The Ticket That Exploded

by William S. Burroughs

  “Now I am going to cut the cylinder into sections and rejoin the sections alternating your voice with mine . . take me an hour or so.. you can pass the time reading this”..

  He handed Bill a copy of the Saturday Evening Post. . on die cover boy at an attic window waving to a distant train. Bill turned to “The Diamond As Big As The Ritz” by F. Scott Fitzgerald and started to read. He finished the story.

  “All right now .. his master’s voice . . listen . .”

  The sound was scarcely recognizable as human voices .. a cadence of vibration .. Bill felt a rush of vertigo as if the sofa was spinning away into space. Blue light filled the darkening room. Bill was breathing a soft electric silence that sent the blood pulsing to his crotch . . the two boys naked bodies washed in blue twilight shivered and twitched in spasms .. He was spiraling up toward the ceiling ..

  “Look Billy the Milky Way.”

  sad train whistles cross a distant sky . . wild geese . . boy there waving to the train . . your Saturday Evening Post a long time ago . . two young bodies stuck together like dogs teeth bared . . two dead stars . . They went out a long time ago in empty back yards and ash pits .. a rustle of darkness and wires . . They went out and never came back a long time ago..

  Standing there in the dark room the boy said: “I’ve come a long way.”

  It was a long time in such pain used address I give you .. went out a long time ago . . The crystal radio set far away refused the bribe . . empty back yard . . long long radio silence on Portland . . . soccer scores — clock hands on a bar wall — Plaintive boy cries drift from the Street of Vagrant Ball Players to la Calle de los Desamparados — Image no matter how good must die in time blockade exploded. The last human blood i created is dead at the Swan Pub. Magazine must tell you bulkhead about to blow — kerosene light on Tangier streets — his smile through cigarette smoke — dead at the Swan Pub trailing his funny stories.” “He tried to entertain the family, Meester.”

  “Look in the mirror. You face dead soldier. The last human image — Mr Bradly Mr Bolivar is dead — Big Picture calling Shifty — Klinker is dead — Major Ash is dead. When your image is dead you become virus and must obey virus orders. You understand now, you dumb hick? Life without flesh is the ovens. Only way we get out of Hell is through our image in the living. Remember the ovens? It is not only the heat. Remember the lack of ‘emotion’s oxygen’ the lack of what you breathe, the lack of everything that would ever make you want to live or breathe? Well like you say any image repeated loses charge and that loss is the lack that makes this Hell and keeps us here. Where we are is Hell. You see how we were caught? Hostages ‘here’ — Life without flesh is repetition word for word. Only way we got out of Hell is through repetition. That’s why we all obey virus orders and endlessly reproduce its image there in the living. You see how we were caught in repetition sets? Any image repeated in your eyes, Bradly, makes this Hell and this enemy: the endless lack of what you breathe being the same image that repeats you want to live and breathe in all directions.”

  And like all virus the past prerecords your “future.” Remember the picture of hepatitis is prerecorded two weeks before the opening scene when virus negatives have developed in the mirror and you notice your eyes are a little yellower than usual — So the image past molds your future imposing repetition as the past accumulates and all actions are prerecorded and doped out and there is no life left in the present sucked dry by a walking corpse muttering through empty courtyards under film skies of Marrakesh.

  Do you see life declined in the mirror? My sad ugliness the sheer answer muttering. “I was dead. I took your identity. Only the ugliness remains. Because ugliness is repetition to maintain precarious occupation. I wanted to say ‘It wasn’t like that — I didn’t mean — there was another side’ without a throat without a tongue locked in virus image that could only invade and damage to occupy. Now I can speak and I say: ‘Do not accept another image identity on any terms in any form or you will be as I am now. As to what life can be worth when the honor the honor is gone par example I can offer an opinion. I know all about it. It is worth nothing nothing nothing. The offer of another image identity is always on virus terms. No good no bueno outright or partially. The only thing I can give you is my gun. I can’t use it. You can. Here is my gun Bradly. Come in and get them.’” — Last words of Mr Bradly Mr-June 19, 1963 Marrakesh.

