Cities of the Red Night

by William S. Burroughs

  * * *

  The bartender goes into a song and dance as he taps glasses with a spoon, singing:

  “She’s too fat for me

  She’s too fat for me

  I don’t want her

  You can have her

  She’s too fat for me.”

  He wipes the bar from one end to the other. “And the sperm dealers has left too, most of them. Can’t operate under the new conditions. And good riddance to the Gombeen men.”

  * * *

  Marty has a good thing going. Operating with a friend in the Records Department at City Hall he is forging quitclaim deeds to properties in the burnt-out areas. When the smoke clears away he will be owning a big chunk of lower Manhattan. “The compensation and then the building contracts. The whole thing drips with goodness.”

  He has troops of boys in the street to keep the home fires burning. And these riot boys will later be used to harass any wise citizens who try to reclaim their property and rebuild. The boys screaming insults at visitors. “I catching one clap from fucky your asshole.” Swarming over the house like monkeys, leering in at windows, throwing stones at passersby from the roof, urinating and masturbating from balconies.

  There are a number of these boys sleeping in the Turkish bath where we have billeted ourselves. They parade around naked doing imitations. Death throes they dig special, flopping around, screaming and groaning and jacking off while the others piss themselves with laughter.

  Krup gets it together finally. Two kraut SPs at the door. “All leaves cancelled. Report back to ship immediately.” Next stop: the future.

  TAMAGHIS REVISITED

  When we were first stationed in Tamaghis, it was such a frantic and dangerous place that we never got a chance to relax and look around. At that time, Tamaghis was in the hands of the women with their dogcatchers and Sirens, supported by a weak and acquiescent City Council.

  Since the I.D.-card riots, the massacre of the Sirens and dogcatchers, the flight of the Countesses and their retinue, and the appointment of the new Commandante from Waghdas, power had definitely shifted to the men. The new Commandante dissolved the City Council and ruled by decree.

  The rioters are now the elite of the city, setting style and tone. The fashionable thing is to look for the answers or the questions behind sex and death. So the youth of Tamaghis look to the academies of Waghdas. I am speaking of about ten percent of the total population. As always, the permanent parties remain: the shopkeepers, restaurant and bar owners, merchants, craftsmen and farmers.

  Tamaghis is a walled city, circular in shape, with gates at the four cardinal points. The population is about twenty thousand, but the area of the city would accommodate a much larger population.

  Since considerations of privacy do not apply for the emancipated youth, they live by preference in dormitories and cubicle rooms, sharing bathing and sanitary facilities. This concentration of personnel leaves room for the fishponds, farms, aviaries, and orchards within the walled area, so that the city is almost self-sufficient.

  And the rich, eager to disassociate themselves from the lingering taint of the dogcatchers, Sirens, predatory Countesses, and the infamous Hanging Fathers of the erstwhile City Council, have made their estates productive. Some have thrown their houses open to youth communes. Cows’ milk is brought in from a farm outside the city walls, since the new Commandante banished all cows from the city.

  The main square is a composite of the Djemalfnaa of Marrakesh and the Mercado Mayorista of Lima, surrounded by parks and trees. I am sitting in the Red Night Café with Dahlfar, Bluie, and Jimmy Lee drinking tea one afternoon. There is no alcohol and no tobacco in Tamaghis by order of the new Commandante.

  A kid I recognize as a former outcast, barred from the Double G, is moving from table to table. Now he is a hero of the I.D. riots.

  The kid has a basket full of xiucutls. This small orange-and-red speckled snake has a venom that causes erotic convulsions and acute diarrhea and is frequently used as a practical joke in commune initiations. Of course you can get the same thing in ampules or poppers but the old folkloric ways still have charms for the rich. The boy is making a sale at a table of rich kids.

  Looking out across the square, I see a man pushing a cart with crates roped onto it and one of the kraut kids is walking alongside it.

  “Looks like Krup is taking on some cargo.”

