Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel

by Rucker, Rudy

  “I was depending on you to take us all the way to our destination,” said Alan, sounding tense and prissy again.

  “But there’s nothing at all down there,” chimed in Susan, peering out the window. “Just some crappy shacks.”

  “It’s my cousin’s spread,” said Naranjo, his voice gone cold. “An Eden, if you can open your eyes. But you can’t. You’re too white.”

  In silence, the pilot maneuvered the chopper to a spot beside the ramshackle structures. They touched down in two feet of snow. An Indian man appeared at the cottage door, his eyes crinkling, his smile a white slash in his weathered face.

  “I didn’t mean—” began Susan.

  “We’re done,” said Naranjo curtly. “Cousin Ricky and I gonna cover up my helicopter so nobody sees it from the air. You go ahead and walk to Los Alamos. Take your chances. I’ll be glad to see you gone.”

  So Susan and Alan thanked the stone-faced Naranjo for saving them, and set off, zipping their flimsy coats to their chins. The sun was low in the sky, and the snow was beginning once again to fall. At least their clothes were dry, and they had solid shoes.

  In a last-minute gesture of mercy, Naranjo teeped them his memory of the trail. He said they ought to be able to make it to Los Alamos two hours, even with the snow. Los Alamos was on a separate bluff, which meant they faced a climb down to the bottomlands, and a scramble up the other side.

  The first part of the walk went well, with Naranjo’s landmarks popping into place. But then it began getting dark. The snow was blowing hard, icing their faces.

  “Something’s following us, Alan!” exclaimed Susan. Doggy forms off to their right. “Wolves?”

  “I’m hardly a native,” said Alan impatiently. “And—blast and damn—Naranjo’s out of teep range.”

  They came to a stop. They could see four toothy animals sitting on their haunches, about twenty feet off, yipping to each other in the dusk.

  “Not wolves,” said Alan. “Too small. Aren’t there others kinds of wild dogs in the States? Like foxes or dingoes or jackals or—”

  “Coyotes!” exclaimed Susan. “Of course. The fabled tricksters. I think they’re scavengers? So we’re okay until we slip off a sheer hundred-foot cliff and break our legs and have brain damage and bleed to death and freeze up hard as rocks.”

  “Maybe we just go back to Naranjo’s cousin Ricky?” said Alan. “We could try again in the morning.”

  “Naranjo thought Los Alamos might not even be safe yet,” said Susan. “The cops might be checking all the nearby towns. Are we really going to kill ourselves just because we had a tiny quarrel with Naranjo? But I can’t think straight. You decide. I keep sinking into daydreams about my poor Vassar. You have to understand that he was brilliant. You did have sex with him on the ship, didn’t you?”

  “A couple of times, yes. And, as I said, I loved him too.”

  “But ever since New Orleans you were so cold to him. Contemptuous, almost. It was ugly of you.”

  “Once Vassar learned I was a man, I was cast into the position of being an importuning pervert. And so I withdrew. I meant no insult. Perhaps in Los Alamos, William Burroughs and I can be happily queer together.” At the edge of a puddled shadow, one of the four coyotes moved closer, extending his dim muzzle to savor Alan and Susan’s scent.

  “I’m sorry I called you a heartless robot on the plane,” said Susan, utterly whipsawed by her emotions.

  “I do have tendencies in that direction,” said Alan. “One of my uncountably many flaws.” He pulled out his handkerchief and dried Susan’s cheeks. “Silly or not, I don’t relish the idea of facing Naranjo just now. What if we do try going a bit further?”

  Soon they’d reached the crumbly edge of their bluff. The snow had let up again, and they could see straight across to the lights of Los Alamos on the facing cliff. Down in the bottomlands was an isolated cluster of lights. A heavy truck was driving down there. A military vehicle?

  “If the weather’s clearing, I guess we could push on,” said Susan, thinking. “But it would help to shapeshift into coyotes. We’d be covered with fur, and walking on four legs. In synch for this landscape. I’d like to yip and howl, too. I’d like to howl for Vassar.”

  “I reckon we’d have to become three coyotes each,” said Alan thinking it over. “To conserve our mass, don’t you know. Giant coyotes wouldn’t work. But, yes, I’m game. I’ll be three coyotes, and so will you.”

