Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  On top of the mesa were crumbled mounds of earth that had once been houses. Slabs of stone had been crisscrossed to form an altar. Homo sapiens was here.

  Dusk was falling and blue shadows gathered in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east. Sangre de Cristo! Blood of Christ! Rivers of blood! Mountains of blood! Does Christ never get tired of bleeding? To the west the sun sets behind thunderclouds over the Jemez Mountains, and Jiménez straddles the mountains with his boots of rock and trees, a vast charro rising into the sky, his head a crystal skull of clouds as his guns spit from darkening battlements and thunder rattles over the valley. The evening star shines clear and green . . . “Fair as a star, when only one / Is shining in the sky.” That’s Wordsworth, Kim remembers. It is raining in the Jemez Mountains.

  “It is raining, Anita Huffington.” Last words of General Grant, spoken to his nurse, circuits in his brain flickering out like lightning in grey clouds.

  Kim leaned back against stone still warm from the sun. A cool wind touched his face with the smell of rain.

  Pottery shards . . . arrowheads . . . a crib . . . a rattle . . . a blue spoon . . . a slingshot, the rubber rotted through . . . rusting fishhooks . . . tools . . . you can see there was a cabin here once . . . a hypodermic syringe glints in the sun . . . the needle has rusted into the glass, forming little sparks of brown mica . . . abandoned artifacts . . .

  He holds the rose flint arrowhead in his hand. Here is the arrowhead, lovingly fashioned for a purpose. Campfires flicker on Indian faces eating the luscious dark meat of the passenger pigeon. He fondles the obsidian arrowhead, so fragile . . . did they break every time they were used, like bee stings, he wonders?

  (Bison steaks roasting on a spit.)

  Somebody made this arrowhead. It had a creator long ago. This arrowhead is the only proof of his existence. Living things can also be seen as artifacts, designed for a purpose. So perhaps the human artifact had a creator. Perhaps a stranded space traveler needed the human vessel to continue his journey, and he made it for that purpose? He died before he could use it? He found another escape route? This artifact, shaped to fill a forgotten need, now has no more meaning or purpose than this arrowhead without the arrow and the bow, the arm and the eye. Or perhaps the human artifact was the creator’s last card, played in an old game many light-years ago. Chill of empty space.

  Kim gathers wood for a fire. The stars are coming out. There’s the Big Dipper. His father points to Betelgeuse in the night sky over Saint Louis . . . smell of flowers in the garden. His father’s grey face on a pillow.

  Helpless pieces in the game he plays

  On this checkerboard of nights and days.

  He picks up the obsidian arrowhead, arrow and bow of empty space. You can’t see them anymore without the arm and the eye . . . the chill. . . so fragile . . . shivers and gathers wood. Can’t see them anymore. Slave Gods in the firmament. He remembers his father’s last words:

  “Stay out of churches, son. All they got a key to is the shit house. And swear to me you will never wear a lawman’s badge.”

  Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,

  And one by one back in the Closet lays.

  Playthings in an old game, the little toy soldiers are covered with rust, shaped to fill a forgotten empty space.

  Rusty tin cans . . . pottery shards . . . cartridge cases . . . arrowheads . . . a hypodermic syringe glints in the sun.

  Kim has never doubted the possibility of an afterlife or the existence of gods. In fact he intends to become a god, to shoot his way to immortality, to invent his way, to write his way. He has a number of patents: the Carsons spring knife, an extension of the spring blackjack principle; a cartridge in which the case becomes the projectile; an air gun in which air is compressed by a small powder charge; a magnetic gun in which propulsion is effected by compressing a reversed magnetic field. “Whenever you use this bow I will be there,” the Zen archery master tells his students. And he means there quite literally. He lives in his students and thus achieves a measure of immortality. And the immortality of a writer is to be taken literally. Whenever anyone reads his words the writer is there. He lives in his readers. So every time someone neatly guts his opponent with my spring knife or slices off two heads with one swipe of my spring sword I am there to drink the blood and smell the fresh entrails as they slop out with a divine squishy sound. I am there when the case bullet thuds home—right in the stomach . . . what a lovely grunt! And my saga will shine in the eyes of adolescents squinting through gunsmoke.

