The Soft Machine

by William S. Burroughs

  Call through remote dawn of back yards and ash pits—Plaintive ghost in the turnstile—Shadow cars and wind faces came to World’s End—Whiff of dried jissom in the bandanna trailing sweet young breath through remote lands—soft globs on a brass bed in Mexico—naked—wet—carbolic soap—tight nuts—piece of soap in the locker room rubbing each other off to “My Blue Heaven”—grinning as the other two watched—street light on soiled clothes dim jerky far away dawn in his eyes. Do you begin to see there is no boy there in the dark room? He was looking at something a long time ago. Changed place?—Same position—Sad image circulates through backward time—Clom Fliday.”

  Case Of The Celluloid Kali

  The name is Clem Snide—I am a Private Ass Hole—I will take on any job any identity any body—I will do anything difficult dangerous or downright dirty for a price—

  The man opposite me didn’t look like much—A thin grey man in a long coat that flickered like old film—He just happens to be the biggest operator in any time universe—

  “I don’t care myself you understand”—He watched the ash spiraling down from the end of his Havana—It hit the floor in a puff of grey dust—

  “Just like that—Just time—Just time—Don’t care myself if the whole fucking shithouse goes up in chunks—I’ve sat out novas ­before—I was born in a nova.”

  “Well Mr. Martin, I guess that’s what birth is you might say.”

  “I wouldn’t say—Have to be moving along any case—The ticket that exploded posed little time—Point is they are trying to cross me up—Small timers—Still on the old evacuation plan—Know what the old evacuation plan is, Mr. Snide?”

  “Not in detail.”

  “The hanging gimmick—Death in orgasm—Gills—No bones and elementary nervous system—Evacuation to The Drenched Lands—A bad deal on the level and it’s not on the level with Sammy sitting in—Small timers trying to cross me up—Me, Bradly-Martin, who invented the double-cross—Step right up—Now you see me now you don’t—A few scores to settle before I travel—A few things to tidy up and that’s where you come in—I want you to contact The Venus Mob, The Vegetable People and spill the whole fucking compost heap through Times Square and Piccadilly—I’m not taking any rap for that green bitch—I’m going to rat on everybody and split this dead whistle stop planet wide open—I’m clean for once with the nova heat—Like clean fall out—”

  He faded in spiraling patterns of cigar smoke—There was a knock at the door—Registered letter from ­Antwerp —Ten thousand dollar check for film rights to a novel I hadn’t written called The Soft Ticket—Letter from somebody I never heard of who is acting as my agent suggests I contact the Copenhagen office to discuss the Danish rights on my novel Expense Account—Bar backed by pink shell—New Orleans jazz thin in the Northern night. A boy slid off a white silk bar stool and held out the hand: “Hello, I’m Johnny Yen, a friend of—Well, just about everybody. I was more physical before my accident you can see from this interesting picture. Only the head was reduced to this jelly but like I say it the impression on my face was taken by the other man’s eyes drive the car head-on it was and The Big Physician (he’s very technical) rushed him off to a surgery and took out his eyes and made a quick impression and slapped it on me like a pancake before I started to dry out and curl around the edges. So now I’m back in harness you might say: and I have All of ‘you’ that what I want from my audience is the last drop then bring me another. The place is hermetic. We think so blockade we thought nobody could get thru our flak thing. They thought. Switch Artist me. Oh, there goes my frequency. I’m on now. . .”

  The lights dimmed and Johnny pranced out in goggles flickering Northern Lights wearing a jockstrap of Undifferentiated Tissue that must be in constant movement to avoid crystallization. A penis rose out of the jock and dissolved in pink light back to a clitoris, balls retract into cunt with a fluid plop. Three times he did this to wild “Olés!” from the audience. Drifted to the bar and ordered a heavy blue drink. D noted patches of white crystal formed along the scar lines on Johnny’s copy face.

  “Just like canals. Maybe I’m a Martian when the Crystals are down.”

  You will die there a screwdriver through the head. The thought like looking at me over steak and explain it all like that stay right here. She was also a Reichian Analyst. Disappear more or less remain in acceptable form to you the face.

