William S. Burroughs (38 page)

Tony shot him a
reproving look.

"Well I
am
going backward, aren't I?"

"Yes, but
observe the speed limit."

"I
adore
dirigibles. It's like floating along in a
gigantic
erection."

"Ah yes, very
well put." The Commander shot him a glance as piercing as it was
meaningless.

"I'd like baked
Alaska for dessert," Kim said primly.

"Well it just
so happens
...
and quite a decent
champagne...the oily kind, you know...
"

"Reserve
Heidsieck."

As he spooned the
last of the baked Alaska into his mouth and a Malay refilled their
glasses, the Commander arched his eyebrows...

"And what have
you lads been up to?"

"Well how would
you put it, Kim? As an English public schoolboy?"

"You mean like
I was selling a screenplay to Hollywood? In one sentence, what is
this epoch-making film about? Well speaking as an English public
schoolboy, it's just too disgusting to talk about...Same character
forty years later speaking as an Old Auntie:

"
'No force of man or God could ever bring me to reveal what I saw in
that cursed valley...There are secrets that no man may learn and keep
his reason.'

"
'In the beginning of time was a deed so foul that we have been
fleeing it ever since, down the months and down the days, down the
labyrinths of the years
...
hiding behind a
million empty masks to cover a bottomless terror...Building cities,
waging wars, playing games, anything to keep us from seeing the
horror of our origins...
'

"You don't sell
a film by saying you won't show it. There may be secrets too horrible
for a man to know and keep his sanity but that won't go down in
Hollywood, Mister.

"
'We saw the origins of human speech, the beginning and end of the
word. We saw the start of a plague that will rage through cities of
the world like a topping forest fire.'
"

The dreaded Talk
Sickness, also known as the Dummies, or the Yacks...So named since
the first symptom is a yacking manner of speech like a
ventriloquist's dummy. In a few hours the blood coagulates and rots
in the veins. The throat swells to the size of a watermelon and death
usually results from asphyxiation. From the onset the victim's
mental faculties are affected...He loses all sense of human
decency or consideration for his fellows. Knowing himself doomed he
delights in infecting others.

Here is a crowded
restaurant, two men are talking at the bar...

"What do you
think about this merger, B.J.? Off the record...
"

"It sucks,"
B.J. yacks.

Silence falls like a
thunderclap.

"THE YACKS! THE
YACKS! THE YACKS!"

The patrons scream
as they rush the exits.

It's the most
contagious disease ever seen on this planet. Here is a crowded
commuter train...

"Tickets
please," the conductor yacks.

"THE YACKS! THE
YACKS! THE YACKS!"

The commuters pull
the emergency cord out of its socket but even as the train grates to
a halt the whole car is yacking. A country-western singer goes dummy
on stage. "Stay all night and stay a little longer
..."
Just a hint of a yack. The crowd stirs uneasily in their
seats. "Take off your coat and throw it in a corner
..."
No doubt about it.

"THE YACKS! THE
YACKS! THE YACKS!"

"Don't see why
you don't stay a little longer
..."

They are piled up
three-deep at the exits where
123
died.

Perhaps one percent
of those stricken adapt themselves to the sickness and form outlaw
bands. They will swarm out of a derelict building and yack in
the faces of pedestrians: "We love New York!" or stick
their heads into car windows and yack out: "Have a good day!"

The putrid smell of
rotten blood hangs over cities of the world like a smog.

"It's a real
Hollywood Spectacular."

Kim frequently
placed himself in remote jungle outposts, or in Antarctica, or on
some alien planet. Here is a page from Kim's Venusian Diary:

November
19, 1980.
This is the
first settlement on Planet Venus. Evening Star is supposed to be
representative, so there has to be a gay couple. It wasn't easy
to put
that
across. It
took ten years, and it was a long, bloody, dirty fight. And we won by
being more ruthless, more devious, more resourceful and a lot smarter
than our creeping Venusian opponents, cowering in occupied human
bodies. They shit-sure didn't want any
unoccupied
observers
on their stinking asshole planet.

I am rooming with
Tom in the government compound. We get along well enough with
the neighbors. The Bensons come over once a week for dinner. Beverly
Benson is a good old girl who drinks too much. And one of our best
friends is Martin Winters, Chief of Security, a gun buff from
Colorado.

Of course, Tom and I
have our spats. In Los Angeles before the expedition, our nerves
a bit frayed from the long fight to get on the space program, I came
back to the hotel to find clothing strewn all over the apartment. And
Tom says, "Kim, your fucking trade stole my bathing trunks!"

"You lie in
your capped teeth. It was your own Chicano done it."

"No one can
tell me my teeth are capped!" Tom flings back, stung to the
gums.

"Oh yes,
'Nobody knows about
meeee.
' "

Personnel are housed
in identical long huts of petrified peat with aluminum roofs. On one
side is a steep slope of scrub and thorn bushes, leading down to the
edge of a pestilent swamp. We can look out through heavy glass
windows, like portholes, at the nightmare landscape, the swamp to the
sky, the interlocking islands and peninsulas, many of them
floating masses of vegetation, all under sulfurous clouds.