  Kapow! Kapow! Kapow!

  Kim considers that immortality is the only goal worth striving for. He knows that it isn’t something you just automatically get for believing some nonsense or other like Christianity or Islam. It is something you have to work and fight for, like everything else in this life or another.

  The most arbitrary, precarious, and bureaucratic immortality blueprint was drafted by the ancient Egyptians. First you had to get yourself mummified, and that was very expensive, making immortality a monopoly of the truly rich. Then your continued immortality in the Western Lands was entirely dependent on the continued existence of your mummy. That is why they had their mummies guarded by demons and hid good.

  Here is plain G. I. Horus. . . . He’s got enough baraka to survive his first physical death. He won’t get far. He’s got no mummy, he’s got no names, he’s got nothing. What happens to a bum like that, a nameless, mummyless asshole? Why, demons will swarm all over him at the first checkpoint. He will be dismembered and thrown into a flaming pit, where his soul will be utterly consumed and destroyed forever. While others, with sound mummies and the right names to drop in the right places, sail through to the Western Lands.

  There are of course those who just barely squeeze through. Their mummies are not in a good sound condition. These second-class souls are relegated to third-rate transient hotels just beyond the last checkpoint, where they can smell the charnel-house disposal ovens from their skimpy balconies.

  “You see that sign?” the bartender snarls:

  MAGGOTTY MUMMIES WILL NOT BE SERVED HERE

  “Might as well face facts . . . my mummy is going downhill. Cheap job to begin with . . . gawd, maggots is crawling all over it. . . the way that demon guard sniffed at me this morning. . . .” Transient hotels . . .

  And here you are in your luxury condo, deep in the Western Lands . . . you got no security. Some disgruntled former employee sneaks into your tomb and throws acid on your mummy. Or sloshes gasoline all over it and burns the shit out of it. “OH . . . someone is fucking with my mummy . . .”

  Mummies are sitting ducks. No matter who you are, what can happen to your mummy is a pharaoh’s nightmare: the dreaded mummy bashers and grave robbers, scavengers, floods, volcanoes, earthquakes. Perhaps a mummy’s best friend is an Egyptologist: sealed in a glass case, kept at a constant temperature . . . but your mummy isn’t even safe in a museum. Air-raid sirens, it’s the Blitz!

  “For Ra’s sake, get us into the vaults,” scream the mummies, without a throat, without a tongue.

  Anybody buy in on a deal like that should have his mummy examined.

  Kim got off the stage at Cottonwood Junction. The stage was going west and he wanted to head north. Sometimes he decided which way to go by the signs, or his legs would pull him in a certain direction. Or maybe he’d hear about some country he wanted to see. Or he might just be avoiding towns where folks was known to be religious. That morning before he took the stage he had consulted the Oracle, which was a sort of Ouija board that had belonged to his mother. She’d been into table-tapping and crystal balls and had her spirit guides. One that Kim liked especially was an Indian boy called Little Rivers.

  Once when she was out Kim put on one of her dresses and made up his face like a whore and called Little Rivers and next thing the dress was torn off him oh he did it of course but the hands weren’t his and then he was squirming and moaning while Little Rivers fucked him with his legs up and he blac
ked out in a flash of silver light.

  The Oracle told him that Little Rivers was near. He should keep his eyes open and he would know what to do, so when he saw a sign pointing north—CLEAR CREEK 20 MILES—he decided to leave the stage, standing there in the street with his “alligator.”

  The town was built in a grove of cottonwoods at a river junction. He could hear running water and the rustle of leaves in the afternoon wind. He passed a cart with a strawberry roan. On the side: TOM D. DARK, TRAVELING PHOTOGRAPHER.He went into a saloon, dropped his “alligator” on the floor and ordered a beer, noting a youth sitting at the end of the bar. He took a long swallow, looking out into the shaded street. The boy was at his elbow. He hadn’t heard him move.

