William S. Burroughs (35 page)

Some cultures
cultivated danger for itself, not realizing that danger derives from
conflicting purposes.

Happiness is a
by-product of function. Those who seek happiness for itself seek
victory without war. This is the flaw in all Utopias. A society, like
the individuals who compose it, is an artifact designed for a
purpose. As to what life may be worth when the purpose is gone
...

"We take you
now to the Nanyuka Indians of Brazil. They are a simple happy people
steeped in rituals that date back to the beginnings of time: the
age-old conflict between Men and Women.

"Once upon a
time, according to legend, the women seized the Sacred Flutes. But
with the aid of a bull-roarer, the men wrested the flutes back from
the women and have guarded them in the Men's House ever since. In the
Ceremony of the Bees, the men take ritual revenge for the ancient
trespass, and swarm through the village like bees, driving the women
into the square, where they smear them with greasy black paint, thus
preparing the boys for the realities of adult life."

Madre de Dios,
what realities? This tawdry
pageantry fit for half an hour's entertainment, stretched out over
centuries?

"It remains
only to paint the wooden birds."

"And now the
cycle of ritual is over."

Empty, sad as the
graves of dying peoples...The Last Patagonians and the hairy Ainu
mark their male graves with an erect phallus crudely carved from wood
and painted with ocher...wind and dust
...
the
markers are broken and scattered...

"The
Hummingbird Spirit has been appeased, at least for another year
...
and
so we leave the Nanyuka...
"

Flute music squeaky,
off-key, fades out in one last distant false note.

All the old human
rituals are dead as the, Bee Ceremony. The human saga flickers out on
a darkening stage to an empty house...

A youth looks out
over a desert. On his T-shirt is ETERNITY in rainbow letters. He
yawns. Eternity yawning on the sands.

Military operations
of one kind or another were always in progress, most of them totally
senseless, or rather making a different kind of sense that means
nothing to a Westerner. Thought about in Arabic, however, Kim could
make out some sort of design, like a device he had been working
on to enable the blind to see. They wouldn't be able to see in the
usual manner but they could scan out dot patterns rather like the
pinpoint style in abstract paintings.

Some of the patterns
remain incomprehensible, their roots buried in unwritten antiquity.
He would feel the stir of muscles and brain areas, like when you ride
for the first time and use muscles you don't use at all walking, and
wake up sore, so he would wake up with aches in places he couldn't
even find or specify...

Fears and
exaltations and griefs from the wild uncharted regions of the mind...

He was currently
engaged in another idiotic operation which involved ambushing a
truck of soldiers. Here his Owl Eye night sight could be used to
advantage.

It's a good kick
shooting someone from a distance like God himself hurling a bolt from
the heavens or Thor throwing his hammer so different from the
face-to-face handgun fight. Rifle duels are common here. The
contestants two or three hundred yards apart you can see him through
your telescopic sight and you know he's seeing you
...
a
puff of smoke. The bullet hits before you hear the report. It gives
you a funny feeling like sound turned off on a screen...

"And perhaps we
can blow up a bridge on the way home, sir?"

"Certainly,
Lieutenant, if you do a good job on the truck...
"

"We won't do
our best, Captain. We'll do a lot better."

Kim smiles all slimy
and insinuating..."Captain, when I die I want to be buried right
in the same coffin with you...
"

"What makes you
think we are going to die right at the same time, Lieutenant?"
the Captain asks with an easy smile. Clearly he enjoys the
exchange...

"Well sir, if
one of us dies first he simply leaves room for the other, you
understand...Have to clear it with the board of health, of course.
Can you believe it, sir, in my home town of Saint Louis a board of
health regulation,
"1585,
you can't
burn rubbish in your own fucking ass pit, if you'll pardon the
expression, sir."

Kim knew that the
Captain's favorite topic was Washington bureaucrats who are wrecking
the country and strangulating us in red tape.

"Like a hernia,
Captain."

"Ah yes, very
well put, Lieutenant...
"
Kim presses
his advantage. "The men are a bit restless, sir...Couldn't we
sack a village, after the bridge, I mean...
"

"Of course,
Lieutenant. It pays to pay the boys off."

A quote from Tacitus
unfurled in Kim's brain. "If a woman or a good-looking boy fell
into their hands they were torn to pieces in the struggle for
possession while the survivors were left to cut each other's
throats...
"

"That will be
keen, sir
..."

Kim showed his teeth
in the wild-dog smile. (Wild dogs, you know, show all their teeth at
each other as a greeting.) The Captain smiled back. And Kim's fifty
ragged boys smiled too when they got the juicy-fruit news. Don't
count your civilians before they're raped.

The ambush was a
shambles. Kim's night sight didn't work...design was sound enough,
just a few technical details to iron out, and an epileptic kid blew
it, shooting off his squirt gun in a fit, the whole thirty-shot clip,
and the soldiers were out of the truck, strafing our flashes (the
flash suppressor didn't work either). Kim gave the order to pull
back, leaving fifteen dead. The wounded who couldn't walk had to be
shot to keep them from the Turks, who were known torture freaks and
ravenous since they rarely took a prisoner.

Not enough of them
left to sack a shit house, they decide to join another army. There
are no police as such in the area and owing to the fact that everyone
is heavily armed the casualties are substantial. Bodies are left in
the street and ticketed for twenty-four hours. If friends or
relatives haven't claimed them by then they are rendered down into
fertilizer.

