENTALIST complained to his master that he and his wife never went to church to eat Jesus’ flesh, his master punished him by making his, the master’s, daughter go to bed without supper.

 

Immediately Kathy rebelled by running away with Heathcliff, again, up into the moors. This time they stayed in the beginning of the world.

 

Time began here, outside, where there were no humans. They wandered on the moors for days. They’re only safe where everything’s public.

 

On the other side of the moors, they found a house similar to theirs. Because Kathy’s nature was perverse or fucked-up, she wanted to be wild and to be part of society. In this total freedom, she said to her friend, “Let’s find out what the inside of this house looks like.”

 

They climbed down the crags, then peered into two of the windows. They gazed upon a rich boy and a girl, who were their age, dismembering a puppy.

 

Heathcliff said, “They aren’t nice people, those who live inside of houses.”

 

Kathy wanted to destroy the beginning of this sight or world. Heathcliff would do whatever Kathy wanted. Listen. “The name of that which is forbidden is Heaven,” Kathy said. “Do it to me now.”

 

Heathcliff said he would do whatever Kathy wanted.

 

“Listen. I, Kathy, am dreaming that sex which is the witch’s den. The den is located in the true house.”

 

Rattles, colored wheels, amniotic rags, and an excessive number of teeth were stigmatizing all outcasts.

 

“I knew that there was a place where everything would take place. I started searching for that place.

 

“I was inside a house. Leaving some room, I began looking for tracks, a smell, these are the indications of the way to get to the room I want to reach. I dream, and have always dreamt, of water.

 

“The armier Arnaud Gelis has said, for we do not need authorities but we do need information, that the dead, with whom he had the unfortunate habit of consorting, wanted all the men and women who were living to, also, be dead. Whether or not you admire this sort of thing. Doves, owls, weasels, snakes, lizards, hares, and all other animals who suck on the milk of cows, goats, women are the associates of witches. Behind milk lies blood; so, behind every each witch, all the dead.

 

“Between two rooms, one is always walking to another room. I passed through a series of rooms.

 

“Finally I came to thin metal stairs which descended downwards.

 

“According to our Inquisitors who are only able to see the material world, the claviceps purpurea, a mushroom which grows out of rye, causes ergotism whose symptoms are cramp-like convulsions, epilepsy, and a loss of consciousness; ergot causes abortion and is anti-hemorrhagic. During such losses of human consciousness, visions can appear.

 

“I stood on the edge of the black metal stairs’ first step.

 

“A mushroom that grows near fir trees and birches, amanita muscaria, causes both ecstasy and lameness.

 

“I was standing in the middle of the fight of stairs.

 

“In China, the name for amanita muscaria is toad mushroom. Both toads and witches are crippled. In the fourteenth century, Billia la Castagna kept a large toad under her bed whom she nurtured on bread, cheese, and meat so that she could make a potion out of its shit.

 

“I walked down metal staircase after metal staircase, descending. After long descents, I saw a floor that was stacks of wood shelves, even cabinets, all filled with books, between some of the shelves openings just large enough for a human to fit into, all around the spiralling stairs.

 

“Finally I descended to a huge room where there was red somewhere. This room, which was where I had wanted to reach, was the library of the witch. I felt scared. I was at the bottom.”

 

As they were looking into the house and making fun of the rich children, Heathcliff realized that it was time to leave. Starting to run, he pulled Kathy’s hand in such a way that she tripped.

 

A dog sat on and ripped her ankle while his purple, huge tongue half-fell out of his lips and these pendant dripped with bloody slaver.

 

Since Kathy was missing, Heathcliff told Kathy’s family about what had just taken place.

 

Heathcliff’s Story of the Rich House

 

The children are in their house, doing their homework. These children consist of a young boy and a young girl.

 

The young girl was assigned a paper on Edgar Allan Poe. But she doesn’t have enough time to complete her assignment.

 

In the classroom, the teacher talks. Teach is paying attention to many, almost all the other students and the girl can’t manage to interrupt to say that she didn’t have time to do her paper. She runs out of the school.

 

Being a good girl, she goes home, back to her room, and works on the Poe paper incessantly, cutting and cutting until only two sections are left. Each of these sections is a few paragraphs long.

 

Despite all these odds–as if Fate is sitting in judgment against her–the girl goes back to her school so she can present her Poe thesis. Now the institution is shut.

 

Seeing that she was thrust out of school against her will and desire, it is probable that the devil rules this world.

 

The girl continued down the street, into the building next to the school. There she saw the spirit of Karen Finley. Seeing this spirit allowed her to take off all her clothes which were now heavy, drenched in mud, icy from the outside mist.

