by Olivia Laing
Outside the water in the pool was green and the balconies were luxuriant as usual, draped in foliage, bright with geraniums, maybe also begonias. Kathy was late, she had to go to another gallery, she was walking with very long strides, sunglasses on, trying to get one over on the clock. Her meeting was supposed to be about art but actually it was gossip, this often happened, presumably not just to her. She ate a bendy biscuit, drank what her seventh glass of fizzy water. Stories about brothers, nephews, dealers, collectors, stories about people arriving too early, people being embarrassed, being on the outside and trying to get in, only later it turned out the outside was smarter. That was Kathy’s take too, also that it didn’t really matter where you situated yourself since the centrifuge of history would eventually pluck you up and switch you round. It was the thing right now to take people from the outskirts, the wallflowers if you like, and try and look at events through their eyes. No one cared about Napoleon or Darwin, it was more interesting to be obscure, almost unheard of, a failure, a total creep.
On the tube Kathy kept getting glimpses of people’s papers, take down hate sites in two hours or else, an earthquake in Mexico, some sort of minor or minor so far coup in Spain. She read an essay about dementia on her iPad. Was this what she was scared of, her husband receding into the blind alleys of memory loss? He was twenty-nine years older than her, she worried about blood clots, bowel cancer, a heart attack, a sudden fall. He had five aneurysms, at any minute one could rupture and kill him, just like that. One had already been operated on, she’d seen him after surgery, unconscious and intubated, his little white face absolutely drained. For weeks he’d been incapacitated, bedbound then hobbling and brave. He had sleep apnoea, that could be fatal too. It had killed Carrie Fisher. She woke him in the night to check that he was breathing, she just wanted to keep his company for as long as she could. The world was good with him in it, awful, fearful, but also secure, she raced up the road to get back to him, even if she didn’t speak much or snapped she delighted in his presence, the way he was always so amenable, so keen to please, his handsome mouth, the dear little bristles around his ears. He’d painted the deck when she got home, bending at the waist on account of his artificial knee. He was very tired, he went to bed almost immediately, it was only 5, and she sat upstairs in her study alone, not unhappy, her fingers moving, watching the hazy yellow light, the golden leaves. I never know how to say goodbye, she wrote. We never do, do we? Just say ‘Goodbye.’
Writing, she can be anyone. On the page the I dissolves, becomes amorphous, proliferates wildly. Kathy takes on increasingly preposterous guises, slips the knot of her own contemptible identity. I gave the old guy a dirty look. I’m not fucking you, I’m your enemy. I know my grandmother hates my father. I love mommy. I know she’s on Dex. I didn’t feel frightened yet. I myself never commit murder, I’m constantly drunk, I never despair. I’m as normal as any moral person. As soon as I was clean, again I started haunting clothes stores. I grew up wild, I want to stay wild. I felt very happy when my sister’s huge hat, while we were both in an auto, flew away. 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. Grief saturates her words, she can’t stop it, she writes about rotten meat and rape, raw sewage, she writes about mothers and fathers and little girls, she writes I’m banging my head my head into a wall.
*
It was her penultimate day in England, 21 September 2017, and her husband was up for a prize. He went to bed cross and nervy, he woke up cross and nervy. The decorator had returned. Did you know you have a parking ticket, he called from the door. Her husband was livid. He had parked on double yellows she observed reasonably, but he did not think it was reasonable at all. I LIVE ON THIS STREET, he shouted. IT’S MY STREET. Anyway there weren’t any spaces from here all the way to St Philip’s Road. He couldn’t work out how to seal the parking-fine envelope and that made him even crosser. He didn’t want to go to London or to read, he didn’t want the deflation of not having won something he hadn’t asked for in the first place. She felt for him, his prickles and bristles, which were so much less pronounced than her own, nearly invisible, worn smooth with age.