Might as well make
themselves useful. The most young and healthy cadavers are chopped up
and fed to the long pigs. Sustained exclusively on human flesh
and fresh fruit, they are unspeakably toothsome.

Kim's band falls
apart. He goes with three boys to a restaurant on top of a cliff
overlooking the valley where the river widens out. He can see sails
in the distance, delicate outriggers with paper-thin hardwood
hulls and brightly colored sails. He orders a pitcher of Metaxa, dry
pungent brandy distilled from pomegranates...The waiter gives
them the wild-dog smile and says
.. .
"Long
pig tonight," and comes back in half an hour with an exquisite
piglet crackling with juicy fat streaked with pink baby flesh...They
finish with the local oranges grown on a poor hillside soil which
gives them a spicy tang like herbs in the still noonday heat. They
lean back and belch as a twilight like blue dust slowly fills the
valley.

Kim thinks lazily of
his mission to locate the link, the be ginning of human
speech...And the throwbacks in remote valleys who still use the
larynx as a sexual organ
...
rather like
those horrid kissing fish, Kim thinks with distaste, the way their
mouths click together. The first words were unspeakably foul
...
And
that is why they have not been uttered for a million years
except in those remote valleys...Kim remembers a story:

The Hounds of
Tindalos, March
1929...
No words in our
language can describe them
...
symbolized
vaguely in the myth of the Fall
...
obscene
ancient tablets...The Greeks had a name for them to veil their
essential foulness...As soon as you name something you reduce its
power, of course, the power of a foulness essential to their
function...They must be too horrible to name or look at...If you
could look Death in the face he would lose his power to kill you.
Quien es?
When you ask Death for his credentials you are dead.
His passport picture is your deathmask, to get back to these blcody
hounds a most awful mystery, Frank a terrible and unspeakable
deed
was done in the beginning. Was no words for it in the beginning
of what exactly? In the beginning of the results of this deed, vat
else? Before time, the deed started time and dumped all this shit in
our laps...The seeds of the deed, in dim recesses, are hungry and
thirsty...In a white glare that was not light, in shrieking silence
I heard them breathe, felt their breath upon my face...

Things are getting
worse and worse you gotta be crazy you wanta get reborned. We'll be
pushing around shopping carts full of documents like money it takes
more and more to buy less and less same way with documents it takes
more and more to prove less and less you go through days of waiting
in offices to get some document but the bureaucracy has etted more of
the taxpayer's green grass and shitted out more laws your pistol
permit is buried under tons of it. You don't got Form 4F-Q you don't
got nothing less than nothing even if you don't have it they will
come and take it away from you...

I fled down
quintillions of years but they scented me. They thirst for that which
is clean
...
which emerged from the deed
without stain this they hate. They are that which in the beginning
fell away from cleanliness
...
just naturally
dirty like the shit-eating, cringing, vicious, fawning beasts they
are, receptacles of all foulness. In this universe there is only
the pure and the foul...So the foul long for purity, which they can
only see as food, and the pure want a vicarious little whiff of
foulness.

And this annoys the
foul. "Oh dear, you're all sick and ugly inside, aren't you, you
poor little creature...
"

The foul expresses
itself through angles. That so?

Man, the pure part
of him, is descended from a curve. Now what kind of curve you
throwing us, Chambers? A cunt curve...
?
I
don't intend to stay and listen to such gibberish...A long rest in a
good sanitarium should benefit you immeasurably.

"They must be
kept out. Reach us only through the angles, you know...We must
eliminate all angles from this room...Mother, save me from the
hounds...Send 'em back ravenous, snarling, frustrated to the foulness
that was in the beginning before time and space...It was good of
you to help
...
acrid nauseous
odor
...
doubled me over it did sir, like a
kick in the stomach sir, lost my porridge sir, the way you can tell a
real gentleman is a real gentleman isn't mean."

The reporter
reluctantly parts with ten shillings.

He lay naked, his
chest and arms covered with bluish pus gave off a smell like rotten
solder. "Must beware of the Doels. They can help them break
through, you know who they are, of course. The satyrs will help. They
can gain entrance through the scarlet circle, the Greeks knew a way
of preventing that. Good God, the plaster is falling...It is getting
dark in the room
...
their tongues."

Kim needed to piss.
He slid cautiously out of his hammock, picked up his shoes, and shook
a scorpion out and killed it with the hard rubber sole. He put on his
shoes and stepped out of the door into brilliant moonlight, with only
his shorts and his belt with the
44
revolver. Facing the cliff he pissed a silver stream. The night air,
balmy and cool around the edges, fanned his body. At that second the
dogs started barking, somebody coming. The other boys were
already out of their hammocks with weapons ready. A wall of cactus
seals off the house. There is a narrow gate of barbed wire...

"Advance and be
recognized. And it better be worth all this horrid yapping." The
innkeeper's son held up a lantern. A boy stood there cool and
debonair. He had a revolver in a cartridge belt, a Bowie knife, and
he was carrying a cane of whip steel loaded at the end.

"I bring
important message for
Captain
Carsons...
"

The gate was
unhooked, the dogs rushed forward snarling.

"Let me
administer the correction. Otherwise the dogs hate you and will leap
at your throat when you are sick or wounded, after the nature of
their species...Back, hounds of Tindalos. Receptacles of filth."
He lashed out with his cane and snarls turned to yelps and the dogs
crept into their filthy warrens. The boy smiled and flexed his cane.
"You see, Meester Carsons, I am a fellow dog-hater." He
flashed the wild-dog smile.