 

The slut walked bare-ass through what was simultaneously a pub and a church.

 

Saw that none of the building’s inhabitants, all of whom were male, gave a shit that she was naked. One of them even walked up to her and was very nice to her.

 

Later on in the pub, she decided to hide behind the entrance door so that she could slip a pair of shorts over her ass. But she couldn’t find any.

 

“Shit. I didn’t bring any shorts.”

 

She had to put back on all her clothes which were still wet cold and dirty.

 

One of these men, all of whom were older than her, comments, “Nothing has changed. Nothing changes.”

 

Me

 

Heathcliff says, Because I had told them about Kathy caught in the strange house, Hindley kicked me out for good. So I threw away the rest of my human trappings and I became an animal who didn’t even clean itself. In order to toss their humanity into their faces.

 

Humans run away from their own shit, their ends, whereas I was now covered in mine: I had become twice a man.

 

When Kathy returned from strangeness, I loved her more than ever. She had came back dressed like a lady, no longer like a wild thing. I didn’t see her when she came in. She was silent about what had taken place in that strangeness. She told her father that she wanted to see me immediately.

 

But I was shit.

 

As soon as Kathy saw me, her heart leaped up like the dog it is. Even though romanticism pretends otherwise.

 

As if one can own shit, Hindley owned me so he knew where I was and ordered me to enter the house and greet Kathy as a servant along with all the other servants. I am not.

 

I did as I had been told only in order to throw more shit into their faces. But, as soon as she saw me, Kathy threw her finery into a bathroom and climbed on me until her lips became my skin. Because it was thirsty, her pussy rubbed me. I knew that I will always hold her cunt in the palm of my hand.

 

Then she leaped back and informed me, I was only her servant and, worse, I smell of piss. “Oh, Heathcliff, have you forgotten me?”

 

Since I was her servant, I couldn’t speak.

 

Father said, “Since you’re a servant, Heathcliff, you can shake hands with Kathy. Only once.”

 

I mumbled that I wouldn’t do anything. The lips of hell were opening and closing.

 

“You shouldn’t be sulky because you smell of piss.”

 

I was silent because I was a hound.

 

“Heathcliff. Now shake hands with me.”

 

SOCIETY’S PROGRESS TO TOTALITARIANISM AROSE AND KEEPS ARISING FROM ITS REFUSAL TO BE SHIT. I touched her.

 

“Oh, Heathcliff, you are filthy dirty.” Kathy was becoming obsessed. Obsessed because she simultaneously wanted to touch me and didn’t. I knew every inch of her flesh, muscle, and liquids, and I was hungry for her. “I didn’t ask you to touch me.”

 

Let the heavens open up, rain sperm.

 

Kathy said, “But I want to touch you.” I knew, just as she knew, that she would be unable to dream until the moment she dreamed about me.

 

I knew that she knew that I knew this, so I decided, in order to teach her, that I would become dirtier and dirtier until I was so dirty that I would have nothing more to do with what her family named reality and I would drag her down with me.

 

This is the way that Kathy says that obsession never rises from and involves only one person: “Let all that matters be sex when and where all is glowing.”

 

I say: I don’t need sex. I don’t need a cock, my cock. Simply: I am not going to and I am not living in hell.

 

As soon as I had announced my allegiance to filth to Kathy’s family, I got out of their house. I ran away to the crags and moors and rocks who belong to anybody.

 

Where it will always be raining, for the eyes will no longer

 

For I, body, know who I am.

 

I will not deny the witches.

 

If Kathy was pure of cunt, she would follow the sperm out of the cockless cock.

 

She stayed behind because she preferred to make her allegiance to skin, her fancy clothes, trappings of society, rather than to me, the gook inside the body. Because she was scared to shake hands with filth.

 

Kathy In Her Society Finery,

 

“But if I knew what men were really like, I would never want one. I say this so that I can be more desirable to men.”

 

Me–Perverted

 

Heathcliff says, But I cried all night because she was mine and she was hurting me. I cried, but I wasn’t ever going to be demeaned. Naturally I wanted my skin to be other than dark and my hair to be straight, not so that I could live in a house, but so that she could look up to me enough to run away with me.

 

And then I’d sink my head into her stomach and my teeth would turn into her bones. I will not live without her–whatever I must do! I have sold myself to the devil! As do those who write.

 

The next day I woke up and then I heard a noise. When I peered through one of their infernal windows, I saw those two rich murderers or children walking into the black-and-white tiled hallway. Of course, I followed them inside.