Kim got a chill
looking down into a clear deep pool, just beyond the shoreline. He
could see way down, five hundred feet, into clear green water where
strange predators lurked like black shadows. The garbage chutes were
pushed out through the wall and retracted lest some noxious creature
gain access. Scavengers devour every morsel of garbage before it can
reach the water, where other scavengers would have made equally short
work of it. An aquatic centipede (that attains a length of six feet)
with a thick reddish-brown shell sometimes darted out of the water to
fight for some choice morsels with the land crabs and the terrible
Smuns, and sometimes there were swarms of tiny vultures no bigger
than hummingbirds...

Tom looks up sharply
from his crossword puzzle.

"What's
noxtious in the kitchen?" he demands.

"It's possum."
Kim waltzes around humming "The Anniversary Waltz."
...
"A
surprise for our anniversary."

"That possum
couldn't surprise anyone half a mile downwind," Tom says
flatly. "Tell me frankly, Kim, what were the circumstances
surrounding its death?"

Kim looks at him
complacently as if he were announcing his pregnancy. He sings:

"Possum
ain't far

Thar
he are thar...
"

He points to the far
end of the hut, which serves as the kitchen.

"I have no
reason to doubt it. What I want to know is
how
did it die? and
when?
"

"At the last
full moon
...
the time is now ripe
..."

"You could say
so."

Kim leafs through a
Venusian cookbook
....
"It's called
La
Cuisine de Peste
...
disease
cooking...You see, when an animal dies of a certain illness it
imparts a certain flavor to the meat
...
Fortunately
for us, our possum succumbed to climactic buboes
...
Swollen
groin glands
...
They swell, they burst, they
suppurate...
"

And indeed,
disgusting farting noises are emanating from the kitchen...Kim reads
from the cookbook.

"
There
is no pleasure short of love-making to equal the crunchy, curdy
...'
"
—
Kim sticks
his middle finger in his mouth and pops it out with a loud "POP,"
spraying saliva across the table
—
"
Of a suppurating bubo cooked in aftosa spit
...
And
there
will be candied suckling armadillos cooked in their own
leprosy
...
pearl-white phosphorescent
meat soft as butter, you cut it with a lead knife
...
when
the knife
sinks
through
the
·
meat is ready
...
unspeakably
toothsome...
' "
Kim bares his teeth, lays back his ears and purrs like a hungry cat.

"Look, honey
face, whyn't you nip down to the PX for Spam and canned
pineapple
...?"

"Oh why do you
have to spoil everything!" Kim wails, rubbing his hands...
There is a muffled explosion from the kitchen and such a vile
stink billows out that they are both thrown retching to the floor...

"Get it out of
here, for the love of God!" Tom screams. They don masks and
manage to get the stinking potful into the chute and dump it. They
pull the chute back in and draw up stools in front of the window.
Smuns wriggle up and grab the steaming carrion in the air...Scavenger
land crabs big as plates swarm from burrows in the slope, snapping up
the bits that fall from the slavering, steaming jaws of the Smuns.
(And all this in deadly silence broken only by sounds of chewing and
rending
—
not a snarl or even a whimper
as one Smun disembowels another with a side kick of its deadly
claws.)

Kim is writing at
the kitchen table. There is an open can of beans in front of him.

Of course Kim never
had the intention to eat the funky old possum. It was just a spoof to
break the monotony...The G.I. jokes
...
The
horror outside
...
This hideous alien
place
...
Kim knew now that all the places
that had ever dragged him were simply reflections of this horrible
planet...The vampirism of Egypt, which got a technological
face-lift to suck England and America dry
...
a
dead hopelessness in the slave classes, the incredible brutality of
the police...They are a race apart, huge men six foot six and heavy
with iron muscle.

Kim remembers a
young Arab guide who inadvisedly led Kim out of the tourist area,
which is like an airport on many levels, with shops, restaurants, and
films all of the dreariest caliber but brightly modern like the
smiles turned on for the tourists.

Kim sits down at a
garish food counter, all neon chrome and mirrors. The only dish seems
to be fried banana chips with marshmallow sauce and at the end of the
counter is this scrawny old Lesbian naked to the waist, her lungs
hanging down like deflated balloons, eating a hole plateful of
this muck.

Kim walks down in
front of a movie marquee and propositions a group of sullen
adolescents. They inform him in Venusian that there is no word
for it here.

A young Arab guide
he knows from Tangier offers to show him something interesting. They
go down a ramp that leads out of the tourist area
...
muddy
canals here and heavy timber, what looks like a logging camp...To
Kim's left a muddy street sloping steeply upward past
miserable-looking mud huts, cut in clay. Down by the canal a youth he
knew from the Dilly circuit transformed into a creature with the
lower limbs of a frog, eyes dead and rotten-looking, he dips a clay
ladle into the water, drinks deep, and falls back unconscious on the
muddy bank..."The waters of Lethe" trilled in his ears...He
hears an angry shout. He notices now the loggers. Hulking brutes,
well over six feet. They are screaming at the guide..."Why you
bring tourist here?" The guide turns green with fear and
runs for the tourist center, five of these cops right behind
him. They catch him...A thin discarded cry
...
The
first slap must have killed him but they worry the corpse a bit like
greyhounds with a rabbit. They go back to their logging.