Naked Lunch

by William Burroughs

  The doctor’s liver sick Indian face was blank as a dealer’s.

  ‘Completely modern, as you can see,’ he gestures toward the room with the purple fingers of bad circulation. ‘Bath … water … flowers. The lot.’ He finished in Cockney English with a triumphant smirk. ‘I will write for you a letter.’

  ‘This letter? For the sanitarium?’

  The doctor was speaking from a land of black rocks and great, iridescent brown lagoons. ‘The furniture … modern and comfortable. You find it so of course?’

  Carl could not see the sanitarium owing to a false front of green stucco topped by an intricate neon sign dead and sinister against the sky, waiting for darkness. The sanitarium was evidently built on a great limestone promontory, over which flowering trees and vine tendrils broke in waves. The smell of flowers was heavy in the air.

  The commandante sat at a long trestle under a vine trellis. He was doing absolutely nothing. He took the letter that Carl handed him and whispered through it, reading his lips with the left hand. He stuck the letter on a spike over a toilet. He began transcribing from a ledger full of numbers. He wrote on and on.

  Broken images exploded softly in Carl’s head, and he was moving out of himself in a silent swoop. Clear and sharp from a great distance he saw himself sitting in a lunchroom. Overdose of H. His old lady shaking him and holding hot coffee under his nose.

  Outside an old junky in Santa Claus suit selling Christmas seals. ‘Fight tuberculosis, folks,’ he whispers in his disembodied, junky voice. Salvation Army choir of sincere, homosexual football coaches sings: ‘In the Sweet Bye and Bye.’

  Carl drifted back into his body, an earthbound junk ghost.

  ‘I could bribe him, of course.’

  The commandante taps the table with one finger and hums ‘Coming Through the Rye.’ Far away, then urgently near like a foghorn a split second before the grinding crash.

  Carl pulled a note half out of his trouser pocket.… The commandante was standing by a vast panel of lockers and deposit boxes. He looked at Carl, sick animal eyes gone out dying inside, hopeless fear reflecting the face of death. In the smell of flowers a note half out of his pocket, the weakness hit Carl, shutting off his breath, stopping his blood. He was in a great cone spinning down to a black point.

  ‘Chemical therapy?’ The scream shot out of his flesh through empty locker rooms and barracks, musty resort hotels, and spectral, coughing corridors of T.B. sanitariums, the muttering, hawking, grey dishwater smell of flophouses and Old Men’s Homes, great, dusty custom sheds and warehouses, through broken porticoes and smeared arabesques, iron urinals worn paper thin by the urine of a million fairies, deserted weed-grown privies with a musty smell of shit turning back to the soil, erect wooden phallus on the grave of dying peoples plaintive as leaves in the wind, across the great brown river where the whole trees float with green snakes in the branches and sad-eyed lemurs watch the shore out over a vast plain (vulture wings husk in the dry air). The way is strewn with broken condoms and empty H caps and K.Y. tubes squeezed dry as bone meal in the summer sun.

  ‘My furniture.’ The commandante’s face burned like metal in the flash bulb of urgency. His eyes went out. A whiff of ozone drifted through the room. The ‘novia’ muttered over her candles and altars in one corner.

  ‘It is all Trak … modern, excellent …’ he is nodding idiotically and drooling. A yellow cat pulls at Carl’s pant leg and runs onto a concrete balcony. Clouds drift by.

  ‘I could get back my deposit. Start me a little business someplace.’ He nods and smiles like a mechanical toy.

  ‘Joselito!!!’ Boys look up from street ball games, bull rings and bicycle races as the name whistles by and slowly fades away.

  ‘Joselito! … Paco! … Pepe! … Enrique! …’ The plaintive boy cries drift in on the warm night. The Trak sign stirs like a nocturnal beast, and bursts into blue flame.

  The Black Meat

  ‘We friends, yes?’

  The shoe shine boy put on his hustling smile and looked up into the Sailor’s dead, undersea eyes, eyes without a trace of warmth or lust or hate or any feeling the boy had ever experienced in himself or seen in another, at once cold and intense, impersonal and predatory.

  The sailor leaned forward and put a finger on the boy’s inner arm at the elbow. He spoke in his dead, junky whisper.

