Intifada
“They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors.”
..A miserable day spent in bed: our dying intimacy, receding from one another in time until all that’s left is a kind of crackling: for me it’s a mute interstellar scream, for her it’s the exhaustion of having to intuit and care for that scream, its silence, though I try my best for it to go nowhere, absolutely nowhere…
..We go to this fake Instagram influencer ballet (some kind of horror Stravinsky cabaret) in an abandoned office building in a desolate downtown L.A. office park. When we arrive everyone’s leering at us, like we’re prey, figures in a vision of hell. The tickets cost one hundred dollars and Pri found out about it from an Instagram ad. They direct us up the elevator a bunch of floors and around the maze of the office into a black misty room where the ballet is supposed to be, though it hasn’t started. Immediately we realize something is off, because most of the guests look like sugar daddies and their Russian girlfriends, and some of the people in attendance are moving in a ghastly, nightmarish way, as if the ground were sinking beneath their feet or as if the L.A. skyline, which can be seen through all the windows, were closing in on them, on us, invading the office building from a sinister and inscrutable dimension. This feels like some kind of sex trafficking ring, some kind of money-laundering scheme, and that impression only gets worse when the ballet starts. Pri’s friend Sonja from high school joins us, who later I realize is really lovely, speaks from this place of yearning thoughtfulness, is a talented roller skater, an artist who at the age of twenty doesn’t believe she’ll ever find her voice or vision, and Sonja’s awful friend JoJo who has these put-on Shane from the L Word fuckboi vibes (later we find out she’s not actually a dyke, dates men she hates and doesn’t fuck, hideous men, physically hideous but also hideous on a metaphysical level). JoJo immediately mentions wanting to do coke in the bathroom in this super heavy-handed way (we’re going to the bathroom, but you know, not to go to the bathroom), I’m in a terrible mood so I just ignore her. The ballet starts and it’s weird. It’s not really ballet, actually. Sonja who’s a dancer says you can tell from their calves that they’re not dancers, they’re like bottle or poker girls or something. Somehow we leave and end up smoking cigarettes outside, half-lost in the confusing, phantasmagoric office park, talking about the evil phenomenon we’ve just witnessed, and then we all drive in JoJo’s car back to Pri’s place, where we sit on the bed while JoJo gets ready for some Gossip Girl-themed party she’s going to. After she leaves Pri and Sonja, who haven’t seen each other in years, catch up on their lives, in this tender, melancholy way that I find extraordinarily moving. In Sonja’s eyes, in her words, I can see this deep care for Pri whose origin is in the past, the past of childhood, the only past that really counts, ultimately. Sonja talks about this terrible doomed years-long love affair with a schizophrenic alcoholic guy who she says was constantly violent, not with her but with other people, like when they went out, but at the same time he was the most upright person she ever met, the person who lived by the strictest ethics in relation to himself, which makes me wonder how someone could be simultaneously the most violent and the most ethical person one knows (it makes a kind of sense in my insomniac mind). Then Pri wants to read Sonja my writing, says I’m a genius, or her favorite writer, or something like that, some impossibly high praise that no one could live up to. She chooses this piece I wouldn’t have chosen, that I don’t like all that much but which she says is her favorite thing I’ve ever written, that lyrical nightmare that came from when I was having a mental breakdown earlier this year and drawing a series of pictures of tragic sapphic lovers, a scene pervaded by the atmosphere of nuclear catastrophe, of the end of a love affair, a beginning in which the ending is already contained, each scene taking place in an atemporal vertigo, forming a whole only when it’s clear that we’re talking about a posthumous world in which suicide has become a planetary reality. I don’t know if Sonja likes it, her response is kind of vague, I don’t really care all that much, though, I’m too tired to care, too heartbroken, too. Then I read Pri’s poetry out loud, her fragments of sex turned against the world, of the abject refusal of abjectness, the hunting of men, getting hard off the male obsession with power, an obsession that’s infinitely soft, like a limp dick after an inconsolable orgasm. At some point Sonja leaves and Pri gets a call from her friend Angie, who needs her to come over, her relationship, which is all fucked up, is coming to an end. So Pri takes a car all the way to Inglewood, but lets one of her roommate’s cats escape, so I spend