Cities of the Red Night (37 page)

Lights come on to show the ruins of Ba'dan. Children play in the Casbah tunnels, posing for photos taken by German tourists with rucksacks. The old city is deserted.

A few miles upriver there is a small fishing and hunting village. Here, pilgrims can rest and outfit themselves for the journey that lies ahead.

But what of Yass-Waddah? Not a stone remains of the ancient citadel. The narrator shoves his mike at the natives who lounge in front of rundown sheds and fish from ruined piers. They shake their heads.

“Ask Old Man Brink. He'll know if anybody does.”

Old Man Brink is mending a fish trap. Is it Waring or Noah Blake?

“Yass-Waddah?”

He says that many years ago, a god dreamed Yass-Waddah. The old man puts his palms together and rests his head on his hands, closing his eyes. He opens his eyes and turns his hands out. “But the dream did not please the god. So when he woke up—Yass-Waddah was gone.”

A painting on screen. Sign pointing:
WAGHDAS-NAUFANA-GHADIS.
Road winding into the distance. Over the hills and far away.…

Audrey sits at a typewriter in his attic room, his back to the audience. In a bookcase to his left, we see
The Book of Knowledge, Coming of Age in Samoa, The Green Hat, The Plastic Age, All the Sad Young Men, Bar Twenty Days, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Adventure Stories
and a stack of
Little Blue Books.
In front of him is the etching depicting Captain Strobe on the gallows. Audrey glances up at the picture and types:

“The Rescue.”

An explosion rumbles through the warehouse. Walls and roof shake and fall on Audrey and the audience. As the warehouse collapses, it turns to dust.

The entire cast is standing in a desert landscape looking at the sunset spread across the western sky like a vast painting: the red walls of Tamaghis, the Ba'dan riots, the smoldering ruins of Yass-Waddah and Manhattan, Waghdas glimmers in the distance.

The scenes shift and change: tropical seas and green islands, a burning galleon sinks into a gray-blue sea of clouds, rivers, jungles, villages, Greek temples and there are the white frame houses of Harbor Point above the blue lake.

Port Roger shaking in the wind, fireworks displays against a luminous green sky, expanses of snow, swamps, and deserts where vast red mesas tower into the sky, fragile aircraft over burning cities, flaming arrows, dimming to mauves and grays and finally—in a last burst of light—the enigmatic face of Waring as his eyes light up in a blue flash. He bows three times and disappears into the gathering dusk.

RETURN TO PORT ROGER

This must be it. Warped planks in a tangle of trees and vines. The pool of the Palace is covered with algae. A snake slithers into the green water. Weeds grow through the rusty shell of a bucket in the
haman.
The stairs leading to the upper porch have fallen. Nothing here but the smell of empty years. How many years? I can't be sure.

I am carrying a teakwood box with a leather handle. The box is locked. I have the key but I will not open the box here. I take the path to Dink's house. Sometimes paths last longer than roads.

There it is on the beach, just as I remember it. Sand has covered the steps and drifted across the floor. Smell of nothing and nobody there. I sit down on the sand-covered steps and look out to the harbor at the ship that brought me here and that will take me away. I take out my key and open the box and leaf through the yellow pages. The last entry is from many years ago.

We were in Panama waiting for the Spanish. I am back in the fort watching the advancing soldiers through a telescope, closer and closer to death.

“Go back!”
I am screaming without a throat, without a tongue—
“Get in your galleons and go back to Spain!”

Hearing the final sonorous knell of Spain as church bells silently implode into Sisters of Mary, Communions, Confessions …

“Paco … Joselito … Enrique.”

Father Kelley is giving them absolution. There is pain in his voice. It's too easy. Then our shells and mortars rip through them like a great iron fist. A few still take cover and return fire.

Paco catches a bullet in the chest. Sad shrinking face. He pulls my head down as the gray lips whisper—“I want the priest.”

*   *   *

I didn't want to write about this or what followed. Guayaquil, Lima, Santiago and all the others I didn't see. The easiest victories are the most costly in the end.

I have blown a hole in time with a firecracker. Let others step through. Into what bigger and bigger firecrackers? Better weapons lead to better and better weapons, until the earth is a grenade with the fuse burning.

I remember a dream of my childhood. I am in a beautiful garden. As I reach out to touch the flowers they wither under my hands. A nightmare feeling of foreboding and desolation comes over me as a great mushroom-shaped cloud darkens the earth. A few may get through the gate in time. Like Spain, I am bound to the past.

ALSO BY WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Junky

Naked Lunch

The Soft Machine

The Ticket that Exploded

Dead Fingers Talk

The Yage Letters

The Third Mind

Nova Express

The Job

The Wild Boys

Exterminator!

Port of Saints

The Last Words of Dutch Schultz

The Place of Dead Roads

The Western Lands

CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT.
Copyright © 1981 by William S. Burroughs. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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Grateful acknowledgment is made for use of a portion of “The Too Fat Polka” by Ross MacLean and Arthur Richardson. Copyright 1947, renewed by Shapiro, Bernstein and Co., Inc., New York, New York. Used by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Burroughs, William S.

Cities of the red night.

I. Title. PZ4.B972Ci [PS3552.U75] 813'.54 80-13637

ISBN 0-312-27846-2

First published in the United States by Holt, Rinehart and Winston

eISBN 9781466856608

First eBook edition: October 2013

*
Daniel P. Mannix,
The History of Torture
(New York: Dell, 1964).