The Place of Dead Roads

by William S. Burroughs

  In filthy hovels needy Marbles are close to molting, the shell eaten through in patches, pus leaking out...flesh under there has lost all immunity...skin is long gone...Pulling the rotten shells off each other, underneath a mass of festering sores and fissures a reek of rotten flesh and rotten stone, dank and sweet and heavy in the lungs. Don't get too close...The idiot molting Marbles writhe in sexual frenzies, stuck together in screaming quivering clusters. Could hardly be called sentient in the end, much less human.

  Cure is possible in the very early stages but requires at least a year of special care. The most distressing symptom is dermal irritation, the skin is so sensitive that a breath of air will send the addict into convulsions. They must be kept in sensory-deprivation immersion tanks and maintained on large dosages of morphine and antibiotics since the liability to infections is breathtaking...

  "Trough City."

  The houses all have that narrow look not more than five or six feet deep with stairways and doors and corridors, a maze of narrow rooms and corridors, stairways going up, stairways going down...Watch the Downers leading down to a dead end and a heavy door that closes behind you...

  "We're knocking this joint over."

  Door swings open on a narrow corridor....To the left is a small square room open on the street. "Troughs are down here." Kim jerks his thumb to the right. "Guy, you cover our back. Marbles and me will take out the trough room."

  The room is quite light from windows on the far side. At the end of the room is a door. And a man rushes out. He is about four feet tall, powerfully built, with a bulbous forehead. His eyes flare with xenophobic hate.

  He is wearing a gray tunic with a belt. He stretches out his fingers in a malevolent jab gliding forward. Kim draws his 44 and shoots him in the forehead. A thick white milk spurts out. The dwarf falls into a trough. At this moment pincers break through the forehead of one of the trough men. They all look alike in one way, yet retain a vestige of difference like one of those shrunk-down heads. You could see who it had been.

  The centipede head emerges from a dry dead husk.

  Guy is looking over Kim's shoulder.

  "Don't look in the troughs! Let's go!"

  Marbles tosses in an explosive incendiary device set for three minutes. The giant, standing in the street by the door, wrings his hands.

  "I must return to the palace!" he wails and runs away down a paper road, disappearing like the end of a cartoon.

  "Up those stairs!"

  Stone stairs, light above. They are standing on a hillside above the structure looking down through it. A maze of narrow plywood rooms, doors and corridors and trough rooms, stairs going up and going down extend as far as the eye can see into the hillside and down into a haze of distance.

  In front of them is a limestone court a hundred yards across...Beyond that the avenue and the sea. It looks very far away yet clear as if seen through a telescope.

  "Run!"

  A rumbling blast and the whole shit house is going up in chunks, pieces of plywood, dwarfs, sand and centipede fragments raining down on them as they run. Kim sees a centipede claw in front of him turn into a fossil...The blast and the rain of debris shuts off like someone turned off a TV set.

  No court, just a rubbly weed-grown vacant lot. Nothing behind them but the bare rocky hillside, scrub oak, stunted pine, a few olive trees. They are walking down a dry stream bed toward the waterfront. Not at all far, actually, a hundred yards ahead.

  Memory of the troughs is fading like dream traces...The lights are out in the trough rooms. There is only darkness and sifting dust and the little sounds of decay...the barren hillside, grazing goats, a distant flute...egg-sac foreheads explode with a dry muffled sound like a puffball bursting in still noon heat in this area of rubbish and vacant lots...A cool evening breeze brings a whiff of the sea...A blue smell of youth and hope. One is not serious at seventeen...They sit down under a blue awning and order ouzo with a plate of black olives...Late afternoon...a few bathers linger on the beach. Boys in swimming trunks walk by laughing, talking...Old men sit on benches along the esplanade, hands on their canes, looking out to sea.

  Sound of a distant flute trickles down from the hillside in deepening twilight.

  They eat dinner on a balcony over the sea... Shrimps in a sauce of olive oil, oregano, lemon juice and garlic...red mullet and Greek salad washed down with retsina.

  "Your primitive weapon is of no use," hissed the Alien.

  "How do you know?" Kim asked and blew it away...

  "He looked kinda surprised."

