Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  “What’s the matter, somebody take your lollipop?”

  “Oh señor, I am sorry for you . . .”

  And the Priest, who goes into a gunfight giving his adversaries the last rites. And the Blind Gun, who zeroes in with bat squeaks. And the famous Shittin’ Sheriff, turned outlaw. At the sight of his opponent he turns green with fear and sometimes loses control of his bowels. Well, there’s an old adage in show biz: the worse the stage fright, the better the performance.

  Kim trains his men to identify themselves with death. He takes some rookie guns out to a dead horse rotting in the sun, eviscerated by vultures. Kim points to the horse, steaming there in the noonday heat.

  “All right, roll in it.”

  “WHAT?”

  “Roll in it like dogs of war. Get the stink of death into your chaps and your boots and your guns and your hair.”

  Most of us puked at first, but we got used to it, and vultures followed us around hopefully.

  We always ride into town with the wind behind us, a wheeling cloud of vultures overhead, beaks snapping. The townspeople gag and retch:

  “My God, what’s that stink?”

  “It’s the stink of death, citizens.”

  Kim had now gone underground and in any case the days of the gunfighter were over. So far as the world knew, he was just a forgotten chapter in western history. He was d-e-a-d. So who would move against him, or even know about the Alamuts he was establishing throughout America and northern Mexico? He had in fact taken pains to remain anonymous and dispatched his henchmen to remove records of the Fort Johnson Incident from libraries, newspaper morgues and even from private collections of old western lore. . . . So who now would know where he was and reveal themselves by moves against him? He decided to wait and see. The first settlement, a resort hotel at Clear Creek, demonstrated that they did know and were already dispatching their agents to intercept the project. It’s rather like bullfighting, he reflected. If the bull can get a querencia where he feels at home, then the bullfighter has to go and get him on his own ground, so the alert bull sticker will do anything to keep the bull from finding a querencia. In fact some unethical practitioners have small boys posted with slingshots . . .

  Well things start to go wrong. Right away there are delays in shipments of material. These were traced to a warehouse in Saint Louis and a certain shipping clerk who was later found to be suffering from a form of petit mal with spells of amnesia. A small boy brought charges of molestation against the foreman of construction. When the boy became violently insane the charges were dropped, but not before a drummer had attempted to incite the townspeople to form a lynch mob.

  But an old farmer who was one of our own said, “You live hereabouts, Mister? Wouldn’t say so from your accent. . .”

  “Well I live north of here . . .”

  “You a country boy?”

  “Well I was. . . that is. . .”

  “From Chicago, ain’t you?”

  A murmur from the crowd. The drummer is losing his audience.

  “We have children in Chicago too . . .”

  “Well whyn’t you stay up there and protect your children ‘stead of selling your lousy war-surplus hog fencing down here?”

  Kim now realizes that they can take over bodies and minds and use them for their purposes. So why do they always take over stupid, bigoted people or people who are retarded or psychotic? Obviously they are looking for dupes and slaves, not for intelligent allies. In fact their precise intention is to destroy human intelligence, to blunt human awareness and to block human beings out of space. What they are launching is an extermination program. And anyone who has sufficient insight to suspect the existence of a they is a prime target.

  He listed the objectives and characteristics of the aliens . . .

  They support any dogmatic religious system that tends to stupefy and degrade the worshipers. They support the Slave Gods. They want blind obedience, not intelligent assessment. They stand in the way of every increase in awareness. They only conceded a round earth and allowed the development of science to realize the even more stupefying potential of the Industrial Revolution.

  They support any dogmatic authority. They are the archconservatives.

  They lose no opportunity to invert human values. They are always self-righteous. They have to be right because in human terms they are wrong. Objective assessment drives them to hysterical frenzy.

  They are parasitic. They live in human minds and bodies.

  The Industrial Revolution, with its overpopulation and emphasis on quantity rather than quality, has given them a vast reservoir of stupid bigoted uncritical human hosts. The rule of the majority is to their advantage since the majority can always be manipulated.

  Their most potent tool of manipulation is the word. The inner voice.

