The Western Lands (32 page)

"'Well,' I said, 'it's worth a try.'

"And there's nothing more to tell. I guess he got his wish, one way or another."

"What happened to the Wishing Machine?"

"I have it. Police found a handwritten will, leaving all his personal effects to me. Wasn't much: cooking utensils, cat food, a few tools, a machete, a Ruger Speed-Six Magnum, a Rossi double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun, and the Wishing Machine."

"Do you intend to use it?"

"No . . . but then who can refuse the monkey's paw?"

It was a hectic, portentous time in Paris, in 1959, at the Beat Hotel, No. 9, rue Git-le-Coeur. We all thought we were interplanetary agents involved in a deadly struggle . . . battles . . . codes . . . ambushes. It seemed real at the time. From here, who knows? We were promised transport out of the area, out of Time and into Space. We were getting messages, making contacts. Everything had meaning. The danger and the fear were real enough. When somebody is trying to kill you, you know it. Better get up off your tail and fight.

Remember when I threw a blast of energy and all the light in the Earl's Court area of London went out, all the way down to North End Road? There in my five-quid-a-week room in the Empress Hotel, torn down long ago. And the wind I called up, like Conrad Veidt in one of those sword-and-sorcery movies, up on top of a tower raising his arms:
"Wind! Wind! Wind!"
Ripped the shutters off the stalls along World's End and set up tidal waves killed several hundred people in Holland or Belgium or someplace.

It all reads like sci-fi from here. Not very good sci-fi, but real enough at the time. There were casualties . . . quite a number.

Well, there isn't any transport out. There isn't any important assignment. It's every man for himself. Like the old bum in the dream said: Maybe we lost. And this is what happens when you lose.

But in those days there were still purple patches, time eddies by the side of the river. I remember a Gypsy with a baboon that jumped through a hoop to an old, foul tune, and a muzzled dancing bear, and a trained goat that walked up a ladder, a German piper boy with a wolf's face and sharp little teeth. Gone, all gone now . . . and soon, anyone who might regret their going will be gone too.

So here I am in Kansas with my cats, like the honorary agent for a planet that went out light-years ago. Maybe I am. Who will ever know?

The Director reels around on an empty deck giving meaningless orders. The. radio is out. The guns stopped working light-years ago. The Shadow, Memory, horribly maimed, clings to the Remains, Sekhu. The spirit that must remain in the body after all the others are gone: the Remains, that enabled the others to leave, by giving them a receptacle to occupy in the first place.

Palm Beach, Florida. 202 Sanford Avenue. Mother and I take Old Fashioneds, which I mix every day at 4 p.m. We are trying to keep my son Billy from getting into more trouble before his trial, on a charge of passing forged speed scripts.

Mother comes into my room with a bag full of empty paregoric bottles from Billy's room, just lying around for the narcs to find. I take the bag down to Lake Worth and throw it out with a stone for ballast.

Every day I walk out to the end of a sandy road by the sea, to wait for 4 p.m. Once a police car stopped and drove part way out on the road, looked at me, backed up and turned around.

"Just an old fuck with a cane and his trousers rolled."

At least I dare to eat a peach.

The dream is set right there in the sand and driftwood. An L-shaped building with an open door. Standing by the door is an old bum who says,
"We lost!"

There were moments of catastrophic defeat, and moments of triumph. The pure killing purpose. You find out what it means to lose. Abject fear and ignominy. Still fighting, without the means to fight. Deserted. Cut off. Still we wore the dandy uniform, like the dress uniform of a distant planet long gone out. Messages from headquarters?
What
headquarters? Every man for himself—if he's got a self left. Not many do.

I am looking at a big book, the paper made of some heavy, translucent material. The pages are blue, with indistinct figures. The book is attached to the floor of a balcony. I am looking at the book when two Chinese girls intervene and say to someone else I can't see clearly, "This is ridiculous. After all, he is just an
old bum.
"

Battles are fought to be won, and this is what happens when you lose. However, to be alive at all is a victory.

Soul Death takes many forms: an eighty-year-old man drinking out of an overflowing toilet clogged with shit.

"We lost!"

Cancer wards where death is as banal as a bedpan. Just an empty bed to prepare for the next Remains. The walking Remains, who fill up the vast medical complexes, haunted by nothingness.

The door closes behind you, and you begin to know where you are. This planet is a Death Camp . . . the Second and Final Death. Chances of getting out are maybe one in a billion. It's the last game.

The ally Smoker is not lightly invoked, a creature of light-less depths and pressure that could flatten a gun barrel. Smoker emerges in a burst of darkness.

Remember, Smoker will take you at your word. . . .

Newlyweds Killed in Flash Fire . . .

"Not
that
way!" the foolish wisher exclaims in horror. "He left me paralyzed from a botched operation, and then took my bloody bird. All I wanted was to ruin him with a malpractice suit, to see him barred from practice, eking out a meager living as a male midwife, and her peddling 'er dish in Piccadilly. Didn't mean to
burn
them. Hmm, well, I did say 'damn his soul to hell and she should fry with him.' But I didn't mean . . ."

Be careful, and remember there is such a thing as too much of the goodest thing, like a wise guy who wishes all his wishes would be immediately granted. Wakes up, has to shave and dress—no sooner said than done, breakfast already eaten, at the office another million dollars, faster and faster, a lifetime burnt out in a few seconds. He clutches at Joy, Youth, Innocence, enchanted moments that burst at his touch, like soap bubbles.

Mr. Hart wanted the ultimate weapon so he would always be safe. His is a face diseased and covered with pustules, bursting to communicate a secret so loathsome that few can learn it and live. They flee before him in blind panic or drop in their twisted tracks, tongues protruding to the root, eyes exploded from their sockets. Perhaps those eyes saw Smoker.