  “We could go on cutting my cleavage act, but genug basta assez dice fall hombre long switch street. . . I had this terrible accident in a car a Bentley it was I think they’re so nice that’s what you pay for when you buy one it’s yours and you can be sure nobody will pull it out from under our assets. Of course we don’t have assholes here you understand somebody might go and get physical. Soo we are strictly from urine. And that narrows things to a fine line down the middle fifty feefty and what could be fairer than that my Uncle Eyetooth always says he committed fornication but I don’t believe it me old heavy water junky like him. . . So anyhoo to get back to my accident in my Bentley once I get my thing in a Bentley it’s mine already.

  So we had this terrible accident or rather he did. Oh dear what am I saying? It wasn’t my first accident you understand yearly wounded or was it monthly Oh dear I must stay on that middle line. . .

  “Survivor. Survivor. Not the first in my childhood. Three thousand years in show business and always keep my nose clean. Why I was a dancing boy for the Cannibal Trog Women in The Ice Age. Remember? All that meat stacked up in the caves and The Blue Queen covered with limestone flesh creeps into your bones like cold grey honey. . . that’s the way they keep them not dead but paralyzed with this awful stuff they cook down from vampire bats get in your hair Gertie always keep your hair way up inside with a vampire on premises bad to get in other alien premises. The Spanish have this word for it, something about props ajeno or something like that I know so am ya la yo mixa everything allup. They call me Puto The Cement Mixer, now isn’t that cute? Some people think I’m just silly but I’m not silly at all. . . and this boyfriend told me I looked just like a shrew ears quivering hot and eager like burning leaves and those were his last words engraved on my back tape—along with a lot of other old memories that disgust me, you wouldn’t believe the horrible routines I been involved through my profession of Survival Artist. . . and they think that’s funny, but I don’t laugh except real quick between words no time you understand laughing they could get at me doesn’t keep them off like talking does, now watch—”

  A flicker pause and the light shrank and the audience sound a vast muttering in Johnny’s voice.

  “You see”—Shadows moved back into nightclub seats and drank nightclub drinks and talked nightclub talk—“They’d just best is all. So I was this dancing boy for these dangerous old cunts paralyzed men and boys they dug special stacked right up to the ceiling like the pictures I saw of Belsen or one of those awful contracted places and I said they are at it again. . . I said the Old Army Game. I said ‘Pass The buck.’ Now you see it, now you don’t. . . Paralyzed with this awful gook The Sapphire Goddess let out through this cold sore she always kept open on her lips, that is a hole in the limestone you understand she was like entirely covered with one of those Stag Rites. . . Real concentrated in there and irradiated to prevent an accident owing to some virus come lately wander in from Podunk Hepatitis. . . But I guess I’m talking too much about private things. . . But I know this big atomic professor, he’s very technical too, says: ‘There are no secrets any more, Pet’ when I was smooching around him for a quickie. My Uncle still gives me a sawski for a hot nuclear secret and ten years isn’t hay, dahling, in these times when practically anybody is subject to wander in from the desert with a quit claim deed and snatch a girl’s snatch right out from under her assets. . . over really I should say but some of we boys are so sick we got this awful cunt instead of a decent human asshole disgust you to see it. . . So I just say anything I hear on the ol
d party line.

  “I used to keep those old Cave Cunts at bay with my Impersonation Number where I play this American Mate Dance in Black Widow drag and I could make my face flap around you wouldn’t believe it and the noises I made in uh orgasm when SHE ate me—I played both parts you unnerstand, imitated The Goddess Herself and turn right into stone for security. . . And SHE couldn’t give me enough juice running out of this hole was her only orifice and she was transported dais and all, die ass and all, by blind uniques with no balls, had to crawl under HER dais dressed in Centipede Suit Of The Bearer which was put on them as a great honor and they was always fighting over matter of crawl protocol or protocrawl. . . So all these boys stacked to the ceiling covered with limestone. . . you understand they weren’t dead any more than a fresh oyster is dead, but died in the moment when the shell was cracked and they were eaten all quivering sweet and tasty. Vitamins the right way. . . eaten with little jeweled adzes jade and sapphires and chicken blood rubies all really magnificent. Of course I pinched everything I could latch onto with my prehensile piles I learned it boosting in Chi to pay the Luxury Tax on C. Three thousand years in show business. . . Later or was it earlier, the Mayan Calendar is all loused up you know. . . I was a star Corn God inna Sacred Hanging Ceremony to fructify The Corn devised by this impresario who specializes in these far out bit parts which fit me like a condom, he says the cutest things. He’s a doctor too. A Big Physician made my face over after ‘The Accident’ collided with my Bentley head on. . . the cops say they never see anything so intense and it is a special pass I must be carrying I wasn’t completely obliterated.

