Cities of the Red Night

by William S. Burroughs

  “These are copies. Please study them carefully. I will pay one million dollars for recovery of the originals.”

  “How good are the copies?”

  “Almost perfect.”

  “Then why do you want the originals? Collector’s vanity?”

  “Changes, Mr. Snide, can only be effected by alterations in the original. The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe are the prerecordings themselves. The copies can only repeat themselves word for word. A virus is a copy. You can pretty it up, cut it up, scramble it—it will reassemble in the same form. Without being an idealist, I am reluctant to see the originals in the hands of the Countess de Gulpa, the Countess de Vile and the pickle factory.…”

  “I don’t need a pep talk—but I do need a retainer.”

  She laid out a check for two hundred thousand cools on the table. I began examining the books, skipping through to get a general impression. They are composed in a variety of styles and periods. Some of them seem to stem from the 1920s of The Great Gatsby, old sport, and others to derive from the Edwardian era of Saki, reflecting an unbearably flawed boyishness. There is an underlying current of profound frivolity, with languid young aristocrats drawling epigrams in streets of disease, war, and death. There is a Rover Boys–Tom Swift story line where boy heroes battle against desperate odds.

  The books are color comics. “Jokes,” Jim calls them. Some lost color process has been used to transfer three-dimensional holograms onto the curious tough translucent parchment-like material of the pages. You ache to look at these colors. Impossible reds, blues, sepias. Colors you can smell and taste and feel with your whole body. Children’s books against a Bosch background; legends, fairy stories, stereotyped characters, surface motivations with a child’s casual cruelty. What facts could have given rise to such legends?

  A form of radiation unknown at the present time activated a virus. This virus illness occasioned biologic mutations, especially alterations in hair and skin color, which were then genetically conveyed. The virus must have affected the sexual and fear centers in the brain and nervous system so that fear was converted into sexual frenzies which were reconverted into fear, the feedback leading in many cases to a fatal conclusion. The virus information was genetically conveyed, in orgasms that were often fatal. It seems likely that the burnings, stabbings, poisonings, stranglings, and hangings were largely terminal hallucinations produced by the virus, at a point where the line between illusion and reality breaks down. Over a period of generations the virus established a benign symbiosis with the host. It was a mutating virus, a color virus, as if the colors themselves were possessed of a purposeful and sinister life. The books are probably no more representative of life at the time than a Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell represents the complex reality of American life.

  “Are these complete copies of the originals I am retained to find, or should I say uncover?”

  “No, these are fragments.”

  “You have some idea as to what the other books contain?” I asked.

  She glanced at the check. “Do you?”

  I nodded. “They may contain the truth, which these books cover with a surface so horrible and so nauseously prettified that it remains impervious as a mirror.” I put the check in my wallet. “And as misleading,” I added. I returned to the books.

  As I read on, I became increasingly aware of a feeling of faintness and malaise. The colors were giving me a headache—the deep electric blue of the southern sky, the explosions of green by the pools and waterways, the clothes of tight-fitting red velvet, the purples, reds, and pinks of diseased skin—rising from the books palpable as a haze, a poisonous miasma of color.

  I loosened my collar, my thoughts hazy and somehow not my own, as if someone were delivering a lecture on the books, of which I caught an occasional phrase … captions in English? “At one time a language existed that was immediately comprehensible to anyone with the concept of language.” A World War I ambulance?

  As I tried to examine it more closely, I could not be sure, but I had seen it with photographic clarity … an old sepia photo circa 1917. “They have removed the temporal limits.”

  I looked up with a start, as if I had been dozing. The Iguana and her brother were not in the room. I had not seen them go. Jim was sitting on one side of me and Kiki on the other. They seemed to be equally affected.

  “Whewwww…” said Jim. “I need a good hooker of brandy.”

  “Muy mareado,” said Kiki. “No quiero ver más.…”

  Jim and Kiki walk over to a cabinet bar in the corner of the room. I pick up a book bound in red skin. In a deeper shade of red: The First Redhead.

