William S. Burroughs

by The Place of Dead Roads

  He exists in these pages as Lord Jim, the Great Gatsby, Co-mus 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 Quien Es? Who is it? Kim, ka of Pan, God of Panic. Greatest of human dreams, Quien 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. .. .

  "Quien 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."

  "Quien es?"

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

  "Quien es?"

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

  "Quien es?" No motion has he now no forces 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!..."

  "Quien 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. "Quien 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..."Quien es?" Last of Kim's inventions...Leaves whisper, "Hello, Anita Huffington."

  2

  It is time for Kim's Arab assignment and he will need perfect Arabic without a trace of foreign accent. Language sense is like card sense. Some people have it, some don't. Reading is one thing, speaking another. Kim's guess that language operates on the virus principle of replication has been verified in the Linguistic Institute located outside Paris. Any language can now be conveyed directly by a series of injections.

  The Institute is dedicated to studying the origin, function and future of language. As in physics and mathematics, the most abstract data may prove to be the most practical...Matter into energy...Word back to virus. Students are taught such seemingly useless skills as talking backward or talking at supersonic speed. They can talk right along with you and finish at the same time with precise mimicry of every syllable. It's a most disconcerting performance that can reduce a speaker to...stammer slobber glob glub...and the students are all expert ventriloquists.

  Kim is waiting to see the doctor. The Chief was vague about Kim's assignment except to say that we could be very close to a final solution of the language problem and that Kim's assignment could be a crucial step. Kim knows that language shots can be very painful,
especially for those who are not good natural linguists...The doctor looks younger than his twenty-eight years. He is thin and sandy-haired and keeps running his hands through his hair as he talks.

  "Some shots are a lot more difficult than others. French Spanish tres muy facil...Maybe you need to rest up for a day or two.. .. But when it comes to oriental languages you are using a whole different set of muscles and neural patterns...so you're bound to have a sore throat, just like your legs are sore after riding a horse for the first time...And Arabic is frankly the worst...It literally cuts an English-speaking throat...Spitting blood is one of the symptoms, though not necessarily the worst...It is the stutter of neural response—remember when you first tried to row a gondola? The way you couldn't possibly get it, and your muscles knotted up and you were just making spastic gestures with the oar and the feeling in your stomach and groin, that sort of packing dream tension almost sexual...? And then suddenly you could do it? Well it's like that, only worse...And there is the gap between languages that can be terrifying...the great silences...And erotic frenzies when the patient feels himself sexually attacked by Arab demons...

  "About ten days in the hospital...You realize that you don't talk with your mouth and throat and lungs and vocal cords, you talk with your whole body...And the body keeps reaching back for the old language—it's rather like junk withdrawal in a way...The erotic manifestations always occur...It's like the subject is being raped by the language, shouting out obscenities in the injected idiom...And of course the set is important..."

  "The set?"

  "Yes. For example, we had six Arab boys in for an English injection...And we rigged it up like a dorm in an English public school...It isn't just the language, the subject has to come from somewhere...He's got to have a regional accent. This was an old-school-tie infiltration job—they had to have not just an upper-class accent but an upper-class accent complete with a special school and a part of England...this was an interesting case because of the surprises involved...The boys could soon spout those clear English voices you can hear across a baronial dining room but they were sexually aroused by Cockney vulgarisms...One would say to the other...'Cooo I'd like to glim you in the altogether...'I want to bottle you, mate...' 'Get off my dish,' one boy snarls to another. 'Look at Reggie, starkers...' It was like some Cockney demon had invaded our re-creation of Eton..."

  "How do you account for this erotic factor...?"

  "It must be something inherent in the nature of language itself...After all, language is communication—that is, getting to know someone all over like in the altogether...There is in fact strong evidence that at one time the larynx was a sexual organ...The first words were not warning cries or exchanges of information...The first words were obscenities...As you may have gathered, your mission is to discover more about the nature and function of words...That is why you have been selected. You are a writer who can not only gather the information we are seeking but transcribe it as well..."

  The doctor got up and pointed to a map..."Now in this area, the highlands of Yemen, there are a few remote valleys where the original link between ape and man that led to speech may still survive. These beings have sex by talking in each other's throats. They are called 'smouners.'...An experienced smouner can strangle an adversary by this lethal ventriloquism...Your job is to penetrate the smouners..."

  "So I am the man for a highly important and, I may add, highly dangerous assignment—is that it?"

  The doctor smiled and ran his fingers through his hair..."Yes...But, I may add, a highly diverting assignment...In fact I'd like to go along."

  "What's keeping you?"

  "Not much. My papers are going through channels. However, we won't be traveling together. Your point of entry will be here...this is the market...It varies as to time and place...This year it will be held on the outskirts of Ganymede, an oasis village in the highlands...with the language and a supply of money...two hundred thousand dollars is minimal."

  The doctor prepares an injection. As the shot takes effect, Kim can feel the language stirring in his throat with a taste of blood and mint tea and greasy lamb. He is squeezed into a crowded bus in a smell of unwashed flesh, exhaust fumes, and kief. The words are eroding English like acid...later...time sense is not segmented into hours, but laid out spatially like a road...the truck stops in the marketplace of Ganymede.

