Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel

by Rucker, Rudy

  “Remember why we’re here,” admonished Susan. “For poor Joan’s memory. We have to help her soul find liberation.” She dragged Alan and me around the room, and we let her. The faces flowed past, and Susan’s voice gabbled at everyone. I’d dialed up my high to where I was just seeing colors and shapes.

  At some point, Susan zeroed in on this gaunt, long-haired cat with an air of arrested development. Like a waxwork in a museum of mental aberration. He was sitting alone with an empty, sticky-looking glass and an ashtray full of butts.

  “I hear you are muralist, Señor Cortez?” said Susan, in a corny stage accent. She leaned over him and stuck out her tits. “I am composer.”

  “What kind of sound?” asked the guy. He didn’t seem Mexican at all.

  “Sound like thees,” said Susan amping the corn. She dragged a chair back and forth so that it screeched against the floor. She made wild grunting noises at the same time. “Acousmatics, vato!” She flopped down in the chair she’d been flinging around and pointed her finger at her chest. “Susan Verde. And this skinny maricon is my friend Bill.”

  “Far out,” said Cortez the loner. “But don’t talk that way. I’m from Texas.”

  “The, uh, bartender says you’re doing a mural at the Panteón Americano,” continued Susan, not missing a beat.

  Hearing that, I turned off my buzz and started paying attention. The Panteón Americano was where Joan was buried.

  “Yeah, babe,” said Cortez with strange, sinister jocularity. “A mural in mosaic. I’m copying a work by Salvador Dali, Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity. It’s highly erotic, you dig, but as long as it’s got the word ‘Virgin’ in the title, I figure the archbishop gives me my hall-pass. Even though what the clerics really wanna see is a dying man with an hourglass and a scythe on the floor, and the man’s reaching up ecstatic towards a triangle of white light, it’s like God’s eye, or Mary’s snatch more brighter than a harp of gold. I work at night when nobody’s there to run the Inquisition on me.”

  “You, ah, have the key to the main gate?” I asked, getting aboard our hell-bound ride.

  “Sure,” said Cortez, looking us over and reaching a conclusion. “And you three want me to let you in, right? Helping freaks set up necro sex parties is by way of being a profitable sideline.” His face folded into an expression of contented depravity. “No problemo.”

  “No party,” I said. “We’re here to visit my dead wife.”

  “Sure you are, Bill,” said Cortez. “You’ve got a bone to pick.” It was as if he and I knew each other from somewhere, and his words referred to private jokes from our period of intimacy. Like in a lucid dream.

  “Let’s do it,” I said, handing Cortez a sheaf of bills.

  Rising to his feet, Cortez seemed to float a few inches above the ground. I saw him as an airborne jellyfish, torpid and predatory. “Get me a bottle of tequila, too,” he burbled.

  It was quite dark out. Cortez, Alan, Susan, and I walked towards the Panteón Americano cemetery. It wasn’t very far. On the way, we passed some outdoor markets. I felt numb and cold, like a condemned man on his way to the gallows. For his part, Cortez made a side deal with Susan Green, selling her a nasty little pistol that he had in his coat pocket.

  “Fuck the pigs,” said Susan, striking a tough pose with her dinky gun. I doubted she’d know how to reload it.

  Cortez keyed us through the graveyard gate. Images of Joan’s burial and the cops and the reporters were streaming from the dusky borders of my visual field. Joan’s corpse. Her parents. My brother. The morgue. My lawyer. Joan’s face.

  Cortez was was overly loud and animated, swinging his flashlight in reckless loops. Rather than helping us find Joan’s crypt as required, he dragged us to the chapel to show off his bullshit mural—some bobby-soxer girl with a rhino’s horn between the cheeks of her butt, completely vapid. Cortez was executing his work using tiny squares of tile tinted in the properly hideous hues of conventional religious art.

  “The tiles are like atoms in matter,” Cortez intoned, warming up to an artist’s brag. “The tiles are like people in a crowd. We’re puzzle pieces, man. Who fits?” He laid his dark hand on Susan’s waist.

  I was very edgy by now. My skug’s candy-ass endorphins weren’t softening this scene at all. I made my arm into an anaconda and gave Cortez a bone-rattling shake. “You go back to the gate and don’t let anyone in,” I told him.

  “Yeah,” sneered Susan, getting very cocky with her shabby little gun. “Make it snappy or I’ll blast you.”

