William S. Burroughs (27 page)

Men blown out of the
saddle, horses disemboweled, trailing entrails, a
_/
rider
one foot caught in the stirrup, the other leg blown off at the knee
spurting blood in his face. Mike watches impassively. He turns and
rides back to town.

They carry Tom into
the barn and lay him down on a bedroll with an army blanket folded
under his head. The
30-30
has gone through
both lungs, angled from above. Kim starts to prepare a shot of
morphine but Tom stops him
...
a small
distant voice...

"It doesn't
hurt, Kim
...
I'm just cold
..."

Boy covers him with
a blanket.

He's bleeding out
and there's nothing I can do about it, Kim thinks. He starts to say,
You'll be all right, bursts into tears instead.

Kim burned it on an
oak barrel stave with an old rusty running iron he found in the
barn:

tom
dark

june
3,
1876
april
2,
1894

Kim's father had
told him something about painting: artists who couldn't sell a canvas
during their lifetimes and now their paintings are literally
priceless.

"If you know
how to pick them, it's the best investment you can make."

Kim makes an
appointment with an art dealer and takes along a selection of his
father's paintings. The man is Middle European, dark and heavyset,
with shrewd gray eyes.
.. .
"So you're
Mortimer Carsons's son...
"
Mr. Blum
studies the pictures carefully...One is a portrait of Kim, age
fourteen, standing on a balcony, his face radiant with dazzling
unearthly joy. He is waving to something beyond...Another picture
shows an old steam locomotive pulling floats of
The Mary
Celeste
and
The Copenhagen.
In the open cab of the
locomotive, a black engineer and fireman are pounding each other
on the back, smiling and waving...There are a number of landscapes,
mostly of the Ozarks in winter, spring and fall...

"There was
another portrait," Kim says. "Several years later...I
looked for it and couldn't find it...
"

"It's in
Paris," Blum told him, "and so is the dealer for these"
—
he
indicated the paintings. Blum was an ethical man after his
lights. This deal belonged to his old friend Bumsell and he knew
it...

Kim decides to make
the Grand Tour...

Kim dislikes England
on first contact. The porters are deferring to the signal presented
by his clothes and luggage. They don't see him. He infers correctly
that the whole place operates on hierarchical categories that
determine how everybody treats everybody else, categories
carefully designed to make sure no one ever
sees
anyone else.

"Well it's
convenient, isn't it?"

"Only in
petrified context. Function negative in space conditions."

The hyphenated
names, the old school ties, the clubs, the country weekends. Kim's
stomach turns at the thought of an English weekend. He had
thought of a large country house or a shooting lodge in Scotland. He
decides against it.

"They would
force me into a loathsome Lord of the Manor role...'And how is your
wife's cold, Grimsey?' Or get me out altogether. Always think about
the tenants when you buy on foreign soil. You are on their turf.
They were here before you came. They will be here when you are gone.
Which will be soon if you don't play their game."

Kim took a taxi. He
was meeting Tony Outwaite in Hyde Park.

Kim got out and
looked about him with loathing at the brown water, the listless
ducks, the warped benches stained with pigeon droppings.

"There is
something here that is just
awful,"
he decided. "A
terrible
lack...
No doubt they are all yacking away to
their
queen
...
taking tea with her oh quite at
ease you know and taking liberties she will just love like calling
her 'love' she'd just love that wouldn't she now?"

Kim was a few
minutes early for his meet with Tony. On operative meets it is always
indicated to get there a bit early and check things out...Trade
craft, you know.

Maybe I should feed
the fucking pigeons to be less conspicuous or cruise one of the
obvious guardsmen in civilian uniform or cheap lumpy blue suits. Most
of them look suety and stupid and deeply vulgar with a vulgarity of
the spirit that only a class rotten society can mold. No doubt
about it, these are the
lower
classes.

Someone else is
sitting on the designated bench reading
The Times
where Tony
should have been and Kim doesn't like it. He feels slighted. The man
is M-5, from his shoes, shined but not glitter-shined, to his gray
felt hat neither new nor old. Oh just any old M-5 hack is good enough
for me, is that it? He sits down petulantly and belches. This is the
password of ERP, the English Republican Party, which, under cover of
English eccentricity, is an extremely deadly and dangerous
conspiracy. You are expected to belch very discreetly and cover your
mouth. Kim belches rather loudly and doesn't cover his mouth. He can
feel the man shiver with disapproval.

"Nice weather
we're having isn't it?" the man says out of the corner of his
mouth as he folds his paper with the expertise of someone who does a
lot of sitting around reading papers. It's like folding a map./lf you
don't do it right you have an accordion of recalcitrant papers in
your hands.

"Well,"
Kim says distinctly. "It won't last."

"Daresay."

Kim reluctantly
surrenders the satchel containing his plague cloak, sandals, knife,
and sheath in accordance with his agreement with Tony, an agreement
he is already regretting. He stands up and walks away with a vague
uneasy feeling of universal damage and loss
...
in
his pocket a slip of paper
...
Empress
Hotel,
23
Lillie Road near Gloucester Road
Station, room reserved name Jerome Wentworth
...
reserved
not paid. Kim finds he has ten pounds left, just enough to buy a
cheap suitcase and some toilet articles
...
No
the chemist didn't have a shaving
kit,
but he did
grudgingly sell Kim a razor, shaving soap, toothbrush, and
toothpaste.