  A blond boy with a noose around his neck blushes deeper and deeper, red washing through his body, his lips swelling as the red tide sweeps into his hair and ripples down his chest to the crotch, down his legs, dusting the skin with red hairs that glisten in a soft fire, heart pounding against his ribs like a caged bird.…

  I pick up a book with a heavy blue cover like flexible metal. In gold letters: The Blue Mutant. As I open the book I get a whiff of ozone.

  A boy with a blue rash around his crotch, neck, and nipples, burning his asshole and crotch, a slow cold burn behind his ear, the blue color in his eyes, pale blue of northern skies washes across the whites, the pupils deep purple, blue shit burning in his ass like melting solder … the smell of the Blue Mutant Fever fills the room, a rotten metal meat smell that steams off him as he shits a smoldering blue phosphorescent excrement. His pubic and rectal hairs turn bright blue and crackle with sparks.…

  I was looking at the books from above in a spacecraft coming in for a landing.

  * * *

  A purple twilight lay over the sad languorous city. We were driven to a villa on the outskirts of Lima. The house was surrounded by the usual high wall, topped with broken glass like sugar crystals on a cake. Two floors, balcony on the second floor, bougainvillea climbing over the front of the house.

  The driver carried the luggage in and gave us keys. He also gave me a guidebook in which certain shops and business addresses were checked.

  We had a look around. The furniture looked like a window display: solid, expensive, undistinguished. Glassed bookcases were filled with leather-bound encyclopedias, Dickens, Thackeray, Kipling, books on the flora and fauna of South America, bird books and books on navigation. Nowhere did I see any indication that anyone had ever lived there.

  Consulting a map of Lima, on a glass-covered coffee table spread with some issues of the National Geographic, I looked up the addresses. All in or near the Mercado Mayorista. One was an art-supply store.… Hmmmm.… I had already decided to fabricate the complete books if I could find the right paper. In fact, I felt sure that this was exactly what I was being paid to do. An address in the Mercado was Blum & Krup Import-Export. This was my contact.

  * * *

  The Mercado Mayorista of Lima occupies about four square blocks. Here vegetables, fruits, pigs, chickens and other produce are brought in by truck from all over Peru to be unloaded and sold. The shops, booths, bars, and restaurants are open twenty-four hours a day. The only thing comparable to the Mercado Mayorista is the Djemalfnaa of Marrakesh. The Djemalfnaa, however, has been a tourist attraction for so long that millions of cameras have sucked its vitality and dimmed its colors.

  The Mercado is seldom visited by tourists and is not conceived as a folkloric spectacle. It has a definite function and the folklore is incidental. Street performers gather here because there are always spectators with money.

  We walked on, passing little restaurants serving hot fish soup, meat on spits, brown bread … bars with jukeboxes and boys dancing, Chinese restaurants, snake charmers, a trick bicycle rider, trained monkeys. Very faintly I could hear the pipes of Pan.

  Some distance away there was a small circle of onlookers. A boy was playing a bamboo flute. He was about fifteen years old, with yellow hair, blue eyes, and a dusting of freckles on a broad face. Lookin
g into the boy’s eyes, I experienced a shock of recognition. His eyes were blank and empty as the blue sky over the market, devoid of any human expression: Pan, the Goat God. The music went on playing in my head, trickled down mountainsides in a blue twilight, rustling through glades and grass, twinkling on starlit streams, drifting down windy streets with autumn leaves.

  I decided to visit the art-supply store alone. What I wanted would be under the counter. Anyone handling that kind of paper and ink would be into art forgery, probably passports and documents as well. Two visitors could queer the deal. Kiki wanted to look around the town anyway, and Jim needed some photographic equipment.

  The store was on a dingy narrow street near the market. There were some dusty canvases, easels, and tubes of paint in the window, reminiscent of the rubber sandwiches served in Swedish bars to legitimize the sale of liquor. When I tried the door I found that it was locked. I knocked, and the door was finally opened by a middle-aged man with heavy rimless glasses who looked at me suspiciously.

  “Vous voulez?”

  “Du papier, monsieur!”

  “Entrez.” He stood aside and locked the door behind me. A fattish woman with frizzy blonde hair and large diamonds on her liver-spotted fingers sat at an ancient cash register. She had been reading Le Figaro, which lay on the counter. She looked frightened. So did he. War criminals, I decided matter-of-factly. French collaborators.

