William S. Burroughs

by The Place of Dead Roads

  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, senor, somebody you used to meet, uno 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 gray 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, senor...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.

  8

  As Kim moves back in time he leaves a wake of disasters behind him, which is only logical since he is retracing his space in time, leaving a time vacuum behind him.

  Here he is in Tangier having his coffee on the terrace. He settles down to read about the earthquake in Agadir oh yes he'd just been there the Commander was way off course lucky thing he didn't split the earth open with his bungling the incompetent old beast. Kim read avidly all eyewitness accounts, people who were saved because they stayed where they were people who just got out of where they had been in time frantic relatives clawing at the rubble with their bare hands seem to look at him accusingly...the boiled eggs are just right...rather high on the scale it was Kim is hopeless about the mechanical details after all what could be less magical than saying I am going to produce an earthquake of seven microperimeters on the Whosis scale...Oh here was something juicy: an underground snake pit was ruptured by the quake so that thousands of frenzied cobras and adders slither through the stricken city biting any unfortunates they encounter...

  Trucks rumble through the rubble filled with wild-eyed soldiers...

  "NOTICE TO ALL CITIZENS...NOTICE TO ALL CITIZENS...KILL YOUR DOGS AND CATS...REPEAT: KILL YOUR DOGS AND CATS...ANYONE TRYING TO BE A HYPOCRITE WILL BE PUNISHED BY TWENTY YEARS IN JAIL"

  Despite the strict order of the government health services, thousands of dogs roam the streets and the police have a shoot-on-sight order for all stray animals. However, their inaccuracy is such that citizens are frequently wounded or killed by stray bullets while a disdainful Afghan hound swishes away untouched.

  "We have a tight schedule to keep, remember..."

  "Ah yes...and what happens here when we leave...?"

  "A riot, I think. It will suck all the money out of Tangier..."

  Earthquakes, riots, floods, fires, hurricanes and tornadoes he digs special because that is what he is leaving in his wake, a low-pressure area...

  And the barometer dropped and dropped until we thought it was broken...Carsons was here. There were tornadoes never seen before, Sound Twisters that sucked the words out of your mouth, shattering tapes to dust and stripping records. Then silence rushes in like a thunderclap...and Odor Twisters.

  Kim adored tornadoes. Giver of winds is my name he wrote it out in Egyptian characters...the green sky the black funnel the twisting black strength he can feel it in his head...

  And hurricanes were nice too, nothing more exhilarating than riding a hurricane watching the trees and telephone poles bend and break like matchsticks, the windows blow out, the roofs tear loose, and tidal waves rushing in fifty feet high...and plagues of course were delightful but Kim just couldn't get up any enthusiasm for famine. What a dreary bore the children with swollen bellies and dead eyes the old people like pieces of dirt just patiently waiting to crumble...There's no élan about famine...not like riding the wind across a screaming sky...I hear tell they got these thousand-mile-per-hour winds on Mars just think what that would do to London or New York...

  Kim always reads the tornado stories. Here was one a barber was shaving a man when the twister struck the razor was pulled from his hand and cut a man's throat three hundred yards away. And the straws driven into telephone poles...Imagine a fist or kick coming at that speed...Kim dismissed the idea of a twister gun but twister shells or grenades might work.

  "Clutter the Glind," screamed the Captain of Moving Land.

  Traveling back in time is like being at the controls of an intricate ship that requires the most delicate and precise touch to steer through shallows and reefs and enemy fire...Clickety clickety clack...back back back...back through Tangier, Paris...Sometimes he shifted his identity ten times in the course of a day...Concierge, gendarme, police inspector, lavatory attendant, thief, bestial peasant, surly waiter, song-and-dance man, mass murderer, member of the Academy. Then he rests up in a safe house and catches up on his journals...

  Back now in gay Paree, where Kim indulges in an orgy of identity shifts.

  "It's like footwork in fighting. Keep moving so you are harder to hit. We call it 'shoe work' in the trade...Your shoes are your identity papers. Keep them clean and polished. When you travel back in time on your own time track, you are bucking your whole past karma. So you never travel in a straight line. It would be suicidal."

  Kim began his acquaintance with the anonymous Shoehorns and Cobblers who forge passports and other documents. You get what you pay for. Pay enough and your papers are real.

  The gendarme saluted smartly as the elegant young man approached but the youth perceived something dead and cold and joyless in the small hard green eyes. The gendarme would later become a collaborationist commandant of police, a vicious torturer of resistance fighters. He will escape to Argentina after the war and find Death Squad work.

  "Twenty Monsieur le Prince?" The gendarme gives precise directions. The youth thanks him. The police thing nods distantly, for his soutane waits around the corner.

  "If you want to find a good restaurant just walk around until you see a priest eating... Well if you want to look like a priest find a good restaurant and eat in it. Gawd, there's a bishop...Room for one more inside, sir..." After dawdling over a sumptuous dinner and a little too much wine like any greedy old pig priest, he hurries away, his cassock flapping behind him, obviously bent on some urgent errand of mercy or condolence. He stops in a doorway to adjust his cassock, troublesome beast. His key opens the door and he slips in like a shadow.

