The Ticket That Exploded

by William S. Burroughs

  Bradly was in a delirium where any sex thought immediately took three-dimensional form through a maze of Turkish baths and sex cubicles fitted with hammocks and swings and mattresses vibrating to a shrill insect frequency that danced in nerves and teeth and bones — “a thin singing shrillness that touched the nerves as well as the ears and made them vibrate ecstatically to the same beat” . . quote from Fury by Henry Kuttner page 143. The sex phantoms of all his wet dreams and masturbating afternoons surrounded him licking kissing feeling — From time to time he drank a heavy sweet translucent fluid brought by the guard — The liquid left a burning metal taste in his mouth — His lips and tongue swelled perforated by erogenous silver sores — The skin glowed phosphorescent pink purple suffused by a cold menthol burn so sensitive he went into orgasm at a current of air while uncontrolled diarrhea exploded down his thighs — The guard collected all his sperm in a pulsing neon cylinder — Through transparent walls he could see hundreds of other prisoners in cubicles of a vast hive milked for semen by the white-coated guards —The sperm collected was passed to central bank — Sometimes the prisoners were allowed contact and stuck together melting and welding in sex positions of soft rubber — At the center of this pulsing translucent hive was a gallows where the prisoners were hanged after being milked for three weeks — He could see the terminal cases carried to the gallows, bodies wasted to transparent mummy flesh over soft phosphorescent bones — Necks broken by the weight of suspension and the soft bones spurted out in orgasm leaving a deflated skin collected by the guards to be used on the next shift of prisoners — Mind and body blurred with pleasure some part of his being was still talking to the switchblade concealed under his mattress, feeling for it with numb erogenous fingers — One night he slipped into a forgotten nightmare of his childhood — A large black poodle was standing by his bed — The dog dissolved in smoke and out of the smoke arose a dummy being five feet tall — The dummy had a thin delicate face of green wax and long yellow fingernails —

  “Poo Poo,” he screamed in terror trying desperately to reach his knife — but his motor centers were paralyzed — This had happened before — “i told you i would come back” — Poo Poo put a long yellow corpse fingernail on his forehead vaulted over his body and lay down beside him — He could move now and began clawing at the dummy — Poo Poo snickered and traced three long scratches on Bradly’s neck —

  “You’re dead, Poo Poo! dead! dead! dead!” Bradly screamed trying to pull the dummy head off —

  “Perhaps i am — And you are too unless you get out of here — i’ve come to warn you — Out of present time past the crab guards on dirty pictures? — There’s a Chinese boy in the next cubicle and lam is just down the hall — He’s very technical you know — And use this — i’m going now” —

  He faded out leaving a faint impression on the green mattress cover — The room was full of milky light — (Departed have left mixture of dawn and dream) — There was a little bamboo flute on the bed beside Bradly — He put it to his lips and heard Poo Poo speak from an old rag in one corner — “Not now — Later” —

  He contacted the Chinese boy who had smuggled in a transistor radio — They made plans quickly and when the guard came with the heavy liquid turned on the metal static and stabbed the switchblade deep into insect nerve centers — The guard fell twisting and flipping white juice from his ruptured abdomen — Bradly picked up the guard’s gun and released the other prisoners — Most of them were too far gone to move but others they revived with static and formed a division of combat troops — Bradly showed the guard’s weapon to lam —

