Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (6 page)

Turing brought a pound of his alien mollusk’s flesh in a cloth sack, and he set it out in a bowl on my counter. He call the thing a skug, he say it made of UDT or undifferentiated tissue, he talk to it like a pet. The UDT is subject to take root and grow anywhere. He very uneasy about using his skug before he’s done doctoring the pet with, like, goat bile and radio waves, he brought a whole mad-scientist lab along.

Meanwhile, every time I turn around, Turing want more medicine. His horrible condition is make him a junk hog in record time. And this afternoon while I step out to fetch my mail, the situation reach the inevitable crisis.

As fate wills it, I was detain from my rapid return on account of three fellahs are immolating some kind of mutant monster in the lane that leads into my naberhood.

“This clumsy thing brings us shame,” a boy explain, with weirdly fluid gestures of his arms—like maybe he a mollusk too.

Makes me feel so hot and nasty to see the flames lick across the rival mutant they’ve laid low, half-man/half-slug. The boys are goosing each other, laughing like hyenas, bending their faces into impossible grins.

When I finally sashay home, I find all my ampules gone, and my guest nodded out on the shitter floor. In a spasm of disgust I am compelled to remove his moribund facial tissues, using my scalpel-sharp shiv to sever the capillary-rich roots.

Liquidated Zeno’s face in the bidet, I did, doused it in nitric acid. Hideous pungent stench. An Arab gendarme come pounding on my door, I yell that I’m making a pork couscous, and can I borrow a pint of piss. And then Turing arises from the Land of Nod and runs out to the balcony screaming like lobster lost his shell, blending his voice with the muezzin in the minaret across the way.

The stub of Turing’s original face is red and raw like dysenteric buttocks. Taking pity, I squirt on some Vaseline and give him the last of my M tabs. He’s asleep on the couch now.

I’m having a pipe, watching the skug-thing twitch on the counter. Maybe if I dip a dab onto my spine I sprout a lemur tail.

As ever,

Bill

***

To Jack Kerouac

Tangers, December 24, 1954

Dear Jack,

Turing fixed my typewriter, so now it’s back to my novel, if it is a novel.
Interzone
. Maybe I just interleave the carbons of my letters with you-are-there descriptions of my innaresting daily routines. “I live my art,” says the Author, smoothing his eyebrow with buffed-nail pinkie. “Don’t you?” What I need is a television camera broadcasting me all day long. “You got an audience of like two, Boss. A hebephrenic and a blind leper.”

We find our protagonist in his louche Casbah suite...the plot as thick as the goat offal simmering on his alcohol stove. Cook it up and shoot it, amigo.

Continuity note: House-guest Alan Turing was hogging my junk to the point where I find my day’s box of Eukodal ampules empty before the Hour of Prayer. So I shave off the dying Zeno face that was paining him. Made a man of him, I did, only he look like lunch counter hamburger meat. He planning to patch himself with questionable slime that he call his pet skug. A larger version of his skug have eat a secret agent and was burned by Arabs in the street.

This afternoon, while Turing fiddle-fucks with his radio tubes and my broken typewriter, I watch a buzzard circling the fellahin sky. I am one with the bird, taking in the fragrant cedar of the souq braziers, the kief pipes’ glad exhalations, the drying jissom on pearly bellies, the slow rotting of the black meat, and the persistent pong of the parasitic Zeno Nu-Face that I charred with acid in my bidet. Flashback of me stirring clotted filaments with my double-jointed three-foot switch-blade.

Clickity-clack. Happy keys on my typewriter. I dance the alphabet while my flayed-face professor putters at my kitchen counter, less jolly than before. He plan to change his looks yet again, and then to obtain a fresh passport—not easy just now as the heat have close down the Interzone paperhangers on account of a rogue con-man have pass himself off as the Norwegian consul and infect half of Embassy Row with coal-gas addiction which result in they metamorphose into scaly manila folders that smell of
lutefisk
.

“I am my papers.”

Turing’s company wears thin. In reaction, I’m compulsively pitching comedy routines at him, just to hear him laugh—a sound like a starter-motor on a cold morn.

I can’t ascertain if he has hard feelings over my emergency surgery on him, his raw-meat phiz being somewhat hard to read. He still poking at his skug of undifferentiated tissue. He say he eventually need to let it grow all over his head for making a new face. But first he want to make it smarter.

Meanwhile he giving me the horrors with his boffin etiquette. “I say, Burroughs, could you possibly procure a pint of ammonia?”

He’s sent me out to the farmacia twice today for like streptococcal infusion and bovine growth hormone, the latter come in glass icicle tubes that Turing crack open to drip yellow glow-juice into his little reagent vat...formerly my cooking-pan and now destined, I shouldn’t wonder, for the Royal British Museum of the History of Bio-Computational Science.

Drip, stir, measure, mix, low mutter, squeak of pencil on paper...last night Turing sneak out and steal two car batteries he use to power a mad-scientist all-fluid self-generating magic-lantern show...he not care about making me felony burglary accessory after the fact.

The batteries connect to colored juice between two sheets of glass he cut out of my window. Seems like he’s hand-crafted some kind of optical display, it’s hooked into his radio tubes to make a show for his skug thing that sits on a cushion like a hairless cat—watching. Horribly the skug have grown a fuzz of snail-antennae, with a tiny black eyeball atop each wobbly stalk.

I fix M and settle in with the skug to watch Turing’s show this morning for a few hours...jaguar yage visions, subdimensional towers, sea cucumbers of the hollow earth, branching tentacles of the Crooked Beetle, and then Joan’s annulled face transitioning through the days and months of decomposition. Turing has the skug mirroring these mind movies on its own skin. He has probes all over it, he at his controls, watching me from the corner of his eye, his own raw face unreadable.