  Cortez picked up a heavy hammer from his bench, glaring at us with bloodshot eyes, fully set for a showdown. Susan really was ready to shoot him. It was like, with her husband murdered, she didn’t care what she did. I liked that.

  “Here, here,” interposed Alan. “Let’s be civilized, Mr. Cortez! We did pay you, but—” Alan passed him another bill. “Do take your tequila and sit by the front gate. That’ll suit us very nicely.”

  So Cortez reeled back towards the cemetery entrance. I bagged his hammer and a screwdriver as well.

  Now that I didn’t have the besotted artist yammering at us, my head cleared and I was able to find Joan’s crypt. I’d walked here in my dreams often enough. It was January, but the Mexican graveyard was lush with poinsettia shrubs and the stylized cypress trees. The moon was peeping out. I could hear the yowling of cats.

  With Alan’s help, I pried the plate off Joan’s unlabeled spot in the wall. A wild smell. She’d been dead over three years. I’d feared her ghost would dart from the tomb, more vengeful than ever before. But nothing happened.

  “Any bit of tissue will do,” said Alan, bustling at my side. He reached bare-handed into the funerary niche, his arm deep in the dark. A madman. “I’m touching her,” he reported, and made an abrupt, twisting motion, as if snapping desiccated sinews.

  Alan displayed his prize to me, cradling it in the palm of his hand, dramatically lit by a moonbeam. A withered finger, with dried skin and strands of dark flesh. It bore a fingernail. Alan remanded it to my custody.

  “Joan,” I said, my voice weak and strange. I clutched the finger tight in my hand.

  We blew through the gate without talking to Cortez at all. Endless traffic clogged the night street.

  “Are you all right?” Susan Green asked me.

  “I’m imagining Joan trailing back from her finger,” I said. “Bobbing in the air like a lifesize balloon.”

  “We’ll go to that room you rented?” coaxed Susan.

  “Right-o,” put in Alan. “Above the Bounty Bar. But we need some material.”

  We were nearing the all-night market that we’d passed on the way to the graveyard. Alan trotted over to one of the butchers there and—how horrible—purchased a hundred-pound skinned calf, draping the creature across his shoulders. Uncut protein for Joan.

  I’d asked the Bounty bartender for any old room. But—I could hear the unerring ping of synchronicity—he’d given us the very room in which I’d shot Joan in 1951.

  It seemed the room was currently in use as a short-term flop for whores and johns. Where once the lodging had held books, rugs, and a circle of friends, it was now reduced to a bed, a chair, a light bulb, a glass by the sink. Alan threw the slaughtered veal calf onto the dirty floor. A church bell tolled midnight. I closed the door to the hall. The intense silence peculiar to Mexico engulfed us—a vibrating, soundless hum.

  Moving in a trance, I spawned a skug off my stomach and laid it upon the veal calf. The bony flesh shuddered and took on life, forming itself into a featureless loaf. By way of orienting itself, the skug carpeted itself with tiny snail antennae, each stalk with a black bead eye at its time. The thousand eyes watched me and made way as I laid Joan’s finger down in their midst. I was like a bishop installing a reliquary bone.

  To promote the transformation, Susan Green sang to the skug, running her odd voice up and down an archaic scale. Susan was weirdly vibrating her throat to add dark, low overtones. And now
, guided by the genetic codes in the dead finger, the skug morphed into a crude human form, then tightened into a replica of the final, spindly Joan.

  Not daring to think too deeply about what I was doing, I set to work on programming the simulacrum’s mind via teep. I was in effect reconstructing Joan’s personality from my memories. I remembered the early days—Joan and I camping on her vaguely oriental bed with coffee and benzedrine, two youths chattering about decadence and nothingness, Joan quite alluring in her silks and bandannas. I thought of Joan catching a June bug outside our shack in Louisiana, and tying a thread to the bumbling bug’s foot—Joan called it the beetle’s hoof, and she flew the beetle in a circle around our heads. I thought of more and more.

  Even in the last days in Mexico City, Joan had kept her slant humor, seeing adventure in our squalor. The week before she died, she’d perched herself atop a pile of six mattresses we’d found in the street—and she’d called herself the princess and the pea. A phrase from Allen Ginsberg’s in memoriam poem popped into my mind.

