Read Cities of the Red Night Online
Authors: William S. Burroughs
Audrey, naked except for a sailor hat, is tipped back balancing in a chair while he reads a comic book entitled: “Audrey and the Pirates.”
Jerry comes in naked with an envelope sealed with red wax.
“Open it and read it to me.”
“Oh sir, it's battle orders.”
“Wheeeeeeeeeeee!” Audrey ejaculates.
On deck, naked tars throw their hats into the air jacking off and leaping on each other like randy dogs: “Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” They scramble into uniforms as bugles call them to battle stations.
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The Fever:
A red silk curtain scented with rose oil, musk, sperm, rectal mucus, ozone and raw meat goes up on a hospital ward of boys covered with phosphorescent red blotches that glow and steam the fever smell off them, shuddering, squirming, shivering, eyes burning, legs up, teeth bare, whispering the ancient evil fever words.
Doctor Pierson covers his face with a handkerchief.
“Get it out of here!”
Yen Lee looks at a painted village with his binoculars. Taped voice: “We see Tibet with the binoculars of the people.”
In a stone hut, a naked boy lies on a filthy pallet. Bright red luminescent flesh-clusters glow in the dark room. He rubs the clusters with a slow idiot smile and ejaculates.
Yen Lee sags against a wall with a handkerchief in front of his face.
“It's the pickle factory.”
“A health officer is on the way.”
The Health Officer is on the nod on his porch over a sluggish river. The huge bloated corpse of a dead hippopotamus floats slowly by. The Health Officer is oblivious. Taped voice: “For he had a sustaining vice.” On a riverbank with Ali standing over him, he looks with horror at his torn pocket and empty hand. Backdrop shifts to another bank. With the same expression, Farnsworth looks down at his naked body covered with red welts. Ali stands over him smiling, the red welts a dusky rose color on his reddish-brown skin.
Marine band plays “Semper Fi.”
Picture of a privy on a door with a bronze eye under the sickle moon. Audrey, as Clem Snide the private eye, is sitting in a sunken room open at the top. The audience is looking down into the room so they can see what he is looking at: photos of Jerryâbaby pictures ⦠age fourteen holding up a string of cutthroat trout ⦠naked with a hard-on ⦠Jerry live onstage, naked with his hands tied, face and body covered with red blotches, a baneful red glow behind him. He is looking at something in front of him as his penis stirs and stiffens. Scattered applause and
olés
from the audience.
Banner headlines in red letters:
MYSTERY ILLNESS SPREADS.
On a hospital bed, Jerry spreads his legs with a slow wallowing movement, showing his bright red asshole glowing, pulsing, and crinkling like a randy mollusk. He twists his head to the right, eyes sputtering green flashes as he hangs.
A sepia cutback to the hospital bed. He ejaculates, kicking his legs in the air. Jimmy Lee, as a male nurse, catches his sperm in a jar.
Thunderous applause â¦
“Olé! Olé! Olé!”
The jar is passed to four Marine guards and rushed to a top-secret lab. A scientist looks through a microscope. He gives the OK sign.
Bouquets of roses rain on stage.
Red-letter headline:
NATIONAL EMERGENCY DECLARED.
Stop lights. Quarantine posts.
Soldiers with their pants sticking out at the flies clutch their throats and fall.
Newscaster: “It is impossible to estimate the damage. Anything put out up to now is like drawing a figure out of the air.”
A diseased face with a slow idiot smile is projected onto the newscaster's face from a magic lantern.â¦
“The world's population is now approximately what it was three hundred years ago.”
Boys on snowshoes reach the
haman.
Steam and naked bodies fade to a misty waterfront. Opium Jones is there with patches of frost on his face as the boys sign on in the ghostly cabin of
The Great White.
Dinner at the Pembertons. Candlelight on faces that suggest madeup corpses. Only Noah, his boyish face flushed, looks alive. The conversation is enigmatic.
“Are they doing mummies to standard?”
“This is the aunt's language.”
“We still don't have the nouns.”
“You need black money.”
“A master's certificate to be sure.⦔
“Suitable crops.”
“Are you in salt?”
“Bring a halibut.”
“Ah good the sea.”
They all look at Noah, who blushes and looks down at his plate.
“Draw the spirits to the
plata.â¦
”
“The family business⦔
“It probably belongs to the cucumbers.”
