Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  The traveler must start in Tamaghis and make his way through the other cities in the order named. This pilgrimage may take many lifetimes.

  WE ARE HERE BECAUSE OF YOU

  Red Night in Tamaghis. The boys dance around a fire, throwing in screaming Sirens. The boys trill, wave nooses, and stick their tongues out.

  This was but a prelude to the Ba’dan riots and the attack on Yass-Waddah. The boys change costumes, rushing from stage to stage.

  The Iguana twins dance out of an Angkor Wat-Uxmal-Tenochtitlán set. The “female” twin peels off his cunt suit and they replicate a column of Vietcong.

  The Countess, with a luminous-dial alarm clock ticking in her stomach and crocodile mask, stalks Audrey with her courtiers and Green Guards. Police Boy shoots a Green Guard. Clinch Todd as Death with a scythe decapitates the Goddess Bast.

  Jon Alistair Peterson, in a pink shirt with sleeve garters, stands on a platform draped with the Star-Spangled Banner and the Union Jack. Standing on the platform with him is Nimun in an ankle-length cloak made from the skin of electric eels.

  The Board enters and take their place in a section for parents and faculty.

  Peterson speaks: “Ladies and gentlemen, this character is the only survivor of a very ancient race with very strange powers. Now some of you may be taken aback by this character . . .”

  Nimun drops off his robe and stands naked. An ammoniacal fishy odor reeks off his body—smell of some artifact for a forgotten function or a function not yet possible. His body is a terra-cotta red color with black freckles like holes in the flesh.

  “And I may tell you in strictest confidence that he and he alone is responsible for the Red Night. . .”

  Jon Peterson gets younger and turns into the Piper Boy. He draws a flute from a goatskin sheath at his belt and starts to play. Nimun does a shuffling sinuous dance singing in a harsh fish language that tears the throat like sandpaper.

  With a cry that seems to implode into his lungs, he throws himself backward onto a hassock, legs in the air, seizing his ankles with both hands. His exposed rectum is jet-black surrounded by erectile red hairs. The hole begins to spin with a smell of ozone and hot iron. And his body is spinning like a top, faster and faster, floating in the air above the cushion, transparent and fading, as the red sky flares behind him.

  A courtier feels the perfume draining off him . . .

  “Itza . . .”

  A Board member opens his mouth. . . . “Itza. . . .” His false teeth fly out.

  Wigs, clothes, chairs, props, are all draining into the spinning black disk.

  “ITZA BLACK HOLE!!”

  Naked bodies are sucked inexorably forward, writhing screaming like souls pulled into Hell. The lights go out and then the red sky . . .

  Lights come on to show the ruins of Ba’dan. Children play in the Casbah tunnels, posing for photos taken by German tourists with rucksacks. The old city is deserted.

  A few miles upriver there is a small fishing and hunting village. Here, pilgrims can rest and outfit themselves for the journey that lies ahead.

  But what of Yass-Waddah? Not a stone remains of the ancient citadel. The narrator shoves his mike at the natives who lounge in front of rundown sheds and fish from ruined piers. They shake their heads.

  “Ask Old Man Brink. He’ll know if anybody does.”

  Old Man Brink is mending a fish trap. Is it Waring or Noah Blake?

  “Yass-Waddah?”

  He says that many years ago, a god dreamed Yass-Waddah. The old man puts his palms together and rests his head on his hands, closing his eyes. He opens his eyes and turns his hands out. “But the dream did not please the god. So when he woke up—Yass-Waddah was gone.”

  A painting on screen. Sign pointing: WAGHDAS-NAUFANA-GHADIS. Road winding into the distance. Over the hills and far away . . .

  Audrey sits at a typewriter in his attic room, his back to the audience. In a bookcase to his left, we see The Book of Knowledge, Coming of Age in Samoa, The Green Hat, The Plastic Age, All the Sad Young Men, Bar Twenty Days, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Adventure Stories and a stack of ‘Little Blue Books. In front of him is the etching depicting Captain Strobe on the gallows. Audrey glances up at the picture and types:

  “The Rescue.”

  An explosion rumbles through the warehouse. Walls and roof shake and fall on Audrey and the audience. As the warehouse collapses, it turns to dust.

  The entire cast is standing in a desert landscape looking at the sunset spread across the western sky like a vast painting: the red walls of Tamaghis, the Ba’dan riots, the smoldering ruins of Yass-Waddah and Manhattan, Waghdas glimmers in the distance.

  The scenes shift and change: tropical seas and green islands, a burning galleon sinks into a grey-blue sea of clouds, rivers, jungles, villages, Greek temples and there are the white frame houses of Harbor Point above the blue lake.

  Port Roger shaking in the wind, fireworks displays against a luminous green sky, expanses of snow, swamps, and deserts where vast red mesas tower into the sky, fragile aircraft over burning cities, flaming arrows, dimming to mauves and greys and finally—in a last burst of light—the enigmatic face of Waring as his eyes light up in a blue flash. He bows three times and disappears into the gathering dusk.

  RETURN TO PORT ROGER

  This must be it. Warped planks in a tangle of trees and vines. The pool of the Palace is covered with algae. A snake slithers into the green water. Weeds grow through the rusty shell of a bucket in the haman. The stairs leading to the upper porch have fallen. Nothing here but the smell of empty years. How many years? I can’t be sure.

  I am carrying a teakwood box with a leather handle. The box is locked. I have the key but I will not open the box here. I take the path to Dink’s house. Sometimes paths last longer than roads.

  There it is on the beach, just as I remember it. Sand has covered the steps and drifted across the floor. Smell of nothing and nobody there. I sit down on the sand-covered steps and look out to the harbor at the ship that brought me here and that will take me away. I take out my key and open the box and leaf through the yellow pages. The last entry is from many years ago.

  We were in Panama waiting for the Spanish. I am back in the fort watching the advancing soldiers through a telescope, closer and closer to death.

  “Go back!” I am screaming without a throat, without a tongue—“Get in your galleons and go back to Spain!”

  Hearing the final sonorous knell of Spain as church bells silently implode into Sisters of Mary, Communions, Confessions . . .

  “Paco. . . Joselito. . . Enrique.”

  Father Kelley is giving them absolution. There is pain in his voice. It’s too easy. Then our shells and mortars rip through them like a great iron fist. A few still take cover and return fire.

  Paco catches a bullet in the chest. Sad shrinking face. He pulls my head down as the grey lips whisper—“I want the priest.”

  * * *

  I didn’t want to write about this or what followed. Guayaquil, Lima, Santiago and all the others I didn’t see. The easiest victories are the most costly in the end.

  I have blown a hole in time with a firecracker. Let others step through. Into what bigger and bigger firecrackers? Better weapons lead to better and better weapons, until the earth is a grenade with the fuse burning.

  I remember a dream of my childhood. I am in a beautiful garden. As I reach out to touch the flowers they wither under my hands. A nightmare feeling of foreboding and desolation comes over me as a great mushroom-shaped cloud darkens the earth. A few may get through the gate in time. Like Spain, I am bound to the past.

  from the place of dead roads

  (SELECTIONS)

  SHOOT-OUT IN BOULDER

  September 17, 1899. What appeared to be an Old-Western shoot-out took place yesterday afternoon at the Boulder Cemetery. The protagonists have been identified as William Seward Hall, sixty-five, a real-estate speculator with holdings in Colorado and New Mexico, and Mike Chase, in
his fifties, about whom nothing was known.

  Hall resided in New York City, and wrote western stories under the pen name of “Kim Carsons.” “He was apparently here on a business trip,” a police source stated.

  At first glance it appeared that Chase and Hall had killed each other in a shoot-out, but neither gun had been fired, and both men were killed by single rifle shots fired from a distance. Chase was shot from in front through the chest. Hall was shot in the back. Nobody heard the shots, and police believe the rifleman may have employed a silencer.

  A hotel key was found in Hall’s pocket, and police searched his room at the Overlook Hotel. They found clothing, a .38 revolver, and a book entitled Quién Es? by Kim Carsons. Certain passages had been underlined.

  Police investigating this bizarre occurrence have as yet no clue to the possible motives of the men. “Looks like an old grudge of some sort,” Police Chief Martin Winters said. When asked whether there was any reason Chase and Hall should want to kill each other, he replied, “Not that I know of, but we are continuing the investigation.”