  “You’re Kim Carsons, aren’t you?”

  The youth was about twenty, tall and lean, with red hair, a thin face with a few pimples growing in the smooth red flesh, his eyes grey-blue with dark shadows.

  “Yes, I’m Carsons.”

  “I’m Tom Dark. That’s my cart outside.”

  They shook hands. As their hands parted Tom stroked Kim’s palm with one finger lightly. Kim felt the blood rush to his crotch.

  “Going north?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like to ride with me in the wagon?”

  “Sure.”

  A Mexican kid is sitting in the driver’s seat of Tom’s cart.

  “Kim Carsons, this is my assistant. Pecos Bridge Juanito.”

  The boy has a knowing smile.

  The road winds along a stream, trees overhead . . . bits of quartz glitter in the road, which isn’t used often, you can tell by the weeds. Looks like the road out of Saint Albans. They cross an old stone bridge.

  “This is Pecos Bridge. . . . We’ll stop here . . . be dark in another hour.”

  Juanito guides the wagon off the road into a clearing by the stream, which is slow and deep at this point. He unhitches the horse and starts pulling tripods and cameras out of the wagon.

  “My specialty is erotics,” Tom explains, “rich collectors. Paris . . . New York . . . London. I’ve been looking for you on commission. Got a client wants sex pictures of a real gunman.”

  “I hope you don’t mean the naked-except-for-cowboy-boots-gun-belt-and-sombrero sort of thing.”

  “Look, I’m an artist.”

  “And I’m a shootist, not a gunman. The gun doesn’t own me. I own the gun.”

  “Well, are you interested?”

  Kim puts a finger on the cleft below his nose, runs the finger down his body and under the crotch to the perineum. He holds out his open hand.

  “Right down the middle.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Kim brings a bottle of sour-mash bourbon from his “alligator” and they toast their fucking future.

  “They hanged a Mexican kid from that branch.” Tom points to a cotton-wood branch a few feet above the wagon. “You can still see the rope marks. . . . Yep hanged him offen the cayoose he went and stealed but he hadn’t stoled that horse. He’d boughten it. Only the posse didn’t find that out until after they’d hanged the kid.

  “You may have read about it. . . made quite a stir . . . federal antilynching bill in Congress and the Abolitionists took some northern states. . . . All the papers wanted a picture of the hanging and I gave them one . . . fake, of course. . . . How did I get away with it? Well there isn’t any limit to what you can get away with in this business. Faked pictures are more convincing than real pictures because you can set them up to look real. Understand this: All pictures are faked. As soon as you have the concept of a picture there is no limit to falsification. Now here’s a picture in the paper shows a flood in China. So how do you know it’s a picture of a flood in China? How do you know he didn’t take it in his bathtub? How do you even know there was a flood in China? Because you read it in the papers. So it has to be true, if not, other reporters, other photographers . . . sure you gotta cover yourself or cut other reporters and photographers in so they get together on the story. . . .

  “Two years ago I was doing portrait photos in Saint Louis and I ran into this old lady I knew from England who is a very rich Abolitionist on a lecture tour. And the idea comes to me. I tell her what is needed to put some teeth into the Abolition movement is an incident and she puts up some front money and most of that goes to pay off the sheriff who would investigate the hanging and the doctor who would sign the death certificate, which turned out to be the birth certificate of Pecos Bridge Juanito, a fabrication out of whole paper. And I had the whole scoop . . . picture of the boy . . . interviews with his mother, who died years before he was born . . . even pictures of the posses repenting and getting born again in Jesus. . . . Not that some reporters weren’t suspicious. . . . They can smell a fake story but they couldn’t prove anything. We even had a body in the coffin just in case; young Mexican died of scarlet fever . . . the picture was the easiest part. . . . Lots of ways to fake a hanging picture or any picture, for that matter. . . . Easiest is you don’t show the feet and they are standing on something. . . . I did my shot with an elastic rope they use in carny hanging acts.” He points to the horse. . . . “There’s the only actor didn’t get paid. . . . I call him Centaur. How about a dip and a swill?”

