Great Expectations

by Kathy Acker

  I’d like to fuck you when you return from London,

  Yours,

  Rosa

  Dear Steve Maas,

  Why don’t you give some of the money you are making off the Mudd Club to the poor starving artists who’re supporting it? Diego says you’re a millionaire now. Michael Betsy many of my friends, you know who they are, are desperate. You’re always saying you want to do something for art and you understand what art is. If you understand what art is, you wouldn’t be a power-monger: you’d let artists have the door at least between twelve and two, not between nine and eleven—as it is now—before anyone’s even allowed in the club.

  Yours,

  Rosa

  Dear God,

  I used to complain that the world isn’t fair. Now I don’t think the world isn’t fair. I don’t think. Have you made me into a lobotomy case? Has the world turned me into a lobotomy case? You are the world. I wish there was a man here who could put me back in touch with the world,

  Love,

  Rosa

  “You’ll be a friend to me, won’t you?”

  “I’ll try. But you know, it’s not easy to be your friend.”

  “It isn’t? Why?”

  “Oh, I’m such a mite of a thing and you’re so gorgeous. You always know what you’re doing. You’re so sure of yourself you could crush me. You make me feel like I’m nothing, I know you don’t mean it.”

  “No one loves me, I lead this horrible life. Don’t think I’m someone I’m not. I’m like a hermit a nothing, I think I’m one of the true innocents.”

  “You not being hermetic with me. You’re open and friendly!” Rosa, the pupil in the Nuns’ House says.

  “How can I help it, sweetie? You fascinate me.”

  “Me?” Rosa half-questions and, half-teasing, pretends to question. “It’s too bad Peter doesn’t feel it.”

  The girls in the Nuns’ House heard endlessly every detail of Peter’s and Rosa’s relations.

  “Peter adores you!” O, the orphan who’s the new pupil exclaims, fiercely blazing if Peter doesn’t adore Rosa she’ll make him do it.

  “Well … he likes me,” Rosa begins to own up, twists her fingers in each other there’s still a bit of a question, “I know he does. Our arguments are my fault. My mind won’t stay still. I’m never contented. Everything dissatisfies me. Still … he CAN be ridiculous!”

  O’s eyes demand what can possibly be ridiculous about gentle Peter. These days none of the boys are gentle.

  “He never buys me coffee (Rosa means ‘he never buys me expensive meals’) … and he manipulates me I know he’s manipulating me he’s waving things over my head like marriage he knows I want to get married and he’s using my want to control me even though he’s a wimp.” Rosa answers as if everything she’s saying is absolutely true.

  O’s realizing in a world where affection’s possible she will have none. Consciousness of this pain gives her power. She without thinking grabs Rosa’s hands and says, “Please, be my friend. I need affection.”

  “I’ll be your friend,” Rosa replies straightway, “though you’re so far above me you must have lots of friends. I’ll be true to you and if I ever let you down, please understand, I don’t mean to let you down, I’m just weak. I don’t know anything about myself. You help me find who I am. You talk straight to me.”

  O hugs her friends and holds her in her arms. “Tell me, Rosa. Who is this Mr. Sadat?”

  Rosa shakes. Her eye pupils look slightly upwards.

  “Just before I came here, my brother and I met him.”

  “He’s Peter’s uncle.”

  “You don’t like him?”

  “Oh!” Rosa’s hands go over her face. “No.”

  “He says he loves you very much.”

  “Oh.” Rosa hugs her new resource (friend) even closer. “I don’t want to know … I don’t know what there is about him that makes me feel this way. It doesn’t make sense. I’m scared of him beyond any reason I know of. I think about him all the time. He terrifies me. He can get at me even when he’s not around. He’s evil. There’s no such thing as evil.”

  “What happened between you and him?”

  “I can’t talk now. I’m sorry. In a minute. Please don’t go away from me. I’ll be able to talk in a minute.”

  “He DID do something horrible, didn’t he?”

  “No … no. He’s very kind. He acts as he should. He never SAYS anything.”

  “And yet …?”

  “He doesn’t say anything, but I know, I know it’s true. He wants to have power over me he almost has power over me, I can hardly fight. He always acts kind to me. I have no reason to think this. I can’t tell it to anyone. I’m mad. When I’m playing piano, his eyes are always on my hands. When I’m singing I’m a horrible singer, his eyes are always on my lips. He’s telling me he’s controlling me I’m accepting that I’m accepting our nonverbal agreement. I don’t look at him. That doesn’t matter. Every now and then my eyes have to brush by his our eyes meet just for a second, this means I agree I’m under his spell. Sometimes he’s so powerful but he’s not there, do you know what I mean, he’s like a robot. I don’t have any way of talking to him.”

  “What could he actually want from you?”

  “I don’t know. All I do is fear. I can’t see beyond fear.”

  “Did anything else happen tonight?”

