“Make it thirty. And a ten tube advance. This time tomorrow.”
“Need a tube now, Fats.”
“Take a walk, you’ll get one.”
The Sailor drifted down into the Plaza. A street boy was shoving a newspaper in the Sailor’s face to cover his hand on the Sailor’s pen. The Sailor walked on. He pulled the pen out and broke it like a nut in his thick, fibrous, pink fingers. He pulled out a lead tube. He cut one end of the tube with a little curved knife. A black mist poured out and hung in the air like boiling fur. The Sailor’s face dissolved. His mouth undulated forward on a long tube and sucked in the black fuzz, vibrating in supersonic peristalsis disappeared in a silent, pink explosion. His face came back into focus unbearably sharp and clear, burning yellow brand of junk searing the grey haunch of a million screaming junkies.
“This will last a month,” he decided, consulting an invisible mirror.
All streets of the City slope down between deepening canyons to a vast, kidney-shaped plaza full of darkness. Walls of street and plaza are perforated by dwelling cubicles and cafés, some a few feet deep, others extending out of sight in a network of rooms and corridors.
At all levels criss-cross of bridges, cat walks, cable cars. Catatonic youths dressed as women in gowns of burlap and rotten rags, faces heavily and crudely painted in bright colors over a stratum of beatings, arabesques of broken, suppurating scars to the pearly bone, push against the passerby in silent clinging insistence.
Traffickers in the Black Meat, flesh of the giant aquatic black centipede—sometimes attaining a length of six feet—found in a lane of black rocks and iridescent, brown lagoons, exhibit paralyzed crustaceans in camouflage pockets of the Plaza visible only to the Meat Eaters.
Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades, doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, officials of unconstituted police states, brokers of exquisite dreams and nostalgias tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, drinkers of the Heavy Fluid sealed in translucent amber of dreams.
The Meet Café occupies one side of the Plaza, a maze of kitchens, restaurants, sleeping cubicles, perilous iron balconies and basements opening into the underground baths.
On stools covered in white satin sit naked Mugwumps sucking translucent, colored syrups through alabaster straws. Mugwumps have no liver and nourish themselves exclusively on sweets. Thin, purple-blue lips cover a razor-sharp beak of black bone with which they frequently tear each other to shreds in fights over clients. These creatures secrete an addicting fluid from their erect penises which prolongs life by slowing metabolism. (In fact all longevity agents have proved addicting in exact ratio to their effectiveness in prolonging life.) Addicts of Mugwump fluid are known as Reptiles. A number of these flow over chairs with their flexible bones and black-pink flesh. A fan of green cartilage covered with hollow, erectile hairs through which the Reptiles absorb the fluid sprouts from behind each ear. The fans, which move from time to time touched by invisible currents, serve also some form of communication known only to Reptiles.
During the biennial Panics when the raw, peeled Dream Police storm the City, the Mugwumps take refuge in the deepest crevices of the wall sealing themselves in clay cubicles and remain for weeks in biostasis. In those days of grey terror the Reptiles dart about faster and faster, scream past each other at supersonic speed, their flexible skulls flapping in black winds of insect agony.
The Dream Police disintegrate in globs of rotten ectoplasm swept away by an old junky, coughing and spitting in the sick morning. The Mugwump Man comes with alabaster jars of fluid and the Reptiles get smoothed out.
The air is once again still and clear as glycerine.
The Sailor spotted his Reptile. He drifted over and ordered a green syrup. The Reptile had a little, round disk mouth of brown gristle, expressionless green eyes almost covered by a thin membrane of eyelid. The Sailor waited an hour before the creature picked up his presence.
“Any eggs for Fats?” he asked, his words stirring through the Reptile’s fan hairs.
It took two hours for the Reptile to raise three pink transparent fingers covered with black fuzz.
Several Meat Eaters lay in vomit, too weak to move. (The Black Meat is like a tainted cheese, overpoweringly delicious and nauseating so that the eaters eat and vomit and eat again until they fall exhausted.)
A painted youth slithered in and seized one of the great black claws sending the sweet, sick smell curling through the café.
from HOSPITAL
The lavatory has been locked for three hours solid. . . . I think they are using it for an operating room. . . .
NURSE: “I can’t find her pulse, doctor.”
DR. BENWAY: “Maybe she got it up her snatch in a finger stall.”
NURSE: “Adrenalin, doctor?”
DR. BENWAY: “The night porter shot it all up for kicks.”
He looks around and picks up one of those rubber vacuum cups at the end of a stick they use to unstop toilets. . . . He advances on the patient. . . . “Make an incision, Doctor Limpf,” he says to his appalled assistant.
. . . “I’m going to massage the heart.”
Dr. Limpf shrugs and begins the incision. Dr. Benway washes the suction cup by swishing it around in the toilet bowl. . . .
NURSE: “Shouldn’t it be sterilized, doctor?”
DR. BENWAY: “Very likely but there’s no time.”