  Sex scenes in the diary were in coded symbols like Japanese forget-me-nots flowering in the medium of memory: June 3, 1883. . . Met T at Cottonwood Junction . . . (sexual attraction and reason to believe reciprocated) . . . & (naked) . . . (erection) . . . (sodomy) . . . (ejaculation).

  Sunset through black clouds . . . red glow on naked bodies. Kim carefully wraps his revolver in a towel and places it under some weeds at the water’s edge. He puts his foot in the water and gasps. At this moment Tom streaks by him, floating above the ground in a series of still pictures, the muscles of his thigh and buttock outlined like an anatomical drawing as he runs straight into the water, silver drops fanning out from his legs.

  Kim follows, holding his breath, then swimming rapidly up and down. He treads water, breathing in gasps as the sky darkens and the water stretches black and sinister as if some monster might rise from its depths. . . . In knee-deep water, soaping themselves and looking at each other serene as dogs, their genitals crinkled from the icy water . . . drying themselves on a sandbank, wiping the sand from his feet. . . following Tom’s lean red buttocks back to the wagon. He stations Kim at the end of the wagon. . . . “Stand right there,” facing the setting sun. Tom pulls a black cloth out of the air with a flourish, bowing to an audience. He stands behind the camera with the black cloth over his head. . . . “Look at the camera . . . hands at your sides.”

  Kim could feel the phantom touch of the lens on his body, light as a breath of wind. Tom is standing naked behind the camera.

  “I want to bottle you, mate,” Tom says. Kim has never heard this expression but he immediately understands it. And he glimpses a hidden meaning, a forgotten language, sniggering half-heard words of tenderness and doom from lips spotted with decay that send the blood racing to his crotch and singing in his ears as his penis stretches, sways, and stiffens and naked lust surfaces in his face from the dark depths of human origins.

  Tom is getting hard too. The shaft is pink and smooth, no veins protruding. Now fully erect, the tip almost touches the delineated muscles of his lean red-brown stomach. At the crown of his cock, on top, is an indentation, as if the creator had left his thumbprint there in damp clay. Held in a film medium, like soft glass, they are both motionless except for the throbbing of tumescent flesh . . .

  “Hold it!” . . . CLICK . . . For six seconds the sun seems to stand still in the sky.

  Look at this picture from Tom’s collection: the Indians and the one white are all related, by location: the end of the line. Like the last Tasmanians, the Patagonians, the hairy Ainu, the passenger pigeon, they cast no shadow, because there will never be any more. This picture is the end. The mold is broken.

  This final desolate knowledge impelled them to place phalluses, crudely carved from w
ood and painted with ocher, on male graves. The markers are scattered and broken. Only the picture remains.

  Notice the Indian fourth from the left in the back row: a look of sheer panic. For he recognizes the photographer: Tom Dark, who takes the last picture and files it “Secret—Classified.” Only he knows exactly where it is in relation to all the other files, since location is everything.

  The picture itself is a cryptic glyph, an artifact out of context, fashioned for a forgotten purpose or a purpose blocked from future realization. And yet spelling out. . .

  Five passenger pigeons in a tree . . . CLICK: “The Last Passenger Pigeons.”

  KAPOW! The birds drop and flutter to the ground, feathers drifting in dawn wind.

  The Hunter looks about uneasily as he shoves the birds into his bag. It’s been a bad day. He turns to face the camera.

  CLICK: “The Last Passenger-Pigeon Hunter.”

  Spelling out. . . August 6, 1945: Hiroshima. Oppenheimer on screen: “We have become Death, Destroyer of Worlds.”

  “Doctor Oppenheimer!”

  CLICK.

  Hall reflected that he was himself the end of the Hall line, at least by the old-fashioned method of reproduction.

  “Waahhhh!”

  CLICK.

  “Awwwwwwk!!!”

  CLICK.

  Kim recruits a band of flamboyant and picturesque outlaws, called the Wild Fruits. There is the Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent.