by Jack Kerouac
Credits
THE ELECTROCUTION OF BLOCK 38383939383
BY JACK KEROUAC
AN EBOOK
ISBN 978-1-909923-39-3
PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS
COPYRIGHT 2013 ELEKTRON EBOOKS
www.elektron-ebooks.com
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a database or retrieval system, posted on any internet site, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders. Any such copyright infringement of this publication may result in civil prosecution
Foreword
In 1954, Jack Kerouac announced that he was writing the world’s first Beat Science Fiction novel; what resulted the following year was actually a short story of around 10,000 words entitled cityCityCITY, a futurist dystopian tale of a mega-city plated in superconducting steel, whose inhabitants are housed in “Zone Blocks” which double, when necessary, as electrified mass-execution chambers. Kerouac apparently sent this blueprint to William S. Burroughs with a request to collaborate on a full-length version, but Burroughs declined.
Thus the story languished in limbo, until a new version of it, entitled “The Electrocution Of Block 38383939383”, was published in 1959 (in Nugget magazine).
The story was later published under its original title in the anthology The Moderns (1963), and again in the 1990s with an additional two pages discovered amongst Kerouac’s papers; whether the author intended for these additional pages to be part of the finished story remains unclear. Certainly, “The Electrocution Of Block 38383939383” was the version apparently preferred by Kerouac whilst he was alive.
This special ebook edition of “The Electrocution Of Block 38383939383” as originally published, restores to prominence one of the most intriguing literary experiments of Kerouac’s oeuvre, and of the Beat Generation as a whole.
“The Electrocution Of Block 38383939383”
Boys pushing through the combination inter-group deactivator, for juvenile delinquent kicks, and sometimes just young children when they tried to shove through to their ball, had brought up before Congress the subject of laxity of Deactivation. “It’s a grave peril to our freedoms,” said a spokesman close to sources in Master Center Love (MCL). “It shows a disrespect for ancient tradition in cityCityClTY that was accepted without cavil by the older generation. A great many lives of our children, too, are endangered, when their non-deactivated rubber balls fall into a No-Zone and the game of ‘push-me-in’ takes place, where boys line up behind the brave volunteer and forcibly shove him through the air barrier of the deadly No-Zone where he struggles, choking and turning blue and causing irreparable damage to his lungs, until the ball usually is handed to him by a No-Zone child, as a courtesy, and then ensues the even deadlier game of pulling him back with the pushed-in hand of the leader of the file in Zone, which sometimes fails and results in the death of the child trapped to choke in No-Zone. These practices, plus the delinquent practice of running and throwing oneself against the No-Zone air barrier, which is called Sexing, must be dealt with at the root of their cause; mere punitive punishment, increase of electrocutions, alone, serves no real preventative courtesy to the ideals of Master Center Love and all it has stood for since the Twenty-Eighth Century and the blood shed so willingly before the year One.”
