William S. Burroughs (40 page)

They are back on the
hillside and Kim says to Guy
...
"Just
to be anywhere out of there
...
no matter how
ordinary
...
just out of that
horrible place.

Kim realizes that
the dwarfs in the troughs are being processed into centipedes.
The
centipede eyes are already in place.
Eventually the
centipede will emerge from the forehead, leaving the dead gray hulk
behind.

Why? One of a number
of expedients to destroy souls and so limit and monopolize
immortality.

Where? Planet Venus,
where else.

Who or what is
behind the scenes here? Something dry, brittle, timorous. Kim senses
that this is
card magic
associated with a special card deck.
The cards are painted on a material like plastic that absorbs the
colors to produce a three-dimensional impression. The cards move
into combinations like animated cartoons...

When more flatly
revolting things are done the Venusians will do them.

A narrow, almost
two-dimensional space
...
Look at those
houses
...
not more than four feet deep. They
must
slide
around in there
...
nursery-rhyme
magic, attacking clubs and coffee grinders, giants, dwarfs and
palaces. The Lords in red robes, centipedes encrusted in their amber
foreheads, old-woman magic with spinning wheels in tiny cottages of
the plywood they use for building, compacted in layers like the cards
animated by a malevolent sliding life", doors slide open,
snap shut.

In his knee-length
cape of centipede skins, Kim walks with the Noon Devil in hot still
electric air. The cape makes a dry rustling sound. Kim stops and
unfastens the pincer clasp at his throat and passes the cape to his
faithful squire, Arn
...
under the cape Kim
is wearing a magnificent coat of red satin with many pockets, a
tricornered hat of blue satin, pants of yellow pongee silk, his
boots, brownish pink and porous, are made from the skin of an
electrical eel. At his side is the magic sword and the invisible
swordsman, a creature of his will that moves with the speed of light.
In his hand is a crystal tube. As he lifts the tube to eye level blue
lightning crackles from his eyes out along the tube...

BLAT BLAT BLAT

The Palace goes up
in chunks.

"You've seen
the troughs...
"

Kim nods, his face
blazing with pure killing purpose as he remembers the dream.

"Well remember
this. If they get their hands on you anyone can be broken down
into the troughs
...
'peed,' they call it...
"

He pauses, giving
Kim time to know what it would mean to recognize a friend's face just
as the pincers start cutting through the swollen egg-sac forehead.

The Supervisor is
suddenly an old man who has carried heavy pain for a long time. Long
long time, you can tell by the shoulders.

"They get you
screaming curses like an old washerwoman...Make your hate solid
in silence."

Ali trots down the
street, his kris vibrating in front of him, pulling him forward,
shop shutters bang down...this street
...
this
shop
...
here she comes. The fat one with the
dead cold shark eyes
...
we called her the
Great White now isn't that cute her face shattering in recognition
she dives for the pistol in her handbag late and she knows it he
slices her open from her cunt to her gullet. The eyes roll back
showing the white and she sinks in a reek of blood and guts...Her
Consort is backing away, hands outstretched in supplication...

Ali smiles over his
bloody kris. No mercy there. Consort turns to run, slips on dog shit,
falls on his face. Ali glides forward, puts a foot in the small
of his back, pulls his head back by the hair, and cuts his throat.

Making machine-gun
noises
...
BBBBUUUUUUPP as he sprays the
blood around...

Ali prances out with
a T-shirt. Hand holding a bloody kris has written AMOK across his
chest. He clasps his hands above his head and smiles...Plane crash?
You carry Caesar and his fortunes unsteady, he slipped and bumped
against me at the airport. It was his error. Pilot's error. And
that's when I skipped in...I am leading him away from the
controls
...
I can be soo seductive, look
like anybody, he is already screwing the hostess, getting a
hard-on
...
then the
error...
Shock on
the co-pilot's face...

Realization

OH SHIT

The ripping
splintering crash
...
Among the passengers
killed in the crash of Flight
18...

Hurricanes
...
let
it all sweep through faster faster ride the wind ride the glass
shards stripping flesh from the screaming bones, the tidal waves
churning houses, people, cows, and windmills...Anita advances on
Texas...

Ali prances out in
his ANITA shirt...A big fat whore with her mouth open is blowing a
city away...

Tornado is quite a
different operation. You pull all the curses and the hate in all the
way in right to the epicenter...They are all pouring in everybody who
ever hated you and cursed you...

Stay all night and
stay a little longer

Take off
your
coat and throw it in a corner

Don't see why you
don't stay a little longer

Round and round
faster and faster spinning in

a green black
funnel
...
tornado sky
...

tossing trucks and
cars around like matchboxes

the funnel skips and
hops

and it comes down
here

And it comes down
there

Take off your house
and throw it in a corner
...

The funnel whirls
and tilts

And it comes down
here

And it comes down
there

And I said, "Pa,
we best get in the house and there

wasn't any house...
"

Don't see why you
don't stay a little longer

And the music softly
moans
...
tornado warning

sirens

'Tain't no sin to
take off your skin

And dance around in
your bones...

"The truck had
crushed her completely, just her legs was sticking out."

Ali prances out in
his T-shirt, KID TWIST in green-black letters across his chest. Ali
smiles...Texas twister T-shirt
...
legs
sticking out
...

