Nova Express

by William S. Burroughs

  The lemur dropped down on Lee’s shoulder and playfully nipped his ear—Other lemurs raised sails on a fragile bamboo craft and sailed away over the lagoon under the red satellite that does not change position—

  “There are other islands out there where no one has ever been—The lemurs of such delicacy that they die if one sets foot on the island—They exist at different prenatal flesh in black lagoons—”

  “You understand silver arrows sniffing pointing incroyable but the movements on The Board a terrible doom: (‘Suppose there is no enemy?’) Take or avoid but see also that gives rise to great pain—You did a round of exquisite festivals—”

  “Me see your lemur people with flicker lights in swamp cypress?”

  “Hours to coax them down—Finally the dawn innocence of control sent liquid flickering screens like pearl—All affect, you understand, that is blending beauty and flesh—”

  A Lemur touched Lee’s face with delicate people who die in ­captivity—skittering again into the specially prized—this stressing they are back in who will not hold and possess—out on a ledge—a heavy narcotic indeed—thousand years more or less—

  The Mongolian Archers with short black conversation of ritual dancing flexed there—dowsing feeling for The Enemy like of course they all do—

  “You wouldn’t—”

  “My dear, they make me terrible arrangements that have been sold to our—”

  “That would be unfortunate, Madame—Been laughing stock at one time or ask for protection—and now—”

  “Tonight is the festival of Nice Young Emotions—Why they die in captivity—Juanito again?—Where is he now?—”

  “Branches no one has ever been—He far now is—”

  “They are of such a hat—Is your travel agent selling you attempt or thought of holding the branches where they wait?”

  “Perhaps—They have waited a long time—Five Uranus—”

  “The Pakistan Berries lay all our dust of a distant thank you on Lee’s shoulder—”

  REMEMBER I WAS CARBON DIOXIDE

  Nothing here now but the recordings—in another country—

  “Going to give some riot noises in the old names?”

  “Mr. Martin I have survived” (smiles).

  “All right young countryman so we took Time . . . Human voices take over my job now . . . Show you around alien darkroom . . . their Gods fading . . . ­departed file . . . Mrs. Murphy’s rooming house left no address. . . . You remember the ‘third stair’ it was called? You wrote last flight . . . seals on North Beach . . . the lights flashing . . . Clark St. . . . The Priest against a black sky . . . rocks gathered just here on this beach . . . Ali there, hand lifted . . . dim jerky far away street . . . ash on the water . . . last hands . . . last human voices . . . last rites for Sky Pilot Hector Clark . . . He carries the man who never was back . . . Shall these ticker bones live?? My host had been a long time in inquisition. . . .”

  Through all the streets no relief—I will show you fear on walls and windows people and sky—Wo weilest du?—Hurry up please its accounts—Empty is the third who walks beside you—Thin mountain air here and there and out the window—Put on a clean shirt and dusk through narrow streets—Whiffs of my Spain from vacant lots—Brandy neat—April wind revolving lips and pants—After dinner sleep dreaming on rain—The soldier gives no shelter—War of dead sun is a handful of dust—Thin and tenuous in grey shivering mist of old Western movies said: “Fill your hand, Martin.”

  “I can’t, son—Many years ago that image—Remember I was carbon dioxide—Voices wake us and we drown—Air holes in the faded film—End of smoky shuttered rooms—No walls—Look ­anywhere—No good—Stretching zero the living and the dead—Five for rain—Young hair too—Hurry up please its William—I will show you fear in the cold spring cemetery—Kind, wo weilest du?”

  “Here,” said she, “is your card: Bread knife in the heart—”

  “What thinking, William?—Were his eyes—Hurry up please its half your brain slowly fading—Make yourself a bit smart—It’s them couldn’t reach flesh—Empty walls—Good night, sweet ladies—Hurry up please it’s time—Look any place—Faces in the violet light—Damp gusts bringing rain—”

  Got up and fixed in the sick dusk—Again he touched like that—Smell of human love—The tears gathered—In Mexico committed fornication but—Cold spring—besides you can say—could give no information—vast Thing Police—

  “What have I my friend to give you?—Identity fading out—dwindling—Female smells—knife in the heart—boy of dust gives no shelter—left no address”

  “I’d ask alterations but really known them all—Closed if you wanted a Greek—I do not find The Hanged Man in the ­newspapers—blind eyes—see—Who walks beside you?” “Will you let me tell you lost sight a long time ago . . . Smell taste dust on the ­window . . . touch . . . touch?? How should I from remote landing dim jerky far away.”

