O and Ange

BEFORE THE DAYS OF DREAMING

O, a woman and a Jew. Her father’s family, originally in Spain, first emigrated to Morocco, then on to Algeria.

It was the days when women were economically either wives or whores . . .

O: “How can I do this? Begin.

“Begin what?

“The only thing in the world that’s worth beginning: the end of the world.”

O, being a whore, had to find the origin of whoredom:

Alexandra, one of Cleopatra’s friends, had loved Cleopatra so deeply that she had tried to persuade Anthony to be both kind and gentle to his paramour’s children.

In order to please Alexandra, the first princess, Herod the Great had made her seventeen-year-old son into a priest. The boy was beautiful. Herod drowned him.

Of this Alexandria, no longer anything remains.

O remembered the poet saying that Alexandria is replete with men who are sick, solitary, prophetic. All those who have been deeply wounded in their sex. When O came to Alexandria, the air was as dry as the wings of insects. There were neither male solitaries nor male prophets. For such men were found only in the white world and that world had died.

Here, O thought, lies the center of all prostitution.

O began to dream that she was in the whorehouse for which she had been looking. She wasn’t anywhere yet. She had already passed by “The Brothel of the Virgins.”

O:

“I entered the most famous whorehouse in Alexandria.

“These are the names of some of the whores:

“Whore #1, Ange, twenty-one years old, politically mature, a professional imagination, a sweetheart only when she comes into contact with children, or with anyone (men, women, or other categories, sedentary, semisedentary, and nomadic) uninterested in money. Ange lucidly believes in the progress of this country.

“I HAVE NEVER FORGOTTEN HER.

“Two years ago, Ange was put into the prison of M—. There, though still lucid and generous, she was broken. I saw her bruises.

“Thus, in shit begins the new world.

“Whore #2, Barbara, in older days left Egypt for France in order to continue her studies. Classical ones. Some days off the ship in the harbor of Marseilles, to her consternation she learned that she would have to do whatever she would have to do in order to survive there, and so she returned to her activities of the night. What I am saying is that in order to earn the right to education in the Western world, it was necessary for the whores who were not from the Western world to be at war and to continue teaching themselves.

“ ‘You fuckers,’ said Barbara. Finally sick of whoring, every morning, to earn her right to education, she got up at four, in order, for the rest of the day, to work her ass off in the shipyards of Midnight-by-the-Sea. A machine cut off her right foot; despite that, or in despite, whenever possible from then on, she came to the aid, effectively and materially, of those whose social origin was named Misery. Misery due to exile. Exile, whose other name is Delayed Death, is the fate of all those who live in the realm of racism.

“Barbara, now known as St. Barbara, again inhabits an Alexandrian whorehouse.

“Whore #3. She sleeps all the time. Her name is Louise Vanaen de Voringhem. While she’s sleeping, her record player blares. Not that she’s got anything against music. But she has to sleep because she’s been so worn down by work.

“Some day Louise Vanaen will have to get up, and one day she did. Because her body wanted to wake. Immediately she walked toward the source of her music. Suddenly she was thrown to the ground and cut in her left eye. A neighbor, one of the many Algerians Armenians Bedouins Egyptians Vietnamese surrounding the brothel, hearing screams which he recognized as unusual, ran over to the house, gun in hand. In order to defend herself, with this neighbor’s help, she mortally wounded her attacker by cutting off his balls.

“For this reason, Sister Louise was convicted of voluntary homicide. For this reason: she was Arab and her rapist was white. Since only her natal family was allowed to visit her, there, in jail, and they lived far away, Louise Vanaen dwelled in solitary for many years.

“Her family was poor.

“In her prison, the whore Louise Vanaen began to dream of a revolution, a revolution of whores, a revolution defined by all methods that exist as distant, as far as is possible, from profit.

“Among other things, Louise wrote this to her sisters:

“ ‘These pages smell of women.

“ ‘I perceive more clearly during sex. All the lips, all the fists: it’s necessary to have the deepest discipline so that all these, so that everything, can be seen. In the brothel, where women are talking, where the women are cooking, lips on lips, hands on hands: all the world is at peace.’

“ ‘In these rooms of sleep and of dream,’ she continued in another of her letters which will become famous after history has gone to sleep, ‘we will walk around, brushing by each other, touching each other without actually touching. There we shall affirm everyone, even flesh that is bourgeois, the flesh that likes to be done but not to do, the flesh that is the object of desires.’

“From these letters, St. Barbara developed her political theory of religion: Every revolution starts in a church or in the place of the church because churches and brothels do not have windows that lead to what lies outside. And so are refuges to all the shipwrecked of the world.

“To you, Barbara, courage. Courage for all of you, the generosity that inhabits prostitution.”

Ange, St. Barbara, Louise Vanaen de Voringhem, and the rest of the whores learned that if language or words whose meanings seem definite are dissolved into a substance of multiple gestures and cries, a substance which has a more direct, a more visceral capacity for expression, then all the weight that the current social, political, and religious hegemonic forms of expression carry will be questioned. Become questionable. Finally, lost.

The weight of culture: questioned and lost.

“I’ve been so tired lately,” Lulu, another prostitute, complained, “that nothing’s turning me on.”

Ange replied, “That’s the fate of us who are prostitutes.”

Lulu and Ange decided to masturbate so they could find a reason to live.

Lulu, starting to masturbate: “My mind’s all over the place so I can’t do this right now.” After some time had passed, “No. Not now.”

Ange, who was doing the same thing, muttered, “Me too.”

Lulu: “Now we’re entering the night.”

Entering the night resembled entering a room. Entering through those narrow doorways, the room could be glimpsed. The halls’ walls were pale green. A lighter green than the color of the walls of most of childhood.

Lulu: “Here’s a toilet. No, I don’t want a toilet. Now, turn the door’s handle and walk in. It’s necessary to sidle in sideways . . . Why did I just stop feeling anything?”

In order to live, Lulu needed to be in the realm of sex.

Lulu: “Body, talk.

“While I masturbate, my body says: Here’s a rise. The whole surface, ocean, is rippling, a sheet that’s metal, wave after wave. As it (what’s this it?) moves toward the top, as if toward the neck of a vase, it crushes against itself moving inward and simultaneously it increases in sensitivity. The top of the vase, circular, is so sensitive that all feelings, now circling around and around, all that’s moving, are now music.

“Music is my landscape.

“Deep down, at the bottom. Whatever is bottom is so deep that it’s spreading away from its center . . . Toward what? Opening up to whom? Opening up only to sensitive. Sensation is the lover.

“If I could move down there, down the rabbit’s hole, I would never stop coming . . .

“Never never . . .

“And I want to come and come and come . . .

