Interzone

by William S. Burroughs

  Yesterday I meant to add a few sentences to this. Possessed by a wild routine and wrote two pages. I laughed till my stomach hurt. These routines will reduce me to a cinder, like the Technician. And how can I ever write a “novel”? I can’t and won’t. The “novel” is a dead form, rigid and arbitrary. I can’t use it.

  The chapters form a mosaic, with the dream impact of juxtaposition, like objects abandoned in a hotel drawer, a form of still life. Just looking over Chapter II. I don’t know. The mosaic method is more suitable to painting than writing. I mean, you can see a painting as a whole.

  What I want to do in Chapter II is to indicate Lee’s literal point of view. The following concepts are central:

  1. He writes with horror and foreboding because his writing is meant to be acted out somewhere, somehow, sometime, and so can put him in actual danger.

  2. Repetition of Lee’s desire and intention to kick habit. Junk keeps him in state of suspension. He must kick to realize his routines. His cautious, junk-bound flesh is reluctant to leave the safety of junk. I notice the songs that sing themselves in my head indicate my hesitancy to leave the safe, warm place of junk. One for example: I heard the tune a long time before I remembered the words. It’s about an old spade who has sold his “cabin and patch of ground” to go north for better pay:

  “But Dinah she don’t want to go

  She says we’re getting old

  She’s ’fraid that she will freeze to death

  The country am so cold

  That story ’bout the work and pay

  She don’t believe it’s true

  She begs me not to do the thing

  That I am bound to do.”

  Dinah is junk, of course—that is, my cellular representative of junk.

  3. His love for anyone is always a pretext, a means to achieve something, to go somewhere…. Perhaps the search for an ideal audience?

  4. The Routine (Birth of the Monster, Hassan the Afterbirth King, the Baboon Stick, etc.) as Lee’s special form. What distinguishes the routine from writing, painting, music? It is not completely symbolic but subject to slide over into action at any time. (Cutting off finger joint, wrecking the car, etc. In a sense, the whole Nazi movement was a great, humorless, evil routine on Hitler’s part.) Routines are uncontrollable, unpredictable, charged with potential danger for Lee himself, and anyone close to him is liable to be caught in the line of fire. I mean the so-called innocent bystanders. Actually there are no “innocent bystanders.” In the immortal words of Huncke, “We are all guilty of everything.”

  Of all forms, the routine is closest to bullfighting. The routine artist is always trying to outdo himself, to go a little further, to commit some incredible but appropriate excess. A routine, like a bullfight, needs an audience. In fact the audience is an integral part of the routine. But unlike a bullfight, the routine can endanger the audience.

  This morning the orderly took my table away to surgery. I opened my knife and held it out to him: “Need this too?” I’m the life of the hospital.

  A wet dream of a thirteen-year-old redheaded kid waiting for treatment, sitting on the long white waiting bench … I see myself a doctor, bandaging his thigh with “sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.”

  “Mrs. Brounswig is in shock, Doctor. I can’t find her pulse.”

  “Maybe she’s got it up her snatch in a finger stall.”

  “Adrenalin, doctor?”

  “The night porter shot it all up for kicks.”

  Tangier extends in several dimensions. You keep finding places you never saw before. There is no line between “real world” and “world of myth and symbol.” Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination. Of course I see now with the child’s eyes, the Lazarus eyes of return from the gray Limbo of junk. But what I see is there. Others see it too.

  I am selecting, editing and transcribing letters and notes from the past year, some typed, some indecipherable longhand, for Chapter II of my novel on Interzone, tentatively entitled Ignorant Armies.

  Find I cannot write without endless parenthesis (a parenthesis indicates the simultaneity of past, present and emergent future). I exist in the present moment. I can’t and won’t pretend I am dead. This novel is not posthumous. A “novel” is something finished, that is, dead—

  I am trying, like Klee, to create something that will have a life of its own, that can put me in real danger, a danger which I willingly take on myself.

  My thoughts turn to crime, incredible journeys of exploration, expression in terms of an extreme act, some excess of feeling or behavior that will shatter the human pattern.

  Klee expresses a similar idea: “The painter who is called will come near to the secret abyss where elemental law nourishes evolution.” And Genet, in his Journal of a Thief: “The creator has committed himself to the fearful adventure of taking upon himself, to the very end, the perils risked by his creatures.”