  One is not serious at seventeen.

  7

  Kim Christmas, the perfect intelligence agent, turned into one of the shabbier streets of Aman. He tossed a coin to a handless leper who caught it in his teeth. Kim's cover story is taking over. He is Jerry Wentworth, a stranded space pilot.

  It is a standard medina lodging house...whitewashed cubicle rooms...wooden pegs in the wall to hang clothes...a pallet, a blanket, tin washbasin, and water pitcher...built around a courtyard with a well, some fig and orange trees. In such lodgings every man who can afford it sleeps with a bodyguard. Jerry sat up and hugged the army surplus blanket around his skinny chest. It was cold and his reptile in bed beside him was sluggish. That was the trouble with a reptile bodyguard. But Jerry heard the old man approaching with earthern bowls of hot coals hooked on both ends of an iron balance rather like justice and her scales, Jerry thought. He ordered bread and hot schmun, a sweet concoction of tea and khat. Good way to get started in the morning. He closed the door and soon the heat from the bowl permeated the room and his reptile stirred languidly and peeled off the covers.

  It is a Mamba addict in the most advanced stages, skin a smooth bright green, eyes jet-black, the pubic and rectal hairs a shiny green-black. He squirms his legs apart and his eyes light up with lust as his ass flushes salmon, pink, mauve, electric blues, reeking rainbows.

  The boy dresses sulkily. He needs the green. They cut out to the nearest snakehouse.

  Through the open doorway drifts the snakehouse smell, heavy and viscid as languid surfeited pythons, somnolent cobras in Egyptian gardens, dry and sharp as a rattlesnake den and the concentrated urine of little fennec foxes in desert sand, smell of venomous sea snakes in stagnant lagoons where sharks and crocodiles stir in dark oily water.

  The snakehouse is a narrow room cut into the hillside. There are stone benches along the walls impregnated with generations of reptile addicts. In the center of the floor toward the back is a manhole cover of patinaed bronze giving access to a maze of tunnels and rooms that had housed the mummies of the Pharaohs and others rich enough to belong to that most exclusive club in the world. I.L. Immortality Limited.

  The reptiles are waiting on the Snake. The Snake is late as usual and the reptiles hiss desperately. A few are already molting and pulling strips of skin off each other with shrill hisses of pain and ecstasy. Jerry's reptile turns away in disgust. Some of the reptiles are clad in ragged cloaks of reeking leather, others wear snakeskin jockstraps and the ever-popular hippopotamus-hide knee-length boots, many are naked except for spring shoes with razor-sharp Mercury wings for a deadly back kick.

  There sits an exquisite coral snake, his banded red and white phallus up and throbbing, and opposite him is a copperhead, his pointed phallus smooth and shiny, his skin like burnished copper. They hiss at each other and their throats swell. "Doing the cobra," it's called and it's dangerous. If you don't get sex right away with someone in your cock group you will die of suffocation in a few seconds. The waiter rushes up with a pallet, and hurries off to open the manhole cover. The bodies heat up glowing copper red white and orange; and the boys shed their skins in a sweet dry wind that wafts up from the spicy mummies.

  "Shredded incense in a cloud / from closet long to quiet vowed / Moldering her lutes and books among / as when a Queen long dead was young."

  "Here comes the Snake!"

  "All-natural products from pure venom," he squeaks out.
/>   The reptiles hiss with joy.

  Actually the Snake has a burning-down flea habit and looks like Blake's Ghost of a Flea. He wears a tight pea-green suit and a purple fedora. He passes it out and pulls it in with his quick dry claws lined with razor-sharp erectile hairs that can brush flesh from the bone, recall this out-of-towner made a crack about "Bug Juice" and the Snake slapped him. He put a hand up to feel the side of his face and he doesn't have any face on that side.

  The waiters bring coffee tables and water and cotton and alcohol. Some of the reptiles have little snake-jaw syringes and they go through an act of biting each other. The latest slither is ampules to pop when you come. It's a game of chicken with the kids. A full blow of king cobra is fatal about half the time, same way with Tiger Breath from tiger snakes. The reptiles are slithering around and constricting each other but Jerry's green mamba takes a quick fix and they walk out.