“. . . why?. . .

“The middle ring, or the ring around the middle of the shaft, is doing most of the feeling, but now it’s slipping downward. If this tunnel, which the ring’s slipping down, becomes rigid, there won’t be any more sensation. No sensation is nothing. If this tunnel becomes rigid, there’ll be nothing. I must make my world out of nothing. Relaxation’s opening the field, but I don’t dare—I’m holding back—open to being a rose; a rose unfolds again and again until the nerves drive the flesh into pure nerves; they are—I’m closing again (becoming rigid)—these are the rhythms of the labyrinth.

“The vibrations (pleasure) are taking over. Now any desire to stop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . oh yes, there it goes; this disappearance of it causes laughter; laughter’s a threshold that’s soon reached.

“As soon as I went over this threshold, for the first time I began to play; I was opening and opening to the point that I could touch being pure nerves.

“In the realm of being pure nerves, to touch is to be touched: every part of mind, body and feeling is relaxing so much that sensation has domain. When I came, the spasms traveled all the way down the funnel, to its bottom, where there was an opening. Then or there, everything disappeared; the world or everything became more sexual.

“My hole opened up into only opening: the vibrations intensified.

“Soon this world will be nothing but pleasure, the world in which we live and are nothing but desires for more intense and more intense joy.

“I want more now, I want every rose, all the major rows down there, but something is always going over. Again again. An animal. It would always come again: the animal claw.”

Thus Lulu entered the labyrinth.

She taught the whores to do this and all of them began to masturbate regularly.

Lulu: “I want to talk about being a criminal because that’s the only thing that makes sense to me now.”

*  *  *

Ange said to Lulu:

“Today I had to come by reading pornography.

“First, I took any book and just opened it. I was only going to read a few sentences until I became wet enough for my dildo to slip easily into my cunt. But the first sentence I read was about a woman who was beautiful and older seducing a very young boy who was just so hot for her that he would have come even if she had done nothing. This sentence turned me on to such an extent that I couldn’t remain at the edge of the text, I had to enter into those words, and this entering, as I sat there with a dildo up my cunt—I think that must look ugly—was a moving into the halls, with all their walls, there, of my rising sexual energies. I don’t think this space which I was now in was my body. . .

“I wasn’t in a body, but in a place.

“In my cunt, there’s a little animal, a type of fish, but it’s a mammal. A weasel-cat. The weasel-cat, who’s hungry, is sticking out its tongue . . .

“And so I came without language.

“My whole cunt is now this animal who’s becoming hungrier: mouth opens more widely, the clit is a tongue that licks, laps, is tapping like a foot, tapping what’s outside as if a floor. Eyes lie above this tongue. All my sensations are a sky. I could no longer talk. As soon as I stopped talking, everything turned white and the waves that were approaching, slowly, steadily, and very strongly, solid, solid, transformed into my blood, then into my bones; whatever had been the rhythms of my body inside my body were now rhythms outside. This is the meaning of mantra. The final orgasm will occur when my brains are making mantra.”

Lulu said to Ange: “I would smear the whole world with sperm.”

*  *  *

Here finally were the days of the beginning of happiness, when the heat and the yellow were dry. When the spine’s bottom rose up from its body:

“No,” exclaimed one whore, “I’m not going to masturbate today because, inside my cunt, the well where all is bottomless has come out so far, as if an animal is moving out of the hole, that I’m turning inside out. I’m scared. I’m scared . . . that if the animal gets o u t . . . god knows what might happen . . . I’ll never be able to stop coming, so it’ll have to be a new kind of world.

“But I don’t know if I can give up the pleasure of masturbating even for a day.”

St. Barbara was the first call-girl to tell a client to go get fucked so she could continue masturbating:

“Old-Filthy-Husband-Who-Kills-Off-Wives—this was a common term for ‘husband’ in Alexandria—Old-Scum-Tongue-Who-Can-Only-Lick-Off-Wives, Azzefonian, you’re just about to depart for the seas of Europe, right?”

“Right,” Azzefonian answered.

“Well, those waters stink of the cunts of women who don’t masturbate and other strange fish that cause diarrhea, whereas our cunts, O Legba, Eleggua La Flambeau, La Sirène, O Legba You Who Are Truly Us, our cunts are made from the sun and out of rubies. Cunts to whom we gave birth in the foyer of the end of the world. Our cunts are knives in our fists and the insides of our thighs are becoming darker.

“Come inside, come inside.”

Azzefonian, in love with white, went off to Europe.

*  *  *

Finally free of johns, the whores, now alone, spewed out bits of ink, words in ink, sexual or filthy words, words that were formed by the scars and wounds, especially those of sexual abuse, those out of childhood. All the women bore their wounds as childhoods. Therefore, words apocalyptic and apostrophic, punctuations only as disjunctions, disjunctions or cuts into the different parts of the body or of the world, everything priced and priced until, finally, all the numbers disappeared and were displaced by the winds:

Ventre, vente, vent.

These were only some of the elements of whore writing: all will never be named, for both word and self, whore, are always being lost because it is the winds who screw them.

(END OF THE FIRST WHORE-SONG)

Secret ContractsType. no.(2)General Security

General Index Card

Curriculum Vitae

Tripartite name: Aziz Salih Ahmad

Date of Birth: (left blank)

Profession: Fighter in the Popular Army

Activity: Violation of Women’s Honor

Journalist’s report:

Every major prison seems to have had its own specially equipped rape room (replete in one case with soft-porn pictures stuck on the wall opposite the surface being used).

. . . in the woman’s section of the Juweideh Prison, a section is called “adultery room.” Police roaming the streets outside apparently have the power to detain young and unmarried women in the company of men unrelated to them. The couple are taken to a medical officer who tests the girl’s virginity. If she is not virgin, the police immediately inform both families. The families negotiate the feasibility of marriage. Should the man refuse to marry the woman he was with, both are charged. Within two months, the man is released. But the woman is compelled to stay in prison beyond the period of her sentence.

Half the women in the adultery room of this prison had no sentences to serve. Some had been there five years; they had stayed because they needed protection from their families. The police did not take responsibility for a girl being shot or stabbed to death by a family member on the day of her release from prison.

In order to alleviate this situation, the police hunted for men who would marry the women in their custody. They found either old men looking for a new lease on life before they died or pimps.

Of this ancient world, very little will remain.

O now began to masturbate full-time, imagining every sailor, cock, hairs dripping from cock when wet, cats . . .

O:

“ . . . all this while masturbating. There’s farther to travel.

“Sailors, who’re pirates, journey into nonexistence or the world of the unfurling rose:

“I’m a man. I hold her head in my hands. Her finger, rotating inside my asshole, makes all the liquids move. All the liquors flow into the centers or my balls, two spheres which hang black down there.

“As her finger travels, the pressures of the liquids build. They’re going to shoot up through me into her hole.”

“Now it’s starting again the sensation’s deep down have to keep it there, deep down open, or else it, or all, or I, will stop. The problem’s the rigidity of everything and, above all, this must be prevented.”

“A map of rigidities: the world’s stopped. All feeling’s gone. What did I do wrong? Or what went wrong?”

“Feeling or sensation evaporates whenever the feeler—the subject here is the object—tries to perceive and understand a particular feeling or sensation.

“This doesn’t make sense anymore because I’m feeling too much. Any feeling is feeling too much.”

“It’s all over. The world’s stopped. Then, another round of feeling, like a wave, rises under the most recent, retreating wave. Each new wave’s bigger and stronger.”

“I think about him. Any thought or agitation which lies outside feeling, outside the space in which subject and object are the same, causes cessation.”

“oh yes baby starting to come too excited shaking eyes fading regular spasms contraction mouth is smiling going yes yes wants no open stay open I didn’t expect to come and I am now squeezing all legs and thighs around wrist while inside, in there, all the shakes

“I’m going to come harder now, in there, no end in sight”

“sailing, each series, starting with a high rise then swoop downward, each one more violent, direct”

“where is there an end to these convulsions?”

“Being with someone would be more violent.”

“I will turn again to dreams”

“the ocean; all the fish go crazy; see them all orange”

“now this final orgasm all stirred up: the walls become rigid and in between, there’s burning”

“today there’s no end”

“now I have to use my fingers to masturbate.”

“Later, the convulsions increased.”

“After this, the whores accepted me, O, as one of them.”

(END OF THE SECOND WHORE-SONG)

Even before this, O would say that she never wanted to be a master.

The Entrance of the Punk Boys

Among a hundred brothers him I greet

Who ate my heart and I his heart did eat.

According to the first of the dirty, filthy boys, the body is still in a process of being forged.

Especially his body—his name was Antonin Artaud— which was thin nasty sick mangled distorted ravaged by drugs and by desires which had been repressed by thinking.

The body, the kid said further, when not being robbed blind by family and religion, has an infinite capacity for self-transformation.

He had actually talked in a much more disgusting manner. Before he had died.

The punk boys were the ones who followed him. After his death.

All of them had fucked their mothers and were no longer colonized.

The growth of private property, one characteristic of the bourgeois industrial world, ceased; private property, in the form of multinational and extranational capital, returned to the hands of the few. Economic, therefore political, power seemed to be centralizing.

This decrease of the separation between private and public property, finally this disappearance, was directly related to a movement away from, and then to the passing away of the memory of, patriarchy.

In other words, the punks were one beginning of a new world.

Though these brats were at the edges of a new world, they had no idea how to relate to each other. For them, language just wasn’t a problem.

Though he had been the protopunk boy, Artaud was the one the punk boys publicly disavowed. Like him, they wanted to destroy.

They disavowed history, but they were the direct descendants of Heliogabalus of Alexandria, who had been made emperor at fourteen years of age. Heliogabalus despised his own government and was anarchistic. His reign was replete with murder, incest, and a lack of values.

The Alexandrian police cut Heliogabalus apart when he was eighteen years old, in the toilets of his own palace, and then threw his corpse outside on the dirt where two dogs happened to be pissing.

To be kissed by a punk boy was to be drawn to insanity or toward death. The last of the race of white men.

And to fuck one of them, said a girl who was doing just that, is to be drawn into murder.

Perhaps this was what happened to the prostitutes. They didn’t commence their violent actions because they had started masturbating. As O had thought. They began because the punk boys came to town and the whores got touched by these boys.

It was the days before the boys who came after the punk boys landed in England.

The boys taught the whores: “We’re not free because at any moment the sky could explode into shreds of flesh . . .

“Europe is far away . . . farther because the civilized West has disappeared . . . already shreds of flesh . . . without any explosion.”

The punks said further, “Terror is the answer for our times because we, whores and punks, cannot liberate ourselves by running away from horror, a horror that’s nameless.”

“But,” O replied, “I’ve already lived through horror. I won’t know where prostitution came from until I get rid of it.

“My mother’s inside me. She wants me to suicide because she suicided. I could try to find a father so there would be no more mother, but there are no fathers around.”

All of the whores agreed with O: it was the end of the white world.

It was at this time that O became friendly with a girl who also worked in the brothel, who had black hair and green eyes.

In order to figure out how to stop being a prostitute, O told her friend, Ange, this story about St. Gall Bladder:

“Until the world of water, earth, air, and light begins, all there can be is desire for water, earth, air, and light.

“St. Gall Bladder was running in the mountains. He was traveling through forests. In the woods, the dew dripped out of the cedars; hard, stiff stalks vibrated in the scintillating light. St. Gall Bladder stood up to his knees in dead spiders, mosses, saliva; soon all was a clarity: gold light and liquid. The gold of the air was that of the water.

“Below the cedars, bits of insect wings were lying on the high-tension cables; around the poles, the grass was virgin.

“St. Gall Bladder fell asleep on what was virgin . . .

“When St. Gall Bladder woke out of his dream of loneliness, he decided that it was time for him to return to the human world. He felt that now it was time for him to become nothing, to give everything away, and to go down into blackness, that blackness which is called the world that is under.

“ ‘When I’m nothing,’ he said out loud, ‘I’ll become human.’

“St. Gall Bladder went down and met some whores who were spread out on the ground. He walked up to them. During the Algerian war a bullet had blown a hole in his left thigh, so when one of the two prostitutes raised her eyes to him, she just as quickly lowered them.

“He seated himself between the two. ‘I entreat you, my sisters, be true to the earth. Do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestrial hopes.

“ ‘In times that were past, the soul looked contemptuously down at the body. This contempt was the supreme virtue. All the soul wanted was to escape . . .’

“ ‘Take some if you’re hungry,’ the slender whore replied.

“St. Gall Bladder grabbed a banana; he was just about to put the fruit to his lips; he glanced at this girl who was the younger of the prostitutes; his eyes were gleaming with wet dreams.

“The young girl took up one of the hands of her lover, whose name was Ange, and held it. Fingers that trembled while held down in that valley which felt like sand, where the sea began, then explosion after explosion, made the world tremble.

“St. Gall Bladder watched everything carefully.

“The whores explained to the saint that they were voyaging to the end of the night.

“One of them placed her swollen membranes over the saint’s face and the other licked his cock. For there was no way to be a whore anymore.