Despite all recent reverses, Turing remain manfully eager to emigrate to Amerika and set to work building morphogenetic slime processors for the Fatherland.

One thing Turing say this afternoon is very disturb me: “Tomorrow for Christmas, I want to be you.” He say this with his voice flat and wistful like a prairie orphan, his teeth very prominent in his ruined face.

At this point, I’d gladly throw my boy Kiki off the sled and into Turing’s slavering jaws, but Kiki don’t come around no more. My lodger the Mathematical Brain is give everyone the creeps.

“Sorry to be a bother, Burroughs, but could you pop out for some turmeric and cayenne pepper? My display needs more
hues
.”

Like I owe him endless favors. Just because I carved off his nasty rotting face. Classic mooch psychology.

I’m scared of him, Brother Jack.

As ever,

Bill

***

To Allen Ginsberg, Letter A

Tanger, December 25, 1954

Letter A

My original plan today: take a break from junk so’s I can get my sex up...hit the Socco Chico and gift myself a Christmas boy...or eat majoun and be a centipede that wriggle along the endless maze of Tanger sewer pipes inspecting cheeks.

But I got this like house guest Alan Turing who spring a surprise routine of his own. He was working all night, and when I wake up this morn, there’s no gay, bright presents...instead I see Turing’s become a human-sized slug of undifferentiated tissue. What I’d call a
skugger
. The prof’s gone viral on my ass.

He slime up onto the wall and across the ceiling, he move very fast for a mollusk, like a speeded up movie,
schluppp
, he drop down and assimilate me right in my bed. Now I’m a skugger too. Our skins quilt themselves together...all is one... everything is merged inside. We’re filled with white light ecstasy, our four tranced eyes stare up like shiny puddles. Thinking fast.

Sexy the way our livers slide across each other, tasty how our bones bump the grind. With the orgone pleasure rush comes a nausea like I never feel it before, my trillions of cells in revolt against Turing’s violation of the immune system code...

Feeling overly full, your humble correspondent lumbered down the stairs to his filth-strewn back yard and took a seventy kilogram dump...eliminating redundant units like a corporation resizing herself after a handsome acquisition. Mercy me, but I was shivers all over when I passed that gentleman’s skull. Can’t say as I actually looked back at what I crapped out, just scuffed some dust over the remains like a dog does, then hurried back inside for a festive refreshment—candied dates and hot black tea. For the first time in years, I’m feeling no craving for junk, booze or Miss Green.

I sat down at my well-oiled typewriter and began transmitting you this latest news...and then came the confrontation that every man fears and longs for the most.

The shambling thump of...something Burroughsian... huffing up the sun-sharpened stairs to my door, my fellow skugger dragging himself towards me like a canvas sack of black meat.

Taking a jiu-jitsu stance, I open my door to find...a lean, weathered man with thin lips and a sly smile, balding, horsy jaw, narrow nose, keen eyes, he’s really quite dazzling this fellow...I might as well be looking into a mirror. This weasel Turing have absorb my chromosomes so he can lift my papers. Call him Alan-William Turing-Burroughs now.

The obvious question: do we make fucky-fuck? Fie! I’m not my type, dear. Instead we rustle up a brace of boys in the Socco Chico—my Kiki, and Alan’s erstwhile soul-mate Driss. The big surprise is that the boys are already by way of being skuggers too. The transformation has had a bad effect on them, they seem a listless, limp. But once Turing lay on his hands and flow in his latest skuggy program tweaks, they peppy.

So we four while away a lovely Christmas afternoon in my digs, eating couscous and nibbling sweetmeats between tastes of the Forbidden Fruit, sometimes melting into a mound. Even when we’re not in physical touch, we’re reading each others’ feelings and thoughts. It’s richer than what I’d expected from telepathy—I call it
teep
.

Such expansiveness today, such laughter and joy...
luxe, calme et volupté
. And Turing—how rare to share the company of a truly intelligent and utterly subversive man. An oasis in the long caravan of life.

But then our hired boys leave, the sweets are all eaten up, and my opportunistic double want to sit in my rocker and use my typewriter even though I am still in mid-stream on this letter.

Over my shoulder, even now as I type, I tell him he’s disloyal as a sheep-killing dog, and he think I’m joking. Even under the ameliorating influence of my genes, his laugh still very ugly and he enjoy to talk about like Diophantine equations yet. I have this suppurating anxiety he gonna burst open any second and release uncountable numbers of skug larvae to recruit the local citizenry
en masse
.

So I pull my shiv on him and explain it best he leave town tonight on the ferry to Spain. I’m giving him my passport and a letter of reference...just for the pleasure of seeing his questionable ass go out my door before he get me exiled from my Land of Nod. Still some details to wrap up...and then for The Novel.
Interzone
.

Love,

Bill

***

To Mortimer Burroughs

Tangier, Christmas Day, 1954

Dear Father,

The man who bears this letter and my passport has taken on my form as a way to avoid unjust persecutions of the sort that I myself am subject to. I ask you to assist him as much as you can.

He is a pleasant gentlemen of sober habits and considerable scientific skill. He hopes to find work in some technical field. I realize that you’ve long since sold your stock in the Burroughs Corporation, but perhaps you still have some contacts among the higher-ups. He feels he would do very well in a research lab.

I won’t try to explain how it is that he took on my appearance. Suffice it say that the interaction had no bad effects on me...far from it, I feel livelier than usual, and I am full of energy for my next book.

Rest assured that I remain your true son Billy, and that I am indeed still in Tangier. I can arrange a confirming telephone call through the US Legation if you like. By no means should you discontinue my monthly payments.

Love to Mother, and Merry Christmas to you both.