Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  I land in a catwalk open to my left. Walking down, I see a door at the end of the walkway, about six feet wide and eight feet high. Outside the door a boy in a grey sweatsuit is working at something I can’t see, with his back to me. I feel he is hostile, and I couldn’t care less. The door opens and a man emerges. He is wearing a very dark blue striped suit, with a tie. He has a black mustache. He looks at me without a trace of friendliness or hostility. Just registering my presence. No one I ever saw before. Out to my left there is a ditch about thirty feet below the ramp where I am standing. Beyond that some pine trees and what looks like a cemetery . . . mausoleums with inscriptions embossed in white stone . . .

  Had I gone down there (sorry—time to wake up . . .) I might have found my own name in stone relief, like the stained-glass window in a church in Citronelle, Alabama:

  SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF

  WILLIAM SEWARD BURROUGHS

  My grandfather, whom of course I never saw, died here in Citronelle, of tuberculosis, aged forty-one.

  The beautiful mausoleum is empty.

  I am in my pajamas at a discontinued subway stop.

  Now with James Grauerholz rushing through subway stations with inhuman speed and agility. Jumping across tracks, down stairways, floating through turnstiles . . . and here we are at Johnson’s store, open-air booths with counters on four sides.

  * * *

  So here I am in the Land of the Dead with Mikey Portman. We are sharing an apartment which consists of two rooms with a bathroom between them. Mikey’s room is also provided with a sleeping porch. There are two beds side by side and touching each other, lumpy-looking mattresses, throw rugs, eiderdowns, cushions covered in tattered, frayed yellow and gold velvet. Looks like the madam’s room in a whorehouse, lacking only an asthmatic Pekingese. It seems an old German lady with tight lace collar and high-button, black shoes has been billeted on us for the night.

  Mikey is on the sleeping porch wrapped up in a pink blanket. I tell him he should let her sleep on one of the beds. After all, he can retire to the sleeping porch. And I have assurances she will not even remove her clothes.

  “No, I don’t want her in here.”

  “Well, you can stay on the porch. There are two beds.”

  “I might want to sleep in here.”

  No use. Death hasn’t changed him a bit; the same selfish, self-centered, spoiled, petulant, weak Mikey Portman.

  Now I see a small black dog peeking out of the bathroom door which is ajar . . . dog all black, shiny black . . . with a long pointed muzzle quivering like a dowser wand.

  “Where did that door dog come from? What is it doing here?”

  “Does it matter?” Distilled concentrate of petulant Portman.

  “Door man . . . door dog,” I say.

  He doesn’t answer. Obviously I will have to billet the old German lady in my room, which is a duplicate of his room except the beds are smaller.

  On a plane and it is going down and I know this is reality.

  No feeling of a dream . . . we are going down. Passengers across the aisle are all standing up now to see something I can’t see because they block my view.

  However, the plane lands safely and we disembark on a city street that looks like the Main in Montréal.

  “I’m a dreamer Montréal?”

  A painting tells a story but viewed from different time and positions simultaneously. Cézanne shows a pear seen close up, at a distance, from various angles and in different light. . . the pear at dawn, midday, twilight. . . all compacted into one pear . . . time and space in a pear, an apple, a fish. Still life? No such thing. As he paints, the pear is ripening, rotting, shrinking, swelling.

  An example from my own painting: A flooded, washed-out bridge seen from the side. An approaching truck seen head-on from a distance, the moment when the driver sees that the bridge is gone, a close-up of his face, the fear and calculations written on his face as he unhooks the seat belt. Applies the brakes. All happening at the same time so far as the viewer is concerned.

  Take a picture by Brion Gysin: “Outskirts of Marrakech.” Phantom motor scooters and bicycles. Solid scooters and bicycles. A place where the painter had been many times at, many different times. As he walks he sees a scooter from yesterday, last year. Perhaps from tomorrow as well, since he is painting from a position above time.

