The Place of Dead Roads

by William S. Burroughs

  Since the market stocks artifacts from all history, it is also a functioning museum with documentary films and lectures.

  The Museum of Lost Inventions:...As one makes the round of display cases, lectures and films switch on, seemingly activated by one's presence...

  Spread out in dusty display cases, devices from extinct cultures so remote in space and time that no link exists to tell the viewer what function they could have served.

  "This cluster of interlocking perforated crystal disks? purely decorative?

  "This cabinet about the size of a large TV set...cabinet, for lack of a more precise word, and difficult to assign dimensions since there is no apparent symmetry. Most of the surfaces seem curved rather than angular, then you see quite a few angles..."

  No symmetry? This absence gives Kim a hint as to the cabinet's function...a ghost escape. Symmetry is predictable, therefore a good escape route must randomize symmetry...an intricate arrangement of panels that can be opened or closed in thousands of different combinations. The panels are slotted, emitting an eerie music of escape from forgotten dangers.

  "What exactly were these things used for?" asks a CIA man in dry incisive disapproving tones. The Custodian grounds the question with a curious reverse shrug, a slight downward movement of the shoulders.

  "The uh human species...Homo sap...(laughter) is perhaps two million years old...prehistorians keep pushing our birthdate further back...perhaps an abortion would be the uh simplest solution...(laughter) but the incidence of clearly recognizable artifacts dates back only fifty to a hundred thousand years. In that modest span, gentlemen, we have come from stone* axes and spears to intercontinental missiles with nuclear warheads...the same principle as the spear but rather more efficacious...(laughter). Is it not feasible that other cultures may have traveled the same road and disappeared without a trace? Nor can we rule out the possibility that artifacts were deliberately destroyed. The river people of New Guinea fashion masks for their festivals which are burned once the festival is consummated. And what would a historian of the distant future make of pseudo artifacts of modern art? Who is that artist who does a barrelful of nuts and bolts? He went on to burnt kitchen chairs...Oh yes...Armand...How could our future scholar know that this artifact commemorates the sale of a name. It's an Armand and worth so much just as the coppers of Kwakiutl potlaches were valued according to the transfers they had accreted."

  The display case contains something that looks like a bull-roarer...A tube of some dull green metal two feet long, two inches in diameter with an opening in each end. A smooth white cord sprouts from the middle of the tube and is attached to a handle of the same green metallic substance.

  The room darkens...A screen lights up...on a steep slope with his back to a cliff we see a tall thin humanoid in sandals and loincloth of some porous brown-pink skin. He holds the tube in his narrow hands, not more than two inches across, with long tapering fingers and four joints...Twelve uncouth savages with spears and clubs advancing up the slope...

  "The lone survivor of a wrecked spacecraft, this being of an ancient race wants only to live in peace with the natives...to teach and perhaps to learn...But he finds himself threatened by barbarians, inflamed by an ugly brutish hatred for a foreigner, a being different from themselves...

  "Got no hair on him."

  "All naked and indecent."

  "Wonder if he's got hair on his balls?"

  Cash thumbs his knife..."I dunno, Clem, but I aims to find out."

  The alien's face is a light pink color, smooth as terra-cotta. His unwinking black eyes with luminous blue pupils reflect something too remote and neutral to be called contempt.

  He draws twelve darts from a sheath at his belt and feeds them into the tube. He whirls the tube above his head.

  "What's he doing up there?"

  "The Tube Spirit takes over and animates the tube. It spins now on its own volition. The tube derives its force from a compact between the man and the Tube Spirit. The spirit agrees to animate the tube but only once. Once used the tube may never be used again."

  The tube is a blur now, the man has been lifted almost off his feet and stands poised on tiptoe. A thin cold whine breaks from the tube and the darts whistle out, each one finding a vital spot...head...heart...stomach...neck... the posse has been destroyed. But what if other enemies burst upon him? He can fashion a weapon from materials at hand. A huge savage with a stone ax, shooting red flashes from his berserk eyes, bursts out six feet in front of him. The man snaps off a switch and levels it ZUT right through the beast, severing his spinal column. He falls, writhing like a stricken worm...