  “How do you work this fucker?” —

  lam examined the mechanism with long fingers precise as tooled metal — explained it was camera gun with telescopic lens equipped to take and project a moving picture vibrating the image at supersonic speed — He attached the radio to the camera gun so that the static synchronized with the vibrations — Bradly had the gun ready in his hand as they zigzagged out of the hive rushing the metal points of the ovens — Guard towers opened up with magnetic spirals and Bradly lost half his men before he could hit the central control tower and deactivate the mechanical gun turrets — (His troops had one advantage — All the guards and weapons of the enemy were operated by machine control and they had no actual fighters on the location) — Zigzagging he opened up with camera gun and static — Towers and ovens went up in a nitrous blast of burning film — A great rent tore the whole structure of the garden to the blue sky beyond — He put the flute to his lips and blue notes of Pan trickled down from the remote mountain village of his childhood — The prisoners heard the pipes and streamed out of the garden — The sperm tanks drained into streets of image forming thunderbolts of plasma that exploded The Garden of Delights in a flash of silver light — The Green Pine Inn is on a bluff over the river . . a lawn with chairs and tables stretches down to the edge of the bluff. The family is sitting on a screened porch fried chicken hot biscuits iced tea on the table. At one end of the table opposite his father is a boy about 18 dressed in a blue suit. . a slash of red on each cheekbone. He is looking across the valley.

  The Demolition Squad has arrived. The G.O.D. is being pulled down and stacked into piles for burning. A lean leather-faced man with pale grey eyes looks sourly at a broken gallows covered with pink tinsel. A tape recorder gasps, shits, pisses, strangles and ejaculates at his feet. He listens his face impassive. He swings his heavy metal tipped boot. The noise stops. He leans forward and picks up a piece of twisted film streaked with excrement and holds it up to the late afternoon sun. He lets his arm drop and the film twists from his fingers. He glances around. “All set I guess.”

  Men step forward sloshing pails of gasoline. The foreman throws a match and steps back. Other fires are starting here and there across the valley the smoke hanging black and motionless in the still September air. The Demolition Squad is walking up the hill to their truck . . a clank of tools. The two garden guards, who have been waiting there for a lift to town, get in . . a grinding of gears . . sound of a distant motor. Behind them in a darkening valley the Garden of Delights is scattered piles of smoldering rubbish . . . scrub and vines grow through blackened tape recorders where goats graze and lizards bask in the afternoon sun. G.O.D. is the smell of burning leaves in cobblestone streets a rustle of darkness and wires frayed sounds of a distant city.

  The Guard named Rose sitting on a bench in the back of a swaying truck with the silent demolition men. He does not know where he is going or what he will do when he gets there . . . “getting old . . watchman in a warehouse .. museum guard maybe . .”

  I stopped at a newsstand on Shaftesbury Avenue and bought a copy of Encounter contemplating under Eros the feat of prose abstracted to a point where no image track occurs.

  (The concomitance or rather juxtaposition with this relentlessly successful though diagrammatic schemata by sexualizing syntactically delinquent analogous metaphor)

  It was 11:50 P.M. when I stepped into the entrance of Boot’s and there was “Genial” standing outside blue neon on his face you thought of diseased metal when you looked at him a face burning in slow cold fires.

  (desperately effete negation of societal values fecundate with orifices perspective and the ambivalent smugness of unavowed totalitarianism.)

  I knew why he was standing there. He didn’t have the ready to fill his script. He was waiting for somebody he could touch.

  (foundering in disproportionate exasperation he doesn’t even achieve the irrelevant honesty of hysteria but rather an uneasy somnolence counterpointed by the infantile exposure of fragmentary suburban genitalia.)

  “Need bread for your script, man?”

  He turned and looked at me decided I wasn’t the heat and nodded. I passed him a quid. “That should buy six jacks. I’ll see you outside.”

  He nodded again went in and sat down in the script line.

  (ironically the format is banal to its heart of pulp ambivalently flailing noneffectual tentac
les of verbal diarrhea)

  I waited half an hour of word sludge

  (confirming the existence of their creator their periodically jolted lives starved of direction or vector by the recognizable official negative analogues banal “privatisation” being the most reliable)

  “You can fix at my place if you like.”

  I could tell he had no place of his own. He just nodded and we got in a cab. I had to wake him up when we got there and help him up the stairs. He’d been hitting the goof balls waiting on his script. I deposited him in a chair. He slumped forward and his tongue lolled out. He opened one eye and looked at me.

  “Don’t I know you from some place?”

  “Right back where we started from born knowing.”