“Then they told him about the origin of prostitution: ‘We, and all the other prostitutes, come from the city of KaWeDe, where mothers eat their own children and afterwards fuck dogs. Now, it’s time for us to go back, for all whores to go back, for whores to return to their origins.

“ ‘Go to KaWeDe and tell them that hell is coming to them. Inform them that we are coming. That we’re going back to the source of prostitution and that only a saint who has had his day can be our messenger.’”

St. Gall Bladder became the messenger of revolution and the women set the brothel on fire. Flames leapt from this building to nearby buildings, to edifice after edifice. When there was nothing left that could burn in the city, the flames shifted toward the forest. Turning trees and air into black smoke, the fire touched the doves in their flight, and the vultures, and threw them, as they lacked breath, against the sun. Fire ate at the feet of the animals, who were racing, nostrils as wide open as mouths stuffed with living coals: the whole mountain was blazing.

Aware that he was beginning to suffocate, for he was now journeying through this forest, Bladder retired into the bathroom of the hut that had formerly been his hermitage. He picked up his own shit, rubbed it into his face, for he was a saint. Then Gall Bladder threw himself into the source of the river that ran through the woods. A gun, which had been left by a murderer, to his own eye.

“Enough blood. Enough hatred,” he said. “Turn to water. Turn cocks into water.”

The moment that his face touched the water, the saint shot himself. Blood spurted out of the skin, reddening the river burning under the smoke; his head rolled ball-like through the underwater billows while above, lions, serpents, pigs, even vultures, all chased by heat and smoke, passed and were passed by each other.

The corpse of the father was turning into water.

The crayfish hid under the dead man’s armpits and orange fish nibbled at his lips . . .

The whores were drunk.

O didn’t know whether she should leave with the other prostitutes. She began to dream about women.

She saw that she was in the room of a witch. It was colored pink-red. In its middle, there was a tweed couch. To the side of that, a Christmas tree.

The older woman proceeded to show O objects that scared her. O had to decide whether she would go through something more terrifying, a particular ceremony: if she went through it, she’d be allowed to enter the other world.

The other world lay in the upstairs of that apartment.

O felt two opposite emotions: her desire, her need to be in the other world accentuated her fright.

It was in the upstairs room that the witch showed O her crystal gun. O tossed it away. As soon as she had done this, she knew she shouldn’t have. That it was against rules which hadn’t yet been spoken. O also understood that the purpose of the ceremony, through which she still had to pass, was to scare her out of her mind.

“I don’t want to lose my mind.”

The ceremony began when O opened white business envelopes. O’s Visa slips sat in the first one. O had to see them. She had to realize that she always spent more money than she earned or would ever be able to. By overspending, O was placing herself in the position of her mother before her mother had suicided.

O wasn’t scared enough.

The second envelope held those plastic dolls made for the tops of birthday cakes. They were either cowboys or Indians. All of these carried insects in their mouths, under their chins, and inside their palms. The most horrible possible insects, such as scorpions. They had something to do with sex, but O didn’t understand what.

O wasn’t scared, because she was holding herself back because she was most scared of being scared, and yet she wanted to. She wanted to become scared out of her mind so she could cross into the unknown.

It was here, in the city that had burnt down, that O dreamed her last dream about herself and her friend:

“John, fingerfuck O.” Said Ange. Ange was directing her first play, perhaps in what had been the brothel’s theater. And John was the boyfriend of O’s only male friend in Alexandria.

The boy slowly inserted one of his middle fingers between O’s thick outer labia. “Is this okay?”

“Okay,” said O.

She was wearing a Kotex pad and the black cotton panties that she always had on whenever she had her period. These were the only underpants O owned that didn’t disappear into the crack of her ass.

John screwed his finger in as far as he could. He knew how to do this so that a woman felt pleasure, pleasure as if every type of pleasure was coexisting yet separate from every other type in the same space.

Neither John nor O was upset by her blood.

John ordered O to suck his fingers, which, having been up her cunt, were now soaked in blood. O couldn’t tell if these fingers were still up there. She didn’t mind licking them over and over again.

O drew away from John. Now she was conscious—if her mind was eyes, a veil had been drawn away from them—that she was experiencing sexual delight in a public space and that this was wrong. One shouldn’t open up sexually in public to a man one didn’t know when one was bleeding. Nevertheless she was doing this. And adoring this. In other words: what was clearly happening, with her, couldn’t possibly be happening.

Everything was happening, as it always does, sexually.

John bit down hard on the tips of her nipples, and bit down hard again. O felt joy. She knew he was on the verge of fucking her. She didn’t want him to fuck her because she was in a classroom and exposed to all the students and blood was showing everywhere but the outer strips of her thighs.

It was the beginning of the night when Ange asked her why she hadn’t let herself be fucked. She knew that O wanted desperately to fuck.

O thought about this question. She decided that she must be a victim, though she had never before thought she was a victim, a victim of her society’s definition of women her age. These women, no longer children, according to the society were no longer sexually desirable to men, except perhaps as prostitutes; more important, according to her society they no longer possessed sexuality.

O realized that the women who were younger than her were far more intelligent about these issues than the women her age.

Now night had come to the dead city and lay everywhere.

O found herself-in the middle of one of its great streets. She was walking down this middle, as if she were a car or a motorcycle.

Somewhere in her, O knew that it was dangerous for her to act like a motorcycle. She believed that the middle lane, the middle of which she was in, was going to disappear, so just as it did, just as it became one of the other lanes, O swerved into the right lane.

In safety, she reached the bottom of the great thorough-fare. There Ange was waiting for her, though O hadn’t expected to see her friend ever again. In the deserted city.

“Stay with me, O. Here.”

There had been a previous arrangement between O and a man whose name she didn’t know, to meet, at this very hour, in the tenderloin district. O remained with Ange.

The two women were already walking. O was upset that she was missing her appointment with the older man, but she couldn’t be worried about that because she had to do something about the blood. She wasn’t wearing anything so, at any moment, blood was going to seep through her clothes into the outside.

She remembered that there was a pharmacy on the corner, down the street from the department store where she had planned to meet——.

Instead of walking toward this department store, Ange and O moved in the other direction, across the principal street that crossed the one down which O had been running. Into the darkest and most deserted part of the burnt-down city.

This was where the artists lived.

In the gigantic pharmacy that was situated in this district, O was looking up toward a glass countertop far above her. She saw a pile of Tampax. The Tampax, she realized, was Eastern, because it hadn’t been boxed, because it was wrapped in only the thinnest, the cheapest colorless paper. Its covering, in spots, was torn.

Since O couldn’t buy the Tampax because she thought that it might be diseased, she asked the woman behind the glass counter if the pharmacy had anything else for periods.

