William S. Burroughs

by The Place of Dead Roads

  The town of Ganymede has grown into a settlement housing fifteen hundred technicians, scientists, and military personnel, with air-conditioned Quonset huts, a bar, a movie, and a choice of restaurants. A black M.P. checks their passes and directs them to a decontamination station.

  An hour later, showered and scrubbed with carbolic soap, wearing clean khakis, Kim feels approximately clean but every now and then he gets a whiff of the vile smell of the bladder monkeys. After three stiff gin-and-tonics and a hookah of hashish he feels better still.

  They are eating in a pizza place out by the airport. Kim saws at the rubbery crust.

  "I didn't bring you out here for the cuisine, my dear," Tony says, looking at his wristwatch.

  A chopper is coming in for a landing and clearly in trouble, wobbling from side to side.

  "Looks like the pilot's got a skinful..." someone says at an adjoining table...

  "You can say that again," Tony mutters.

  Fire trucks and ambulances are already on the runway, sirens blaring.

  "Watch." Tony takes out his binocular camera and Kim does the same...

  The doors of the chopper burst open and three men lurch out...

  Click click...The ambulance crew rush forward to help, then start back in horror...Click click...The faces are demented, inhuman, throats hideously swollen and covered with pustules...Click click .. .

  They are yacking like ventriloquist dummies, and Kim can see something stirring and twisting in their tumescent throats, choking words out. Bloody spit hangs down off their chins in long streamers...Click click . . .

  "Let's get out of here fast..." Tony says. He throws a note on the table and they sprint for the parking lot...

  Before they reach the car, the voice rings from loudspeakers. . .

  "Notice to all personnel...This is an emergency measure...The streets are closed to all civilian personnel..."

  "Hope to God it starts..." The motor turns over...

  "...or pedestrians...If you are inside, stay where you are..."

  A guard is hooking a chain across the exit and locking it...

  "Otherwise proceed immediately to the nearest shelter..."

  "Hey YOU...STOP." The guard holds up his hand and reaches for his 45.

  Tony accelerates and knocks the guard over the chain and across the street. The broken chain whips around the car with a crack like a rifle shot. Tony takes a right, tires screeching.

  "Repeat...The streets are closed to all unauthorized personnel...Violators will be shot on sight..."

  Sirens, searchlights...Tony ducks as machine-gun fire shatters the windshield...He pulls the car off the road and down a steep slope, scattering a herd of goats...A screech of brakes behind them as the police car pulls up—a light searching the slope.

  The car splashed through an irrigation ditch and turned left on a dirt road. The sounds of pursuit were sucked out as if run backward.

  "Here's where we shift vehicles."

  Just ahead was a carriage. They got in and Tony gave directions to the driver in a dialect unknown to Kim...

  "He is Malay," Tony explained as he settled back and lit a cheroot. A beggar child padded alongside and Kim flipped him a coin. They drove for perhaps an hour...The night air was balmy, and hot around the edges. Kim could hear crickets and frogs.

  Occasionally they passed mud huts with thatched roofs.

  And there was the dirigible ahead, moored to a tower...The Commander waved to them...

  "Well climb aboard, you blokes... We're all revved up and ready to go..."

  Two Malay servants helped them carry their gear up the ladder and deposited it in their luxurious cabins...

  "You understand the Big Picture, old thing. We are retracing our steps in time like a film running backward, breaking the immutable rules of the universe and all that rot..."

  "And about time too."

  Dinner was kulan steaks...

  "They are practically extinct, you know," Tony told him between mouthfuls.

  "Bring on the whooping crane," Kim whooped. "And a dodo-egg omelette..."

  The Commander laughed heartily and twirled his mustache. Kim stretched luxuriously, savoring the vintage Burgundy like a fifteen-year-old schoolboy on holiday.

  Tony shot him a reproving look.

  "Well I am going backward, aren't I?"

  "Yes, but observe the speed limit."

  "I adore dirigibles. It's like floating along in a gigantic erection."

  "Ah yes, very well put." The Commander shot him a glance as piercing as it was meaningless.

  "I'd like baked Alaska for dessert," Kim said primly.