  They pass a swampy pool green with algae, where alligator addicts wallow in mindless depravity.

  Jerry sniffs and he can feel the smell brain stir deep in his pons with a delicious dull ache...what a kick for an uptight Wasp! Mindless garden of our jism...parking lot...belches the taste of eggs...this is it...magnificent...Sput Sput Sput...It's a lovely sound the sound of a silenced gun...a sound you can feel...good clean there we are in one asshole...stale night smell...mindless trance on porches the air like cobwebs...the lake...fish...the sky was clouded over...here...cleaned the fish on grass...unwashed sheets belching we ease into the normal boy at sunrise...along any minute now...watery sunlight...sitting job...the boy was here before the job...like cobwebs the job...the job? Oh it. Low-velocity nine-millimeter...sundown...boy awake...military purposes...Jerry sniffed the rotten belches of a python...boys shed their skins in a sweet Sput Sput Sput...

  A musky zoo smell permeates the animal street lingering in your clothes and hair...a skunk boy pads in beside them...

  "Got wolverine poppers..."

  They walk on and the boy gives them a squirt of skunk juice...

  "Chip Americans!"

  They pass the massive metal lattice gate to the Insect Quarter...faceted eyes of the insect addicts peer out from dark warrens. The smell doubles them over like a blow to the stomach. They hurry on, heading for the port. They are on the outskirts of the town.

  Ledges and terraces cut into the hillside with markets and cafes and lodging houses...stone steps and ramps lead from one level to another...abandoned cars here and there eroded to transparent blue shells as if nothing remains but the paint. At the top of the hill the Sea of Silence stretches away into the distance.

  Along the shores are driftwood benches sanded smooth. It is said that every man sees the flotsam of his own past here...Cottonwoods along an irrigation ditch at Los Alamos Ranch School...a wispy skittish space horse by a desert fort from Beau Geste.

  Einstein writes matter into energy on the blackboard...

  Los Alamos Ranch School...A cluster of buildings and roads, it looks like a little village resort...Pasturelands on both sides of the yellow gravel road, we come now to the trading post and post office...Get out to buy a soft drink...It is a cold windy spring day...and just in front of us at the bottom of a little valley is a pond, waves like bits of silver paper in the wind...A naked boy sprawls on the raft in the middle of the pond seemingly oblivious to the cold. To the right of the trading post is a vegetable garden...To the left barns and outbuildings and workers' cottages and across the pond the green icehouse...and a road that winds away into pine forest...The Big House is to the right, it's an easy walk...along the edge of the vegetable garden and then there is a line of boys singing the school song:

  Far away and high on the mesa's crest

  Here's the life that all of us love the best

  Los Alamos

  Winter days as we skim o'er the ice and snow

  Summer days when the balsam breezes blow

  Los Alamos

  The boys are dismissed. Some start a dispirited game of catch. Others huddle about in corners of the building, shoulders hunched, sheltering from the cold spring wind. "The balsam breezes," they intone sourly. They have to stay outside until five o'clock. One boy keeps looking at his Ingersoll wristwatch with radium dial.

  "Forty minutes yet."

  The boys groan. The shadow of a cloud darkens the young faces. The wind blows harder. Boys are lowering the flag. As the first raindrops plop into the dusty road the boys rush into the house.

  There seem to be a lot of new kids here. The boy who sits down beside him on the swing in front of the huge fireplace seems familiar. He has bright red hair and a yellowish face splotched with brownish orange freckles like dead leaves. His eyes are a yellow-green color. The boy smiles.

  "Hi. I'm Jerry."

  A splash of light quick inhuman gesture puckers of ozone from desert boy's genitals...sulfurous hate like palpable light the boy comes gasping and snarling.

  "What's wrong with you? Remember he saw the picture."

  Kim sees himself spread on a pink launching pad like a soft rocket. His ass is the touchhole, Jerry's cock the light. Now it touches, enters in a blaze of light as they streak out over the river and trees...a wake of jism across the Milky Way.