  Drew iron tears down Pluto’s cheek — a wall of water you understand — full fathom five — and still the words muttering and turning like dry leaves in the winter pissoir — “J’aime ces type vicieux qu’ici montre la bite.” In the distance muffled explosions like dynamite in jelly. The natives are fishing. Four atomic underwater blasts were assayed yesterday at the testing grounds off Seattle. Doctor Unruh of Atomic Dissemination Headquarters described the yield as negligible and pointed up the necessity of a defense policy at once devious and unyielding firm and elastic so that, as he put it, the free world is subject to burst out anywhere. We have traction. All we need is a peg to hang it on or let us say one flash bulb in very fine copper wire. “Big Picture calling Flash bulb — put Major Ash on the phone.”

  “Lips that once were mine have you heard the news of war and death? Klinker is dead — Major Ash is dead — Chigger is dead.” White rains slashed down. Blurred solutions leave something there between us on the white stone steps — fragments dying losing pain. Looked at me his voice muffled as if I were seeing his face through words fraying breaking focus — brain and blood and bones in the frozen till of a distant bank — Liver of self-deception in catatonic limestone liberates a love letter, sir, from marble flesh in slow spirals.

  “I screw Meester?”

  Burning sky the sheer answer — union rules — closed shop — fascist beasts.

  “Yas,” he said, “great bloody banners of resistance leaking red into straw.” So Fred Flash he expose wrong and I think that he now take nothing, vast repetition muttering in empty news magazine, change somewhat unusual to those with a deep and glittering image.

  “So? Burning heavens, idiot.”

  Chigger he was called. Running do you see after me up the stone street. So turned around both guns blazing pounding blue stabs seventy tons to the square inch you understand and I saw the brains go. He crumpled there on the steps and now looking at me silent as all the red hair and smudged freckles and red flesh of the world flushed through him blurring his face out of focus as if I were seeing his face through dying eyes that could not focus the red swirls and blurs — dying there on the white steps brains and blood and bones frayed by my laser guns. My guns? But who am I? The sheer answer out of focus in dying eyes and I told the driver: “Take me to a hotel of the medium class — decent — inexpensive.” (Rain marched across the valley in silver columns) Then the rain hit and I was running toward the barrier up the stone street the gun in my pocket still. Are you? Will you? I know nothing here running running the gun in my pocket in my hand in my eyes — pounding light gun. “Well yas,” he said, “Great libraries and bureaucracies of such an intricacy a thousand years to draft a single petition you understand and five thousand years to process it through the filters and amber molds — It could have been so?” Words falling like dead birds there in the noon streets — sad last time with some dead being — the gun dripping from my fingers forming a heavy blue mist around my feet.

  “You and I fading,” he said and the words between us dying losing color there on the white stone steps to say — “I think under the circumstances — conduces to a certain lack and as such we protest — life in all its infinite variety of repetition to prolong a very old outhouse — fertilizer you understand — inasmuch as any conclusion is at some point foregone by a form of excremental processing — that is any interference you understand on that level — Would you cut up a love letter, sir, from a charming lady? — fascist beasts who would once again raise the bloody banner of resistance over our peaceful ovens and virus cultures giving rise of course to certain harsh necessi
ties of a hysterical nature irrelevant as honesty immutable as time but somewhat hampered by the weekly mail service in Shell Mara — concealed doubt — reasonable friend — circumstantial witness — his cruclest lawyers — the Halifax explosions — twins — brothers you understand — something else — circumstantial doubt — concealed friend muttering: ‘justice of alien law courts — we are an old people — reasonable witness — circumstantial lawyers —’ His crudest evidence was rejected as irrelevant under circumstances that retroactively canceled the San Francisco earthquake and the Halifax explosion and doubt released from the skin law extendable and ravenous consumed all the facts of history — lost or eaten or something? Who walks in when you walk out? If I knew I’d be glad to tell you — Breakfast in Glasgow right enough streaked across the sky—decent inexpensive middle class threats without a throat without a tongue. ‘We do not know,’ he said for lack of reasonable expectations. ‘The filters you understand are clogged — no more — no más — delito mayor — It is dangerous to play after hours — I saw it move I tell you — we were expendable and we did not write books after the war — paper shortage you understand — When large numbers of people are unable to find anything that would sustain life liberty or the pursuit of any endurable condition a chronically acute shortage may be said to obtain and one looks speculatively from the word cloth to the sheer sucking funnel of a vast bullfighter or bullshitter who screams out: “Don’t looka me — You know what I mean right enough.” Ah yes but does it not touch your heart to see the frustrated vultures wheeling through empty skies of Lima? They have come to eat and there is nothing not even carrion left — But the duties you understand of our glorious revolution and the free world must not betray itself for the simple lack of razor blades. “The razor inside sir — Jerk the handle///” ‘

  I mean what kind of show is it after everything has been sucked out? You want to sit for all eternity watching the yellow movie of hepatitis and the blue movie of junk? We know every line and they never change. They will change less and less. Let there be light in the darkrooms. Only solution is total exposure.

