William S. Burroughs (25 page)

The Old Man could
reach as far as Paris. Sources tell us nothing of the training
received by his assassins at Alamut, but we do know it sometimes took
years of preparation before the assassin was dispatched on his
mission. No one has explained how the Old Man conveyed the signal for
an assassination across hundreds or thousands of miles. The library
at Alamut was apparently a myth and no written teachings have
survived. Whom did he assassinate and why? Most of the hits were
caliphs, sultans and religious leaders, mullahs and such. Hassan
i Sabbah did not initiate attack. He waited until the enemy made a
move against him. In this way his position was similar to
Kim's...Just minding his own business when some punk looking for the
rep of killing the famous Kim Carsons starts the argument.

Hassan i Sabbah was
well known through the Moslem world just as Kim was known as a
gunfighter throughout the Old West. So any general, caliph, mullah,
sultan, could take a crack at the Old Man. He knew who would try this
before they knew it, and had a man staked out to kill when the move
was made.

The basis of the
Ishmaelite cult is a direct conveyance of divine power and leadership
through contact with the Imam. This cannot be simulated. You can't
fake it any more than you can fake a painting, a poem, an invention,
or a meal for that matter. It's there or it isn't. One look and you
know. The Old Man's power over his assassins is based on self-evident
spiritual truth.

During his exile in
Egypt he learned some basic secret by means of which his future power
was realized. Some scholars have assumed erroneously that this secret
was the use of hashish. Hashish was only an adjunct. What Hassan
i Sabbah learned in Egypt was that
paradise actually exists and
that it can be reached.
The Egyptians called it the Western
Lands. This is the Garden that the Old Man
showed
his
assassins...
I
t
cannot be faked any more than contact
with the Imam can be faked.
This is no vague eternal heaven for
the righteous. This is
an actual place
at the end of a very
dangerous road.

The Garden of Edeu
was a space station, from which we were banished to the surface of
the planet to live by the sweat of mortal brows in a constant losing
fight with gravity. But banished by whom? An asshole God who
calls himself Jehovah or whatever. Only one spiritual leader found
this out, and found a key to a garden
...
for
once you have the key, there are not just one garden but many
gardens, an infinite number.

He found the key in
Egypt. But the Egyptians didn't have a key. The Gods held all their
keys and admitted only favored mortals. And favored why? Because they
served as energy conduits to maintain the station. They were in
fact trained vampires put out on mummy leads to suck the energy
the space station requires, because the station, from time
immemorial, is rooted in time and supplied by time.

The Old Man was a
renegade. His assassins struck down the foremen and overseers who
manage the Big Ranch. And every time they did this, they grabbed
a key. So the Old Man set up his own station, the Garden of Alamut.
But the Garden is not the end of the line. It might be seen as a rest
camp and mutation center. Free from harassment, the human artifact
can evolve into an organism suited for space conditions and space
travel.

To what extent has
the situation changed? Not much. The mummy has been replaced by a
virus culture, inserted into suitable human hosts. The Virus
23
serves exactly the same function as a mummy: an energy
conduit to keep the ranch going and the human cattle out there on the
range getting fat and ready...
As it was in the beginning, is now,
and ever shall be
...
World
without end MOO MOO MOOOO.

Cows driven into the
slaughter chutes
...
God, the Father,
Son, and Holy Ghost, and when the Holy Ghost wears thin they simply
deny that the space station exists. This is the present directive.
Anyway, we got our cows going with the Vatican and coming with
the Kremlin, and the huge reservoir of scientific materialism, quite
as fanatic as any demented Inquisitor. "Anyone writing
about so-called ESP should be publicly horsewhipped and barred from
further activity," said someone whose name was so close to
Condom that if it fits he should put it on.

Well done, thou true
and faithful servant. We have conveniently ceased to exist. And
there have been moments when they had the sky sewed up tight as a
junky whore's ass
...
but it always happens,
the big cattle men go soft in the outhouse.

The Old Man found a
way to bypass the mummy route. Present-day immortalists have not done
so. They have simply reduced their stinking old mummy to virus
crystals for insertion in a human host, like loathsome insects
who go around laying their eggs in people. The Old Man's route
is sex between males. Sex forms the matrix of a dualistic and
therefore solid and real universe. It is possible to resolve the
dualistic conflict in a sex act, where dualism need not exist.

How did the Old Man
convey the death order at a distance? The word
telepathy
is
misleading.
Organic communication
would be a more accurate
designation, since the whole organism is involved.

You transmit and
receive as much with your big toe as you do with your brain and what
is transmitted is a strong emotional
reaction,
not
neutral data like triangles, circles, and squares. Consider the
Russian experiment described in
Psychic Discoveries Behind
the Iron Curtain.
Six baby rabbits of the same litter in a
Russian submarine three thousand miles from the mother rabbit. They
are then dispatched in a manner calculated to elicit the
strongest reaction, seized by bestial Russian tars, swung in the air
by their hind legs, urinating and defecating in terror as their
brains are bashed out against a torpedo launcher. Three thousand
miles away, the mother rabbit showed six strong reactions on the
polygraph at the precise instant when her babies were
liquidated..."So we will make rabbits of our enemies," the
Russkies chortle as they mix Bloody Rabbits from rabbit blood and
vodka...So the Old Man transmitted a
reaction
to activate a
preconceived plan.

