Cities of the Red Night

by William S. Burroughs

  The boys stood up and said in chorus: “Thank you, Mr. Pierson.” They flashed toothpaste smiles.

  Mr. Pierson looked down at his desk and said nothing. The boys walked out.

  As he stepped out of the office, Audrey got a whiff of that unmistakable hospital smell. A young man in a white coat was chatting with a nurse at the reception desk. A taxi pulled up for them at the door.

  In the office, Doctor Pierson picked up the phone: “Doctor Pierson here.… Yes, no question about it.” He picked up the slides and studied them. “B-23 all right.… The boy Jerry is obviously the original carrier.… Active? Like a plutonium pile.… There is, of course, the uh delicate and sensitive question of differential racial or ethnic susceptibility … with further research, perhaps … Could not commit myself on the basis of present findings … theoretically possible, of course. On the other hand, uncontrolled mutation cannot be ruled out … sure? How can I be sure? After all it’s not in my district.”

  Late afternoon in the cabin of The Billy Celeste. Audrey and the boys have just signed on.

  Skipper Nordenholz glanced down at the names. “Well uh Jerry, Audrey, and John … you have made a wise choice. I hope you are quite fit?”

  “Oh yes, Captain.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “The doctor said we made a remarkable recovery.”

  “Good. We will be sailing within the hour.… Tunis, Gibraltar … Lisbon for Halifax. Incidentally, we will be passing the exact spot off the Azores where The Mary Celeste was found in 1872—all sails set, completely undamaged, nobody on board.” His green eyes glinted with irony as he smiled slightly and added, “The mystery was never solved.”

  “Perhaps it was just the basic mystery of life, Skipper,” Audrey said cheekily. “Now you see it—now you don’t.”

  MINUTES TO GO

  We call ourselves the Destroying Angels. Our target is the rear-end of Yass-Waddah, if it could be said to have one. We feel rather like the Light Brigade. All the bad characters of history are gathered in Yass-Waddah for a last-ditch stand: the Countess de Gulpa, heavy and cold as a fish under tons of gray shale; the Countess de Vile, eyes glowing, face flushed from the ecstasy of torture; the Ugly Spirit; the Black Abbot; and the Council of the Selected—all with their guards and minions and torture chambers. How can we prevail against this wall of icy purpose?

  We got the message on the teleflash from Ba’dan. Yass-Waddah has completed nuclear device ahead of schedule. All-out aid requested.

  We are still 150 miles from Yass-Waddah. Four days hard marching. We don’t have that much time.

  WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF YOU

  Woke up in the silent wolf lope. There is the river. No sign of Yass-Waddah. I must be above or below it.

  I reach the bank. Across the river I can see the rotting piers and sheds of East Ba’dan. To my right is what remains of a bridge, the upper structure rotted away, leaving only the piles protruding from green water.

  I am standing where Yass-Waddah used to be. The water looks green and cold and dirty and curiously artificial, like a diorama in the Museum of Natural History.

  A blond boy enters from my right where the bridge used to be, walking on the green-brown water. He moves with a stalking gait as if he were playing some part in a play, mimicking some actor with a touch of parody.

  The boy is wearing a white T-shirt with a yellow calligram on the chest surrounded by a circle of yellow light, rainbow-colored at the edges. He is wearing white gym shorts and white tennis shoes.

  A dark boy in identical white gym clothes is standing to my left on the bank at the top of a grassy hillock. He has planted a banner in the ground beside him and holds the shaft with one hand. The banner is the calligram in the rainbow circle stirring gently in a wind that ruffles his shorts around smooth white thighs.

  The blond boy walks up from the water and stands in front of his dark twin. The dark boy begins to talk in soft flute calls, clean and sweet and joyful with a sound like laughter, wind in the trees, birds at dawn, trickling streams. The blond boy answers in the same language, sweetly inhuman voices from a distant star.

  Now I recognize the dark boy as Dink Rivers, the boy from Middletown, and the other as myself. This is a high school play. We have just taken the west side of the river. This is the conquest of Yass-Waddah.

  Good evening, our chap. A good crossing. Yass-Waddah disintegrated.