  “Big Picture calling Indecent — Come in please — gasoline crack of history.” Doctor Benway rushed in with a bicycle pump full of heavy blue liquid pulsing out blue light and a smell of ozone.

  “Now,” he said “We must find a worthy vessel.”

  (Warning. It may be habit forming.)

  “Is it legal and exempt narcotic?”

  “Legal as Hell. I got the O. K. from St. Anslinger.”

  Saint Anslinger appears now the heavy metal fix falling sugar blue from hooded eyes hooked every living thing that stood in his focus — A young boy stepped forward and offered his arm.

  “Don’t be a volunteer, kid. Exposing the negatives or just dyeing them blue? Pushing radioactive heavy metal junk? Stand a little back from the game. You see the past is radioactive. Time is radioactive. Virus is radioactive. The nova formula is simple repetition down a long lane of flash bulbs old photos fall on the burning deck. Have you heard the notice? No more is written. They are packing up at Lexington.” A tall thin man wearing canvas leggings and frayed knickers, cigarette holder stained brown, turned at the door and smiled like a rat in the setting sun. His long yellow teeth glinted as he walked out and disappeared in yellow light left a puff of cigarette smoke hanging in the air. And I am returning his birthplace lost at addicts of the world.

  “And I am returning his birthplace lost at addicts of the world — groin stained with dew back to all the others down a silver funnel of years. Remember me as twisted dead leaves in the winter pissoir your gun the last negative inextricably involved in that partial today. Do you begin to see there is no cigarette there?”

  Beauty held in mold goes stale and ugly as Shitola where all the young stuff is drained off for storage and privileged Aphids who have performed appreciable services for the Insect Trust are allowed to bathe in this nectar — flower scent of young hard-on and first run jacko-ffs:: (“I tell you, Mazie, you stupid bitch, I’m getting it all” he arches a young boy body up out of the black liquid cock spurting white wash “Come in you foule honteuse — If you don’t i’ll simply drag you in with strong tattooed sailor arms — He’s drinking it now” And she reached up bronzed arms smooth as teakwood sharply etched with a blue hawk tattoo and drags her simpering sister down into the youth bath until they are both twisting about like worms on a hot plate and screaming in unison with tough exciting young voices: “More! More! More!”) “So come out of those ugly molds and remember good is better than evil because its nicer to have around you. Its just as simple as that. And if anyone thinks different just assign that cocktail lounge fly boy to front line duty so he can register just how unpleasant evil is to have around you cut off light-years behind enemy lines.”

  “Pay Day calling Shifty — Evacuation soon please.”

  “Difficult loud and clear you dumb hick inconvenience.”

  And when we young officers heard the General call us “a dumb hick inconvenience” we rolled all over the staff room in psychophantic spasms until we had to take plasma in the Shitola baths while the General just sat there glued to his view screen chewing his cigar: “Cute little image with guns — little hicks — Gawd, Mazie, I love them — In fact its time for lunch.”

  And some of us could not but feel that our youthful ardor, daily renewed in carbonic bubbles, was being sold out by officers unworthy of the name. And we were getting the pure stuff you understand from revolutions and underground armies everywhere. We had our Castro period and then all the mad queens from camouflage camped about in Vietnam drag designed for maximum exposure of misappropriated parts. And of course the FLN girls were to be seen buggering each other on every street corner. I mean we were getting it and getting it steady. So we began to convene in tense graceful clusters of incipient conspiracy. Then came the order that inflamed us to open revolt: “The Shitola baths are closed until further notice.”

  “Justlikethat eh?”

  We posed in sulky muttering groups pushing locks of hair from our eyes with brusque gestures of youthful defiance. And the General stepped out of his view screen in a glittering robe of pure shamelessness.

