William S. Burroughs (31 page)

The Ganymede Hotel
is at the end of a long crooked street. He signs the papers and the
boy takes them to a room opening onto a little walled garden with fig
and orange trees and a pool with a fountain...There is a
haman
down the hall and old-fashioned carbolic soap, "lovely boy
toilet soap," they call it in Persia. Kim is a connoisseur of
carbolic soap...There are other boys in the
haman,
he
recognizes kinky red hair and the green cat eyes that shine in a
shuttered room.

Long crooked street
of youths handling the guns. In the
ha-man
are two youths from
the market. The boys turn and grin. They are standing there with
erections, languidly soaping each other with the same loving fingers
they use when touching a gun, checking the mechanism with a gentle
precise touch. They are holding up fingers. Some bargaining the
Traveler doesn't understand and they are speaking a dialect not
covered in his Arab Bedouin and dialect shots. It is a humming sound
that buzzes out of the larynx through the teeth, which are bared like
those of wild dogs in the act of speech. At first the vibration sets
the stranger's teeth on edge with an exquisite pain, his phallus
sways and stiffens and throbs.

Now the boy
—
Jarad
was his name
—
squirms in behind him
with the KY musk. The fingers like loading a gun slide in and touch
the trigger and the Traveler spurts, hitting a target on the wall.
The boys are pounding him on the back. They carry him back to the
room and Jarad blows smoke down his chest to the crotch and the
Traveler falls on his knees, sniffing the smoke up with the rank
musky ferret smell. Runs his hand lovingly over the cloning
equipment. Sound of running water a flute Lifebuoy Carbolic Soap
peels off his underwear grin. They are standing there serene impure
kinky red hair that shines in the shuttered room like fine gold wire.
They are holding up fingers the Ganymede Hotel. He doesn't understand
the bargaining the boys sniffing him a humming sound on all fours on
the pallet teeth bared like wild dogs stiffens and throbs. The boys
are pounding him on the back. He remembers the game of taking three
deep breaths while a boy behind him pulls his arms tight across his
chest and he blacks out and comes around with the boys all laughing,
he has passed some sort of test.

They carry him back
to his room and lay him on the bed where he falls asleep. He wakes up
with Jarad shaking him gently to the smell of roasting mutton,
cooked over coals on the balcony.

After dinner the
four boys bring out maps. It's an action of some sort. They are
pointing to the map, setting up an ambush. (One boy ejaculates across
the map. Another traces the spurts with a crayon. He makes
calculations with a slide rule.)

They handle their
bodies like their guns, as artifacts, with the knowing caressing
fingers of connoisseurs. Jarad is naked, his gun disassembled on a
low table in front of him. He picks up each piece, feeling it and
memorizing the shape of it like braille, he can disassemble and
assemble the gun in the dark. The boys play a game of recognizing
each other in the dark by touching each other's cocks.

Kim sits up naked
and yawns, tightening his sphincter lest he soil the bed. At the end
of the room is a marble toilet and a water faucet and a hip bath with
a copper kettle over it and a low kerosene flame. He defecates with a
loud sound that spatters the bowls with liquid feces streaked with
blood. Nobody pays the slightest attention. He washes himself in
carbolic soap and dries himself and takes his
44
special Russian with a set trigger out of its case. A tip-up revolver
and not a fraction of an inch of play in the cylinder. He takes the
gun down carefully, oiling and memorizing each part. Another boy
has an eighteen-shot 17-caliber revolver, the thin cartridges
three inches long, the bullet long and pointed with soft metal in the
middle and hard metal at both ends that mushrooms on impact to the
size of a half-dollar.

Kim feels a numbing
blow in the chest, sucking, gasping for breath that won't come...

"Code
Blue...Code Blue!"

The doctor holds up
a restraining hand.

"He's coming
around...No need to electrocute him."

Kim is spitting
blood into a basin. His throat aches and every breath stabs
through his lungs with searing pain...The doctor prepares an
injection...

"You'll be out
of here in a few days...Your accent is
Moroccan
...
Casablanca
...
Profession:
perfume dealer
...
That covers any amount of
travel...Pick up further instructions in Tangier.

I am Captain
Zomba...Hotel Continental."

Guide English
accent, Kim decided. The man had a sincere untrustworthy face beneath
a worn red fez. His smile showed gold teeth to go with the braid in
his funky old fez.

The Captain began
shouting orders as Kim's luggage was hoisted into the carriage. The
porters screamed curses as the carriage pulled away from the
docks and the Captain stuck his head out and snarled some smashers
back. They jolted through narrow streets, exchanging
pleasantries with pedestrians, some of whom had to flatten themselves
in doorways to avoid being crushed against a wall by the horse. Kim
took a suite with a balcony overlooking the harbor and he could
see across the straits. A steep slope led down to the water. There
was a smell of garbage and the sea. The sunset was
magnificent...The boy arrived with gin and tonic.

"Put it
there...
"
Kim learned that these
sunsets were a regular feature said to be surpassed only by the
Timbuktu sunsets, owing to a suspension of red dust in the
Timbuktu area. As a connoisseur of sunsets he intended to visit
Timbuktu eventually. Now there was his mission and Timbuktu
would have to wait. He unpacked his pistols and opium pipes. He had
letters of course but arriving in a strange town he preferred to have
a look around on his own first. He selected a sword cane and a
lightweight
44
Russian with a
three-inch barrel, the holster sewn into a vest.

