William S. Burroughs (29 page)

So many faces, yet
something that is Kim in all of them caught in his father's portrait.
The face is flawed and scarred and nakedly diseased. Something animal
in the face, but this is not an earth animal. Kim's alien stigma, the
fact that he is not of human species, stands out raw and shocking,
like a man exhibiting his privates in a crowded marketplace.

Displacement and
vertigo
...
distant voices...Who was Kim's
father? Expense account suggested illness
...
illness
was radium poisoning. The radioactive Carsons...Perhaps we are Death,
Kim thought with a delicious little shiver, and he reeked off his
skunkish smell...

Half-remembered
bargains and commitments
...
old friends and
enemies
...
remember me? and me? and meeeeee?

Kim knew he was
remembering past lives from somewhere, bits of vivid and vanishing
detail. Oh that doesn't mean he was Cleopatra in a previous
incarnation or any rubbish like that...Some parallel universe maybe,
and very technical, let someone else work out the details. Point
is, Kim is
remembering.
He remembers the exhilaration and
madness of the Black Death.

Is
it not fine to dance and sing

While
the bells of Death do ring?

He can feel the
plague around him like a cloak as he glides through London, billowing
out puffs of Death with clear ringing peals of boyish laughter.

"Bring out your
dead."

What a splendid
line, Kim thought, and what better thing could most of them bring
out?

The icy blackness of
space
...
Quonset huts
...
G.I.
jokes...the horror outside
...
light-years
ring through
...
fainter...blurring
...
tears
...
the
father he is not
...
look closer
...
youthful
courage portentous as a comet
...
death and
the Piper...sunlight on marble
...
diamond-hard
core of purpose
...
dazzling smile
...
the
final order
.. .
home
...
you
know
...
remember the bells of time on
that mesa with Kim?
...
the final order
...
you
can't fake it
...
you can't fake it
...
through
London
...
through London
...
a
face
...
hands
...
the
face of a man willing
...
he will not
hesitate
...
we win or lose?...alertness
around him like a cloak
...
blood diseased
from outer space
...
intercourse
...
sperm
...
think
of it getting loose
.. .
reeking of
corruption and death
...
look closer
...
the
face, hands, blood
...
human animal in the
diseased cloak
...
And when intercourse
sperms father's portrait: naked alien face
...

April is the
cruelest month mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots
with spring rain
...
half-remembered bargains
and promises
...
old friends and
enemies
...
Death and the Piper?

Kim knew he had to
do it without quite knowing what it was...Like a good scout, he was
prepared...

Zur
jeden Massenmord stehen wir bereit!

(For
every mass murder let us stand ready.)

Kim spent three
years in Paris. These years extend like a vast canvas where time can
be viewed simultaneously bathed in the Paris light, the painters'
light, as Kim bathed and breathed in the light of Manet and Cezanne
and who are the other two that escape my mind so good at bathers and
food and parasols and wineglasses and who did that marvelous picture
Convalescent
where a maid is opening a soft-boiled egg? The
painter dips his brush in the light and a soft-boiled egg, a
wineglass, a fish come miraculously alive touched by the magic of
light. Kim soaked in the light and the light filled him and Paris
swarmed to the light. Kim was the real thing, an authentic Western
shootist. There were of course those who questioned his credentials.
Kim wounded one editor in a duel.

Kim's first book, a
luridly fictionalized account of his exploits as a bank robber,
outlaw, and shootist, is entitled
Quien Es?
Kim posed for the
illustrations. Here he is in a half-crouch holding the gun in both
hands at eye level. There is an aura of deadly calm about him like
the epicenter of a tornado. His face, devoid of human expression,
molded by total function and purpose, blazes with an inner
light.

QUIEN
ES?

By
Kim Carsons Ghostwritten by William Hall

"Quien es?"

Last words of Billy
the Kid when he walked into a dark room and saw a shadowy figure
sitting there. Who is it? The answer was a bullet through the
heart. When you ask Death for his credentials you are dead.

Quien es?

Who is it?

Kim Carsons does he
exist? His existence, like any existence, is inferential
...
the
traces he leaves behind him
...
fossils
...
fading
violet photos, old newspaper clippings shredding to yellow dust
...
the
memory of those who knew him or thought they did
...
a
portrait attributed to Kim's father, Mortimer Carsons: Kim
Carsons age
16
December
14, 1876...
And this book.

He exists in these
pages as Lord Jim, the Great Gatsby, Co-mus Bassington, live and
breathe in a writer's prose, in the care, love, and dedication that
evoke them: the flawed, doomed but undefeated, radiant heroes who
attempted the impossible, stormed the citadels of heaven, took the
last chance on the last and greatest of human dreams, the punch-drunk
fighter who comes up off the floor to win by a knockout, the horse
that comes from last to win in the stretch, assassins of Hassan i
Sabbah, Master of Assassins, agents of Humwawa, Lord of
Abominations, Lord of Decay, Lord of the Future, of Pan, God of
Panic, of the Black Hole, where no physical laws apply, agents of a
singularity. Those who are ready to leave the whole human comedy
behind and walk into the unknown with no commitments. Those who
have not from birth sniffed such embers, what have they to do with
us? Only those who are ready to leave behind everything and
everybody they have ever known need apply. No one who applies
will be disqualified. No one
can
apply unless he is ready.
Over the hills and far away to the Western Lands. Anybody gets in
your way, KILL. You will have to kill on the way out because this
planet is a penal colony and nobody is allowed to leave. Kill the
guards and walk.

Ghostwritten by
William Hall, punch-drunk fighter, a shadowy figure to win in
the answer, Master of Assassins, Death for his credentials, Lord of
Quien Es?
Who is it? Kim,
ka
of Pan, God of Panic.
Greatest of human dreams,
Quien es?
The horse that comes from
there, who is it? Lord of the future son, does he exist? Inferential
agents of a singularity, the fossils fading leave the whole human
comedy shredding to yellow dust...Unknown with no commitments
from birth.

No one can apply
unless he breathes in a writer's prose hills and faraway Western
Lands...

Radiant heroes,
storm the citadel
...
Kill the last guards
and walk.

Guns glint in the
sun, powder smoke drifts from the pages as the Old West goes into a
penny-ante peep show, false fronts, a phantom buckboard.

Don Juan lists three
obstacles or stages: Fear
...
Power
...
and
Old Age
...
Kim thought of old men with a
shudder: drooling tobacco juice, spending furtive hours in the toilet
crooning over their shit...The only old men that were bearable were
evil
old men like the Old Man of the Mountain
...
He
sees the Old Man in white robes, his eyes looking out over the valley
to the south, seeking and finding enemies who would destroy his
mission. He is completely alone here. His assassins are extensions of
himself...So Kim splits himself into many parts...

He hopes to achieve
a breakthrough before he has to face the terrible obstacle of old
age...So here is Kim making his way through the Old West to found an
international Johnson Family...Being a Johnson is not a question of
secret rites but of belonging to a certain species. "He's a
Johnson" means that he is one of
us.
Migrants fighting
for every inch. The way to Waghdas is hard. The great victory and the
fall of Yass-Waddah are but memories now, battles long ago.

It is said that
Waghdas is reached by many routes, all of them fraught with hideous
perils. Worst of all, Kim thinks, is the risk of being trapped by old
age in a soiled idiot body like Somerset Maugham's. He has shit
behind the drawing-room sofa and is trying to clean it up with his
hands like a guilty dog. Alan Searle stands in the doorway with the
Countess...

"Here's Blintzi
to see us, Willy
...
oh dear."

Like Beau Brummell,
his rigid mask was cracking to reveal a horrible nothingness beneath.

"Brummell would
rush upon his plate and gulp down a roast in such a revolting manner
that the other guests complained they were nauseated and
Brummell had to be fed in his room...
"

And here is the mask
in place. When Beau Brummell was exiled to Calais by his debts and
Princely displeasure, a local lady sent him an invitation to dinner
and he sent back the message:

"I am not
accustomed
to feed
at that hour." Toward the end of the
month when his allowance ran out, Brummell would rush into a sweet
shop and cram into his mouth everything he could reach, the old
shopkeeper flailing at him and trying to wrest her wares from his
fingers...

"Alors,
Monsieur Brummell
...
encore une fois!"

He sometimes spent
hours getting the crease of his cravat exactly right. His valet would
carry out bundles of linen: "Our failures
..."

As he took Lady
Greenfield's arm to lead her into dinner, Maugham suddenly shrieked
out as if under torture,
"Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!
"

Alan Searle leads
him away, Searle's pudgy face blank as a CIA man's.

Maugham would cower
in a corner whimpering that he was a horrible and an evil man.

He was, Kim
reflected with the severity of youth, not evil enough to hold himself
together...

A friend who took
care of Brummell in his last years wrote, "His condition is
indescribable. No matter what I do, it is impossible to keep him
clean."

Alan Searle wrote:
"The beastliness of Maugham is beyond endurance."

The Evening Star
floats in a pond, keeping the ledger books of stale dead time.

Kim collected last
words, all he could get his hands on. He knew these words were pieces
in a vast jigsaw puzzle. Big Picture, he called it.
.. .

"Quien es?"
Who is it? Last words of Billy
the Kid when he walked into a dark room where Pat Garrett shot him.

"God damn you,
if I can't get you off my land one way I will another." Last
words of Pat Garrett. As he said them he reached for a shotgun under
his buckboard and Brazil shot him once in the heart and once between
the eyes. They had been engaged in a border argument.

"It is raining,
Anita Huffington." Last words of General Grant, spoken to his
nurse.

"Yes I have
reentered you long ago."

"Quien es?"

Through the years,
through the dead tinkling lull, the gradual dusky veil distant
youth blushing brightness falls from the air.

"Quien es?"

Rocks and stones and
trees the little toy soldiers the thoughts of youth
...

"Quien es?"
No motion has he now no forces
he neither hears nor sees
...
"God
damn you, if I can't get you off my land one way I will another."
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course with rocks and stones and
trees. "It is raining, Anita Huffington."