a few hours looking for him on and off and watching Girl, Interrupted, feeling alone and insane, and when Pri finally comes back, around four in the morning, we see the cat, she woos him into her arms, when we get to her bedroom she breaks down sobbing, I can’t do this, she says, I can’t be with you. I feel a dim wave of panic but also I feel as if I’m watching this scene from a million miles away, thinking about how now it makes sense why she chose that particular piece of mine to read earlier in the night. My first instinct is to say these wild, hurtful things, but of course I don’t, I’m not like that anymore. Pri says she’s tired of wearing the pants in the relationship, can’t take care of me. I never asked you to, I say, I never fucking asked. But it doesn’t matter, I’m like an infection, ultimately, my love is an infection, I’ve always known that. I turn away from her, can’t look at her, hug the pillow, say I no longer know what’s real, what’s not, though of course I do know what’s real, and what’s unreal, because ultimately in a situation like this reality and unreality are the same thing, it’s the unreality of love that needs to be tended to and which proves lethal, in the end, the unreality of the void inside us, between us, my desperate need for that void to be filled in an illusory way, her need to live brutally within the void, create within the void, fuck from within the void, etc. There’s so much more I want to say but Pri says she’s tired, she’s going to sleep on the couch in the other room. I listen to Sufjan for awhile in her bed and contemplate suicide, plan for suicide, but in the gentlest way possible. I resolve to become so gentle on this Earth that I no longer exist, fade away, bit by bit, like those girls in those pictures, ephemeral visions in the sand, as tired as the sun.
..I book a flight the next morning, cutting the trip short. We spend the day in bed talking things over, crying, pledging our love to one another, a pledge that sometimes feels hollow to me and sometimes feels infinitely meaningful. We read a last Anne Sexton poem together. We should have known our relationship was cursed when Anne Sexton was our poet, she says. You can’t trust New England WASPs, they’re evil, I say. “A woman who writes feels too much…Never loving ourselves/hating even our shoes and our hats,/we love each other, precious precious./Our hands are light blue and gentle,/Our eyes are filled with terrible confessions./But when we marry,/the children leave in disgust./There is too much food and no-one left over/to eat up all the weird abundance.” Weird abundance, fuck, she says. When love reaches its final apex, she says, which is the end, blip, a microsecond, we are all gone. With only an hour left before I have to head to the airport, we watch Peter Vack’s movies in bed, in disgust. White bourgeois art is child porn, she says: depravity, the sadistic murder, torture, rape of women and children. For all that fascism has become meta and subtextual and hidden in a mise en abyme of self-referential solipsism, it’s still ultimately about the ego, the white ego in its death throes, they plumb new depraved depths of themselves because they have nothing else, no collective effervescence, consciousness of love, beauty, sex appeal, nothing. We talk about us in the future, a guerrilla cell of two assassinating theses fascist artists, in semi-clandestinity (but also as publicity for our first books, brilliant and murderous), starting with xxx: an underground war against bad art, first of all, and only then against fascism, though for both of us bad art and fascism are indistinguishable, ultimately, there’s no fascism that’s not bad art, no bad art that’s not fascist, etc. The future, our future, becomes increasingly unreal, the more we talk about it. We look at each other, or I see her looking at me, with searching eyes, yearning, but I can’t look at her the same way, it’s too painful for me, we both know it’s not working but she’s the one who broke up with me and it’s because she wants to be alone, cannot bear the intensity of the mirror that is us, or at least that’s what she says. She reaches out to touch me cautiously, in deference to the pain I’m in, as if even the slightest touch could shatter me, which it could.
..It didn’t start with Anne Sexton, I say, it started with Pizarnik, all night long I hear the noise of water sobbing…
..It ends the same, with the noise of water sobbing, water sobbing…
***
..On the second night without her, back in Oakland, the ache begins.
..It occurs to me that she chose a twenty-two year-old SpaceX tech dork over me. She liked theway his dick is always hard, how virginal he is, how he’s beneath her, not on her level, the eager way he fucks her, etc. Though my dick can stay hard for hours on Viagra, it’s not the same. Girldick isn’t the same as the semiotic dick, the mystical-materialist dick, the dick of I Love Dick, perversely hunted and hyper-cathected.