  ‘With veins like that, Kid, I’d have myself a time!’

  He laughed, black insect laughter that seemed to serve some obscure function of orientation like a bat’s squeak. The Sailor laughed three times. He stopped laughing and hung there motionless listening down into himself. He had picked up the silent frequency of junk. His face smoothed out like yellow wax over the high cheek-bones. He waited half a cigarette. The Sailor knew how to wait. But his eyes burned in a hideous dry hunger. He turned his face of controlled emergency in a slow half pivot to case the man who had just come in. ‘Fats’ Terminal sat there sweeping the café with blank, periscope eyes. When his eyes passed the Sailor he nodded minutely. Only the peeled nerves of junk sickness would have registered a movement.

  The Sailor handed the boy a coin. He drifted over to Fats’ table with his floating walk and sat down. They sat a long time in silence. The café was built into one side of a stone ramp at the bottom of a high white canyon of masonry. Faces of The City poured through silent as fish, stained with vile addictions and insect lusts. The lighted café was a diving bell, cable broken, settling into black depths.

  The Sailor was polishing his nails on the lapels of his glen plaid suit. He whistled a little tune through his shiny, yellow teeth.

  When he moved an effluvia of mold drifted out of his clothes, a musty smell of deserted locker rooms. He studied his nails with phosphorescent intensity.

  ‘Good thing here, Fats. I can deliver twenty. Need an advance of course.’

  ‘On spec?’

  ‘So I don’t have the twenty eggs in my pocket. I tell you it’s jellied consommé. One little whoops and a push.’ The Sailor looked at his nails as if he were studying a chart. ‘You know I always deliver.’

  ‘Make it thirty. And a ten tube advance. This time tomorrow.’

  ‘Need a tube now, Fats.’

  ‘Take a walk, you’ll get one.’

  The Sailor drifted down into the Plaza. A street boy was shoving a newspaper in the Sailor’s face to cover his hand on the Sailor’s pen. The Sailor walked on. He pulled the pen out and broke it like a nut in his thick, fibrous, pink fingers. He pulled out a lead tube. He cut one end of the tube with a little curved knife. A black mist poured out and hung in the air like boiling fur. The Sailor’s face dissolved. His mouth undulated forward on a long tube and sucked in the black fuzz, vibrating in supersonic peristalsis disappeared in a silent, pink explosion. His face came back into focus unbearably sharp and clear, burning yellow brand of junk searing the grey haunch of a million screaming junkies.

  ‘This will last a month,’ he decided, consulting an invisible mirror.

  All streets of the City slope down between deepening canyons to a vast, kidney-shaped plaza full of darkness. Walls of street and plaza are perforated by dwelling cubicles and cafés, some a few feet deep, others extending out of sight in a network of rooms and corridors.

  At all levels criss-cross of bridges, cat walks, cable cars. Catatonic youths dressed as women in gowns of burlap and rotten rags, faces heavily and crudely painted in bright colors over a strata of beatings, arabesques of broken, suppurating scars to the pearly bone, push against the passers-by in silent clinging insistence.

  Traffickers in the Black Meat, flesh of the giant aquatic black centipede – sometimes attaining a length of six feet – found in a lane of black rocks and iridescent, brown lagoons, exhibit paralyzed crustaceans in camouflage pockets of the Plaza visible only to the Meat Eaters.

  Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades, doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, o
steopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, officials of unconstituted police states, brokers of exquisite dreams and nostalgias tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, drinkers of the Heavy Fluid sealed in translucent amber of dreams.

  The Meet Café occupies one side of the Plaza, a maze of kitchens, restaurants, sleeping cubicles, perilous iron balconies and basements opening into the underground baths.

  On stools covered in white satin sit naked Mugwumps sucking translucent, colored syrups through alabaster straws. Mugwumps have no liver and nourish themselves exclusively on sweets. Thin, purple-blue lips cover a razorsharp beak of black bone with which they frequently tear each other to shreds in fights over clients. These creatures secrete an addicting fluid from their erect penises which prolongs life by slowing metabolism. (In fact all longevity agents have proved addicting in exact ratio to their effectiveness in prolonging life.) Addicts of Mugwump fluid are known as Reptiles. A number of these flow over chairs with their flexible bones and black-pink flesh. A fan of green cartilage covered with hollow, erectile hairs through which the Reptiles absorb the fluid sprouts from behind each ear. The fans, which move from time to time touched by invisible currents, serve also some form of communication known only to Reptiles.