  “Can we do that?” asked Susan, intrigued.

  “Your pieces will stay in touch with each other,” said Alan. “Like the nations of the British Empire. My skug says it’s feasible.” He sent a tendril out from his finger and sent it towards the closest of watchful canine forms behind them.

  The coyote snarled at Alan’s surprise touch, but he’d already extracted a tissue sample. He reeled in his tendril and passed some of the coyote cells to Susan.

  “I use the doggy genes for, like, my flesh-knitting pattern?” said Susan.

  “Indeed,” said Alan.

  “What if those coyotes attack us as soon as we’re coyotes too?”

  “We’ll be ruthless in our self-defense.”

  Without any further ado, Alan slumped to the ground and broke himself into three pieces. A bit unsettling, that. Your head and shoulders here, your belly there, and your legs and bottom off to one side. But his skugger teep held his self-image together. Bristling and growling, he became three coyotes.

  Susan followed suit. Spooked by the uncanny transformation, the real coyotes melted from view. And now, moving cautiously, the Alan-and-Susan pack of six made their way forward.

  “Lovely,” Alan teeped to Susan. “I’m my own good company.”

  “Make way, you,” teeped Susan, one of her muzzles nipping one of Alan’s legs. “Here’s where we have to scramble down. I smell the path. This is fun.”

  As they picked their way down the steep cliff, the snow and wind returned. The sky clouded over, and it was utterly dark. Even on four legs, it was all the Alan-and-Susan coyotes could do to keep from sliding off a ledge. The small cluster of lights on their left had made for a beacon—but now the heavy snow masked it from visibility.

  In the bottomland, they stumbled around, bewildered and blind. At some point they began mounting a bluff.

  “I think we got turned around and that we’re climbing up onto Ricky’s side again,” teeped Susan after a while. “I smell our old tracks. We’re going in a circle. That’s how lost hikers always die. They see, like, a door in a snowbank that opens into a room full of steam-heat and opium. The grave. I don’t really care. I’m ready.”

  “Let’s gather our wits,” teeped Alan, setting his three coyote bodies on their haunches. Barely visible at his side, Susan’s coyote bodies threw back their heads and howled. Alan joined in, mourning Vassar and Ned. Answering howls sounded—and not so very far away. The real coyotes.

  Very uneasy, Alan strained at his mind, hoping to pick up a flash of teep from the sulky Naranjo. The pilot wasn’t to be found, but there was something else in the psychic channels, a nearby sense of warmth from a sacrificed friend.

  “Vassar,” teeped Susan. “He’s with us.”

  A flapping gold blob flickered at the edges of Alan’s visual fields. It had a thin tail at its rear.

  Putting their heads down against the storm, the pack of six followed the spirit guide towards a hoped-for shelter.

  Chapter 13: The Apocalypse According to Willy Lee

  [This double-length chapter is the entire text of an unpublished memoir fragment by William Burroughs, hand-written in January, 1955.]

  At fourteen I’d study myself in the mirror, practicing “looks”—the dreamy waif from famine-land, the lonely succubus lapping sex spills, the noble on the nod.

  Evidently I was queer. I’d watch my friend Peter’s delicate hands, his beautiful dark eyes, the flush of excitement on his cheeks, and I’d project imaginary psychic fingers, caressing his ears, smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the ha
ir back from his face, my soul an ectoplasmic amoeboid that strained like a hungry blind worm to enter Peter’s body, to breathe with his lungs, to see with his eyes, to learn the feel of his cock and balls.

  Reviewing these states of mind before my mirror, I’d notice that, as I heated up, my mouth would fall slightly open, with my teeth showing in the half-snarl of a captive animal. The social limitations upon my desires were the bars of my cage. Every day I was looking out through those bars, watchful, alert, waiting for the keeper to forget to latch the door.

  Eventually, of course, I broke loose and showed the more receptive boys how the cow ate the cabbage. “Bear down, Peter. You’ll fit.”

  I liked to imagine merging with my lovers. One of my first routines. “Wouldn’t it be booful if we should juth shlup together into one gweat big blob,” I’d say in baby talk, lying at ease with a boy. This never went over well—until I met Turing.