  The Sunday paper played up the story, with pictures of the deceased and the cemetery, and diagrams showing the location of the bodies and the probable spot from which the shots had been fired. When asked about the make and caliber of the death weapon, the Medical Examiner stated: “Definitely a rifle. Size of the exit holes is consistent with a .45-70 dumdum bullet, but the projectiles have not been recovered.”

  The article quoted the underlined passages from Hall’s book Quién Es?

  * * *

  Papers in an old attic . . . an old yellow press clipping from the Manhattan Comet, April 3, 1894:

  Three members of the Carsons gang were killed today when they attempted to hold up the Manhattan City Bank. A posse, dispatched in pursuit of the survivors, ran into an ambush and suffered several casualties. . . . Mike Chase, a U.S. marshal, stated that the ambush was not carried out by the Carsons gang but by a band of Confederate renegades armed with mortars and grenades. . . .

  This poem was wroted by Kim Carsons after a shoot-out on Bleecker Street, October 23, 1920. Liver Wurst Joe and Cherry Nose Gio, Mafia hit men, with Frank the Lip as driver, opened fire on Kim Carsons, Boy Jones, Mars Cleaver, known as Marbles, and Guy Graywood, described as an attorney. In the ensuing exchange of shots Liver Wurst Joe, Cherry Nose Gio, and Frank the Lip was all kilted. Only damage sustained by the Carsons group was to Boy’s vest when he took refuge behind a fire hydrant.

  “My vest is minted,” he moaned. “And it was dog shit done it. There should be a law.”

  Owing to certain “offensive passages” written in the French language the poem could not be quoted, but an enterprising assistant editor had copies made with translations of the offensive passages and sold them to collectors and curiosity seekers for five dollars a copy.

  Stranger Who Was Passing

  un grand principe de violence dictait à nos moeurs

  (a great principle of violence dictated our fashions)

  Surely a song for men like a great wind

  Shaking an iron tree

  Dead leaves in the winter pissoir

  J’aime ces types vicieux

  Qu’ici montrent la bite. . . .

  (I like the vicious types who show the cock here. . . .)

  Simon, aimes-tu le bruit des pas

  Sur les feuilles mortes?

  (Simon, do you like the sound of steps

  on dead leaves?)

  The smell of war and death?

  Powder smoke back across the mouth blown

  Powder smoke and brown hair?

  Death comes with the speed of a million winds

  The sheltering sky is thin as paper here

  That afternoon when I watched

  The torn sky bend with the wind

  I can see it start to tilt

  And shred and tatter

  Caught in New York

  Beneath the animals of the Village

  The Piper pulled down the sky.

  LET IT COME DOWN.

  Appointment at the cemetery . . . Boulder, Colorado . . .

  September 17, 1899

  Mike swung onto the path at the northeast corner, wary and watchful. He was carrying a Webley-Fosbery .45 semi-automatic revolver, the action adjusted with rubber grips by an expert gunsmith to absorb recoil and prevent slipping. His backup men were about ten yards away, a little behind him across the street.

  Kim stepped out of the cemetery onto the path. “Hello, Mike.” His voice carried clear and cool on the wind, sugary and knowing and evil. Kim always maneuvered to approach downwind. He was wearing a russet tweed jacket with change pockets, canvas puttees, jodhpurs in deep red.

  At sight of him Mike experienced an uneasy déjà vu and glanced sideways for his backup.

  One glance was enough. They were all wearing jackets the color of autumn leaves, and puttees. They had opened a wicker shoulder basket. They were eating sandwiches and filling tin cups with cold beer, their rifles propped against a tree remote and timeless as a painting.

  Déjeuner des chasseurs.

  Mike sees he has been set up. He will have to shoot it out. He feels a flash of resentment and outrage.

  God damn it! It’s not fair!

  Why should his life be put in jeopardy by this horrible little nance? Mike had a well-disciplined mind. He put these protests aside and took a deep breath, drawing in power.

  Kim is about fifteen yards south walking slowly toward him. Fresh southerly winds rustle the leaves ahead of him as he walks “on a whispering south wind” . . . leaves crackle under his boots . . . Michael, aimé tu le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes. . .? Twelve yards, ten . . . Kim walks with his hands swinging loose at his sides, the fingers of his right hand brushing the gun butt obscenely, his face alert, detached, unreadable. . . . Eight yards. . . . Suddenly Kim flicks his hand up without drawing as he points at Mike with his index finger.

