Cities of the Red Night

by William S. Burroughs

  Red brick houses line blue canals where crocodiles play like dolphins. Lost mournful stars dim as spark boys chitter and mewl against his shoulder, a frosty luminescence off their backsides, cool remote garden, lead gutters dripping, a stone bridge where a boy stands with a sad blue monkey on his shoulder.

  * * *

  “Fun City is a segregated vice area occupying a plateau on the north side of the city. Here gambling houses and brothels of many times and places promise to satisfy any taste, but these establishments are, for the most part, tourist traps and clip joints with more shills and Murphy men than whores.”

  Audrey blinks at the screen. He must have seen Fun City through fever-tinted glasses. Seen on the screen, it is a vast composite honky-tonk, temple virgins sealed while you wait, Aztec and Egyptian sets looking like 1920s movie theaters, hula girls around swimming pools with paper palms, fan-tan games with tasseled lamps and geisha girls, New Orleans whorehouses with fake Spanish moss and houseboats on filthy lakes and canals, massage parlors, Dante’s Inferno with female impersonators … the whole scene made in Hollywood.

  “The real action is in the Casbah, but tourists are afraid to go there, scared off by horror stories concocted by the tradespeople and the Fun City shills. Addicts are routinely burned or overcharged in Fun City, so they head for the Casbah, where any drug can be had for a price.

  “The Casbah is built into the hills and bluffs that slope down to the river. This vast ghetto houses fugitives and displaced persons. Outlaws in every sense, they pay no taxes and are entitled to no municipal services. Criminals and outcasts of many times and places are found here: bravos from seventeenth-century Venice, old western shootists, Indian Thuggees, assassins from Alamut, samurai, Roman gladiators, Chinese hatchet men, pirates and pistoleros, Mafia hit-men, dropouts from intelligence agencies and secret police.”

  Cameras pan old western sets, bits of ancient Rome, China, India, Japan, Persia, and medieval England.

  “Over the centuries, the area has been mined with tunnels so that all the buildings interconnect. The tunnels also give access to a maze of natural caves and caverns.

  “There are cable cars and wires with hand carriages and jump seats that run from one building to another. The Flying Squirrels, little people like Igor, hop from the highest bluffs in hang-gliders, skipping from roof to roof, carrying messages, drugs, and weapons.

  “The Casbah spills into the river in a maze of piers, catwalks, moored boats and rafts. The tunnels at river level are half full of water, forming an underground Venice with gondolas and limestone palaces dripping with stalactites.

  “Any services can be purchased in the Casbah—from assassination to such illegal operations as I.T.—Identity Transfer. There are whores, from the most sophisticated courtesans and Rems who offer wet dreams to order, to such mindless organisms as the Happy Cloak and the Siren Web.

  “Any drug can be had in the Casbah for a price. Longevity drugs that require ever-increasing dosage, the addict crumbling to putrescent dust if the drug is withheld. Joy Juice: blackout in erotic convulsions and every shot takes years off the user’s life-span. A Joy Juicer lasts two years on average and ends up a burnt-out idiot hulk. And Derm my God what a feeling … soothes your skin down to flexible marble … but if you don’t get it … the irritation of the dermal nerve endings … well I’ve seen a kicking Dermy tear himself to pieces with his own hands. The Blue and the Gray, heavy metal drugs so habit-forming that a single shot results in lifelong addiction. Yes, every drug can be had here for the price.”

  * * *

  “Now you take the stonefish poison.…” He tapped the vial of milky fluid. “… Like fire through the blood; morphine won’t touch it, but this Blue shit is fifty times stronger. So combine the fish poison and the Blue”—he draws the milky fluid into the syringe—“for a Fire Fix!”

  The stranger was running short of credits. No money for luxuries like Hot Shots. Jay had a deal going to bring in some Gray but it was dragging out and then the panic hit.

  Suddenly there was no Blue in the city. Heroin just barely took the edge off like codeine with a heroin habit. The cold fire in his bones kept him in constant agony and he was bleeding through the skin: blood-sweat, it’s called.

  Fortunately, he had not been on long enough for the spontaneous amputations that leave arms and legs smoldering blue stumps. With the last of his credits, he went to a clinic for a deep-freeze sleep cure.

