by Rucker, Rudy
“I’ll tell Abby to meet you at noon on Monday,” said Alan evenly.
“I’ll be there,” said Vassar. “If I can square it with the wife. Maybe we’ll drive up together, me and her. Might be she’ll dig it.”
“You’re married?” exclaimed Alan, his knees going weak with chagrin. His vision dimmed; he was seeing Vassar as if through a haze.
“Jealous?” said Lafia with an open-mouthed grin. “Now, now. You’re not in the running, Burroughs. You know that. It’s Abby I’m after.”
With a half-hearted gesture of farewell, Alan walked off the ship. He needed to get over this mad infatuation. Vassar was like some ribald cartoon character, really quite lacking in empathy. How could he have let himself get so deeply involved?
The passport check was perfunctory, and the customs man didn’t bother looking at Alan’s pillowcase of radio parts. Nobody cared. It was Saturday evening, it was New Year’s Day, it was 1955.
Asking around among the passers-by, Alan learned that Palm Beach was seventy miles north of Miami, that it would be impossible to get a bus or a train until tomorrow, and that there was no hope of changing money today.
Alan felt an intense pressure to get far away from the ship lest Ned Strunk reappear. And he still felt dogged by the sense of being observed. Could Strunk be somehow spying on him? It seemed best to proceed to Palm Beach immediately.
Alan was nursing a fantasy that the kindly Burroughs family would take him in. Surely, once he’d shown them Bill’s letter of introduction, they’d understand why he wasn’t exactly like their son. They’d want to help him anyway. Americans were fundamentally kind and generous.
Not so the cabbie whom Alan engaged.
“It’s a three or four hour trip for me,” the driver crabbed. “Going all the way up there and back. I want my cash in front, chum.”
“I only have British pounds. They’re worth very nearly three dollars each.”
They settled on forty pounds, an absurdly high sum, and all that Alan still had. But booking a hotel would have cost money too. It was dusk now, with a rising breeze. Thunder-mutters and lightning-flashes were moving in from the Atlantic. This was no time to be walking the waterfront streets, which were splattered with vomit and teeming with rowdies and police.
The cab cut down a street of noisy dives, with jukeboxes blasting, women screeching, and men crudely hooting. Last night’s revels had never stopped.
The sky had a greenish tinge, as if the neon lights were bleeding into it. An operatic clap of thunder sounded directly overhead. Abrupt sheets of rain lashed the windshield. Even now Alan had the oppressive sense of being watched.
Turning a corner at the end of the next block, the driver momentarily lost control. The cab swerved, skidded, and thumped into something. With a vile curse the cabbie pulled to halt.
“You’ve struck someone!” exclaimed Alan.
“You don’t know that,” snarled the driver. “Maybe a stumblebum.” He lowered his window and peered into the heavy rain, not bothering to open the car door. “Don’t see nobody. He must of run off. A junky or an illegal.”
“What if the poor fellow’s beneath your tires?”
“Put a cork in it, Lord Fauntleroy. We got some driving to do.”
The cab rolled forward, with Alan staring out the rear window. He saw nobody in the street. And now the invisible watching eye seemed to be gone. Alan felt a sense of relief. The cab found its way out of the Miami maze, and the lurching turns diminished. Alan dozed off—only to dream of Ned Strunk importuning him, his voice hoarse and lonely, his arms sticky and long.
“Here we are, bub,” said the cabbie, waking him. “End of the line.”
“What time is it?”
“Eight or nine. Now beat it.”
They were parked before a pale yellow house lit by the cab’s headlights. The two-story stucco home was set on a sandy lot amid palms, cacti, and wiggly-branched flowering shrubs. The driveway seemed to be pebbles and shells. Everything was flowing with rainwater.
Alan stepped out with his pillowcase in hand. The cabbie gave him a final glance, ascertained that no tip was forthcoming, and peeled out, throwing wet gravel against Alan’s trousers.
Faint light showed through the house’s curtained windows, but no streetlamps lit the yard. Alan picked his way up the puddled driveway, his ears filled with the hiss and splash of the rain. Already he was soaked through. Hearing a scrape and scrabble behind him, he whirled and stared into the humid gloom. A long dark shape seemed to be lying on the ground where the cab had been. Could it be—an alligator? The beasts were said to be ubiquitous in Florida.