  "Well it just so happens...and quite a decent champagne...the oily kind, you know..."

  "Reserve Heidsieck."

  As he spooned the last of the baked Alaska into his mouth and a Malay refilled their glasses, the Commander arched his eyebrows...

  "And what have you lads been up to?"

  "Well how would you put it, Kim? As an English public schoolboy?"

  "You mean like I was selling a screenplay to Hollywood? In one sentence, what is this epoch-making film about? Well speaking as an English public schoolboy, it's just too disgusting to talk about...Same character forty years later speaking as an Old Auntie:

  " 'No force of man or God could ever bring me to reveal what I saw in that cursed valley...There are secrets that no man may learn and keep his reason.'

  " 'In the beginning of time was a deed so foul that we have been fleeing it ever since, down the months and down the days, down the labyrinths of the years...hiding behind a million empty masks to cover a bottomless terror...Building cities, waging wars, playing games, anything to keep us from seeing the horror of our origins...'

  "You don't sell a film by saying you won't show it. There may be secrets too horrible for a man to know and keep his sanity but that won't go down in Hollywood, Mister.

  " 'We saw the origins of human speech, the beginning and end of the word. We saw the start of a plague that will rage through cities of the world like a topping forest fire.' "

  The dreaded Talk Sickness, also known as the Dummies, or the Yacks...So named since the first symptom is a yacking manner of speech like a ventriloquist's dummy. In a few hours the blood coagulates and rots in the veins. The throat swells to the size of a watermelon and death usually results from asphyxiation. From the onset the victim's mental faculties are affected...He loses all sense of human decency or consideration for his fellows. Knowing himself doomed he delights in infecting others.

  Here is a crowded restaurant, two men are talking at the bar...

  "What do you think about this merger, B.J.? Off the record..."

  "It sucks," B.J. yacks.

  Silence falls like a thunderclap.

  "THE YACKS! THE YACKS! THE YACKS!"

  The patrons scream as they rush the exits.

  It's the most contagious disease ever seen on this planet. Here is a crowded commuter train...

  "Tickets please," the conductor yacks.

  "THE YACKS! THE YACKS! THE YACKS!"

  The commuters pull the emergency cord out of its socket but even as the train grates to a halt the whole car is yacking. A country-western singer goes dummy on stage. "Stay all night and stay a little longer..." Just a hint of a yack. The crowd stirs uneasily in their seats. "Take off your coat and throw it in a corner..." No doubt about it.

  "THE YACKS! THE YACKS! THE YACKS!"

  "Don't see why you don't stay a little longer..."

  They are piled up three-deep at the exits where 123 died.

  Perhaps one percent of those stricken adapt themselves to the sickness and form outlaw bands. They will swarm out of a derelict building and yack in the faces of pedestrians: "We love New York!" or stick their heads into car windows and yack out: "Have a good day!"

  The putrid smell of rotten blood hangs over cities of the world like a smog.

  "It's a real Hollywood Spectacular."

  6

  Kim frequ
ently placed himself in remote jungle outposts, or in Antarctica, or on some alien planet. Here is a page from Kim's Venusian Diary:

  November 19, 1980. This is the first settlement on Planet Venus. Evening Star is supposed to be representative, so there has to be a gay couple. It wasn't easy to put that across. It took ten years, and it was a long, bloody, dirty fight. And we won by being more ruthless, more devious, more resourceful and a lot smarter than our creeping Venusian opponents, cowering in occupied human bodies. They shit-sure didn't want any unoccupied observers on their stinking asshole planet.

  I am rooming with Tom in the government compound. We get along well enough with the neighbors. The Bensons come over once a week for dinner. Beverly Benson is a good old girl who drinks too much. And one of our best friends is Martin Winters, Chief of Security, a gun buff from Colorado.

  Of course, Tom and I have our spats. In Los Angeles before the expedition, our nerves a bit frayed from the long fight to get on the space program, I came back to the hotel to find clothing strewn all over the apartment. And Tom says, "Kim, your fucking trade stole my bathing trunks!"

  "You lie in your capped teeth. It was your own Chicano done it."