As Joe moves about the house making tea, smoking cigarettes, reading trash, he finds that he is, from time to time, holding his breath. At such times a sound exhales from his lips, a sound of almost unbearable pain. It is not a pain he can locate in bodily terms. It isn't exactly
his
pain. It's as if some creature inside him is suffering horribly, and he doesn't know exactly why, or what to do to alleviate the pain, which communicates itself to him as a paralyzing fatigue, an inability to do the simplest thing—like fill out the driver's license renewal form. Each night he tells himself firmly that he will do it tomorrow, and tomorrow finds that he simply cannot do it. The thought of sitting down and doing it causes him the indirect pain that drains his strength, so that he can barely move.

What is wrong? To begin with, the lack of any position from which anything can be seen as right. He cannot conceive of a way out, since he has no place to leave from. His self is crumbling away to shreds and tatters, bits of old songs, stray quotations, fleeting spurts of purpose and direction sputtering out to nothing and nowhere, like the body at death deserted by one soul after the other.

First goes Ren, the Secret Name. Destiny. Significance. The Director reels out onto a buckling deck. In shabby theatrical hotels the Actors are frantically packing:

"Oh don't bother with all that junk, John. The
Director
is onstage and you know what that means in show biz!"

"Every man for himself!"

Then Sekem, Energy. The Technician who knows what buttons to push. No buttons left. He disappears in a belch.

Then Khu, the Guardian, intuitive guide through a perilous maze. You're on your own now.

Then Ba, the Heart. "Feeling's dull decay." Nothing remains to him but his feeling for cats. Human feelings are withering away to lifeless fragments abandoned in a distant drawer. "Held a little boy photo in his withered hand . . . dim jerky far away someone has shut a bureau drawer."—(cut up, circa 1962-63).

Is it the Ka, the Double, who is in such pain? Trapped here, unable to escape, unable even to formulate any place to escape to?

And the Shadow, Memory, scenes arbitrarily selected and presented ... the badger shot by the Southern counsellor at Los Alamos, sad shrinking face rolling down a slope, bleeding, dying.

Joe is galvanized for a few incandescent seconds of rage. He jerks the gun from the man's hand and slaps him across the face with it.

"But it might have bitten one of the
boys!"

The boys? Even lust is dead. The boys wink out one by one, like dead stars. The badger turns to bones and dust. The counsellor died years ago, heart attack in his sleep. A shadowy figure stands over him with an old .45 automatic pointed at his chest.

"But, but—I, I—"

The bullets crash into his chest, knocking the breath out. Standing on an empty hillside, a rusting gun in his arthritic hand, like an old root growing around the cracked handle.

"Gibbons," the Director A. J. Connell called his boys. Tailless apes. Ugh! Your gibbon is a very dangerous animal. A friend of mine pushed his pet gibbon gently aside, and the gibbon whirled with a scream of rage and severed his femoral artery with its canines. He knew what to do: He lived. He gave the gibbon to the zoo. Wouldn't you? Bits and pieces.

The Big House at Los Alamos. God it was cold on those sleeping porches. "Get down and waddle like a duck!" says the counsellor, who directs fifteen minutes of exercise before breakfast. Wind and dust. . . where the balsam breezes blow . . . Los Alamos. A vast mushroom cloud darkens the earth.

Ashley Pond is still there. Joe is catching a trout, a big trout, twelve inches. You eat the meat off the back . . . trout bones.

A whiff of incense. He used to burn incense in his room at Los Alamos and read Little Blue Books.

Back in the 1920s, looking for an apartment in the Village. I am wearing a cape and hold a sword in my hand, a straight sword three feet long in a carved wooden sheath with a brass clip. Will it go on the right side, so I don't have to take my belt all the way off?

A sword:
"Je suis Américain, Catholique et gentilhomme.
I live by my sword."—"The Golden Arrow," by Joseph Conrad.

To wail the fault you visualize. What form would surface with an explosive separate being, desperate last chance? The 12-gauge number 4 or never explosive honesty. You see that comes from sincerity the punch-drunk fighter commitment at the count kid.
Bang
and your hybrid is there, speed of light
splat.
Ace in the hole the cats scrap way buried your own laws of nature we create our layout trigger by will. Some of HIS blew up in the sky what of the hybrid? Yes nodded primitive unthinkable not time. Guardian is the saddest shot has a tear in it. Big Bang shotgun art an orgasm of any solid only one of its kind. Chance the hopeless message flashes with the sky final desperate gamble Ruski blow the house layout challenge the immutable results as simple as squeezing energy directed accented brush work.

I want to reach the Western Lands—right in front of you, across the bubbling brook. It's a frozen sewer. It's known as the Duad, remember? All the filth and horror, fear, hate, disease and death of human history flows between you and the Western Lands. Let it flow! My cat Fletch stretches behind me on the bed. A tree like black lace against a gray sky. A flash of joy.

How long does it take a man to learn that he does not, cannot want what he "wants"?

You have to be in Hell to see Heaven. Glimpses from the Land of the Dead, flashes of serene timeless joy, a joy as old as suffering and despair.

The old writer couldn't write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words. And then? "British we are, British we stay." How long can one hang on in Gibraltar, with the tapestries where mustached riders with scimitars hunt tigers, the ivory balls one inside the other, bare seams showing, the long tearoom with mirrors on both sides and the tired fuchsia and rubber plants, the shops selling English marmalade and Fortnum & Mason's tea . . . clinging to their Rock like the rock apes, clinging always to less and less.

In Tangier the Parade Bar is closed. Shadows are falling on the Mountain.

"Hurry up, please. It's time."

THE END