Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (5 page)

Further tweaks were needed, and there was no time like the present. Alan resolved to continue treating the man-sized slug with the healthful and educational rays that emanated from his radio circuitry. Aiming his disk antenna towards the mound, he cranked his transmitter to full power. He taped two disks of foil to his temples by way of giving the system an input device.

As night fell, Alan played telepathic tutor—thinking through the details of his epochal result on the unsolvability of the machine-halting problem, and mentally reviewing the partial differential equations that had appeared in his
Transactions of the Royal Society
paper on morphogenesis. Hopefully the arcane knowledge was hitting home.

Alan might have done more, but now the skug arose from its torpor. It tightened up its body and slid across the floor. A lisping chorus issued from the myriad of snouts upon the thing’s surface—perhaps it was saying goodbye.

“Wait,” called Alan, his voice harsh in the dark room. “I still need a sample of you for designing my cure. I still need to fix my face.”

The skug extruded a meaty tentacle that waved in the air like a lariat. The base of the pseudopod pinched itself off. The liberated half-kilogram of skug-flesh dropped to the floor and formed itself into a compact sausage.

And now, flowing like lava, the bulk of the skug progressed onto Alan’s balcony and began drizzling off the edge and into the filthy back alley below. Wanting to keep his distance but driven by curiosity, Alan went out on the balcony to watch.

The dripping skug-flesh was rising into a pair of stalagmites in the dim alley, two slanting limbs that joined at waist height tips and grew higher, slowly taking on the rudimentary form of—a naked man? A semblance of Pratt. The skug may have erased Pratt’s personality, but, via the cells’ genetic codes, it knew the man’s shape. Jiggling at the waist, the skug-man waved a chubby arm and wobbled off.

Would Pratt’s masters come looking for Alan again? It was past time to abandon this apartment. Using tongs, Alan maneuvered the remaining sausage of skug into a cloth sack. He knotted the top for safekeeping. Somehow he’d get a passport with a different name. But of course this all would be in vain if Alan couldn’t heal his rotting Zeno face!

He bundled his radio equipment and a sampling of his home-brewed chemicals into a pillowcase. He cut his Zeno Metakides passport into pieces and burned them. He thumbed through the bills from Pratt’s wallet.

He needed to fix his face, obtain a passport, and get aboard a ship. And for the short term, he needed a human ally. Someone dodgy, low-down, shameless. As if running on automatic, his mind turned to William Burroughs—the attractive oddball writer chap whom he’d met at the Café Central this summer. A Harvard man and a morphinist, Burroughs had a wonderfully jaundiced view of the world.

If anyone could sympathize with the surrealistic absurdity of Alan’s plight, Burroughs was the man. He’d seek out Burroughs, and something marvelous might result.

Chapter 3:Tangier Routines

[These letters, and the ones reprinted in a later chapter, are said to have been written by the author William Burroughs. The letters in this chapter are variously addressed to Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and to Burroughs’s father, Mortimer. The letters date from December 22, 1954 to December 25, 1954; the first two are hand-written, and the final three are typed. Note that Burroughs uses a variety of spellings for “Tangier.”]

To Allen Ginsberg

Tangiers, December 22, 1954

Dear Allen,

I been pounding my keys for a silo-fulla-queer-corn story this month...to the point where my typewriter seize up and croak. So I come at you direct through my quivering quill. Imagine a hack writer fixes with ink and he enters his personal Xanadu pleasure dream. But then the Great Publisher edit him outta Eden.

I’ve settled back into Tangier, they got everything I want. Each trip to the homeland drags me more. How did we ever let our cops get so out of hand?

If I ever started feeling sorry for my parents, I’d never stop. I’m a disappointment, but having gone thus far, I’d be a fool not to go further. My word hoard is compost to make lovely lilies bloom.