  She studied me with

  clear eyes and downcast smile, her

  face restored to a fine beauty.

  And now it was so. Joan’s body sat up and blinked, very jerky, very robotic. This wasn’t going to work. She wasn’t really alive. But then I saw the glinting ultraviolet cuttlefish of Joan’s ghost, dawdling at the fringes of visibility, twiddling her tentacles and flipping her hula-skirt fin, making up her mind. She dove into the skugged meat.

  Still sitting on the floor, the Joan-thing shuddered like a wind-riffled pond. She fixed me with her eyes and began talking, her voice languid and intermittent, like music down a windy street.

  “I want to leave. I want to go to paradise. But I’m not done with you, Bill.”

  “I’m agonized by regret,” I said. “I writhe abjectly. Go up to heaven, Joan. You deserve it. Forgive me and go.”

  “What about little Billy?” asked Joan, rising lithe to her feet. She seemed taller than I remembered. Reaching out, she laid a cool hand on my face.

  Immediately I had a physical sense that I was carrying a large covered basket. I’d been carrying it in my arms for a long time. Our son Billy was in the basket. He was going to die.

  “I’ll help him!” I cried. “It won’t happen that way.” I stepped back, breaking Joan’s hallucinatory contact.

  “You won’t save him,” said Joan, bleakly mournful. “I know you.” She looked around as if only now recognizing this as the spot where I’d shot her.

  I stood frozen in place, awaiting her next move, more than ever wishing I hadn’t set this in motion.

  “Ooooo!” said Joan, her voice purring up through an octave. “I know. It’s time for our William Tell routine.”

  Without moving her arms or her shoulders, she poked her head out on a snaky tendril, scanning the room. Of course she spotted Susan Green’s gun.

  “No,” said Susan, guessing what lay ahead. It was like we were playing out a script. Joan held out her hand. In thrall—or maybe just curious to see what came next—Susan passed Joan the pistol. Turing sat goggling like a mute imbecile.

  “The glass, Bill,” said Joan, her voice low and firm.

  I moved across the room like a fish in heavy water. I set the glass on my head.

  A few paces away from me, Joan raised the pistol.

  “Don’t,” I said, faint and husky. “Don’t shoot me, Joan.”

  She fired. I flinched to the side. The bullet struck my temple. I slumped to the floor: deaf, blind, undead. I could sense things via teep.

  “It’s over!” breathed Joan, with a fading lilt of summer in her voice.

  Her ghost wriggled from her skugly flesh and fluttered in the air, still like a flowing cuttlefish, but more—peaceful than before. Flying around the borders of my teep, Joan’s ghost shrank as if moving far away.

  Her spurned new body reverted to being a skug. It raised one end, as if sniffing the air, then humped along the floor and slid out the window.

  Brain-scrambled as I was, I hallucinated that I humped my own body after Joan’s skug. Fully into the invisible zone of the astral plane, I slithered out the window and—just for jolly—levitated myself fifty feet high in the air. See me fly?

  Downstairs at the Bounty Bar, Cortez was coming back from the cemetery. I lifted a pinky and Cortez ran amok with his razor-sharp tile knife, wounding a photographer and killing three poets on the spot. But when Cortez surged across the bar for a fresh bottle of tequila, the bartender beheaded him, using a Aztec maquahuitl edged in volcanic glass.

  La policia kicked in our rented room’s door, inevitable as reek on rot. It was a straight-on replay of 1951, but with me in a new role. The victim. They took me to the morgue and laid me naked on a marble slab. With a spongy erection.

  “We need acousmatics,” said Susan, sidling in. “I memorized the sounds of a race riot in Miami. I’ll pump the replay from my skin, mixing in the shrieks of swine at the slaughterhouse. We’ll raise Bill from the dead and rectify those policia.”

  My head was splitting in unbearable pain. I retracted my limbs, blanking things out.

  “Bill?” said Alan, leaning over me and shaking me. “Bill?”

  Reset. We were still in the room where I’d been shot. I sat up and spit the bullet from my mouth. The sun was high.

  “What a burn,” I said. “Let’s split this scene.”

  “Agents everywhere,” said Susan, leaning out the open window. “Like shit on shit. We need more acousmatics.” She emitted a fresh torrent of noise. It was a collage of every sound I’d ever heard in my life—thrown into a rock-tumbler.