  “Oh there’s my doctor made the face over after my accident. He calls me Pygmalion now, isn’t that cute? You’ll love him.”

  The doctor was sitting in a surgical chair of gleaming nickel. His soft boneless head was covered with grey green fuzz, the right side of his face an inch lower than the left side swollen smooth as a boil around a dead, cold undersea eye.

  “Doctor, I want you to meet my friend Mister D The Agent, and he’s a lovely fellow too. (“Some time he don’t hardly hear what you saying. He’s very technical.”)

  The doctor reached out his abbreviated fibrous fingers in which surgical instruments caught neon and cut Johnny’s face into fragments of light.

  “Jelly,” the Doctor said, liquid gurgles through his hardened purple gums. His tongue was split and the two sections curled over each other as he talked: “Life jelly. It sticks and grows on you like Johnny.”

  Little papules of tissue were embedded in the doctor’s hands. The doctor pulled a scalpel out of Johnny’s ear and trimmed the papules into an ash tray where they stirred slowly exuding a green juice.

  “They say his prick didn’t synchronize at all so he cut it off and made some kinda awful cunt between the two sides of him. He got a whole ward full of his ‘fans’ he call them already.

  “When the wind is right you can hear them scream in Town Hall Square. And everybody says ‘But this is interesting.’

  “I was more physical before my accident, you can see from this interesting picture.”

  Lee looked from the picture to the face, saw the flickering phosphorescent scars—

  “Yes,” he said, “I know you—You’re dead nada walking around visible.”

  So the boy is rebuilt and gives me the eye and there he is again walking around some day later across the street and “No dice” flickered across his face—The copy there is a different being, something ready to slip in—Boys empty and banal as sunlight her way always—So he is exact replica is he not?—Empty space of the original—

  So I tailed the double to London on the Hook Von Holland and caught him out strangling a naked faggot in the bed sitter—I slip on the antibiotic hand cuffs and we adjourn to The Mandrake Club for an informative little chat—

  “What do you get out of this?” I ask bluntly.

  “A smell I always feel when their eyes pop out”—The boy looked at me his mouth a little open showing the whitest teeth this Private Eye ever saw—Naval uniform buttoned in the wrong holes quilted with sea mist and powder smoke, smell of chlorine, rum and moldy ­jockstraps—And probably a narcotics agent is hiding in the spare stateroom that is always locked—There are the stairs to the attic room he looked out of and his mother moving around—Dead she was they say—dead—with such hair too—red.

  “Where do you feel it?” I prodded.

  “All over,” he said, eyes empty and banal as ­sunlight —“Like hair sprouting all over me”—He squirmed and giggled and creamed in his dry goods—

  “And after every job I get to see the movies—You know—” And he gave me the sign twisting his head to the left and up—

  So I gave him the sign back and the words jumped in my throat all there like and ready the way they always do when I’m right “You make the pilgrimage?”

  “Yes—The road to Rome.”

  I withdrew the antibiotics and left him there with that dreamy little-boy look twisting the napkin into a hangman’s knot—On the bus from the air terminal a thin grey man sat down beside me—I offered him a cigarette and he said “Have one of mine,” and I see he is throwing the tin on me—“Nova police—You are Mr. Snide I believe.” And he moved right in and shook me down looking at pictures, reading letters checking back on my time track.

  “There’s one of them,” I heard some one say as he looked at a photo in my files.