  During the biennial Panics when the raw, pealed Dream Police storm the City, the Mugwumps take refuge in the deepest crevices of the wall sealing themselves in day cubicles and remain for weeks in biostasis. In those days of grey terror the Reptiles dart about faster and faster, scream past each other at supersonic speed, their flexible skulls flapping in black winds of insect agony.

  The Dream Police disintegrate in globs of rotten ectoplasm swept away by an old junky, coughing and spitting in the sick morning. The Mugwump Man comes with alabaster jars of fluid and the Reptiles get smoothed out.

  The air is once again still and clear as glycerine.

  The Sailor spotted his Reptile. He drifted over and ordered a green syrup. The Reptile had a little, round disk mouth of brown gristle, expressionless green eyes almost covered by a thin membrane of eyelid. The Sailor waited an hour before the creature picked up his presence.

  ‘Any eggs for Fats?’ he asked, his words stirring through the Reptile’s fan hairs.

  It took two hours for the Reptile to raise three pink transparent fingers covered with black fuzz.

  Several Meat Eaters lay in vomit, too weak to move. (The Black meat is like a tainted cheese, overpoweringly delicious and nauseating so that the eaters eat and vomit and eat again until they fall exhausted.)

  A painted youth slithered in and seized one of the great black claws sending the sweet, sick smell curling through the café.

  Hospital

  Disintoxication Notes. Paranoia of early withdrawal.… Everything looks blue.… Flesh dead, doughy, toneless.

  Withdrawal Nightmares. A mirror-lined café. Empty.… Waiting for something.… A man appears in a side door.… A slight, short Arab dressed in a brown jellaba with grey beard and grey face.… There is a pitcher of boiling acid in my hand.… Seized by a convulsion of urgency, I throw it in his face.…

  Everyone looks like a drug addict.…

  Take a little walk in the hospital patio.… In my absence someone has used my scissors, they are stained with some sticky, red brown gick.… No doubt that little bitch of a criada trimming her rag.

  Horrible-looking Europeans clutter up the stairs, intercept the nurse when I need my medicine, empty piss into the basin when I am washing, occupy the toilet for hours on end – probably fishing for a finger stall of diamonds they have stashed up their asshole.…

  In fact the whole clan of Europeans has moved in next to me.… The old mother is having an operation and her daughter move right in to see the old gash receive proper service. Strange visitors, presumably relatives … One of them wears as glasses those gadgets jewelers screw into their eye to examine stones.… Probably a diamond-cutter on the skids … The man who loused up the Throckmorton Diamond and was drummed out of the industry.… All these jewelers standing around the Diamond in their frock coats, waiting on The Man. An error of one thousandth of an inch ruins the rock complete and they have to import this character special from Amsterdam to do the job.… So he reels in dead drunk with a huge air hammer and pounds the diamond to dust.…

  I don’t check these citizens.… Dope peddlers from Aleppo? … Slunk traffickers from Buenos Aires? Illegal diamond buyers from Johannesburg? … Slave traders from Somaliland? Collaborators at the very least.…

  Continual dreams of junk: I am looking for a poppy field.… Moonshiners in black Stetsons direct me to a Near East café.… One of the waiters is a connection for Yugoslav opium.…

  Buy a packet of heroin from a Malay Lesbian in white belted trenchcoat.… I cop the paper in Tibetan section of a museum. She keeps trying to steal it back.… I am looking for a place to fix.…

  The critical point of withdrawal is not the early phase of acute sickness, but the final step free from the medium of junk.… There is a nightmare interlude of cellular panic, life suspended between two ways of being.… At this point the longing for junk concentrates in a last, all-out yen, and seems to gain a dream power: circumstances put junk in your way.… You meet an old-time Schmecker, a larcenous hospital attendant, a writing croaker.…

