Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (25 page)

“Lovely,” Alan teeped to Susan. “I’m my own good company.”

“Make way, you,” teeped Susan, one of her muzzles nipping one of Alan’s legs. “Here’s where we have to scramble down. I smell the path. This is fun.”

As they picked their way down the steep cliff, the snow and wind returned. The sky clouded over, and it was utterly dark. Even on four legs, it was all the Alan-and-Susan coyotes could do to keep from sliding off a ledge. The small cluster of lights on their left had made for a beacon—but now the heavy snow masked it from visibility.

In the bottomland, they stumbled around, bewildered and blind. At some point they began mounting a bluff.

“I think we got turned around and that we’re climbing up onto Ricky’s side again,” teeped Susan after a while. “I smell our old tracks. We’re going in a circle. That’s how lost hikers always die. They see, like, a door in a snowbank that opens into a room full of steam-heat and opium. The grave. I don’t really care. I’m ready.”

“Let’s gather our wits,” teeped Alan, setting his three coyote bodies on their haunches. Barely visible at his side, Susan’s coyote bodies threw back their heads and howled. Alan joined in, mourning Vassar and Ned. Answering howls sounded—and not so very far away. The real coyotes.

Very uneasy, Alan strained at his mind, hoping to pick up a flash of teep from the sulky Naranjo. The pilot wasn’t to be found, but there was something else in the psychic channels, a nearby sense of warmth from a sacrificed friend.

“Vassar,” teeped Susan. “He’s with us.”

A flapping gold blob flickered at the edges of Alan’s visual fields. It had a thin tail at its rear.

Putting their heads down against the storm, the pack of six followed the spirit guide towards a hoped-for shelter.

Chapter 13: The Apocalypse According to Willy Lee

[This double-length chapter is the entire text of an unpublished memoir fragment by William Burroughs, hand-written in January, 1955.]

At fourteen I’d study myself in the mirror, practicing “looks”—the dreamy waif from famine-land, the lonely succubus lapping sex spills, the noble on the nod.

Evidently I was queer. I’d watch my friend Peter’s delicate hands, his beautiful dark eyes, the flush of excitement on his cheeks, and I’d project imaginary psychic fingers, caressing his ears, smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face, my soul an ectoplasmic amoeboid that strained like a hungry blind worm to enter Peter’s body, to breathe with his lungs, to see with his eyes, to learn the feel of his cock and balls.

Reviewing these states of mind before my mirror, I’d notice that, as I heated up, my mouth would fall slightly open, with my teeth showing in the half-snarl of a captive animal. The social limitations upon my desires were the bars of my cage. Every day I was looking out through those bars, watchful, alert, waiting for the keeper to forget to latch the door.

Eventually, of course, I broke loose and showed the more receptive boys how the cow ate the cabbage. “Bear down, Peter. You’ll fit.”

I liked to imagine merging with my lovers. One of my first routines. “Wouldn’t it be booful if we should juth shlup together into one gweat big blob,” I’d say in baby talk, lying at ease with a boy. This never went over well—until I met Turing.

Montage—pages fly off my calendar. When I was thirty I began cohabitating with Joan Vollmer, nine years younger than me. She knew I was a queer junky, but we were on the same wavelength, to a telepathic extent. I’ve always longed to be so effortlessly understood. Seven years Joan took care of me.
Faute de mieux
, sex with a woman isn’t bad.

I failed Joan in innumerable ways. Addicted and indicted, I drifted through New Orleans, Texas, and down Mexico way. And there, one autumn evening in 1951, I shot Joan in the head. A William Tell act—with an empty glass for the apple. I say that the gun’s aim was crooked, that I was possessed by an ugly spirit, that Joan telekinetically drew the bullet towards her brain. Poor excuses.

For any number of years I’d been developing my routines—crazed and menacing rants like a drunken out-of-control burlesque comic might lay on the rubes. I’d spring my spoken-word art on friend and foe alike. My goal? Free-flowing laughter—at least for me—rollicking hyena kicks to break the grip of my frightened flesh.

While in Mexico City I’d progressed towards a complete lack of caution and restraint. It was like I thought nothing must be allowed to dilute my routines. I’d once been shy about approaching boys, for instance, but I could no longer remember why. My centers of inhibition had atrophied.

In the months before I shot Joan, my routines had led to ostracism, eviction, and threats. The routines bubbled forth like mephitic gasses from a sulfur spring. “Pardon me, Señor, you should have made that one a fart.” All too often, a routine could slop over into real action. Go into a bar and call a policeman a moronic baboon, petition his partner for sexual favors, wave your gun in the bartender’s face—metastasized madness.

When I shot Joan I was pretending to be drunk and criminally reckless. But I only
imagined
I was pretending. Drunk is what I was. Joan fell with my bullet in her temple. The unbroken glass rolled in a circle on the floor.

The sinister musical-chairs opera of Mexican justice closed in. I skipped town and landed in Tangier, devoting myself to debauchery and the literary arts. Wouldn’t you?

I’d see Joan’s sad ghost at any time, always from the corner of my eye, never straight on. I’d awaken with her at my side, puffy and tattered, or in the bloom of youth—with the slow oozing blue hole in her temple. Joan at the edges of the real. Her lips would move. I’d hear a terrible, slow buzz.

Over time her shape began changing to something less human. Something with tentacles. She spun and swooped, she’d dive at me. I’d flinch and twitch. A nut on the street, an expat scribe.

As I continued my bohemian investigations, a number of the people in Tangier took a violent, irrational dislike to me. Especially the people who ran bars. You want I should kill myself already?

I found that any prior, calfskin-bound notion of a novel was radically inadequate for expressing what I needed to say. I wanted to write routines. Note that it falls flat to run a routine through the voice of an “eccentric” character. The routines have to emanate direct from the unseen unreliable author. A transcript off a cuneiform tablet off a UFO.

Sometimes I’d lie in bed and see grids of typewritten words, moving and shifting, a haunted crossword puzzle. I’d try and copy it down. Other times I’d take dictation from voices in my head. As Allah wills.

If you’re writing routines, you can’t try to control what you write. The blind poet jacks his bone at Mount Olympus,
wheee
! Typed and scribbled sheets accumulated on my floor. I was writing my way out.

My relationship with Professor Alan Mathison Turing began in the final days of 1954. The man had fallen on hard times and, against all better judgment, I allowed him to move into my Tangier digs for a week.

Turing was a British mathematician who’d done code-breaking work during the war, later turning to the design of giant electronic brains. By the time I met him, his kick was programming the processes of biological growth. Not unloath to experiment upon himself, he’d infested his face with something vile.

Why did I fall for him? He was two years older than me, which would normally put me off—I like the young stuff. Not to mention that he appeared hideously diseased. But, as Turing’s experiments unfolded, he gained a seemly, pleasant look—in fact, for a time, he looked exactly like me.

I enjoyed Alan’s intellectual companionship from the start. If he came on like a Martian, this was only his protective comedy routine. His oddness was his bulwark against the world’s hale cretins. Like me, Alan was a born outsider, frankly and unapologetically queer. And he hated the authorities—with good cause. The British secret service was bent on assassinating him.

By way of breaking the ice, Turing told me he was planning to become a human-sized cancer tumor. His plan was to cut down on the need for all those body-organs and be a shapeshifting slug of undifferentiated tissue. He’d brought with him a culture of undifferentiated tissue in a cloth sack. He called his protosentient sample a
skug
, and he addressed it like a pet.

Initially I took this for a mere routine. But Turing was bent on pushing his jape to full fruition. He amended his skug with odd compounds from the souq, and tutored the creature with radio waves. And on the third day, lo, the miracle occurred. Turing merged his doctored skug with his body and became a
skugger
.

And a few minutes later, Turing transformed me as well.

At least initially, I found it very agreeable to be a skugger. I seemed to be vacuuming up inputs at a quicker rate than ever before—as if under the effects of a stimulant, but with no subsequent come-down.

More interestingly, as skuggers, Alan and I were shapeshifters, capable of molding our flesh into whatever mad form. To start with, he mirrored me. We had fabulous sex that segued into full-body conjugation. At last I’d truly shlupped with a lover.

Added attraction—we were telepaths as well.

The brain is a bioelectric orgone system, one understands, and it gives off signals akin to radio waves. Teep. A skugger is exquisitely sensitive to teep signals, and is adept at generating them in coherent form. Skugger-to-skugger telepathy extends for as much as half a mile.

From the very start, we skuggers were a social menace. The authorities viewed us as mutants, as disease vectors, as nihilists. Each of these assessments was in some degree correct. But—let me repeat—being a skugger was a delicious pleasure that one longed to share.

During the coming skirmishes, the cops would occasionally capture and subvert a skugger, making a spy of him or her. But the skugger quislings never lived long. To use your telepathy as a tool of repression is to become an orgoneless automaton, a clay juju doll.

Soon after Alan and I became skuggers, he left Tangier for the States, bearing my appearance and my passport. He was fearful of the British operatives and their ongoing plans to terminate him. After Alan’s departure, the British Embassy somehow drew me into an ill-starred attempt to spy on him—via a skugger-hive-mind parabolic-dish antenna. I cooperated, I suppose, out of curiosity. And for the pay. And for a fresh passport.

I’ve mentioned that skugger teep reaches only half a mile or so. But a shlupped combine of skuggers can achieve a hyper-resonant state with Earth’s orgone-pool, making it possible to send and receive teep halfway around the world.

For a few days I was remotely observing my new lover for the British heat—Alan was in Florida by then. Still looking like me, he’d had gone to visit my parents and my son in Palm Beach. Even now, I’m not sure why he did this. I was angry.

My pique escalated into a psychotic fugue state when I overheard Alan telling my son Billy that we might find a way to bring my dead wife Joan back to life. As if by dream logic, I knew right away that this was inevitable. And I was terribly afraid.

As an additional affront, Alan had enlisted another skugger, a rustic American named Ned, and they’d behaved in such a debased fashion at my parents’ that Mother had resolved to cut off the monthly allowance that had been my mainstay for my whole adult life.

Flipped into vengeful-demon mode, I prevailed upon the British Embassy to finger Alan for the Palm Beach police. But the sly Turing and his new friend Ned turned the cops into skuggers as well.

At this point I myself set off for Palm Beach. My plan was—what? It’s hard precisely to recall. Certainly I wanted to get my family allowance reinstated. And perhaps I longed to chastise Alan in the broadest possible sense. Sexually speaking, I wanted him more than ever.

On my plane trip to the States I reached a level of equanimity. A salubrious side-effect of becoming a skugger was that I could inwardly dose myself with endorphins that had the feel of opiates. I’d attained the goal of the adept’s quest: the Man within.

Stepping off my plane in New York City, everything looked sharp and clear, as if freshly washed. Sensations were hitting me like tracer bullets. I felt as fabulously alive as an electric eel. Walking with the King and nothing to declare.

I’d morphed into an beefy Brit to match my passport, but once I cleared immigration, I reverted to the Burroughs Classic look. I felt like a dog rolling in offal after his bath—savoring the filth of being his true self.

My parents frowned and clucked when I arrived in Palm Beach. Mother’s kind face simmered with unspoken questions. At least my son Billy was openly glad to see me. He enjoyed the weird science-fictional vibe of my two back-to-back visits—the previous visit having been, of course, Turing’s hoax. Billy liked to see reality warping into a comic strip.

There was a newspaper in the kitchen, with the headlines were bewailing the outrages that certain unknown drifters had perpetrated—including the deaths of cops. The full particulars of Alan’s visit came clear to me when I went upstairs. A tiny skug crept into my trouser leg, and leeched onto my calf. Alan had left this creature as a messenger—to fill me in on his doings.