You're too lonely. You can't stand it anymore. Your pain has no
relation to anyone else's pain. So what? Learn the varieties of pain,
watch your pain, and grow up.
You think there is truth. Everything is lies. We don't need to lie
'cause everything is lies. Learn to be proud of lies and materialism
and hidings and discrepancies.
Janey:
Accept! Shit. Go take your shit to the grave. That's what I say.
I'll tell you something, tonight
when night comes, I'm going to crawl into your houses, and in your dreams where you have no power, I'll make you steal and whore. I'll turn you around . . .
Gaoler
(breaking in):
What good does it do? All there is is pain in this
hatred. You strut around like a peacock. There's no pain. All the
pain in the world's in your thoughts.
Janey: I
want you to plunge further into irrevocable grief. I want you to be totally without hope. Just what is. I want you to be evil.
Gaoler:
Those are just words.
Janey:
Keep looking for reality. You'll drive yourself crazier and crazier until you'll realize what I'm doing.
Gaoler: I
realize you when I tell you who you are. I realize you by judging you. I love you, Janey, when I beat you up.
Scene 5
Janey's still in gaol. She doesn't know whether it's day or night because she
can't see anything. She's blind.
She used to fantasize that when she went blind, a wonderful man would come along, take pity on her, and rescue her. Now she knows that nothing like that is going to happen.
Janey
{thinking quietly to herself, not spoken aloud):
Everything that is this world stinks. Even if something good would come along now like love, or money which causes love, I would laugh in its face. No I wouldn't. I just absolutely know right now and for ever love's not going to come along, so I might as well die. I don't want to commit suicide anymore, like I used to; I want to go through death. How can I go through death?':
(Aloud)
Hey, death!
(Death doesn't answer.)
Janey:
Goddamn you answer me even if I am a woman!
Death:
What do you want, you lousy brat?
Janey: I
want to know why a man doesn't love me and why my life's
such a miserable shit-pit and why suffering exists?
Death:
I'm not your gaoler. Only living humans are gaolers.
Janey:
You're the biggest and best rebel who is. Why don't you teach
me how to rebel better?
Death:
Your pride in yourself as a criminal, whore, and piece of scum
is causing your suffering.
Janey:
So what.
Death:
Do you want me to tell you what death's like?
Janey:
No. When I'm dead, I'll find out.
(Death departs.)
Janey:
The night is left. I'm alone. Now the murderers are descending.
(Sounds of thunder.)
Scene 6
As soon as the cops throw Janey into the clinker, Genet starts stealing from the poor and the crippled so he can join Janey in gaol. He doesn't love Janey, but he intuits it'll be wild to join her.
For months he publicly rips off everyone. At first the cops stay away from him because of his reputation as a white intellectual. Finally they bust into his room and stick handcuffs around his wrists.
Being in prison is being in a cunt. Having any sex in the world is having to have sex with capitalism. What can Janey and Genet do?
Scene 7
The capitalists get together and discuss the Janey question.
Mr Knockwurst:
The slave Janey stinks. My God. Workers are pigs, women are worse, but she's something else. I arranged to have her steal from that homosexual she lives with so I could have her locked up for the rest of her life, but now she's convincing criminals and prostitutes they're people. If they think they're people, they'll revolt against us. What are we going to do about her?
Mr Fuckface
(an intellectual Viennese count):
Each time you dare to show one of them attention, even if it's to imprison him, the thief begins to think he's someone.
Mr Knockwurst:
Well, what can I do? I can't kill all my workers. Then I might have to work.
Mr Blowjob
(he owns a large fava bean plantation about ten miles south of Cairo):
I always cut out my peasants' tongues and whatever other extremities they don't need.
Mr Knockwurst:
As it is my workers are ready to kill themselves.
Mr Fuckface:
What the hell is she? Fourteen years old? What the hell can any of them do? We're fully armed. We own all the weapons in the world and all the scientists who design the weapons.
(Taps his cigar against an ashtray.)
The truth is we can let them do what they want as long as we convince them to stay alive.
(An Egyptian sneaks in and sets fire to a tree.)
Mr Knockwurst:
The terror is upon us.
Our workers hated us. We denied their expectations. We limited their space and time boundaries so we could get more work out of them. They began to hate everyone. The world. They want to destroy the world. Themselves. They're about to commit mass suicide. Look at Janey . . . That's the problem.
(Another Egyptian sets fire to a tree.)
Mr Fuckface:
Let her kill herself. Let them all kill themselves. We'll take their babies.
The capitalists lie down on the ground and make love to each other. That is the only sex we know nowadays.
Mr Blowjob:
Our love is here to stay.
He and the others in ecstasy take off their false cocks and lipsticks and diamonds and kneecaps and fake fingernails and pacemakers and artificial kidneys and breast sponges and contact lenses and American Express cards and lying voices. Lies lies lies.
Mr Fuckface:
You see, we own the language. Language must be used
clearly and precisely to reveal our universe.
Mr Blowjob:
Those rebels are never clear. What they say doesn't make
sense.
Mr Fuckface:
It even goes against all the religions to tamper with the
sacred languages.
Mr Blowjob:
Without language the only people the rebels can kill are
themselves.
(Meanwhile, the theatre in which the play is being shown is set on fire.)
Mr Knockwurst:
Every night Sahih tells me my workers play these records of screams and to amuse themselves instead of sleeping they knife each other. Is that what we call language?
(No answer.)
Mr Knockwurst:
They're all Janeys. They're all perverts, transsexuals, criminals, and women. We'll have to think of a plan to exterminate them and get a new breed of workers.