  The market had the temporary and dilapidated aspect of a military encampment or a carnival that has, for some reason, been there for a very long time. The Greek camp outside Troy must have looked something like this, he decided. Only this market had been here for centuries. The truck stopped in a huge square with trees and wells here and there and people filling gasoline cans and pots at the pumps. Around the square and on side streets running from it were stalls, tents, tin-roofed shacks, houses of stone and adobe. He walked past sidewalk cafes and shabby hotels and bathhouses. Boys with painted eyes beckoned from doorways. He knew where he was going and soon he began to see guns and knives displayed in front of the bazaars and in the windows of dark shops. This he knew was the weapons section. He slowed his steps, stopping now and again to look at displays. He noticed armed guards here and there. He came to a square where a number of people were offering weapons for sale. The guns were passed from hand to hand as bargaining went on...The guns were mostly automatic rifles, Israeli and Russian and a few M-16s. A boy touched his arm and pointed to an M-16.

  "Buy me that and I am yours forever."

  Kim nodded. He asked the price of a frizzy-haired boy. The boy held up three fingers. "Three American dollars."

  Kim looked puzzled and the boy who had accosted him quickly explained. "That means three thousand dollars and it's too much."

  After haggling, a price of $2,500 was agreed upon, with two hundred rounds of ammunition thrown in. The boy slung the rifle over his shoulder and put the bullets into a leather shoulder pouch. At the end of a long crooked street that wound steeply upward between walls of red adobe was the Ganymede Hotel, with a facade of marble pillars from some ancient settlement. Kim could see the market spread out below. It would take days to see it all...

  Kim is winded from the steep climb and the heat. Silver spots boil in front of his eyes...Vertigo...a whiff of ether...a marketplace...terrible heat...a gathering crowd...the faces...screaming...

  "Hold him down, Greg...I'll get some medication."

  "Say, these language shots are rough...learning a language the hard way, if you ask me...Remember that bloke in for bushman shots? Poor blighter never came back..."

  "That shot straightened him out..." Kim is sleeping peacefully.

  The town has the temporary look of a military encampment, an oil or mining town, deserted and repopulated in strata at once gratingly new and dilapidated. A marketplace with army surplus trucks parked around it...Booths selling hardware, camping equipment, knives, guns and ammunition, stone steps leading up from the marketplace to the old town built into a hillside, a town of red adobe and shuttered windows.

  Kim thought it looked all spewed out in one piece by a monster wasp. From the narrow twisting streets he catches whiffs of shit-encrusted walls, an ancient insect evil that stops the breath...Get yourself together, Agent K9. The Traveler is equipped with money and the language. He strolls about in jeans with an army surplus jacket and a straw hat...Ah the guns...Quite a large area given over to buying and selling every variety of gun.

  "If you are looking for a special model, sir"—a portly gentleman hands Kim his card—"we'll track it down, sir..." Kim looks around—nothing but weapons as far as he can see in shops built into the hillside. He is in the automatic-weapons section. Here the golden youth gather to lovingly feel a K-47 Russian assault rifle, or an Uzi, it's the chic thing to carry around with you to bars and restaurants...full auto stuff, Kim observes, and lots of it. From junk like the Czech squirtguns, effective range about four feet, to good heavy stuff like the old Thompsons...A boy with dusky-rose cheeks and long lashes looks longingly at an Η & Κ 223
..."Buy me that and I am yours forever..." The boy's breath is spicy and musky...The Traveler steps forward and asks the price. The dealer sees that the Traveler is armed and probably skilled in the use of arms...

  "Four thousand dollars it is, reasonable."

  They settle for thirty-five hundred. Money doesn't mean much here. Kim hands the boy the gun in front of the beaming dealer...

  "Pleased to serve such fine gentlemens..."

  "Now I need some handguns...spare clothes and luggage."

  It is usual procedure for an agent or private buyer to arrive at the market knowing he can pick up whatever gear he needs at the shops. Kim is quickly outfitted with just his brand of aftershave and his eternal alligator, as he calls his Gladstone, when one wears out he buys another. Ah yes, weapons...That double-action 44 special takes the Russian as well? Very good, rosewood handle, and that two-inch Colt 38 special with the butt cut down right into Kim's hand. Don't forget the KY—my God, it's five dollars a tube..."Yessir, things do keep going up," the young attendant titters without shame. The boy leads the way, his new Η & Κ slung over sure arrogant young shoulders. You can see how neatly he could unsling it and cut someone in two.

  The Ganymede Hotel is at the end of a long crooked street. He signs the papers and the boy takes them to a room opening onto a little walled garden with fig and orange trees and a pool with a fountain...There is a haman down the hall and old-fashioned carbolic soap, "lovely boy toilet soap," they call it in Persia. Kim is a connoisseur of carbolic soap...There are other boys in the haman, he recognizes kinky red hair and the green cat eyes that shine in a shuttered room.

  Long crooked street of youths handling the guns. In the ha-man are two youths from the market. The boys turn and grin. They are standing there with erections, languidly soaping each other with the same loving fingers they use when touching a gun, checking the mechanism with a gentle precise touch. They are holding up fingers. Some bargaining the Traveler doesn't understand and they are speaking a dialect not covered in his Arab Bedouin and dialect shots. It is a humming sound that buzzes out of the larynx through the teeth, which are bared like those of wild dogs in the act of speech. At first the vibration sets the stranger's teeth on edge with an exquisite pain, his phallus sways and stiffens and throbs.