The Place of Dead Roads

by William S. Burroughs

  The whole stinking thing is arbitrary and bureaucratic...the Immortality Control Board and their terrible demon police...Venusian M.O.

  Most immortality blueprints are vampiric, directly or covertly, so Kim surmises that the Egyptian model is no exception, though no Egyptologist has ever suggested such a thing. Dismissing the mummy road and the Western Lands as primitive superstition, they never ask themselves how such a system could work. It ran on fellahin blood. Vampires, like the Western Landers, enjoy a precarious immortality...They are vulnerable to fire and dismemberment or worst of all explosions. Just like mummies and that was the tipoff: vampirism, crude and rampant. The Western Lands are kept solid and operative with fellahin energy and this entails the additional risk of a fellahin shortage.

  "The crops have failed. Millions will starve."

  "Oh dear, starving people are so unrewarding."

  "Hardly worth sucking..."

  "From their green going we gets no coin."

  "And a terrible plague has further decimated our herds..."

  "And marauding barbarians are sweeping down from the north..."

  Dead peasants, burning huts...the age-old face of War, from here to eternity...

  Why was it necessary to preserve the actual physical body? Look at this body. It is a spacecraft designed to accommodate one person. And no two are exactly alike. Fingerprints differ. Voiceprints differ. Pricks differ. (It never occurred to them to isolate these factors? No they didn't have the technology for that. We do now.) So the ka fits perfectly into this body. And it needs that precise filter to suck energy from other bodies. And this precise difference. You fellahin cattle are there. We immortals are here. A parasite must always preserve this unique difference, otherwise it will merge with the host and lose the most precious thing a parasite can have: Its identity. Its name. So the body has to be preserved since it contains the essence of name and difference that enables it to suck life from others, a specialized filter on which the ka is absolutely dependent for its continued existence in the Western Lands.

  Vampires need victims. The victims need vampires like they need pernicious anemia. For vampires to go unnoticed they have to be few in number. Suppose we suck up a few centimeters a day from say five thousand fellahin. They won't even miss it.

  The Western Lands was a vampiric mirage kept solid with fellahin blood.

  So how did such an unpleasant, precarious, and dangerous concept arise? Because it works. The Western Lands can be made to exist. Kim is beginning to understand how the whole system can be installed in England or anywhere else.

  The Queen is the head filter just like the Pharaohs. And any vampiric immortality is strictly limited. Like a good club.

  Oh yes, we've come a long way from the Egyptians. They had to maintain an actual life-sized mummy. We can reduce our wealthy clients to a virus particle that can take root anywhere and suck and suck as good as any mummy because it's got all the genetic information.

  Mummies are the arch-conservatives...

  "What about space?"

  "We must never allow anyone to leave this planet. .. . Certain things simply must not be allowed to change; otherwise, "WE ARE COMPLETELY FUCKED..."

  From time to time hints are dropped. .. . Kim could even become one of the chosen few...

  "You see, there aren't enough Western Lands to go around...not nearly enough...if you would just be sensible..."

  An old-queen voice, querulous, petulant, cowardly, the evil old voice of Gerald Hamilton and Backhouse...

  Kim doesn't want any immortality that talks like that.

  One morning at breakfast Kim is halfway through his second cup of tea, smoking a cigarette and looking out the window to his right...gray morning, gray street, peeling billboards...Kim experiences an uneasy feeling of disassociation, something stirring and twisting in his throat.

  "I'm trying to eat my breakfast, if you don't mind."

  Kim looks up. A burly red-faced man is sitting at the next table. Strange that Kim hadn't seen him when he came in.

  "I don't know what you mean..." Kim stammers. "I'm just sitting here."

  "You know what I mean right enough. You were making a filthy noise."

  The man stands up and throws down his napkin.

  "Filthy sod!" He walks out.

  Kim sits paralyzed like a man who has received a mortal wound, every drop of life ebbing out of him.

  "Are you all right, sir?"

  "Yes, Mrs. Hardy."

  "A dreadful man, Mr. Wentworth...came right into my kitchen he did...'I'd like my breakfast, if you don't mind,' he says and I tell him I'm fixing it and he says, 'Look sharp...look sharp.

  Directional mike, Kim surmises. Two can play at that game. Kim had been into ventriloquism at one time. He never achieved proficiency but he did encounter some colorful characters like the old Stomach Rumbler, who could ventriloquize stomach rumbles and farts.

  Kim makes the round of music halls, carnivals, theatrical agencies of the shabbier variety...one hundred pounds reward.

  "I'll by God show them some filthy noises."

  Kim's hatred for England is becoming an obsession. If you have the right accent you can be wearing a burlap sack and the Hunkers will stand to attention like one of Pavlov's salivating dogs at the sound of his master's voice. They know their place.

  What hope for a country where people will camp out for three days to glimpse the Royal Couple? Where one store clerk refers to another as his "colleague"?

  Licensing laws left over from World War I: "Sorry sir, the bar is closed." And you know he is just delighted to tell you the bar is closed.

  God save the Queen and a fascist regime...a flabby, toothless fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top...

