Naked Lunch (14 page)

‘“We have destroyed it,” they say smugly.… And I would like to remind
you, Gentlemen and Hermaphrodites of the Jury, that this Great Beast’ – he points to Doctor Schafer – ‘has, on several previous occasions, appeared in this court charged with the unspeakable crime of brain rape.… In plain English’ – he pounds the rail of the jury box, his voice rises to a scream – ‘in plain English, Gentlemen,
forcible lobotomy
.…’

The jury gasps.… One dies of a heart attack.…
Three fall to the floor writhing in orgasms of prurience.…

The D.A. points dramatically: ‘He it is.… He and no other who has reduced whole provinces of our fair land to a state bordering on the far side of idiocy.… He it is who has filled great warehouses with row on row, tier on tier of helpless creatures who must have their every want attended.…“The Drones” he calls them with a cynical leer
of pure educated evil.… Gentlemen, I say to you
that the wanton murder of Clarence Cowie must not go unavenged: This foul crime shrieks like a wounded faggot for justice at least!’

The centipede is rushing about in agitation.

‘Man, that mother fucker’s hungry,’ screams one of the Bearers.

‘I’m getting out of here, me.’

A wave of electric horror sweeps through the Conferents.… They storm the
exits screaming and clawing.…

The Market

Panorama of the City of Interzone. Opening bars of East St. Louis Toodleoo … at times loud and clear then faint and intermittent like music down a windy street.…

The room seems to shake and vibrate with motion. The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian – races as yet unconceived
and unborn, combinations not yet realized pass through your body. Migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and jungles and mountains (stasis and death in closed mountain valleys where plants grow out of genitals, vast crustaceans hatch inside and break the shell of body) across the Pacific in an outrigger canoe to Easter Island. The Composite City where all human potentials are spread out
in a vast silent market.

Minarets, palms, mountains, jungle … A sluggish river jumping with vicious fish, vast weed-grown parks where boys lie in the grass, play cryptic games. Not a locked door in the City. Anyone comes into your room at any time. The Chief of Police is a Chinese who picks his teeth and
listens to denunciations presented by a lunatic. Every now and then the Chinese takes the
toothpick out of his mouth and looks at the end of it. Hipsters with smooth copper-colored faces lounge in doorways twisting shrunken heads on gold chains, their faces blank with an insect’s unseeing calm.

Behind them, through open doors, tables and booths and bars, and kitchens and baths, copulating couples on rows of brass beds, crisscross of a thousand hammocks, junkies typing up for a shot,
opium smokers, hashish smokers, people eating talking bathing back into a haze of smoke and steam.

Gaming tables where the games are played for incredible stakes. From time to time a player leaps up with a despairing cry, having lost his youth to an old man or become Latah to his opponent. But there are higher stakes than youth or Latah, games where only two players in the world know what the
stakes are.

All houses in the City are joined. Houses of sod – high mountain Mongols blink in smokey doorways – houses of bamboo and teak, houses of adobe, stone and red brick, South Pacific and Maori houses, houses in trees and river boats, wood houses one hundred feet long sheltering entire tribes, houses of boxes and corrugated iron where old men sit in rotten rags cooking down canned heat,
great rusty iron racks rising two hundred feet in the air from swamps and rubbish with perilous partitions built on multi-levelled platforms, and hammocks swinging over the void.

Expeditions leave for unknown places with unknown purposes. Strangers arrive on rafts of old packing crates tied together with rotten rope, they stagger in out of the jungle their eyes swollen shut from insect bites,
they come down the mountain trails on cracked bleeding feet through the dusty windy outskirts of the city, where people defecate in rows along adobe walls and vultures fight over fish heads. They drop down into parks in patched
parachutes.… They are escorted by a drunken cop to register in a vast public lavatory. The data taken down is put on pegs to be used as toilet paper.

Cooking smells of
all countries hang over the City, a haze of opium, hashish, the resinous red smoke of Yage, smell of the jungle and salt water and the rotting river and dried excrement and sweat and genitals.

High mountain flutes, jazz and bebop, one-stringed Mongol instruments, gypsy xylophones, African drums, Arab bagpipes.…

The City is visited by epidemics of violence, and the untended dead are eaten by
vultures in the streets. Albinos blink in the sun. Boys sit in trees, languidly masturbate. People eaten by unknown diseases watch the passerby with evil, knowing eyes.

In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up Harmaline, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable
serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of
unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bangutot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities,
gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere,
maladies of the laboratory and atomic war.… A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum … Larval entities waiting for a Live One …

(Section describing The City and the Meet Café written in state
of Yage intoxication … Yage, Ayuahuasca, Pilde, Nateema are Indian names for Bannisteria Caapi, a fast growing vine indigenous to the Amazon region. See discussion of Yage in Appendix.)