  “No. Tonight his look was more compelling … his eyes stood on me more unmovingly than they ever have. He was holding me in his arms tonight. I couldn’t bear the darkness. I cried out. Don’t tell this to anyone. It’s not true. Whatever you do don’t tell Peter, please don’t mention a word to Peter because he’s Peter’s uncle. Tonight you said you’re strong, you don’t know what fear is, please please be strong for me. I used to not know what fear is. I used to have the strength to believe what I feel is real and my affection for people makes me human. I can talk to you. You can’t go away. Don’t reject me. I’m scared now that I’m asking you you’ll walk away.”

  The lustrous gypsy-face droops over those clinging arms and chest; the wild black hair falls over the thin form. The intense eyes hold a sleeping burning energy, now softened by compassion and wonder. Let the man who’s concerned NOTICE this!

  Mr. Anwar Sadat’s monologue:

  I’m seeing everything I’ve ever done rise up before me, just as they are; I have to see (face) everything, nothing is left untouched. I must see everything face-to-face, every action I do, and only finally when that is over, when I’m no longer horror, will I be free.

  War is coming. I hate to say it, but it is. A more devastating war than before and the end of the world as we now know this world. There will be no more money, not much food or heat, diseases rampage, and fear hallucination will reign. It will be the days of nothing and the days of a kind of plenty where there are no causes and effects. There’s no way to prepare for horror. Language like everything else will bear no relations to anything else. The business corporations who’ll run the war are now bringing triple amounts of heroin and coke into this country to prepare the citizenship for soldiery. “Another?” says this woman, in a querulous rattling whisper. “Have another?”

  The Lascar dribbles at the mouth. The graves are still.

  “What visions can SHE have? Visions of more butcher shops and bars and MasterCharge cards? More and more people dying to throw their useless money away eat eat this horrible bed without these bodies on it this wall smooth and sanitary? What relations can drugged-up people have?”

  He listens to the mutterings.

  “Unintelligible!”

  Culture has been chattering and chattering but to no purpose. When a sentence becomes distinct, it makes no more sense or connection. Wherefore the watcher says again “Unintelligible,” nods his head, and smiles gloomily. He puts a few coins on the table, grabs a cap, gropes his way down the broken stairs, mumbles good-morning to some rat-ridden super sitting in an old plastic chair under the stairs, and passes out.


  Dear Peter,

  I’m finding it very hard to live without you.

  The whole day long, in that rather too countrified house at Tansonville, which had the air merely of a place to rest in when out for a stroll or during a shower, one of those houses in which every drawing-room gives the effect of a summerhouse, and where, in the bedrooms, on the wallpaper of one of the roses of the garden, and on the wallpaper of the other birds from the trees have come to join you and keep you company (but one by one, at any rate, for these are old-fashioned wallpapers, on which each rose is so distinct it could have been picked if it had been real, and each bird could be put in a cage and tamed) having none of the pretentious interior decorating of the rooms of this day, in which, on a silver background, all of apple trees of Normandy stand out sharply in Japanese style, to fill with fantasies these hours spent closeted up—that whole day I remained in my room, which looked out on the beautiful verdure of the estate and the lilacs at the entrance border, on the tall trees at the edge of the water, their green foliage glistening in the sunlight, and on the forest of Meseglise. The only reason, at bottom, why I enjoyed looking at Proust’s words was because I said to myself, “It’s pleasant to have so much verdure at my bedroom window,” until suddenly, in the vast, verdant picture I recognized—but brushed by contrast in deep blue simply because it was farther away—the spire of the church at Combray, not a representation of that spire, but the spire itself, which, bringing thus before my eyes distance in both space and time, had come and outlined itself on my windowpane in the midst of the given foliage but in a very different tone, so dark that it almost seemed as if it had been merely sketched in. And, if I stepped out of my room for a moment, at the end of the hall, because the hall faced in a different direction, I caught sight of a band of scarlet, as it were, just the wall covering of a small drawing-room which was of simple mousseline, but red and quick to burst into flame if a ray of sun was falling on it.

  During our walks together, Gilberte talked to me about the way Robert was losing interest in her and increasing his attentions to other women. And it is true that his life was cluttered up with many affairs with women which, like certain masculine friendships in the lives of men who prefer women, had an air of hopelessly trying to defend their position and uselessly taking up space which, in most houses, characterizes objects that can serve no useful purpose.

  During our many walks together, Peter’s new girlfriend Shang-shi talked to me about the way Peter was losing interest in her and increasing his attentions to other women. And it is true that his life was cluttered up with many affairs with women which, like certain masculine friendships in the lives of men who prefer women, had an air of hopelessly trying to defend their position and uselessly taking up space which, in most houses, characterises objects that can serve no useful purpose.

  “How much?” I ask the taxi-driver.

  The taxi-driver answers, “A dollar—unless you wish to make it more.”

  I naturally say I have no wish to make it more.

  “Then it must be a dollar,” observes the taxi-driver. “I don’t want to get into trouble. I know HIM!” He blackly closes an eye at my lawyer Mr. Gordon’s name and shakes his head.

  The Underworlds Of The World

  Anwar Sadat climbs up a broken staircase, opens the door in front of him, looks into a dark stifling room, and says, “Are you alone now?”