  The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire. You see what we owe to Washington and the Valley Forge boys for getting us out from under this den of snobbery and accent, this ladder where everyone stomps discreetly on the hands below him:

  "Pardon me, old chap, but aren't you getting just a bit ahead of yourself in rather an offensive manner?"

  The only thing gets Homo sapiens up off his dead ass is a foot up it. The English thing worked too well and too long. They'll never get all that ballast of unearned privilege into space. Who wants that dumped in his vicinity? They get out of a spaceship and start looking about desperately for inferiors.

  For three months Kim held on at Earl's Court...three months of grinding, abrasive fear, defeats, and humiliations that burned like acid.

  He learned to use the shield of constant alertness, to see everybody on the street before they saw him. He learned to render himself invisible by giving no one any reason to look at him, to wrap himself in a cloak of darkness or a spinning cylinder of light. Devoid of physical weapons, he turned to the weapons of magic and here he scored some satisfying hits.

  He produced a blackout with a tape recorder that plunged the whole Earl's Court area into darkness...SPUT.

  He conjured up a wind that tore the shutters off the market stalls along World's End and went on to kill three hundred people in Bremen or someplace.

  (Giver of Winds is my name.)

  He read about it in the paper next day and said: "The more the merrier." At the same time he realized that he was being fashioned into an instrument of destruction, a bottle djin to use against their enemies. Whose enemies exactly? He was past caring.

  And he takes out some local nuisances. The horrible old crone in the cigarette kiosk across from the hotel who would shove his change back at him...Then one day Kim's eyes blank, appraising, rested on her Primus stove...a peg to hang it on. As he walks away he can feel her eyes on his back spitting little sparks of pure hate...sparks?...Cooking up water for
her morning tea on her leaky old Primus...

  Several old biddies gathered in front of the blackened shattered kiosk. One turns to Kim.

  "Terrible, isn't it?"

  "I can't believe it," Kim says. "Why I was just waiting for her to open..."

  "You heard it?" they ask eagerly.

  "Indeed yes...Just coming out the door I was and I think, Gor blimey it's the Blitz again...Had her wrapped in a plastic sheet like..."

  And he closed down a Greek coffee shop that gave him some sass...camera and tape-recorder magic...So many good ones and so many bad ones...That's what you get for trying.

  "Gentleman to see you, Mr. Wentworth."

  It's Tony, sitting in the dreary little drawing room with lumpy armchairs. Kim takes a deep breath, about to launch into a tirade.

  "Read this." Tony hands him a newspaper clipping.

  PROFESSOR DIES IN BIZARRE MISHAP

  A man, later identified as Professor Stonecliff, a curator at the British Museum and a world-famous Egyptologist, was apparently seized by a fit of madness in Victoria Station. He entered into an altercation with other passengers which developed into a fistfight. Then he broke free and threw himself under the wheels of a train.

  "What really happened?" Kim asks.

  "Professor Stonecliff suddenly lost control of his bowels in a crowded compartment. He was attacked by the other passengers and blinded in one eye by an umbrella."

  Nightmare scene under a green haze...faces contorted out of all human semblance, burning with sulfurous hate and hideous complicity...the man running, stumbling, blood streaming from his ruptured eye...the crowd behind him, one brandishing a bloody umbrella...

  "Get him!"

  "Kill the filthy sod!"

  "So you got off easy," Tony says.

  "And you got off a lot easier."

  "This is no time for recriminations, Kim. The situation is desperate. We could all be charged under the Defence of the Realm Act."

  "Telephone, Mr. Wentworth."

  "Have you got a hundred pounds? I've found the old Stomach Rumbler."

  The Rumbler is a potbellied Indian with the nastiest eyes Kim ever saw. You can't like him. He just isn't a likable man. But he can deliver the goods. We give the old Stomach Rumbler a trial run at ERP Headquarters in Bedford Square. Tony stands at one end of the room, thirty feet away from the Rumbler, and a horrible churning noise rumbles out of Tony's stomach like a vast kraken digesting a whale.

  "What's his range?" Tony asks.

  "Fifty yards, sahib," the Rumbler sneers.

  It's a solemn occasion. The Queen is regretting a tip slide that killed three hundred children. For years the villagers have been saying:

  "We gotta do something about that tip."

  An ominous gray black slagheap that towered over the village and nobody did anything about that tip. Then one fine morning the tip slid down and covered the school.

  Her address was designed to be simple and moving:

  "To those of you who have lost your children in this disaster, I can only say..."

  It rumbles out over the mikes on TV...my God, what a sound. The Queen turns pale but continues:

  "...that your grief is my grief and the grief of all..."

  Her words are drowned out by loathsome, squishy, farting noises, gurgles and chuckles:

  "ENNGLAAND..." the Queen gasps and flees from the podium, leaving in her wake a monumental belch

  ERP

  She never made another public appearance. Her Majesty is indisposed...permanently indisposed...The monarchy is tottering.

  Kim feels that he has acquitted his English karma. He shelves a project to blow up all the mummies in the British Museum.