  A guard in a uniform of human skin, black buck jacket with carious yellow teeth buttons, an elastic pullover shirt in burnished Indian copper, adolescent-nordic-sun-tan slacks, sandals from calloused foot soles of young Malayan farmer, an ash-brown scarf knotted and tucked in the shirt. (Ash-brown is a color like grey under brown skin. You sometimes find it in mixed Negro and white stock, the mixture did not come off and the colors separated out like oil on water.…)

  The Guard is a sharp dresser, since he has nothing to do and saves all his pay to buy fine clothes and changes three times a day in front of an enormous magnifying mirror. He has a Latin handsome-smooth face with a pencil line mustache, small black eyes, blank and greedy, undreaming insect eyes.

  When I get to the frontier the Guard rushes out of his casita, a mirror frame slung round his neck. He is trying to get the mirror off his neck.… This has never happened before, that anyone reached the frontier. The Guard has injured his larynx taking off the mirror frame.…He has lost his voice.… He opens his mouth, you can see the tongue jumping around inside. The smooth blank young face and the open mouth with the tongue moving inside are incredibly hideous. The Guard holds up his hand. His whole body jerks in convulsive negation. I go over and unhook the chain across the road. It falls with a clank of metal on stone. I walk through. The Guard stands there in the mist looking after me. Then he hooks the chain up again, goes back into the casita and starts plucking at his mustache.

  They just bring so-called lunch.… A hard-boiled egg with the shell off revealing an object like I never seen before.… A very small egg of a yellow-brown color … Perhaps laid by the duck-billed platypus. The orange contained a huge worm and very little else.… He really got there firstest with the mostest.… In Egypt is a worm gets into your kidneys and grows to a enormous size. Ultimately the kidney is just a thin shell around the worm. Intrepid gourmets esteem the flesh of The Worm above all other delicacies. It is said to be unspeakably toothsome.… An Interzone coroner known as Autopsy Ahmed made a fortune trafficking The Worm.

  The French school is opposite my window and I dig the boys with my eight-power field glasses.… So close I could reach out and touch them.… They wear shorts.… I can see the goose-pimples on their legs in the cold Spring morning.… I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.

  Did I ever tell you about the time Mary and me pay two Arab kids sixty cents to watch them screw each other? So I ask Mary, ‘Do you think
they will do it?’

  And he says, ‘I think so. They are hungry.’

  And I say, ‘That’s the way I like to see them.’

  Makes me feel sorta like a dirty old man but, ‘Son cosas de la vida,’ as Sobera de la Flor said when the fuzz upbraids him for blasting this cunt and taking the dead body to the Bar O Motel and fucking it.…

  ‘She play hard to get already,’ he say … ‘I don’t hafta take that sound.’ (Sobera de la Flor was a Mexican criminal convict of several rather pointless murders.)

  The lavatory has been locked for three hours solid.… I think they are using it for an operating room.…

  nurse: ‘I can’t find her pulse, doctor.’

  DR. BENWAY: ‘Maybe she got it up her snatch in a finger stall.’

  NURSE: ‘Adrenalin, doctor?’

  DR. BENWAY: ‘The night porter shot it all up for kicks.’ He looks around and picks up one of those rubber vacuum cups at the end of a stick they use to unstop toilets.… He advances on the patient.…‘Make an incision, Doctor Limpf,’ he says to his appalled assistant.…‘I’m going to massage the heart.’

  Dr. Limpf shrugs and begins the incision. Dr. Benway washes the suction cup by swishing it around in the toilet-bowl.…

  NURSE: ‘Shouldn’t it be sterilized, doctor?’

  DR. BENWAY: ‘Very likely, but there’s no time.’ He sits on the suction cup like a cane seat watching his assistant make the incision.…‘You young squirts couldn’t lance a pimple without an electric vibrating scalpel with automatic drain and suture.… Soon we’ll be operating by remote control on patients we never see.… We’ll be nothing but button pushers. All the skill is going out of surgery.… All the know-how and make-do.… Did I ever tell you about the time I performed an appendectomy with a rusty sardine can? And once I was caught short without instrument one and removed a uterine tumor with my teeth. That was in the Upper Effendi, and besides …’