  "No one can tell me my teeth are capped!" Tom flings back, stung to the gums.

  "Oh yes, 'Nobody knows about meeee.' "

  Personnel are housed in identical long huts of petrified peat with aluminum roofs. On one side is a steep slope of scrub and thorn bushes, leading down to the edge of a pestilent swamp. We can look out through heavy glass windows, like portholes, at the nightmare landscape, the swamp to the sky, the interlocking islands and peninsulas, many of them floating masses of vegetation, all under sulfurous clouds.

  Kim got a chill looking down into a clear deep pool, just beyond the shoreline. He could see way down, five hundred feet, into clear green water where strange predators lurked like black shadows. The garbage chutes were pushed out through the wall and retracted lest some noxious creature gain access. Scavengers devour every morsel of garbage before it can reach the water, where other scavengers would have made equally short work of it. An aquatic centipede (that attains a length of six feet) with a thick reddish-brown shell sometimes darted out of the water to fight for some choice morsels with the land crabs and the terrible Smuns, and sometimes there were swarms of tiny vultures no bigger than hummingbirds...

  Tom looks up sharply from his crossword puzzle.

  "What's noxtious in the kitchen?" he demands.

  "It's possum." Kim waltzes around humming "The Anniversary Waltz."..."A surprise for our anniversary."

  "That possum couldn't surprise anyone half a mile downwind," Tom says flatly. "Tell me frankly, Kim, what were the circumstances surrounding its death?"

  Kim looks at him complacently as if he were announcing his pregnancy. He sings:

  "Possum ain't far

  Thar he are thar..."

  He points to the far end of the hut, which serves as the kitchen.

  "I have no reason to doubt it. What I want to know is how did it die? and when?"

  "At the last full moon...the time is now ripe..."

  "You could say so."

  Kim leafs through a Venusian cookbook...."It's called La Cuisine de Peste...disease cooking...You see, when an animal dies of a certain illness it imparts a certain flavor to the meat...Fortunately for us, our possum succumbed to climactic buboes...Swollen groin glands...They swell, they burst, they suppurate..."

  And indeed, disgusting farting noises are emanating from the kitchen...Kim reads from the cookbook.

  "There is no pleasure short of love-making to equal the crunchy, curdy...' "—Kim sticks his middle finger in his mouth and pops it out with a loud "POP," spraying saliva across the table—" Of a suppurating bubo cooked in aftosa spit...And there will be candied suckling armadillos cooked in their own leprosy...pearl-white phosphorescent meat soft as butter, you cut it with a lead knife...when the knife sinks through the · meat is ready...unspeakably toothsome...' " Kim bares his teeth, lays back his ears and purrs like a hungry cat.

  "Look, honey face, whyn't you nip down to the PX for Spam and canned pineapple...?"

  "Oh why do you have to spoil everything!" Kim wails, rubbing his hands... There is a muffled explosion from the kitchen and such a vile stink billows out that they are both thrown retching to the floor...

  "Get it out of here, for the love of God!" Tom screams. They don masks and manage to get the stinking potful into the chute and dump it. They pull the chute back in and draw up stools in front of the window. Smuns wriggle up and grab the steaming carrion in the air...Scavenger land crabs big as plates swarm from burrows in the slope, snapping up the bits that fall from the slavering, steaming jaws of the Smuns. (And all this in deadly silence broken only by sounds of chewing and rending—not a snarl or even a whimper as one Smun disembowels another with a side kick of its deadly claws.)

  Kim is writing at the kitchen table. There is an open can of beans in front of him.

  Of course Kim never had the intention to eat the funky old possum. It was just a spoof to break the monotony...The G.I. jokes...The horror outside...This hideous alien place...Kim knew now that all the places that had ever dragged him were simply reflections of this horrible planet...The vampirism of Egypt, which got a technological face-lift to suck England and America dry...a dead hopelessness in the slave classes, the incredible brutality of the police...They are a race apart, huge men six foot six and heavy with iron muscle.

  Kim remembers a young Arab guide who inadvisedly led Kim out of the tourist area, which is like an airport on many levels, with shops, restaurants, and films all of the dreariest caliber but brightly modern like the smiles turned on for the tourists.