  “At dawn—Put on a clean shirt in another ­country—Soccer scores and KiKi give you?—Empty to the ­barrier—Shuttered dawn is far away—Bicycle races here in this boy were no relief—Long empty noon—Dead recordings—Moments I could describe that were his eyes in countries of the world—Left you these sick dawn bodies—Fading smiles—in other flesh—Far now—Such gives no shelter—Shifted the visiting ­address—The wind at noon—walks beside you?” Piece of a toy revolver there in nettles of the alley . . . over the empty broken streets a red white and blue kite.

  ***Reference to the Pakistan Berries, a small black fruit of narcotic properties sometimes brought to southern Morocco by caravan—when smoked conjures the area of black lagoons sketched in these pages—

  Gave Proof Through the Night

  GAVE PROOF THROUGH THE NIGHT

  (This section, first written in 1938 in collaboration with Kells Elvins who died in 1961, New York, was later cut back in with the “first cut-ups” of Brion Gysin as published in Minutes to Go.)

  Captain Bairns was arrested today in the murder at sea of ­Chicago—He was The Last Great American to see things from the front and kept laughing during the dark—Fade out

  S.S. America—Sea smooth as green glass—off Jersey Coast—An air-conditioned voice floats from microphones and ventilators—:

  “Keep your seats everyone—There is no cause for alarm—There has been a little accident in the boiler room but everything is now/”

  BLOOOMMM

  Explosion splits the boat—The razor inside, sir—He jerked the handle—

  A paretic named Perkins screams from his shattered wheelchair:

  “You pithyathed thon of a bidth.”

  Second Class Passenger Barbara Cannon lay naked in First Class State Room—Stewart Hudson stepped to a porthole:

  “Put on your clothes, honey,” he said. “There’s been an accident.”

  Doctor Benway, Ship’s Doctor, drunkenly added two inches to a four-inch incision with one stroke of his scalpel—

  “Perhaps the appendix is already out, doctor,” the nurse said peering over his shoulder—“I saw a little scar—”

  “The appendix OUT! I’M taking the appendix out—What do you think I’m doing here?”

  “Perhaps the appendix is on the left side, doctor—That happens sometimes you know—”

  “Stop breathing down my neck—I’m coming to that—Don’t you think I know where an appendix is?—I studied appendectomy in 1910 at Harvard—” He lifted the abdominal wall and searched along the incision dropping ashes from his cigarette—

  “And fetch me a new scalpel—This one has no edge to it”—

  BLOOOMM

  “Sew her up,” he ordered—“I can’t be expected to work under such conditions”—He swept instruments cocaine and morphine into his satchel and tilted out of The Operating Room—

 
Mrs. J. L. Bradshinkel, thrown out of bed by the explosion, sat up screaming: “I’m going right back to The Sheraton Carlton Hotel and call the Milwaukee Braves”—

  Two Philippine maids hoisted her up—“Fetch my wig, Zalameda,” she ordered. “I’m going straight to the captain—”

  Mike B. Dweyer, Politician from Clayton Missouri, charged the First Class Lounge where the orchestra, high on nutmeg, weltered in their instruments—

  “Play The Star Spangled Banner,” he bellowed.

  “You trying to corn somebody, Jack?—We got a union—”

  Mike crossed to the jukebox, selected The Star Spangled Banner With Fats Terminal at The Electric Organ, and shoved home a handful of quarters—

  Oh say can you seeeeeeeeee

  The Captain sitting opposite Lucy Bradshinkel—He is shifty redhead with a face like blotched bone—

  “I own this ship,” The Lady said—

  The deck tilted and her wig slipped over one ear—The Captain stood up with a revolver in his left hand—He snatched the wig and put it on—

  “Give me that kimona,” he ordered—

  She ran to the porthole screaming for help like every­one else on the boat—Her head was outlined in the porthole—He fired—

  “And now you God damned old fool, give me that kimona—”

  I mean by the dawn’s early light

  Doctor Benway pushed through a crowd at the rail and boarded The First Life Boat—

  “Are you all right?” he said seating himself among the women—“I’m the doctor.”