  “BANG! YOU’RE DEAD.”

  He throws the last word like a stone. He knows that Mike will see a gun in the empty hand and this will crowd his draw.

  (With a phantom gun in an empty hand he has bluffed Mike into violating a basic rule of gunfighting: TYT. Take your Time. Every gunfighter has his time. The time it takes him to draw aim fire and hit. If he tries to beat his time the result is almost invariably a miss . . .)

  “Snatch and grab,” Kim chants.

  Yes, Mike was drawing too fast, much too fast.

  Kim’s hand snaps down flexible and sinuous as a whip and up with his gun extended in both hands at eye level.

  “Jerk and miss.”

  He felt Mike’s bullet whistle past his left shoulder.

  Trying for a heart shot. . .

  Both eyes open, Kim sights for a fraction of a second, just so long and long enough: the difference between a miss and a hit. Kim’s bullet hits Mike just above the heart with a liquid SPLAT as the mercury explodes inside, blowing the aorta to shreds.

  Mike freezes into a still, gun extended, powder smoke blowing back across his face. He begins to weave in slow circles. He gags and spits blood. His gun arm starts to sag.

  Kim slowly lowers his gun in both hands, face impassive, eyes watchful.

  Mike’s eyes are glazed, unbelieving, stubborn, still trying to get the gun up for the second shot. But the gun is heavy, too heavy to lift, pulling him down.

  Slowly Kim lowers his gun into the holster.

  Mike crumples sideways and falls.

  Kim looks up at the trees, watching a squirrel, a remote antique gaiety suffuses his face, molding his lips into the ambiguous marble smile of a Greek youth.

  Definitely an archaic from Skyros with that special Skyros smile.

  Who is the Greek youth smiling at? He is smiling at his own archaic smile.

  For this is the smile that happens when the smiler becomes the smile.

  The wind is rising. Kim watches a dead leaf spiral up into the sky.

  The Egyptian glyph that
signifies: To stand up in evidence. An ejaculating phallus, a mouth, a man with his fingers in his mouth.

  Kim waves to his three witnesses. One waves back with a drumstick in his hand.

  Hiatus of painted calm . . .

  Pâté, bread, wine, fruit spread out on the grass, gun propped against a tombstone, a full moon in the China-blue evening sky. One of the hunters strums a mandolin inlaid with mother-of-pearl as they sing:

  “It’s only a paper moon . . .”

  Kim lifts his gun and shoots a hole in the moon, a black hole with fuzz around it like powder burns.

  A wind ripples the grass, stirs uneasily through branches.

  “Flying over a muslin tree.”

  Kim’s second shot takes out a grove of trees at the end of the cemetery.

  The wind is rising, ripping blurs and flashes of russet orange red from the trees, whistling through tombstones.

  All the spurious old father figures rush on stage.

  “STOP, MY SON!”

  “No son of yours, you worthless old farts.”

  Kim lifts his gun.

  “YOU’RE DESTROYING THE UNIVERSE!”

  “What universe?”

  Kim shoots a hole in the sky. Blackness pours out and darkens the earth. In the last rays of a painted sun, a Johnson holds up a barbed-wire fence for others to slip through. The fence has snagged the skyline . . . a great black rent. Screaming crowds point to the torn sky.

  “OFF THE TRACK! OFF THE TRACK!”

  “FIX IT!” the Director bellows. . . .

  “What with, a Band-Aid and chewing gum? Rip in the Master Film. . . . Fix it yourself, Boss Man.”

  “ABANDON SHIP, GOD DAMN IT. . . . EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF!”

  For three days Kim had camped on the mesa top, sweeping the valley with his binoculars. A cloud of dust headed south told him they figured him to ride in that direction for Mexico. He had headed north instead, into a land of sandstone formations, carved by wind and sand—a camel, a tortoise, Cambodian temples—and everywhere caves pocked into the red rock like bubbles in boiling oatmeal. Some of the caves had been lived in at one time or another: rusty tin cans, pottery shards, cartridge cases. Kim found an arrowhead six inches long, chipped from obsidian, and a smaller arrowhead of rose-colored flint.