Get their hands on
you it would mean operations
...
screaming
face in the trough, you could just see her...

National
Geographic
voice: Guy, Marbles,
and Kim are patrolling dead-end slums where addicts of the suicide
drugs gravitate to hideous dooms. Some are dragged into the canals by
the dreaded Lophy Women. Underwater, the abducted male depends on his
mate for oxygen as he is slowly absorbed into her body until only his
testicles remain. So she becomes a self-fertilizing hermaphrodite
and fulfills her biologic destiny...Galvanized by hideous hunger,
these half-formed creatures slither through the filthy alleys and
warrens of slums adjoining a huge swampy lake. An underground river
feeds in here, the water is clear and deep...Suddenly a Lophy Woman
slithers out, huge mouth gaping to show the incurving teeth fine as
hairs. They eat into the victim's face to block his breathing as they
feed in oxygen through their gills. So the lethal mating is
consummated. She absorbs first his head and brain, keeping his
body alive with her bloodstream. Kim shoots her in the mouth with a
shot load and blows the top of her head off...

Others wind up on
the centipede troughs, or as sexual stumps for the Amazon tribes, cut
off at the waist and the knee, kept alive by feeding tubes...

"It's not a
question of shoot first and ask questions later. We never ask
questions. We are here strictly in the capacity of Stoppers, our
function to
Stop. To arrest
."

They turn into a
square on the outskirts of a city. Here the poor are receiving their
evening handout from a liveried servant. A carriage stands by. Each
supplicant receives a slab of yellow metal paste. It is cut with a
lead knife and the freshly cut paste gleams silver like sodium. Their
faces are covered with metallic sores leaking pus like melted solder
with a sickening sweetish metal reek.

The Stone Hots is a
molecular alternation of the stone fish venom, a poison so agonizing
that victims roll round screaming and must be restrained from suicide
by any means at hand. Even large doses of morphine bring no
relief...The Stone Hots affords the addict what he calls a "fire
fit" as pleasurable as the unaltered venom is agonizing...

One of Kim's
informants sidles up, an old man in a tattered black overcoat...

"There's a
Stoner. You can tell by the burnt-out look. Those fire fits burn the
brains out. Look in his eyes. Nobody there. Skin and bones at the
end."

The Stoner sits on a
shit-stained limestone curb, with his conch shell of Stone Hots...He
dips in a little barbed sting and shoves it deep into his leg. His
eyes light up and flash with insane delight. Like a galvanized
skeleton, he jumps up and dances the Fire Fit Jig.

More and more
unaltered venom accumulates in the body...The Stoner rolls screaming
in the square. Urchins gather. One throws himself down and mimics the
Stoner's screams while the others piss with laughter...Kim shoots the
Stoner through the head...Nothing inside, as if you'd broken open a
dry empty husk. The urchins hiss and slither away.

The Marbles is a
heavy translucent white liquid that is carried in a golden
bottle and injected in a gold syringe. The Marbles or the Rocks
encases the addict in mineral calm. They live longer. Much longer. Up
to six hundred years if they can keep the Rock on. Takes more and
more as the body acids concentrate. Here is a gathering place
for wealthy Marbles, gilt and gold and white satin. Tropical fish
flash in floor-to-ceiling aquariums. They move very slow with
the blank golden eyes of the axolotl salamander. They sit in chairs
of smooth form-fitting marble.

In filthy hovels
needy Marbles are close to molting, the shell eaten through in
patches, pus leaking out
...
flesh under
there has lost all immunity
...
skin is long
gone...Pulling the rotten shells off each other, underneath a mass of
festering sores and fissures a reek of rotten flesh and rotten stone,
dank and sweet and heavy in the lungs. Don't get too close...The
idiot molting Marbles writhe in sexual frenzies, stuck together in
screaming quivering clusters. Could hardly be called sentient in the
end, much less human.

Cure is possible in
the very early stages but requires at least a year of special care.
The most distressing symptom is dermal irritation, the skin is
so sensitive that a breath of air will send the addict into
convulsions. They must be kept in sensory-deprivation immersion tanks
and maintained on large dosages of morphine and antibiotics since the
liability to infections is breathtaking...

"Trough City."

The houses all have
that narrow look not more than five or six feet deep with stairways
and doors and corridors, a maze of narrow rooms and corridors,
stairways going up, stairways going down...Watch the Downers leading
down to a dead end and a heavy door that closes behind you...

"We're knocking
this joint over."

Door swings open on
a narrow corridor.
...
To the left is a small
square room open on the street. "Troughs are down here."
Kim jerks his thumb to the right. "Guy, you cover our back.
Marbles and me will take out the trough room."

The room is quite
light from windows on the far side. At the end of the room is a door.
And a man rushes out. He is about four feet tall, powerfully built,
with a bulbous forehead. His eyes flare with xenophobic hate.

He is wearing a gray
tunic with a belt. He stretches out his fingers in a malevolent jab
gliding forward. Kim draws his
44
and
shoots him in the forehead. A thick white milk spurts out. The dwarf
falls into a trough. At this moment pincers break through the
forehead of one of the trough men. They all look alike in one way,
yet retain a vestige of difference like one of those shrunk-down
heads. You could see who it had been.