..The feeling that I’m a freak to the world, I said, during our last conversation in her bedroom. You should write about that, she said.
..I make plans to kill myself in the winter. At first I think I have some last projects to complete, a few loose ends to tie up. But no, that’s not really true. It could just as well be today. There’s nothing to do, nothing I’m waiting for.
..She was my last, I think, as I suspect she secretly wanted to be (but does she secretly want that?
Or do I only want her to want that?). In L.A. I gave her Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre with a lipstick kiss, rose petals inside.
..“We have nothing to fear but insincerity,” I wrote on the title page, quoting the narrator. But that’s not really true. There was more to fear, like the shadow of heterosexuality, like giving birth to one’s father’s child, monstrous, like the insufficiency of love, the emptiness of mirrors…
..One cannot bear the reality of oneself in another. Sonja said men are incapable of love, that night in Pri’s bedroom. That’s when Pri said those beautiful things about sapphic love, about our love, which she didn’t mean, or which she meant but also her words were a kind of valedictory
letter, swansong: words that nullify the reality they’re transmitting…
..The intimacy of our final hours together turns into something else now that I’m alone: a cryptic anger, adamantine hate: like she turned her back on our love.
..If she wants me in her life she’ll have to win me back, I think. But she doesn’t want me like that, doesn’t want to win me anymore. She wants me and she doesn’t want me.
..Of course, she wants someone else, everyone else. She waited for me to leave so she could fuck the SpaceX dude, the girl from the bar the other night who was erotically obsessed with leather, the beautiful French girl who looks like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction who doesn’t shower and
is kind of evil, that hot cis architect couple (who are absolutely evil), etc. In a cuck fantasy it’s you alone who’s unwanted, an absolute erotic deathspace. I cum to my own martyrdom: the last lesbian, the only one who believes in love, acolyte of femcel apocalypse.
..In the background, though perhaps I’m the background, even if all history takes place in consciousness, though not always a human consciousness, is the apocalypse of Zionism, the stunning intifada of the Palestinians in Gaza, the nightmare necro-reality dying and those who refuse to die without protest or self-assertion (and of course, nauseatingly, the murderous chorus of liberals naturalizing genocide, asking for whole peoples to disappear in silence, addicted to their lethal moral narcissism to the very end). Palestine is all anyone can talk about, or think about, really. It animates Pri into a poetics of violence and reckoning, a war in which the battlefield is as much the past as any other temporality, as much her personal past as a collective planetary past, while for me everything that’s happening in the world is an extension of my own heartbreak, as it’s always been, really, because even when I fight I fight on behalf of a broken heart, I have no other language (but poetry, but the heart, etc). I read Darwish in the concentration camp of Shatila almost exactly ten years ago, chatting up an avuncular former PFLP guerrilla-turned-school teacher, we talked about Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature and about the geopolitics of Syria, a ten year-old kid proudly showed me his gun, his grandfather had probably been born in the camp, a Scandinavian couple volunteering with an NGO lamented the moral decline of the Palestinians, their Palestinians, the sexual barbarity of the men, a few nights later at a party at a French girl’s apartment an obnoxious incel talked to me about Jean Genet, he believed in the sexualized martyrdom of the oppressed, even then the world was ending if you paid attention, if you knew what to look for (a few days after that a bomb went off outside the camps, killed a few hundred people)…
..In Oakland, I start to miss Pri so much that I lose my mind. For awhile I feel stunned, but then I feel angry, used, abandoned. I send her a series of angry texts, saying I’m literally almost in awe of how deeply you betrayed me, all I want is for you to delete my writing from your email and then we never have to talk again. She calls me, baffled. I need you to know how hurt I am, I say. I don’t want to have to act composed about this, I want to go to pieces, have a messy breakup, tell you I fucking hate you, even though I don’t, and can’t. I’ve been writing about you, about us, she says, I want you to know how much you mean to me. Do you know how fucking humiliating it was for me to show up to L.A., I say, after everything that happened between us in Oakland?, wanting to be with you, love you, feel closet to you, fuck you, and feel so fucking unwanted, rejected, like my presence was resented, though I didn’t do anything different than the first time, I showed up with nothing but my desire, my heart, a book by Qiu Miaojin, all the words we’d already said to each other. I still believe everything I said on our last day together, she says. I believe you’re the most brilliant, the most beautiful, the most loving person I’ve ever met, I believe you’re the acme of all of this, how the species should evolve, the species in its ending…you cum to yourself, she says, I could never cum to myself…But I also have my desire, which is to be alone, to do whatever I want, fuck whoever want, create my own art and my own life, and that’s one of my beliefs too, that I should always, always remain steadfast in my desire…The sex we had in Oakland was the best sex can be, but I want the worst from sex, she says, etc…I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to be the perfection of the species, a paragon, pure, I want to be wanted, I want her to want to be with me, in a fucking depraved way, why not?, anything but having to feel that feeling I’ve had since childhood, which is that I’m a kind of abstract doll, entrancing and repulsive at the same time, impalpable, like I lack some dirty quotient of reality, as if the only way to love me is from afar, ideally, because I wasn’t born real but ideal, somehow, by some congenital defect, defectively perfect, and she knows that, knows that I’m jealous, or envious, that it’s not just that I want to be with her but I want to fuck like her, get fucked like her, lose myself like her, as if even in being a woman I could never truly be abject, it’s why I’m always looking in the mirror, to make sure the specular emptiness is still there, because what if in the meantime, while I wasn’t looking, I lost even my unreality?