  “J’ai besoin de papier pour une tâche spéciale.… Des livres qui devraient paraître anciens.”

  He nodded and something like a smile touched his thin lips. “Par ici, monsieur.”

  He led the way to a back room containing a long oak table and several chairs. Iron cabinets with cylinder locks occupied one wall. He looked at me sharply.

  “Ah oui.” He gestured to the cabinets. “L’histoire, monsieur, à votre disposition … quelle époque? Vous cherchez peutêtre un codex mayan? Un papyrus d’Égypte? Quelque chose du Moyen Age?”

  “Plus récent … Dix-huitième … environ 1702.”

  “Et l’auteur, monsieur? Gentilhomme, courtisane, voleur?” And the author? Gentleman, courtesan, thief?

  “Pirate américain.”

  “Parfaitement.” He opened a little casket with a key from his vest pocket and selected from it another key. With this he opened a cabinet in which I could see packages in cubbyholes, and brought out several packets tied and sealed with red wax.

  “De Boston.”

  “Parfaitement.” I examined the parchment carefully, holding it up to the light and looking at it under a magnifying glass. I nodded and smiled. “Très bien.”

  “De d’encre?”

  “Oui.”

  He opened another cabinet full of bottles and jars and tubes.… “Ça.”

  I brought out my portable kit and ran some tests. “Ça marche … ça marche.… ja besoin aussi de couleurs.… C’est un livre illustré.”

  “De couleurs parfumées, monsieur?”

  “Mais bien entendu … d’hachissh, d’opium, du sang, du rhum, encens d’église, de latrines, du pourriture…”

  The package came to $10,000, plus $300 of regular art supplies.

  “Alors, monsieur, vous avez le temps pour un cognac?”

  “J’ai toujours le temps pour ça.”

  * * *

  We start making books. I write the continuity. Jim does the drawings. We have the address of a modeling agency which puts us in touch with the film underground. We are in the right place.

  Lima is the film studio of the world for far-out porn and snuff films, mostly on contract to collectors and governmental agencies. Only the third-rate material finds its way into the open market. The best camera work, processing, special effects, and actors of all nationalities can be had here for a price.

  Jim sketches a scene in the rough. We stage it with live actors and then photograph it. Then Jim projects the color shots onto our paper for the finished product, which is something between photography and drawing and looks quite a lot like the Iguanas’ “joke books.”

  Monsieur La Tour sells quality merchandise. The books seem to age two hundred years overnight. I am working mostly on my pirate story line. But since I am sure of the quality of the goods, I will invest some more money in Mayan and Egyptian papers and colors, and do two snuff films—a Mayan number called The Child of Ix Tab, and an Egyptian number called The Curse of the Pharaohs.

  Ix Tab was the patron saint of those who hang themselves, whom she would transport straight to Paradise. In this number a young aristocrat is hanged by Ix Tab, who then gives birth to a superpotent Death Baby. The boy who plays the young aristocrat has a classic Mayan profile, and Ix Tab, spotted with decay, is a versatile pro who also plays in my Egyptian number as the evil sister of Tutankhamen—she has him strangled and gives birth to a Scorpion Goddess.

  A million dollars is shrinking to expense-account money at this point. I am already a hundred thousand clams into the $200,000. I figure it is about time to look up Blum and Krup before they come looking for me. It’s a small town and word gets around.

  A COWBOY IN THE SEVEN-DAYS-A-WEEK FIGHT

  Tamaghis is a walled city built of red adobe. The city stirs at sunset, for the days are unbearably hot at this season and the inhabitants nocturnal. As the sun sets the northern sky lights up with a baleful red glow, bathing the city in light that shades from seashell pink to deep-purple shadow pools.

  It is a summer night and the air is warm and electric with a smell of incense, ozone, and the musky sweet rotten red smell of the fever. Jerry, Audrey, Dahlfar, Jon, Joe, and John Kelly are walking through a quarter of massage parlors, Turkish baths, sex rooms, hanging studios, cubicle restaurants, booths selling incense, aphrodisiacs and aromatic herbs. Music drifts from nightclubs, sometimes a whiff of opium smoke—the Painless Ones who run many of the concessions smoke it.