  "Now some of you may ask, didn't he run out of ideas? That's a good question...Well...maybe he did..."

  A display case with life-size masks of human skin compacted in layers...vile faces...gloating faces, stinking of charred flesh and screams...faces of abject cringing cowardice dead soulless faces...

  "A very old game...It's called 'throwing the mask'...rather like tennis..."

  A limestone court with tiers of seats for spectators. The contestants arrive. They are naked except for belts, and with their masks. They advance to the middle of the court and look at. each other. The gaze of a mask thrower can cut like a scalpel. Now they move back and face each other at thirty feet. A player draws a mask and throws it in a blur of speed. The other gestures and the mask flies back. After three serves one player sends the mask spinning up into the grandstands. The game is hotting up now as more potent masks come into play. Sometimes they may serve and return thirty, fifty times and with every exchange the mask gathers power.

  WHAM

  It hits. A player is down...a broken idiot thing...drooling, slobbering, pus oozing from the cataracts that cluster at his dead burnt-out eyes...He will be left to the terrible urchins who haunt the mask courts.

  "Tennis anyone?

  "Most weapons operate on the projectile design...a spear, a bullet, a shell... Something is added to the target. A bullet, an arrow, explosive charge, poison gas...Consider the possibility of taking something away from the target...A tornado sets up a low-pressure area which causes buildings and windows to blow out...Our weapon creates a concentrated and localized low-pressure area so that a living target will literally explode like a deep-sea creature brought up from the depths. It's an awesome spectacle...See that African buffalo out there snorting and pawing the ground? Most dangerous brute on the continent. He sees us."

  "This had better be good."

  The buffalo puts down its head. The custodian presses a button...a whistling roar and the buffalo flies apart in a great splash of red. The horns stick in the ground a few feet from our truck.

  "As you see, a different design. We took something away from the target...in this case, pressure...It can be aimed like a rifle or a pistol...suck out an eye, explode a throat...Other facilities besides pressure can be shut off...Oxygen, sleep, dreams, or that most basic of all commodities, time."

  Time is a resource. Time runs out. The most basic problem facing any culture is the conservation and disbursement of time. Human time is measured in terms of human change. So the most flagrant time-wasting may minimize change and thus conserve time. The English dictum of never going too far in any direction is actually a time-saving expedient, ill advised to be sure when it may be necessary to go too far in all directions for a bare fighting chance of survival. Utopian concepts stem from a basic misconception as to our mission here. So many snares and dead ends. Nietzsche said, "Men need play and danger. Civilization gives them work and safety."

  Some cultures cultivated danger for itself, not realizing that danger derives from conflicting purposes.

  Happiness is a by-product of function. Those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war. This is the flaw in all Utopias. A society, like the individuals who compose it, is an artifact designed for a purpose. As to what life may be worth when the purpose is gone...

  "We take you now to the Nanyuka Indians of Brazil. They are a
simple happy people steeped in rituals that date back to the beginnings of time: the age-old conflict between Men and Women.

  "Once upon a time, according to legend, the women seized the Sacred Flutes. But with the aid of a bull-roarer, the men wrested the flutes back from the women and have guarded them in the Men's House ever since. In the Ceremony of the Bees, the men take ritual revenge for the ancient trespass, and swarm through the village like bees, driving the women into the square, where they smear them with greasy black paint, thus preparing the boys for the realities of adult life."

  Madre de Dios, what realities? This tawdry pageantry fit for half an hour's entertainment, stretched out over centuries?

  "It remains only to paint the wooden birds."

  "And now the cycle of ritual is over."

  Empty, sad as the graves of dying peoples...The Last Patagonians and the hairy Ainu mark their male graves with an erect phallus crudely carved from wood and painted with ocher...wind and dust...the markers are broken and scattered...