  Montage—pages fly off my calendar. When I was thirty I began cohabitating with Joan Vollmer, nine years younger than me. She knew I was a queer junky, but we were on the same wavelength, to a telepathic extent. I’ve always longed to be so effortlessly understood. Seven years Joan took care of me. Faute de mieux, sex with a woman isn’t bad.

  I failed Joan in innumerable ways. Addicted and indicted, I drifted through New Orleans, Texas, and down Mexico way. And there, one autumn evening in 1951, I shot Joan in the head. A William Tell act—with an empty glass for the apple. I say that the gun’s aim was crooked, that I was possessed by an ugly spirit, that Joan telekinetically drew the bullet towards her brain. Poor excuses.

  For any number of years I’d been developing my routines—crazed and menacing rants like a drunken out-of-control burlesque comic might lay on the rubes. I’d spring my spoken-word art on friend and foe alike. My goal? Free-flowing laughter—at least for me—rollicking hyena kicks to break the grip of my frightened flesh.

  While in Mexico City I’d progressed towards a complete lack of caution and restraint. It was like I thought nothing must be allowed to dilute my routines. I’d once been shy about approaching boys, for instance, but I could no longer remember why. My centers of inhibition had atrophied.

  In the months before I shot Joan, my routines had led to ostracism, eviction, and threats. The routines bubbled forth like mephitic gasses from a sulfur spring. “Pardon me, Señor, you should have made that one a fart.” All too often, a routine could slop over into real action. Go into a bar and call a policeman a moronic baboon, petition his partner for sexual favors, wave your gun in the bartender’s face—metastasized madness.

  When I shot Joan I was pretending to be drunk and criminally reckless. But I only imagined I was pretending. Drunk is what I was. Joan fell with my bullet in her temple. The unbroken glass rolled in a circle on the floor.

  The sinister musical-chairs opera of Mexican justice closed in. I skipped town and landed in Tangier, devoting myself to debauchery and the literary arts. Wouldn’t you?

  I’d see Joan’s sad ghost at any time, always from the corner of my eye, never straight on. I’d awaken with her at my side, puffy and tattered, or in the bloom of youth—with the slow oozing blue hole in her temple. Joan at the edges of the real. Her lips would move. I’d hear a terrible, slow buzz.

  Over time her shape began changing to something less human. Something with tentacles. She spun and swooped, she’d dive at me. I’d flinch and twitch. A nut on the street, an expat scribe.

  As I continued my bohemian investigations, a number of the people in Tangier took a violent, irrational dislike to me. Especially the people who ran bars. You want I should kill myself already?

  I found that any prior, calfskin-bound notion of a novel was radically inadequate for expressing what I needed to say. I wanted to write routines. Note that it falls flat to run a routine through the voice of an “eccentric” character. The routines have to emanate direct from the unseen unreliable author. A transcript off a cuneiform tablet off a UFO.

  Sometimes I’d lie in bed and see grids of typewritten words, moving and shifting, a haunted crossword puzzle. I’d try and copy it down. Other times I’d take dictation from voices in my head. As Allah wills.

  If you’re writing routines, you can’t try to control what you write. The blind poet jacks his bone at Mount Olympus, wheee! Typed and scribbled sheets accumulated on my floor. I was writing my way out.

  My relationship with Professor Alan Mathison Turing began in the final days of 1954. The man had fallen on hard times and, against all better judgment, I allowed him to move into my Tangier digs for a week.

  Turing was a British mathematician who’d done code-breaking work during the war, later turning to the design of giant electronic brains. By the time I met him, his kick was programming the processes of biological growth. Not unloath to experiment upon himself, he’d infested his face with something vile.

  Why did I fall for him? He was two years older than me, which would normally put me off—I like the young stuff. Not to mention that he appeared hideously diseased. But, as Turing’s experiments unfolded, he gained a seemly, pleasant look—in fact, for a time, he looked exactly like me.

  I enjoyed Alan’s intellectual companionship from the start. If he came on like a Martian, this was only his protective comedy routine. His oddness was his bulwark against the world’s hale cretins. Like me, Alan was a born outsider, frankly and unapologetically queer. And he hated the authorities—with good cause. The British secret service was bent on assassinating him.