All her emails angered her. She walked down the garden and snapped the last dahlias, fiercely. The lawn was full of little heaps of coiled mud. Worm casts. Upstairs, she looked them up. Earthworms are hermaphrodite animals that pair up to exchange semen. Eggs are deposited in the soil in lemon-shaped egg sacs. Worms sounded fun, a regular orgy on the greensward, she for one would not seek to prevent them.
Her husband was hunched at his chair, his head poking forward like a turtle. You’re filling the house with your nervousness, Kathy told him. You’re making a complex architecture of anxiety and fear. He was very twitchy, they both were. She wanted him to win and she also thought as he did that prizes were dreadful, that comparisons had no place in art. Still, they shouldered on. He left first, damp-palmed in corduroy. She couldn’t find the right clothes, it was one of those days where her skin and hair felt coated in a thin layer of grease, when nothing hung right. Her socks had holes, oh well. She loved him, that was her dress, each element a sequin. She fell asleep on the train, she got off at Embankment and walked across the bridge, pausing to inspect a damp shirt caught in a railing. She met him in Eat, fed him bolognese at an Italian chain on the Southbank. The realisation of the grandeur of the occasion crept up on them slowly. Girls were getting into lifts in silk dresses and heels. There were long queues for press tickets. He was focusing his nervousness on some fruit plates he’d seen in the green room, which would apparently be removed at six on the dot. They had pineapple and melon, he told her sadly. She sent him on and queued alone.
The foyer filled up. Alex was at the bar, also Rebecca. Jack was somewhere in the building, she hadn’t seen him since they kept frequenting the same cafe in New York. Amy, Katherine, maybe Chris. She was too jumpy to talk to anyone, she held her phone like an alibi and snuck round the back to the second-floor bar to sink a secret beer. Her ticket said C9. The tannoy was demanding haste. Then someone was on stage mourning the death of a poet, not Ashbery, and then there was her husband in his washed and worn old jacket, looking pleased and very shy. He read last, and when he got to a line about an entire bowl she gasped. Every word came out clean. We’re a monstrous pair of crows, devoted to a singular being.
All the poets filed off stage. Her attention was caught by a green silk skirt, a mustard dress. But he’d won! It was his name. As he climbed back up a man behind her said he has got a nice face. Earlier the same man had been talking apologetically about Times Square, that there were too many people. Well there were too many people and his face was fantastic. He hadn’t prepared a speech, of course. Thank you, he said. Thank you all. She couldn’t get to him for ages, and when she could there were people intersecting and also in the verges. Peter said I’m Peter, I know you’re Peter, she told him reassuringly. They waited a long time for a drink and drank them too fast, he was talking to a former student and was so happy he honestly couldn’t get a word out. Briefly they saw the party, luckily train-wise she knew the quickest place to get a cab. It was all stops and starts, Waterloo Bridge, Euston Road, talking of all things about the paedophile. They couldn’t sleep, they were too excited, they lay there whispering and making up songs, I love you, she said and placed herself entirely in his arms.
The next day was the equinox, the next day was her last day in England. Entirely unencumbered sky, the blue of flags and sailors. There was a heavy dew, she had an unfortunate headache that ran through her left eye and out the base of her skull, a metal bar with spikes. She had to collect currency and pack, she had to wrap up her life and sail away in her small boat, the one she now disparaged. She didn’t want to be alone, she was done with it, it was yesterday’s gig and no doubt tomorrow’s. I’m going to be sick she said and ran upstairs and was. The pain was inte
nse, she rocked under the duvet, mumbling and weeping. Then it lifted enough to dip into her emails, while he lay beside her crooning. Now this is where we live and when you come back it’s our eight-week wedding anniversary, and an eight on its side means infinity so then we’re permanent, which wasn’t true but was nice to think about.