He sits on the suction cup like a cane seat watching his assistant make the incision. . . .
“You young squirts couldn’t lance a pimple without an electric vibrating scalpel with automatic drain and suture. . . . Soon we’ll be operating by remote control on patients we never see. . . . We’ll be nothing but button pushers. All the skill is going out of surgery. . . . All the know-how and make-do . . . Did I ever tell you about the time I performed an appendectomy with a rusty sardine can? And once I was caught short without instrument one and removed a uterine tumor with my teeth. That was in the Upper Effendi, and besides . . .”
DR. LIMPF: “The incision is ready, doctor.”
Dr. Benway forces the cup into the incision and works it up and down. Blood spurts all over the doctors, the nurse and the wall. . . . The cup makes a horrible sucking sound.
NURSE: “I think she’s gone, doctor.”
DR. BENWAY: “Well, it’s all in the day’s work.”
He walks across the room to a medicine cabinet. . . . “Some fucking drug addict has cut my cocaine with Saniflush! Nurse! Send the boy out to fill this RX on the double!”
Dr. Benway is operating in an auditorium filled with students: “Now, boys, you won’t see this operation performed very often and there’s a reason for that. . . . You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning.
“Just as a bullfighter with his skill and knowledge extricates himself from danger he has himself invoked, so in this operation the surgeon deliberately endangers his patient, and then, with incredible speed and celerity, rescues him from death at the last possible split second. . . . Did any of you ever see Dr. Tetrazzini perform? I say perform advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance like a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: ‘I don’t give them time to die,’ he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. Tucking undisciplined cells!’ he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter.”
A young man leaps down into the operating theater and, whipping out a scalpel, advances on the patient.
DR. BENWAY: “An espontaneo! Stop him bef
ore he guts my patient!”
(Espontaneo is a bullfighting term for a member of the audience who leaps down into the ring, pulls out a concealed cape and attempts a few passes with the bull before he is dragged out of the ring.)
The orderlies scuffle with the espontaneo, who is finally ejected from the hall. The anesthetist takes advantage of the confusion to pry a large gold filling from the patient’s mouth. . . .
I am passing room 10 they moved me out of yesterday. . . . Maternity case I assume. . . . Bedpans full of blood and Kotex and nameless female substances, enough to pollute a continent. . . . If someone comes to visit me in my old room he will think I gave birth to a monster and the State Department is trying to hush it up. . . .
Music from I Am an American. . . . An elderly man in the striped pants and cutaway of a diplomat stands on a platform draped with the American flag. A decayed, corseted tenor—bursting out of a Daniel Boone costume—is singing The Star Spangled Banner, accompanied by a full orchestra. He sings with a slight lisp. . . .
THE DIPLOMAT (reading from a great scroll of ticker tape that keeps growing and tangling around his feet): “And we categorically deny that any male citizen of the United States of America . . .”
TENOR: “Oh thay can you thee. . . .” His voice breaks and shoots up to a high falsetto.
In the control room the Technician mixes a bicarbonate of soda and belches into his hand: “Goddamned tenor’s a brown artist!” he mutters sourly. “Mike! rumph” the shout ends in a belch. “Cut that swish fart off the air and give him his purple slip. He’s through as of right now. . . . Put in that sex-changed Liz athlete. . . . She’s a fulltime tenor at least. . . . Costume? How in the fuck should I know? I’m no dress designer swish from the costume department! What’s that?The entire costume department occluded as a security risk? What am I, an octopus? Let’s see. . . . How about an Indian routine? Pocahontas or Hiawatha? . . . No, that’s not right. Some citizen cracks wise about giving it back to the Indians. . . . A Civil War uniform, the coat North and the pants South like it show they got together again? She can come on like Buffalo Bill or Paul Revere or that citizen wouldn’t give up the shit, I mean the ship, or a G.I. or a Doughboy or the Unknown Soldier. . . . That’s the best deal. . . . Cover her with a monument, that way nobody has to look at her. . . .”
The Lesbian, concealed in a papier mâché Arc de Triomphe fills her great lungs and looses a tremendous bellow.
“Oh say do that Star Spangled Banner yet wave . . .”
A great rent rips the Arc de Triomphe from top to bottom. The Diplomat puts a hand to his forehead. . . .
THE DIPLOMAT: “That any male citizen of the United States has given birth in Interzone or at any other place. . . .”
“O’er the land of the FREEEEEEEEEEE . . .”
The Diplomat’s mouth is moving but no one can hear him. The Technician clasps his hands over his ears: “Mother of God!” he screams. His plate begins to vibrate like a Jew’s harp, suddenly flies out of his mouth. . . . He snaps at it irritably, misses and covers his mouth with one hand.
The Arc de Triomphe falls with a ripping, splintering crash, reveals the Lesbian standing on a pedestal clad only in a leopard-skin jockstrap with enormous falsie basket. . . . She stands there smiling stupidly and flexing her huge muscles. . . . The Technician is crawling around on the control room floor looking for his plate and shouting unintelligible orders: “Thess thupper thonic!! Thut ur oth thu thair!”