An emaciated blonde pointed to wooden shelves which were so high that their tops and bottoms had disappeared. They stood behind O. On one of the higher shelves lay a jumbo box of Kotex. Pads so huge they must have been designed for elephants.

“You see, O,” the salesgirl said, “you could have gotten fucked even though you had your period.”

Everything about the restaurant to which the older man brought O spoke of wealth and the upper classes. The man turned out to be a professor O had once met, one of the most respected teachers in the country, and a novelist. Unlike the other ones who had fucked O in the recent past, the men she could remember, this one treated her gently and with respect.

It was toward the end of their meal that he pulled her toward him, across the red leather couch on which they were still sitting.

So he does want to get to know me, O told herself.

The hands that were holding her head pushed her head down to where she saw a cock that wasn’t human. That was small, very pointed at the end, a ring of flesh around its middle, white rather than red. Like a cat’s. O put her mouth around it. She didn’t think anyone in the restaurant, certainly not their waiter, was noticing her disappearance, or the head, beneath the white-cloth-covered tabletop, down in the realm that lay under.

When everything was over, she raised her head and saw that the man had changed: he was smiling angelically; the hair on his head, once scanty and white, was now very thick, black, an Afro, like what white liberals had once worn.

O was feeling sick. She realized that having this sex, during which she never lost consciousness, made her queasy. Such sex was immoral. Whereas the sex during the sex show had sent her over the edge, over every edge, over her self, flying, until all that was left was sky and endless blackness. During the loss of herself, “she” had become scared. O realized that she wanted this sex, that she needed it, this sexuality that she had known when she was a whore.

(END OF THE THIRD WHORE-SONG)

O, the Jew, told herself, I have to go back to my roots.

IN A WORLD WITHOUT MEN, IN A WORLD PUNCTURED BY DREAMS

Later, Ange told O that she had had a dream about her father. O hadn’t known that she’d had a father.

“I was back in my childhood. It was a large room. Below that room lay an even grander hotel.

“As spacious and majestic as possible, for it had been designed for spectacles. Theatrical. Medical.

“We were all alone in this room. Daddy and I. Since there was no door out of there and its only phone wasn’t working, we had only each other.

“I watched him slip to the floor. As he lay on that wood, he gasped. Gasped again.

“Then I knew Daddy was a businessman.

“I don’t know how the doctors found out what had happened. Nevertheless, they arrived and carted him away to a hospital that was equally gigantic, underground. The whole time while he was being rolled into that hospital, I held on to one of his hands.

“The doctors took my parent away from me.

“I waited for him to come back. Until I met you, O, I’d never known how to do anything but wait.

“The times of waiting were when there was no time.

“Now there was no time . . .

“The doctors informed me that Daddy was going to live. ‘But’—my heart sat in my mouth—’he’s blind.’

“ ‘Oh.’

“ ‘If you want,’ said this doctor who was kind, ‘you can see your father now.’

“I entered a small room where I saw long, thin tubes, a differently colored liquid filling each one, connected to longer, thinner tubes connected to Daddy. I think they were feeding him. I must have banged my funny bone against the corner of a chair or something because I started to scream.

“The crowd around me, all of whom were my friends, told me to shut up. My father had a bad heart and now he didn’t have any eyes and he wasn’t screaming.

“Daddy didn’t say anything.

“I was young. Just like Antigone, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with an old, dying man. To be shut up with a father. I looked for a phone. There were some outside my father’s room, but they were dead. Every phone in the hospital, dead.

“I left my father only ‘cause I was looking for a working phone. I came to what I thought was a hotel.

“The building, which could have been a hotel, was a theater whose insides mirrored the hotel’s outside.

“Like a mole, a small store hung off of the building’s skin.

“Its back was full of books. Its front was crowded with wooden shelves weighted down by porn mags. The bottom two shelves, each stand, held comics.

“Louise Vanaen was standing next to me in that store. Her eyes were greener than mine because she knew more about comic books. So I wanted to turn to her, but instead I secretly watched the huge eyes, where they journeyed, how long, where they lingered. I saw each comic the hands touched.”

O was getting jealous.

“When I could no longer see, a man explained that two other men had just questioned him.

“Though he hadn’t been talking to me, he stopped speaking and two jocks came up to me. One of them placed a piece of paper in my mouth.

“ ‘What’re you doing to me?’

“ ‘This paper is litmus. We use it to take fingerprints.’

“I was the only one they were doing this to. ‘Why me?’

“ ‘We just want to ask you some questions.’

“They shot liquid—it was either pale yellow or pale orange—into my flesh. I didn’t understand why they were doing it. It couldn’t be to find out my secrets because I tell everybody everything. I turned to Louise Vanaen and begged her not to leave me. ‘I feel funny. Maybe it’s ‘cause there’s this liquid in me.’”

O and Ange were standing next to a lake of stagnant gray water which had once been part of the wealthy and exclusive spa of the port.

“What does this dream have to do with your father?”

“I don’t know.” But she knew. Since her father no longer had any eyes, Ange could begin to see. She saw the green and gray water, the gulls, and beyond the birds, where there might be other seas whose roads led to treasure.

“I’ve never dreamt about a father,” O said.

“I’ve dreamt about cities. Last night, you and I walked through a dead one.

“We came to the city’s heart. In its center was a monastery.

“Monks crawled over the floor.

“Below were the pits. Sand mounds looking like cutoff breasts rose upward.

“O, you couldn’t understand the meaning of any of the words you read in the dense, illuminated manuscripts, found elsewhere in that edifice.”

The two ex-whores were standing in their favorite spot in Alexandria; unordered clusters of broken walls; pools too fetid for the filthiest of birds; substances between the sand and mud which reeked of the strangest of excrements. Once the foundation of a spa so magnificent that teenage boys had traveled from all parts of the known to hide in its shadows. O, more than Ange, loved decay. At times, the stench, more pungent than sweat, under her own armpits.

They huddled against one of the structures, for sharp winds were now moving off of the salt-drenched sea.

“My dreams’re no longer telling me what to do. There’s nothing in this place, Ange. We can’t stay here.”

“Where are we going to go?”

They watched a gull fly from one point of a rock covered with gull turd to another.

“We got rid of our johns. Now our dreams don’t mean anything.”

A storm burst. The air transformed to charcoal, grew into itself until it became so thick that it was material. It was like the creation of the world.

In full day, the sky broke into two.

“Myths mean something,” said the green-eyed girl.

“They do?”

The former tried to disappear into the part of the wall against which she was leaning but couldn’t and curled into O. “Let me recite a myth. Anyway, I think it’s a myth. It’s one of the stories the punk boys told me.”

The brats had disappeared from the city.

“There was this girl who had a boyfriend. She had black skin and he had white.”

