Cities of the Red Night
Page 28
The Iguana twins dance out of an Angkor Wat—Uxmal—Tenochtitlán set. The “female” twin peels off his cunt suit and they replicate a column of Viet Cong.
The Countess, with a luminous-dial alarm clock ticking in her stomach and crocodile mask, stalks Audrey with her courtiers and Green Guards. Police Boy shoots a Green Guard. Clinch Todd as Death with a scythe decapitates the Goddess Bast.
Jon Alistair Peterson, in a pink shirt with sleeve garters, stands on a platform draped with the Star-Spangled Banner and the Union Jack. Standing on the platform with him is Nimun in an ankle-length cloak made from the skin of electric eels.
The Board enters and takes their place in a section for parents and faculty.
Peterson speaks: “Ladies and gentlemen, this character is the only survivor of a very ancient race with very strange powers. Now some of you may be taken aback by this character.…”
Nimun drops off his robe and stands naked. An ammoniacal fishy odor reeks off his body—a smell of some artifact for a forgotten function or a function not yet possible. His body is a terra-cotta red color with black freckles like holes in the flesh.
“And I may tell you in strictest confidence that he and he alone is responsible for the Red Night.…”
Jon Peterson gets younger and turns into the Piper Boy. He draws a flute from a goatskin sheath at his belt and starts to play. Nimun does a shuffling sinuous dance singing in a harsh fish language that tears the throat like sandpaper.
With a cry that seems to implode into his lungs, he throws himself backward onto a hassock, legs in the air, seizing his ankles with both hands. His exposed rectum is jet-black surrounded by erectile red hairs. The hole begins to spin with a smell of ozone and hot iron. And his body is spinning like a top, faster and faster, floating in the air above the cushion, transparent and fading, as the red sky flares behind him.
A courtier feels the perfume draining off him.…
“Itza…”
A Board member opens his mouth.… “Itza…” His false teeth fly out.
Wigs, clothes, chairs, props, are all draining into the spinning black disk.
“ITZA BLACK HOLE!!”
Naked bodies are sucked inexorably forward, writhing screaming like souls pulled into Hell. The lights go out and then the red sky.…
Lights come on to show the ruins of Ba’dan. Children play in the Casbah tunnels, posing for photos taken by German tourists with rucksacks. The old city is deserted.
A few miles upriver there is a small fishing and hunting village. Here, pilgrims can rest and outfit themselves for the journey that lies ahead.
But what of Yass-Waddah? Not a stone remains of the ancient citadel. The narrator shoves his mike at the natives who lounge in front of rundown sheds and fish from ruined piers. They shake their heads.
“Ask Old Man Brink. He’ll know if anybody does.”
Old Man Brink is mending a fish trap. Is it Waring or Noah Blake?
“Yass-Waddah?”
He says that many years ago, a god dreamed Yass-Waddah. The old man puts his palms together and rests his head on his hands, closing his eyes. He opens his eyes and turns his hands out. “But the dream did not please the god. So when he woke up—Yass-Waddah was gone.”
A painting on screen. Sign pointing: WAGHDAS-NAUFANA-GHADIS. Road winding into the distance. Over the hills and far away.…
Audrey sits at a typewriter in his attic room, his back to the audience. In a bookcase to his left, we see The Book of Knowledge, Coming of Age in Samoa, The Green Hat, The Plastic Age, All the Sad Young Men, Bar Twenty Days, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Adventure Stories and a stack of Little Blue Books. In front of him is the etching depicting Captain Strobe on the gallows. Audrey glances up at the picture and types:
“The Rescue.”
An explosion rumbles through the warehouse. Walls and roof shake and fall on Audrey and the audience. As the warehouse collapses, it turns to dust.
The entire cast is standing in a desert landscape looking at the sunset spread across the western sky like a vast painting: the red walls of Tamaghis, the Ba’dan riots, the smoldering ruins of Yass-Waddah and Manhattan, Waghdas glimmers in the distance.
The scenes shift and change: tropical seas and green islands, a burning galleon sinks into a gray-blue sea of clouds, rivers, jungles, villages, Greek temples and there are the white frame houses of Harbor Point above the blue lake.
Port Roger shaking in the wind, fireworks displays against a luminous green sky, expanses of snow, swamps, and deserts where vast red mesas tower into the sky, fragile aircraft over burning cities, flaming arrows, dimming to mauves and grays and finally—in a last burst of light—the enigmatic face of Waring as his eyes light up in a blue flash. He bows three times and disappears into the gathering dusk.
RETURN TO PORT ROGER
This must be it. Warped planks in a tangle of trees and vines. The pool of the Palace is covered with algae. A snake slithers into the green water. Weeds grow through the rusty shell of a bucket in the haman. The stairs leading to the upper porch have fallen. Nothing here but the smell of empty years. How many years? I can’t be sure.
I am carrying a teakwood box with a leather handle. The box is locked. I have the key but I will not open the box here. I take the path to Dink’s house. Sometimes paths last longer than roads.
There it is on the beach, just as I remember it. Sand has covered the steps and drifted across the floor. Smell of nothing and nobody there. I sit down on the sand-covered steps and look out to the harbor at the ship that brought me here and that will take me away. I take out my key and open the box and leaf through the yellow pages. The last entry is from many years ago.
We were in Panama waiting for the Spanish. I am back in the fort watching the advancing soldiers through a telescope, closer and closer to death.
“Go back!” I am screaming without a throat, without a tongue—“Get in your galleons and go back to Spain!”
Hearing the final sonorous knell of Spain as church bells silently implode into Sisters of Mary, Communions, Confessions …
“Paco … Joselito … Enrique.”
Father Kelley is giving them absolution. There is pain in his voice. It’s too easy. Then our shells and mortars rip through them like a great iron fist. A few still take cover and return fire.
Paco catches a bullet in the chest. Sad shrinking face. He pulls my head down as the gray lips whisper—“I want the priest.”
* * *
I didn’t want to write about this or what followed. Guayaquil, Lima, Santiago and all the others I didn’t see. The easiest victories are the most costly in the end.
I have blown a hole in time with a firecracker. Let others step through. Into what bigger and bigger firecrackers? Better weapons lead to better and better weapons, until the earth is a grenade with the fuse burning.
I remember a dream of my childhood. I am in a beautiful garden. As I reach out to touch the flowers they wither under my hands. A nightmare feeling of foreboding and desolation comes over me as a great mushroom-shaped cloud darkens the earth. A few may get through the gate in time. Like Spain, I am bound to the past.
ALSO BY WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS
Junky
Naked Lunch
The Soft Machine
The Ticket that Exploded
Dead Fingers Talk
The Yage Letters
The Third Mind
Nova Express
The Job
The Wild Boys
Exterminator!
Port of Saints
The Last Words of Dutch Schultz
The Place of Dead Roads
The Western Lands
CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT. Copyright © 1981 by William S. Burroughs. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Grateful acknowledgment is made for use of a portion of “The Too Fat Polka” by Ross MacLean and Arthur Richardson. Copyright 1947, renewed by Shapiro, Bernstein and Co., Inc., New York, New York. Used by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Burroughs, William S.
Cities of the red night.
I. Title. PZ4.B972Ci [PS3552.U75] 813'.54 80-13637
ISBN 0-312-27846-2
First published in the United States by Holt, Rinehart and Winston
eISBN 9781466856608
First eBook edition: October 2013
* Daniel P. Mannix, The History of Torture (New York: Dell, 1964).