The headache passed, it got smaller and smaller until she forgot it. She tried to check in but there’d been an error with her ticket, someone had typed her date of birth in wrong, reducing her to 38. She rang American Airlines and was given a complicated list of things she’d need to do to be able to fly. She did them, but apparently it was the wrong list. After multiple conversations a man with a beautiful voice told her it was going to be okay. You have your ESTA? You have a valid passport? You gone be okay. Earlier that blue afternoon she had gone to the post office for her money and waited behind a woman who was trying to send mail to California. Next time you have to fill in a customs form, the postmaster told her. Customs can be very pedantic. He said something else and at the door she called back I’m not Japanese. I thought she was Japanese, the man said, baffled and clearly a little hurt. Maybe she’s Korean. She looked Japanese. He counted Kathy’s money very carefully, he had a little pad to dabble his fingers but it wasn’t enough, he found a bottle of water lurking behind the till and moistened the pad. Do you see what I’m doing here, he asked her. It’s so I can go faster. Fifty fifty twenty twenty ten five one. The queue was long, it is not easy to get away.
That night she moved beds three times, she kept waking up thinking someone was in the kitchen. She came in to him at 1:30, his fumbling hand found her and hung on. She listened to him breathing, the long apnoeic gaps. She wasn’t the first person to do this, she wasn’t even the first person to write down what it felt like. She was breathless with love for him, the warm sleeping animal, the golden eyes that opened and peered at her fondly. Pip, he said. My Pip.
He woke her at 7:30 with tea, back in her own bed by then. 23 September 2017. They clung together. It was unprecedented, this departure. She’d never left a husband behind before. He was driving her to the airport, I am, that’s all there is to it, even though she already had a train ticket, even though she was mad with terror lest he die in a crash. The cases were assembled, they both zipped up, all the chargers were aligned between socks and knickers, nobody could contest that she had her stuff, minus the Gucci loafers that wouldn’t fit and which she’d regret for weeks to come. They were quiet in the car, clutching hands and fiddling with the aircon, the trees small yellow torches, sometimes advanced to scarlet flares. It was England, she’d miss it, even as it became unrecognisable, officially racist. The worry about checking in was overwhelming her, they hit traffic on the M40, she counted each minute and yanked at her lip. But it was all fine, Pip it’s all fine, they parked and wheeled, they had plenty of time.
At the baggage drop a young yawning man took her passport. You look tired, she said. I am, but I also have something in my eye. He scrubbed at it like a child, interrogating her about her plans, the consecutive days she’d spend doing this and that. She wanted to be through and home, he stamped her ticket, she was good to go. They had time for a coffee, no one could stop them, they had a whole ocean of minutes before he had to leave. This is very watery he said, and biting into a brownie this contains orange essence. She’d never loved anyone before, not really. She’d never known how to do it, how to unfold herself, how to put herself on one side, how to give. His dear old face, his dear new face, all hers. He kissed her very hard three times and then he got into the lift and she looked and looked until the door removed him.
That was it, she was on her own, with her wheelie case and tote bag, her knackered old coat. She showed her passport to anyone that cared. She was small, she was loose, she was 100% married. She went through security, which left her where. In the interstitial zone, between Dixons and Ted Baker, a speaker blasting all the old songs, want and love and show me. She’d parked herself by the door to the multi-faith prayer room, people went shuffling by in twos and threes. Her flight was at 2:30, she had three hours, she was already up in the air. She loved him, she loved him. Nick DMed her. How many dreary bepenised bores did they have to blow out of the way to get that decision right, he asked. It hadn’t stopped. It would all keep going on and on, with or without her. Kim Jong-un had called Trump a dotard, perhaps they’d all be blown to smithereens. Still, ants at least would proceed, building up their infinite cities, stealing honey from the cupboards. She held on to her bag. She waited for her flight. She loved him, she loved him. Love is the world, pain is the world. She was in it now, she was boarding, there was nowhere to hide.
Something Borrowed
‘The cheap 12 inch sq. marble tiles behind speaker at UN always bothered me. I will replace with beautiful large marble slabs if they ask me.’: @RealDonaldTrump, Twitter, 3 October 2012.