  Kim sits down at a garish food counter, all neon chrome and mirrors. The only dish seems to be fried banana chips with marshmallow sauce and at the end of the counter is this scrawny old Lesbian naked to the waist, her lungs hanging down like deflated balloons, eating a hole plateful of this muck.

  Kim walks down in front of a movie marquee and propositions a group of sullen adolescents. They inform him in Venusian that there is no word for it here.

  A young Arab guide he knows from Tangier offers to show him something interesting. They go down a ramp that leads out of the tourist area...muddy canals here and heavy timber, what looks like a logging camp...To Kim's left a muddy street sloping steeply upward past miserable-looking mud huts, cut in clay. Down by the canal a youth he knew from the Dilly circuit transformed into a creature with the lower limbs of a frog, eyes dead and rotten-looking, he dips a clay ladle into the water, drinks deep, and falls back unconscious on the muddy bank..."The waters of Lethe" trilled in his ears...He hears an angry shout. He notices now the loggers. Hulking brutes, well over six feet. They are screaming at the guide..."Why you bring tourist here?" The guide turns green with fear and runs for the tourist center, five of these cops right behind him. They catch him...A thin discarded cry...The first slap must have killed him but they worry the corpse a bit like greyhounds with a rabbit. They go back to their logging.

  "You better get back to the tourist place where you belong..."

  Another glimpse: The tourist area shades away into the underworld. Kim sees passages and arcades leading down into lightless depths.

  "And what do you think of my people?"

  It is a Venusian lady of the highest caste. Kim has seen her before someplace.

  "Speaking from an Intourist point of view, you mean? I don't want to get anyone else into trouble..."

  Kim steps forward gingerly to get a better look...worn stone steps, narrow passageways between clay walls slanting steeply down...shops like Gibraltar, Tangier, Panama, selling those ivory balls one inside the other, hideous tapestries, carvings in jade and soapstone...shoddy merchandise going down into darkness...Kim has heard that the houses down there are put together using human excrement as mortar. He smells no reason to doubt it...darkness fills the lower levels like water with the smell of countle
ss years of encrusted shit and sweat and unwashed bodies crowded into tiny cubicles...

  "Yes," says an old resident. "It's bad here in the summer...gets up to 140 then you lose count. It's torture to move and in the winter when it gets down below zero you will need summer shit to chink the cracks."

  "Down there"—she gestures to the lightless depths—"are blind humanoid centipedes and scorpions..."

  "Ah yes," Kim says, anxious to impress the grande dame with his erudition..."Like the Egyptian Watch Goddess, who is a beautiful and irresistible woman...When man wakes up him find she has the head of a scorpion, pincers in his face and dead greedy insect eyes..."

  "I see you have been well instructed," she says dryly.

  Kim decides to say nothing.

  The tourist area ends here in an area of vacant lots. In this no-man's-land the underworld of Venus ply their incredibly precarious trades, for punishments are severe...

  "It's all so unpleasant." In a sad little square lit by Primus gas lanterns that flicker and spurt, the poor have gathered for a handout...This consists of some metallic matter that is cut with a lead knife and shows a bright silver sheen when freshly cut, like sodium...Little slivers of this metal paste^ are handed out to the needy, who have all brought their own bowls, from which they gobble greedily, the metal flashing in the light...as if they are signaling in phosphorus flashes...Kim drifts on.

  A man has bared his arm and he is about to slash it with a razor for his "ninos" (for some reason he seems to be speaking in Spanish...) and he did cut himself and the blood ran down "para sus ninos, madre de Cristo." Was it ever distasteful...Kim wrote in his guidebook that on the planet Venus entertainment reaches an all-time low...One can, with a special pass, witness the "evening meal...in which food is ritually handed out to the poor. It will save both the tourists and the Venusian authorities embarrassment if tourists will just understand we have rules and they are intended to be obeyed. Certain areas are off limits to tourists. Unscrupulous guides or drivers may direct you to such a place. If this happens it is your duty as a tourist to report the incident without delay..."