Great Expectations Read online

  “Listen, Cynthia. I fucked so many girls, I took them up to this penthouse sauna and swimming pool someone lent me. Beautiful girls pass each other on the stairway. Limbs disappear in the shadow, and then there’s nothing else.

  I’m living with a girl. I don’t even know her.”

  PROPERTIUS IS TELLING CYNTHIA WHO HIS CURRENT GIRLFRIEND IS. “The more I knew she was fucking the men she met through me behind my back, the more I’d do anything for her—crazed because I knew every move she made was planning to leave me. By allowing female emotions, I drive them away. Then it all stopped, she ran away with her other boyfriend.

  “So I want you.

  “If you’re not obsessed for me, bitch, you’re going to drink blood—you now living off your grandmother’s capitalist hoard though blowing more—your food whatever you eat must always stink of rotten guts, human, always always you must regret everything you are. The thoughts that have to be imaginings must make you victim eat you, hole. You’re looking everywhere you’re looking everywhere you’re looking everywhere you’re looking everywhere: Every human is so stupid there’re only ravenous wolves. Cats and dogs now gone wild are gnawing the crumbling white concrete blocks. Long red pointed fingernails separate the cunt lip flesh, then digging into the soft purple, and around the protrusion of the nipple right there, another fingernail.

  There are no more images. This is what it is, this is why you can’t run from me. There’s only obsession.

  “Love will turn on the lover and gnaw.”

  Propertius is down on his knees because he’s helpless.

  “Last night I had a dream Cynthia. You were standing over me, the ring I had given you, your finger, your hand white palm outstretched. You said the following words to me:

  ‘I didn’t mean to tell your girlfriend was fucking around but 1) you had just told me I wasn’t a female because I have a ‘career’ and because I’m not a female no man will love me. That hurt. 2) You set up the terms of the relationship, but I was thinking about you all the time, so you said STAY RATIONAL at a time I wasn’t rational: this was confusing me. I explained my identity-desperation by telling you I had known your girlfriend was two-timing you that was why I loved you. But the second I just mentioned the first word, explosion!, so I backed off: I just heard gossip, the gossip was old she wasn’t fucking anyone else. I’m wrong to listen to gossip. Let me be hurt. 3) I said ‘Propertius is no more,’ but my body reacted: I cut a razor blade through my flesh so I could see the flesh hole revealing two thin purple-blue-gray wires which frightened and reminded me of my mother’s chin three days after she committed suicide, the body gets sick. I’m not a woman who takes shit, but

  ‘Why do I like you so much? I like you so much you’re necessary to the continuing of my existence right now and I don’t understand this at all, I just know it’s true.’

  Cynthia walked away from me, and I woke up.”

  PROPERTIUS TALKS TO CYNTHIA WHO ISN‘T IN FRONT OF HIM. “I don’t want you, slut, because love is mad and I don’t want to be mad.”

  My mother committed suicide and I ran away. My mother committed suicide in a hotel room because she was lonely and there was no one else in the world but her, wants go so deep there is no way of getting them out of the body, no surgery other than death, the body will hurt. There are times when there is no food and those times must be sat through.

  I ran away from pain.

  What is, is. No fantasy. Pain. Just the details: the streets, the green garbage bag a bum’s sleeping next to, a friend, too much time no time, too much to eat not enough to eat, going to a movie with Jeffrey I don’t know if the world is better or worse than it has been I know the only anguish comes from running away.

  Dear mother,

  End

  THE BEGINNING

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  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  First published in 1982

  This edition published in Penguin Classics 2018

  Copyright © Kathy Acker, 1982

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Cover photograph Roxy 2 from the Punk series, 1977 © Karen Knorr with Olivier Richon

  Author photograph © Mark Baker/Photoshot/Getty Images

  ISBN: 978-0-241-35215-1