Cities of the Red Night (27 page)

“We wish to travel.”

“Travel? Where exactly?”

The boys strip off their clothes: “Where naked troubadours shoot snotty baboons.”

They open up with Venus 22 machine guns, a sound like farting metal. Staff and customers lie dead.

Travelogue voices through the loudspeakers: They are a happy simple people / She wears the traditional Athrump / Many moons ago they say / He offered me a cup of Smuun, a mixture of black rum and the blood of a menstruating seal / Now they would show me the Sacred Uncle ceremony / Mixta demonstrates how the
poi mansu
is prepared / We stop to observe the traditional Ullshit that must be observed before this young peasant can Bulunkmash his fiancée / The old Ungling is sick / Can nothing be done? / Sanfraz the sorcerer has been consulted / Every foot of arable land is treasured / All refuse must go into the Ungern or fertilizer ditch / The Phren crop is good and there is much rejoicing / Youths scream
muku muku fucky fucky
over their thumous / How long can the old ways withstand the onslaught of modern technology? / He say long long ago many thousand moons a red light appeared in the northern sky / This light inflamed men to madness and many fell sick with a terrible plague / All that remains of the ancient city of Ba'dan: mud walls in a waste of sand / If these walls could speak what tales they could tell /

What tall tales indeed. Tacitus tells us that the Scythians, a warlike and horsey people, hanged their captives from trees like an old western posse. And Herodotus gives a lurid account of their practices.

When a Scythian king died, fifty pure-blooded Arabic horses and fifty handsome youths were strangled, disemboweled and stuffed. The horses were then placed in a semicircle around the tomb and the youths mounted on the horses, being held in place by a stake which passed through the body of the horse and into the ground and through the anus of the youth up to the top of his skull for good posture.…

A baneful red glow flares across the northern sky, bathing the city of Tamaghis in a flickering red light shading from light pink to dark purple, flowing like water through the ancient twisting streets cut from desert rock which has now powdered to sand under generations of shuffling feet.

The first thing you notice here is the dead muffled silence of the sand-covered streets. Now we hear music and singing as a strange procession winds into sight. Naked boys with boots of rotten animal hides crawling with maggots lead a column of horses on which boys are riding naked and bound. The Carrion Boys caper and whinny and rear and fart, showing their teeth like horses.

Now the procession halts in front of the King's tomb and the horses are being strangled with ratchet cords that tighten and cannot be unloosed. A horse rears, baring his teeth and rolling his eyes as blood drips from his nose … the horses are turning intolerably into youths … shrinking faces spit out horse teeth like bullets. A horse rolls on its side kicking spasmodically, sloughing off hooves and sinews and hide, patches of human skin breaking through. Another rolls on its back kicking its legs in the air as the tail whisks in between human legs, kicking human genitals, shooting horse pricks, as intestines spurt from shrinking bellies and brains jet out from eye sockets.

As they emerge from the ruptured horse bodies, the youths are seized by the carrion-booted boys with long red hair and gloating idiot smiles. The youths and horses have all been strangled.

It is time now for the butchery, which they attack with good cheer as one boy heartens his companions with a comic bump-and-grind striptease with intestines that drop off as his erect member snaps out. He sticks his tongue out and ejaculates as his friends roar with laughter. They are a simple happy people.

Now there is work to be done. The horses must be stuffed with aromatic herbs and the youths impaled on stakes that will hold each boy astride a dead horse until horse and rider crumble into the red dust. The Carrion Boys caper away and disappear in little eddies of sand under the red sky shot with meteors and Northern Lights.

“Yipeayee Yipeaayoo Ghost riders in the sky”

*   *   *

In desert lands cool stone latrines / Outhouses covered with roses in drowsy summer afternoons / Dead leaves in the pissoir /
J'aime ces types vicieux qui se montrent la bite
/ Find yourself in the navy / All right you jokers hit the deck / Naked boys roll around squirming legs kicking in the air as the colors ripple through them / One bumps out a rich sepia with a smell of military laundry and black vomit in faded violet photo wards and it hits a delicate rose pink of seashells with the hyacinth smell of young hard-ons 1910 the young sailor in Panama yellow-fever epidemic assigned to work in the wards he knew he'd catch it sooner or later then the itching started and the red rash in his crotch and ass pearling in his pants he sniffs the smell of vomit and fever shivering in yellow olive green deep mahogany and black death spasms. Rainbows in faded calendars light up and blaze across the sky.… Coming in for a neon landing at the Rainbow Club in Portland.

*   *   *

When Wilson, Chief of Security at Portland, arrived at his office, his assistant handed him a message:

“
The Billy Celeste,
U.S. Navy from 1980 has landed and requests permission to disembark.”

Wilson looked at his assistant and raised an eyebrow. “Fever?”

“And how. Even the cockroaches.”

Wilson reached for a standard “Quarantine and Repatriation” form. “That's Nordenholz's ship, isn't it?”

“Right.”

“Miserable old bastard. One of these days he's going to find my foot up his skinny ass.” He signed the form and tossed it into the Out basket.

LOCKER ROOM

It is Christmas Eve and Toby is alone in the locker room. The old YMCA building has been sold and only a few boys still stay on. They have moved into the locker room because it is warmer and the showers are there.