 

As soon as he had passed the ceiling beams, the boy turned around and said to me that I should brush that horse’s mane out of my face. I bucked, in the kitchen picked up a large pot of simmering soup, ran back to the edge of the hallway and threw the liquid into his visage.

 

I had seen Kathy standing in the hall and, then, the look on her face.

 

Here was the first time that I wanted to kill her. That night I dreamed that she died from giving birth to a baby. This was the first time I dreamed this.

 

According to Gilbert Lely reciting some kind of Freudianism, one of the ways a sadist can prevent himself or herself from travelling from neurosis to psychosis is to sublimate his or her asocial instincts into art.

 

Freud.

 

After I had put the boiling liquid to the boy’s face, Kathy loved me even more than before. I needed to believe that she loved me so that I could be alive.

 

I kept turning nasty because there was nothing else I could do in the face of rejection. In the face of Hindley. The nastier I found myself, the more Kathy looked up to my purity.

 

As Joseph who was religious said, “This house is an infernal region.”

 

Today, a yellow worm that looked like a plastic banana began a walk across a dirt path. The path moved downhill in steeper and steeper zigzags until it reached a sign that said BEWARE OF RATTLESNAKES.

 

Kathy hadn’t run away with me to this earth of rattlesnakes where there were no more humans. Both Kathy and I knew that I was the only one who could lead her here, where nature would tame her by demeaning her so that she could begin to learn.

 

Marriage According to Heathcliff:

 

As soon as her father went travelling, I returned to Kathy.

 

The first time I stood again in that sittingroom, she was mentioning to the nurse who happened to look like Jessie Helms that the rich boy had asked her to marry him.

 

I said, loudly, “Kathy, with all that I am and have–if that is any power–I beg you to stop rejecting me for your rich friends. I have born too much rejection since I was born.”

 

Kathy didn’t notice me because she was combing her pussy hairs.

 

“I’ve come back to you, Kathy. Why aren’t you looking at me?”

 

“Because you don’t belong in any decent society. You smell like a horse, like Linton said you smelled, and you don’t know what a relationship is. Human. Your very presence bores me.”

 

I didn’t know how to reply because I was open to her.

 

“You’re as dumb as any animal, Heathcliff.”

 

Because she needed me to be her and at the same time refused to touch my skin, I no longer was.

 

“But the fact that I’m marrying Linton has nothing to do with you. I’m not marrying Linton because you don’t exist; what you believe is my torment of you doesn’t exist.

 

“I’ll explain to you why I’m marrying Linton:

 

Marriage:

 

Kathy says, I said to my nurse, but not to Heathcliff: “Do you know the real reason why I’m marrying that creep who doesn’t possess a cock? (Not that I give a damn about cocks: it’s what they stand for.)

 

“I can’t marry Heathcliff because Heathcliff and I aren’t separate from each other. It would be redundant for me to marry Heath.

 

“I need to get married. Heathcliff and I don’t belong in the normal world whose name is society–we don’t even know whether we’re male or female. And. But, unlike Heathcliff, I can pass for normal; I want the money and moral position that normalcy brings. (When I pretended normalcy in the past, the normals, who are named the English, stuck a lit bulb up my ass then shorted it.) I need to get married and get my certificate.

 

“In the real or abnormal world, it’s the law that Heathcliff is more me than me, though no one knows who Heathcliff is, his name.

 

“It’s disgusting for Heathcliff to live as a freak in my family’s world.

 

“I’m going to marry Linton so that neither Heathcliff nor I will have to live any more as freaks; for doesn’t marriage in this society render anything acceptable? Freaks cannot live as freaks because in reality there are no freaks: there are only those society people who’ve carved identities out of fear.

 

“Will I be able to be married without becoming perverted like one of those society people? I’m only human…

 

“Therefore, by means of marriage to a rich person, I will show that Heathcliff and I are as normal as rich people. I learned logic in school.”

 

Heathcliff overheard all of this. As soon as he had understood that it would degrade me to be with him, he ran out of the room.

 

This was how I threw myself or Heathcliff out of my life.

 

I had the following dream:

 

In a hotel that’s under the aegis of the Buddhist Poetry Institute, while I’m waiting for an elevator that’s going up, I recognize a man who’s walking past. He’s a former lover.

 

This hotel has a pool that’s composed of several uneven tiers.

 

The hotel’s bars and restaurants likewise hide the raised and lowered floors. My former lover and I sit down at a white- cloth-covered table in the most secluded alcove.

 

I feed him sake after sake, as I did when we used to fuck, and he becomes drunker, as also used to happen. All the time.

 

The initials of this man’s name, R.W., are those of a boyfriend prior to him.