  The sky went pale green. Hailstones fell past, big as hens’ eggs, shattering on the street. Elephants trumpeted frantic at the drone of an approaching twister. The room’s wall rocked twice and exploded out. Turing and I slid helpless across the floor, pissing our pants. Cars tumbled through the air with clown-cops behind the wheels. A striped circus tent swept upwards, drawing me into a whirling shattered midway of bleachers and shooting galleries, of sugar skulls and Socco Chico queens.

  Poised at the virtual tent-peak of the vortex was Joan, far and wee, the bride on the funeral cake, luminous white, bidding farewell, giving me the finger. Behind her glowed the light of a Missouri sunset, the clouds like bruised flesh.

  I twitched and vomited, turning myself inside out. I was an eyeball on a transfinite spinal cord, shooting up like Jack’s beanstalk, slipping through the same clenched hole as Joan, the atomic pucker, the tiny pinprick between purgatory and paradise. My eye in heaven gazed upon a radiance beyond our wan spectrum—vivid, vital, vibrant.

  The core spake unto Willy Lee: “I am. I am the V-bomb.” And as yet, your prophet knew not the meaning of these words.

  Second reset. I was still in the flophouse room we’d rented, on the floor in a clotted crust of blood. I’d been in a night-long seizure, reflexively regrowing my brain. The sunlight lay like pig iron on the ground. The police had dispersed—if they’d ever been there at all.

  We got a cab to the Mexico City junk neighborhood and teeped Naranjo. He’d scored two kilos of coarse brown H.

  Back on the plane, with Susan in front with Naranjo, and Alan in back with me, I tore into the corner of a brick, and told Naranjo I was keeping an ounce for my own. He didn’t care. I stashed my junk into the cellophane of a cigarette pack. Alan watched disapprovingly.

  “Hardly prudent,” he said.

  Skugged, shot in the head, back from the dead, I wanted to be on the nod, skating the edge of OD, in blank oblivion. But when I went to snort my junk, my inner skug wouldn’t let me. So I dialed up the inner stim and declaimed unto my fellows a Sura.

  “Hearken unto me, Alan, Susan, and Naranjo. I am the man. I was there. I snaked the hole to heaven. Death can be conned. There’s a higher level, my dear ones, a paradise beyond the shrieking sea of ghosts. Yea, wouldst thou attain immortality, thou shalt—”

  “Shut your crack, Burroughs,” said Naranj
o. “Unless you want another ride on that deathbed rollercoaster.” He’d turned around in his pilot’s seat. He had an oily 45 automatic pointed at my forehead. He looked utterly resolute. “I’m not about to listen to your bullshit for ten hours.”

  “How about I suck your cock instead?” I said, just to push him a little further. I like to see people go over the edge.

  “Degenerate,” muttered Naranjo, stashing his gun and turning back to the plane’s controls.

  “Don’t bully Bill,” said Alan at my side. “He’s had a rough night of it.”

  So I held my tongue during the long flight back to Ranger Rob the Smuggy Bear’s strip, leaning on Alan’s shoulder, staring freaky out the plane window, continually amazed to be alive.

  I was done with Joan.

  Chapter 14: Los Alamos

  “You have got to change your look,” said Ranger Rob as Alan, Bill, Susan and Naranjo debarked from the plane on his snowy, tree-shrouded landing strip. “The word is out. You’re in the news.”

  Ranger Rob was a fat-faced man with too much hair—a gray pouf on top, nasty muttonchop sideburns and a lumberjack beard with pancakes and bacon. And he was a skugger too, thanks to Alan. The little TV in his tiny, velvet-curtained cabin was jabbering away. The story of the Gormly ambush was a national sensation. Newscasters and politicos were ranting about witchcraft, satanic cults, communist cells and anarchy. Alan’s and Susan’s faces were on endless replay, shown in a news film shot during the attack, with occasional glimpses of Naranjo, labeled as a hostage. The high point of the film was a grainy, slo-mo loop of Alan deforming his body in a skuggy way, reaching up for Naranjo’s helicopter.

  “Funny they’re not talking about a mass vaccination,” said Alan. “Using that anti-skug vaccine Roland Gill was telling me about. He was the FBI agent I skugged?”

  “I bet that vaccine is hard to make,” said Susan. “Expensive. They’re saving it for the elite. For the police. Meanwhile it’s open season on us.”