  His eyes touched me inside. He smiled twisting a Sammy scarf in his dirty fingers.

  “You should have let me finish the job instead of leaving it half done.”

  (species spawning for such a purpose to ask reputably informed complacent “What is it for?” Accessibility is I feel to beg the question.)

  “I’m immune now remember.”

  “Yes thanks to me.”

  “Thanks ‘Genial.’”

  “So what did it get you?” He pointed to the mirror. “Look at you . . burnt out used up . . .”

  (to traduce or transfigure and reduce a man’s pulsating multiplicity to untranslatable inchoate word for latent consensus of “otherness”)

  “And look at you ‘Genial’ . . . sex scar tissue on anyone I ever asked alive or dead I should know.”

  (Mr S. who latterly became something the point is simply the contradictions of an inherent territory prophet stridently inclined to gritty acceptances depending on banal illiterate process of perceptive engagement)

  I found “Genial” in the police shed on top of the hill. He was sitting on a bench his face blank as an empty screen. A police sergeant behind a desk squinted through cigarette smoke. “Much trouble this one,” he pointed to ‘Genial,’ “papers muy malo no en ordenes . .”

  “He has a passport?”

  “Oh yes but the date here and the date here no corresponde . . muy malo .. perhaps the passport is false . . it will have to be sent to the Capitol of course ..”

  He watched my hand and checked the denomination of the note I was slipping under the frayed green blotter.

  He picked up the passport and leafed through it. “Oh yes . . here is the date of entry . . Yes everything quite in order .. your passport señor..”

  “Genial” stood there with the passport in his hand . . “Come along ‘Genial,’” I put a hand under his arm and led him out onto the road.

  “Adiós señores.”

  “Adiós.”

  I guided “Genial” with one hand under an elbow. He weighed no more than his clothes. We sat down under a tree worn smooth by others who sat there before or after time switched the tracks through a field of little white flowers by the ruined signal tower. We remember the days as long procession of the secret police always everywhere in different form, outside Guayaquil sat on a river bank and saw a big lizard cross the mud flats dotted with melon rind thrown from passing canoes. It was the end of the line. My death across his face faded through the soccer scores the urinal and the bicycle races . . faded into lam’s face at the Green Inn looking across the valley.

  He was standing on a Moroccan hillside with his troops and around them the Pan pipes calm and impersonal as the blue sky — From his pocket he heard Poo Poo say “Take me with you” — He felt a little plastic bag and drew it out — There was a flat grey membrane inside it — He moved away on Pan pipes to the remote mountain village of his childhood where blue mist swirled through the streets and time stopped in the slate houses — Words fell from his mind — He drifted through wind chimes of subway dawns and turnstiles — Boys on roller skates turned slow circles in a shower of ruined suburbs — grey luminous flakes falling softly on Ewyork, Aris, Ome, Oston — crumpled cloth bodies through the glass and metal streets swept by time winds — from siren towers the twanging tones of fear — positive feedback Pan God of Panic piping blue notes through empty streets as the berserk time machine twisted a tornado of centuries — wind through dusty offices and archives — board books scattered to rubbish heaps of the earth — symbol books of the all powerful board that had controlled thought feeling and movement of a planet with iron claws of pain and pleasure from birth to death — control symbols pounded to word and image dust; crumpled cloth bodies of the vast control machine — The whole structure of reality went up in silent explosions under the whining sirens — Pipers from his remote mountain villages loosed Pan God of Panic through streets of image — dead nitrous streets of an old film set — paper moon and muslin trees and in the black silver sky great rents as the cover of the world rained down in luminous film flakes — The 1920’s careened through darkening cities in black Cadillacs spitting film bullets of accelerated time —

