William S. Burroughs (41 page)

The centipede head
emerges from a dry dead husk.

Guy is looking over
Kim's shoulder.

"Don't look in
the troughs! Let's go!"

Marbles tosses in an
explosive incendiary device set for three minutes. The giant,
standing in the street by the door, wrings his hands.

"I must return
to the palace!" he wails and runs away down a paper road,
disappearing like the end of a cartoon.

"Up those
stairs!"

Stone stairs, light
above. They are standing on a hillside above the structure looking
down through it. A maze of narrow plywood rooms, doors and corridors
and trough rooms, stairs going up and going down extend as far
as the eye can see into the hillside and down into a haze of
distance.

In front of them is
a limestone court a hundred yards across...Beyond that the avenue and
the sea. It looks very far away yet clear as if seen through a
telescope.

"Run!"

A rumbling blast and
the whole shit house is going up in chunks, pieces of plywood,
dwarfs, sand and centipede fragments raining down on them as
they run. Kim sees a centipede claw in front of him turn into a
fossil...The blast and the rain of debris shuts off like someone
turned off a TV set.

No court, just a
rubbly weed-grown vacant lot. Nothing behind them but the bare
rocky hillside, scrub oak, stunted pine, a few olive trees. They are
walking down a dry stream bed toward the waterfront. Not at all far,
actually, a hundred yards ahead.

Memory of the
troughs is fading like dream traces...The lights are out in the
trough rooms. There is only darkness and sifting dust and the little
sounds of decay
...
the barren hillside,
grazing goats, a distant flute
...
egg-sac
foreheads explode with a dry muffled sound like a puffball bursting
in still noon heat in this area of rubbish and vacant lots...A cool
evening breeze brings a whiff of the sea...A blue smell of youth and
hope. One is not serious at seventeen...They sit down under a blue
awning and order ouzo with a plate of black olives...Late
afternoon
...
a few bathers linger on
the beach. Boys in swimming trunks walk by laughing, talking...Old
men sit on benches along the esplanade, hands on their canes, looking
out to sea.

Sound of a distant
flute trickles down from the hillside in deepening twilight.

They eat dinner on a
balcony over the sea... Shrimps in a sauce of olive oil, oregano,
lemon juice and garlic
...
red mullet and
Greek salad washed down with retsina.

"Your primitive
weapon is of no use," hissed the Alien.

"How do you
know?" Kim asked and blew it away...

"He looked
kinda surprised."

One is not serious
at seventeen.

Kim Christmas, the
perfect intelligence agent, turned into one of the shabbier streets
of Aman. He tossed a coin to a handless leper who caught it in his
teeth. Kim's cover story is taking over. He is Jerry Wentworth, a
stranded space pilot.

It is a standard
medina lodging house
...
whitewashed cubicle
rooms
...
wooden pegs in the wall to hang
clothes
...
a pallet, a blanket, tin
washbasin, and water pitcher
...
built around
a courtyard with a well, some fig and orange trees. In such lodgings
every man who can afford it sleeps with a bodyguard. Jerry sat
up and hugged the army surplus blanket around his skinny chest. It
was cold and his reptile in bed beside him was sluggish. That was the
trouble with a reptile bodyguard. But Jerry heard the old man
approaching with earthern bowls of hot coals hooked on both ends of
an iron balance rather like justice and her scales, Jerry thought. He
ordered bread and hot schmun, a sweet concoction of tea and khat.
Good way to get started in the morning. He closed the door and soon
the heat from the bowl permeated the room and his reptile stirred
languidly and peeled off the covers.

It is a Mamba addict
in the most advanced stages, skin a smooth bright green, eyes
jet-black, the pubic and rectal hairs a shiny green-black. He squirms
his legs apart and his eyes light up with lust as his ass flushes
salmon, pink, mauve, electric blues, reeking rainbows.

The boy dresses
sulkily. He needs the green. They cut out to the nearest snakehouse.

Through the open
doorway drifts the snakehouse smell, heavy and viscid as languid
surfeited pythons, somnolent cobras in Egyptian gardens, dry and
sharp as a rattlesnake den and the concentrated urine of little
fennec foxes in desert sand, smell of venomous sea snakes in stagnant
lagoons where sharks and crocodiles stir in dark oily water.

The snakehouse is a
narrow room cut into the hillside. There are stone benches along the
walls impregnated with generations of reptile addicts. In the
center of the floor toward the back is a manhole cover of patinaed
bronze giving access to a maze of tunnels and rooms that had housed
the mummies of the Pharaohs and others rich enough to belong to that
most exclusive club in the world. I.L. Immortality
Limited.

The reptiles are
waiting on the Snake. The Snake is late as usual and the reptiles
hiss desperately. A few are already molting and pulling strips
of skin off each other with shrill hisses of pain and ecstasy.
Jerry's reptile turns away in disgust. Some of the reptiles are clad
in ragged cloaks of reeking leather, others wear snakeskin jockstraps
and the ever-popular hippopotamus-hide knee-length boots, many are
naked except for spring shoes with razor-sharp Mercury wings for a
deadly back kick.

There sits an
exquisite coral snake, his banded red and white phallus up and
throbbing, and opposite him is a copperhead, his pointed phallus
smooth and shiny, his skin like burnished copper. They hiss at
each other and their throats swell. "Doing the cobra," it's
called and it's dangerous. If you don't get sex right away with
someone in your cock group you will die of suffocation in a few
seconds. The waiter rushes up with a pallet, and hurries off to open
the manhole cover. The bodies heat up glowing copper red white and
orange; and the boys shed their skins in a sweet dry wind that wafts
up from the spicy mummies.