"Nothing is
true. Everything is permitted." Last words of Hassan i Sabbah.
And what is the truest thing to a human mark? Birth and Deaths The
Old Man showed his assassins freedom from rebirth and death. He
created actual beings, designed for space travel.

The air-breathing
potential must come before the transition from water to air.
Otherwise it is simply suicidal for water creatures without any
air-breathing potential to move into air. So the potential for
existence in space must come before the transition from time into
space. We are considering here demonstrable biologic
alterations. New beings. You can't fake it. You can't breathe in fake
lungs.

"Let's go up
the Metropole and suck some bubbly."

Now Broadway's full
of guys

Who think they're
might wise

Just because they
know a thing or two

You can see them
every day

Strolling up and
down Broadway

Boasting of the
wonders they can do

There are con men
and drifters

Shake men and
grifters

And they all hang
around the Metropole

But their names
would be mud

Like a chump playing
stud

If they lost that
old ace down in the hole
...

Kim has reserved a
table. Eyes follow them. But nobody sees Boy do a fifty-dollar palm
on the headwaiter. All they see is fifty dollars of respect.

Cold, watchful,
probing eyes
...
gamblers, con men, sincere
untrustworthy eyes of a Murphy Man..."Now there's a party to
stay well away from."

Some
have a girl on the old tenderloin

And
that's their ace in the hole

WHAP
...
"You
no good junky slut, what's this?" He throws some crumpled bills
in her face from his manicured fingers. All pimps get manicures.
He has the assurance of one who knows his precise area of
exploitation and never steps outside of it. (In Kim's party he
is way outside his area. Nothing there for a pimp.) An old con man
smells money. But he doesn't smell marks. He looks away with a wrench
because it's
big
money he is smelling...

"No, I'd be
wasting my time."

A heist team smells
money too in the pocket. They also smell guns and trouble..."Looks
like a bank mob from out west carrying heavy iron...
"

Shake men and
grifters
...

There is Joe
Varland. He worked the broads on the trains. Nobody knew just how,
but he always came back from a train trip with money. Thin scarred
face...About thirty-five. Yellow gloves and brass knucks...You
notice his eyes
...
"sleepy and
quiescent in the presence of another species
...
at
once helpless and brutal
...
incapable of
initiating action but infinitely capable of taking advantage of the
least sign of weakness in another...
"

And he lost that old
ace in the hole...

Slugged a cop and
run for it. Didn't run far...A short trip home.

You can see them
every day...

A shadowland of
furnished rooms, chile parlors, pawnshops, opium dens, hobo
jungles, bindle stiffs, and rod-riding yeggs, some of them missing a
few fingers, mostly from the fulminate caps.

He remembers a dream
phrase spoken in Tom's voice a few months after Tom's death...

"Life is a
flickering shadow with violence before and after it...
"

Walking up and down
Broadway
...

Eyes watchful,
waiting, perceiving, indifferent, follow them to their table...Noting
the ease and deadly assurance...

Eyes old unbluffed,
unreadable.

From Florida up to
the old North Pole
...

They wind up in a
Village all-night place, eating spaghetti, surrounded by
long-haired scruffy-looking artists and poets
...
and
there but for the grace of Carsons
...

Yes, he could be
living in some cold-water flat, peddling his short stories from
editor to editor..."Too morbid," they tell him...

They pay the check
and as they step into the street and turn left on Bleecker Kim feels
it up the back of his neck..."Hey Rube," he yells.

He moves behind a
lamppost and drops his satchel, the
44
in
his hand. He can see Boy diving for a fireplug, a charge of shot
misses him by inches. Kim gets Liver Wurst Joe with the
44
and he drops his sawed-off into the street.

Guy has the Mauser
out across the street, shooting for the driver...Cherry Nose Gio
pumps in another round but his aim is bad because Frank the Lip lies
dead across the wheel and the car is bucking out of control and he is
catching lead from all of us, his head seems to fly apart from Boy's
45...
The car jumps the curb, crashes through a shop window in
a shower of glass.

"The coppers
will assume of course it is just another woppish beef," Kim says
as they walk rapidly away.

"What the
fuck happened?" the Director bellows.

The Technician
shrugs..."Old gangster film stock is worn right down to the
celluloid...I can do a chewing-gum patch
...
turn
the glass into rain...
"

"Well how
about a hurricane blowing glass splinters down the street?"

"A
hurricane?
Jesus
fucking Christ...Look, Boss, there is just so much
energy
...
so
much
IT...
You
use too much over
there,
you
don't have enough over
here...
We're
overdrawn,
Boss...Right
now we don't have enough IT to fry an elderly woman in a
rooming-house fire...
"

"Well we
'
ll
have to start faking it.
"

"All right,
Boss
...
anything you say...
"