Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  Joe had indeed brought back strange powers and knowledge from the grave, but without the one thing he had not brought back, his knowledge was of little use.

  Of course, Kim thought. When you save someone’s life, you cheat Death, and he has to even the score. Kim was aware of the danger from Joe the Dead, but he chose to ignore it. Joe never left the Cemetery, and Kim was an infrequent visitor there. Besides, vigilance was the medium in which Kim lived. The sensors at the back of his neck would warn him of a hand reaching for a knife, or other weapon.

  Joe’s only diversions were checkers and tinkering. He was a natural mechanic, and Kim worked with him on a number of weapons models which Kim conceived, leaving the details to Joe. Oh yes, leave the details to Joe. That’s right, just point your finger and say: “Bang, you’re dead”—and leave the details to Joe.

  Kim spent three years in Paris. These years extend like a vast canvas where time can be viewed simultaneously bathed in the Paris light, the painters’ light, as Kim bathed and breathed in the light of Manet and Cézanne and who are the other two that escape my mind so good at bathers and food and parasols and wineglasses and who did the marvelous picture Le Convalescent where a. maid is opening a soft-boiled egg? The painter dips his brush in the light and a soft-boiled egg, a wineglass, a fish come miraculously alive, touched by the magic of light. Kim soaked in the light and the light filled him and Paris swarmed to the light. Kim was the real thing, an authentic Western shootist. There were of course those who questioned his credentials. Kim wounded one editor in a duel.

  Kim’s first book, a luridly fictionalized account of his exploits as a bank robber, outlaw, and shootist, is entitled Quién Es? Kim posed for the illustrations. Here he is in a half-crouch holding the gun in both hands at eye level. There is an aura of deadly calm about him like the epicenter of a tornado. His face, devoid of human expression, molded by total function and purpose, blazes with an inner light.

  QUIÉN ES?

  By Kim Carsons Ghostwritten by William Hall

  “Quiéen es?”

  Last words of Billy the Kid when he walked into a dark room and saw a shadowy figure sitting there. Who is it? the answer was a bullet through the heart. When you ask Death for his credentials you are dead.

  Quiéen es?

  Who is it?

  Kim Carsons, does he exist? His existence, like any existence, is inferential. . . the traces he leaves behind him . . . fossils . . . fading violet photos, old newspaper clippings shredding to yellow dust. . . the memory of those who knew him or thought they did . . . a portrait attributed to Kim’s father, Mortimer Carsons: Kim Carsons age sixteen, December 14, 1876. . . . And this book.

  He exists in these pages as Lord Jim, the Great Gatsby, Comus Bassington, live and breathe in a writer’s prose, in the care, love, and dedication that evoke them: the flawed, doomed but undefeated, radiant heroes who attempted the impossible, stormed the citadels of heaven, took the last chance on the last and greatest of human dreams, the punch-drunk fighter who comes up off the floor to win by a knockout, the horse that comes from last to win in the stretch, assassins of Hassan i Sabbah, Master of Assassins, agents of Humwawa, Lord of Abominations, Lord of Decay, Lord of the Future, of Pan, God of Panic, of the Black Hole, where no physical laws apply, agents of a singularity. Those who are ready to leave the whole human comedy behind and walk into the unknown with no commitments. Those who have not from birth sniffed such embers, what have they to do with us? Only those who are ready to leave behind everything and everybody they have ever known need apply. No one who applies will be disqualified. No one can apply unless he is ready. Over the hills and far away to the Western Lands. Anybody gets in your way, KILL. You will have to kill on the way out because this planet is a penal colony and nobody is allowed to leave. Kill the guards and walk.

  Ghostwritten by William Hall, punch-drunk fighter, a shadowy figure to win in the answer, Master of Assassins, Death for his credentials, Lord of Quién Es? Who is it? Kim, ka of Pan, God of Panic. Greatest of human dreams, Quién es) The horse that comes from there, who is it? Lord of the future son, does he exist? Inferential agents of a singularity, the fossils fading leave the whole human comedy shredding to yellow dust. . . . Unknown with no commitments from birth.

  No one can apply unless he breathes in a writer’s prose hills and faraway Western Lands . . .

  Radiant heroes storm the citadel. . . . Kill the last guards and walk.