 

Both of us are three-quarters sodden when I realize that this man didn’t and now doesn’t love me. His attitude toward me is: about once a year he uses me to try to find the oblivion for which he’s longing.

 

My Father (Whom I’ve Never Known) Tries to Kill His Own Child

 

Kathy says,

 

Hindley, who had become drunker and drunker, returned home, doused in alcohol like a rag in gas. The chill night howled through the dying branches and the dying cars started beeping. Inside, he grabbed the child which he had had by his new wife and cut off all its hair. Raggedly. When he let go of the brat, it fell down a flight of stairs. Didn’t die. Not noticing anything, father kept looking for the Jack Daniels which had been hidden.

 

All my life I’ve dreamt dreams which, after the initial dreaming, stayed with me and kept telling me how to perceive and consider all that happens to me. Dreams run through my skin and veins, coloring all that lies beneath. I DREAM: I’m in a hotel in which I’ve never before been. I have to give another performance.

 

Whenever I’m about to perform, I don’t like to be around the other performers. I wander by myself in the unknown hotel.

 

While I’m waiting in line for the elevator to go up, a man who’s also waiting recognizes me as a bodybuilder. He’s middle- aged, large in body with the beginnings of a pot, disappearing hair. Standing right in back of me so that I can feel the pot, his hands massage my biceps. I allow this.

 

Today is the day of sex. Informing me that he’s a trainer, the guy shows me how I can tuck my stomach in or he makes my stomach disappear.

 

We go down in the elevator. In the bathroom, he fucks me from the back just like I used to be when I was a kid.

 

Now that he’s gone, I’m desperate to find a man who will have me in order that I can become normal.

 

My next lover is married. (I fuck married men as a rule because they don’t want to come to close to me.) Predictably, the creep informs me that there’s no way he can love who I am.

 

After he tells me this, I squat down on his floor. Then I think, as I’ve thought before, many times, all I have to do now is get myself out of here. This house. As soon as I do this one thing, I promise myself, I can fall apart just as I want to: I can be less than anything that is.

 

Just as I have promised myself: outside his building, I sink against the garbage cans that are against the wall. I had probably created or passed through romance just so I could be here, where I should be, do what I should do.

 

Let the garbage eat out the night.

 

In that night, when two homeless recognize one of the members and walk up to me, the thought comes to me that I’m ready to pull myself up by the bootstraps.

 

My next lover is, as much as possible, the man of my dreams.

 

This time, there’s a mass of wharfs and compartments whose insides and outsides are mingled. Or mangled. In one of these rooms, this man and I lie on a bed. He can’t get hard. Female creatures, as elegant and lean as those in Paris, are haunting a few of the other rooms.

 

Outside the room in which I’m trying to fuck, something that’s a combination of truck and tractor is zooming away from the pier that’s nearest the horizon and down a white road that runs parallel to the dawn. Then, the vehicle swerves around, almost running into, five others. Monsters. All of whom are whizzing around and around, breath-taking speeds, hurtling past each other. The tractor-trucks are just like horses.

 

I watch them, amazed.

 

This is the realm of males. A man remarked to seemingly no one, “This is how things are done.”

 

After watching the monsters, I decide that I can’t marry my boyfriend because he doesn’t get hard.

 

But if I’m not going to marry, how can I survive in this society?

 

In the same room in which he couldn’t get it up, I’m teaching a class. One of my students asks me to dance.

 

We dance in an oval, around the back of the room just behind where the other students are sitting, as I had been taught to dance in the school I had attended as a girl. Waltzing and tangoing seriously and with grace.

 

Even though she appears fem, my student is leading me: I orgasm several times.

 

In this way I learn that, since I can come with a woman, I don’t need a man.

 

After I have come or alternatively:

 

For some time I’ve been standing, in front of a white stucco wall, on a white road which, as though it’s a platform, is raised above all the surrounding and dirt underneath. All around me are masses of luggage, suitcases and bags.

 

I’m leaving. Finally.

 

But as for me, I have too much baggage: I can carry all of them only with great difficulty. A man whom I don’t know offers to pick up all the suitcases and duffels that are dropping around me and then hand them to me.

 

While I’m just managing to hold on to these bags, two of the people who seem to be in my group screech, “She’s coming!” Race to, then down the pier that’s on the left side of the white building.

 

Now there’s a crowd of people down at the wharf. I want to be there too, but I’ve got all the bags. Deciding that probably no one’s going to steal them, I abandon them, follow the crowd, some of whom are my friends.

 

At the left pier’s end, a huge mass is watching a superstar, perhaps Tina Turner, come.