This was on the Brow Multivision set, just a little rubber disc adhering to the brow, turned on and off at the breast control; the sensation to a newcomer was of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling and thinking the sensation of the vision, which was being waved out of Master Center Love Multivision Studios. M-80, of Zone Block 38383939383-338373 (a number most difficult to refer to, without a Multigraph), (but referred to and duly recorded and Destinated in Master Center Love), walked down the street in the early morning sunshine. M-80 was a kid of thirteen. He had pushed the Multivision down from where he usually kept it on the back of his ear, listened a minute, to the speech about juvenile delinquents, and now was about to slide it back, when the commercial came on and he felt a delicious wave of ecstasy from some spiel about a new Drug… “They were saying I couldn’t be happy, couldn’t be high in the cloudless sky, glad, raving to joy, but no, say, hear me, I went and got myself a tube of 17-JX, we call it Jex, and I took out two tablets, and swallowed with water, and instantly, almost at once! there stole over me the incomparable ecstasy of a REALLY free and at the same time POLITE compound. I said to myself ‘These MCL chemists who prepare this Drug for the people of cityCityCITY show that they really know the meaning of LOVE: they have gone all out to provide myriallions and myriallions with the Best, the Most Polite, Courteous, Loving that ingenuity can devise and Merits buy..!” But M-80 wasn’t listening to the announcer; he was busy enjoying the four or five seconds of bliss allowed by the commercial, as a teaser. People all over cityCityCITY were putting in calls this minute to the Super Drugway; soon you’d see them flying around, to their destination; “nobody’ll even be on the street,” sneered the boy, who wanted to play. “U21’ll stay home and try his old Drug, and H-30’ll sleep on it... Golly! Atheism! There’s a pool of water – a real pool of water!” His heart thumped. He had never seen a pool of water in his life, except in Multivision in their history shows, showing how, in the days before rain was diverted from citvCitvClTY, moisture used to fall from the skies and form in the streets and blocks of old cities. “There’s been a leak!” thought the kid frantically. “What’ll they say? Wow!” He rushed up to the pool. Marvelously it reflected the blue perfect sky, with a little ripple only. It was a clean puddle, just a little dust on the edges. He touched it wonderingly, squatted. It was only 8 in the morning and he was the only one who’d seen it. He ran his finger around, stepped in. “It’s just like when they electrocute a block and forget to sweep out a dead man ash. Golly zoo Athies! Romanticism! This is going to kill dad.” He ran to his house, singing happily some gurgled crazy kidyell of happiness. “Ha, ha, ha,” he crashed into the house, interrupting his father, T-3 at breakfast. “What’s it, kid?” – wiping his mouth. “A pool of water? Who ever heard of such a thing? Lemme see.” They went out together, their crepe-foam shoes sliding softly over the steel-plate street with its bolts at intervals like shiny knobs. The pool lay in a depression formed by an old accident, when an insane old man had thrown the Computer of Merit out of the front window and put a dent in the street. “Hmm,” said T-3, Prime Minister of Block 38383939383-338373, a tall handsome man with thick temple gray and a bushy head of hair still jet black in parts, frowning thickly now, “it looks like somethin went wrong somewhere. Couldn’t be the Raindar, the Umbrella Command never had any trouble with electronics that I know of, tho there’s a theory among some of the MCL wiseguys, about infiltration of Activation agents in the Command... a joke on somebody. Let’s see... a leak in the next plate? But the water wouldn’t get through from the No-Zone. What the divine hell could it be? Aw well, it’s a puzzle. I’ll bring it up with the girls. Son, the day women took over all the central organization of world government, wow, lookout, that was it... The day my grandfather envisioned, he told me too, when women get a hold of the whole works and you have to kowtow every morning to a dike martinet, that’s your red wagon…” T-3 called M-80 “son” but in actuality he was only adopted; all the children of the world, after birth in Central Deactivation, where Deactivator disks were riveted into their breastbones prior to Connection in their given Zone Block, were assigned to various parents, according to the Computer of Infinite Merit in MCL (one of the most, if not THE most complicated mechanical brains ever put together; its central secret feature obtained around a mathemat
ical principle relatively unknown, something to do about the chasing of the Zero to Infinity, a constant process that kept equations spinning dizzily on the Dial, you saw thousands of them flashing on and off, vibrating, sending off waves of computation that you could almost sense sprinting to keep up with the race of the zero and still turn out Estimates of Merit, General and Local, by which the government was run). Some people even went so far as to state that Master Center Love itself was a computation, ever-changing, from the Computer of Infinite Merit, but the truth was, Master Center Love had for centuries emanated from the inner core of the High Women of the world, whose system of succession had never been revealed... It was Political. M-80 was assigned to his Zone block by the computation of the machine. His real (seminal) parents he would never know, because they were in other Zone Blocks.
The world was the earth; every square inch was covered with electrical steelplate. The ocean had long ago been covered with earth acquired from surrounding planets. cityCityClTY was the world; every square inch of the world steelplate was covered with the Three Types of Levels of cityCityClTY. You saw the skyline, of steel skyscrapers, far away; then beyond that, like a ballooned imitation of the same skyline, rising way beyond and over it, vastly larger, the second level of cityCityClTY, the City level; beyond that, CITY, like a dim cloud, rose huge on the horizon a vast phan tasmal skyline so far away you could barely see it, yet it rose far above the other two and far beyond. Those three levels were to facilitate the ingress of sunlight into the various people-flats. The cityCityCITY Tri-Levels were: one tenement ten miles high; the second, fifty miles; the third, a hundred miles high; so that from Mars for instance, you saw the earth with its complete CITY everywhere looking like a prickly ball in the Void. The prickles represented one vast domicile of millions upon millions upon myrillions. In each Zone Block lived only about 2,500 people; but there were billions of Zone Blocks. M-80 was our hero’s name; but it was also the name of billions and myrillions of other boys, each with his zone number. His full name was, thus: M-80 38383939383338373… Population kept increasing continually. It was necessary at intervals to electrocute entire Zone Blocks and make room for a new group culled from slags and miscalculations in the system. Deactivation which prevented people from leaving their own Zone Blocks, was a necessary caution against the chaos which would have resulted from an overpopulated Movement over the crowded steelplate of the world. Migrating to other planets was out of the question; especially after centuries of Self Enforced Deactivation. Other planets in the immediate vicinity of earth had been denuded of life and turned into Deactivator Bases and Laboratories, Deactivating all that part of the universe around the earth. Outside raged the life of the Universe, where Activation reigned. Many were the space ships from unknown planets who’d come crashing against the No-Zone of earth and disintegrated in mid-air; many the meteors met the same fate. Nobody questioned the wisdom of Master Center Love in refusing to have any contact with the rest of the universe. Activated... a word written in black letters dripping with red ink... ACTIVATED, you’d see it written on superseptic toilet walls of the cityCityClTY, with lewd drawings. It was a word whispered in dark sex rooms, turned into a colloquial dirty-word. “Activate me.” For all anybody knew, the rest of the universe was completely hostile as well as Activated; no one was taking any chances. But for centuries there had been a steady infiltration of Activationists, and of Activationism. Congressional Committees had investigated. Traitors were found; at least they seemed to be guilty of Activationist activities. The means were through propaganda via Multivision and via certain subversive drugs with telepathic compounds by which the Activationist was said to telepathize propaganda around Master Center Love... One Activationist was believed to be behind one of the famous boners in the history of cityCityClTY. Everybody was lying around one day enjoying the afternoon comedy show, Jexed to the gills (“I’m telling you I was HONORED that afternoon, why I was so honored…“) when somebody at Master Center threw the Panic Switch, which sets off the Warning throughout the world of the impending destruction of the Outer Zone Barrier. (Also it is the switch that transmits directly individually to a single Zone Block ten seconds before it is to be electrocuted.) Using it as a warning of impending destruction of the Outer Zone Barrier naturally has never been known to be needed. Zone Blocks are eliminated at the rate of sixteen a day, but with the world so vastly populated, densely, deeply 100 miles down and 24,000 miles around, it was rare that a Zone Blocker could remember at some time in his life witnessing the doom of his nextblock neighbor on either of the four sides. You could see four other zone blocks but you couldn’t put your hand through the No-Zone Air, unless pushed, and at great pains, into it. “Yes I remember seeing the north Zoneblock next door here, burned, in ‘306... it was awful... everybody turned black… you saw em come runnin outa the house at the warning and still runnin on the steelplate and then they burn black and crisp up… there warnt any smoke much... I hope never to see it again.”
“You think it’ll ever happen to our Zone Block?” (a kid).
Wherein comes the famous saying of the world, “If it does you only got ten seconds to worry about it.”
The goof at Master had thrown this switch, but for every Zone Block in the world, so that for a moment, everywhere in the world in the trillions of billions of Zone Blocks up and down and all around the globe people rushed out of their houses screaming, sending a human vibration, they say, into the sky, that was said to have almost destroyed the No-Zone Air Barrier, and was the supposed intention behind the plot. Studies were being made century after century to ascertain the effect of such a vast human vibration on the Electronics Wall (Great E Wall)… Nothing had ever been unearthed concerning the mystery of the panic broadcast. But it was Activationist work.