  * * *

  “On the south side of Ba’dan, along bluffs overlooking the river, are the vast estates of the rich, guarded by their own Special Police. Recently, sons of the rich, bored with the tinsel attractions of Fun City, began frequenting the criminal ghettos. Some of these youths are addicts and drug dealers, others are purposeful agents sounding me out with offers of aid and weapons.

  “The administration, courts, and police occupy a governmental area. A pass is required for entrance. The large middle class of tradesmen, artisans, and minor functionaries occupy the middle of the city, hemmed in between Portland, Fun City, the Casbah, and the governmental area.”

  Camera pans a wasteland of housing projects like the drearier sections of Queens.

  “Traditionally, the city of Ba’dan is ruled by a City Council in which the very wealthy hold an overwhelming majority. Now, the discontented middle class is demanding more seats in the Council. These demands are fanned by agitators under orders from the Council of the Selected with headquarters in Yass-Waddah.

  “The Council of the Selected controls a number of cults that are finding adherents among the middle-class youths. These cults are basically of low-church Protestant derivation.

  “Agents from the Council of the Selected are also organizing paramilitary groups and smuggling in arms. These agents operate with the connivance of the Heroid Police.

  “The basic issue is a proposed Anschluss with Yass-Waddah that would leave the Council of the Selected in virtual control of both cities. This plan is supported by the middle class, who are ignorant of the intrigues of the Council to ruin Ba’dan economically and eventually to close the spaceport.

  “To distract attention from these maneuvers, agents of the Council, vociferously self-righteous, call for a cleanup of Fun City, a crackdown on the Casbah, and an end to the international status of Portland. The wealthy see the Anschluss as a danger to their position, but much more vulnerable and immediately threatened are the inhabitants of the Casbah.”

  * * *

  He is dozing off. Dry cold rasps his raw lungs … putting on his clothes, shivering, dropping things, cold burn in his bowels, just made the privy, a trough of smooth red stone in the hall streaks of phosphorescent shit, a smell like rotten solder, burning shivering sick, he needs the Blue Stuff. Dry blue crystals of snow on the floor stir in an eddy of wind and a crystal spark boy takes shape, naked, radiant, his long needle fingertips dripping the deadly Joy Juice, bright red hair floating about his head, disk eyes flashing erogenous luminescence, his erect phallus smooth as seashell with a tip of pink crystal, he is like some dazzlingly beautiful undersea creature dripping deadly venoms.

  * * *

  “Yass-Waddah, a spaceport in rivalry with Ba’dan, is a matriarchy ruled by a hereditary empress. Here men are second-class citizens who can only achieve status as courtiers, servants, shopkeepers, agents, and guards.

  “Those who fall into none of these categories try frantically to ingratiate themselves as informers. No city in the cosmos is so riddled with informers as Yass-Waddah. The Ba’dan word for informer is Yass.

  “The inner city of Yass-Waddah is forbidden to any male being, except the Green Guards, genetic eunuchs, potbellied but strong. They form the shock police of Yass-Waddah.

  “Latterly, Her Serene Majesty, the Empress, is being pushed upstairs into the attic as the Council of the Selected moves in, backed by the powerful countesses de Vile and de Gulpa, smarting from their defeat and narrow escape in Tamaghis. They are pushing for the Anschluss, after which the Heroids a
nd the Green Guards will wipe out Tamaghis and block the way to Waghdas forever.

  “The riots we are here to foment are simply a prelude to an all-out assault on Yass-Waddah. We are pushing for a final solution. There can be no compromise. Even the memory of Yass-Waddah must be destroyed as if Yass-Waddah had never existed.”

  AFTERBIRTH OF DREAM

  Smell of the salt marshes, slivers of ice at dawn, catwalks, towers, and wooden houses over the water where white-furred crocodiles lurk …

  There are many albinos in the city with hair white as snow and long slanting black eyes, all pupil, like black shimmering mirrors. Many of the inhabitants change color with the seasons—being white in winter and changing in summer to a mottled green-brown.

  The summers are almost tropical and the marshes bloom with a rich profusion of flowering trees and shrubs along pools and canals. Here and there patches of swamp poppies with pods big as cantaloupes bursting with reddish-brown opium.

  It was a fall day, leaves turning, crisp frosty air. Most of the people were out in red hair and freckles, yellow, sepia, and orange.

  Naked with the spark boy in narrow stagnant streets. Saffron smoke curls out between his legs and fades to pale yellow and violet as the boy winks and capers away.