“Cheers here are the nondead.”
The boys are back on
The Great White.
A shout from the cabin boy brings them out on deck. Jerry, with a noose around his neck, grins a wolfish smile. Then he hangs, as the western sky lights up with the green flash.
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Captured by Pirates:
Boys swarm over the rail with knives in their teeth. One with an enormous black beard down to his waist swings his cutlass at imaginary opponents with animal snarls and grunts and grimaces until the crew of
The Great White
rolls on the decks, pissing in their pants with laughter.
“Guarda costa⦔
the boys mutter.
One puts a patch over one eye and scans the coast with an enormous wooden telescope.
Kiki fucks Jerry, pulling a red cashmere scarf tight around his neck and grinning into his face. As Jerry ejaculates, blood gushes from his nose.
Slowly, a room in an English manor house lights up. A picture on the wall shows an old gentleman wrapped in red shawls and scarves propped up in bed, with laudanum, medicine glass, tea, scones, and books on the night table beside him. Taking to his bed for the winter.â¦
A light shines on a huge four-poster bed. A man with a nightcap sits up suddenly. A naked radiant boy is standing at the foot of his bed. The man gasps, chokes, turns bright red and dies of apoplexy, blood gushing from his mouth and nose.
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Cities of the Red Night:
Spotlights bathe the papier-mâché walls in red light. The boys camp around putting on disease makeup. Juanito, the Master of Ceremonies, puts a red rubber flesh-cluster in his navel.
“My dear, you look like Venus de Milo with a clock in her stomach.”
The boys pose with expressions of idiot lust. The spectators roll on the floor laughing. One turns blue in the face.
“Cyanide reaction! Medics on the double!”
Boys in white coats rush in and shoot him with a blackout dart.
Piper Boy with a bamboo flute in Lima ⦠blue sky, color of his eyes. Smell of the sea. Dink is fucking Noah who turns into Audrey and Billy.
“It's me! It's me! I've landed! Hi, Bill! It's two hundred years, Bill! I've landed!”
The pilgrimage may take many lifetimes. In many rooms, on many levels, the ancient whispering stage â¦
Moving age with his binoculars, Audrey lays back in a chair masturbating. Bright pirates. Jerry comes in red wax. We see Tibet for a few seconds, people. A sepia cutback to the hospital. Depraved smile, sperm in a beaker.
He plays “Semper Fi” to four Marine guards. Baby pictures declared in red letters of cutthroat trout. Red anticipation of fever drifts from the bed. See what he is looking at onstage.
National Emergency, age fifteen, holds up a string of stoplights. Jerry's radiant ghost may take many lifetimes. Jerry, the cabin boy, stands over the hills and far away.
“Lima, flash, it's me. The Piper Boy in Lima. Dink, I've landed. Long way to find you.”
Noah is in the library studying diagrams of mortars and grenades. He is drawing a cannon. A Chinese child in the doorway throws a firecracker underneath his chair. As the firecracker explodes, the cannon barrel tilts up at an angle. A backdrop of burning galleons falls in front of him.
Audrey's boys are back on deck. Gas tank explodes in Tamaghis. Flintlock rifle on the library table. Hans and Noah take off their shorts.
“Wenn nicht von vorn denn von hintern herum.”
If not from the front then around by the back way.
As Noah bends over, the flintlock breaks at the breech. As Noah ejaculates, breech-loading rifles pour withering fire into a column of Spanish soldiers.
A float of a Spanish galleon moves slowly and ponderously across the gymnasium floor. On the deck, we see the Inquisition with stakes and garrotes, the Conquistadores, the patróns and governors, officers and bureaucrats and their modern equivalents,
machos
and
polÃticos
swilling Old Parr scotch and brandishing pearl-handled 45s.
Immigration police in dark glasses â¦
“Pasaporte ⦠Documentos⦔
Kelley as Ah Pook, spattered with black spots of decay, is fucking the young Corn God in a pirate's chest overflowing with gold ducats and pieces of eight. As they come, a yellow haze like gaseous gold streams off them and wafts across the deck of the galleon.
Machos
clutch their throats, spit blood, and die.
Noah hangs ejaculating in the same yellow haze of magical intention. The curtain is drawn for a moment and guns are piled up in front of himâfrom his first cartridge rifle to M-16s and bazookas, rocket guns and field pieces.