"Shredded
incense in a cloud
/
from closet long to
quiet vowed
/
Moldering her lutes and books
among
/
as when a Queen long dead was
young."

"Here comes the
Snake
!"

"All-natural
products from pure venom," he squeaks out.

The reptiles hiss
with joy.

Actually the Snake
has a burning-down flea habit and looks like Blake's Ghost of a Flea.
He wears a tight pea-green suit and a purple fedora. He passes it out
and pulls it in with his quick dry claws lined with razor-sharp
erectile hairs that can brush flesh from the bone, recall this
out-of-towner made a crack about "Bug Juice" and the Snake
slapped him. He put a hand up to feel the side of his face and he
doesn't have any face on that side.

The waiters bring
coffee tables and water and cotton and alcohol. Some of the reptiles
have little snake-jaw syringes and they go through an act of biting
each other. The latest slither is ampules to pop when you come. It's
a game of chicken with the kids. A full blow of king cobra is fatal
about half the time, same way with Tiger Breath from tiger snakes.
The reptiles are slithering around and constricting each other
but Jerry's green mamba takes a quick fix and they walk out.

They pass a swampy
pool green with algae, where alligator addicts wallow in mindless
depravity.

Jerry sniffs and he
can feel the
smell brain
stir deep in his pons with a
delicious dull ache
...
what a kick for an
uptight Wasp! Mindless garden of our jism
...
parking
lot
...
belches the taste of eggs
...
this
is it
...
magnificent
...
Sput
Sput Sput...It's a lovely sound the sound of a silenced gun
...
a
sound you can
feel
...
good
clean there we are in one asshole
...
stale
night smell
...
mindless trance on porches
the air like cobwebs...the lake
...
fish
...
the
sky was clouded over
...
here
...
cleaned
the fish on grass
...
unwashed sheets
belching we ease into the normal boy at sunrise
...
along
any minute now
...
watery
sunlight
...
sitting job
...
the
boy was here before the job...like cobwebs the job
...
the
job? Oh it. Low-velocity nine-millimeter
...
sundown
...
boy
awake
...
military purposes
...
Jerry
sniffed the rotten belches of a python
...
boys
shed their skins in a sweet Sput Sput Sput...

A musky zoo smell
permeates the animal street lingering in your clothes and hair
...
a
skunk boy pads in beside them...

"Got
wolverine
poppers...
"

They walk on and the
boy gives them a squirt of skunk juice...

"Chip
Americans!"

They pass the
massive metal lattice gate to the Insect Quarter...faceted eyes
of the insect addicts peer out from dark warrens. The smell
doubles them over like a blow to the stomach. They hurry on, heading
for the port. They are on the outskirts of the town.

Ledges and terraces
cut into the hillside with markets and cafes and lodging
houses
...
stone steps and ramps lead from
one level to another
...
abandoned cars here
and there eroded to transparent blue shells as if nothing remains but
the paint. At the top of the hill the Sea of Silence stretches away
into the distance.

Along the shores are
driftwood benches sanded smooth. It is said that every man sees the
flotsam of his own past here...Cottonwoods along an irrigation ditch
at Los Alamos Ranch School
...
a wispy
skittish space horse by a desert fort from
Beau Geste.

Einstein writes
matter into energy on the blackboard...

Los Alamos Ranch
School...A cluster of buildings and roads, it looks like a little
village resort...Pasturelands on both sides of the yellow gravel
road, we come now to the trading post and post office
...
Get
out to buy a soft drink
...
It is a cold
windy spring day
...
and just in front of us
at the bottom of a little valley is a pond, waves like bits of silver
paper in the wind...A naked boy sprawls on the raft in the middle of
the pond seemingly oblivious to the cold. To the right of the
trading post is a vegetable garden...To the left barns and
outbuildings and workers' cottages and across the pond the green
icehouse
...
and a road that winds away into
pine forest...The Big House is to the right, it's an easy
walk
...
along the edge of the vegetable
garden and then there is a line of boys singing the school song:

Far
away and high on the mesa's crest

Here's
the life that all of us love the best

Los
Alamos

Winter
days as we skim o'er the ice and snow

Summer
days when the balsam breezes blow

Los
Alamos

The boys are
dismissed. Some start a dispirited game of catch. Others huddle about
in corners of the building, shoulders hunched, sheltering from the
cold spring wind. "The balsam breezes," they intone sourly.
They have to stay outside until five o'clock. One boy keeps looking
at his Ingersoll wristwatch with radium dial.

"Forty minutes
yet."

The boys groan. The
shadow of a cloud darkens the young faces. The wind blows harder.
Boys are lowering the flag. As the first raindrops plop into the
dusty road the boys rush into the house.

There seem to be a
lot of new kids here. The boy who sits down beside him on the swing
in front of the huge fireplace seems familiar. He has bright red hair
and a yellowish face splotched with brownish orange freckles like
dead leaves. His eyes are a yellow-green color. The boy smiles.

"Hi. I'm
Jerry."

A splash of light
quick inhuman gesture puckers of ozone from desert boy's
genitals
...
sulfurous hate like palpable
light the boy comes gasping and snarling.