  And so dreams tell stories, many stories. I am writing a story, if it could be so called, about the Mary Celeste. I am painting scenes from the story I am writing. And I am dreaming about the Mary Celeste, the dreams feeding back into my writing and painting. A burst of fresh narrative: the Celestial Babies and the Azore Islands . . . digression and parentheses, other data seemingly unrelated to the saga of the Mary Celeste, now another flash of story . . . a long parenthesis. Stop. Change. Start.

  Should I tidy up, put things in a rational sequential order? Mary Celeste data together? Flying dreams together? Land of the Dead dreams together? Packing dreams together? To do so would involve a return to the untenable position of an omniscient observer in a timeless vacuum. But the observer is observing other data, associations flashing backward and forward.

  For example, I just remembered a dream where I met a man called Slim I allegedly knew thirty years ago in London. Slim? I don’t remember. Thirty years ago? A dull ache . . . “old unhappy far-off things” . . . I meet Slim at the doorway of some apartment. What does he look like? Grey, anonymous face dimmed out of focus? What is he wearing? Grey suit, grey tie, suggestion of scarf and a watch chain.

  You see, I am seeing him as he was thirty years ago, five years ago, yesterday, today . . . like Brion’s motor scooter in Marrakech. So I should put Slim back there in the paragraph about Brion’s Marrakech painting? I don’t think so. Who runs can read.

  I am using myself as a reference point of view to assess current and future trends. This is not megalomania. It is simply the only measuring artifact available. Observer William: 023. Trends can be compacted into one word . . . GAP. Widening GAPs. GAP between 023 and those who can club seal cubs to death, set cats on fire, shoot out the eyes of lemurs with slingshots. (Oh sure, they are poor and hungry. From 023 they can get poorer and hungrier: 023 doesn’t care if they starve to death. There is no empathy, no common ground.) Those who say: “I think animals are a splendid tool for research.” . . . Most of it quite useless. But so it does save lives. Human lives. Too many already. . . 023 doesn’t care. He contributes to Greenpeace, the Primate Center at Duke University, to “no-kill” animal shelters. Not a dime for cancer research!

  GAP between 023 and antidrug hysterics like Daryl Gates, Chief of Police of Los Angeles, who says casual pot users should be taken out and shot, and someone named Davey in an article in SWAT: “All drug dealers, no matter how young, should be summarily executed. They are murderers many times over.” (Like cigarette companies?) In the same category are Paki bashers, queer bashers, and anyone with a “Kill a Queer for Christ” sticker on his heap.

  Nigger killers, raw material for lynch mobs, the Bible Belt, the fundamental Muslims—023 feels nothing for these specimens. GAP.

  World leaders catering to the stupid and the bigoted. Bush says the drug war has united us as a nation. Of finks and lunatics? What do they care what someone else does in his own room? No skin off them.

  GAP. 023 don’t like liars. And lying comes natural as breathing to a politician.

  The leaders are desperately trying to achieve a standard and malleable human product. But instead, by enforced proximity, the irreconcilable differences of interest and basic orientation are constantly reinforced and aggravated.

  Fact is Homo Sap is fracturing into subspecies: 023 predicts that this trend of separation will continue and escalate and will be reflected in basic biological differences rather sooner than later.

  The leaders, cut off from any intelligent and perceptive observers, will lose control. The motions they go through, the convergences and agreements, will have less and less relation to actual events.
This is already happening in Russia. Another trend that will continue and escalate geometrically.

  The violent bigots will become more and more bestial, degenerating into a hideous subspecies of vicious and graceless baboons.

  “We know our duty.”

  “Vast army of purple-assed baboons.”

  The scientists will continue to reject the evidence with regard to ESP and UFOs and withdraw into academic vacuums.

  GAP. GAP. GAP.

  The dream I am about to relate illustrates the inadequacy of words when there are simply no equivalent meanings. To begin with, it is not a dream in the usual sense, being totally alien to any waking experience. A vision? No, not that either. A visit is the closest I can come. I was there. If I could draw or paint with accuracy, or better still, if I had a camera . . .