  Guns glint in the sun, powder smoke drifts from the pages as the Old West goes into a penny-ante peep show, false fronts, a phantom buckboard.

  Don Juan lists three obstacles or stages: Fear . . . Power . . . and Old Age. Kim thought of old men with a shudder: drooling tobacco juice, spending furtive hours in the toilet crooning over their shit. . . . The only old men that were bearable were evil old men like the Old Man of the Mountain. . . . He sees the Old Man in white robes, his eyes looking out over the valley to the south, seeking and finding enemies who would destroy his mission. He is completely alone here. His assassins are extensions of himself. . . . So Kim splits himself into many parts . . .

  He hopes to achieve a breakthrough before he has to face the terrible obstacle of old age. . . . So here is Kim making his way through the Old West to found an international Johnson Family. . . . Being a Johnson is not a question of secret rites but of belonging to a certain species. “He’s a Johnson” means that he is one of us. Migrants fighting for every inch. The way to Waghdas is hard. The great victory and the fall of Yass-Waddah are but memories now, battles long ago.

  It is said that Waghdas is reached by many routes, all of them fraught with hideous perils. Worst of all, Kim thinks, is the risk of being trapped by old age in a soiled idiot body like Somerset Maugham’s. He has shit behind the drawing-room sofa and is trying to clean it up with his hands like a guilty dog. Alan Searle stands in the doorway with the Countess . . .

  “Here’s Blintzi to see us, Willy . . . oh dear.”

  Like Beau Brummell, his rigid mask was cracking to reveal a horrible nothingness beneath.

  “Brummell would rush upon his plate and gulp down a roast in such a revolting manner that the other guests complained they were nauseated and Brummell had to be fed in his room . . .”

  And here is the mask in place. When Beau Brummell was exiled to Calais by his debts and princely displeasure, a local lady sent him an invitation to dinner and he sent back the message:

  “I am not accustomed to feed at that hour.”

  Toward the end of the month when his allowance ran out, Brummell would rush into a sweet shop and cram into his mouth everything he could reach, the old shopkeeper flailing at him and trying to wrest her wares from his fingers . . .

  “Alors, Monsieur Brummell . . . encore une fois!”

  He sometimes spent hours getting the crease of his cravat exactly right. His valet would carry out bundles of linen: “Our failures . . .”

  As he took Lady Greenfield’s arm to lead her into dinner, Maugham suddenly shrieked out as if under torture, “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

  Alan Searle leads him away, Searle’s pudgy face blank as a CIA man’s.

  Maugham would cower in a corner whimpering that he was a horrible and an evil man.

  He was, Kim reflected with the severity of youth, not evil enough to hold himself together . . .

  A friend who took care of Brummell in his last years wrote, “His condition is indescribable. No matter what I do, it is impossible to keep him clean”

  Alan Searle wrote: “The beastliness of Maugham is beyond endurance.”

  The Evening Star floats in a pond, keeping the ledger books of stale dead time.

  Kim collected last words, all he could get his hands on. He knew these words were pieces in a vast jigsaw puzzle. Big Picture, he called it. . .

  “Quién es?” Who is it? Last words of Billy the Kid when he walked into a dark room where Pat Garrett shot him.

  “God damn you, if I can’t get you off my land one
way I will another.” Last words of Pat Garrett. As he said them he reached for a shotgun under his buckboard and Brazil shot him once in the heart and once between the eyes. They had been engaged in a border argument.

  “It is raining, Anita Huffington.” Last words of General Grant, spoken to his nurse.

  “Yes I have reentered you long ago.”

  “Quiéen es?”

  Through the years, through the dead tinkling lull, the gradual dusky veil distant youth blushing brightness falls from the air.

  “Quién es?”

  Rocks and stones and trees the little toy soldiers the thoughts of youth . . .

  “Quién es?” No motion has he now no force he neither hears nor sees . . . “God damn you, if I can’t get you off my land one way I will another.” Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees. “It is raining, Anita Huffington.” “How sleep the brave who sink to rest by all their country’s wishes bless’d! . . .”

  “Quién es?” Helpless pieces in the game he plays.