  When Audrey woke up, the smell was still there oozing from the yellow cashmere blanket that covered his naked body. He closed his eyes, remembering the arrival in Ba’dan … a shabby whorehouse district called Fun City where he had gone to meet his contact … the briefing from Dimitri during which he kept dozing off … dreams in which Fun City became an arena for deadly sexual games … encounters with the spark boys … addiction to a radioactive drug known as the Blues … the clinic … the doctor.

  There was another body in the bed beside him. Opening his eyes and turning his head, he saw milky-white skin, amber hair, and the face of an idiot angel.

  “Toby.”

  An English boy named Arn with a foxy, red face and a corrupt insinuating leer: “Popper Toby, we calls him. When he gets in—eat the smell of him—pops you right enough. Bit of a lark, mate.”

  Toby opened huge blue eyes and looked at Audrey, the pupils contracting. He kicked the blanket down and arched his body, stretching.

  The room is cold with a dusting of dry snow on the floor from the round opening in the wall that serves as a window. Audrey shivers, hugging his knees against his chest.

  “Oh my.” Arn stands at the foot of the bed in a red turtleneck sweater, green corduroys, and sandals. “Just popped in to put some water on for tea.”

  Arn then lights an alcohol stove and turns back towards Toby and Audrey, peeling off his sweater and pants. “Coo…” he says.

  A violet smoke pours from Toby’s scent glands, blanketing Audrey’s body with a smell of hyacinths, cyanide, and ozone. Audrey is choking, gasping, in a flash of violet light.

  Audrey sits up groggily. “Where’s Toby?”

  Arn puts a hand on Audrey’s chin, turning his head around to face a tarnished mirror on the wall above his bed: “Mirror mirror on the wall…”

  A vertebra pops in Audrey’s neck. Arn clicks his tongue. Audrey is looking into the vacant blue eyes of Toby, seeing the milky-white flesh, larval and wraithlike, clinging to his body.

  Arn points to the mirror. “Gor blimey you shoulda ’eard ’im before we got together like. Right school tie ’e was.” Arn says this in those clear penetrating upper-class English tones. You can hear every word fifty feet across a hotel dining room.

  “You’ve ’eard of me, myte. Arn the voice. ‘Absolutely breathtyking,’ said a gentleman from the Times and the Queen dropped ’er haitches on TV. Wouldn’t you?”

  He tosses Audrey his underwear. “Nip into your duds, luv. Nobody is lyte for briefing. It’s like rehearsals in show biz.”

  * * *

  In the operations room, Dimitri is passing out photos and addresses for hit assignments. Arn is nowhere to be seen. Audrey is looking at the photo of the man he is to kill: a thin Italian face with protuberant yellow eyes glowing with a sulfurous hate.

  “Don’t looka me…” screams the photograph.

  This will be a pleasure, Audrey thinks. I have not come justa looka you—you greasy worthless black-market wop.

  Dimitri points to the map: “Right there. Runs a cigarette store. Smuggled stuff. Also an Uncle, a Broker, a Buyer. Pays off in info to operate. He’s got lookouts in this kiosk and this grocery store who report any strangers in the neighborhood. Two metal detectors, here and here. He’s got another in the door of his shop and a sawed-off shotgun under the counter. You pick up your gun here after you pass the first two detection points. The detector in his doorway will be disconnected.”

  A miniature youth, passing for an eight-year-old street boy, clicks his heels and bows. “I am the Disconnector.”

  “And you’re just a dumb space sailor,” Dimitri tells Audrey, “looking to pick up a few cartons of smuggled cigarettes.” He glances at Audrey’s clothes—blue pullover, seaman’s pea jacket, blue pants … “And here’s your hat. After you do the job on him, you walk out with your cigarettes and go to this Chinese laundry. They’ll show you out the back way.”

  In the street, Toby’s face is an asset. With vacant blue eyes, yellow hair and seaman’s clothes, no one could look less like a dedicated and purposeful assassin.

  He pauses frequently, looking at a map of the city which he can’t figure out how to fold up again, so he fumbles it together and stuffs the protesting paper into his pocket. Just a dumb fucking kid space sailor.

  Now he feels the eyes from the lookouts, probing, hate-filled, but not suspicious. Just the contempt of the angle boys for a mark, a crumb who worka for a living. He drops his map and as he bends down to get it, pulls a loose brick from a wall and gets the gun. He can feel the lookout’s eyes on his ass.

  “Looks like a fucking fruit—takes it up the farter.”

  An old Italian hag leans over a balcony: “Ha ha ha, maricón.”

  The gun is a snub-nosed 38 with cyanide bullets. He looks around, blushing, then opens the door of the shop and goes in.

  The man behind the counter looks at him. Audrey fumbles awkwardly and pulls off his hat. The man’s eyes spit hate and contempt.

  “Whatta you want?”

  Audrey holds the cap by the visor, moving it across the counter within two feet of the man’s chest. With smooth fluid casual movements, he draws the gun from his waistband and pushes it gently into the cotton lining the hat.

  The vacant face of Toby ages and tightens, the eyes blazing into the Italian’s face like a comet as Audrey smiles. Comprehension, then stark ugly fear, flickers into the man’s eyes as he knows what is happening and knows it is too late to reach the shotgun.

  Audrey shoots three times through the hat—a muffled sound like a backfire in heavy snow. The man crumples sideways, his eyes flaring out. Audrey reaches across the counter for a carton of cigarettes. He steps outside, looks around uncertainly and walks away.

  In the Chinese laundry, an old Chinese is ironing a shirt. He jerks his head towards the rear of the laundry. Audrey walks through into an alley that leads to a sort of mall in sunlight.

  A WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD

  Audrey was walking on a mall in bright sunlight. Ahead he could see mountains shrouded in mist, brightly colored food stands, tables under umbrellas, waiters in red uniforms. This could be a small resort town in Switzerland.

  He was passing a huge marble snail, a bronze frog and a beaver. Fourteen-year-old boys lounged on the statues in studied postures, eating ice cream and looking at each other, insulated from the passersby by some invisible barrier.

  Farther on, boys in cowboy boots, Stetson hats and jeans posed in front of a clothing store with the same stylized unsmiling nonchalance, engaged in some timeless charade. A boy with white-blond hair sat on a stone bridge dangling his legs.

  Audrey turned into a paved courtyard and suddenly the air was oppressive and heavy with tropica
l heat. Youths in eighteenth-century clothes lounge in cane chairs sipping rum punch. They look cruel and languid as they caress pistol butts in their belts with slow obscene movements.

  A private eye is talking to the bartender. “What were you doing in Bill Gray’s Tropico?” It’s an old western and Clem Snide is a fabled shootist. The bar is full of black powder smoke, the smell of entrails, blood and chili. The walls and roof fall in.

  A sweet dry wind rises from the southeast. Audrey with some last-minute purchases. Almost the same buckboard it is already taken care of Meester once he gets up beside the boy and they start off down the road where flint chips glitter in the sun. Ahead they see mountains shrouded in mist, the orange and purple sky glowing behind.

  He must have dozed off while he was walking—it’s known as the Walkies—you get it from space travel. You can walk and talk and get yourself around while you are sound asleep, living in a dream. The dream is made of your actual surroundings—so you don’t bump into things. You just see them differently.

  A ragged street urchin falls in beside him for a fraction of a second. He glances sideways and knows it is one of the miniature youths, strong and quick as little cats.

  The boy flashes ahead leading the way through mirrors and walls, through shops and urinals that open into squares where street acts are in progress: minstrels, Gnaoua drums, lutes, horns, zithers, tumblers, fire eaters, jugglers, snake charmers—all blurring together.

  Audrey is walking very fast to keep up with the youth’s “sorcerer’s gait,” past a platform where several boys are doing animal copulation acts as they impersonate cats, foxes, lemurs, and horses, snorting, whinnying, growling, whimpering. The spectators roll in the street pissing with laughter.

  Audrey is struck by the variety of garb and racial types that flash by like scenes glimpsed from a train window: Mongols with felt boots, eighteenth-century dandies in silk pumps and breeches, pirates with cutlasses and patches, medieval jerkins and codpieces, sharp smell of weeds from old westerns, boots and holsters, djellabas, togas, sarongs, and youths clad in a transparent fabric like flexible glass lounge about in the studied postures he had noticed in the mall—obviously there to be seen … superb Nubians naked except for leopardskin capes and boots of hippopotamus hide … boys in tight rubber suits with smooth poreless faces like green-white glazed terra-cotta.