  “He sure is,” Jimmy tells me. “Right after the riots he bought up all the nooses on the open market and all the noose material. The nooses he plans to sell to tourists in Ba’dan. He’s got all the old noose merchants making rugs … and he’s shipping Red Hots and White Angels and Blue Burns and Black Lights and Greenies—the lot. So he cuts them with Spanish fly and sells them in the Ba’dan cathouses.”

  “He sure is an operator.”

  “He’s putting up the prices, the miserable bastard.”

  “We’d better lay in a stock.”

  We walk around through the bazaars pricing color poppers and aphros. The price has about doubled but we know it’s twenty times higher in Ba’dan for cut stuff.

  The Red Hots bring you out in red blotches and dots, squirming around on your red-hot ass, itching to pop, and you can top it with a Red Pop. This can be dangerous, bringing on internal hemorrhaging or in some cases spontaneous fracture of the vertebrae.

  The White Angels turn your jism to light. A Snow Pop is a blaze of cold white light with hot sex sparks. The Blue Burn, which is usually mixed with Yagé, is cold and hot at the same time. You come out in a blue rash with a cold menthol burn, and a Blue Pop is like cyanide and ozone.

  The Black Light turns you black as obsidian and knocks all the white words out of your brain so you are right there with whatever the sex scene is, and a Black Pop brings you off in synch. The Greenie is something between animal and vegetable. You come out in a green rash, your nuts a tight seedpod popped off by the Green Pop.

  You can mix colors—say Red Hots with a Snow Pop for bells of rosy fire ringing in the sky while you squirt a choir of angels. Now, your partner may be doing the same thing or he may be squirting blue twilight in attic rooms and distant train whistles. Or you take Red Hots and smooth it with a Black Pop and spurt deep purple. An Old Glory threesome: red fucking blue, who is fucking white, and red pops blue, blue pops white, and white pops red.

  Try the Rainbow Special—all colors in one—and squirt Niagara Falls, Pikes Peak, souvenir postcards, rainbows, and Northern Lights. Step right up, good for young and old. Young boys need it special. Sometimes they forget the heroes of the fever who made all this available to young boys.

  Yeah, I’m a hero of the fever … Audrey thought as they made selections. But it won’t get me a discount. Yeah, I’m a hero of the fever, and knowing what went into those products I don’t like to see them cut and sold to drunken American Legion slobs. That’s right—the City Fathers are setting up an American Legion Convention. The Ba’dan Hilton and American Express arrive in a cloud of pop stars.

  The proprietor, a thin gray old man in a gray djellaba, follows us around pointing out rare items, apologizing for the higher prices.

  “Oh there are some Itchy Tingles!” Audrey exclaims. “Just the thing for my high-school Christmas play. Give me a case.”

  “Oh and there are some Firsties. I’ll take all you’ve got.”

  A Firsty Pop is the hyacinth smell of young hard-ons, a whiff of school toilets, locker rooms, and jockstraps, rectal mucus and summer feet, chigger lotion, and carbolic soap—whiffs you back to your first jackoff and leaves you sitting there on the toilet—if you don’t keep flying speed. Never linger over a Firsty.

  The proprietor has it all crated up. We pay him and tell him to send it to the mail room on The Billy Celeste.

  I stop at a bookstall by a canal to pick up some light reading for the trip to Ba’dan. From an old Frenchman smoking a Gitane I buy An Outcast of the Islands by Conrad, Maiden Voyage by Denton Welch and Brac the Barbarian by John Jakes.

 
; We walk out through the flower markets, florist shops and greenhouses. Sex nettles for fraternity initiations. It’s more fun than paddles. Orchids that grow into your flesh, tendrils stirring vegetable lusts. And here is a humanoid mandrake six feet in height.

  “Is it a screamer?” Audrey asks.