  The Captain stepped lightly down red carpeted stairs—In The Purser’s Office a narrow-shouldered man was energetically shoving currency and jewels into a black suitcase—The Captain’s revolver swung free of his brassiere and he fired twice—

  By the rocket’s red glare

  Radio Operator Finch mixed a bicarbonate of soda and belched into his hand—“SOS—URP—SOS—God damned captain’s a brown artist—SOS—Off Jersey Coast —SOS—Might smell us—SOS—Son of a bitching crew —SOS—URP—Comrade Finch—SOS—Comrade in a pig’s ass—SOS—SOS—SOS—URP—URP—URP—”

  The Captain stepped lightly into The Radio Room—Witnesses from a distance observed a roaring blast and a brilliant flash as The Operator was arrested—The Captain shoved the body aside and smashed the apparatus with a chair—

  Our flag was still there

  The Captain stiff-armed an old lady and filled The First Life Boat—The boat was lowered jerkily by male passengers—Doctor Benway cast off—The crew pulled on the oars—The Captain patted his bulging suitcase absently and looked back at the ship—

  Oh say do that star spangled banner yet wave

  Time hiccoughs—Passengers fighting around Life Boat K9—It is the last boat that can be launched—Joe Sargeant, Third Year Divinity student and MRA, slipped through the crowd and established Perkins in a seat at the bow—Perkins sits there chin drawn back eyes shining clutching a heavy butcher knife in his right hand

  By the twilight’s last gleamings

  Hysterical waves from Second Class flood the deck—“Ladies first,” screamed a big faced shoe clerk with long teeth—He grabbed a St. Louis matron and shoved her ahead of him—A wedge of shoe clerks formed behind—A shot rang and the matron fell—The wedge scattered—A man with nautical uniform buttoned in the wrong holes carrying a World War I .45 stepped into the last boat and covered the men at the launching ropes—

  “Let this thing down,” he ordered—The boat hit the water—A cry went up from the reeling deck—Bodies hurtled around the boat—Heads bobbed in the green water—A hand reached out of the water and closed on the boat side—Spring-like Perkins brought down his knife—The hand slipped away—Finger stubs fell into the boat—Perkins worked feverishly cutting on all sides:

  “Bathdarths—Thons of bidth—Bathdarth—thon bidth—­Methodith Epithcopal God damn ith—”

  O’er the land of the freeee

  Barbara Cannon showed your reporter her souvenirs of the disaster: A life belt autographed by the crew and a severed human finger—

  And the home of the brave

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I feel sorta bad about this old finger.”

  Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there

  SOS

  The cold heavy fluid settled in a mountain village of slate houses where time stops—Blue twilight—Place Of The Silence Addicts—They move in and corner SOS and take it away in lead bottles and sit there on the nod in slate houses—On The Cool Blue or The Cold Grey—leave a wake of yapping ventriloquist dummies—They just sit there in cool blocks of blue silence and the earth’s crust undulates under their weight of Heavy Time and Heavy Money—The Blue Heavy Metal People Of Uranus—Heavy con men selling issues of fraudulent universe stock—It all goes back into SOS—[Solid Blue Silence.]

  “Nobody can kick an SOS habit, kid—All the screams from The Pain Bank—from The Beginning you understand exploded deep in the tortured metal—”

  Junk poured through my screaming flesh—I got up and danced The Junky Jig—I had my spoons—That’s all I need—Into his spine falling some really great shit lately (“Shoot your way to peat bog”) The cold heavy fluid settled—hydraulic beginning you understand—Exploded time stops in blue metal—Suburban galaxies on the nod—blue silence in the turnstile—village of slate houses—This foreign sun in bottles—

  Martin came to Blue Junction in a heavy blue twilight where time stops—Slow hydraulic driver got out and moved away—Place of The Silent People—The Foreman showed him to The Bunk House—The men sat in blocks of cool blue silence at a long table and laid out ­photos in silent language of juxtaposition projecting the work—­playing poker for position and advantage—