  Kim loved Paris at first sight...the outdoor urinals, the flower stalls and markets and cobblestone streets, the lovely gun stores full of sword canes and sword pistols and fountain-pen guns, the well-stocked pharmacies, French boys with gamin grins, a three-foot baguette under one arm...An old man peddles by on a bicycle, a lobster gesticulating frantically from his handle basket...It's like a painting that moves.

  It is a fall day, crisp and clear. The Paris light lingers on the buildings, touches cornices, a white cat, a geranium in a window box...Dead leaves...Kim steps into a pissoir and there on the wall these lines worthy of Verlaine or Rimbaud:

  Jaime ces types vicieux

  Qu 'ici montrent la bite...

  I like the vicious types

  Who show the cock here...

  "Moi aussi..." Kim lisped ineptly, "and this is the pencil of my brother-in-law." I must do something about my French. He gets a book in French and the same book in English and very quickly learns to read French.

  Kim makes an appointment with Maitre Bumsell...The Maitre, a thin aristocratic-looking old man, extends a long cool hand.

  Kim suspects that Bumsell is not the old French aristocrat he is impersonating. His native language, Kim decides, is German...A Swiss Jew, most likely from Zurich or Basel...

  Bumsell leads him into a room with an alcove and draws a curtain...Kim looks out of the picture, smiling:

  HIS FATHER'S PICTURE

  Kim Carsons age 16 1876

  So many faces, yet something that is Kim in all of them caught in his father's portrait. The face is flawed and scarred and nakedly diseased. Something animal in the face, but this is not an earth animal. Kim's alien stigma, the fact that he is not of human species, stands out raw and shocking, like a man exhibiting his privates in a crowded marketplace.

  Displacement and vertigo...distant voices...Who was Kim's father? Expense account suggested illness...illness was radium poisoning. The radioactive Carsons...Perhaps we are Death, Kim thought with a delicious little shiver, and he reeked off his skunkish smell...

  Half-remembered bargains and commitments...old friends and enemies...remember me? and me? and meeeeee?

  Kim knew he was remembering past lives from somewhere, bits of vivid and vanishing detail. Oh that doesn't mean he was Cleopatra in a previous incarnation or any rubbish like that...Some parallel universe maybe, and very technical, let someone else work out the details. Point is, Kim is remembering. He remembers the exhilaration and madness of the Black Death.

  Is it not fine to dance and sing

  While the bells of Death do ring?

  He can feel the plague around him like a cloak as he glides through London, billowing out puffs of Death with clear ringing peals of boyish laughter.

  "Bring out your dead."

  What a splendid line, Kim thought, and what better thing could most of them bring out?

  The icy blackness of space...Quonset huts...G.I. jokes...the horror outside...light-years ring through...fainter...blurring...tears...the father he is not...look closer...youthful courage portentous as a comet...death and the Piper...sunlight on marble...diamond-hard core of purpose...dazzling smile...the final order .. . home...you know...remember the bells of time on that mesa with Kim?...the final order...you can't fake it...you can't fake it...through London...through London...a face...hands...the face of a man willing...he will not hesitate...we win or lose?...alertness around him like a cloak...blood diseased from outer space...intercourse...sperm...think of it getting loose .. . reeking of corruption and death...look closer...the face, hands, blood...human animal in the diseased cloak...And when intercourse sperms father's portrait: naked alien face...

  April is the cruelest month mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain...half-remembered bargains and promises...old friends and enemies...Death and the Piper?

  Kim knew he had to do it without quite knowing what it was...Like a good scout, he was prepared...

  Zur jeden Massenmord stehen wir bereit!

  (For every mass murder let us stand ready.)

  Kim spent three years in Paris. These years extend like a vast canvas where time can be viewed simultaneously bathed in the Paris light, the painters' light, as Kim bathed and breathed in the light of Manet and Cezanne and who are the other two that es
cape my mind so good at bathers and food and parasols and wineglasses and who did that marvelous picture Convalescent where a maid is opening a soft-boiled egg? The painter dips his brush in the light and a soft-boiled egg, a wineglass, a fish come miraculously alive touched by the magic of light. Kim soaked in the light and the light filled him and Paris swarmed to the light. Kim was the real thing, an authentic Western shootist. There were of course those who questioned his credentials. Kim wounded one editor in a duel.

  Kim's first book, a luridly fictionalized account of his exploits as a bank robber, outlaw, and shootist, is entitled Quien Es? Kim posed for the illustrations. Here he is in a half-crouch holding the gun in both hands at eye level. There is an aura of deadly calm about him like the epicenter of a tornado. His face, devoid of human expression, molded by total function and purpose, blazes with an inner light.

  QUIEN ES?

  By Kim Carsons Ghostwritten by William Hall

  "Quien es?"

  Last words of Billy the Kid when he walked into a dark room and saw a shadowy figure sitting there. Who is it? The answer was a bullet through the heart. When you ask Death for his credentials you are dead.

  Quien es?

  Who is it?

  Kim Carsons does he exist? His existence, like any existence, is inferential...the traces he leaves behind him...fossils...fading violet photos, old newspaper clippings shredding to yellow dust...the memory of those who knew him or thought they did...a portrait attributed to Kim's father, Mortimer Carsons: Kim Carsons age 16 December 14, 1876...And this book.