  through the open window trailing swamp smells and old newspapers — orgasm addicts stacked in the attic like muttering burlap — the mattress molded on all sides masturbating afternoons reflected; “Difficult to get out” — word and image skin like a rubber toy dusted with grey spine powder — Blue notes of Pan trickled down silver train whistles — calling the imprisoned Jinn from copulation space suits that clung to his muscle lust and burning sex skin — The green fish boys dropped their torture of spectral presence and like fish left the garden through clear water — Tentative beings followed the music membrane of light and color — Pipes of Pan trickled down sleeping comrade of his childhood — pure blue jabs through the Garden of Delights — cutting the black insect — He slipped out of time in a — His camera gun blasted memory — The blue boy reached from the remote mountain village other apparatus — They twisted cool and impersonal as the sky against each other in pressure seats — stuck together in slow-motion faces — crisscrossed with tentative whistles of other lips broken now from birth to death — control skin melted leaving crumpled cloth bodies of muttering burlap — Explosion swept through empty sex thoughts as the sperm tanks drained into streets of image — the cover of the world rained down — all from an old movie will give at his touch.

  in a strange bed

  Lykin was the first to awake — He could not remember where he was — Slowly his blue eyes blurred with exhaustion registered glowing red rocks and metallic shrubs with silver leaves that surrounded the little pool where he lay — The ghastly night flooded back into his memory — Controls of their space craft had suddenly blanked out by the intervention of an invisible alien force like an icy draught through the cabin — Not only the mechanical controls had been put out of action but their nerve centers had been paralyzed — He and Bradly the Co-pilot had sat helpless in their pressure seats for two hours while the invading force guided their ship in a sickening spiral through the poisonous cloud belts of an unknown planet — Lykin and Bradly had blacked out when they landed — How had they gotten out of the ship? — He stood up and tripped over the sleeping form of his companion naked except for the skin-tight transparent space suit that clung to his muscular body — He decided to have a quick look at the terrain before waking Bradly — He was at the bottom of a gully surrounded by red rocks of some translucent substance — He climbed out of the gully and found himself on a plateau — A fantastic landscape of multicolored rock carved like statues of molten blue lava interspaced with stalagmites of a pearly white intensity he had never experienced in his previous explorations — The sky was like a green ocean — There were four suns on the horizon around the plateau, each sun of a different color — Blue, green, red, and one (much larger than the others) a brilliant silver — The air was of a tingling clarity that seemed to support his body so that movements were incredibly precise and easily performed — He turned and started back down the gully toward the pool — He felt a click in his brain like a crystal flare and heard a silver voice: “Come stranger” — Bradly was accustomed to telepathic phenomena but this v
oice was unusually clear and immediate — He climbed over a large rock and saw the pool — His friend was still asleep—Beside him sat an amphibious green fish boy shimmering with water from the pool — The creature pulsed with translucent green light that flooded through the flesh in eddies — The head was a pointed dome that sprang from a slender neck on either side of which protruded gills like sensitive spongy wings — The creature was covered by a membranous substance with a network of transparent veins — The body surface was in constant motion like slow water dripping down a statue — The face was almost flat but with lips and nose sharply and beautifully delineated and huge liquid eyes above the high ridged cheekbones the delicate structure of which shone through transparent skin — The being was sitting in a cross-legged position and from its thighs jutted small silver fins of fine gauze — The slender sinuous legs ended in webbed flippers — Between the legs Lykin could see the genitals half aroused in curiosity as the fish boy stroked the head of his sleeping companion and touched the space suit with tentative jabs of its long green fingers — Lykin moved cautiously so as not to frighten the creature back into the pool — The fish boy turned and looked at him with a shy dreamy smile — An electric shiver ran up his spine and burst in crystal fish syllables: “Approach stranger — Have no fear” — The creature’s mouth had not moved — Lykin moved forward with excitement tingling through his body and knelt beside the water boy who extended a dripping hand and lightly clasped his shoulder — A thrill ran through him from the contact — Underwater memory bubbles burst in his brain — He was in the alien medium, squirming in crystal rock pools and basking on edges of limestone fanned by giant ferns in the sound of dripping water — Swimming through ruined cities with the water creatures twisting in slow swirls of orgasm, shooting out explosions of colored bubbles to the surface, trailing blue streamers —