Alan ran the rest of the way to the front door, stumbling over a stone, frantically milling his arms to keep from falling. He was desperately afraid he’d feel the sudden impact of bone-crushing jaws upon his leg. He pounded on the door and rang the bell. Voices within quietly discussed the intrusion.
Alan stared anxiously at the gloomy shifting shapes of the shrubbery. Was the alligator coming closer? As he beat another frantic tattoo with the knocker, he felt a sliding in his flesh. Blast it, he’d just lost his Burroughs form, reverting to the familiar shape of Alan Turing—or was it Abby? Evidently his current system of body-organization had several local minima. A sufficient perturbation could nudge him from one valley to the next.
With an extreme focus of his will, Alan managed to regain his William Burroughs look—just as the door opened. A tall, balding man with a deep tan stood there in the light. By dint of his second-hand memories, Alan knew this to be Bill’s father, Mortimer Burroughs, known as Mote. Mote wore a white shirt and chino slacks. He had a wary expression, but upon seeing the form on his doorstep, he broke into a smile.
“Bill! The prodigal returns! Come on in, son. You look like a drowned rat. Laura, Billy, come see who’s here!”
“I’m delighted to arrive,” said Alan, pushing forward into the entrance-way. He was wet to the skin, and his pillowcase was soaked. The tiled hall was furnished in the French manner, with a painted screen, a spindly white chair, a chandelier and a gilded mirror. “Please do close the door immediately,” Alan implored. “There’s an alligator.”
“Got the DTs?” said Mote, as if playing along with a joke. “Time for some of those New Year’s resolutions, hey?” He shut the door against the flowing night. “Let’s find you some dry clothes to start with, Bill.”
An older woman who looked a bit like William Burroughs herself came tripping down the white-carpeted stairs, her arms stretched out. She meant to hug him. And close behind her was a lively little boy with a shock of blonde hair.
“Daddy!” cried the lad. In a flash, Alan realized it was Bill’s son, Billy. Somehow he hadn’t noticed this memory record before.
“Wait,” said Alan backing against the door as Laura Burroughs closed in on him. “Let me clear up a potential misunderstanding. I’m not actually your son, Mrs. Burroughs. And I’m not this boy’s father.” He fumbled in his pocket to find the letter of introduction that Bill had typed. “I only just happen to look like him—for the nonce. Please be so kind as to read this, Mr. and Mrs. Burroughs.”
“Oh, what’s wrong with you this time!” cried Laura Burroughs, implacably gathering him into her arms. She smelled like a white, waxy flower. She poked him in the side. “And now give little Billy a hug. Poor thing, he talks about you every day.”
While Mote and Laura Burroughs examined the letter of introduction, Alan knelt down and faced Billy. The boy looked to be about eight. He had bright, intelligent eyes and a toothy mouth. “Stout fellow,” said Alan, feeling a rush of sympathy towards him. “Well met.”
“You’re talking funny, Dad,” said Billy.
“What’s the point of this nonsense?” said Mortimer, tapping the folded letter against one hand. “I can’t make sense of it.”
Laura snatched the letter and tore it in pieces. “You show up with a stupid joke, Bill? Excuse my language, but it’s like handing someone a card that says,
‘Hi, I just farted!’ Mote, I wonder if it’s time to have him committed.”
“He thought he saw an alligator outside,” said Mote, lowering his voice.
“Oh lord. Is he in withdrawal again?”
“An alligator!” exclaimed Billy, perking up. “Let’s feed him the roast beef bone. Race you to the kitchen, Dad.”
With a mental sensation akin to slamming a car into a different gear, Alan recast his plans. Why had he even come here? It had been folly to suppose he could tell this family that he wasn’t really William Burroughs. At this point the only winning strategy was, once again, the imitation game.
“What do you say I gnaw that bone myself,” said Alan, letting a latent William Burroughs accent take over his vocal cords. “It’s been a long, dry day. And to hell with the alligator. Sorry to come on so vaporous, folks. Did you say something about dry clothes?”
“What’s in the pillowcase?” asked Laura, wanting to be mollified.