  They will always support any measures that tend to stultify the human host. They will increase the range of arbitrary and dogmatic authority. They will move to make alcohol illegal. They will move to regulate the possession of firearms. They will move to make drugs illegal.

  They are more at home occupying women than men. Once they have a woman, they have the male she cohabits with. Women must be regarded as the principal reservoir of the alien virus parasite. Women and religious sons of bitches. Above all, religious women.

  We will take every opportunity to weaken the power of the church. We will lobby in Congress for heavy taxes on all churches. We will provide more interesting avenues for the young. We will destroy the church with ridicule. We will secularize the church out of existence. We will introduce and encourage alternative religious systems. Islam, Buddhism, Taoism. Cults, devil worship, and rarefied systems like the Ishmaelite and the Manichaean. Far from seeking an atheistic world as the communists do, we will force Christianity to compete for the human spirit.

  We will fight any extension of federal authority and support States” Rights. We will resist any attempt to penalize or legislate against the so-called victimless crimes . . . gambling, sexual behavior, drinking, drugs.

  We will give all our attention to experiments designed to produce asexual offspring, to cloning, use of artificial wombs, and transfer operations.

  We will endeavor to halt the Industrial Revolution before it is too late, to regulate populations at a reasonable point, to eventually replace quantitative money with qualitative money, to decentralize, to conserve resources. The Industrial Revolution is primarily a virus revolution, dedicated to controlled proliferation of identical objects and persons. You are making soap, you don’t give a shit who buys your soap, the more the soapier. And you don’t give a shit who makes it, who works in your factories. Just so they make soap.

  Killed in the Manhattan Shoot-out. . . April 3, 1894 . . . Sharp smell of weeds from old westerns.

  Christmas 1878, Wednesday. . . Eldora, Colo. . . . William Hall takes a book bound in leather from a drawer and leafs through the pages. It is a scrapbook with sketches, photos, newspaper articles, dated annotations. Postscript by William Hall:

  The Wild Fruits, based in Clear Creek and Fort Johnson, control a large area of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. Like latter-day warlords, they exact tribute from settlers and townspeople and attract adventurous youth to their ranks.

  Mr. Hart starts a Press campaign.

  QUANTRILL RIDES AGAIN

  How long are peaceful settlers and townspeople to be victimized by a brazen band of marauding outlaws? Wallowing in nameless depravity, they have set themselves above the laws of God and man.

  Wires are pulled in Washington. The army is called in to quell this vicious revolt against the constituted government of the United States.

  In charge of the expedition is Colonel Greenfield, a self-styled Southern Gentleman, with long yellow hair and slightly demented blue eyes. He has vowed to capture and summarily hang the Wild Fruits. His cavalry regiment with artillery and mortars has surrounded Fort Johnson, where the outlaws have gone to ground. The Colonel surveys the fort throug
h his field glasses. No sentries in the watchtowers, no sign of life. From the flagpole flies Old Glory, a cloth skunk, tail raised, cleverly stitched in.

  “FILTHY FRUITS!”

  The Colonel raises his sword. Artillery opens up, blowing the gate off its hinges. With wild yipes, the regiment charges. As the Colonel sweeps through the gate, horses rear and whinny, eyes wild. There is a reek of death. Crumpled bodies are strewn about the courtyard. From a gallows dangle effigies of Colonel Greenfield, Old Man Bickford, and Mr. Hart. From the crotch of each effigy juts an enormous wooden cock with a spring inside jiggling up and down as the dummies swing in the afternoon wind.

  “They’re all dead, sir.”

  “Are you sure?”

  The Sergeant claps a handkerchief over his face in answer.

  Colonel Greenfield points to the gallows.

  “Get that down from there!”

  A cloud of dust is rapidly approaching . . .

  “It’s the press, sir!”

  The reporters ride in yelping like cossacks. Some even swing down from balloons as they swarm over the fort, snapping pictures.

  “I forbid . . .”