O kissed Ange. “I told you there’s no more meaning.”

“He lived in burial grounds.”

“Oh,” said O.

“He and his girlfriend were always fighting: that’s how they remained together.

“One day she yelled, ‘You’re always naked except for that bunch of skulls around your neck. In which maggots’re living. That you never take off. And you’re odoriferous. In a bad way. You think that death’s sexy, that’s why you stink most of the time; of rot and foul, fetid fur, but you smell worst when you’re about to come.’

“The boy was always about to come because he never came. Sometimes the girl wasn’t sure whether she liked this.

“ ‘What’re you talking about?’ asked the boy. ‘You’re not white.’

“To win their argument, the girl decided to get white skin.

“In solitude so complete that it approached nothingness, she’d meditate on whiteness. Which is nothingness.

“She went away.

“Abandoned by love, the boy was vulnerable.

“A demon, because demons’re always hanging around skulls and graveyards, saw that the boy was vulnerable. Open to demon attack. ‘Yum,’ uttered the demon and turned itself into a snake. Now it was a male. Demons, being without any gender, can become whoever and whatever they want.

“As snake, he slithered up to the mausoleum of the boy and girl. At that threshold, he turned himself into a replica of the girl, and crossed the threshold.

“The boy thought that his girlfriend was coming back to beg him to take her back. He wasn’t going to make it hard for her.

“ ‘Darling,’ he said. He was naked. ‘All that I’ve done since you’ve been away from me is smell you. The wood and moss that sleep in your pussy. The liquids that drip in pools out of your cunt. From now on I’ll do anything to be able to smell you beyond the end of time.’

“ ‘I’ve come back because I love you.’

“The snake into whom the demon had changed itself had been poisonous. And the demon took those poisonous fangs, when it metamorphosed again, and placed them high, hidden, in the fake girl’s cunt.

“From her words the boy recognized that this wasn’t his girlfriend, so he attached a bomb to the tip of his cock. Just in the slit. With this explosive cock, he conquered his sexual loneliness and the vulnerability that rises out of such loneliness.

“Having been subdued, the demon, in snake form, wound around the erect cock.”

Ange finished the story she had gotten from the boys. “I want to be like that.”

The winds that were coming off of the sea were turning fiercer.

“I want that serpent power.”

“We can’t stay here,” O said. “We need to do more than be whores and masturbate.”

“I agree.”

“Let’s go to Europe.”

“No way. I don’t want to go to Europe. Europe’s dead.”

“We’ll just go back to Europe to steal.”

“Okay.”

This was the first significant decision that the girls had made since they’d helped burn down the brothel, since the subsequent conflagration of the city.

Ange: “How’re we going to get there? There’s no money.”

“Once I tried to go to Europe,” said O. “I went to an airport. I had my ticket in my hand.

“In those days, I was earning money.

“My hand was clammy. It was holding only the top half of the ticket because the woman behind the desk had taken away the rest. Now there was no one in the airport.

“I knew I’d never get back to Europe.

“I stood in those cavernous passageways. It must have been evening, for there was no longer any weather. I searched for the woman who had taken the bottom half of my ticket away from me.

“There was no one.

“It was as if there was no more time.

“Time had died and anxiety mounted. The higher it climbed up my body, as if it wanted to sit around my neck, the more I wanted to reach Europe. Until desperation or need was so intense that I didn’t know whether I could keep on living.

“I thought, where I am in this world which is no world, there’s nobody.”

Ange knew O was describing loneliness, which she had also felt in the brothel.

“I had to find another human. Someone who would help me.” O continued.

“Time began when I saw a girl standing behind a desk. I walked up to her to explain all that had just happened.

“She disappeared.

“Beyond my range of vision lay numerous sections of the airport. In some of those areas, the passengers who had obtained tickets were able to pass through the gate.

“A shrunken man whose face was like a goat’s sat in one of those areas at a folding table. He was staring down at the white part of a Visa slip. It was the bottom of my ticket.

“I handed it to the girl who had disappeared.

“Now I was allowed to return to Europe, where people still read books.

“I had arrived at this airport long before the travel agency told me to come. Long before any airplane was due to depart. It had taken me so much time to repossess the whole ticket that, as soon as I had obtained it, my plane was due to leave.

“There was only one more gate to pass through before I boarded the airplane: the one where all possessions were checked.

“The checker, who was male, inserted his middle finger into the stuffed zebra my last boyfriend had given me as a goodbye present. The tip of the finger encountered something hard. Up there. This tip curved, scraped, then brought out with it a number of large coins. Nazi war money.”

“We’re going to go to Europe, O.”

“Yes? . . .”

“We’re beginning to travel.”

The winds were sinking with the sun: all the gold that’s hidden treasure on the ocean, which changes from day to day, started to become visible. Ange sat down on a small, flat rock; O sat on top of her.

“Shh. Calm down. Until you calm down, we can’t begin traveling.”

O didn’t say anything.

“We’re traveling now.”

O hid her eyes in the safety of the chest in front of her body because she could vacation only when she didn’t have any eyes.

“Tell me what you’re seeing, O.”

“I don’t know. I’ve got to come out of hiding, Ange. It’s very scared down here.”

“It?”

“It doesn’t think that anyone likes it. It doesn’t know it can come out and play and it desperately wants to come out and play. And I’m scared it’s going to take me over, Ange.”

“You’ve got to stay with me.” She smoothed down her friend’s hair.

“There’s a spot,” the slender girl announced.

“Where, honey?”

“In the ocean. The ocean of drudge, of gook. Brown, dirty water.”

For a while, there was silence.

“Now the spot’s beginning to send out arms. Its eyes open.

“ ‘This is nice,’ is the first thing that the spot says.”

Ange’s mouth opened like her friend’s name as she listened and watched what she couldn’t see.

“It began to play,” O reported as if everything, or the world, had already taken place. “By turning, then by moving under itself. It somersaulted; it sent out rays again.

“Now I think it’s gone. I think it became this circle of swirling water. My center just shivered.”

“This is what traveling is,” said Ange when O could no longer hear her.

“The animal awakes, shivering,” O said.

“The vibrations want to move downward. ‘Nothing,’ they are telling me, ‘will happen until all of us go down there. The only way you can wake up, O, is by going down there.’

“ ‘I’m lonely,’ I cried.

“ ‘Come down here, you motherfucking bitch,’ they said to me.

“I said, ‘Thank you.’”

“Let’s go inside. Inside somewhere,” Ange corrected herself when the world was over.

“I want to go down again.”

The two girls had started to walk away from the dead fish. “We’ve others to fry, O. We’ve the future.”

There were no men, so dead fish lay everywhere. Ange remembered a former girlfriend, a nurse, who had advertised hers on a male nude beach.

Some odors never go away, for they are never forgotten.

That night, Ange dreamed that her father visited her. She was lying with her stuffed animal. Her father wanted to tell her that there would again be men in the world, but instead he started discussing Ange’s mother.

“Your mother’s waiting for you, A. She wants you to go to her.”

“Come in her, more likely.”

“A. We’re your parents. She wants you to go to her apartment. In the bathroom sink there’ll be a layer of leftover rice and peas mixed with brown shit. In its bottom half, as if a circle had been drawn. You’ll have to clean everything up. Your mother has placed all your cosmetics and oils inside her washing machine.”

“I’ve never heard it called a ‘washing machine’ before.”

As if childhood had relevance to anything.

The next morning, Ange told O her dead father had visited her. He had explained to her how to get to Europe.

“Okay,” O replied, “let’s crawl through all the houses of the rich who once fucked in this city and see if we can find anything to enable us to reach Europe.”

It was early morning, not yet yellow, and they began to scramble through the homes of the rich. These buildings were broken; some without doors or a wall; sometimes so shattered that they were no longer edifices. They resembled sets of Dario Argento movies. Though a few of the upper class had remained in this city, O and Ange met only nonhumans who, like them, were on their hands and knees.

O thought, it’s not that we’ve become animals, it’s that the animals accept us. Now.

It was as if a world was beginning in which a sun knew no misery and all that was appearing was alive and moving.

Ange began to tell her friend about childhood because, at this time, it was hard for her to talk: “All money . . . my mother’s side . . . she insane . . . totally insane . . . the freedom, that is, the isolation of the rich due to money.” She was repeating herself. “My father had a son who died, so he brought me up as a boy. ‘Your mother loves you,’ he would say, because he protected her.

“When I was a child, I never spoke. I was a boy.”

All that Ange and O found in these houses were boxes of condoms.

“If we keep on crawling, we’re bound to stumble over something.”

“Something other?”

The house they were inside had no more walls. Ange wriggled to the outside, where she found a road. Rather, a path that was egotistic. When she realized that she was moving over dead dogs, she ran into the first shelter she saw.

Here was only half a front door. Ange knew everything about this house. Though there was no light inside, she stepped quickly through a mélange of planks and shattered objects until she came to a stair.

She found a second stair.

O had followed her friend. She was thinking about her coming period.

“Draw down the blind, O.” The one blind wasn’t attached to a window. In this bottom room.

O let down the blind.

“Now the stairs. Follow me.”

She reached the top of the stairs and walked forward until her knee hit the doubling of a body and a bed.

Ange: “I’m following my father’s instructions.”

She hadn’t been able to fall asleep, when a child, until she was safe. Safe on a ship which an ocean surrounded. She became even safer when, as she fell into sleep, monsters emerged out of those emerald waters. No two monsters were the same.

Ange knew that the body was her mother, and dead.

“Mommy.”

She didn’t answer Ange. She had never answered Ange because she was on the phone with her friends.

Ange kicked her.

She had been stubborn, only concerned with herself. All that she had noticed was her incredible beauty and her friends. She had green eyes and hair blacker than Chinese pussy. A mouth that was always red covered by red lipstick. Red, black, and green. Ange didn’t know what color her skin was because the girl could no longer see.

Ange began to feel her mother up.

“O, come over here.”

When O realized that Ange was doing what she was doing, though O knew nothing about mothers, she asked Ange why she was doing what she was doing.

“There’s the key, O,” Ange answered.

“The key?”

“The key to the box that contains treasure. We’re going to search for buried treasure, aren’t we?”

O began to remember. She decided, without having to decide, to help Ange locate the key.

As soon as they opened this box, they’d be able to journey to Europe.

Ange had come upon this box only once when she was young. She had been all alone in her parents’ house. Which was unusual. In her mother’s green clothes closet, three rows of two-inch, high-heeled shoes. Below was the box. Locked.

Ange ordered O to feel around the breasts, for the key might be on a chain.

O couldn’t feel anything with her hands.

Ange was searching down below. Nothing was there to which a key could be tied. “O, help me.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Keep on looking. I’ve become lost.”

And Sailing toward her India, in that way

Shall at her fair Atlantick Novell stay;

Though thence the current be thy Pilot made,

Yet ere thou be where thou wouldst be embay’d,

Though shalt upon another Forest set,

Where many shipwrack, and no further get.

O was disgusted. But since Ange was her friend, she’d do anything for her. Perhaps that’s what friendship is. So O tried to convince herself that any dead body’s only a dead body.

She remembered a North African writer’s words. “Source or transformer of meaning and sense, forever relativizing the right, the left, and the earth whence these directions spring, you have fused your compass into the liquid body.”

These words gave O the courage to begin searching this body more profoundly. Not only the surfaces that were the breasts, but those that lay in between. In there, she found a bit of string. She followed this string, as if tracking an animal, until she came to a hard object.

It was about to get away from her.

“Give it to me, O.” Ange, grabbing, fell on top of O, who tumbled onto the dead body.

All of them lay still for a moment. Ange took the strange object away from O. The dead mother didn’t say anything.

“Now we have to find your mother’s box.”

They started to search for that object, which was as yet imaginary.

The two girls abandoned the dead body and arrived at another flight of stairs. The top of these steps, resembling an arch, immediately presented a room that was smaller. A room like a window looking out over an ocean larger than the window. The room had a desk and a large black box.

The top of the container was embossed with letters from an alphabet unknown to the girls.

While O sniffed, Ange turned the key in its lock.

“I smell something,” whispered O.

“What’re you sniffing?”

“I don’t know.” She started to investigate herself.

The green-eyed girl opened the box. “There’s nothing here.”

“I agree.”

At the edge of the threshold of the unknown, O was about to give up.

Ange reached into the box as deeply as she could and touched paper.

“Heave ho!” she announced.

And placed what appeared to be a number of papers, wrapped in a piece of oilcloth a dog must have pissed on, in an area of her sweater; then, O did the same with whatever money she could find in that bottom. They groped their way downstairs, removed the half of the door still standing, and walked into the night. Where fog so thick that it absorbed both the visible and audible concealed the burnt city.

This was the last time that either Ange or O were to return to a parent’s home.

The fog gave them the sensation that they had arrived at the end of the world. There were only fish and birds, none of whom could be seen or heard and so were only sensed: here and there, where the fog broke, a band of clouds.

Ange knew that the roads that they were about to follow, those made of seaweed and the bone that line the ocean, mirrored the pathways of these birds.

O: “My final dream of Alexandria was about my last boyfriend. The last time I was with a man.