  Walking down a passageway. The whole area seems to be enclosed—by inference, that is: I never see the sky or anything beyond. I look up and see a handsome boy of about nineteen on a balcony with an older youth about twenty-three or so. The balcony is about thirty feet above the passageway, and the building is red brick. Someway, I get up on the balcony. Behind is a small room with several other people.

  The boy is wearing a white shirt with a yellow tie. Now the older youth takes a crossbow, though instead of the bow sticking out on both sides, it is set vertically on the shaft. He puts the bow between the boy’s legs—there is an arrow in the bow (double-edge hunting arrow, thirteen inches long and two inches at the base) pointed up to the boy’s groin—and pulls the trigger. For some reason the arrow does not hit the boy. I gather this is some sort of test and I am next. I stand without flinching. The bowman says I have passed the test and that now I am one of them. We shake hands.

  There is one there who has not passed the test. He is more like a doll than a person, with what appears to be a detachable head. Next, we form a line, one behind the other, and they are showing me how our muscles can become attuned so we are one body. There is a further lesson which I do not understand, involving balance or movement. I want to explore further but want to return later. So I make a note of the spot.

  I look down the passageway, which is somewhat like an airport, and walk down. At the end to my right, I come to a square about sixty feet on each side. White stone buildings around the three sides but no windows or doors. Just a few slots or round openings.

  Someway this square was connected with the Christian religion. I can see nobody but I feel that there are eyes watching me. Around the walls of the square are what appear to be glass ornaments of some kind, but I can’t be sure they are made of glass, nor do I have any clear idea as to what they look like.

  I leave the square to the left and there is an area like a living room or a waiting room with potted plants and two people sitting on a couch, one of whom looks vaguely like Jacques Stern, and I ask if his name is Stern. Others gather around: one has a strange, large, white face and a smile that seems painted on. He is formal with me and wishes to introduce himself, but I don’t catch the name. I think I should get back to the place where I made a connection and was received.

  But I look, now, down a side street and some distance away is a very high building . . . perhaps seven hundred to a thousand feet high, surrounded by other buildings in some red stone. It looks very alien and magnificent and I want to see the large buildings from inside. The roof is shaped like an arch . . . like a huge Quonset hut.

  I come to a door in yellow oak which I push open . . . down a large hallway into a large room. But this is not the inside of the large building. Not nearly high enough. But still quite large. There are a number of people there, moving around, engaged in incomprehensible pursuits. I am attacked viciously by a small dog which is biting my hand. It hurts. I manage to transfer the dog’s jaws to another small dog, wirehaired and black.

  I am sitting by a round cage . . . like a zoo aviary. In the cage there are a number of people dressed in some ceremonial costumes. They are, I gather, a presidium. Sitting next to me on a high stool or chair is a tiny boy, not more than a foot high, but thick and with a large head. His face is perfectly smooth, like ceramic. A very handsome and perfect face. He does not move or speak. I walk away, towards a door, still trying to find the inside of the large building. Turning, I see a boy four feet tall with an inhumanly beautiful face and a buckskin jacket. . . like a figure in my painting “The Magic Rose Garden.”

  I’ve seen him with just a glance over my shoulder. Did he notice? I don’t think so. In fact no one in this area has acknowledged my presence. Except the dog. The miniature boy or man sitting beside me could have been a ceramic statue. No movement, not even blinking.

  I open a door, which leads to a square, boxlike room about fifty feet on each side by forty feet high. The walls and floor are white, but unlike Christian Square, this looks like white polished wood and the room is definitely closed at the top, unlike the stone square, which is open on top . . . though I could not see the sky. This wooden room reminds me of a surrealist painting of birdhouses and running figures in the distance. There is a humming sound and the room communicates a strident menace. As if something could pop out of the walls on springs or the room could suddenly shrink down to a birdhouse.