  The jewelry firm of Potterman and Pearlmutter is on the third floor. They're only kikes, he tells himself, knowing that criminals are bigots. You have to think and feel your cover. Old-style safe...A muffled boom and Kim walks out after a change of clothes with a satchelful of jewels.

  He is now a fine old gentleman with the pince-nez, the expensive dark suit, the tiny ribbon in his lapel. Despite his bella figura, Monsieur Dupre was involved in a number of highly questionable financial transactions. In fact the Dupre Scandal would bring down a government and precipitate an abortive revolution...In the course of which thirty people will die...

  "Oui, monsieur. " The cab driver made a noise like ripping canvas..."Machine guns...When you hear that, you know that it is, how you say, serious."

  The suit is now worn and shabby. He is wearing three dirty old scarves...

  "Qui est ca qui monte?" he demands, popping out of his cubbyhole under the stairs. For some hapless American has dared to visit someone in the blouse without first announcing himself to the concierge...Oh he knows the step of every tenant. And woe to the client who attempts to smuggle in an illicit hotplate. The concierge can detect the slightest overload of current and tra
ce it to its source by means of a contraption he has been trying to market for thirty years, writing letters to various government departments, eliciting polite bureaucratic replies: Do not envisage any way in which this department...and in course of time replies that were not so polite...This neglect of his genius work has further soured his disposition, if such a thing is possible. Kim decides to get out from under before the genius work blows up as it did several days later, razing the hotel to the ground.

  Kim heard the blast as he had an afternoon Pernod with Madame Rachau, his landlady at the theatrical hotel where he lived in his song-and-dance capacity.

  He nodded..."Ca commence. "

  "Oui," said Madame with a smile..."Ca commence."

  Kim can feel Europe coming apart under his feet as dogs are said to feel the approach of an earthquake...the mutter and rumble of war. He can smell war in the streets and in the cafes.

  So he plunders the past, present, and future for war songs...

  He gets them in little bits and pieces...Here's a poster...

  mother and children sitting in front of the fireplace. They are looking at Dad's picture in uniform.

  Keep the home fires burning

  (mutter of artillery in the distance)

  Though the hearts are yearning...

  (Regret to inform you)

  The war song is of course a very old genre and far removed from the actualities of modern combat, where a singing soldier would constitute a public nuisance outranking a singing waiter.

  Kim had cribbed a song from a future war.

  The last time I saw Paris

  Her heart was young and gay

  No matter how they change her

  I'll remember her that way...

  Impressionist paintings unfold in his brain like those Japanese flowers that open in water...bookstalls along the Seine...leaves falling...urinal in the upper-right-hand corner...this was going to be a diseuse song-and-dance number with magic-lantern slides of impressionist paintings...Monet...Renoir...

  No matter how they change her...slides of Paris after nuclear attack...weed-grown rubble. The only thing left you can recognize is the Eiffel Tower, now a rusted shell, vines growing up along the struts and the cables. But still unquestionably the Eiffel Tower. Interplanetary tourists point to the picture in a guidebook...What remains of London? Kim can see White's gathering the dust of centuries...

  New York? The Statue of Liberty...streets covered with melted glass like ice and a thousand years hence happy otters slide down the glass chutes into a crystal-clear East River. Saint Louis? Nothing is left but the arch, gateway to the west...

  I'll remember her that way...Paris light on the hands of a nurse as she opens a boiled egg...

  le convalescent

  She sets the tray down by an elegant young man in a blue dressing gown...There is a bottle of laudanum and a medicine glass on his night table. Some fruit in a bowl. I can make out a ripe peach with a bruise here and there and an apple—it looks like a goofl apple—I haven't had one in so long. And the boiled egg is just right with the toast and the tea, and the laudanum is hitting the back of his neck and moving down his thighs.

  There's a book on the table. The youth stretches out a languid hand. You can see that he has been very ill.

  The book is entitled Quien Es?

  On the cover is a skeleton figure with black vest and sheriffs badge. On the badge is written MOI.

  Kim dances out singing:

  Paris please stay the same...

  Citizens dance by with the morning pain under their arms...

  An old crippled woman dances into a pharmacie..."

  Codethyline Houde, s'il vous plait..."

  "Oui, madame..."

  The old woman does a spastic twitching dance out of the store...

  Clerk: "This is the twentieth today..."

  The proprietor is Madame Rachau..."Ah oui...there is much pain, much trouble..."

  "And some of your sad days..."

  "Ah here comes ce bon vieux Monsieur Carsons..."

  She reaches for the codethyline...

  "Bonjour, monsieur...Codethyline...?"

  "Oui, madame..."

  Paris please stay the same...

  All over Paris people reach for Quien Es?

  Here's a man collapsed over his pain, little pink codethyline pills spilling down the stairs from a ruptured green and white bag with a little seal...Pharmacie de Bonne Chance...

  "ARRETEZ!" A blurt of machine-gun fire...

  quien es?

  Monsieur de Paris punches the condemned man in the stomach and throws him under the guillotine. The knife, falls—

  quien es?