Brushing aside a
horde of beggars, guides, and procurers (Kim has a NO he learned from
Salt Chunk Mary. It's a NO that never means yes. A NO that is
understood even by a Tangier guide) and wrapping himself in a cloak
of invisibility, he went for an evening stroll. He loved the narrow
twisting streets, the smell of sewage, the tiny cafes where the
natives sit on stone benches drinking mint tea and smoking their kief
pipes. He found an English bar in the European quarter and had three
gin and tonics. He could feel a quickening of interest. Small place,
a stranger in town is news here. Avoiding conversational overtures he
went back to the hotel and had dinner served on his balcony. Then he
unpacked his typewriter and wrote until
3:00
a.m.

As soon as an
article goes into mass production the company doesn't want to know
about a simpler better article, especially if it is basically
different. So a number of very good inventions are scrapped and
forgotten. We can extrapolate that the same formula applies to
living organisms once we have accepted the supposition that
living organisms are artifacts created for a definite purpose. There
are no cosmic accidents in this universe. I mean of course the
universe which we see and experience. No reason to think that this is
the only universe. This universe is probably a minute fraction of the
overall picture, which we will not have time to see. And if we saw it
it would be, to our limited perceptions, completely
incomprehensible, which is why we can't see it. (A phenomenon must be
to some extent comprehensible to be perceived at all.)

So at the outset is
a breakthrough that makes a new technology possible and an
efflorescence of inventions good and bad. Then one of these
models, and not necessarily the best one, goes into mass production
and that's it. No more changes, no more basic innovations
...
just
technical improvements. There is no basic difference between Kitty
Hawk and a modern jet liner.

Now apply this
concept to living organisms. The mammalian configuration opened a
whole new technology with an outpouring of mammalian models. And
there were creatures between mammals and reptiles...quite good, some
of them
...
models about the size of a wolf
with lizard claws and teeth
...
promising...Imagine
a mammalian brain with reptilian features of quiescence and renewable
neural tissue
...
Look at
Homo
sapiens...
Before they went into mass production there must have
been some good models lost in the shuffle and for
what?
Look
around you on the street and what do you see, a creature that
functions at one-fiftieth of its potential and is only saved
from well-deserved extinction by an increasingly creaky social
structure...So let's go back and take a look. You want new ideas in
cars, go back to the early models before they started rolling the
inefficient internal combustion engines off the assembly line...

Consider the
mammalian species we see at the present time. Mass production set in
and that was the end of evolution. Darwin doesn't explain why the
whole evolutionary process has ground to a halt. Why aren't the
present-day cats evolving into horses? Answer is simple. The
mutation process has stopped. There won't be any more changes at this
rate. Just as the auto industry doesn't want to know about any
turbine engines because they would have to scrap their dies and
that is the most expensive thing they could do. So the present-day
controllers don't want to scrap their horse dog human molds. Because
doing so would involve paying in currency that they don't have: the
currency of creation. They don't want to know about a better human
model that is basically different. They can be relied upon to
sabotage any meaningful space program that involves biologic
alterations instead of transportation in an aqualung, which is like
moving a fish up onto land in an aquarium.

[The Scriptwriter
turns from his TV set..."Oh God, the salmon are at it again,
leaping up waterfalls to spawn and die...How tiresome of them! Mother
Nature in all her rich variety of an old shit house...What does
She offer us? A toilet in Hell."]

I theorize that the
present God or gods were not the creators. They took over something
already created and are using it for their own purposes, which is not
at all to our advantage.

To put it country
simple: the Christian God exists. He
is not the Creator.
He
stole someone else's work after the manner of his parasitic species.
He steals and curses the source. The Christian God, and that goes for
Allah, is a self-seeking asshole planning to cross us all up. Like
all colonists he despises those he exploits. To him we are nothing
but escape energy. He needs our energy to escape because he has none
of his own. Who but an asshole wants to see people groveling in
front of him?

"Like a little
soldier I stand at attention before my captain," said Pope John
23.
Gawd, what shit is this? And the prayer-mewling Allah
freaks is molded from the same crock of shit...ALLAH ALLAH ALLAH
...

The magical theory
of history: the magical universe presupposes that nothing
happens unless someone or some power, some living entity
wills
it to happen.
There are no coincidences and no accidents.

A chaotic situation
is always deliberately produced. Ask yourself who or what sort of
creature could benefit from such a situation. Even in the
crudest economic terms there are those who profit from
chaos
...
speculators, black marketeers,
ultimately warlords and bandits...

Now look at the
whole of human history and prehistory from this viewpoint. Look
at it spread out spatially before you...

Mechanical devices
exteriorize the processes of the human nervous system...A tape
recorder externalizes the vocal function, a computer
externalizes one function of the human brain, the faculty that stores
and processes data. See human history as a vast film spread out in
front of you. Take a segment of film:

This is a time
segment. You can run it backward and forward, you can speed it up,
slow it down, you can randomize it do anything you want with your
film. You are God for that film segment. So "God," then,
has precisely
that
power with the human film.

The only thing not
prerecorded in a prerecorded universe is the prerecordings
themselves: the master film. The unforgivable sin is to tamper with
the prerecordings. Exactly what Kim is doing. Acting through his
representatives like Hart and Old Man Bickford, God has prerecorded
Kim's death.

The exercise of
seeing a section of time as a film can be applied to small
arms...Spread out from the matchlock to the automatic assault rifle
and machine pistol...