"Will that be
all, sir?"

(Gentlemen don't ask
for shaving
kits.
)

The Empress Hotel is
in a rundown shabby area on the edge of a rural slum with shops
selling jellied eels and blood pudding.

A motherly woman
greets him at the hotel.

"Oh yes, Mr.
Wentworth
.. .
gentleman reserved the room
and left this package. Our rates are a pound a night with breakfast,
five pounds by the week. Breakfast is seven to nine-thirty, seven to
ten on Sundays. We appreciate payment in advance."

Kim gives her a
five-pound note. He has nothing left but some change.

"Here's your
key, Mr. Wentworth. Room twenty-nine on the back."

The room is small
but the bed is comfortable. The one window faces a backyard with
trees and clotheslines. There is a gas grate that you feed shillings
into. Kim opens the package. There is a passport in the name of
Jerome Wentworth, student, and a letter of introduction to Professor
Gailbraithe at the British Museum which identifies him as a
Ph.D. in Egyptology from the University of Chicago. There is fifteen
pounds in notes. This, he gathers, is his weekly allowance after
paying for the room.

He feels like a
forgotten agent from some remote planet that winked out light-years
ago.

He assembles himself
for a tour of the neighborhood. He feels awkward, vulnerable,
conspicuous. He bumps into a woman at a corner.

"Well you might
look where you are going," she snaps.

"Are you next,
sir?" a clerk says insolently.

Symptoms of acute
weapon withdrawal.

In the days that
follow he will learn to stay out of places where he is discourteously
treated and he will find enough safe places to make life
bearable
...
just bearable
...
a
change of management or personnel...Kim has fallen from favor at
the Prince of Wales Pub. He observes that while good places may
change to bad, bad places never change to good ones.

He establishes a
routine. Every morning after breakfast in the hotel dining room he
goes to the museum and studies Egyptian texts, making notes.
Professor Gailbraithe is helpful in a vague way and Kim even has a
tiny office at his disposal. After lunch in the museum cafeteria, he
goes back to the Empress, types up and enlarges on his notes.

Every week he
receives twenty pounds by post. He always pays in advance.

"And how is the
back, Mrs. Hardy?"

"Well sir, I
could use one of those pain tablets."

"Of course,
Mrs. Hardy...You keep the other two in the bottle just in case...
"

A perfect gentleman
in every sense of the word.

The Egyptian
pantheon is colorful
...
a demon with the
hind legs of a hippopotamus, the front paws of a lion, and the head
of a crocodile
...
a beautiful woman with a
scorpion's head
...
a pig demon who walks
erect, seizing violators and squeezing the shit out of them, which he
grinds into their mouths and noses until they suffocate.

The whole stinking
thing is arbitrary and bureaucratic
...
the
Immortality Control Board and their terrible demon police...Venusian
M.O.

Most immortality
blueprints are vampiric, directly or covertly, so Kim surmises
that the Egyptian model is no exception, though no Egyptologist has
ever suggested such a thing. Dismissing the mummy road and the
Western Lands as primitive superstition, they never ask themselves
how such a system
could work.
It ran on fellahin blood.
Vampires, like the Western Landers, enjoy a precarious
immortality...They are vulnerable to fire and dismemberment or worst
of all
explosions. Just like mummies
and that was the
tipoff: vampirism, crude and rampant. The Western Lands are kept
solid and operative with fellahin energy and this entails the
additional risk of a fellahin shortage.

"The crops have
failed. Millions will starve."

"Oh dear,
starving people are so unrewarding."

"Hardly worth
sucking...
"

"From their
green going we gets no coin."

"And a
terrible plague has further decimated our herds...
"

"And marauding
barbarians are sweeping down from the north...
"

Dead peasants,
burning huts
...
the age-old face of War,
from here to eternity...

Why was it necessary
to preserve the actual physical body? Look at this body. It is a
spacecraft designed to accommodate one person. And no two are exactly
alike. Fingerprints differ. Voiceprints differ. Pricks differ. (It
never occurred to them to isolate these factors? No they didn't have
the technology for that. We do now.) So the
ka
fits perfectly
into this body. And it needs that precise filter to suck energy from
other bodies. And this precise difference. You fellahin cattle are
there.
We immortals are
here.
A parasite must
always preserve this unique difference, otherwise it will merge
with the host and lose the most precious thing a parasite can have:
Its identity. Its name.
So the body has to be preserved since
it contains the essence of name and difference that enables it to
suck life from others, a specialized filter on which the
ka
is absolutely dependent for its continued existence in the
Western Lands.

Vampires need
victims. The victims need vampires like they need pernicious anemia.
For vampires to go unnoticed they have to be few in number. Suppose
we suck up a few centimeters a day from say five thousand fellahin.
They won't even miss it.

The Western Lands
was a vampiric mirage kept solid with fellahin blood.

So how did such an
unpleasant, precarious, and dangerous concept arise? Because it
works. The Western Lands can be made to exist. Kim is beginning to
understand how the whole system can be installed in England or
anywhere else.