  By way of breaking the ice, Turing told me he was planning to become a human-sized cancer tumor. His plan was to cut down on the need for all those body-organs and be a shapeshifting slug of undifferentiated tissue. He’d brought with him a culture of undifferentiated tissue in a cloth sack. He called his protosentient sample a skug, and he addressed it like a pet.

  Initially I took this for a mere routine. But Turing was bent on pushing his jape to full fruition. He amended his skug with odd compounds from the souq, and tutored the creature with radio waves. And on the third day, lo, the miracle occurred. Turing merged his doctored skug with his body and became a skugger.

  And a few minutes later, Turing transformed me as well.

  At least initially, I found it very agreeable to be a skugger. I seemed to be vacuuming up inputs at a quicker rate than ever before—as if under the effects of a stimulant, but with no subsequent come-down.

  More interestingly, as skuggers, Alan and I were shapeshifters, capable of molding our flesh into whatever mad form. To start with, he mirrored me. We had fabulous sex that segued into full-body conjugation. At last I’d truly shlupped with a lover.

  Added attraction—we were telepaths as well.

  The brain is a bioelectric orgone system, one understands, and it gives off signals akin to radio waves. Teep. A skugger is exquisitely sensitive to teep signals, and is adept at generating them in coherent form. Skugger-to-skugger telepathy extends for as much as half a mile.

  From the very start, we skuggers were a social menace. The authorities viewed us as mutants, as disease vectors, as nihilists. Each of these assessments was in some degree correct. But—let me repeat—being a skugger was a delicious pleasure that one longed to share.

  During the coming skirmishes, the cops would occasionally capture and subvert a skugger, making a spy of him or her. But the skugger quislings never lived long. To use your telepathy as a tool of repression is to become an orgoneless automaton, a clay juju doll.

  Soon after Alan and I became skuggers, he left Tangier for the States, bearing my appearance and my passport. He was fearful of the British operatives and their ongoing plans to terminate him. After Alan’s departure, the British Embassy somehow drew me into an ill-starred attempt to spy on him—via a skugger-hive-mind parabolic-dish antenna. I cooperated, I suppose, out of curiosity. And for the pay. And for a fresh passport.

  I’ve mentioned that skugger teep reaches only half a mile or so. But a shlupped combine of skuggers can achie
ve a hyper-resonant state with Earth’s orgone-pool, making it possible to send and receive teep halfway around the world.

  For a few days I was remotely observing my new lover for the British heat—Alan was in Florida by then. Still looking like me, he’d had gone to visit my parents and my son in Palm Beach. Even now, I’m not sure why he did this. I was angry.

  My pique escalated into a psychotic fugue state when I overheard Alan telling my son Billy that we might find a way to bring my dead wife Joan back to life. As if by dream logic, I knew right away that this was inevitable. And I was terribly afraid.

  As an additional affront, Alan had enlisted another skugger, a rustic American named Ned, and they’d behaved in such a debased fashion at my parents’ that Mother had resolved to cut off the monthly allowance that had been my mainstay for my whole adult life.

  Flipped into vengeful-demon mode, I prevailed upon the British Embassy to finger Alan for the Palm Beach police. But the sly Turing and his new friend Ned turned the cops into skuggers as well.

  At this point I myself set off for Palm Beach. My plan was—what? It’s hard precisely to recall. Certainly I wanted to get my family allowance reinstated. And perhaps I longed to chastise Alan in the broadest possible sense. Sexually speaking, I wanted him more than ever.

  On my plane trip to the States I reached a level of equanimity. A salubrious side-effect of becoming a skugger was that I could inwardly dose myself with endorphins that had the feel of opiates. I’d attained the goal of the adept’s quest: the Man within.

  Stepping off my plane in New York City, everything looked sharp and clear, as if freshly washed. Sensations were hitting me like tracer bullets. I felt as fabulously alive as an electric eel. Walking with the King and nothing to declare.

  I’d morphed into an beefy Brit to match my passport, but once I cleared immigration, I reverted to the Burroughs Classic look. I felt like a dog rolling in offal after his bath—savoring the filth of being his true self.