  "The Hummingbird Spirit has been appeased, at least for another year...and so we leave the Nanyuka..."

  Flute music squeaky, off-key, fades out in one last distant false note.

  All the old human rituals are dead as the, Bee Ceremony. The human saga flickers out on a darkening stage to an empty house...

  A youth looks out over a desert. On his T-shirt is ETERNITY in rainbow letters. He yawns. Eternity yawning on the sands.

  5

  Military operations of one kind or another were always in progress, most of them totally senseless, or rather making a different kind of sense that means nothing to a Westerner. Thought about in Arabic, however, Kim could make out some sort of design, like a device he had been working on to enable the blind to see. They wouldn't be able to see in the usual manner but they could scan out dot patterns rather like the pinpoint style in abstract paintings.

  Some of the patterns remain incomprehensible, their roots buried in unwritten antiquity. He would feel the stir of muscles and brain areas, like when you ride for the first time and use muscles you don't use at all walking, and wake up sore, so he would wake up with aches in places he couldn't even find or specify...

  Fears and exaltations and griefs from the wild uncharted regions of the mind...

  He was currently engaged in another idiotic operation which involved ambushing a truck of soldiers. Here his Owl Eye night sight could be used to advantage.

  It's a good kick shooting someone from a distance like God himself hurling a bolt from the heavens or Thor throwing his hammer so different from the face-to-face handgun fight. Rifle duels are common here. The contestants two or three hundred yards apart you can see him through your telescopic sight and you know he's seeing you...a puff of smoke. The bullet hits before you hear the report. It gives you a funny feeling like sound turned off on a screen...

  "And perhaps we can blow up a bridge on the way home, sir?"

  "Certainly, Lieutenant, if you do a good job on the truck..."

  "We won't do our best, Captain. We'll do a lot better."

  Kim smiles all slimy and insinuating..."Captain, when I die I want to be buried right in the same coffin with you..."

  "What makes you think we are going to die right at the same time, Lieutenant?" the Captain asks with an easy smile. Clearly he enjoys the exchange...

  "Well sir, if one of us dies first he simply leaves room for the other, you understand...Have to clear it with the board of health, of course. Can you believe it, sir, in my home town of Saint Louis a board of health regulation, "1585, you can't burn rubbish in your own fucking ass pit, if you'll pardon the expression, sir."

  Kim knew that the Captain's favorite topic was Washington bureaucrats who are wrecking the country and strangulating us in red tape.

  "Like a hernia, Captain."

  "Ah yes, very well put, Lieutenant..." Kim presses his advantage. "The men are a bit restless, sir...Couldn't we sack a village, after the bridge, I mean..."

  "Of course, Lieutenant. It pays to pay the boys off."

  A quote from Tacitus unfurled in Kim's brain. "If a woman or a good-looking boy fell into their hands they were torn to pieces in the struggle for possession while the survivors were left to cut each other's throats..."

  "That will be keen, sir..."

  Kim showed his teeth in the wild-dog smile. (Wild dogs, you know, show all their teeth at each other as a greeting.) The Captain smiled back. And Kim's fifty ragged boys smiled too when they got the juicy-fruit news. Don't count your civilians before they're raped.

  The ambush was a shambles. Kim's night sight didn't work...design was sound enough, just a few technical details to iron out, and an epileptic kid blew it, shooting off his squirt gun in a fit, the whole thirty-shot clip, and the soldiers were out of the truck, strafing our flashes (the flash suppressor didn't work either). Kim gave the order to pull back, leaving fifteen dead. The wounded who couldn't walk had to be shot to keep them from the Turks, who were known torture freaks and ravenous since they rarely took a prisoner.

  Not enough of them left to sack a shit house, they decide to join another army. There are no police as such in the area and owing to the fact that everyone is heavily armed the casualties are substantial. Bodies are left in the street and ticketed for twenty-four hours. If friends or relatives haven't claimed them by then they are rendered down into fertilizer.

