William S. Burroughs (44 page)

It all comes under
the head of evasive action. Kim is planning to dance offstage
from his Paris number, maybe right into one of those awful East End
music halls. Kim shudders at the thought
...
bestial
English criminals gouging each other's eyes out with broken beer
bottles.

"Now I don't
want any trouble with you, mate, let me buy you a drink."

So saying, he knees
him in the groin, throws brandy into his eyes and lights it.

Kim winds up his
Paris show with a medieval set. It's Paris in the terrible winter of
1498
when famished wolves came into the outskirts of Paris.
Kim, as Frangois Villon, in his scholar's cloak, does a
diseuse
number.

"Ou sont les
neiges d'antan?"

Wolves slink by
chanting:

"Ou sont les
neiges d'antan?"

Street gangs of
youths ready to kill for a crust of bread
...
Kim
engages five of them and routs them with his sword. He pulls the hood
down over his face. Magic-lantern slides show the street winter
spring summer fall faster and faster. Kim throws the hood back. He is
now an old man who quavers out:

"Ou sont les
neiges d'antan?"

Applause.

The applause fades
into traffic sounds and Kim finds himself in London on Westbury
Street, near the corner of Ryder Street. He is still wearing the
medieval cloak and Kim knows it is his old plague cloak. It is a
beautiful garment of fine black camelwool lined with raw silk
impregnated with suppurating lymph glands, tuberculosis and leprosy,
the sweet rotten aftersmell of gangrene and putrid blood, the sharp
reek of carrion, winter smell of typhus in cold doss houses
where the windows are caulked with paper and never opened
...
a
very old cloak, Kim reflects
...
been in our
family for a longtime, picking up a whiff here and a whiff there
.. .
sweet diarrhea smells from cholera wards, black vomit of
yellow fever in Panama, the congested sour smell of mental illness
like rotten milk and mouse piss...

A lovely cloak but
it does look a little strange in Mayfair. Kim billows out a few
whiffs. The passersby look at him indignantly, cough, and walk
away.

"They won't be
so sassy in a few days' time." Still it would be prudent to
change into a suit before he has to take out a bobby or two. He
walks into a men's-wear store on Jermyn Street.

The manager prided
himself on his impeccable cool. Despite the horrible odor, he
observed that the cloak was of the finest materials and probably
priceless, the sandals of an authentic medieval design in
deerskin with gold buckles. The manager considered himself a good
judge of character and it was Kim's presence that decided him against
giving the call-police signal to his assistant. An aura of menace
palpable as a haze, eyes with a cold blue burn like sputtering ice,
and the voice silk-soft and caressing, sugary and evil with
violence just under the surface...

"I want the
lot, from shoes to hat, you understand."

"I understand
perfectly," the manager said and lifted his hand. A willowy
young fag undulated up...

"Am, take care
of this gentleman."

Arn fingered the hem
of Kim's cloak...

"Sweet stuff,
dearie."

"Yes, it's been
in our family for a long time."

The boy lingered in
the doorway of the change cubicle, hoping Kim would take off his
cloak and be naked underneath. Kim smiled at him and took off the
cloak, which billowed across the cubicle, seemingly with a life of
its own, and settled onto a hanger.

The boy sniffed
ecstatically..."Coo what a lovely smell!"

"It's been in
our family for
quite
a long time."

Kim was wearing a
codpiece fashioned from some pinkish-brown porous skin.

"The pelt of an
electric eel," Kim told him.

A sheath of the same
material was at his belt shaped to hold a curved blade twelve inches
long. Kim withdrew the blade, which shone with an inner light like
crystal.

"This blade,
fashioned by a Japanese craftsman, was tempered in human
blood
...
an insolent peasant who called my
ancestor a Dishdigger
...
that's
medieval slang for 'queer
...
Intolerable,
was it not?"

"Yes sir. Quite
intolerable."

"Now I want
your M-5 suit."

"Something
inconspicuous, sir?" Exactly. The well-dressed man is one whose
clothes you never notice
...
That's what you
English say, isn't it?"

"Sometimes,
sir. What size?"

"Thirty-eight
long
...
felt hat, not a bowler
...
the
cloak and sandals to be packed into one of those leather satchels
with brass fittings
...
that one
..."
Kim pointed.

"It's rather
expensive, sir."

"The more the
merrier. Expense account, you know."

So in what
guise shall he return to the New World as if he were coming from the
Old World, which in fact he is, since his footsteps are vanishing
behind him like prints in heavy snow or windblown sand.

"Our chaps are
jolly good," Tony told him. "Any passport, any part you
fancy, old thing
..."

A rich traveler of
uncertain nationality
.. .
with a Vaduz
passport.

Name: Kurt van
Worten

Occupation:
Businessman

And what business is
Mr. van Worten in? Difficult to pin down. But wherever he opens his
briefcase, disaster slides out. The market crashes, currencies
collapse, breadlines form. War clouds gather. An austere gilt-edged
card with a banking address in Vaduz...

The passport picture
catches the petulant expression of the rich. It can be counterfeited.
Just look sour and petulant and annoyed at everything in sight.
At the slightest delay give little exasperated gasps. It is well
from time to time to snarl like a cat. And a handkerchief redolent of
disinfectant can be placed in front of the face if any sort of
creature
gets too close. And spend long hours in deck chairs
with dark glasses and a lap robe, silent as a shark. Just do it long
enough and money will simply cuddle around you.