  The space capsule is accelerating...cracked concrete streets, drifting sand...Thousands of white butterflies. Blue mist of abandoned army...there's a path out...Smell of adolescent genitals on the camel saddle spermy smear across a vast empty sky...old cars and bicycles rusty derricks worn benches sand streets pools of silence...driftwood ruined piers and pavilions...swamp land...canals.

  The guide traces the area on the map with his finger..."The Place of Dead Roads, senor. This does not mean roads that are no longer used, roads that are overgrown, it means roads that are dead. You comprehend the difference?"

  "And how can this area be reached?"

  The guide shrugged. "It is usual to start in a City of Dead Streets...And where is this city? In every city are dead streets, senor, but in some more than in others. New York is well supplied in this respect...But we are late. The car is waiting to take us to the fiesta."

  Evening falls on Mexico, D. F. The plumed serpent is suffocating the city in coils of foul saffron smoke that rasp the lungs like sandpaper, undulating slightly as the inhabitants walk through, many with handkerchiefs tied across mouth and nose. The poisonous reds and greens and blues of neon light fuzz and shimmer.

  Two men reel out of a cantina and pull their nasty little 25 automatics from inside belt holsters and empty them into each other at a distance of four feet. Smoke flashes light the sneering macho faces, suddenly gray with the realization of death. They lurch and stagger, eyes wild like panicked horses. Pistols fall from nerveless fingers. One is slumped on the curb spitting blood. The other is kicking the soles of his boots out against a wall. In seconds the street is empty, wise citizens running to get as far away as possible before the policia arrive and start beating "'confesiones" out of everyone in sight. A buck-toothed boy with long arms like an ape snatches up one of the pistols as he lopes by.

  Kim ducks into an alley, practicing Ninja arts of invisibility. They are on the outskirts of the city by a ruined hacienda. Along crumbling mud walls men huddle in serapes of darkness that seeps into ditches and potholes like black ink.

  Abruptly the city ends. An empty road winds away through the cactus, sharp and clear in moonlight as if cut out of tin.

  Clouds are gathering over a lake of pale filmy waters. A speckled boy with erection glares at Kim as Kim glides by in his black gondola, trailing a languid hand in the water. Hate shimmers from the boy's eyes like black lightning. He holds up a huge purple-yellow mango. "You like beeg one, Meester Melican cocksucker?" The fragile shells of other boys are gathering...lifeless faces of despair...

  "Malos, esos muchachos" said the clouds and heat lightning behind the boy.

  Kim is floating down a river that opens into a lake of pale milky water. Storm clouds are gathering over the mountains to the north. Heat
lightning flickers over the filmy water in splashes of silver. On a sandbank a naked boy with erection holds up a huge silver fish, still flapping.

  "On peso, Meester. Him fruit fish." The boy's body shimmers with pure naked hate.

  "Why don't you come with us instead of moaning?" Kim drawls. Other boys are gathering, faces of hatred and evil and despair. They run through the shallow water that scatters from their legs like fish milk. They huddle in the stern of the boat like frightened cats. The boys shimmer and melt together. One boy remains, sitting on a coil of rope.

  "Me Ten Boy Clone. Can be one boy, five six, maybe."

  "Malos, esos muchachos," says the guide from the tiller behind the boy. The boy sniggers.

  At daybreak they are in a vast delta to the sky, dotted with islands of swamp cypress and mangos. There is a feeling of end less depths under the fragile shell of the boat. Not a breath of air stirring.

  As they pass an island the leaves hang limp and lifeless. An alligator slides into the water and a snake hanging from a tree limb turns to watch them attentively, darting out its purple tongue. Here the dead roads and empty dream places drift down into a vast stagnant delta. Alligator snouts protrude above oily iridescent water. Pale and unreal, the lake extends into nowhere.

  The Place of Dead Roads...We are floating down a wide river heat lightning sound of howler monkies. The guide is steering for the shore. We will tie up for the night. The boat is a raft on pontoons with a sleeping tent. I am adjusting the mosquito netting. A fire in the back of the boat in a tub of stones frying fish. We lie side by side listening to the lapping water. Once a jaguar jumped onto the stern of the boat. Caught in the flashlight he snarled and jumped back onto the shore. I put down the double-barreled twelve-gauge loaded with buckshot. We are passing a joint back and forth.