  A slow insouciant shrug of rocks and stones and trees spreads a golf course along the river now several hundred yards away. Two caddies stand in a sand trap. One rubs his crotch and the other makes a jack-off gesture. Music from the country club on a gust of wind. Red brick buildings, cobblestone streets. It is getting darker. Dusty ticket booth.

  A sign:

  The Billy Celeste High School presents:

  CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT

  I lead the way through rooms stacked with furniture and paintings, passageways, partitions, stairways, booths, cubicles, elevators, ramps and ladders, trunks full of costumes and old weapons, bathtubs, toilets, steam rooms, and rooms open in front.…

  A boy jacks off on a yellow toilet seat … catcalls and scattered applause.

  We are in a cobblestone alley. I look at my companion. He is about eighteen. He has large brown eyes with amber pupils, set to the side of his face, and a long straight Mayan nose. He is dressed in blue-and-brown-striped pants and shirt.

  I open a rusty padlock into my father’s workshop. We strip and straddle a pirate chest, facing each other. His skin is a deep brownish-purple gray underneath. A sharp musty smell pulses from his erect phallus with its smooth purple head. His eyes converge on me like a lizard’s.

  “What scene do you want me to act in?”

  “Death Baby fucks the Corn God.”

  We open the chest. He takes out a necklace of crystal skulls and puts it on. There is a reek of decay as he drapes me in the golden flesh of the young Corn God.

  We are in a vast loft-attic-gymnasium-warehouse. There are chests and trunks, costumes, mirrors, and makeup. Boys are taking out costumes, trying them on, posing and giggling in front of mirrors, moving props and backdrops.

  The warehouse seems endless. A maze of rooms and streets, cafés, courtyards and gardens. Farm rooms, with walnut bedsteads and hooked rugs, open onto a pond where boys fish naked on an improvised raft. A Moroccan patio is animated with sand foxes and a boy playing a flute … stars like wilted gardenias across the blue night sky.

  A number of performances are going on at the same time, in many rooms, on many levels. The spectators circulate from one stage to another, putting on costumes and makeup to join a performance and the performers all move from one stage to another. There are moving stages and floats, platforms that descend from the ceiling on pulleys, doors that pop open, and partitions that slide back.

  Audrey, naked except for a sailor hat, is tipped back balancing in a chair while he reads a comic book entitled: “Audrey and the Pirates.”

  Jerry comes in naked with an envelope sealed with red wax.

  “Open it and read it to me.”

  “Oh sir, it’s battle orders.”

  “Wheeeeeeeeeeee!” Audrey ejaculates.

  On deck, naked tars throw their hats into the air jacking off and leaping on each other like randy dogs: “Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” They scramble into uniforms as bugles call them to battle stations.

  * * *

  The Fever: A red silk curtain scented with rose oil, musk, sperm, rectal mucus, ozone and raw meat goes up on a hospital ward of boys covered with phosphorescent red blotches that glow and steam the fever smell off them, shuddering, squirming, shivering, eyes burning, legs up, teeth bare, whispering the ancient evil fever words.

  Doctor Pierson covers his face with a handkerchief. “Get it out of here!”

  Yen Lee looks at a painted village with his binoculars. Taped voice: “We see Tibet with the binoculars of the people.”

  In a stone hut, a naked boy lies on a filthy pallet. Bright red lumin
escent flesh-clusters glow in the dark room. He rubs the clusters with a slow idiot smile and ejaculates.

  Yen Lee sags against a wall with a handkerchief in front of his face.

  “It’s the pickle factory.”

  “A health officer is on the way.”

  The Health Officer is on the nod on his porch over a sluggish river. The huge bloated corpse of a dead hippopotamus floats slowly by. The Health Officer is oblivious. Taped voice: “For he had a sustaining vice.” On a riverbank with Ali standing over him, he looks with horror at his torn pocket and empty hand. Backdrop shifts to another bank. With the same expression, Farnsworth looks down at his naked body covered with red welts. Ali stands over him smiling, the red welts a dusky rose color on his reddish-brown skin.

  Marine band plays “Semper Fi.”

  Picture of a privy on a door with a bronze eye under the sickle moon. Audrey, as Clem Snide the private eye, is sitting in a sunken room open at the top. The audience is looking down into the room so they can see what he is looking at: photos of Jerry—baby pictures … age fourteen holding up a string of cutthroat trout … naked with a hard-on … Jerry live onstage, naked with his hands tied, face and body covered with red blotches, a baneful red glow behind him. He is looking at something in front of him as his penis stirs and stiffens. Scattered applause and olés from the audience.

  Banner headlines in red letters: MYSTERY ILLNESS SPREADS.

  On a hospital bed, Jerry spreads his legs with a slow wallowing movement, showing his bright red asshole glowing, pulsing, and crinkling like a randy mollusk. He twists his head to the right, eyes sputtering green flashes as he hangs.

  A sepia cutback to the hospital bed. He ejaculates, kicking his legs in the air. Jimmy Lee, as a male nurse, catches his sperm in a jar.

  Thunderous applause … “Olé! Olé! Olé!”

  The jar is passed to four Marine guards and rushed to a top-secret lab. A scientist looks through a microscope. He gives the OK sign.

  Bouquets of roses rain on stage.

  Red-letter headline: NATIONAL EMERGENCY DECLARED.

  Stop lights. Quarantine posts.

  Soldiers with their pants sticking out at the flies clutch their throats and fall.

  Newscaster: “It is impossible to estimate the damage. Anything put out up to now is like drawing a figure out of the air.”

  A diseased face with a slow idiot smile is projected onto the newscaster’s face from a magic lantern.…

  “The world’s population is now approximately what it was three hundred years ago.”

  Boys on snowshoes reach the haman. Steam and naked bodies fade to a misty waterfront. Opium Jones is there with patches of frost on his face as the boys sign on in the ghostly cabin of The Great White.

  Dinner at the Pembertons. Candlelight on faces that suggest madeup corpses. Only Noah, his boyish face flushed, looks alive. The conversation is enigmatic.

  “Are they doing mummies to standard?”

  “This is the aunt’s language.”

  “We still don’t have the nouns.”

  “You need black money.”

  “A master’s certificate to be sure.…”

  “Suitable crops.”

  “Are you in salt?”

  “Bring a halibut.”

  “Ah good the sea.”

  They all look at Noah, who blushes and looks down at his plate.

  “Draw the spirits to the plata.…”

  “The family business…”

  “It probably belongs to the cucumbers.”

  “Cheers here are the nondead.”

  The boys are back on The Great White. A shout from the cabin boy brings them out on deck. Jerry, with a noose around his neck, grins a wolfish smile. Then he hangs, as the western sky lights up with the green flash.

  * * *

  Captured by Pirates: Boys swarm over the rail with knives in their teeth. One with an enormous black beard down to his waist swings his cutlass at imaginary opponents with animal snarls and grunts and grimaces until the crew of The Great White rolls on the decks, pissing in their pants with laughter.

  “Guarda costa…” the boys mutter.

  One puts a patch over one eye and scans the coast with an enormous wooden telescope.

  Kiki fucks Jerry, pulling a red cashmere scarf tight around his neck and grinning into his face. As Jerry ejaculates, blood gushes from his nose.

  Slowly, a room in an English manor house lights up. A picture on the wall shows an old gentleman wrapped in red shawls and scarves propped up in bed, with laudanum, medicine glass, tea, scones, and books on the night table beside him. Taking to his bed for the winter.…

  A light shines on a huge four-poster bed. A man with a nightcap sits up suddenly. A naked radiant boy is standing at the foot of his bed. The man gasps, chokes, turns bright red and dies of apoplexy, blood gushing from his mouth and nose.

  * * *

  Cities of the Red Night: Spotlights bathe the papier-mâché walls in red light. The boys camp around putting on disease makeup. Juanito, the Master of Ceremonies, puts a red rubber flesh-cluster in his navel.

  “My dear, you look like Venus de Milo with a clock in her stomach.”

  The boys pose with expressions of idiot lust. The spectators roll on the floor laughing. One turns blue in the face.

  “Cyanide reaction! Medics on the double!”

  Boys in white coats rush in and shoot him with a blackout dart.

  Piper Boy with a bamboo flute in Lima … blue sky, color of his eyes. Smell of the sea. Dink is fucking Noah who turns into Audrey and Billy.

  “It’s me! It’s me! I’ve landed! Hi, Bill! It’s two hundred years, Bill! I’ve landed!”