  “Hummm—yes—and here’s another—Thank you Mr. Snide—You have been most cooperative—”

  I stopped off in Bologna to look up my old friend Green Tony thinking he could probably give me a line—Up four flights in a tenement past the old bitch selling black-market cigarettes and cocaine cut with Saniflush, through a dirty brown curtain and there is Green Tony in a pad with Chinese jade all over and Etruscan cuspidors—He is sitting back with his leg thrown over an Egyptian throne smoking a cigarette in a carved emerald holder—He doesn’t get up but he says: “Dick Tracy in the flesh,” and motions to a Babylonian couch.

  I told him what I was after and his face went a bright green with rage, “That stupid bitch—She bringa the heat on all of us—Nova heat—” He blew a cloud of smoke and it hung there solid in front of him—Then he wrote an address in the smoke—“No. 88 Via di Nile, Roma.”

  This 88 Nile turned out to be one of those bar-soda fountains like they have in Rome—You are subject to find a maraschino cherry in your dry martini and right next to some citizen is sucking a banana split disgust you to see it—Well I am sitting there trying not to see it so I look down at the far end of the counter and dug a boy very dark with kinky hair and something Abyssinian in his face—Our eyes lock and I give him the sign—And he gives it right back—So I spit the maraschino cherry in the bartender’s face and slip him a big tip and he says “Rivideci and bigger.”

  And I say “Up yours with a double strawberry phosphate.”

  The boy finishes his Pink Lady and follows me out and I take him back to my trap and right away get into an argument with the clerk about no visitors stranezza to the hotel—Enough garlic on his breath to deter a covey of vampires—I shove a handful of lire into his mouth “Go buy yourself some more gold teeth,” I told him—

  When this boy peeled off the dry goods he gives off a slow stink like a thawing mummy—But his asshole sucked me right in all my experience as a Private Eye never felt anything like it—In the flash bulb of orgasm I see that fucking clerk has stuck his head through the transom for a refill—Well expense account—The boy is lying there on the bed spreading out like a jelly slow tremors running through it and sighs and says: “Almost like the real thing isn’t it?”

  And I said “I need the time milking,” and give him the sign so heavy come near slipping a disk.

  “I can see you’re one of our own,” he said warmly sucking himself back into shape—“Dinner at eight”
—He comes back at eight in a souped up Ragazzi and we take off 160 per and scream to stop in front of a villa I can see the Bentleys and Hispano Bear Cats and Stutz Suisses and what not piled up and all the golden youth of Europe is disembarking—“Leave your clothes in the vestibule,” the butler tells us and we walk in on a room full of people all naked to a turn sitting around on silk stools and a bar with a pink shell behind it—This cunt undulates forward and give me the sign and holds out her hand “I am the Contessa di Vile your hostess for tonight”—She points to the boys at the bar with her cigarette holder and their cocks jumped up one after the other—And I did the polite thing too when my turn came—

  So all the boys began chanting in unison “The ­movies! —The movies!—We want the movies!—” So she led the way into the projection room which was filled with pink light seeping through the walls and floor and ceiling—The boy was explaining to me that these were actual films taken during the Abyssinian War and how lucky I was to be there—Then the action starts—There on the screen is a gallows and some young soldiers standing around with prisoners in loincloths—The soldiers are dragging this kid up onto the gallows and he biting and screaming and shitting himself and his loincloth slips off and they shove him under the noose and one of them tightens it around his neck standing there now mother naked—Then the trap fell and he drops kicking and yelping and you could hear his neck snap like a stick in a wet towel—He hangs there pulling his knees up to the chest and pumping out spurts of jissom and the audience coming right with him spurt for spurt—So the soldiers strip the loincloths off the others and they all got hard-ons waiting and watching—Got through a hundred of them more or less one at a time—Then they run the movie in slow motion slower and slower and you are coming slower and slower until it took an hour and then two hours and finally all the boys are standing there like statues getting their rocks off geologic—Meanwhile an angle comes dripping down and forms a stalactite in my brain and I slip back to the projection room and speed up the movie so the hanged boys are coming like machine guns—Half the guests explode straightaway from altered pressure chunks of limestone whistling through the air. The others are flopping around on the floor like beached idiots and the Contessa gasps out “Carbon dioxide for the love of Kali”—So somebody turned on the carbon dioxide tanks and I made it out of there in an aqualung—Next thing the nova heat moves in and bust the whole aquarium.