  “God damn you, if I can’t get you off my land one way I will another.” On this checkerboard of nights and days. “It is raining, Anita Huffington.” Confused alarms of struggle and flight. “Quién es?” Hither and thither moves and checks and slays. “God damn you, if I can’t get you off my land one way I will another.” And one by one back in the closet lays.

  “It is raining, Anita Huffington.” Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  Cold dewy fingers . . . a tinted photo.

  Ledger book shining in the sky . . . Big Picture, he calls the rearranged fragments. . . . “Quién es?” Last of Kim’s inventions . . . Leaves whisper, “Hello, Anita Huffington.”

  The guide traces the area on the map with his finger. . . . “The Place of Dead Roads, señor. 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, señor 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 grey 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 policía 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 invisiblity. 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.

  “One peso, Meester. Him fruitñsh.” 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 endless 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-guage loaded with buckshot. We are passing a joint back and forth.

  Every day the river is wider. We are drifting into a vast delta with islands of swamp cypress, freshwater sharks stir in the dark water. The guide looks at his charts. The fish here are sluggish and covered with fungus. We are eating our stores of salt beef and dried fish and vitamin pills. We are in a dead-end slough, land ahead on all sides.

  And there is a pier. We moor the boat and step ashore. There is a path leading from the pier, weed-grown but easy to follow.

  “And what is a dead road? Well, señor, somebody you used to meet, un amigo, tal vez . . .”

  Remember a red brick house on Jane Street? Your breath quickens as you mount the worn red-carpeted stairs. . . . The road to 4 calle Larachi, Tangier, or 24 Arundle Terrace in London? So many dead roads you will never use again . . . a flickering grey haze of old photos . . . pools of darkness in the street like spilled ink . . . a dim movie marquee with smoky yellow bulbs . . . red-haired boy with a dead-white face.

  The guide points to a map of South America. “Here, señor. . . is the Place of Dead Roads.”

  Just ahead a ruined jetty . . . some large sluggish fish stirs at our approach with a swish and a glimpse of a dark shape moving into deeper water . . .

  We step ashore . . . through the broken walls and weeds of a deserted garden . . . dilapidated arches. . . . A boy, eyes clotted with dreams, fills his water jug from a stagnant well.

  So in what guise shall he return to the New World as if he were coming from the Old World, which in fact he is, since his footsteps are vanishing behind him like prints in heavy snow or windblown sand.

  “Our chaps are jolly good,” Tony told him. “Any passport, any part you fancy, old thing . . .”

  A rich traveler of uncertain nationality . . . with a Vaduz passport.

  Name: Kurt van Worten

  Occupation: Businessman

  And what business is Mr. van Worten in? Difficult to pin down. But wherever he opens his briefcase, disaster slides out. The market crashes, currencies collapse, bread
lines form. War clouds gather. An austere gilt-edged card with a banking address in Vaduz . . .

  The passport picture catches the petulant expression of the rich. It can be counterfeited. Just look sour and petulant and annoyed at everything in sight. At the slightest delay give little exasperated gasps. It is well from time to time to snarl like a cat. And a handkerchief redolent of disinfectant can be placed in front of the face if any sort of creature gets too close. And spend long hours in deck chairs with dark glasses and a lap robe, silent as a shark. Just do it long enough and money will simply cuddle around you.

  Hall sips his drink and picks up another envelope. Mr. van Worten, he feels, would prove a bit confining, and he is not intrigued by the mysteries of high finance. Something more raffish, disreputable, shameless. . . . It is pleasant to roll in vileness like a dog rolls in carrion, is it not?

  A con man who calls himself Colonel Parker, with the sleek pomaded smug expression of a man who has just sold the widow a fraudulent peach orchard. His cold predatory eyes scan the dining room from the Captain’s table . . .

  An impoverished Polish intellectual from steerage trying to conceal his tubercular cough and the stink of cold doss houses he carries with him like a haze. One expects to see typhus lice crawling on his frayed dirty collar. . . . too uncomfortable . . .

  The door to another dimension may open when the gap between what one is expected to feel and what one actually does feel rips a hole in the fabric. Years ago I was driving along Price Road and I thought how awful it would be to run over a dog or, my God, a child, and have to face the family and portray the correct emotions. When suddenly a figure wrapped in a cloak of darkness appeared with a dead child under one arm and slapped it down on a porch: