I just wanna feel myself, you want me to kill myself
I starved myself and fell in love with A, a girl I met on an app to practice my Spanish. She was from Torreón, Mexico. From her photos, her voice, her words (what else is there to go on in these intravenous love affairs, these cyborgian hypnotisms?), I imagined her as a sensitive vampire, an infrarealista: a body created out of impermeable solitude and intermittent lust. What kind of lust? A lust that passed through the hyperactive, desperate void of her days, violently but without changing anything. Lust like a migraine, sometimes, but usually like chronic fatigue. She was very skinny, very pale, and very beautiful. When she talked to me she was usually in her little attic room, painted the nauseating yellow of a modernist torture chamber, in the midst of a suffocating heat wave. Este maldito calor. We only spoke Spanish. I inflicted it on her with an exhibitionist frenzy. Later, she said she hated speaking English. She could speak it, she had to working in the tourism industry, but the language disgusted her. I told her I wanted us to live together, in her little yellow attic, fucking and starving, living off a kind of chemosynthesis of sweat and cum and whatever it was that made up our connection in the mental realm. We talked about traveling a lot. Where would we go? To Colombia, to Chiapas, to Europe, it didn’t matter…She said she had just moved into the little yellow attic because she’d been living with her cousin, a girl with an indefinable mental illness that had something to do with sexual trauma in her childhood. One day, with no warning, her cousin tried to kill her. I know people who’ve killed people, of course, A said. But you never think they’ll try to kill you. At the same time, I was talking on the app to a melancholy Argentine professor (“atea, feminista, marxista bisexual”) who was living in Mendoza and trying to finish a hermetic dissertation on the underground connection between the 1960s counterculture, from Marcuse to Andy Warhol, and the armed leftist struggle in Argentina. She loved Walter Benjamin, naturally. I had been thinking a lot about Benjamin in the Pyrenees, his heart failing him, on his way to his suicide at the border. I was working out three times a day to avoid that fate, fasting like the fascist moguls of Silicon Valley. Living post-eschatologically. Without documents, without the fear of death, without any hope of divine violence. Of mythico-legal violence, I could see it for the little whinging bitch it was.
I spent my days speaking Spanish, too, to the disembodied voices of (mostly) Central Americans who were almost certainly going to be deported. Not almost certainly: certainly. In the context of this kind of necropolitics, you lose all sense of “perspective,” of spatial orientation. Everything becomes a dromological nightmare, your politics stop having anything to do with ludicrous fantasies of sovereignty, with humanism and even with humans. Your politics become only a counter-logistics in hell (when will we euthanize, shoot like a disgraced dog, this notion of having “a politics”?). At night R got drunk until she couldn’t speak and still she had the same recurring dream about being shot point-blank in the head, soaking the bed in her sweat. We went to Refuge Recovery meetings in the middle of their schism. We were supposed to vote on whether to stick with the corny hipster narcissist who founded the group and turned out to be a self-pitying sex predator, or move onto some woker iteration of a chimerical white Buddhism. There had been ecumenical councils all over the country, show trials or restorative justice interventions, depending how you looked at it, tears and Jezebel exposés. Some of the older punks seemed to be experiencing genuine anguish. R wanted to vote to leave so she could salt the organization. She believed in salting everything, turning everybody into Manchurian candidates, unwitting terrorists and agents: she was a saboteur in a world in which every institution was already collapsing and indecipherable. I wanted to vote to leave because of my instinctual hatred for charisma, for institutional survival, for the punk scene, for therapeutic culture, for sentimentality, etc. I didn’t believe in the #MeToo movement, obviously, no one ever had, it had always quite clearly been a vehicle for nihilism, for ressentiment and social-climbing. But I experienced a genuine pleasure at the destruction of men in power, I thought every last one of them deserved it, I was on the side of the two women with borderline personality disorders at Harvard precisely for their unintelligible malice, I saw Jeffrey Epstein’s downfall as a symptom of a profound crackup, an Ouroboros, in the ruling class, a kind of libidinal script out of Salo, or rather, if not an Ourouboros, as a ship sunk in a false flag attack in the night where, as usual, we only saw the rats, so many fucking rats that we had to wonder if we were hallucinating. At the first Refuge meeting R denounced everybody in attendance in a Maoist fever dream. Renunciation, she said (more or less), is bourgeois ideology. To tell the poor that to crave is to suffer is to promote the most heinous form of austerity, masochism, and self-hatred in the people. As for bourgeois craving, if it leads to its own annihilation, so be it. Afterward, we went to Eli’s and talked about the possibility or impossibility of a Marxist Buddhism. I drank diet cokes and recited my sex life. This had become a ritual of ours. Like a Sartre-Beauvoir curatorial voyeurism that outlived physical passion. I told her about B, a girl I’d met in detox. She worked in biotech until she got fired, she’d wasted away to less than 100 pounds, she was mentally ill, basically a hikikomori, messing around with her psych meds and playing Pokémon Go filled her days, that and panic attacks, she was infantile, racist, and solipsistic, her car and room were decorated with a pink-and-white Hello Kitty theme, she never asked a single question about me or my life, though she was fascinated by some kind of obscene essence she saw in me, I played into it, went to her town house in Foster City and put on Enter the Void, a movie whose pretentious pornographic geometry and impotent Oedpalizing violence enthralled her, though she claimed she’d never fuck a Japanese guy (she preferred “Caucasian porn”), and afterwards I fucked her in the ass, only in the ass, to humiliate her, I was the first guy she’d been with in a long time, I didn’t know how long but I guessed five years, maybe more. And then R, to reciprocate, told me about a guy she was seeing, a Salvadorean who’d grown up in Phoenix, who also worked in tech, who’d gotten involved in the immigration justice movement out of a sluggish, a belated sense of guilt, he was maybe the most boring person she’d ever met, he didn’t even know any movies or music, actually he liked Moonlight and Isabel Allende, he liked ethical ayahuasca consumption as a means of reconnecting with his people, she wouild get completely plastered in front of him just to see what she could get away with, and to tolerate his banality, she refused to fuck him but she kept saying yes to a next date, she wasn’t sure why. When I told her about A, she got a little jealous: her jealousies were always temporary, like angry humiliated waves crashing into the coastline of a gray, depopulated future. She said A might be working for the Mexican intelligence agencies. She also said maybe I should go to Mexico to be with her, set up a militant cadre in Coahuila, get all my sexual needs fulfilled, she would come visit sometimes, it would be like one of those Amish polycules they have down there, except for the movement. Everything for R had become about “the movement.” The movement at night fell into the abyss, into the most paranoid and eroticized ramblings, into blackouts. At one point we talked that night about the amoral and anarchic realm of desire, about a friend of ours who had gotten caught up in our lives (our love and sex lives, our addictions, our political manias), and who had ended up badly hurt. Everyone had been hurt, of course, but she was the only one who took it personally. We concluded, with as much honesty as we could muster, that in spite of her protestations and her postures of martyrdom, that she had been the one to lay the trap, a trap she knew, in our weakness, we would walk blindly into. We had always been weak people, essentially, destructive idealists in pursuit of our own degraded jouissance, desperate to be loved and doing everything to make it impossible to be loved, or to require the impossible of people who would love us anyway. In this our families were right, R’s family in particular, who saw us as symptomatic cases of a kind of violent leftist nihilism overtaking the country, the world, one that had anachronically called Trumpism into existence, like those monsters Nietzsche talked about who became monsters themselves, fucked by the abyss, spreading our legs for the abyss, odaliques in the fucking harem of the fucking abyss…
We said goodnight and went our separate ways, with our chaste valedictory hugs. I didn’t know where R was living. She was scared for me to know. That night A and I talked until dawn, promising to be completely honest with each other, completely understanding, naked, locos que somos. Before I went to bed, I bought a flight to Torreón.