THE DIPLOMAT (wiping sweat from his brow): “To any creature of any type or description . . .”
“And the home of the brave.”
The diplomat’s face is grey. He staggers, trips in the scroll, sags against the rail, blood pouring from eyes, nose and mouth, dying of cerebral hemorrhage.
THE DIPLOMAT (barely audible): “The Department denies . . . un-American. . . . It’s been destroyed. . . . I mean it never was. . . . Categor . . .” Dies.
In the control room instrument panels are blowing out. . . great streamers of electricity crackle through the room. . . . The Technician, naked, his body burned black, staggers about like a figure in Götterdämmerung, screaming: “Thubber thonic!! Oth thu thair!!!” A final blast reduces the Technician to a cinder.
Gave proof through the night
That our flag was still there. . . .
from THE MARKET
Panorama of the City of Interzone. Opening bars of East St. Louis Toodle-oo . . . at times loud and clear then faint and intermittent like music down a windy street. . . .
The room seems to shake and vibrate with motion. The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian—races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realized pass through your body. Migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and jungles and mountains (stasis and death in closed mountain valleys where plants grow out of genitals, vast crustaceans hatch inside and break the shell of body) across the Pacific in an outrigger canoe to Easter Island. The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out in a vast silent market.
Minarets, palms, mountains, jungle. . . . A sluggish river jumping with vicious fish, vast weed-grown parks where boys lie in the grass, play cryptic games. Not a locked door in the City. Anyone comes into your room at any time. The Chief of Police is a Chinese who picks his teeth and listens to denunciations presented by a lunatic. Every now and then the Chinese takes the toothpick out of his mouth and looks at the end of it. Hipsters with smooth copper-colored faces lounge in doorways twisting shrunk heads on gold chains, their faces blank with an insect’s unseeing calm.
Behind them, through open doors, tables and booths and bars, and kitchens and baths, copulating couples on rows of brass beds, criss-cross of a thousand hammocks, junkies tying up for a shot, opium smokers, hashish smokers, people eating talking bathing back into a haze of smoke and steam.
Gaming tables where the games are played for incredible stakes. From time to time a player leaps up with a despairing cry, having lost his youth to an old man or become Latah to his opponent. But there are higher stakes than youth or Latah, games where only two players in the world know what the stakes are.
All houses in the City are joined. Houses of sod—high mountain Mongols blink in smoky doorways—houses of bamboo and teak, houses of adobe, stone and red brick, South Pacific and Maori houses, houses in trees and river boats, wood houses one hundred feet long sheltering entire tribes, houses of boxes and corrugated iron where old men sit in rotten rags cooking down canned heat, great rusty iron racks rising two hundred feet in the air from swamps and rubbish with perilous partitions built on multi-levelled platforms, and hammocks swinging over the void.
Expeditions leave for unknown places with unknown purposes. Strangers arrive on rafts of old packing crates tied together with rotten rope, they stagger in out of the jungle their eyes swollen shut from insect bites, they come down the mountain trails on cracked bleeding feet through the dusty, windy outskirts of the city, where people defecate in rows along adobe walls and vultures fight over fish heads. They drop down into parks in patched parachutes. . . . They are escorted by a drunken cop to register in a vast public lavatory. The data taken down is put on pegs to be used as toilet paper.
Cooking smells of all countries hang over the City, a haze of opium, hashish, the resinous red smoke of yagé, smell of the jungle and salt water and the rotting river and dried excrement and sweat and genitals.
High mountain flutes, jazz and bebop, one-stringed Mongol instruments, gypsy xylophones, African drums, Arab bagpipes . . .
The City is visited by epidemics of violence, and the untended dead are eaten by vultures in the streets. Albinos blink in the sun. Boys sit in trees, languidly masturbate. People eaten by unknown diseases watch the passerby with evil, knowing eyes.
In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades, doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up Harmalin
e, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected Operation Bangutot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war. . . . A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum. . . . Larval entities waiting for a Live One . . .
(Section describing The City and the Meet Café written in state of yagé intoxication . . . Yagé, ayuahuasca, pilde, nateema are Indian names for Bannisteria caapi, a fast-growing vine indigenous to the Amazon region.)
from ISLAM, INC.
And now The Prophet’s Hour:
“Millions died in the mud flats. Only one blasted free to lungs.
“‘Eye Eye, Captain,’ he said, squirting his eyes out on the deck. . . . And who would put on the chains tonight? It is indicate to observe some caution in the up-wind approach, the down-wind having failed to turn up anything worth a rusty load. . . . Señoritas are the wear this season in Hell, and I am tired with the long climb to a pulsing Vesuvius of alien pricks.”
Need Orient Express out of here to no hide place(r) mines are frequent in the area. . . . Every day dig a little it takes up the time. . . .
Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader Page 27