  Too late, Colonel. . . . The story was front-page round the world with pictures of the dead outlaws. . . . (Hart and Bickford managed to kill the gallows pictures.) Seems the Wild Fruits had died from a poison potion, the principal ingredient of which was aconite. A week later the whole thing was forgotten. More than forgotten: excised, erased . . . Mr. Hart saw to that. The effigies had accomplished the purpose for which they had been designed.

  Rumors persisted . . . soldiers had found an escape tunnel . . . the bodies found were not Kim and his followers but migrant Mexican workers who had died in a flash flood . . .

  From time to time over the years stories bobbed up in Sunday supplements:

  Mass Suicide or Massive Hoax?

  The outlaws had disbanded and scattered. Colonel Greenfield, unable to accomplish his mission, faked the whole suicide story and buried fifty mannikins. . . . Kim, Boy, and Marbles keep turning up from Siberia to Timbuctu.

  * * *

  William Seward Hall. . . he was a corridor, a hall leading to many doors. He remembered the long fugitive years after the fall of Waghdas, the knowledge inside him like a sickness. The migrations, the danger, the constant alertness . . . the furtive encounters with others who had some piece of the knowledge, the vast picture puzzle slowly falling into place.

  Time to be up and gone. You are not paid off to be quiet about what you know; you are paid not to find it out. And in his case it was too late. If he lived long enough he couldn’t help finding it out, because that was the purpose of his life . . . a guardian of the knowledge and of those who could use it. And a guardian must be ruthless in defense of what he guards.

  And he developed new ways of imparting the knowledge to others. The old method of handing it down by word of mouth, from master to initiate, is now much too slow and too precarious (Death reduces the College). So he concealed and revealed the knowledge in fictional form. Only those for whom the knowledge is intended will find it.

  William Seward Hall, the man of many faces and many pen names, of many times and places . . . how dull it is to pause, to make a rest, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use . . . pilgrim of adversity and danger, shame and sorrow. The Traveler, the Scribe, most hunted and fugitive of men, since the knowledge unfolding in his being spells ruin to our enemies. He will soon be in a position to play the deadliest trick of them all . . . The Piper Pulled Down the Sky. His hand will not hesitate.

  He has known capture and torture, abject fear and shame, and humiliations that burn like acid. His hand will not hesitate to use the sword he is forging, an antimagnetic artifact that cuts word and image to fragments . . . The Council of Transmigrants in Waghdas had attained such skill in the art of prophecy that they were able to chart a life from birth to death, and so can he unplot, and unwrite. Oh, it may take a few hundred years before some people find out they have been unwritten and unplotted into random chaos . . .

  Meanwhile, he has every contract on the planet out on him. The slow, grinding contract of age and emptiness . . . the sharp vicious contract of spiteful hate . . . heavy corporate contracts . . . “The most dangerous man in the world.”

  And to what extent did he succeed? Even to envisage success on this scale is a victory. A victory from which others may envision further.

  There is not a breathing of the common wind

  that will forget thee;

  Thy friends are exaltations, agonies and love,

  and man’s inconquerable mind.

  Hall’s face and body were not what one expects in a sedentary middle-aged man. The face was alert and youthful, accustomed to danger and at the same time tired. The danger had gone on so long it had become routine. Yet his actual life was comparatively uneventful. The scene of battle was within, a continual desperate war for territorial advantage, with long periods of stalemate . . . a war played out on the chessboard of his writings, as bulletins came back from the front lines, which constantly altered position and intensity. Yesterday’s position desperately held is today’s laundromat and supermarket. Time and banality hit the hardest blows.

  The absence of any immediate danger masks the deadliest attack. “It is always war,” Hall had been told by a lady disciple of Sri Aurobindo, whose last words were: “It is all over.” She meant quite simply that Planet Earth is by its nature and function a battlefield. Happiness is a by-product of function in a battle context: hence the fatal error of utopians.

  (I didn’t ask for this fight, Kim reflects, or maybe I did. Just like Hassan i Sabbah asked for the expeditions sent out against him just because he wanted to occupy a mountain and train a few adepts. There is nothing more provocative than minding your own business.)