  Hospital smell of pain...

  "A blessing it was..."

  quien es?

  And in wartime...Regret to inform you...quien es? quien es? quien es?

  The man with a million faces. Death disguised as any other person, as the planet heads for the final sauve qui peut at vertiginous speed.

  "Now when you get in a tight spot, you head for the nearest terminal. Spot of bother in London? Duck into the Paris Cafe or the Lima Hotel or the New York Grill. Of course you have to make it into Paris or Lima or New York. As soon as you walk in look around for a piece of Paris. Get one of those Maurice Chevalier songs going in your head...Paris please stay the same..."

  Well it just so happens the Madame is French and inside of ten seconds Kim is a favored client and the sounds of pursuit snuff out...The Lima Hotel...a whiff of the sad languorous city with vultures roosting on all the public buildings and the statues...A vulture in downtown London is unlikely but look at that old man, coat flapping, and one of those nasty birdlike English faces that peck at one...New York is easy because it has pieces from everywhere...-You can't always find a hotel or cafe...then it's a case of naked hide like naked kill...You have to improvise from what is at hand...Remember, you don't have to move spatially. You can dodge forward or backward in time...

  Kim is in a Paris street...a green haze hangs over the city...the food stalls and shops are all empty. Everyone is looking at him with a slow hideous recognition...Eyes blazing with hate, they are all pointing now, and with a great cry they rush for him hands reaching...Kim runs in a blind panic. He falls, skinning his knees, gets up, and runs on, staggering, winded... They are right behind him.

  Now...Just ahead is a rusty urinal and Kim remembers those lines worthy of Rimbaud of Verlaine...

  Calmly he slides into the urinal...and the screaming crowd is snuffed forward to the future time they came from...a time of hunger and disease, madness and death. Kim shudders at the memory of that green haze, the green-black color of tornado sky but unmoving, suffocating, a silent arrested twister. And HE was the one who did it somehow. They SAW him. Kim buttons his pants and steps out onto dead leaves...They don't belong here, not in this Paris light. Kim hails a cab with his sword cane. He has a date with an acrobat.

  When you are shooting for a future terminal, get ready to make a leap in the dark. You just let go and do nothing and that isn't easy with a screaming mob six feet behind you going to skin you alive and roll you in broken Coca-Cola bottles the end result will look like an action painting. Just wanting to be somewhere else, no matter how intensely, won't do it. You need a peg to hang it on...sharp smell of weeds from a vacant lot and Kim turns around with a sawed-off shotgun. The mob breaks and scatters at the first blast.

  In Marrakesh once, sitting with Waring on the terrace at sunset...a banging on the door. Kim peers over and sees his nemesis, Inspector Dupre. The Central Computer has spat out his falsified passport. Herr Workman died ten years ago. The Inspector tosses the passport on his desk and smiles.

  "You should have bought better shoes...But I think the

  mystery of your identity will soon unfold itself. Take him to the Slobski Institute."

  Waring points..."Look at that beautiful cat there on the wall."

  A white cat on a white wall, immobile, timeless, looking out over Marrak
esh.

  "Oh that must be Monsieur Dupre to change the gas cylinder for the hot-water heater. Be a dear and let him in."

  And there are changes of identity...a silent shift in the head and you are looking out through different eyes..."Screaming crowds? Oh that's the Olympics on TV..." Some frantic characters applaud.

  It all comes under the head of evasive action. Kim is planning to dance offstage from his Paris number, maybe right into one of those awful East End music halls. Kim shudders at the thought...bestial English criminals gouging each other's eyes out with broken beer bottles.

  "Now I don't want any trouble with you, mate, let me buy you a drink."

  So saying, he knees him in the groin, throws brandy into his eyes and lights it.

  Kim winds up his Paris show with a medieval set. It's Paris in the terrible winter of 1498 when famished wolves came into the outskirts of Paris. Kim, as Frangois Villon, in his scholar's cloak, does a diseuse number.

  "Ou sont les neiges d'antan?"

  Wolves slink by chanting:

  "Ou sont les neiges d'antan?"

  Street gangs of youths ready to kill for a crust of bread...Kim engages five of them and routs them with his sword. He pulls the hood down over his face. Magic-lantern slides show the street winter spring summer fall faster and faster. Kim throws the hood back. He is now an old man who quavers out:

  "Ou sont les neiges d'antan?"

  Applause.

  The applause fades into traffic sounds and Kim finds himself in London on Westbury Street, near the corner of Ryder Street. He is still wearing the medieval cloak and Kim knows it is his old plague cloak. It is a beautiful garment of fine black camelwool lined with raw silk impregnated with suppurating lymph glands, tuberculosis and leprosy, the sweet rotten aftersmell of gangrene and putrid blood, the sharp reek of carrion, winter smell of typhus in cold doss houses where the windows are caulked with paper and never opened...a very old cloak, Kim reflects...been in our family for a longtime, picking up a whiff here and a whiff there .. . sweet diarrhea smells from cholera wards, black vomit of yellow fever in Panama, the congested sour smell of mental illness like rotten milk and mouse piss...