 

Now I know that there are two ways for me to survive without marrying: I can either be gay or famous.

 

The hell with dreams because dreams only lead to perversity.

 

I dreamt I was in Heaven. But I had no business being there so I ran back to Wuthering Heights (this place) (loneliness) (this state of human) (this impossibility named hell). I know that here is happiness.

 

I was the day after my most important performance. I was cleaning the hotel room which the Buddhist Poetry Institute had lent me; I always do exactly what I’ve been told to do.

 

A large wood vanity whose mirror was hidden under layers of clothing and cloths stood right in front of me. A mirror because I’m alone.

 

A, the Institute’s head, just opened my door and walked in. She hadn’t bothered to knock. She had entered in order to pay me. “I’m only going to pay those writers who matter.”

 

“Matter?”

 

“Who’re important.”

 

This message is that writers are either famous or starve.

 

While A was making her pronouncement, I was lifting up and folding a huge thick olive wool blanket. Beneath the blanket, a bare mattress.

 

Then A and I stood in front of the vanity’s covered mirror.

 

On the surface of the table part, some of the objects which I had uncovered during my cleaning now began to move. Two black crabs the size of human fists strolled. When I saw them, I was confident that I could kill the…things or, at least, crush them to pulp.

 

The whole table was alive. Specifics: two small black lobsters; two black spiders as large as these lobsters, whose legs resembled daddy-long-legs’ but who weren’t daddy-long-legs because their bodies were as substantial as cats’; the two crabs already recognized.

 

I lifted a dress, then a white wool crocheted cloth, then something which I couldn’t recognize or can’t remember off of the mirror and A and I clearly saw its glass.

 

The insects and the sea-life were crawling, or whatever they do, under the strewn olive blanket, all over the mattress, hiding in the wool folds. Down to the floor. They were disgusting.

 

Now I saw who I was: one spider perched, half of it on the top of my calf just below the back of the knee, half on my black cowboy boot. I’m not terrified of a spider because I know it can be crushed.

 

I slammed it to death.

 

A and I crushed all of the moving beings.

 

The Lack Of Dreams Is Disappearance Of The Heart

 

Kathy says, Heathcliff had left.

 

I said:

 

“My flesh is wood that needs to be chopped up. For this reason, I’m never going to forsake you, whatever-your name-is and wherever-you-are. The cunt is always speaking. But I will never marry you, whoever-you-are, because marriage means nothing to the likes of us because society means nothing to the likes of us.

 

“Heathcliff, you are now whoever-you-are because I am named absence.”

 

I BEGAN SEARCHING FOR HEATHCLIFF BECAUSE I DIDN’T WANT HIM. AND I DON’T WANT HIM.

 

Searching for Heathcliff (trying to turn whatever-you-are actual), I fell out with my dreams.

 

The fantasy, to refuse to dream, to which I have returned again and again was the following:

 

The situation is that I’ve suddenly learned that I have an incurable disease. This disease has something to do with my heart. Because it’s inevitable that I’m going to become sicker and sicker until I die, an authority declares, someone from this moment onwards is going to have to take care of me until the day I drop dead.

 

But I don’t want some creep to have anything to do with me; I don’t want to be a dependent person.

 

A poet whom I like a lot begins to take care of me. Then, her husband becomes angry because she’s not giving him enough attention. I’m abandoned, the usual, and usual, become upset.

 

The authority who’s a doctor repeats: you have to find someone to take care of you.

 

I decide that everything that this doctor, perhaps because he’s and authority, has said is a con. That I’m ill’s a con. How can I be ill when I don’t know I’m ill?

 

I’m not ill.

 

One day, while I’m performing my morning exercises (since I’m exercising, I can’t be ill), I see, right across my mattress, my old nurse sitting meditating on the floor. I ask her advice. “Who’s the best doctor,” I inquire, “in the world? If I consult that doctor, he’ll be able to cure me if I’m ill.” I assure nurse that I have enough family money to afford the very best.

 

Consulting this best doctor: Wherever I am, which is (the) unknown, I look down on the handsomest possible man standing on a span bridge. As soon as I see him, my incurable disease is more or less cured. (I’m a romantic. Incurable.)

 

The next day or some days later, I see that my girlfriends, all of whom are now standing around me, are wearing the same kind of clothes: upper-middle-class cocktail drag heavy as possible. I’m in a gold sweater knit nothing else.

 

We stroll down a suburban street with its clean-cut lawns. One of the women, who works in a store, keeps tugging at my dress. Finally pulls out a thread. I’m irritated–I’m very irritable.

 

She exclaims, “You’re so white, delicate. You’re the most well-preserved of all of us.”

 

I no longer know whether or not I have this incurable disease.

 

Waking from the dream, I find myself in a business office. I describe what I’ve dreamt to a man who was in my dream in order that both of us can ascertain and know whether or not I’m going to die.

 

I had become almost sick with looking for Heathcliff.

 

I had stopped eating because, when he’s out on the moors, Heathcliff doesn’t eat. Wandered around the rocks at night because I didn’t know where he was.

 

I wasn’t looking for him.

 

The fogs made me animal.

 

Returned home. This is WUTHERING HEIGHTS by a deadhead.

 

Home. “Look,” my father said, “Look at the low-life. She’s ill because she’s always running after men. She’s going to be dead soon.”

 

“No,” I said to myself. I didn’t answer father because there aren’t any, anymore.

 

“So where were you last night, and the night before, you- good-for-nothing-cunt-juice?”

 

(A sailor named St. Germanus has unmasked the diabolical nature of certain spirits named good women who wander about at night.)

 

Father’s replica, the religious servant: “Weren’t you with Heathcliff last night?”

 

When that nut-case dared to question me, I became angry for two reasons: Because my family was considering me ill (nymphomaniac). Because underneath their definition lay the reality of my horniness. (Horniness: I don’t know where Heathcliff is so I don’t know who he is.)

 

Now I knew that it’s necessary to keep interpreting everything because nothing’s true and everything’s real. These interpretations are my body.

 

Therefore I said back to my family: “If you throw Heathcliff out of this house because he’s not like you, I’m going with him, out into the fogs. Our brains are already fogs. But you can’t do anything to Heathcliff because he’s gone.”

 

I had forgotten about myself.

 

I stopped looking for Heathcliff. After that, I could no longer sleep. I had lost the ways or entrances into dream.

 

Without dreams, the body becomes sick. I have an incurable illness of the heart.

 

I want (to find) Heathcliff (myself).

 

The Underside Of Dream

 

Kathy says, I’ve always been bratty. During the period when I was ill, though not yet dead, I turned into more than a brat:

 

“Ellen. Dye my hair blonde.”

 

“Your hair’s already blonde.” So she dyed my hair blonde.

 

“My hair isn’t blonde enough. I look like Madonna fucking. But I’m on my death bed because I’m dying. I want my hair to be pure white!”

 

She took me through two more dye jobs.

 

“Ellen. I said I’m dying. Now you have to make my pussy hairs white.”

 

But, alive or dead, my pussy drips gold and red and tastes like skunk.

 

Return To Dreaming

 

Heathcliff or the devil says, And so Kathy married a rich man for the purpose of entering society. As multitudes of women have done before her. The rich man, Linton, infatuated with his new wife, believed himself to be the happiest of men, as multitudes of men have felt before him. Kathy’s dream was that marriage is the destruction of society:

 

This society is the family’s house. Kathy’s living with her uncle in a huge house. It’s of the utmost importance that she palms him a check and equally important that no one knows that this has happened. If not, she’ll die.

 

Her uncle takes the check.

 

Later, a man woman and child are standing on the lawn outside the house. The evil Trinity: they continually cut themselves with razor blades. If they succeed in penetrating the house, they’ll destroy everyone and everything including Kathy.

 

Somehow they do. Enter. Kathy sees them in the downstairs; instantaneously she knows that she has to do everything possible and anything to prevent them from invading the inner dwelling: she has to remain an enclosed self: otherwise evil might stick its cock into her.

 

Next, she’s standing in front of the mattress over which she handed her uncle the check. He’s now on the other side of the mattress. She knows that evil is coming. So runs in back of the mattress. Up the stairs.

 

The house ascends higher and higher; the higher, the holier the space.

 

They’ve arrived at the top of the house. Now there’s only complete horror in this world: darkness and decay. Flesh is rotting frogs.

 

All evil has come here so a spell begins. This is real creation, the beginning of the world, evil is always born in a cloud of pink smoke emanating from pink incense.

 

Is Kathy seeing her own blood? She scoots as fast as she can, faster, down the stairs, faster, through the hallway cut into two by the light, out of the child’s house. Outside: through a patch of shade, then into sunlight.

 

(I have suddenly realized the meaning of MY MOTHER: DEMONOLOGY.)

 

In all the sunlight and cut grass, the child knows that she is safe.

 

Where will she go without home? She is homeless. She realizes that she can be safe (live) as a wanderer. Free.

 

She roams through the suburbs and finds herself at a filling station. While she’s leaning by one of the tanks, an American car drives up. (I don’t know the names of any cars.) The evil people are sitting in this car. Then Kathy sees a black man, who’s lying on a grey plastic parachute on the cement, look up, see whatever’s getting out of the auto (formlessness?), and scream, “God!”

 

A woman emerges from the car. Her inner thighs have no more skin, only blood.

 

My Childhood by Heathcliff

 

The law that forms society is that which forbids all that reeks of the name humanity. From the moment that I was born, I knew my society was corrupt. I knew that, in and through the name of democracy, the middle classes are being annihilated, that there are numerous tribes as depleted as the homeless.

 

My childhood training with Hindley taught me the characteristics of loyalty, honesty, stubbornness, and ferocity. Further, it caused me to disapprove of the familial society, the only society I knew, which indulged itself in every hypocrisy, corruption or putrescence, lack of control in every area of the self.

 

I became a handsome man, with a high-domed forehead, a square jaw. An air of authority lurked under every surface. My habitual garments of defenses identified me as a member of the samurai class.

 

Though I had as yet no dealings with anyone outside the family, I knew, and I was deeply upset by this, that samurai were starting to attend the local fuckhouses. When I came back to Kathy, real life returned to her: MY DREAM OF RETURNING TO KATHY:

 

Heathcliff says,

 

I was traveling, the same as flying, through rooms which were connected to each other so that their outsides were both outside and inside. The name: the crags of Penniston.

 

The room through which I was passing was either an expensive Eastern clothing store, a window that displays two fur and silk robes, or a Hindu temple. All the walls were the same yellow- white as the ground below them. Sand lay everywhere.

 

As soon as I had emerged from this temple’s recesses, I was presented with a photo of ‘imminent decline’. This photo revealed an at least 70% decline, a road composed out of sand and the rubble of a city. A few people are half-buried in its dust; a knee sticks upward.

 

A voice announced, “People have died here. But, at times, these are the only streets that can take people to where they’re going.

 

“The streets of death.”

 

Where I was heading, there was a chance of disaster, also of rain.

 

I parked my motorcycle facing upwards on a steep hill.

 

Whoever I happened to be in lust with at that time gave me the information that she had given permission to a friend of hers to ride my bike. That bitch had tipped it.

 

“What?” I couldn’t say anything else because–I’m almost never angry–my anger is always waiting to blow me up. Then, I became angry that there were no bike mechanics in the forsaken place. Then, I became angry that all she did was shrug. My lover just didn’t care. Finally and ultimately, I’m angry that I’m helpless.

 

Then, I realized that I could phone a mechanic myself so I did.

 

At the bottom of the decline, the crags, lay a building that was my family’s house. My real father, the one who had started everything, was inside this house.

 

I had made its livingroom into my bedroom; father’s bedroom, which was next to mine, was the actual bedroom of the house. We needed space from each other.

 

Below the normal rooms lay another level: a floor of unused rooms. In the past, something dreadful (or evil) had occurred in these unused rooms.

 

These are the rooms of childhood.

 

The unknown floor’s map was as follows:

 

The large room on the right was the most public, not pubic, knowable and known. Its windows on its outside overlooked an even larger parking lot which, unfortunately, belonged to the neighboring house.

 

Outside: “You’re not concerned for his welfare at all?”

 

“He’s on welfare?”

 

The rooms on the left formed a maze whose center was a bedroom. The bedroom. Will I ever find you?

 

In my search for freedom or in my search, I moved down to the hidden floor. The floor of childhood. When I had been a child, I did and now I do whatever I want to do.

 

In these hidden rooms, my first bedroom was the room on the right. Despite the parking lot lying right next to its insides, it was quieter than my former home.

 

I still hadn’t gotten what I wanted or I still wasn’t where I wanted to be. I want to be in the most secret bedroom of all.

 

Finally my father gave me permission to move in there.

 

I proceeded:

 

But just then, I saw outside that water was pouring, army- like, into, down the wide grey street. A wave was as high as my motorcycle. For the first time in my life, I felt fright: I was terrified that my cycle would be flooded.

 

I dashed outside; then the waters turned ferocious; I ran for safety. Home.

 

In the rain my bike died. I knew that I could have saved bike if I had ridden it into the house as soon as I had seen these waters coming.

 

In order to save bike, I turned time backwards:

 

When I rode my bike into the hall, my mother agreed that this situation was an emergency and that all is decaying. Here lies the smelly realms of the cunt.

 

Moving into the cunt:

 

First object to be moved from known floor to unknown floor: a large and low wood and green velvet table. (Note: Has to be cut into parts in order to be able to be moved.)

 

Second object: a blue exercise mat.