Ideas of Activation had been brought onto the earth-globe via the only form of Activated life in the universe that was capable of penetrating the Great Electronics wall: beings on a level of certain rarity that enabled them to swim, veil-like, pale as ghosts, through the Wall and through the people of earth, yet communicating thoughts and ideas. For a long time they were said to be Tathagatas from a Buddha-land but this was refuted in the year ‘682 by a great Mechanical Scholar who said: “The incidence of supernormal and superreal existence, or isness, on a level of communication via mental conception, is .0008753 impossible, and therefore, After the Zero, on a basis of .3578 returning from the Void Echo Decimal, of no pathoactive significance.” It was established then, that these beings were normal beings in a different vibration, not supernormal beings beyond life. Nothing beyond life had as yet found the light of scientific verification. These Beings, these Activation Agents, were the terrors of the world; the troops of Devils of Gothic times were replaced by these pale phantasmal insinuators from Outside, called Actors. This name was referred philologically back to ancient times when disorderly elements were known as “actors” in early trade unions; it all tied up psychologically; now the “actors” were almost impossible to detect and came from other worlds. It was strange. It was always sunlight because of the Raindar Umbrella that prevented moisture from wetting the dangerous electrical hotplate which was the world. The streets were usually empty. Except in the morning, on Market Days, when Drugs, L-Pumps, Computers of Merit, various gadgets, doodads, delicacy pills, etc. were exchanged at the proper marts. Illicit Actor Fumes were sold in forbidden little jars; Actor Fumes came from the emanation which an Actor left when it passed thru a jar, apparently by intention; the sniff of it had the peculiar effect of inducing a certain blissful feeling that was accompanied by a vitamin lapse, or false recharge, that made it impossible to inject L (Love, the official cityCityCITY drug, used by everyone from birth, by law); with the effect of actor fumes, a man of this world was left wide open for telepathic messages from Actors infesting the air; nothing Multivision could send out could combat this, once the victim had a sniff of Actor Fumes, or Ghost, as it was called; it was so powerful and so sweet to the senses the weaker eleme
nts of the population were all addicted; it was easy to get, the Actors saw to that, by merely passing themselves through every jar in the world; jars became illegal. Actors began fuming themselves in people’s breastpockets; all an addict had to do was bend down and sniff, but this never had the total effect of a good enclosed jarful; the Breast Sniff became the minor evil of the two. Breastpockets of any kind were abolished. Later, pants pockets; cavities of all kinds in clothing, walls, surfaces. Certain addicts became adept at storing fumes in their mouths; certain sexual defectives found all kinds of new thrills. Juvenile delinquents hung around corners holding their hands cupped, after dark, to catch fumes if any. “Man, I’m zoned.”
“What’s wrong with Master Center World Drugs, that a little whiff of Actor Fumes, or Ghost as it is known in the street, Jar Bang or Breast Sniff, gets everybody going in the wrong direction? Activationism is behind this; research, unending struggle in our laboratories and computatoriums and Mechanical Universities, in our whole Machine, must be banded together to find a solution to this invasion which may only be the prelude to an unheard-of catastrophic deluge from Outside.” They called it “Outside,” like 20th Century (Pre One) (P0) Jailbirds. “The world is going up in flames!” cried the prophets of doom. “All respect for ancient values is deteriorating. People wander off into the realm of Activated thoughts, influenced by Fumes. Or if not that, outcries are raised against the Computer Administration, complaints that such and such a Zone Block was chosen instead of another…”
“Five Zone Blocks in my very district have been electrocuted in the past 156 years counting yesterday’s Elimination – yet nothing, NOTHING is being done to ascertain why the Computer Administration has not launched an Investigation into possible administrative defects at Center Love that may have played a role in this needless slaughter of District Seventythree.”