‘Wants go so deep there is no way of getting them out of the body’: Kathy Acker, Great Expectations (Grove Weidenfeld, 1982), p. 127.
‘more delicate than my cunt’: Kathy Acker, postcard to Jonathan Miles, 20 December 1982, in Chris Kraus, After Kathy Acker (Allen Lane, 2017), p. 204.
‘always a john and never a hooker’: Zoe Leonard, ‘I want a president’, 1992.
‘I’m a totally hideous monster. I’m too ugly to go out into the world’: Kathy Acker, The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec [1975], in Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels (Pantheon, 1992), p. 194.
‘I thought you didn’t notice me because I’m so invisible’: Kathy Acker, Translations of the Diaries of Laure the Schoolgirl [1983], in Eurydice in the Underworld (Arcadia, 1997), p. 107.
‘I’m born poor St Helen’s Isle of Wight. 1790. As a child I have hardly any food to eat’: Kathy Acker, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula [1973], in Portrait of an Eye, p. 10.
‘I never saw such terrified people in my life as a group of young men who had run away from Mosul waiting to be vetted by Iraqi security to see if they were former IS fighters. Two men of military age went into a tent for questioning. They were carried to the camp hospital on stretchers two hours later covered in blood.’: Patrick Cockburn, ‘End Times in Mosul’, London Review of Books, Vol. 39, No. 17, 17 August 2017, pp. 25–6.
‘I’m born crazy in the Barbican’: Kathy Acker, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, in Portrait of an Eye, p. 23.
‘I’m crazy as a bedbug’: Kathy Acker, letter to Jackson Mac Low, 7 July 1973, quoted in Chris Kraus, After Kathy Acker, p. 82.
‘I could lead more of my double sexual life in SF etc’: Kathy Acker, letter to Jackson Mac Low, July 1973, quoted in Chris Kraus, After Kathy Acker, p. 85.
‘a tree which is the world which is my back’: Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School (Pan Books, 1984), p. 47.
‘It was almost an intuitive thing. I was still in the bathroom – in the crime scene. I don’t even think I’d stood up. I just typed and typed.’: Amber Amour, ‘Why I Instagrammed My Rape’, Marie Claire, 6 June 2016.
‘My first order as President was to renovate and modernize our nuclear arsenal. It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before . . . . . . Hopefully we will never have to use this power, but there will never be a time that we are not the most powerful nation in the world!’: @realDonaldTrump, Twitter, 9 August 2017.
‘The city panics. Bombers terrorists’re going to take over!’: Kathy Acker, The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, in Portrait of an Eye, p. 205.
‘Maybe you’re dying and you don’t care anymore. You don’t have anything more to say. In the nothingness, the gray, islands almost disappear into the water.’: Kathy Acker, Florida, in Literal Madness (Grove Press, 1987), p. 397.
‘the flesh on the back of his hands was loose like pieces of wet newspaper’
‘most of the dead bodies lay on their stomachs and were naked scorched black’
‘round black balls lay in the sand’
‘a child tried to get milk out of her dead mother’s br
easts’: Kathy Acker, My Death My Life By Paolo Pasolini [1984], in Literal Madness, p. 315.
‘the only thing I want is all-out war’: Kathy Acker, ibid., p. 233.
‘disgusting putrid horror-face’: Kathy Acker, Kathy Goes to Haiti [1978], in Literal Madness, p. 86.
‘Let’s communicate w/out hate in our hearts’: @FLOTUS, Twitter, 12 August 2017.
‘The Holocaust was said to have happened in the 40s, when information was exactly six million times harder to come by than today. Also, all of the “evidence” was sealed behind the iron curtain, so no one could even investigate the sites where it was supposed to have happened until the 90s’: Andrew Anglin, Daily Stormer, 12 August 2017.
‘evidence that any more than a few people died of starvation and disease in these work camps’: Andrew Anglin, Daily Stormer, 12 August 2017.