  I wake up but it is more like a return. In this experience I have no feeling of dreaming. It is completely real. I am there. It is also definitely alien and unpleasantly so. I have no feeling of being in control, especially not in the two white squares. Both communicate potential danger—incalculable danger. Note that there is no line between streets and private house—all doors seem to be open. This line is a convention of Planet Earth and does not apply in these areas.

  Private rooms? Streets? What do these distinctions mean?

  Billy was in bed, sick, in a bare room with a river outside. There is no wall to the room on the side facing the river. I had observed two Phoenicians standing on the ice floes. It looks very precarious, I suppose they are swept out to sea? Well, at least they have oars and are quite close to shore.

  Billy is in a large bed with a brown blanket. Dr. John Dent is the attending physician. I feel that Dr. Dent is not taking as serious a view of the case as the symptoms warrant. I suggest that Billy has a skin condition. The previous day I had read an article on Paul Klee, who suffered from some skin disease called scleroderma which turned his skin into a kind of armor.

  I leave the room and walk down a short corridor into another room. A small room with a low arched ceiling of oval shape, the ceiling arching downward so that it touched the floor at the ends of the room, and there were also little niches in the wall. The whole room was in white plaster, like a tomb, and I began to fear that the door would close and seal behind me. A recurrent nightmare in which I go down stairs that get narrower and narrower and then a door closes behind me. Sometimes the cul-de-sac is a room rather than stairs. I have learned to avoid these traps in my dreams. So now I hastily step back through the door and down the corridor.

  Meanwhile the house has become a ship. I have a ticket and I enter the room where Billy was, which is now carpeted in red, with my baggage. Someone tells me to get off the stage. This is a film, and I can feel the boat moving as I step back into the wings.

  The boat stops. There is no boat. Just the empty house and the white plaster walls. I walk down the corridor and through the rooms. Nobody has been here for a long time. I am overwhelmed by desolation and sadness, and wake up groaning.

  * * *

  Since a number of dreams are set in the house at Price Road, 700 South Price Road, I will indicate how that house was, and probably still is, laid out: Ground floor, front door opens into hall. To the left of door, dining room. Behind dining room is kitchen and servant quarters and back door. To the right is living room. Upstairs a back room with two beds, two closets, and a window on three sides, where Mort and I lived and slept. Bathroom and guest room. Above living room is room where Dad and Mother slept. Bathroom. Balcony opening onto garden.

  Last night, dream David Budd
is with me in back room. Since he often signs his letters “Brother Budd,” association is obvious. In dream there is only one large bed. I suggest he use bed in parental bedroom, and we go there. Coming from bathroom is radio broadcast. I think it is a newscast. David Budd is telling me about an island off the coast of Florida. Name is something like Sploetti. He says very nasty people live there.

  I find myself there in the capacity of a hospital administrator. Forty beds, two occupied by women patients. I ask if they would like a shot of morphine. They say they would. Looking for narco cabinet. An orderly shows me that you press a button and it opens. Vials with screw tops. Can’t assemble injections. Any case, nobody challenges my incumbency.

  Looking back through old dream notes I find:

  With David Budd in East St. Louis. Tunnels under drugstore. Old hotel. Five little dogs. I suspect them to be door dogs, small dogs who bring death or misfortune when they follow someone across a threshold. East St. Louis is a rundown place with strata from the 1920s and back to the riverboat days. Rural slums . . . corn growing in backyards. Sidewalks with weeds growing through cracked pavement. On one side a fifteen-foot drop with limestone and jagged masonry outcropping to vacant lot. Weeds, brambles, broken masonry and bricks. Whorehouses and gambling joints. Still a heroin drop, I understand.

  In the room at Price Road. I find there is someone in bed with me. First I think, Can it be my cat Ruski, but much too big. It’s a man! I keep saying “Mort! Mort!” Can it be Mort, who slept in the bed across the room? But it isn’t. I see his face finally, an ugly wooden face. It is dark in the room, but looking to the east I see it is daylight outside . . . blue sky and sunlight. I am trying to get the blinds up to let the light in.