Too bad you and me didn’t contact personal, but I couldn’t make it to California with all them conditionals you were laying down. Why are you scared of mind-meld? Our buddy-buddy microscopic symbiotes do it alla time. Dysenteric amoeba Bil meets sexy-in-his-bristles paramecium Al, they rub pellicles—ah, the exquisite prickling, my dear—and
schlup
! My protoplasm is yours, old thing, the two of us conjugated into a snot-wad so cozy. I see me in a Mother Billie Hubbard ectoplasmic gown, tatting antimacassars to drape over that
harrumph
Golgi apparatus of yours.

“Just a routine,” says Clem, standing bare-ass on the milking stool while the gray mare kicks screaming through the barn wall. “Sorry, old girl, I meant to use lard, not liniment.”

The local worthies presented me with the key to the city—a nicely broken-in kief pipe stamped with arabesques. Ululating crowds of Spanish and Arab boys bore my pierced sedan chair though the streets. I’m installed in a Casbah seraglio, $23 per month, a clean plaster suite at Piet the Procurer’s, with an extra bedroom and a balcony affording microscopic views of the souq.

Brilliant clear Mediterranean skies. I’m a myrmecophilous arthropod in the African anthill—a parasite/symbiote whom the Insect Trust tolerates on account of my tasty secretions.

I leech the sparkle of the sun from the waves, the Japanese outlines from the pines, the exquisite curls of steam from my cup of mint tea. These stolen vital forces are channeled into making me a citizen. Vote Insect Trust or die.

Kiki seems genuinely glad to have me back. What relief, to have a boy who cares for me. I’ve already given him some of my new dry goods. The pith helmet. The feather-duster. I’m this staghorn beetle lurches in, legs furiously milling, the ants swarming over me like slow brown liquid, flensing off my waxy build-up, a peaceful click of chitin from my sun-stunned den.

Eukodal back in stock at the farmacia. But dollies, M tubes and codeineetas still in short supply. Brian Howard is like to have burned down the place this summer. “I just don’t
feel
right in the morning without I have my medication.” Brian’s gone home to the Riviera, buying a castle, my dear.

You gotta dig the Socco Chico when you and Jack come. The Little Market, the anything-goes interzone of Interzone. Maybe I write a magazine piece about it for
Reader’s Digest
, you be my agent, and we retain intergalactic telepathy rights.

By way of Socco Chico color, I run into a Cambridge type at the Café Central last night, he say he used to be math professor. I know this character from the summer when he briefly orbited Brian Howard, but yesterday I hardly recognize him...his face all dead and gray. Talks like a full-on Brit boffin, with stutters and pauses like Morse code, and he shrieks key words for emphasis. “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah,
Burroughs
!” Pathetically glad to talk to me, and I’m all ears, lonely Ruth amid the alien corn. He laughs inordinately at all my jokes.

After I stand him to a cognac and kief, he rush me outside to talk. This summer he called himself Zeno Metakides, but now he’s shedding his character armor and says he’s Alan Turing. As we walk, he’s darting glances down the side streets in fear of, he says, a large man-eating slug that he’s unleashed. And I’m digging the kicks, carrying a pipe and a bottle.

Turing say he’s learning to program the processes of biological growth. His face, just as a for instance, is a fake, a meat disk that he cultured in a pan six months ago, and it’s grown onto him like a lichen on a boulder. But it’s rotting. While he’s talking to me, he picks shreds of flesh off his cheeks,

Picking up on my visceral repulsion, the mad prof reassures me that his face-rot is akin to cancer and is therefore not a communicable disease. Says he’s concocted a cure with the help of an angelic youth name of Driss. The cure itself have however gone metastatic on him and is the aforementioned slug that roams the Tangier alleys in search of boys.

But Turing’s confident, and manful. He says that he’s still quite fit, he goes running on the beach three miles every morning, trailing his flag of stink. It’s a wonder the fellahs don’t tear him apart bare-handed and roast him like a goat.

Turing has a third problem besides his rotting face and the escaped slug, viz. he is unable to return to his rooms because of some unspecified dust-up with sinister unknown agents who have penetrate the Zone. They are persecute him because he know too much. And then the evening breaks into blotches and streaks with a soundtrack of hysterical laughter. I leave Turing passed-out in an alley.

And now...oh the horror, Allen, the horror...I hear this character’s voice in the street. Real-time message from the Burroughs memory unit: I offered to let the decaying math prof bunk in the spare room of this whorehouse suite where I hang my Writer shingle. He’s coming up the stairs, his gray pieface aimed unerringly my way like a lamprey’s toothed sucker disk.

Love,

Bill

***

To Jack Kerouac

Tangier, December 23, 1954

Dear Jack,

Jack, tell Maw Kerouac shut her crusty crack about me being a bad influence, of all the misguided abuse I ever stand still for. What you need is find you a decent woman, son. Marry the gash and tell your control-knob maw to wipe her
own
wrinkled ass alla time...

I’m practicing my winning sales pitch in case the writing game don’t pan out and I am reduce to sell cooking gear like Neal. Ideas flap in my belfry like hairy jungle bats. Ah, don’t turn away, my lad, I need you. Voice quavering from the darkness of Father Jack’s confessional booth. I got confidential doings that I gotta spill or else I wig already. I buggered my typing machine, your grace. Commence Scrivener’s Tale...

Against my better judgment, I am temporarily lodging a shameless mooch who used to call himself Zeno Metakides, only he a Brit math prof in disguise. He was a code breaker in the War, and he say the UK authorities are out to liquidate him on account of he’s queer. Or maybe it’s KGB, CIA, or the Knights of Templar. His legit handle is Alan Turing, but that don’t come from
my
primly pursed lips.

Turing is two years older than me, slim and fit, awkward and mechanical, with a robotic grating laugh I dig to provoke. Queer as a three-dollar bill. He has an endearingly bad attitude towards the powers that be. Dizzy with Wee Willy Lee’s majoun-tea and sympathy, he’s been pouring out his tormented heart. He’s quite impressed with my pedigree, says he’s had dealings with a giant artificial brain that use a magnetic memory unit from my grandpaw’s Burroughs Corporation.

Turing says he’s on the lam from England for some decryptional security breach. And now he’s evacuated his Tangier squat to sponge off me. It’s Strickly Platonic between Turing and me, at least for now, we’re two logico-analytic brains in jars. But now and then I catch his brain stem schlupping across the counter and vining up my leg. There is, one allows, a certain mutual attraction.

But all this is nothing compared to the real-life routine my prof-in-residence is laying down... and this is the tasty part. Turing is wearing an artificial face, a meat-skin flesh mask that he pancaked on while escaping the MI5 Heat.

Says he grew the face from a sample taken from the tip of his deceased Greek lover’s nose... that being the original Zeno Metakides. Seems the stumblebum Mystery Hit Squad poisoned Metakides instead of Turing. They used a pot of cyanide tea, how cozy. Whiz that Turing is, he quick grew copies of his phiz and of Zeno’s dead pan, reassigned identities, and left the tarted corpse back home, escaping with the Metakides passport to...where else but old William Lee’s trap in Tangier. It’s like Allah sends him here special to be my gunjy muse.

Fed by Interzone’s miasmas, his face-rot have turn galloping necrotic over the last six months, and now he’s working on a cure. Yesterday all day he’s tinkering with colored goo and radio tubes while I write out a new routine in longhand, reading some of the choicer bits to the wacky prof.

Passable fun, but around sunset, Turing drop all dignity and begin mewling and holding his face. “Oh how it aches, Bill, can you give me something for the pain?” My reputation have precede me.

I fix him with an ampule of Eukodal and I sit in my rocking chair watching the show. While Turing dreamy on the floor, this one particular centipede name of Akhmed crawl outta the crack by the toilet bowl to munch on his cheek. I break off a twitching bug-leg and smoke it in my tessellated pipe. And so we passed the night.

This morning Turing clarify that, the day before he moved in on me, the Interzone Heat have made him. He’s rather shy on this point, but I gather he has offed a secret agent by feeding him to a shapeshifting slug that was originally to have been a special unguent for his horrible condition. And this thing is now on the loose.