  “I’m always alone. Worse luck for me, deary, and better for you,” a croak replies. “Come in, come in, whoever you are: I can’t see you ’til I light this match, I recognize your voice I think. I know you, don’t I?”

  “Light that match and see.”

  “Oh oh deary I will oh oh, my hand is shaking so I can’t put it on a match all of a sudden. And I cough so (cough cough) everytime I put these matches down they jump around, I never know where they are. Oh oh oh. They’re jumping around, this damn cough, like living things. Are you planning to go somewhere, deary?”

  “No.”

  “Not planning to go on a long trip?”

  “No way.”

  “Well, there are people who travel by land and people who travel by sea. I’m the mother of both. I provide men with everything. Not like that Jack Chinaman Ludlow Street. He don’t know what it is to father farther and mother. He don’t know how to cut this, he charges what I charge and more, much much more, whatever he’ll get. Here’s a match, sweetie, uh-oh. Where’s that candle? I never could stand electric lights. Everytime I start to cough, I cough out twenty of those damn matches before I get one lit. (She manages to light a match before she starts heaving again.) My lungs are gone! (Yellow phlegm) Oh oh oh!” While she’s grabbing for her breath she can’t see, all of her senses are dead, except the senses of coughing; now it’s over—eyes open—life returning, “Oh, you.”

  “You’re surprised to see me?”

  “Aren’t you dead?”

  “Why do you think I’m dead?”

  “You’ve been away from me for so long. How can you stay alive for three hours without me? Something bad must have happened to you?”

  “Not at all. A relative died.”

  “Died of what, deary?”

  “Probably, death.”

  Beginning her process and starting to bubble and blow at the faint spark enclosed in the hollow of her hands, she speaks from time to time, in a tone of snuffling satisfaction, without leaving off.

  WHERE DO EMOTIONS COME FROM, ARE EMOTIONS NECESSARY, WHAT DO EMOTIONS TELL US ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS?

  She gives the man her brown leather bag.

  She is sitting next to a man and her ass is bare on the taxicab fake leather.

  He is reaching down into her blouse and making her pull off her clothes.

  He’s leaving her alone and she doesn’t know how to handle an alien world.

  He takes her somewhere she’s never been before.

  His hands are touching her sweater.

  His hands are lifting her sweater up her back.

  His hands are running down the outward slope of her ass.

  His right hand’s third finger is sitting in her asshole and his right hand thumb is an inch in her cunt.

  He makes her cry out sharply.

  His right hand is pushing her down.

  His hard cock sticks into her hole.

  He thrusts into her asshole without using any lubrication.

  His knees stick into her face.

  He explains to her she’s not going to know.

  His strong arm pulling on her arms is lifting her to her feet.

  He shows her his whip.

  One of his hands lies on her left shoulder.

  He tells her she can expect he will hurt her mentally and physically.

  He hurts her physically to give her an example.

  He tells her there are no commitments and she has to let him make all the decisions, she won’t make any more decisions.

  IS THERE ANY NEED FOR EMOTION?

  He says to her, “Nothing you have, even your mind, is yours anymore. I’m a generous man. I’m going to give you nothing.”

  She’s turning around and catching his eyes staring at her as if he loves her.

  She is sitting next to him and listening to him talk.

  He is saying that it no longer matters what she thinks and what her choices are.

  He is saying that he is the perfect mirror of her real desire and she is making him that way.

  His eyes are not daring to meet her eyes.

  He is walking back and down and in front of her.

  He is dialing her phone number on the phone.

  He’s telling her to wait without any clothes on for him to come over.

  He’s telling her to throw out certain identities and clothes he doesn’t like.

  He’s telling her he doesn’t have any likes or dislikes so there’s no way she can touch him.

  He’s telling her he’s a dead man.

  She’s laying out her clothes and wondering which one�
��s the softest.

  She’s wondering if she’s going to die.

  She is waiting for this man who says he’s not her lover by trying to guess what he wants.

  He is telling her iron becomes her.

  He is seizing her by the throat and hair.

  She is thinking that it is not a question of giving her consent and it is never a question of choice.

  So what use is emotion? What use is anything? Oh, oh, she isn’t understanding.

  NOT ONLY IS THERE NO ESCAPE FROM PERCEIVING BUT THE ONLY WAY TO DEAL WITH PAIN IS TO KILL ONESELF TOTALLY BY ONESELF. SUICIDE HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE MOST DIFFICULT OF HUMANITY’S PROBLEMS.

  Caress the tips of your nipples.

  I’m giving you away so you have no choice who your teacher is.

  Take off your skirt.

  Suck me.

  You don’t care who you fuck.

  Sex is only physical.

  Play with your clit.

  You’ll obey me without loving me.

  When you arrive, your eyes show happiness.

  My hands are rubbing your breasts.

  My lips are touching your breasts.

  My lips are your lips.

  When will you bring your whip?

  I’m doing everything I can to understand.

  I’m doing everything I can to control.

  I’m doing everything I can to love (name).