  “It sure is, son. And when he screams it will bring off every living creature for a twenty-yard radius. And the beauty of it is, he lives on your shit … saves you installing a toilet.”

  “What makes him scream?”

  “You fuck him, son. Or jack him off or suck him off and he screams like a major.”

  “What happens if we hang its green ass, roots and all?” Jimmy asked.

  “Son, you’d be doing what mankind has always trembled to do. You’d be upsetting the balance between the animal and the vegetable kingdom. He’d scream the planet apart. It would be the last scream.”

  “He certainly has potential as a weapon,” Audrey mused. “That is, if he weren’t so bulky.”

  There are bits and pieces of many cities in Tamaghis. We are walking down a street of worn blue cobblestones rather like the outskirts of Edinburgh when a little boy falls in beside us. About four years old, I think at first. He has a rolling walk like a sailor. He is dressed in shorts with a white sailor shirt and white tennis shoes. I put my hand on his shoulder and he snaps at it with sharp little teeth.

  “Keep your hands off me, you bastard.”

  And I see that he is a miniature youth of eighteen. When we make it back to the ship with the kid, who has pulled a sailor cap out of his pocket, and get to our cabin there are two more krauts in it. Krup is making room for the cargo. I hope he can get it off the ground. He does. Next stop: Ba’dan.

  WHERE NAKED TROUBADOURS SHOOT SNOTTY BABOONS

  Boys in codpieces and leather jerkins carrying musical instruments from the Middle Ages invade American Express. The clerk glares and beckons to a security man. A boy with long blond hair steps to a window.

  “Can I help you with something?”

  “We wish to travel.”

  “Travel? Where exactly?”

  The boys strip off their clothes: “Where naked troubadours shoot snotty baboons.”

  They open up with Venus 22 machine guns, a sound like farting metal. Staff and customers lie dead.

  Travelogue voices through the loudspeakers: They are a happy simple people / She wears the traditional Athrump / Many moons ago they say / He offered me a cup of Smuun, a mixture of black rum and the blood of a menstruating seal / Now they would show me the Sacred Uncle ceremony / Mixta demonstrates how the poi mansu is prepared / We stop to observe the traditional Ullshit that must be observed before this young peasant can Bulunkmash his fiancée / The old Ungling is sick / Can nothing be done? / Sanfraz the sorcerer has been consulted / Every foot of arable land is treasured / All refuse must go into the Ungern or fertilizer ditch / The Phren crop is good and there is much rejoicing / Youths scream muku muku fucky fucky over their thumous / How long can the old ways withstand the onslaught of modern technology? / He say long long ago many thousand moons a red light appeared in the northern sky / This light inflamed men to madness and many fell sick with a terrible plague / All that remains of the ancient city of Ba’dan: mud walls in a waste of sand / If these walls could speak what tales they could tell /

  What tall tales indeed. Tacitus tells us that the Scythians, a warlike and horsey people, hanged their captives from trees like an old western posse. And Herodotus gives a lurid account of their practices.

  When a Scythian king died, fifty pure-blooded Arabic horses and fifty handsome youths were strangled, disemboweled and stuffed. The horses were then placed in a semicircle around the tomb and the youths mounted on the horses, being held in place by a stake which passed through the body of the horse and into the ground and through the anus of the youth up to the top of his skull for good posture.…

  A baneful red glow flares across the northern sky, bathing the city of Tamaghis in a flickering red light shading from light pink to dark purple, flowing like water through the ancient twisting streets cut from desert rock which has now powdered to sand under generations of shuffling feet.

  The first thing you notice here is the dead muffled silence of the sand-covered streets. Now we hear music and singing as a strange procession winds into sight. Naked boys with boots of rotten animal hides crawling with maggots lead a column of horses on which boys are riding naked and bound. The Carrion Boys caper and whinny and rear and fart, showing their teeth like horses.