Hall sips his drink
and picks up another envelope. Mr. van Worten, he feels, would prove
a bit confining, and he is not intrigued by the mysteries of
high finance. Something more raffish, disreputable,
shameless...It is pleasant to roll in vileness like a dog rolls in
carrion, is it not?

A con man who calls
himself Colonel Parker, with the sleek pomaded smug expression of a
man who has just sold the widow a fraudulent peach orchard. His cold
predatory eyes scan the dining room from the Captain's table...

An impoverished
Polish intellectual from steerage trying to conceal his tubercular
cough and the stink of cold doss houses he carries with him like a
haze. One expects to see typhus lice crawling on his frayed dirty
collar...Too uncomfortable...

The door to another
dimension may open when the gap between what one is expected to
feel and what one actually does feel rips a hole in the fabric. Years
ago I was driving along Price Road and I thought how awful it would
be to run over a dog or, my God, a child, and have to face the family
and portray the correct emotions. When suddenly a figure wrapped
in a cloak of darkness appeared with a dead child under one arm and
slapped it down on a porch:

"This yours,
lady?"

I began to laugh.
The figure had emerged from a lightless region where everything we
have been taught, all the conventional feelings, do not apply.
There is no light to see them by. It is from this dark door that the
antihero emerges...

A
Titanic
survivor...You know the one I mean...

"Somewhere in
the shadows of the
Titanic
slinks a cur in human shape. He
found himself hemmed in by the band of heros whose watchword and
countersign rang out across the deep:

"
'Women and children first.'
"

"What did he
do? He scuttled to the stateroom deck, put on a woman's skirt, a
woman's hat, and a woman's veil and, picking his crafty way back
among the brave men who guarded the rail of the doomed ship, he
filched a seat in one of the lifeboats and saved his skin. His
identity is not yet known. This man still lives. Surely he was born
and saved to set for men a new standard by which to measure infamy
and shame...
"

Or a survivor of the
Hindenburg
disaster who was never seen or heard of again. By
some strange quirk his name was omitted from the passenger list. He
is known as No.
23...

Drang nach
Westen:
the drag to the West.
When the Traveler turns west, time travel ceases to be travel
and becomes instead an inexorable suction, pulling everything
into a black hole. Light itself cannot escape from this compacted
gravity, time so dense, reality so concentrated, that it ceases to be
time and becomes a singularity, where all physical laws are no
longer valid. From such license there is no escape
...
stepping
westward a jump ahead of the Geiger...

Kim looks up at a
burning sky, his face lit by the blazing dirigible. No bones broken,
and he didn't see fit to wait around and check in...No.
23
just faded into the crowd.

The Bunker is dusty,
dust on the old office safe, on the pipe threaders and sledgehammers,
dust on his father's picture. The West has only its short past and no
future, no light.

Kim feels that New
York City has congealed into frozen stills in his absence, awaiting
the sound of a little voice and the touch of a little hand...Boy
walks into an Italian social club on Bleecker Street. A moment of
dead ominous silence, dominoes frozen in the air.

"Can't you
read, kid? Members Only."

Two heavy bodyguards
move toward him.

"But I'm a
member in good standing!" A huge wooden phallus, crudely
fashioned and daubed with ocher, springs out from his fly as he cuts
loose, shooting with clear ringing peals of boyish laughter as he
cleans out that nest of garlic-burping Cosas.

Patagonian graves,
wind and dust...Same old act, sad as a music box running down in the
last attic, as darkness swirls

around the leaded
window
...
It looks like an early winter.

Dead leaves on the
sidewalk.

A number of faces
looking out from passports and identity cards, and something that is
Kim in all of them. It's as though Kim walked into a toy shop and set
a number of elaborate toys in motion, all vying for his
attention..."Buy
me
and
me
and
meeee...
"

Little figures shoot
each other in little toy streets
...
hither
and thither, moves and checks and slays, and one by one back in the
closet lays. He can feel the city freeze behind him, a vast intricate
toy with no children to play in it, sad and pointless as some ancient
artifact shaped to fill a forgotten empty need.

There is an urgency
about moving westward
—
or stepping
westward, isn't it? A wildish destiny? One is definitely a jump
or a tick ahead of something
...
the
Blackout
...
the countdown
...
or
the sheer, shining color of police? Perhaps you have just seen the
same Stranger too many times, and suddenly it is time to be up and
gone.

One-way ticket to
the Windy City..."There'll be a hot time in the old town
tonight." Tiny figures string looters up to paper lampposts as
the fire raging on the backdrop is bent horizontal by the wind. Two
actors in a cow do a song-and-dance number, tripping each other up
and squirting milk at the audience.

"One dark night
when all the people were in bed"
—
squirt
squirt squirt
—
"Mrs. O'Leary
took a lantern to the shed."

Mrs. O'Leary with
her milk pail
—
clearly she is
retarded, or psychotic. She looks around the barn blankly (I'm sorry,
I guess I have the wrong number), puts the lantern down, goes to the
door and looks out (Oh well, he's always late. I'll wait inside for
him). The cow kicks'the pail over with a wink and sings, "There'll
be a hot time in the old town tonight."