“I was in a city which was located at the end of the world. I was waiting outside a diner-like restaurant for my boyfriend, who was much younger than me and worked in that joint.

“As for me, I was working in the film business. Sometime later, the director of the film I was on informed me that he was into strange sex. I accompanied him to a hotel, into a room with an enormous bed.

“Even though he looked like Steven Spielberg, he didn’t mind when he discovered that I was having my period. But I didn’t want to take off my white cotton underpants.

“While we were on that bed, a number of well-dressed New Yorkers walked around us.

“The sex between us was negligible, so we started to gossip. In an attempt to be polite—such endeavors always fail—I mentioned some semifamous New Yorkers whom we both knew.

“But I wanted to return to that gray street. The one outside the diner-like restaurant. Waiting for my boyfriend to return.

“Out of that low building he walked, all tall and gangly, until he reached me.

“ ‘Do you want to be with me?’ he bluntly asked me. ‘You’re hungry, so I’m going to feed you.’

“I went away with him. I didn’t know where.

“He asked if I wanted to see him again.

“I told him, the boy I loved, that I couldn’t see him again because I was a whore. While I was saying this, I knew that whoring had nothing to do with loving. ‘I guess we’re never going to see each other again.’

“ ‘Of course we’re going to, O.’

“Now I knew, even more than it was possible for me to know anything, that I was going to go away from him and never return.”

After Ange had listened to O’s dream, the two of them abandoned the now almost deserted city.

Manuscript Found Next to Map:

The Beginning of the World of Pirates

(In Our Scummy Pirate Language)

Incest begins this world. Incest begins the beginning of this world:

A father’s fucking his daughter. Night’s fucking with morning. Night’s black; morning, red. There’s nothing else.

In this area between timeless and time, a father, realizing that maybe he shouldn’t come in his daughter or maybe just that he shouldn’t come, pulls his cock out of her box. His timing must be off because his cock spurts white liquid out. Out into the future, what will be time. In this arena between timelessness and time, the most dangerous thing or being that can come into being is time.

Sperm is explosive.

The night’s black.

The moment that the white drops fall on what will be ground, down, time or this world begins.

Sperm is lying everywhere, in the world of time, on its ground. Lying in viscous pools. Since there’s time now, the sun, the first being in the world, not yet quite being, cooks away all the sperm; black char and red earth are left.

The first animals are colored red or black.

Night’s black; morning, red.

This is how we name the terror of our primordial dawn.

The only person who doesn’t approve of incest is a boy who inhabits graveyards. It’s his own father who’s been fooling around with his sibling. What isn’t bearable is that his father wanted to make the kid pregnant.

In other words, that his father is a father.

In order to stop the incest that’s going on, and all the incest that will ever be, therefore all that’s already taken place in the world, the boy snips off the father’s head with a fingernail. Separated, the head falls down, into the boy’s hand. There, sticks to that palm.

But the boy isn’t into possessions. He likes not death but all that lies outside life and death. The brat hasn’t owned anything in years and years, though he’s been stealing—that’s why he steals—and now, here he is with a head. As soon as it’s happy in his palm, the head turns into a skull. Into a skull-bowl. Because it loves the boy so much that it wants the boy to use it.

The brat does. For now he’s able both to steal and beg. This is how he comes to love skulls and graveyards.

Play or delight will be endless.

The father, headless, is pissed that he doesn’t have a head. He’s determined to punish this brat severely. The brat’s related to him. Moreover, the brat’s an immoral brat because he doesn’t want a family. Because he doesn’t want to be a man. He’ll teach the boy what it is to be a man. To be responsible. To want to reproduce oneself, to keep one’s seed alive in the world.

Not that the brat’s been celibate. In fact, this child’s continually screwing a girl who’s as scummy as he is and looks like a rat. One of her names is Rat-Brat because she’s the rat of the brat. The brat never comes in his girlfriend, which is even worse ‘cause this means that the boy’s into sex only for the sake of sex.

Continually.

And what makes everything even more reprehensible is that the girl, who looks like some rat, loves the parricidal boy more than anyone and anything else in the world, and beyond the world, ‘cause, since he doesn’t come in her, he fucks and fucks her and she comes and comes and so, then, keeps on coming and then there’s no more time.

Those who live in graveyards don’t know time.

They don’t think about love ‘cause they think about sex and skulls. They’re perverts.

Thinks the father. The girl’s his granddaughter.

And since the boy never comes and the girl never stops coming, he comes in the same way that she does. That’s the most perverted or criminal thing of all.

“Those two’ll have to marry each other,” the father without a head declares. “That’s all there is to it.”

It was the only way to solve everything.

The girl’s been coming for twenty-five years. She’s so full of coming, she decides she wants to feel something else.

She wants to be married so she can live in a house that isn’t full of half-rotted corpses and prowling animals who smell dead things and smell like dead things. It’s at this very moment that her grandfather, entering the graveyard, orders his bad son to get married.

“No way. As for babies, I’d rather be dead.”

The girl’s upset that the boy’s not going to wed her. For the first time, she questions his love.

Thus, the father gets his revenge.

Instead of marrying her, the brat fucks her even more often. The more he makes this girl who looks like a boy come, the more she doubts he loves her.

As soon as he realizes she’s questioning his love or him, he wants to be free from her. He makes her come even harder.

So she knows he no longer wants her. “What’s the use of this sexual body,” she cries out loud, “which desires and at the same time fears? What’s the use of this sexual body which alienates what it desires? How can I bear to be conscious? Better not to be.” She attempts to run away from herself and burns herself up.

The boy, of course, is the last to learn that the girl has done herself in. That, burnt up, she’s gone away from him forever. He goes over to her body. He rubs whatever is black char into his skin. He touches her blood. His hands pick up the rest of the material that’s her and hold it high above his head. Holding her there, delicately and precisely, he begins to circle, faster, more rapidly and more rapidly, now that he’s reunited with the rat, whirling twirling. Limbs flail at branches, at the rocks that have thrust themselves into the universe. Neither he nor she feels anything.

What remains of her is hanging like crabs’ legs around his neck.

His sperm flows through the world.

As long as she has any hairs left, they lash the stars.

Irritated by the smell of his own sperm, the boy rotates at such a speed that what limbs there are, then the other parts of her body, fall off. The pupils pop out.

There’s nothing and no one left. Of this world. Except for the cunt. Of a girl. On a nearby tree, a bird hangs and leaves its heart.

With the eyes he has left, he watches her cunt fall into a crevice. It’s the end of the world. There are no more eyes. It’s as if the head has fallen away.

The world has to begin again.

He dreams without a head. Dreams only one dream: He begs the girl to come back to him because he can’t live without her. It’s at this moment that he begins to search for her.

For the treasure of the world.