“Radio tubes,” said Alan, drawing out he words. He was getting the feel of Bill’s raspy, savory tone. “I’ve been fiddling with electronics. Learned the basics working in a repair shop over in Tangier.” He shot Mote a look, gauging the man’s reactions. “Maybe that’s why I wrote that wild letter. My roundabout way of saying that I might yet end up in a research lab. Not that I’d expect to waltz in no questions asked. But you’d be surprised how much I’ve picked up.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” said Mote. “A new leaf. Hope springs eternal.”
“Get your father some of Mote’s old clothes, Billy,” said Laura. “I have a bag for Goodwill in the extra bedroom.”
Billy ran partway up the stairs and waited for Alan to follow. “Did you really see an alligator, Dad?” he called down. “Sometimes they get washed down the rivers and end up in the ocean and crawl onshore. The salt water clouds their eyes. But they can rise up on their toes and run forty miles an hour. Could you wrestle an alligator, do you think?”
“The blind alligator scents his prey,” said Alan squinting his eyes and charging up the stairs. Billy squealed and fled. They thundered into the spare room. Alan found a lightweight black suit and a tattersall checked shirt, both a bit large, but comfortable enough.
The family gathered around a table in the kitchen and watched Alan eat from the remains of their New Year’s Day meal—black-eyed peas, kale, some very nice roast beef, and a chocolate pudding.
“Drink?” said Mote setting out a bottle of bourbon.
“Something non-alcoholic,” said Alan in the dry Burroughs tone. “I’m a new man, I tell you. We’ll raise a toast to 1955. Weren’t we supposed to have flying cars by now?”
“I want one,” put in Billy. “And a rocket ship.”
“We’ve got a statue of Mercury with winged feet in the store,” said Laura, pouring Alan a glass of Coca Cola. “Mote’s been buying up graven images from Mexico. A gamble.”
“They’ll sell this spring when people start thinking about their patios,” said Mote. He struck a classical pose, with his arms stretched to one side. “Gods and goddesses to rule your bathing beauties, your bartenders and your cane toads.”
“The neighbors had a toad as big as this,” said Billy, holding his hands wide apart. “They said his skin was poison. The gardener hacked him with a machete.”
“The toad used to make a noise like a squeaky wheel,” said Laura. “Eep eep eep. All night. His doomed cry for love. Are you booked into a hotel, Bill?”
“I, ah, thought I might as well bunk here,” said Alan.
“That would be nice,” said Laura. “Instead of skulking off like a criminal.”
“Sometimes a blind alligator likes a private wallow,” said Alan, trying to lighten the mood.
“What brings you back to the States, my boy?” asked Mote. “Did you finish another book?”
“Not yet,” said Alan. He had inchoate memories of typed pages, dense with mad routines. “I’m organizing my material. Bringing my files into full disarray. I thought I might show excerpts to my friends and push into a literary magazine.” Names popped into his mind. “Allen Ginsberg can help. And maybe Jack Kerouac.”
“Where are they?” asked little Billy. “Mexico? Louisiana?”
“The scene’s in San Francisco right now,” said Alan, channeling the Burroughs database that lay within his cells. Doing this, he could feel there was something bad about his past with Billy—something that he hadn’t yet excavated. “Anyway I’d like to stay with you folks for a couple of days.” He studied Billy. “How old are you?”
“A father should know that,” said Laura.
“Where’s his mother, anyway?” asked Alan carelessly. The air froze, shattered, and clattered to the floor. The sad faces of the family members were like smudged flowers. And now the troubling memory emerged like a maggot from a wound. Three years ago, William Burroughs had shot his wife in a moment of sodden horseplay.
“You’re asking us where’s Joan?” said Mote, his expression a mixture of pity and contempt.
Desperate to recoup, Alan feigned a poetic transport, and tried to frame his awkward question as rhetoric. Placing the back of his hand on his forehead, he quoted the first snatch of weepy doggerel that came to mind: “Vainly I have sought to borrow / From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore / For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore ...” He grabbed his glass of cola, drank deeply, and bathetically concluded: “Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget the lost Lenore!”
“So let’s be off to beddy-bye,” said Laura after a long pause. She corked the bourbon and put it away. “Do you think you need to see the dentist or the doctor, Bill? I could make some appointments.”
