William S. Burroughs (33 page)

"Ayahuasco,
yage, pilde? No. Too cold. Frost, you know. Too cold for oranges
here...I have, however, extracted the active
principle...Harmaline, telepathine. There's a dash of that in the
candy...
"

Time jumps like a
broken typewriter. Kim finds himself back in the salon, shaking hands
with other guests. Ah this must be the Australian, fat and unctuous,
exuding jovial corruption, and the Lesbians, slinky and sinister with
dead cold undersea eyes like gray nurse sharks and the Count des
Champs with junk coming out his ears. What a fraudulent old piece of
work. I'd hate to be trapped in his chateau. Kim remembers with a
shudder his encounter with the Count de Vile in Venice.
Invitations to the old chateau should be viewed with extreme wariness
and close attention to escape routes. Kim has already exchanged hand
signals with Greg and Brad...One long squeeze and two short...

He turns his
attention to the American Consul and his wife. Mr. Davis is a slim
man in his early sixties, wearing a gray sweater...He is just too
nice to be true. His wife has a distant ethereal look...Quite
deceptive, Kim decides, sensing her expert where-do-you-fit-in
inventory. Kim withdraws into a neutral observation post..."Going
Swiss," he calls it. George Hargrave is telling a long story
about an eccentric English lady who tried to stop a firing-squad
execution on the beach by throwing herself in front of the rifles.

Everyone laughs
politely
...
for the hundredth time...

Dinner is served and
it's a perfect replica of an English dinner
—
roast
lamb, roast potatoes, and mint jelly..."From a little shop
in Gib," spinach with hollandaise sauce
...
peaches and cream for dessert...

Tony is writing down
the name of the shop for Greg and Brad and drawing a map..."Real
marmalade and Earl Grey tea...
"

"We lost our
Fatima
..."

"What a pity,
she did such nice...
"

"It went too
far...
"

"It's no use
facing them with it, no use at all...
"

"Standing over
someone with his throat cut, knife in hand, would swear by Allah they
had nothing to do with it...
"

"It's the way
their minds work."

"What are you
getting from your Indian?"

"Six thirty...
"

"Not bad at
all...
"

Unreality seeps from
the heavy curtains, the glassed bookcases, the deep leather
armchairs and couches, impermanent dwellings of provincial camp
followers.

"Is it true,"
she demands, "that Rome is withdrawing two divisions?"

"Heard the
news? The zone has been nationalized."

Time's winged
chariot hurrying near.

It's all falling
apart
...
in the hill stations and the copra
plantations
...
the garrisons and
outposts
...
mutters of rebellion
everywhere like heat lightning
...
the far
corners of the earth
...
talking about
servants and shops, comparing money changers, exchanging recipes
...
a
lot of it is what Kim calls the "double conversation" that
seems quite ordinary on the surface but conveys a double meaning...

"I'd hurry if I
were you...The shopkeeper says he may not be able to get any more
mint jelly before next year...
"

(Funds cut.)

Greg turns brightly
to the Count..."Oh that brown sugar you're so fond
of...Completely sold out...
"

Le Comte turns
paler, it's quite an accomplishment.

"Can't one make
do with the local molasses?" Kim puts in...

Le Comte shoots him
a who-asked-you-to-put-in-your-two-cents-worth look.

"Is it true
that you are withdrawing two divisions?" an outspoken
Lesbian demands...

The Governor hems
and haws. He knows that Rome itself is menaced by barbarians moving
down from the north. Troops are being pulled back from England,
Germany, North Africa. He is making preparations to leave as
unobtrusively and expeditiously as possible. One day the colonists
will wake up to find there is no garrison left.

"
They've
gone.
Left during the night...
"

Time to pack up and
get out if they're lucky. Back to Rome, London, Paris, where they
will complain about the smaller quarters and the lack of
servants...

Kim was outside of
time, he could look down and see time spread out below him. There was
the farm at Saint Albans, Jerry Ellisor and Rover, a squirrel caught
in midair as it falls from the top of a persimmon tree, shot through
the head...

Old Man Bickford's
son bent over by the
44
slug
...
the
car jumping the curb and crashing through a shop window, glass
fragments glinting in flickering streetlights
—
the
bruised purple cheekbones and blue eyes of Judge Farris looking at
him with cold distaste
...
only he wasn't
there wasn't anywhere in any of the scenes just the empty place a
low-pressure area, a dead spot he was pulling himself out of the
picture and as he did so it was caving in behind him disintegrating
with a nitrous smell of burning film...

And now directly
below him was a vast marketplace stretching to the sky in all
directions
...
and Tony pointing..."It's
the market, Kim
...
you can buy anything you
want and pay with waiting
...
That's the
coinage here
...
you want it, you got
it
...
just look
...
weapons,
drugs, boys of all shapes and sizes
...
It's
all yours
...
Of course we want something in
return, that's reasonable isn't it...
?"

Kim shrugged..."I
can see the reason for it, yes, if that's what you mean...
"

Tony was moving
away
...
"Well if you're going to be
that way about it
..."
His voice
petulant, distant
...

An Arab policeman
stands in front of him. "Passport," he says in Arabic. Kim
hears himself answer in the same language as if someone else is
speaking. The policeman is examining his passport. He is
carrying a cheap automatic in a button-down flap holster.
380,
Kim decides. The policeman hands the passport back and
moves on. Kim finds that he can think in the grafted language,
noting the cop's dead wooden suspicious face. It is like using an
unknown instrument but he is quickly getting the feel of it.

Returning to the
Ganymede Hotel, Kim finds the building much larger than he remembers,
the gardens a vast area of trees and pools and streams, arbors and
summer houses. The town itself is now a huge marketplace. The
weapons section alone occupies an area the size of Lower
Manhattan.

Guns, bows, knives,
boomerangs, bolos, blowguns, slings, clubs, whips, spears, gas guns,
electric sticks and canes
...
crossbows and
elastic rubber bows
...
tiny revolvers
shooting poison darts
...
tiger-snake venom,
venom of the blue-ringed octopus and the sea wasp,
smoothbore-shot pistols loaded with cyanide crystals and little
metal barbs, devices that send sharp metal disks spinning like
hornets
...

The Street of
Knives: lined with stalls and forges
...
smell
of hot iron and ozone
...
the principle of
the spring knife, one of Kim's early patents, has flowered and
proliferated
...
the handle is a spring
usually covered with leather or rubber. When the knife is used to
slash, the spring does the work
...
documentary
shows the spring weapon in action. Here is a man with a samurai sword
and a heavy spring handle. He demonstrates how he can lop off"
three heads, the resistance of each neck lending impetus to the
blade.

"Hand move.
Knife catch up."

When the spring
knife is used for a thrust, flesh compresses the spring, goosing
the blade in
...
knives that fly out of the
handle
...
swords thin and flexible as a
whip
...
a cane with a knife that flies out
propelled by a light powder charge and is then retracted by a spring,
rather like a light air hammer with a double-edged knife as the
cutting tool...And the dreaded Steel Flower, a dart tipped with
little slivers of razor-sharp flexible steel. These elastic
silvers, compressed by flesh, open up inside to form a barb that
makes withdrawal extremely difficult.

The Street of
Pictures: A narrow winding cobblestone street of shabby studios and
massage parlors littered with film garbage...nitrous reek of
darkrooms and the ozone smell of flashbulbs hangs in the air like a
yellow haze
...
photo displays in dusty
windows
...
tinted erotic photos
...
Tom
Flash Photo Studio.

Whenever Kim goes to
the market he accumulates a safari...a riot of perfumes...It's the
unguent, soap and perfume section...Kim opens a jar and sniffs...My
God, it's gamy...smell of young hard-ons, rectal mucus (one of Kim's
made-up words), moldy jockstraps, and gym shoes...He pays the
outrageous price absently. He has plenty of money.
,

He buys some insect
phenergens from a reliable dealer. One whiff brings anyone off three
times in a row
...
quite a potent weapon
actually and with regulated dosage a decided adjunct...proud
beauties need it special...A gamut of smell weapons
...
scents
designed to attract some noxious creature
...
a
scorpion, a centipede, a venomous snake, or disease vectors like the
tsetse fly or the kissing bug that lives on armadillos and conveys
the horrible earth-eating disease...Many smell weapons work on
the "sweet cover" principle, luring one into a good deep
breath like rotten blood a heavy sweet odor so you wonder what flower
could smell that sweet and suck in a lungful doubles you over like a
kick to the crotch
...
gardenia and
carrion
...
roses and baby shit
...
sea
air and gangrene
...
smelling salts and
asparagus jism
...
the smell of modern evil
is said to resemble burnt plastic and rotten oranges
...
only
different
...
so many smells you can't quite
classify because you never quite smelled them before and you have to
approximate. And the most dreaded of all smell weapons
—
Lady
Macbeth
...
the smell that never leaves, you
can wash and scrub till your skin is raw, douse on the lotions and
perfumes and deodorants but you can never wash away Lady
Macbeth...You go into a restaurant, the patrons double over
retching
...
you can't go into a shop or a
subway or even walk the streets...(We are happy to report that
the use of Lady Macbeth has been outlawed by all civilized
intelligence agencies.)

Kim sees a witch's
cradle and knows he is in the occult section
...
a
crystal ball big as a pumpkin, exquisite opal and moonstone
balls
...
juju dolls, powders and
philters
...
witch knives and robes and
altars and incense and cords and grimoires...depressing junk for the
most part.

Kim is interested in
devices for concentrating and directing magical intent, could mean
the difference between a BB cap and a
30-30...
Consider the Australian practice of putting the bone
on your enemy. You get a hollow human bone
...
(the
more horrible the death was, the better the bone) so you fill
your bone with all kind of shit, jump out at your enemy and put the
bone on him...

"Got plenty
good bones, Meester...
"

"Hundred-Cut
bones?" (The bone donor died from the Hundred Cuts, an old
Chinese piece of folklore.)

"Rabies bone?"

"Flayed man
bone?"

What Kim has in mind
is a device for attracting and concentrating the death wish just
as his night sight is supposed to concentrate light...

"Oh I must have
that"
...
a headband of black mamba skin
with a huge black opal just where the third eye is supposed to be.