  Might as well make themselves useful. The most young and healthy cadavers are chopped up and fed to the long pigs. Sustained exclusively on human flesh and fresh fruit, they are unspeakably toothsome.

  Kim's band falls apart. He goes with three boys to a restaurant on top of a cliff overlooking the valley where the river widens out. He can see sails in the distance, delicate outriggers with paper-thin hardwood hulls and brightly colored sails. He orders a pitcher of Metaxa, dry pungent brandy distilled from pomegranates...The waiter gives them the wild-dog smile and says .. . "Long pig tonight," and comes back in half an hour with an exquisite piglet crackling with juicy fat streaked with pink baby flesh...They finish with the local oranges grown on a poor hillside soil which gives them a spicy tang like herbs in the still noonday heat. They lean back and belch as a twilight like blue dust slowly fills the valley.

  Kim thinks lazily of his mission to locate the link, the be ginning of human speech...And the throwbacks in remote valleys who still use the larynx as a sexual organ...rather like those horrid kissing fish, Kim thinks with distaste, the way their mouths click together. The first words were unspeakably foul...And that is why they have not been uttered for a million years except in those remote valleys...Kim remembers a story:

  The Hounds of Tindalos, March 1929...No words in our language can describe them...symbolized vaguely in the myth of the Fall...obscene ancient tablets...The Greeks had a name for them to veil their essential foulness...As soon as you name something you reduce its power, of course, the power of a foulness essential to their function...They must be too horrible to name or look at...If you could look Death in the face he would lose his power to kill you. Quien es? When you ask Death for his credentials you are dead. His passport picture is your deathmask, to get back to these blcody hounds a most awful mystery, Frank a terrible and unspeakable deed was done in the beginning. Was no words for it in the beginning of what exactly? In the beginning of the results of this deed, vat else? Before time, the deed started time and dumped all this shit in our laps...The seeds of the deed, in dim recesses, are hungry and thirsty...In a white glare that was not light, in shrieking silence I heard them breathe, felt their breath upon my face...

  Things are getting worse and worse you gotta be crazy you wanta get reborned. We'll be pushing around shopping carts full of documents like money it takes more and more to buy less and less same way with documents it takes more and more to prove less and less you go through days of waiting in offices to get some document but the bureaucracy has etted more of the taxpayer's green grass and shitted out more laws your pistol permit is buried
under tons of it. You don't got Form 4F-Q you don't got nothing less than nothing even if you don't have it they will come and take it away from you...

  I fled down quintillions of years but they scented me. They thirst for that which is clean...which emerged from the deed without stain this they hate. They are that which in the beginning fell away from cleanliness...just naturally dirty like the shit-eating, cringing, vicious, fawning beasts they are, receptacles of all foulness. In this universe there is only the pure and the foul...So the foul long for purity, which they can only see as food, and the pure want a vicarious little whiff of foulness.

  And this annoys the foul. "Oh dear, you're all sick and ugly inside, aren't you, you poor little creature..."

  The foul expresses itself through angles. That so?

  Man, the pure part of him, is descended from a curve. Now what kind of curve you throwing us, Chambers? A cunt curve...? I don't intend to stay and listen to such gibberish...A long rest in a good sanitarium should benefit you immeasurably.

  "They must be kept out. Reach us only through the angles, you know...We must eliminate all angles from this room...Mother, save me from the hounds...Send 'em back ravenous, snarling, frustrated to the foulness that was in the beginning before time and space...It was good of you to help...acrid nauseous odor...doubled me over it did sir, like a kick in the stomach sir, lost my porridge sir, the way you can tell a real gentleman is a real gentleman isn't mean."

  The reporter reluctantly parts with ten shillings.

  He lay naked, his chest and arms covered with bluish pus gave off a smell like rotten solder. "Must beware of the Doels. They can help them break through, you know who they are, of course. The satyrs will help. They can gain entrance through the scarlet circle, the Greeks knew a way of preventing that. Good God, the plaster is falling...It is getting dark in the room...their tongues."