“Feeling fit,” said Alan, getting to his feet. After Bill’s many years of riotous living, Mort and Laura’s expectations from their son weren’t high. But tonight he was hitting new lows. “Sorry for the outburst. I’ll be charming tomorrow.”
“I’ll show you your alligator wallow,” said Billy, brightening up again.
The extra bedroom had a window looking onto the lush garden behind the house. The rain was abating; the temperature was pleasant. Alan opened the window and its screen by a small amount to let the fresh air waft in unimpeded—he’d missed this in his shipboard cell.
Alone again, tucked into his soft bed, Alan completely relaxed all control over his body. In seconds he’d slid into the form of a giant slug, homogeneous and boneless, a slimy yellow mollusk on the sheets, with his eyestalks drooping across the pillow. Cozy. He slept.
He awoke at the first light of morning. It was a fine day. Out the window, the southern sky was aglow with the ocean’s reflected light. Something bumped and nudged against his window sash—pushing it wider open. The police? A thief?
With a quick pulse of will, Alan pulled his amorphous body into the shape of William Burroughs. Hopping out of bed, he saw a fleshy tendril come sliding through the window’s open slit. Flowing inward like a time-reversed cascade, the glistening, doughy flesh accumulated on the parquet floor beside the window. A skug.
Holding its default mollusk-shape but briefly, the skug rose up from the floor and took on the look of the nude—Vassar Lafia?
“How—how did you—” began Alan, but the Vassar-like skugger strode forward and kissed him, cutting off all talk. Quite unable to control himself, Alan morphed into his womanly Abby form and let his partner’s penis slide into him.
The bed was across the room, and having sex on the floor seemed somehow indelicate. As if sensing Alan’s hesitation, his partner flung up one of his arms, letting it stretch into a thick tendril that thwapped against the high ceiling. Fully in synch, Alan glued his hand to the ceiling as well. Once he’d extended his arm that high, it should only be a matter of sending microtendrils from his palm to take hold of the lath and plaster—like the footpad of a housefly.
Softening their bodies, Alan and the intruder twined themselves around each other and rose off the floor.
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Error. Plaster and splintered wood tore loose from the ceiling. They thumped to the floor.
Reset. Alan and the intruder wrapped fleshy tentacles around a now-bared rafter and rose into the air.
Bliss. Continuously copulating, they swayed and rotated—a soft chandelier. The sensations were exquisite, easily the equal of Alan’s original merge with William Burroughs on Christmas Day. This was more than mere sex—it was cytoplasmic fusion.
During this intimate contact, Alan could readily perceive his partner’s thoughts. The man wasn’t Vassar Lafia at all. He was Ned Strunk, the very person whom Alan had sought to murder aboard the Phos. Strunk was finally getting what he’d wanted—an intimate conjugational contact whereby his body could adopt Alan’s skuggy tweaks. Very well.
And, oh, but this was delicious! Alan was taking pleasure from every square millimeter of his body’s surface—not only from the parts in contact with his new lover, but even from the bits that were bare to the morning breeze. The two skuggers jiggled in the air, embracing still more strongly—and now the mother of all orgasms washed over them.
In the final flash, Alan again had the disturbing vision of a distant eye watching him. But before he could ponder this, the bedroom door flew open.
Mrs. Burroughs was standing there amid the plaster dust. Perhaps she’d come to call her son to breakfast. Little Billy was at her side.
In seconds, Alan had released his hold on the rafter and had returned to his Burroughs form. The sated Strunk thudded to the floor, rose to his feet and scrambled out the window.
Laura Lee Burroughs could hardly have understood what she’d just seen. But she reached a judgment nonetheless.
“Out!” she cried, her voice a call to arms. “You’ve gone too far, Bill! I banish you!”
Chapter 7: Hanging With Ned
Upstairs, Alan donned his borrowed dark suit and graph-paper shirt, abandoning his sodden old clothes and the radio parts. On a last minute impulse, he pinched off a thumb-sized fragment of his flesh. A skuglet. Via teep—Burroughs’s word—he accessed the skuglet’s tiny mind. He told it to lie in wait in a corner of the bedroom closet until it sensed the presence of the real Bill Burroughs in his parents’ home, should the dear man choose to come after Alan. The skuglet could merge with Bill to relay Alan’s memories of his trip thus far—and to tell him where Alan and his skug had decided to head for next.