 

These necessities were too large for me to move myself. When I asked my mother, who must have hated my guts before I had been born because she had abandoned me, for help, for the first time she agreed.

 

Now I accepted my parents.

 

Inside the secret bedroom: When I had finished furnishing the three unknown rooms, they resembled or were the three known rooms (bedroom, workroom, and exercise room) in which I used to live.

 

In this manner, I returned to Kathy, reached into her secret place, and made her my image: In the name of anything but the parent:

 

In the smelly realms of the cunt.

 

Kathy’s Dream Of And Upon Heathcliff’s Returning To Her And Laure’s Dream

 

Kathy says, Somewhere in Thrushcross Grange I was packing my suitcases because I was getting out. Finally.

 

Then, I dragged these bags down to my bedroom where I packed what I didn’t want.

 

When I had packed both what I wanted and what I didn’t want, I found myself next to Heathcliff. Sitting on a stoop just as if we were back in New York City, Heathcliff started burning some of my skin with his cigarette.

 

A boy named Linton with whom both of us were friends sat on my other side. He and Heathcliff burned me.

 

Since he’s my main man, Heathcliff was the one who talked. “I’m deciding who you are.”

 

As soon as he had said that, I felt happy. Happiness was a mingling of feeling and physical heat; the liquid flooded the caves beneath my skin.

 

Heathcliff told Linton, “I own her.”

 

I Return To B

 

I was sitting in a theatre, watching a movie named Wuthering Heights. I had no idea which version. On the movie screen, I saw Kathy telling Heathcliff, who had just returned to her, that the only thing she wants in life, now that almost no life is left to her, is for her and Heathcliff not to part. Never to part.

 

Heathcliff, “But you did everything possible to ensure our parting.”

 

Kathy answers that she only wanted them to be together.

 

Across the screen, I see this word spread:

 

THE KINGDOM OF CHILDHOOD IS THE KINGDOM OF LUST.

 

I had come back to the theatre night after night. Wood walls and the bare and hard wood chairs that I remember from my school days: those auditoriums in which movies were then shown. But this was a real movie theatre, not a schoolroom. And this night, when I sat down and the room became totally black except for the light from the screen, I placed my purse, as I always do, under my seat.

 

During my former visits to the theatre, I had become friendly with a man named Jerry. As Wuthering Heights rolled on to the death of Kathy, Jerry asked if he could sleep with me.

 

“But first,” Jerry in the black, “I have to show you something.”

 

He showed me that the top of his head was bald.

 

No, it was something else.

 

He opened his chest. Most of the chest, its center, was without skin, like an Invisible Man model. I saw right through to his plastic heart.

 

But I didn’t want to fuck with him for another reason. Because he wasn’t into what’s imprecisely named S/M.

 

There was no movie.

 

Bored, and I hate more than anything to be bored, I left my seat to get a drink. When I returned and picked up my bag, I noticed it felt light. When I looked inside, there was nothing there.

 

Since I no longer had cash or credit cards, I was forced by circumstances to enter a brothel.

 

I have always found myself determined to survive.

 

The cathouse in which I landed obviously catered to upper- crust clients. For there were deep pink velvet curtains and no other visible walls.

 

To my surprise I liked my first John.

 

Then a murder took place; the victim was this first John. Was I possibly the murderer?

 

Because we had to ensure that we weren’t caught, some girls and I began escaping from the whorehouse. As I loped down a long and narrow hall, I gazed upon a black satin evening bag which looked expensive. On a tiny, antique mahogany table. I snatched the bag because mine had been taken from me. But thought that it’s wrong to steal.

 

The steep street outside our working quarters had become steeper: my friends and I could barely climb up it. I was wearing very high-heeled shoes because I was a whore. Here there was no hope of running away. I was aware that openly carrying this purse rather than investigating its insides, keeping only what I wanted and throwing away all the rest, was even more dangerous.

 

I opened the black evening bag. At this moment I told the other girls about my theft. They didn’t give a fuck. I extracted the bag’s belongings; I preferred a pair of earrings to money.

 

The girls and I decided that we were going to be thieves.

 

I found myself inside a brothel which was probably the original one, though I couldn’t remember how that brothel had looked.

 

The vestibule in which I stood was the lobby of a movie theatre. All of its velvet, cunt pink.

 

I was watching a policeman talking to or interviewing the movie’s ticket-taker. All sorts or documents concerning the murder were on my person. Of course I had done it. The policeman who was in the ticket booth didn’t notice or care about either my documents or my being; none of the cops walking around the whorehouse cared about the hookers. Already, hookers and thieves, we decided we could be murderers.

 

Heathcliff, my brother.