..We leave things somewhere unfinished, undefinable: her love affair with me taking place inviolably in her head, mine with her feeling like an open wound…
..In the bath, I talk to Megan about what I’m going through, but all Megan has to say is she’s really young, I try not to date people that young, and be careful, because she’s young, and a fan, that’s dangerous, fans are intrinsically dangerous people, she could run away with all your material, go public, smear you, etc.
..Harvey has no patience with me either, tells me we’re not fifteen anymore, “reality isn’t Skins.” I ask them why they’re being so antagonistic to me but they don’t give me an answer. No wonder they’re texting me so manically about Palestine, the end of the world has always been their milieu.
..At my lip filler appointment, Karina asks me if I have any family in Israel, calls the Palestinians savages. I play the fuzzy-hearted bimbo, I say I just hate to see violence, especially when children are involved, it breaks my heart. Technically none of this is a lie. Karina loves Jews and trans girls in the most offensive way possible. Looking at my hands, with their sparkling “red carpet” acrylics, she says so soft, so feminine, you know Leilochka you can always tell from the hands, whether is man or woman, and you are woman, a work of art from head to toe. I picture her evaluating my nose, that’s how you can tell a Jew. At every appointment she’s brought up my dick, and also her friend Oleg, who’s married with two children but harbors a mysterious, lifelong passion for girls like me. I wonder if she masturbates to me, or if Nastasya, the young tatted Russian receptionist, masturbates to me. I masturbate to Nastasya, and sometimes to Karina, too, to the crazy things she says to me, to the way in that clinic they view me as a pure emanation of sex, porn angel, porno-archetype, how every conversation turns to sex, my erotic powers are celebrated in a hyperbolic way, next time they’re going to laser everything, see and touch my girldick, zap it.
..I feel this deep sorrow, Pri says. I feel that I’ve broken something. I can’t tell her she’s wrong. But it wasn’t me she broke, it was the love we were creating together. That hurts, but love is broken, comes apart, all the time. I can’t say if in one month I’ll be even more hopelessly in love with her or if I’ll already have begun to forget about her. What I fear is that my psyche heals so quickly these days, it rapidly assimilates loss and heartbreak, which becomes part of the compounding vacuity of my existence, my art, and in that healing the other person can be walled out so fast, except I want to keep a little secret door just for her, give her the last key, or one of the last keys, to my heart. I’m just not sure it works that way. The ship is setting sail, I see her at the port, come quickly, I want to say, but can only say nothing with my gaze, she returns an incommensurable gaze, this is Anna Kavan’s Ice world, it doesn’t matter, she’ll reappear, flickering, in a hallucinatory foreign country in the midst of an incoherent world war…
***
“Intifada is an Arabic word literally meaning, as a noun, ‘tremor’, ‘shivering’, ‘shuddering’. It is derived from an Arabic term nafada meaning ‘to shake’, ‘shake off’, ‘get rid of’, as a dog might shrug off water, or as one might shake off sleep, or dirt from one’s sandals…