  “Boys, you don’t realize just how unworthy I am,” and escaped in the ensuing nausea. His confessions have finished off three hardened police inspectors and he keeps remembering more things.

  “See what I mean boys? It is time to forget. To forget time. Is it? I was it will be it is? No. It was and it will be if you stand still for it. The point where the past touches the future is right where you are sitting now on your dead time ass hatching virus negatives into present time into the picture reality of a picture planet. Get off your ass, boys. Get off the point.”

  “What that man say? I sweat out thirteen brown-nose years to get this point and now I should get off it again yet?”

  “We all put in five hundred thousand years getting the point. It never happened. Tell you boy no more is written. Old train you stumbled into by mistake.”

  “You and the Mexican, Meester. Electrician far away can you light your earth with paper moon and all the fuses?”

  “New York,” he said “totally unacceptable terms.”

  “His burning metal eyes had your gun, Bradly. It was in the point there you let go. Neither you nor Martin will ever make conditions worth his adiós in hideous electric pain. You wanted other identity for blue light blockade? To my sad soldiers loud and clear now: “Pay Day! Pay Day! Pay Day!”

  “So those mutinous troops broke into the Beauty Banks of time and distributed our exquisitries to the peasantry and all sorta awful contests sprang up like a Most Graceful Movement contest so a body could hardly get through to Walgreen’s for the fag ballet dancers leaping about and everyone you come up against is so graceful you can’t endure it and we went around muttering:

  ’Slip and stumble

  Trip and fall’

  a practical jungle passed along through, nannies all of us looking for some
haven that might have survived the holocause or hollow cast as the case may be some evil old bitch at least in a kiosk spitting drag but by the time we get there she is a Sweet Old Flower Lady — And our erstwhile friends with the police force are boning up for the Most Decent Cop Day. A shambles — a filthy shambles — Gracious Waiter Day up called a pestilent cloud of singing waiters from the Pontine Marshes — Can the Cutest Old Clochard be far behind? Perhaps the most distasteful thing was the Benevolent Presence Contest which ran right into a taffee pull of the sick sweat stuff and the citizens were still belching it out two weeks later. Oh it went on for a while. On Exciting Street Boy Day the pure street boy winner slupped up all the queens in three galaxies and nearly lost his quality in the service — ‘Just give me a piece of that boy’ they screamed cruising and snapping like aroused sharks. Well every whistle stop had its Quality Champ and you always knew who won a quality contest because he included the other contestants in or out at the case may be — SPUT — The winner stands there in the empty ring . . and Final Quality Day when all the winners of localized and specialized contests met in a vast arena . . scarcely a man is now alive — just one shot that’s all it took — Don’t ask me who won because I wasn’t there.”

  This went on until folks wised up that the quality contest was an image contest like Miss America whereupon cool casual inferential invisible contests set in and you knew who won because when the contest was over he just wasn’t there — You may infer his absence by that or this in exactly the same relation as before the contest he retroactively did not take part in. So the best minds coolly shut off a switch and went away down a tunnel of flash bulbs and last words and duped out in grey subway dawn leaving a wake of turned-out pockets — grey ghosts of drunken sleep — The Not There Kid was not there. Empty turnstile marks the spot — So disinterest yourself in my words. Disinterest yourself in anybody’s words . . In the beginning was the word and the word was bullshit. The beginning words came out on the con clawing for traction — Yes sir, boys, its hard to stop that old writing arm — more of a habit than using — Been writing these RXs five hundred thousand years and sure hate to pack you boys in with a burning down word habit — But I am of course guided by my medical ethics and the uh intervention of the Board of Health — no more — no más — My writing arm is paralyzed — ash blown from an empty sleeve — do our work and go — Here comes the old knife sharpener in lemon sunlight blue eyes reflected from a knife blade — blood on white steps of the sea wall — afternoon shadow in dying eyes — ay, good bye Meester — It is hard to the old showmen all the old acts going — It is too hard to face the last carnival.. We are willing to pack up at Lexington. Get off the point. It is precisely time — Exploded sun circles the boy who paid. Its you who have assembled from the broken streets of war and death — down a long lane of flash bulbs twisted face on the burning deck. The burning buckling deck of an exploding star.”