  Now the procession halts in front of the King’s tomb and the horses are being strangled with ratchet cords that tighten and cannot be unloosed. A horse rears, baring his teeth and rolling his eyes as blood drips from his nose … the horses are turning intolerably into youths … shrinking faces spit out horse teeth like bullets. A horse rolls on its side kicking spasmodically, sloughing off hooves and sinews and hide, patches of human skin breaking through. Another rolls on its back kicking its legs in the air as the tail whisks in between human legs, kicking human genitals, shooting horse pricks, as intestines spurt from shrinking bellies and brains jet out from eye sockets.

  As they emerge from the ruptured horse bodies, the youths are seized by the carrion-booted boys with long red hair and gloating idiot smiles. The youths and horses have all been strangled.

  It is time now for the butchery, which they attack with good cheer as one boy heartens his companions with a comic bump-and-grind striptease with intestines that drop off as his erect member snaps out. He sticks his tongue out and ejaculates as his friends roar with laughter. They are a simple happy people.

  Now there is work to be done. The horses must be stuffed with aromatic herbs and the youths impaled on stakes that will hold each boy astride a dead horse until horse and rider crumble into the red dust. The Carrion Boys caper away and disappear in little eddies of sand under the red sky shot with meteors and Northern Lights.

  “Yipeayee Yipeaayoo Ghost riders in the sky”

  * * *

  In desert lands cool stone latrines / Outhouses covered with roses in drowsy summer afternoons / Dead leaves in the pissoir / J’aime ces types vicieux qui se montrent la bite / Find yourself in the navy / All right you jokers hit the deck / Naked boys roll around squirming legs kicking in the air as the colors ripple through them / One bumps out a rich sepia with a smell of military laundry and black vomit in faded violet photo wards and it hits a delicate rose pink of seashells with the hyacinth smell of young hard-ons 1910 the young sailor in Panama yellow-fever epidemic assigned to work in the wards he knew he’d catch it sooner or later then the itching started and the red rash in his crotch and ass pearling in his pants he sniffs the smell of vomit and fever shivering in yellow olive green deep mahogany and black death spasms. Rainbows in faded calendars light up and blaze across the sky.… Coming in for a neon landing at the Rainbow Club in Portland.

  * * *

  When Wilson, Chief of Security at Portland, arrived at his office, his assistant handed him a message:

  “The Billy Celeste, U.S. Navy from 1980 has landed and requests permission to disembark.”

  Wilson looked at his assistant and raised an eyebrow. “Fever?”

  “And how. Even the cockroaches.”

  Wilson reached for a standard “Quarantine and Repatriation” form. “That’s Nordenholz’s ship, isn’t it?”

  “Right.”

  “Miserable old bastard. One of these days he’s going to find my foot up his skinny ass.” He signed the form and tossed it into the Out basket.

  LOCKER ROOM

  It is Christmas Eve and Toby is alone in the locker room. The old YMCA building has been sold and only a few boys still stay on. They have moved into the locker room because it is warmer and the showers are there.

  Now all the other boys have gone away somewhere for Christmas and Toby knows that most of them will not be coming back, since the building has to be vacated by January 18, 1924. Toby is reading The Time
Machine by H. G. Wells.

  I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then …

  I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling …

  I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing …

  The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye.… The sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band.… Minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring …

  There is a stew simmering on a gas ring and occasionally Toby stirs it, listening to the chimes from the Salvation Army mission across the street playing “Silent Night.” He remembers other Christmases, the smell of pine and plum pudding and the oil smell of his steam engine.

  He had been brought up in a three-story red brick house in a middle-western town. When he was six years old his parents died, in the flu epidemic of 1918. After that, a series of uncles and foster parents took care of him.

  Nobody wanted Toby for long, though he was a beautiful boy with yellow hair and huge blue eyes like deep lakes. He made people uneasy. There was a sleepy animal quiescence about him. He never talked except in answer to a question or to express a need. His silence seemed to hold a threat or a criticism, and people didn’t like it.