  The work was hard and silent—There were irrigation canals and fish ponds with elaborate hydraulic locks and motors—The windmills and weather maps—(The Proprietor took photos of sky clouds and mountains every day moving arranging his weather maps in a vast flicker cylinder that turned with the wind on roof of The Main Building—Picture panels on walls of The Bunk House and Day Room changed with weather sky and mountain shadows in a silent blue twilight—The men took photos of each other and mixed picture composites shifting combos to wind and water sounds and frogs from the fish pools—green pastures crisscrossed with black water and springs overhung with grass where Martin fished in the evening with Bradly who slept in the bunk next to his or in his bunk back and forth changing bodies in the blue silence—Tasks shifted with poker play and flesh trade—)

  Blue—Flicker along the fish ponds—Blue shadows twilight—street—frogs and crickets—(crisscrossed my face)

  The knife fell—The Clerk in the bunk next to his bled blue ­silence—Put on a clean shirt and Martin’s pants—telling stories and exchanging smiles—dusty motors—The crop and fish talk muttering American dawn words—Sad rooming house—Picture wan light on suburban ponds and brown hair—Grey photo pools and springs over brass bed—Stale morning streets—sifting clouds and sky on my face—crisscrossed with city houses—

  “Empty picture of a haunted ruin?” He lifted his hands sadly turned them out . . . “Some boy just wrote last good-bye across the sky . . . All the dream people of past time are saying good-bye forever, Mister”

  Late afternoon shadows against his back magic of all movies in remembered kid standing there face luminous by the attic window in a lost street of brick chimneys exploded star between us . . . You can look back along the slate shore to a white shirt flapping gunsmoke.

  SHORT COUNT

  The Heavy Metal Kid returned from a short blue holiday on Uranus and brought suit against practically everybody in The Biologic Courts—

  “They are giving me a short count,” he said in an interview with your reporter—“And I won’t stand still for it�
�” Fade out

  Corridors and patios and porticos of The Biologic Courts—Swarming with terminal life forms desperately seeking extension of canceled permissos and residence certificates—Brokers, fixers, runners, debarred lawyers, all claiming family connection with court ­officials—Professional half-brothers and second cousins twice removed—Petitioners and plaintiffs screaming through the halls—Holding up insect claws, animal and bird parts, all manner of diseases and deformities received “In the service” of distant ­fingers—Shrieking for compensations and attempting to corrupt or influence the judges in a thousand languages living and dead, in color flash and nerve talk, catatonic dances and pantomimes illustrating their horrible conditions which many have tattooed on their flesh to the bone and silently picket the audience chamber—Others carry photo-collage banners and TV screens flickering their claims—Willy’s attorneys served the necessary low pressure processes and The Controllers were sucked into the audience chamber for The First Hearing—Green People in limestone calm—Remote green contempt for all feelings and proclivities of the animal host they had invaded with inexorable moves of Time-Virus-Birth-Death—With their diseases and orgasm drugs and their sexless parasite life forms—Heavy Metal People of Uranus wrapped in cool blue mist of vaporized bank notes—And The Insect People of Minraud with metal music—Cold insect brains and their agents like white hot buzz saws sharpened in the Ovens—The judge, many light years away from possibility of corruption, grey and calm with inflexible authority reads the brief—He appears sometimes as a slim young man in short sleeves then middle-aged and red faced sometimes very old like yellow ivory—“My God what a mess”—he said at last—“Quiet all of you—You all understand I hope what is meant by biologic mediation—This means that the mediating life forms must simultaneously lay aside all defenses and all weapons—it comes to the same thing—and all connection with retrospective controllers under space conditions merge into a single being which may or may not be successful—” He glanced at the brief—“It would seem that The Uranians represented by the plaintiff Uranian Willy and The Green People represented by Ali Juan Chapultepec are prepared to mediate—Will these two uh personalities please stand forward—Bueno—I expect that both of you would hesitate if you could see—Fortunately you have not been uh overbriefed—You must of course surrender all your weapons and we will proceed with whatever remains—Guards—Take them to the disinfection chambers and then to The Biologic Laboratories”—He turned to The Controllers—“I hope they have been well prepared—I don’t need to tell you that—Of course this is only The First ­Hearing—The results of mediation will be reviewed by a higher court—”