  Kim sees his life as a legend and it is very much Moses in the bullrushes, the Prince deprived of his birthright and therefore hated and feared by the usurpers.

  I shall be off with the wild geese in the stale smell of morning.

  Time to be up and be gone. Time to settle his account with Mike Chase.

  Kim breaks camp and rides into El Rito. He knows that Mike is in Santa Fe and he sends along a message through his Mexican contacts.

  TO CONFIRM APPOINTMENT FOR SEPTEMBER 17, 4:30 P.M. AT THE CEMETERY, BOULDER, COLORADO.

  KIM CARSONS, M.D.

  Kim knows that Mike will not meet him on equal footing. Well two can play at that.

  (More than two.)

  Guy Graywood arrived from New York. He had found just the place. A bank building on the Bowery. Maps rolled out on the table. Graywood is a tall slim ash-blond man with a cool, incisive manner. He is a lawyer and an accountant, occupying much the same position in the Johnson Family as a Mafia consigliere. He is in charge of all business and legal arrangements and is consulted on all plans including assassinations. He is himself an expert assassin, having taken the Carsons Weapons course, but he doesn’t make a big thing of it.

  It is time to check out the Cemetery accounts. Joe the Dead, who runs the Cemetery, owes his life to Kim.

  Kim’s Uncle Waring once told him that if you have saved someone’s life he will try to kill you. Hmmm. Kim was sure of Joe’s loyalty and honesty. Joe wouldn’t steal a dime and Kim knew it. . .

  Well he’d saved Joe’s life in his professional capacity, and that made a difference. It was shortly after Kim got his license from the correspondence school and set himself up in the practice of medicine. He specialized in police bullets and such illegal injuries. When they brought Joe in, his left hand was gone at the wrist, the clothing burned off the left side of his body above the waist, and third-degree burns on the upper torso and neck. The left eye was luckily intact. . . . The tourniquet had slipped and he was bleeding heavily. The numbness that follows trauma was just wearing off and the groans starting, pushed out from the stomach, a totally inhuman sound, once you hear it you will remember that sound and what it means.
r />   The same rock-steady hands, cool nerve, and timing that made Kim deadly in a gunfight also make him an excellent practicing surgeon. In one glance he has established a priority of moves. . . . Morphine first or the other moves might be too late. He draws off three quarter-grains into a syringe from a bottle with a rubber top and injects it. As he puts down the syringe he is already reaching for the tourniquet to tighten it. . . . Quickly puts some ligatures on the larger veins . . . then makes a massive saline injection into the vein of the right arm . . . cleans the burned area with disinfecting solutions and applies a thick paste of tea leaves. . . . It was touch and go. At one point Joe’s vital signs were zero, and Kim massaged the heart. Finally the heart pumps again. . . . One wrong move in the series and it wouldn’t have started again.

  The deciding factor was Kim’s decision to administer morphine before stopping the hemorrhage . . . another split second of that pain would have meant shock, circulatory collapse, and death.

  Joe recovered but he could never look at nitro again. He had brought back strange powers from the frontiers of death. He could often foretell events. He had a stump on his left wrist that could accommodate various tools and weapons.

  His precognitive gift stands him and his in good stead. Once a stranger walks into the hotel . . . Joe takes one look, comes up with a sawed-off, and blows the stranger’s face off. Stranger was on the way to kill Joe and Kim . . .

  “I didn’t like his face,” Joe said.

  “Missed your calling,” Kim told him. “Should have been a plastic surgeon.”

  Joe the Dead was saved from death by morphine, and morphine remained the only thing holding him to life. It was as if Joe’s entire body, his being, had been amputated and reduced to a receptacle for pain. Hideously scarred, blind in one eye, he gave off a dry, scorched smell, like burnt plastic and rotten oranges. He had constructed and installed an artifical nose, with gold wires connected to his odor centers, and a radio set for smell-waves, with a range of several hundred yards. Not only was his sense of smell acute, it was also selective. He could smell smells that no one else had ever dreamed, and these smells had a logic, a meaning, a language. He could smell death on others, and could predict the time and manner of death. Death casts many shadows, and they all have their special smells.