The Western Lands (20 page)

"How can I serve you, noble sir?"

Neferti orders an opium absinthe. His bodyguard tosses down a double mango brandy. Neferti sips his drink and looks around: some young courtiers from the Palace on a slumming expedition, a table of the dreaded Breathers. By taking certain herbs mixed with centipede excrement, they nurture a breath so foul that it can double a man over at six feet like a kick to the crotch. At point-blank range the breath can kill.

Every Breather has a different formula. Some swear by bat dung, others by vulture vomit smoothed by rotten land crabs, or the accumulated body fluids of an imperfectly embalmed mummy. There are specialty shops catering to Breathers where such mixtures can be obtained. They vie with each other for the foulest breath. The breath mixtures slowly eat away the gums and lips and palate.

Now a Breather exhales into the air above the courtiers' table and dead flies rain down into their drinks. The Breather lisps through a cleft palate, "Noble sirs, I beg your forgiveness. I simply wish to prevent the flies from annoying your revered persons."

Neferti shudders to remember his encounter with an old Breather.  . . .

The Breather bars his path. His lips are gone and there are maggots at the corners of his mouth.

"A pittance, noble sir."

"Out of my path, offal."

The old Breather stands his ground. He smiles, and a maggot drops from his mouth.

"Please, kind sir."

Neferti shoots him in the stomach with his .44 Special. The Breather doubles forward and such a foul stink jets from his mouth in a hail of rotten teeth and maggots that Neferti loses consciousness.

He came to in a chamber of the Palace, attended by the royal physicians. He shuddered at the memory and vomited until he brought up green bile. Worst of all was knowing that his Ka had been denied. Three months of rigorous purification, during which he ate only fruits and drank the purest spring water, restored him to health.

A beautiful young Breather with smooth purple skin like an overripe tropical fruit glides over to Neferti.

"Honored sir," he purrs, "I can breathe many smells." He exhales a heavy, clinging musk that sends blood tingling to Neferti's groin.

"I can show you how to pass through the Duad."

The Duad is a river of excrement, one of the deadliest obstacles on the road to the Western Lands. To transcend life you must transcend the conditions of life, the shit and farts and piss and sweat and snot of life. A frozen disgust is as fatal as prurient fixation, two sides of the same counterfeit coin. It is necessary to achieve a gentle and precise detachment, then the Duad opens like an intricate puzzle. Since Neferti had been exposed to the deadly poison of Christianity, it was doubly difficult for him to deal with the Duad.

So he nods and the Breather, Giver of Strong Smells and Tainted Winds, guides them through a maze of alleys, paths, ladders, bridges and catwalks, through inns and squares, patios and houses where people are eating, sleeping, defecating, making love. This is a poor quarter and few can afford the luxury of a private house with no rights of passage. There are many degrees of privacy. In some houses there is a public passage only through the garden. Others live in open stalls on heavily traveled streets, or in the maze of tunnels under the city, or on roofs where the neighbors hang clothes to dry and tether their sheep and goats and fowl. Some are entitled to exact a toll. And some routes are the exclusive prerogative of a club, a secret society, a sect, a tong, a profession or trade. Fights over passage rights are frequent and bloody. There are no public services in this quarter, no police, fire, sanitation, water, power or medical service. These are provided by families and clubs, if at all.

Neph is letting his far-seer scouts get too far ahead. Some call them spirit guides or helpers. It is their function to reconnoiter an area so that one knows what to expect, and to alert headquarters with regard to dangers, conditions, enemies and allies to be contacted or avoided. They are bringing him instead general considerations on the area . . . valuable and interesting, but not precisely applicable in present time.

Neferti is in The Golden Sphincter, an ultra-sleazy gay bar at the end of a long, crooked alley, no doubt hollowed out by generations of people sidestepping the human and animal waste that litters the worn stone, stained brown from years of urine and excrement. This bar is on the outskirts of Waghdas and jackals are as common as the feral cats. He sips his drink and looks around: three old queens at the end of the bar, pathic vultures writhing in carrion hunger and the frightful frivolity of the species.

"Do it to me, Death!"

Poisonous puppets . . . Neph recognizes a thin, red-haired man at the bar as a hit man he knows slightly. Good, too . . . does work for the Vatican.

As he walks by the three queens he breathes out, almost subliminally, "The animal doctor should put you to sleep."

A reproduction of the Belgian boy urinating and a seashell of pink papier-mâché stained by dirty years. As Neph was urinating a water closet flew open and a man popped out, a lean Turk with a goatee. From his fly protruded a steel-blue erection.

"You like?"

Back in The Golden Sphincter, he nodded to the Breather.

"There is a rear entrance."

The door opened on what looked like a museum corridor in a blast of stale, cool air. As he stepped into the corridor the door shut behind him. Neph felt a blast of black hate, utterly repulsive and at the same time sad and hopeless.

What hates him? That which is not him and can never become him. They hate him for what he is, because they must become what he is or die. A man is delineated by what he is not. So let their hate be the chisel to form a statue of dazzling beauty. With every curse, every spitting, drooling snarl, every apoplectic sputter, every poisonous snide-queen screech, his marble is polished, the blemishes cleared away, that little twitch of the mouth smoothes out as the worry wrinkles relax into smooth white stone. Shrieking, the attack subsides and withers away, like bacilli caught in the antibiotic dead end.

A dedicated Lesbian denigrator slinks back to vomit her stomach acids on my impeccable marble.

"It would be well, my Short Rib," I tell her, "to kiss my big toe . . . there is a slight imperfection, a protuberance ... a little of your acid
just there
.
  
. . . Thank you, you can go now."

She spits out green bile.

"Self-contained heel. I hope you choke on yourself."

Neph experiences a cool, stony relief. They are gone . . . for the moment.

Neferti and the beautiful Breather are strolling through a flower market. An old hag rushes out and screams at the Breather, "You have sucked all the smell from my flowers.
Voleur!"

"Only to give it back tenfold," and he breathes out such a smell of flowers that the market is covered by a smog of cloying sweetness.

They pass the Restaurant Notre Dame.
"Voleur!
My food tastes like beaverboard. You have sucked all the flavor out!"

The Breather turns and exhales, delicious garlicky cooking smells permeate the quarter. Everywhere people with the spit hanging down off their chins storm the Notre Dame.

"I can jet my way about like an octopus. You see, I'm a
reverse
vampire. Take a little, give back a lot. More than they can use, in fact. Keep moving is my motto. Only way to live. Now, one-way grounded vampirism, worst thing can happen to a man. I mean maintaining a permanent image with stolen energy. Some run it into the ground hot and heavy, moaning in a bloodless desert. Others take a little, leave a little, live and let live—but by the terms of the vampiric process they always take more than they leave. The error here is
& fixed image.

"In fact, a fixed image is the basic mortality error, a ME that cannot be allowed to change, certainly not to change color. Remember the white man in Johannesburg was stung nigger-black by a swarm of bees? They take him to the nigger hospital and he wakes up screaming, 'Where am I, you black bastards?'

"'You is with yo' mummy and daddy, chile.'"

Neferti is dropping his Ego, his Me, his face to meet the faces that he meets. There is nothing here to protect himself from. He can feel the old defenses falling, dropping away like muttering burlap, dripping from crystal bone, burning out like a Coleman mantle . . . the black mantle shreds in the night wind.

In the 1920s, everyone had a farm where they would spend the weekends. I remember the Coleman lanterns that made a roaring noise, and the smell of the chemical toilets.... Khaibit, my shadow, my memory, is shredding away in the wind.

THE HONEY DOOR

Stoneworkers uncovered a stratum of fossilized honeycombs. The congealed sweetness sealed in over the centuries wafted out and the Pharaoh, Great Outhouse 8, whiffed it fifty miles away in his palace. It was said of Great 8 that he could tell when any of his subjects defecated and differentiate among them by the smell.

He dispatched his most skilled stonecutters to the spot. The stratum of stone combs was cut free from the surrounding rock and carried to the palace. Of an irregular shape, it measured ten by eight feet and in some places was two feet in depth.

Great 8 was very old, and he gave orders for his embalming. After the preliminary procedures of extracting the internal organs and the brain and drying and curing the mummy, instead of being wrapped in linen, he would be placed naked into a sarcophagus cut from the combs, the sarcophagus to be filled with honey.

It is known that sugar does not spoil, and soon others are following in the sweet steps of Great Outhouse 8, having their mummies preserved in orange and strawberry, rose and lotus syrups, glycerine with opal chips ... the sarcophagus swings on a pivot so that the chips float about, and there is a little crystal window to observe the deceased in his final habitat.

The priests are disquieted and paw the ground like cattle scenting danger. A flood of unorthodox embalming methods could sweep away the fundamentals of our
Thing
,
they wail. And their fears are not without foundation.

The embalmer, Gold Skin, has discovered a method by which a thin sheet of metal can be applied to a mummy by coating the mummy with charcoal and immersing it in a vat of gold, copper or silver salts activated by a device which was his closely guarded secret. Wrapped in the Golden Skin, one need not fear the encroachment of extraneous insects or scavengers, of time or water. However, the initial mummification must be doubly rigorous, lest one be sealed forever in the vilest corruption of liquefied flesh and bones and maggots.

Gold Skin leaves a small orifice capped by an airtight seal. Every year, on the conception date of the deceased, the Breathing is observed: the seal is broken, and the assembled dignitaries advance and sniff. If there is evidence of mortification, the embalmer is cut into small pieces, which are consumed in a very hot fire with ten Nubian slaves at the bellows so that every fiber of his being is utterly vaporized, until nothing nothing nothing remains as the ashes blow away with the afternoon wind to mix with sand and dust. It's the worst thing that can happen to an embalmer with mummy aspirations . . . got his condominium in the Western Lands all picked out and paid for.

It sometimes happens that a business rival, a disgruntled former employee or a malicious prankster may gain access to the tomb, make an opening in the gold skin, and squirt in an enema bag of liquid shit and rotten blood and carrion with a goodly culture of maggots selected from a dead vulture. He then seals the opening and polishes the metal so that his intervention is undetectable.

This is the Fifth Breathing, and a goodly crowd is there. On previous occasions a sweet, spicy smell wafted out and there was an appreciative sigh from the guests. This time, as he unscrews the cap, it is torn from his hands and a geyser of stinking filth cascades out, spattering the dignitaries with shit and writhing maggots.

Gold Skin was saved from execution, since the Pharaoh and the High Priest recognized the handiwork of the dreaded demon Fuku, also known as the Mummy Basher for his vicious attacks on helpless mummies.

Fuku is the God of Insolence. He respects nothing and nobody. He once screamed at the Pharaoh, Great Two House 9, "Give me any lip and I'll jerk the living prick offen your mummy!"

Creature of Chaos, God of pranksters and poltergeists, dreaded by the pompous, the fraudulent, the hypocritical, the boastful . . . wild, riderless, he knows no master but Pan, God of Panic. Wherever Pan rides screaming crowds to the shrilling pipes, you will find Fuku.

Cut-rate embalmers offer pay-as-you-go plans, so much a month for mummy insurance. If you live fifty years or die tomorrow, your future in the Western Lands is assured. (An old couple with their arms around each other's shoulders stand in front of their modest little villa.)

The Western Lands are now open to the middle class of merchants and artisans, speculators and adventurers, pimps, grave robbers and courtesans. The Priests wring their hands and warn of a hideous soul glut. But Egypt is threatened by invasion from without and rebellion from within. So the Pharaoh decides to throw the biggest sop he's got to the middle classes, to ensure their loyalty. He will give them Immortality.

"If we alienate the middle classes, they will take their skills to the partisans and the rebels."

"It is true what you say, Great Outhouse. But I likes the old ways."

"I too. It was a good tight club in those days. If things get rough, we can always liquidate the excess mummies."

The Embalming Conclaves are able to offer cheap rates because the embalming is done on a moving belt, each team of embalmers performing one operation: remove brains, remove internal organs, wind the wrappings. They become extremely dexterous and quick. What used to take a month can now be done in a day.

"These changes are too fast for Khepera," moans the High Priest. (Khepera, the Dung Beetle of Becoming, is seen rushing frantically about, faster and faster. He throws himself on his back in despair, feebly kicking his legs in the air.)

Three hours and twenty-three minutes from Death to Mummification: an hour to gut it out good, an hour in the drying vats, an hour in the lime-cure vats, internal organs stashed in tasteful vases, wrap it up and store it in the communal vaults, which are carefully controlled for humidity and temperature and patrolled by armed guards at all times.