don’t know who’s backing him.’ Abhor turned around to face me. She must have woken up. ‘All I know is we call him “boss” and he gets his orders. Like you and me.’
‘Somebody knows something. Whoever he is, the knower, must be the big boss.’
‘Look.’ Abhor raised herself up on one arm. She smelled warm, as if from kisses, but to my knowledge no kisses had taken place. ‘All I know is that we have to reach this construct. And her name’s Kathy.’
‘That’s a nice name. Who is she?’
‘It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘If it doesn’t mean anything, it’s dead. The cunt must be dead.’ My puns were dead.
‘Look. All I know is we have to reach this construct. I don’t know anything else.’
‘We have the capacities for understanding and, at the same time, we understand nothing,’ I replied. I understood we had to find some construct.
She told me again. ‘All I know is we’re looking for a certain construct. Somewhere. Nothing else matters.’ A pulsing red then black cursor crept through the outline of a doorway. With enough endorphin analogue, Abhor could walk on a pair of bloody stumps. ‘You don’t matter and reality doesn’t matter.’ The road away from the airport, which became a series of roads, had been dead straight, like neat incisions, into the open body of the city. Poverty was writhing in pink. I had watched, here and there, a machine glide by, bound by fog and grey. Later on there were tenements called ‘council housing’, walls of mottled aluminium, prison guards’ cocks sticking in order to piss through unarranged holes in the brick, more plyboard and corrugated iron walls. The lucky poor had playgrounds. I remembered Abhor was a construct.
Imagination was both a dead business and the only business left to the dead.
In such a world which was non-reality terrorism made a lot of sense.
The modern Terrorists are a new version, a modern version, so to speak, of the hoboes of the 1930s USA. Just as those haters of all work, (work being that situation in which they were being totally controlled; the controllers didn’t work), as far as they were able took over their contemporary lines of communication, so these Terrorists, being aware of the huge extent to which the media now divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent, were not so much nihilists as fetishists. I had worked with them before in some way which I couldn’t quite remember.
Two days after I had met the doctor, I found myself knocking on the door of a record shop somewhere. Terrorism is always a place to start because one has to start somewhere. A boy, or rather a skull, whose teeth were pointed red, as if skulls eat meat, opened the door which was falling apart so badly it was cracking open. I half crawled through a gap, half walked through the door, into a middle-sized record shop store room. Discs lay shattered on the floor. A celluloid nun moved her eyes horizontally as if a hand was moving her eyeballs. Smiley with one hand bone pointed me to a couch on which a freezer was sitting.
‘Among the American international corporations the practice of setting up mixed affiliates is most widespread in chemicals and petrochemicals, rubber and the extractive industries. These ICs combine production on an international scale and organize the vertical and/or horizontal integration of their plants and thus, finally, control the whole product cycle …’
‘I’m not interested.’
‘Du Pont and Union Carbide, Goodyear and Uniroyal, Exxon and Kaiser, for example, organize the supply of semi-finished products from overseas enterprises to others on a wide scale, gain access to sources of raw …’
‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘I need to find a code for a certain construct. I know you’re planning to knock over the CIA library and the code is there.’
Smiley smiled at me again. I remembered we had once been lovers; I had forgotten. We still are, I thought, in that his nastiness and inability to do anything but bite in the face of fear – any human presence triggered fear – matches my deeper nastiness. I never actually worked with the Moderns, but then I only work with people out of my need. Things are always the same.
The fact was that the Moderns talked too much. Their talk, or rhetoric, was blab: they didn’t care who heard them; they would happily explain anything to the tiny parrots who shitted on the record discs as they flew around. The Moderns had the same relation to their work, terrorism: they didn’t give a damn. They just wanted to have fun. Like parrots, they became easily bored.
On this operation the Moderns planned with great glee to reach Washington DC, the location of the library, via chickenwire. The chickenwire was sets of satellite and radio connectives. Like kids gone mad the Terrorists zoomed through the green purple yellow flashlights which are Manhattan, that absence of people, by using epoxy as they touched the midnight glass to control their movements. Then, over black ghettoes.
Except for Manhattan, which had been left to the rich, all of the eastern American urban centres had been left to the packs of wild dogs, wild cats, and blacks who lived in and under the streets. There were no more whites there except for gays.
The library was the American Intelligence’s central control network, its memory, what constituted its perception and understanding. (A hypothesis of the political uses of culture.) It was called MAINLINE. The perception based on culture is a drug, a necessity for sociopolitical control.
Being a bit behind their times the Moderns only wanted to destruct. On the other hand my construct (a cunt) and I had to find the code. The Modernists planned to shoot misinformation into MAINLINE’s internal video. Due to the misinformation each video screen would strobe for twenty seconds in a frequency that would cause the constructs and other robot viewers to have seizures. Pale green apartments strobed emerald at midnight. Simultaneously the audio portion of MAINLINE’s internal video, speeding double, would inform its listeners about the army’s use of a certain endomorphin, at this moment being tested, to throw human skeletal growth into one thousand per cent overkill. The red lights in the brothel tenements strobed blood eyes of Haiti.
The Terrorists would be happy when two minutes later their infiltrated message ended with the main system’s end in white noise.
The Terrorists were happy.
In the white noise the cops arrived so that they could kill everybody. Round revolving cars emitted sonar waves. Certain sonar vibrations blinded those not in the cars; other levels numbing effectively chopped off limbs; other levels caused blood to spurt out of the mouths nostrils and eyes. The buildings were pink. Preferring mutilation the families who lived in bed-sits ran out into the streets. Outside the black ghettoes, through the waters, sea-cruise missiles with two hundred kt. nuclear warheads swam like dolphins. Carrying at least twelve ALCMs on extended pylons and eight on internal rotary launchers, B-52 bombers rode on cars whose trunks held various nerve gases which seeped out through the city atmosphere at designated intervals. ‘Homing-and-kill’ vehicles, upon sensing the presence of any living thing with their infra-red sensors, unfurled two-metre-long metal ribs. Metallic weights studded the metal ribs. The insect life moved on. The cops’ faces, as they killed off the poor people, as they were supposed to, were masks of human beings. And the faces of the politicians are death. A young boy who lay in the street had hollowed-out eye sockets, skinless arms, and a smile due to the large amounts of acid rain in the air. Red and black deco staircases from the magenta tops of buildings bridged building to building.
Inside the library’s research department, the construct cunt inserted a sub-programme