The next night, I didn’t see anyone. And I didn’t talk to A. Instead I talked to a girl I met on FetLife who lived in Pittsburgh. She was a diabetic and an extreme emotional masochist. She was in a relationship with a psychopathic drug dealer who she expected to kill her one day, or to coax her into her own suicide. She wasn’t taking her insulin, both because she couldn’t really afford it and because she liked to deny herself the medication until she began to develop symptoms of ketoacidosis. In five years, ten years tops, she said, I’ll start to need my limbs amputated. And then what will you do?, I asked. Kill myself, obviously, she said. She was smoking crack and she wanted me to keep encouraging her to take another hit. I want you to make me smoke until it gets dangerous, until I might die. I didn’t say anything. Would you feel guilty if I died tonight? I mean you don’t even know me, there would be no consequences, no one would ever know. I don’t know, I said. I know that like everyone I have limits beyond which respect for human existence disappears, but I don’t know where those limits are. Do you want to know?, she said. I thought about it for awhile and said, No. When it comes to evil, I’ve always wanted to walk right up to the border, and no further. And then?…
A group of immigrant activists was supposed to have a meeting in Oakland that R planned to go to. Andy Ngo found out about it and broadcast the meeting to Fox News, to his Proud Boy followers, etc. He’d latched onto this group with the particularly arbitrary, dangerous, dadaist fetishism of the far right: this new far right with its pathetic pretenses of a dissident anti-capitalism, its schizophrenic and ultimately submissive relationship to the state, its lurid fantasies that always lurch between a hypersexualied image of violent leftist revolutionaries and an equally hypersexualized image of their Judeo-reptilian puppet masters in international finance (the savvier practitioners of this new sadico-right understand precisely the clown-car, disorienting nature of their insincerity: they don’t aim to replace the state but to sharpen and instaurate its fascist essence, they don’t want to replace capitalism but to subordinate capitalism to their visions of savagery, they don’t want to avert ecological crisis but to create the conditions for planetary genocide on an Urheimat island of pure futurity, pure male fantasy). R told me the event was canceled because of death threats, but that they tried to organize a meeting for the next day on an abandoned lot in West Oakland. That meeting, however, turned into a disaster in a different sense. It was interrupted by a group of Black radicals, who’d been evicted from their community center a few days after the Ghost Ship fire. They’re the ones with the Thomas Sankara mural?, I asked. She said they wanted to know what the fuck these white activists were doing squatting on their land, did they know where the fuck they were?, etc. Eventually, she said, they all got high together and talked it out, but she couldn’t get the bad taste out of her mouth, the sense of shame and powerlessness. The left, she knew, was cannibalizing itself, but any call for left unity struck her as unbearably arrogant, utopian. I remembered a few lines from an essay I’d read recently: We don’t always encounter rhetors, but exemplars of trauma…Social life under capitalism necessitates a repetition of trauma. I thought about a grad student friend of mine who told me that in every undergrad class he taught, there was the same type of jejune, overbearing “Gen Z” Maoist who relentlessly bullied the other students, scoffing at everything they said with some version of, Don’t you fucking know we’re on indigenous land right now?, which not only served to cut off all inquiry, according to my friend, but to strand the question of land and indigeneity in a kind of Heideggerian primordiality, an ontological pessimism who’s logical endpoint, naturally, was liberalism. A few days later, Andy Ngo issued one of his feverish warnings about the immigration activists converging on El Paso, fomenting armed revolution, and some fucking incel drove twelve hours to the city before he got lost, posted his shitty manifesto to 8chan, and pulled into a Walmart parking lot.
At the White Horse, R confessed to me that she hadn’t had a place to live, off and on, for several months. She’d been paying for places overnight in West Oakland, eating gas station sandwiches alone in her room and crying herself to sleep. She’d finally found some white metalheads who were willing to rent a room to her with her fucked up credit rating. She was exchanging texts with one of the girls who was going to be her master tenant. The girl’s texts always ended with the same line: “$250/hr. $350 anal. $100 massage.”
Finally R asked her what was up with the text messages, as tactfully as she could. I don’t know what you’re talking about, the girl said. R let the matter drop. After leaving R, I went to meet up with a girl from FetLife who worked for the insurance company that kept denying my claims. We had a perfunctory first date at a bar, where she complained that I smelled like cigarette smoke. Then we went back to her place and fucked for awhile, but when she started insisting she was a four year-old girl, I lost my erection and went home. That night I fell asleep thinking about an incel-accelerationist theory I’d read online, which claimed that sex did not exist, either it had never existed or had ceased to exist on some Baudrillardian event horizon of the twentieth century, perhaps sometime around 1973, or when Gerald Ford became president, that all representations of sex, principally in pornography but also in other forms of media and in the whisper network of everyday life, were simulations meant to both torture and sedate the vast slave-proletariat of sexless men, who spurred on by the mirage of sex and the opiate of masturbation would never challenge the existing order, which is precisely why sex was a private act, since it did not exist and to allow it to happen in public would expose its nullity and spectacular nature, and that perhaps, to the extent that sex did exist, it was performed rotely, abstractly, by the pre-selected reptileans of the New World Order, who were not in fact human (needless to say, no woman is human) but some kind of alien species, both aphasic and acephalic but also erotically supercharged, shapeshifting, except that this conspiracy gave itself away in the alien physiognomy of the vagina itself, which could not be anthropomorphized, whose horrific image resembled the special effects of bad sci-fi precisely because that’s what it was, both totalitarian conspiracy and gaping wound…