Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (28 page)

She studied me with

clear eyes and downcast smile, her

face restored to a fine beauty.

And now it was so. Joan’s body sat up and blinked, very jerky, very robotic. This wasn’t going to work. She wasn’t really alive. But then I saw the glinting ultraviolet cuttlefish of Joan’s ghost, dawdling at the fringes of visibility, twiddling her tentacles and flipping her hula-skirt fin, making up her mind. She dove into the skugged meat.

Still sitting on the floor, the Joan-thing shuddered like a wind-riffled pond. She fixed me with her eyes and began talking, her voice languid and intermittent, like music down a windy street.

“I want to leave. I want to go to paradise. But I’m not done with you, Bill.”

“I’m agonized by regret,” I said. “I writhe abjectly. Go up to heaven, Joan. You deserve it. Forgive me and go.”

“What about little Billy?” asked Joan, rising lithe to her feet. She seemed taller than I remembered. Reaching out, she laid a cool hand on my face.

Immediately I had a physical sense that I was carrying a large covered basket. I’d been carrying it in my arms for a long time. Our son Billy was in the basket. He was going to die.

“I’ll help him!” I cried. “It won’t happen that way.” I stepped back, breaking Joan’s hallucinatory contact.

“You won’t save him,” said Joan, bleakly mournful. “I know you.” She looked around as if only now recognizing this as the spot where I’d shot her.

I stood frozen in place, awaiting her next move, more than ever wishing I hadn’t set this in motion.

“
Ooooo
!” said Joan, her voice purring up through an octave. “
I know
. It’s time for our William Tell routine.”

Without moving her arms or her shoulders, she poked her head out on a snaky tendril, scanning the room. Of course she spotted Susan Green’s gun.

“No,” said Susan, guessing what lay ahead. It was like we were playing out a script. Joan held out her hand. In thrall—or maybe just curious to see what came next—Susan passed Joan the pistol. Turing sat goggling like a mute imbecile.

“The glass, Bill,” said Joan, her voice low and firm.

I moved across the room like a fish in heavy water. I set the glass on my head.

A few paces away from me, Joan raised the pistol.

“Don’t,” I said, faint and husky. “Don’t shoot me, Joan.”

She fired. I flinched to the side. The bullet struck my temple. I slumped to the floor: deaf, blind, undead. I could sense things via teep.

“It’s over!” breathed Joan, with a fading lilt of summer in her voice.

Her ghost wriggled from her skugly flesh and fluttered in the air, still like a flowing cuttlefish, but more—peaceful than before. Flying around the borders of my teep, Joan’s ghost shrank as if moving far away.

Her spurned new body reverted to being a skug. It raised one end, as if sniffing the air, then humped along the floor and slid out the window.

Brain-scrambled as I was, I hallucinated that I humped my own body after Joan’s skug. Fully into the invisible zone of the astral plane, I slithered out the window and—just for jolly—levitated myself fifty feet high in the air. See me fly?

Downstairs at the Bounty Bar, Cortez was coming back from the cemetery. I lifted a pinky and Cortez ran amok with his razor-sharp tile knife, wounding a photographer and killing three poets on the spot. But when Cortez surged across the bar for a fresh bottle of tequila, the bartender beheaded him, using a Aztec
maquahuitl
edged in volcanic glass.

La policia
kicked in our rented room’s door, inevitable as reek on rot. It was a straight-on replay of 1951, but with me in a new role. The victim. They took me to the morgue and laid me naked on a marble slab. With a spongy erection.

“We need acousmatics,” said Susan, sidling in. “I memorized the sounds of a race riot in Miami. I’ll pump the replay from my skin, mixing in the shrieks of swine at the slaughterhouse. We’ll raise Bill from the dead and rectify those
policia
.”

My head was splitting in unbearable pain. I retracted my limbs, blanking things out.

“Bill?” said Alan, leaning over me and shaking me. “Bill?”

Reset. We were still in the room where I’d been shot. I sat up and spit the bullet from my mouth. The sun was high.

“What a burn,” I said. “Let’s split this scene.”

“Agents everywhere,” said Susan, leaning out the open window. “Like shit on shit. We need more acousmatics.” She emitted a fresh torrent of noise. It was a collage of every sound I’d ever heard in my life—thrown into a rock-tumbler.

The sky went pale green. Hailstones fell past, big as hens’ eggs, shattering on the street. Elephants trumpeted frantic at the drone of an approaching twister. The room’s wall rocked twice and exploded out. Turing and I slid helpless across the floor, pissing our pants. Cars tumbled through the air with clown-cops behind the wheels. A striped circus tent swept upwards, drawing me into a whirling shattered midway of bleachers and shooting galleries, of sugar skulls and Socco Chico queens.

Poised at the virtual tent-peak of the vortex was Joan, far and wee, the bride on the funeral cake, luminous white, bidding farewell, giving me the finger. Behind her glowed the light of a Missouri sunset, the clouds like bruised flesh.

I twitched and vomited, turning myself inside out. I was an eyeball on a transfinite spinal cord, shooting up like Jack’s beanstalk, slipping through the same clenched hole as Joan, the atomic pucker, the tiny pinprick between purgatory and paradise. My eye in heaven gazed upon a radiance beyond our wan spectrum—vivid, vital, vibrant.

The core spake unto Willy Lee: “I am. I am the V-bomb.” And as yet, your prophet knew not the meaning of these words.

Second reset. I was still in the flophouse room we’d rented, on the floor in a clotted crust of blood. I’d been in a night-long seizure, reflexively regrowing my brain. The sunlight lay like pig iron on the ground. The police had dispersed—if they’d ever been there at all.

We got a cab to the Mexico City junk neighborhood and teeped Naranjo. He’d scored two kilos of coarse brown H.

Back on the plane, with Susan in front with Naranjo, and Alan in back with me, I tore into the corner of a brick, and told Naranjo I was keeping an ounce for my own. He didn’t care. I stashed my junk into the cellophane of a cigarette pack. Alan watched disapprovingly.

“Hardly prudent,” he said.

Skugged, shot in the head, back from the dead, I wanted to be on the nod, skating the edge of OD, in blank oblivion. But when I went to snort my junk, my inner skug wouldn’t let me. So I dialed up the inner stim and declaimed unto my fellows a Sura.

“Hearken unto me, Alan, Susan, and Naranjo. I am the man. I was there. I snaked the hole to heaven. Death can be conned. There’s a higher level, my dear ones, a paradise beyond the shrieking sea of ghosts. Yea, wouldst thou attain immortality, thou shalt—”

“Shut your crack, Burroughs,” said Naranjo. “Unless you want another ride on that deathbed rollercoaster.” He’d turned around in his pilot’s seat. He had an oily 45 automatic pointed at my forehead. He looked utterly resolute. “I’m not about to listen to your bullshit for ten hours.”

“How about I suck your cock instead?” I said, just to push him a little further. I like to see people go over the edge.

“Degenerate,” muttered Naranjo, stashing his gun and turning back to the plane’s controls.

“Don’t bully Bill,” said Alan at my side. “He’s had a rough night of it.”

So I held my tongue during the long flight back to Ranger Rob the Smuggy Bear’s strip, leaning on Alan’s shoulder, staring freaky out the plane window, continually amazed to be alive.

I was done with Joan.

Chapter 14: Los Alamos

“You have
got
to change your look,” said Ranger Rob as Alan, Bill, Susan and Naranjo debarked from the plane on his snowy, tree-shrouded landing strip. “The word is out. You’re in the news.”

Ranger Rob was a fat-faced man with too much hair—a gray pouf on top, nasty muttonchop sideburns and a lumberjack beard with pancakes and bacon. And he was a skugger too, thanks to Alan. The little TV in his tiny, velvet-curtained cabin was jabbering away. The story of the Gormly ambush was a national sensation. Newscasters and politicos were ranting about witchcraft, satanic cults, communist cells and anarchy. Alan’s and Susan’s faces were on endless replay, shown in a news film shot during the attack, with occasional glimpses of Naranjo, labeled as a hostage. The high point of the film was a grainy, slo-mo loop of Alan deforming his body in a skuggy way, reaching up for Naranjo’s helicopter.

“Funny they’re not talking about a mass vaccination,” said Alan. “Using that anti-skug vaccine Roland Gill was telling me about. He was the FBI agent I skugged?”

“I bet that vaccine is hard to make,” said Susan. “Expensive. They’re saving it for the elite. For the police. Meanwhile it’s open season on us.”

“We’ll shift shapes,” said Alan. Driven by a mixture of nostalgia and a desire to agitate Bill, he took on a form remembered from his boyhood.

“My first flame,” explained Alan, cocking his now-narrow head at an impudent angle. “Christopher Morcom. He died of TB at nineteen.”

“That’s young even for me,” said Burroughs sourly. “And I don’t dig fantasies of boyish innocence. We’re all little shits from the start.”

“I’ll
sophisticate
myself for you,” said Alan, running his hands over his slender cheeks, and aging himself into his mid-twenties.

“I’ll match that play,” said Burroughs, reducing his apparent age from forty to about twenty-five. But still he kept the same Burroughs face. He could afford to. As yet he wasn’t on the U. S. skughunters’ radar.

Meanwhile Susan took on the look of a strong-browed, short-haired woman with full lips. “Bebe Barron,” she said. “She’s an electronic composer who’s a friend of mine. She and her husband Louis are making the soundtrack for a science-fiction flick. They’re awesome. Louis wires up these crufty, dirty circuits, and Bebe finds the music.”

For his part, Naranjo made himself starker and fiercer, with slashes of facial tattoos along his cheeks. Like a warrior-spirit version of himself. “I’m heading for Santa Fe,” he announced, fitting the two bricks of heroin into a knapsack. “Meeting a guy. With any luck, this is my last deal. Straight arrow from here on in. Give me a ride, Ranger Rob. You can drop the others in Los Alamos on our way.”

So the fat, oily Ranger Rob drove Bill, Alan, and Susan to Los Alamos. The ranger gave Alan’s bottom a lingering pat as the computer scientist disembarked. And then he continued towards Santa Fe with Naranjo.

“I remember a good diner along here from when I was a kid,” said Burroughs, as he, Suan and Alan they tramped along a slushy strip of drive-ins. They were dressed in the sturdy aviation clothes they’d lifted along the way, each of them in a leather flight jacket. Like a team of acrobats.

“The Big Bow Wow,” continued Bill. “Specializing in chili and sopaipillas. These puffy Southwestern pastries? Unspeakably toothsome with honey. We’ll kill some time at the Bow Wow with a newspaper, and comb the classified ads.”

“Looking for what?” said Susan.

“Aren’t you teeping us?” said Burroughs. “Alan wants to get a job at LANL. The Los Alamos National Labs. And I’m thinking we ought to find an apartment.”

“All three of us together?” said Susan.

“Cheaper that way,” said Burroughs. “And we men can protect your dank furrow.”

“So delicate of you to say that,” said Susan, her voice modulating to a harsh shout. “So refined. It’s been all of two days since those pigs incinerated my poor husband.”

“Have you seen his ghost again?” asked Alan.

“Not since that first night,” said Susan. “After he saved us from the blizzard, he dropped out of sight. Even though he could have helped us in Mexico. But you know Vassar. Always gadding about. Always a new idea.” She looked tired and wretched in the day’s fading gray.

“I’m sorry,” said Bill with atypical empathy. “I overplay the tough guy routine. I’m jonesing because my skug won’t let me get loaded on Naranjo’s brown nod.”

“I’m willing to be your friend,” said Susan. “And Alan loves you. So I wouldn’t mind living with you two boys till the Apocalypse comes down. Might not be long.”

“Were you really playing acousmatics last night?” asked Bill. “After Joan shot me? To drive off the police?”

By way of answer—on non-answer—Susan distended her skugger mouth into a duck-leg trumpet and made an impossibly weird sound. Alan echoed her. For a moment, the two of them stood there blaring like Judgment Day angels.

They made their way to the Big Bow Wow and sat dipping their sopaipillas in honey and scanning the
Los Alamos Monitor
for rentals and jobs. A black and white TV on the wall was pumping out news updates, a steady flow of aggression and fear. Some pundits thought the skuggers were saucer aliens. The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover pegged them as marijuana addicts.