  The boys pause at a booth and Audrey buys some Red Hots from a Painless One. This aphrodisiac causes an erogenous rash in the crotch, anus, and on the nipples. It acts within seconds, taken orally, or it can be injected—but this is dangerous since the pleasure is often so intense that it stops the heart. Adolescents of the city play red-hot dare games known as Hots and Pops.

  The boys are dressed in red silk tunics open on their lean bodies, red silk pants, and magnetic sandals. At their belts they carry spark guns and long knives, sharp on both edges, that curl slightly at the end. Knife fights are frequent here since Red Hots can set off the raw red Killing Fever.

  The virus is like a vast octopus through bodies of the city, mutating in protean forms: the Killing Fever, the Flying Fever, the Black Hate Fever. In all cases the total energies of the subject are focused on one activity or objective. There is a Gambling Fever and a Money Fever which sometimes infect the Painless Ones—eyes glittering, they draw in the money with a terrible eagerness, trembling like hungry shrews. There is also an Activity Fever: the victims rushing about in a frenzy organizing anything, acting as agents for anything or anybody, prowling the streets desperately looking for contacts.

  Red Night in Tamaghis: Dog Catchers, Spermers, Sirens, and the Special Police from the Council of the Selected who are infiltrating Tamaghis from Yass-Waddah. The Dog Catchers will seize any youths they encounter in the Fair Game areas and sell them off to hanging studios and sperm brokers. The Spermers are pirates operating from strongholds outside the city walls, attacking caravans and supply trains, tunneling under the walls to prowl in the rubbly outskirts of the city. They are outlaws who may be killed by any citizen, like cattle rustlers.

  Two boys, faces blazing with alertness, slide from one red shadow pool to another. A patrol of Dog Catchers passes. The boys crouch in the darkness by a ruined wall, teeth bare, hands on their knives. The Dog Catchers are muscular youths with heavy thighs and the deep chests of runners. Naked to the waist, they carry a variety of nets and handcuffs around their shoulders, and bolos that can tangle legs at twenty yards. On leads are the hairless red sniffhounds, quivering, whimpering, s
niffing, trying to fuck the Dog Catchers’ legs. Audrey’s lips part in a slow smile. This is one of his infiltration tactics: the dogs are trained to wrap themselves around a Dog Catcher’s legs and trip him up.

  * * *

  Audrey and Cupid Mount Etna are in a populous area with wide stone streets. A flower float of Sirens passes. In conch shells of roses they trill: “I’m going to pop you naked darling and milk you while you’re being hanged.…”

  Idiot males are rushing up, jumping on the hanging float to be hanged by the Sirens, many of whom are transvestites from Yass-Waddah. The floats wind on towards the Hanging Gardens where the golden youths gather with their Hanging Exempt badges. Like characters in a charade they pose and pirouette in the red glow that lights trees, pools, and diseased faces burning with the terrible lusts of the fever.

  Audrey decides on a detour. Four Special Police from the Council of the Selected stand in their way. They are crew-cut men in blue suits, looking like religious FBI men with muscular Christian smiles.

  “What can we do for you?”

  “Drop dead.” Audrey snaps. He draws his spark gun and gives them a full blast. They fall twitching and smoking. Officially the SPs have no standing in Tamaghis, but they are bribing the local police and kidnapping boys for the transplant operation rooms of Yass-Waddah.

  The boys sprint around the bodies and turn into an alley, police whistles behind them. Possession of a spark gun is a capital offense. Dodging and twisting through a maze of narrow streets, tunnels, and gangways, they lose the patrol.

  * * *

  They are on the outskirts now, near the walls, walking down a steep stone road. There is a road above them and a steep grassy slope leading up to it. Suddenly, a World War I ambulance truck stops on the high road and six men jump out got up as pirates with beards and earrings. They rush down the slope, eyes flashing with greed.

  “Spermers!”

  Audrey drops on one knee, raking the slope with his spark gun. The Spermers scream, rolling down the slope, clothes burning, setting the grass on fire. The truck is burning. Audrey and Cupid sprint on as the gas tank explodes behind them.