Notes from Yage state:
Images fall slow and silent like snow.… Serenity … All defenses fall … everything is free to enter or to go out.… Fear is simply impossible.… A beautiful blue substance flows into me.… I
see an archaic grinning face like South Pacific mask.… The face is blue purple splotched with gold …

The room takes on aspect of Near East whorehouse with blue walls and red tasseled lamps.… I feel myself turning into a Negress, the black color silently invading my flesh.… Convulsions of lust … My legs take on a well rounded Polynesian substance.… Everything stirs with a writhing furtive life.…
The room is Near East, Negro, South Pacific, in some familiar place I cannot locate.… Yage is space-time travel.… The room seems to shake and vibrate with motion.… The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian, races as yet unconceived and unborn, passes through the body.… Migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and jungles
and mountains (stasis and death in closed mountain valley where plants grow out of genitals, vast crustaceans hatch inside and break the shell of body) across the Pacific in an outrigger canoe to Easter Island.…

(It occurs to me that preliminary Yage nausea is motion sickness of transport to Yage state.…)

‘All medicine men use it in their practice to foretell the future, locate lost or stolen
objects, to diagnose and treat
illness, to name the perpetrator of a crime.’ Since the Indian (straitjacket for Herr Boas – trade joke – nothing so maddens an anthropologist as Primitive Man) does not regard any death as accidental, and they are unacquainted with their own self-destructive trends referring to them contemptuously as ‘our naked cousins,’ or perhaps feeling that these trends above
all are subject to the manipulation of alien and hostile wills, any death is murder. The medicine man takes Yage and the identity of the murderer is revealed to him. As you may imagine, the deliberations of the medicine man during one of these jungle inquests give rise to certain feelings of uneasiness among his constituents.

‘Let’s hope Old Xiuptutol don’t wig and name one of the boys.’

‘Take
a curare and relax. We got the fix in …’

‘But if he
wig
? Picking up on that Nateema all the time he don’t touch the ground in twenty years.… I tell you, Boss, nobody can hit the stuff like that.… It cooks the brains.…’

‘So we declare him incompetent.…’

So Xiuptutol reels out of the jungle and says the boys in the Lower Tzpino territory done it, which surprises no one.… Take it from an old Brujo,
dearie, they don’t like surprises.…

A funeral passes through the market. Black coffin – Arabic inscriptions in filigreed silver – carried by four pallbearers. Procession of mourners singing the funeral song … Clem and Jody fall in beside them carrying coffin, the corpse of a hog bursts out of it.… The hog is dressed in a jellaba, a keif pipe juts from its mouth, one hoof holds a packet of feelthy
pictures, a mezuzzoth hangs about its neck.… Inscribed on the coffin: ‘This was the noblest Arab of them all.’

They sing hideous parody of the funeral song in false Arabic. Jody can do a fake Chinese spiel that’ll just kill you – like a hysterical ventriloquist’s dummy. In fact, he
precipitated an anti-foreign riot in Shanghai that claimed 3,000 casualties.

‘Stand up, Gertie, and show respect
for the local gooks.’

‘I suppose one
should.’

‘My dear, I’m working on the most marvelous invention … a boy who disappears as soon as you come leaving a smell of burning leaves and a sound effect of distant train whistles.’

‘Ever make sex in no gravity? Your jism just floats out in the air like lovely ectoplasm, and female guests are subject to immaculate or at least indirect conception.… Reminds
me of an old friend of mine, one of the handsomest men I have ever known and one of the maddest and absolutely ruined by wealth. He used to go about with a water pistol shooting jism up career women at parties. Won all his paternity suits hands down. Never use his own jism you understand.’

Fadeout … ‘Order in the Court.’ Attorney for A.J., ‘Conclusive tests have established that my client has
no uh personal connection with the uh little accident to the charming plaintiff.… Perhaps she is preparing to emulate the Virgin Mary and conceive immaculately naming my client as a harumph ghostly panderer.… I am reminded of a case in fifteenth-century Holland where a young woman accused an elderly and respectable sorcerer of conjuring up a succubus who then had uh carnal knowledge of the young
person in question with the under the circumstances regrettable result of pregnancy. So the sorcerer was indicted as an accomplice and rampant voyeur before during and after the fact. However, gentlemen of the jury, we no longer credit such uh legends; and a young woman attributing her uh interesting condition to the attentions of a succubus would be accounted, in these enlightened days, a romanticist
or in plain English a God damned liar hehe hehe heh…’

And now The Prophet’s Hour:

‘Millins died in the mud flats. Only one blast free to lungs.

‘“Eye Eye, Captain,” he said, squirting his eyes out on the deck.… And who would put on the chains tonight? It is indicated to observe some caution in the upwind approach, the down wind having failed to turn up anything worth a rusty load.… Senoritas
are the wear this season in Hell, and I am tired with the long climb to a pulsing Vesuvius of alien pricks.’

Need Orient Express out of here to no hide place(r) mines are frequent in the area.… Every day dig a little it takes up the time.…

Jack of phantoms whisper hot into the bone ear.…

Shoot your way to freedom.

‘Christ?’
sneers the vicious, fruity old Saint applying pancake from an alabaster
bowl.…‘That cheap ham! You think I’d demean myself to commit a miracle? … That one should have stood in carny.…

‘“Step right up, Marquesses and Marks, and bring the little Marks too. Good for young and old, man and beast.… The one and only legit
Son of Man
will cure a young boy’s clap with one hand – by contact alone, folks – create marijuana with the other, whilst walking on water and squirting
wine out of his ass.… Now keep your distance, folks, you is subject to be irradiated by the sheer charge of this character.’

‘And I knew him when, dearie.… I recall we was doing an Impersonation Act – very high class too – in Sodom, and that is one cheap town.… Strictly from hunger … Well, this citizen, this fucking Philistine wandered in from Podunk Baal or some place, called me a fucking fruit
right on the floor. And I said to him: “Three thousand years in show business and I always keep my nose clean. Besides I don’t hafta take any shit off any uncircumcised cocksucker.” … Later he come to my dressing room and
made an apology.… Turns out he is a big physician. And he was a lovely fellah, too.…

‘Buddha
? A notorious metabolic junky … Makes his own you dig. In India, where they got no
sense of time, The Man is often a month late.…“Now let me see, is that the second or the third monsoon? I got like a meet in Ketchupore about more or less.”