He is lowered with a slow sinuous movement by the Juicy-Fruit Twins. The twins are naked except for their sailor hats and white sneakers.
Offstage, a voice bellows: “
All right, you jokers.â¦
Battle stations.”
Noah and the twins are in the gun turret making calculations, taking the range.â¦
“Yards: twenty-three thousand ⦠Elevation: point six⦔
The galleon is in the cross hairs of the sight. Jerry turns bright red as he presses the Fire button. The galleon blows up and sinks into a prop sea.
Panorama of Mexico, Central and South America ⦠music and singing ⦠naked Spanish soldiers washing in a courtyard, jetting the soap around like a soccer ball and tackling each other, washing each other's backs. In trees by a river boys with idiot expressions jack off, snapping and gurgling like fish as they shake fruit into the water.
Audrey is naked against a backdrop of jungle and ruined pyramids. He gets a hard-on and levitates as it comes up. He lands from a hang-glider in a red desert.
Jerry, the cabin boy, meets him in a lizard suit that leaves his crotch and ass naked. “Me lizard boy ⦠very good for fuck.” Rainbow colors play over his body.
Spanish galleon ⦠movement by the Juicy-Fruit Twins ⦠on the deck we see white sneakers ⦠bureaucrats calculating the range ⦠hand hair turns bright red on Fire button ⦠The Galleon
Pasaporte Documentos
is blown out of the water and so a vast territory as Ah Pook spatters the panorama with insurgents. All the boys in yellow haze of skintight magic transparent for a moment come to attention in a line from the first cartridge gun to M-16s ⦠naked haze like gold gas.â¦
“TENSHUN!”
Audrey and Noah ejaculating angels in rainbow intention.â¦
“AT EASE.”
Naked soldiers sniff bazookas and field pieces.â¦
Peace does not last forever.â¦
Red Night in Tamaghis. The boys dance around a fire, throwing in screaming Sirens. The boys trill, wave nooses, and stick their tongues out.
This was but a prelude to the Ba'dan riots and the attack on Yass-Waddah. The boys change costumes, rushing from stage to stage.
The Iguana twins dance out of an Angkor WatâUxmalâTenochtitlán set. The “female” twin peels off his cunt suit and they replicate a column of Viet Cong.
The Countess, with a luminous-dial alarm clock ticking in her stomach and crocodile mask, stalks Audrey with her courtiers and Green Guards. Police Boy shoots a Green Guard. Clinch Todd as Death with a scythe decapitates the Goddess Bast.
Jon Alistair Peterson, in a pink shirt with sleeve garters, stands on a platform draped with the Star-Spangled Banner and the Union Jack. Standing on the platform with him is Nimun in an ankle-length cloak made from the skin of electric eels.
The Board enters and takes their place in a section for parents and faculty.
Peterson speaks: “Ladies and gentlemen, this character is the only survivor of a very ancient race with very strange powers. Now some of you may be taken aback by this character.⦔
Nimun drops off his robe and stands naked. An ammoniacal fishy odor reeks off his bodyâa smell of some artifact for a forgotten function or a function not yet possible. His body is a terra-cotta red color with black freckles like holes in the flesh.
“And I may tell you in strictest confidence that he and he alone is responsible for the Red Night.⦔
Jon Peterson gets younger and turns into the Piper Boy. He draws a flute from a goatskin sheath at his belt and starts to play. Nimun does a shuffling sinuous dance singing in a harsh fish language that tears the throat like sandpaper.
With a cry that seems to implode into his lungs, he throws himself backward onto a hassock, legs in the air, seizing his ankles with both hands. His exposed rectum is jet-black surrounded by erectile red hairs. The hole begins to spin with a smell of ozone and hot iron. And his body is spinning like a top, faster and faster, floating in the air above the cushion, transparent and fading, as the red sky flares behind him.
A courtier feels the perfume draining off him.â¦
“Itza⦔
A Board member opens his mouth.â¦
“Itza⦔
His false teeth fly out.
Wigs, clothes, chairs, props, are all draining into the spinning black disk.
“ITZA BLACK HOLE!!”
Naked bodies are sucked inexorably forward, writhing screaming like souls pulled into Hell. The lights go out and then the red sky.â¦