Now all the other boys have gone away somewhere for Christmas and Toby knows that most of them will not be coming back, since the building has to be vacated by January 18, 1924. Toby is reading
The Time Machine
by H. G. Wells.

I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then …

I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling …

I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing …

The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye.… The sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band.… Minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring …

There is a stew simmering on a gas ring and occasionally Toby stirs it, listening to the chimes from the Salvation Army mission across the street playing “Silent Night.” He remembers other Christmases, the smell of pine and plum pudding and the oil smell of his steam engine.

He had been brought up in a three-story red brick house in a middle-western town. When he was six years old his parents died, in the flu epidemic of 1918. After that, a series of uncles and foster parents took care of him.

Nobody wanted Toby for long, though he was a beautiful boy with yellow hair and huge blue eyes like deep lakes. He made people uneasy. There was a sleepy animal quiescence about him. He never talked except in answer to a question or to express a need. His silence seemed to hold a threat or a criticism, and people didn't like it.

And there was something else: Toby smelled. It was a sulfurous rank animal smell that permeated his room and drifted from his clothes. His father and mother had had the same smell about them, and they kept a number of pets: cats, raccoons, ferrets and skunks. “The little people,” his mother called them. Toby took the little people with him wherever he went, and his uncle John, an executive on the way up, liked big people.

“John, we have to get rid of that boy. He smells like a polecat,” Toby's aunt would say.

“Well, Martha, perhaps there's something wrong with his glands.” The uncle blushed, feeling that
glands
was a dirty word.
Metabolism
would have been much better …

“That's not all. There's something in his room. Something he carries about with him. Some sort of
animal.”

“Now Martha.…”

“I tell you, John, he's
evil.…
Did you notice the way he was looking at Mr. Norton? Like some horrible little gnome.…”

Mr. Norton was John's boss. He had indeed been visibly discomfited by Toby's silent appraising stare.

Looking back, Toby could see the twinkle of Christmas-tree ornaments. Far away his father points to Betelgeuse in the night sky. The locker room holds the silence of absent male voices like a deserted gymnasium or barracks.

The boys have built a partition of beaverboard and set up their cots in this improvised room. There is a long table with initials carved in the top, folding chairs, and a few old magazines in the main room where the gas ring is located. In one corner is a withered Christmas tree that Toby pulled out of a trash can. This is part of his stage set. He is waiting for someone.

He tastes the stew. It is flat and the meat is tough and stringy. He adds two bouillon cubes. Another fifteen or twenty minutes. Meanwhile, he will take a shower. Naked, waiting for the water to heat up, he is examining the graffiti in the toilet cubicle, running his hands over phallic drawings with the impersonal interest of an antiquarian. He is a plant, an intrusion. He has never seen the other boys, a whiff of steaming pink flesh, snapping towels, purple bruises. He leans against the wall of the toilet as silver spots boil slowly in front of his eyes.

Christmas Eve, 1923: You can see the old YMCA building. Someone he carried with: Hi/ …

“Hi. It's me, Toby.”

His father points to a few boys still staying there … the shower's silence. Other boys have gone away. Part time in this improvised room. Building has to be vacated by the folding time machine where the gas ring is hot occasionally. Toby pulled out of the mission, stage set, other Christmases. His part is six years old in the epidemic. Toilet cubicle, his old face, remote parents. Sleepy animal whiff of naked flesh Christmas geese in the sky. Silent night for someone died waiting for the graffiti in 1918. If you ask for something solid as shirt and pants walks … long sight you read
The Monkey's Paw
? Years over phallic drawings snapping towels and purple bruises.…

Toby dresses and walks back into the “living room,” as they call it. A man is sitting at the table. He is thin and white-haired with blue eyes. His pants and shirt are red-and-white-striped like peppermint. A long patched coat is folded on the chair beside him. Wisps of fog drift from the lapels.

“Well, Toby, and what would you like for Christmas?”

“Well, sir, I guess people ask for a lot of silly things, so I'd like to ask your advice before making up my mind.”

“Yes, Toby, people do ask for silly things. They want to live forever, forgetting or not knowing that forever is a time word and time is that which ends. They want power and money without submitting to the conditions under which power and money are granted. Now I'm not allowed to give advice but sometimes I think out loud. If you ask for something solid like power or money or a long life, you are taking a sight-unseen proposition.… Now, if you ask for an
ability
…”

“I want to learn how to travel in time.”

“Well, you could do a lot worse. Makes you rich just incidentally. But it can be dangerous.…”

“It is necessary to travel. It is not necessary to live.”

Toby experienced a feeling of ether vertigo as he was pulled into a whirling black funnel. Far away, as if through a telescope, he could see someone sitting at a table, a slim youth of about twenty with yellow hair and brown eyes.

A fluid plop and he was inside the youth, looking out. He was sitting in a restaurant somewhere, taste of paper-thin cutlet, cold spaghetti, and sour red wine in his mouth. The waiters looked ill-tempered and tired. Now he became aware of someone sitting at an adjacent table, so obviously looking at him that they seem for a moment to be alone in the restaurant. It was a woman of about twenty-six, neither well nor poorly dressed, with an older man and woman, probably her parents. She had, Toby thought, one of the most unpleasantly intrusive faces he had ever seen, set in an oily smile or rather a knowing smirking cringe with a suffocating familiarity that pressed on his being like a predatory enveloping mollusk.