(Another part of the stage goes up in flames.)
Scene 8
Janey and Genet are locked in neighbouring cages in gaol. Their bodies stink
to high hell. They're whispering to each other.
Janey:
I think a war's coming.
Genet:
That's no news. Wars are capitalists' toys.
Janey: I'm
not talking about a war. Terror is everywhere and it's
increasing.
Genet:
You stink more than this gaol does. You lousy stinking pervert.
Janey
(still whispering):
The night is opening up,
to our thighs,
like this cunt which I'm holding in my hand
cuntcuntcuntcunt.
and we descend,
like we're in a tunnel or a
cave inside the mind, night is opening all all murderers all you makers of violence come out of your holes. the final Maker of Violence is my thighs, and my bloody fingernails, and the teeth inside my cunt.
Please night take over my mind I don't like this poetry I can't stand to live anymore because Genet won't beat me up anymore.
(A man who murdered his parents begins to act out the murder for the millionth time. Genet and Janey watch.)
Genet:
Look . . .
Dim light has gathered through a tiny hole high up in the wall. Suddenly it goes black. In this blackness, caused by a power blow-out, the upper-middle class women and the cops smash store windows, beat up bums with chains, and wander about. A young black man sticks his hand under a ten-year-old girl's tight yellow sweater.
Janey:
Let us pray to madness and suffering and horror.
Genet:
We're going to die soon. Why don't you think about freedom
instead?
Janey:
The night is opening up, like my thighs open up when there's a big fat cock in front of me.
End of abstract haze. Now the specific details can begin in the terrible plagiarism of
The Screens.
The writing is terrible plagiarism because all culture stinks and there's no reason to make new culture-stink.
Scene 9
All the different people in Alexandria, that city of gold.
Two-storey pale blue, brown, and pale grey brick and wood houses, side by side, down the streets. Red-brown colour, air and surface, and, above that, gold light, the sun, and above that pale blue. The air is grey and semi-thick.
Birds call in the air. They're being scared by the increasing numbers of sudden loud noises. There are some modern apartments and the beach surrounds everything.
Artist:
I
want to write a play that will amaze everyone. We'll need at
least 200,000 dollars to do it right. We'll have to have an orchestra,
at least five to ten actors, an assistant director, a top choreographer,
one of the top choreographers in the business, and a proscenium.
Punk Rocker: I
don't understand what's happening. This world is
doomed. There's nothing to believe in.
Rich Do-Nothing:
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting
poorer. The right wing is beginning to show its power in this country.
Taxes are abolished and schools are being shut down. Proposition 13
is going to take place all over the country. Everything economic and
therefore everything is going to get worse.
A Nouveau-Riche Woman
(to the rebels):
You rebels are so fashionable.
You dress in the most cunningly torn rags. Where can I buy rags just
like yours?
Rebels
(to Janey, who just escaped from gaol with Genet):
You stink. Get
out of here. We don't need shit-ass dogs like you. Go to the sewers.
Janey:
Please tell me if the world is horrible and if my life is horrible
and if there's no use trying to change, or if there is anything else. Is
desire OK?
Genet:
Where's Sahih?
Janey:
Please tell me if the world is horrible and if my life is horrible
and if there's no use trying to change, or if there is anything else. Is
desire OK?
The rebels kick Janey out of the city.
Scene 10
The desert outside Alexandria. Janey and Genet are still walking. Soon there's nothing. Due to the blazing sun and exhaustion, all Janey and Genet see are mirages or mirrors, pictures of themselves, images of the world which come out of themselves.
Janey:
I'm tired. I can't move anymore. Sun and dust. I'm sun and dust. The dust on the road is the sadness that's blowing up inside me and that's eating me away. Where are we going, Genet?
Genet
(looking straight at Janey):
Where am I going?
Janey:
Where are we going, Genet?
Genet:
I'm going, me, alone; how can I be with you? The closer you get to me, the more I hate you. I'm going, OK? Far far away, the land of the monster. Even if it's where there'll never be sun, since you're tagging along, you're my shadow.
Janey:
You can leave me.
Genet:
If you stick your filthy body so close to me you're me, I've got to look for the land where the monster lives.
Janey:
Wasn't poverty and gaol enough?
Genet:
Poverty and gaol are just the beginning. Don't you know that by now? Soon there'll be no more sleep and you'll have to eat thistles.
Janey:
Thistles?
Genet:
Sand.
Janey:
There's really nobody. Nothing. Not a living thing. The stones are only stones. America and Europe're no longer anything. Things are winding down to the sea, to the sea, we to the sand.
Genet:
You don't have to be shy anymore.
Janey:
I
do.
(She pauses.)
A mirror.
(She picks up a comb and begins to comb her lousy hair.)
Genet:
Don't touch it.
(He tears the comb out of her maggot hair and breaks it.)
Janey:
I'll
obey you. But I want,
(gains courage and firmness, decision)
I want you to forget who you are.
(Corrects herself.)
Been. I want you to lead me without hesitation into the land of the shadow and the monster. I want you to plunge into endless misery and hardship. I want - because it's my ugliness, my lack of femininity, my wounded body, earned minute by minute that is all that is left to speak - I want you to be without hope. I want you to choose evil. I want you to feel hatred and violence. I want you to refuse the delicacy of thistles, the softness of rocks, the beauty of the darkness, the emptiness. I know where we're travelling, Genet, and I know why we're travelling there. It's not just to travel, but it's so those others who kicked me out have a chance of being at peace, have a chance of knowing the land of the monster without going there.