  Genet says he chose the life of a French thief for the sake of depth. By the fact of this depth, which is his greatness, he is more humanly involved than I am. He carries more excess baggage. I only have one “creature” to be concerned with: myself.

  Four months ago I took a two-week sleep cure—a ghastly routine. I had it almost made. Another five days sans junk would have seen me in the clear. Then I relapsed. Just before relapse, I dreamed the following:

  I was in high mountains covered with snow. It was in a suicide clinic: “You just wait till you feel like it.” I was on a ledge with a boy, about sixteen years old—I could feel myself slipping further and further out, out of my body, you dig. I don’t mean a physical slipping on the ledge. The Plane was coming for me. (Suicide is performed by getting in this Plane with a boy. The Plane crashes in the Pass. No Plane ever gets through.)

  Marv reaches out and catches my arm and says: “Stay here with us a while longer.”

  The suicide clinic is in Turkey. Nothing compulsory. You can leave anytime, even take your boy out with you. (Boat whistle in the distance. A bearded dope fiend rushing to catch the boat for the mainland.) My boy says he won’t leave with me unless I kick my habit.

  Earlier dream-fantasy: I am in a plane trying to make the Pass. There is a boy with me, and I turn to him and say: “Throw everything out.”

  “What! All the gold? All the guns? All the junk?”

  “Everything.”

  I mean throw out all excess baggage: anxiety, desire for approval, fear of authority, etc. Strip your psyche to the bare bones of spontaneous process, and you give yourself one chance in a thousand to make the Pass.

  I am subject to continual routines, which tear me apart like a homeless curse. I feel myself drifting further and further out, over a bleak dream landscape of snow-covered mountains.

  This novel is a scenario for future action in the real world. Junk, Queer, Yagé, reconstructed my past. The present novel is an attempt to create my future. In a sense it is a guidebook, a map. The first step in realizing this work is to leave junk forever.

  I’ll maintain this International Sophistico-criminal Mahatma con no longer. It was more or less shoved on me anyway. So I say: “Throw down all your arms and armor, walk straight to the Frontier.”

  A guard in a uniform of human skin, black buck jacket with carious yellow tooth buttons, an elastic pullover shirt in burnished Indian copper, adolescent Nordic suntan-brown slacks, sandals from the calloused foot sole of a young Malay farmer, an ash-brown scarf knotted and tucked in the shirt. He is a sharp dresser since he has nothing to do, and saves all his pay, and buys fine clothes and changes three times a day in front of an enormous magnifying mirror. He has a handsome, smooth Latin face with a pencil-line mustache, small brown eyes blank and greedy, eyes that never dream, insect eyes.

  When you get to the Frontier, this guard rushes out of his casita, where he was plucking at his mustache, a mirror slung round his neck in a wooden frame. He is trying to get the mirror off his neck. This has never happened before, that anyone ever actually got to t
he Frontier. The guard has injured his larynx taking off the mirror frame. He has lost his voice. He opens his mouth and you can see his tongue jumping around inside. The smooth, blank, young face and the open mouth with the tongue moving inside are incredibly hideous. The guard holds up his hand, his whole body jerking in convulsive negation. I pay no attention to him. I go over and unhook the chain across the road. It falls with a clank of metal on stone. I walk through. The guard stands there in the mist, looking after me. Then he hooks the chain up again and goes back inside the casita and starts plucking at his mustache.

  At times I feel myself on the point of learning something basic. I have achieved moments of inner silence.

  III. WORD

  Word

  The Word is divided into units which be all in one piece and should be so taken, but the pieces can be had in any order being tied up back and forth in and out fore and aft like an innaresting sex arrangement. This book spill off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas, medley of tunes and street noises, farts and riot yipes and the slamming steel shutters of commerce, screams of pain and pathos and screams plain pathic, copulating cats and outraged squawk of the displaced Bull-head, prophetic mutterings of brujo in nutmeg trance, snapping necks and screaming mandrakes, sigh of orgasm, heroin silent as the dawn in thirsty cells, Radio Cairo screaming like a berserk tobacco auction, and flutes of Ramadan fanning the sick junky like a gentle lush worker in the gray subway dawn, feeling with delicate fingers for the green folding crackle.