  The pilgrimage may take many lifetimes. In many rooms, on many levels, the ancient whispering stage …

  Moving age with his binoculars, Audrey lays back in a chair masturbating. Bright pirates. Jerry comes in red wax. We see Tibet for a few seconds, people. A sepia cutback to the hospital. Depraved smile, sperm in a beaker.

  He plays “Semper Fi” to four Marine guards. Baby pictures declared in red letters of cutthroat trout. Red anticipation of fever drifts from the bed. See what he is looking at onstage.

  National Emergency, age fifteen, holds up a string of stoplights. Jerry’s radiant ghost may take many lifetimes. Jerry, the cabin boy, stands over the hills and far away.

  “Lima, flash, it’s me. The Piper Boy in Lima. Dink, I’ve landed. Long way to find you.”

  Noah is in the library studying diagrams of mortars and grenades. He is drawing a cannon. A Chinese child in the doorway throws a firecracker underneath his chair. As the firecracker explodes, the cannon barrel tilts up at an angle. A backdrop of burning galleons falls in front of him.

  Audrey’s boys are back on deck. Gas tank explodes in Tamaghis. Flintlock rifle on the library table. Hans and Noah take off their shorts.

  “Wenn nicht von vorn denn von hintern herum.” If not from the front then around by the back way.

  As Noah bends over, the flintlock breaks at the breech. As Noah ejaculates, breech-loading rifles pour withering fire into a column of Spanish soldiers.

  A float of a Spanish galleon moves slowly and ponderously across the gymnasium floor. On the deck, we see the Inquisition with stakes and garrotes, the Conquistadores, the patróns and governors, officers and bureaucrats and their modern equivalents, machos and políticos swilling Old Parr scotch and brandishing pearl-handled 45s.

  Immigration police in dark glasses … “Pasaporte … Documentos…”

  Kelley as Ah Pook, spattered with black spots of decay, is fucking the young Corn God in a pirate’s chest overflowing with gold ducats and pieces of eight. As they come, a yellow haze like gaseous gold streams off them and wafts across the deck of the galleon. Machos clutch their throats, spit blood, and die.

  Noah hangs ejaculating in the same yellow haze of magical intention. The curtain is drawn for a moment and guns are piled up in front of him—from his first cartridge
rifle to M-16s and bazookas, rocket guns and field pieces.

  He is lowered with a slow sinuous movement by the Juicy-Fruit Twins. The twins are naked except for their sailor hats and white sneakers.

  Offstage, a voice bellows: “All right, you jokers.… Battle stations.”

  Noah and the twins are in the gun turret making calculations, taking the range.…

  “Yards: twenty-three thousand … Elevation: point six…”

  The galleon is in the cross hairs of the sight. Jerry turns bright red as he presses the Fire button. The galleon blows up and sinks into a prop sea.

  Panorama of Mexico, Central and South America … music and singing … naked Spanish soldiers washing in a courtyard, jetting the soap around like a soccer ball and tackling each other, washing each other’s backs. In trees by a river boys with idiot expressions jack off, snapping and gurgling like fish as they shake fruit into the water.

  Audrey is naked against a backdrop of jungle and ruined pyramids. He gets a hard-on and levitates as it comes up. He lands from a hang-glider in a red desert.

  Jerry, the cabin boy, meets him in a lizard suit that leaves his crotch and ass naked. “Me lizard boy … very good for fuck.” Rainbow colors play over his body.

  Spanish galleon … movement by the Juicy-Fruit Twins … on the deck we see white sneakers … bureaucrats calculating the range … hand hair turns bright red on Fire button … The Galleon Pasaporte Documentos is blown out of the water and so a vast territory as Ah Pook spatters the panorama with insurgents. All the boys in yellow haze of skintight magic transparent for a moment come to attention in a line from the first cartridge gun to M-16s … naked haze like gold gas.…

  “TENSHUN!”

  Audrey and Noah ejaculating angels in rainbow intention.…

  “AT EASE.”

  Naked soldiers sniff bazookas and field pieces.…

  Peace does not last forever.…

  Red Night in Tamaghis. The boys dance around a fire, throwing in screaming Sirens. The boys trill, wave nooses, and stick their tongues out.

  This was but a prelude to the Ba’dan riots and the attack on Yass-Waddah. The boys change costumes, rushing from stage to stage.