  This is Revelation and Prophecy of what I can pick up without FM on my 1920 crystal set with antennae of jissom. Gentle reader, we see God through our assholes in the flashbulb of orgasm. Through these orifices transmute your body, the way out is the way in. There is no blacker blasphemy than spit with shame on the body God gave you. And woe unto those castrates who equate their horrible old condition with sanctity.

  Cardinal——-(who shall be a nameless asshole) read Baby Doll in the Vatican crapper and shit out his prostate in pathic dismay. “Revolting,” he trills. His cock and balls long since dissolve inna thervith of shit death and taxes.

  Armed with a meat cleaver, the Author chase a gentle reader down the Midway and into the Hall of Mirrors, trap him impaled on crystal cocks.

  With a cry squeezed out by the hanged man’s spasm, I raise my cleaver…. Will the Governor intervene? Will the whimpering chair be cheated of young ass? Will the rope sing to empty air? Go unused to mold with old jockstraps in the deserted locker room?

  The Word, gentle reader, will flay you down to the laughing bones and the author will do a striptease with his own intestines. Let it be. No holes barred. The Word is recommended for children, and convent-trained cunts need it special to learn what every street boy knows: “He who rims the Mother Superior is a success-minded brown nose and God will reward him on TV with a bang at Question 666.”

  Mr. America, sugar-cured in rotten protoplasm, smiles idiot self bone love, flexes his cancerous muscles, waves his erect cock, bends over to show his asshole to the audience, who reel back blinded by beauty bare as Euclid. He is hanged by reverent Negroes, his neck snaps with a squashed bug sound, cock rises to ejaculate and turn to viscid jelly, spread through the Body in shuddering waves, a monster centipede squirms in his spine. Jelly drops on the Hangman, who runs screaming in black bones. The centipede writhes around the rope and drops free with a broken neck, white juice oozing out.

  Ma looks up from knitting a steel-wool jockstrap and says, “That’s my boy.”

  And Pa looks up from the toilet seat where he is reading The Plastic Age he keeps stashed in a rubber box down the toilet on invisible string of Cowper gland lubricant—hardest fabric known, beat ramie hands down and cocks up. Some people get it, some don’t. A sleeping acquaintance point to my pearl and say, “¿Eso, qué es?” (“What’s that?” to you nameless assholes don’t know Spanish), and I have secrete this orient pearl before a rampant swine not above passing a counterfeit orgasm in my defenseless asshole. It will not laugh a well-greased siege to scorn—heh heh heh—say, “Mother knows best.”

  A Marine sneering over his flamethrower quells the centipede with jellied gasoline, ignoring the Defense Attorney scream: “Double Jeopardy: My Client…”

  The Author will spare his gentle readers nothing, but strip himself brother naked. Description? I bugger it. My cock is four and one-half inches and large cocks bring on my xenophobia…. “Western influence!” I shriek, confounded by disgusting alterations. “Landsake like I look in the mirror and my cock undergo some awful sorta sea change….” Like all normal citizens, I ejaculate when screwed without helping hand, produce a good crop of jissom, spurt it up to my chin and beyond. I have observed that small hard cocks come quicker slicker and spurtier.

  These things were revealed to me in Interzone, where East meets West coming round the other way. In a great apartment house done in Tibetan Colonial, lamsters from the crime of Iowa look out on snowy peaks and groan with Lotus Posture hip-aches. You hooked on Nirvana, brothers, old purple-assed mandrill gibber and piss down your back and eat your ears off. Carry your great meaningless load in hunger and filth and disease, flop against the mud wall like a cut of wrong meat—the Inspector stamp Reject on you with his seal of shit. And the Nationalist white slaver, “Sidi the Lymph,” covers his face with scented Kotex and pass by on the other side; and the bearded old Moslem convert from Ottawa, Illinois, seals a coin in the slack hand intoning Koranic platitudes through his Midwest nose. Chinese boys turn in Dad as a rampant junky, and the Japanese boy has rape his honey-face after subdue her with a jack handle, throw the meat into that volcano and roar home in his hot rod to catch the Milton Berle show. And the Javanese fuck himself with a greased banana in a suburb toilet, and Malays catch halitosis from the copywriters and run for the 6:12 with Amok trot—the reference, you ignorant asshole, is to the typical trotting gait of the Amok. He does not walk, he does not run, he trots—and read “How-to” books: Thank God for My Bang-Utot Attack, and On Being a Latah. See footnote whyncha? So East screams past West on the scenic railway over the midways of Interzone.

  And Mother Green grows geraniums in her asshole, and a mandrake spring from Johnny’s deserted cock. The Rock and Rollers crack wise with a cyclotron, shit on the great American deck, wipe their ass with Old Glory and turn the Palomar telescope into the Women’s Toilet.

  “And is there not perhaps something amiss?” says the World, shitting liver, pissing blood and coughing up tripes and roundworms. “—I don’t even feel like a human … I mean when the poltergeist come down from the attic and shit in the living room, outnumber the haunted ten to one like niggers and Arabs, and their merry pranks are no longer virginal and they turn vicious with adolescence like apes, and with a monarch’s voice fart purple havoc….

  “Can you deny your purple-assed Döppelganger? This is the time of Witness, when every soul stands with a naked hard-on in the Hall of Mirrors under the meat cleaver of a disgusted God. What a Gawd has to put up with in this business! No, I will not hang you. Much too good for you. You abject citizens couldn’t raise the libido to commit a sex murder, mute inglorious Robert Christies give me a pain in my curved ass. Now I’ll say it again and I’ll say it slow … I am curved. Did you think to flee God in thy souped-up hot rod and play chicken with the Holy Ghost whilst fucking the Virgin Mary up the ass? Generation of Yipers I spew thee out like a reluctant cocksucker won’t swallow the load.”

  “It’s rusty,” he complains, “I am subject to the botulism.” A wise old thug beat the Great Famine nourishing himself on jissom of street boys sleep naked, he absorb that protein rich in all dietary goodness oral or rectal as the case may be, mutatis mutandis fore and aft.

  The boy wakes up paralyzed from the waist down, and the Mayan priest has pull a trepanning caper and suck the young boy’s libido right out of the hypothalamus with an alabaster straw.

  “Nothing like a chilled boy on a hot afternoon…. Ever get them hot popovers from a burni
n’ Nigra? Run a red hot rod in and Swedish glögg pour out the nose….”

  So glad to have you aboard, reader, but remember there is only one captain of this shit, and back-street drivers will be summarily covered with jissom and exposed to faggots in San Marco. Do not thrust your cock out the train or beckon lewdly with thy piles, nor flush thy beat Benny down the toilet. (Benny is overcoat in antiquated Times Square argot.) It is forbidden to use the signal rope for frivolous hangings, or to burn Nigras in the washroom before the other passengers have made their toilet. Show Your Culture. Rusty loads subject to carrying charges, plenty of room in the rear, folks, move back into the saloon.

  Bloody Mary’s First-Aid Manual for Boys: … Erections: Apply tight tourniquet at once, open the urethra with a rusty razor blade a whore shave her cunt with it and trim her rag. Inject hot carbolic acid into the scrotum and administer antivenin shot of saltpeter directly into the hypothalamus. If you are caught short without your erection kit, feed a candiru up it to suck out the poison. In stubborn and relapsing cases pelvectomy is indicated.

  The candiru woman with steel-wool pubic hairs receives clients in her little black hut across the river.…

  The Child Molester has lured a little changeling into a vacant lot. “Now open your mouth and close your eyes and I’ll give you a big old hairy surprise.”

  “And I’ve news for thee, uncle,” she say, soul kissing a candiru up his joint.

  A cunt undulates out of a snake charmer’s basket. Tourist: “He’s pulled the teeth of course.”

  Do I hear a paretic heckler mutter, “Cathtrathon Complekth God damn it?” Well I’d rather be safe than sorry. Almost anything can lurk up a woman’s snatch. Why, a Da is subject to be castrated by his unborn daughter, piranha fingerlings with transparent teeth sharp as glass slivers leave you without a cunt to piss in. Safest way to avoid these horrid perils is come over here and shack up with Scylla, treat you right, kid, candy and cigarettes.