William S. Burroughs (4 page)

Thinking about it
gets Kim hot. He can feel Sinki's face nuzzling in like a red-haired
wolf and Sinki's long thin pointed dick sticking up against his
stomach and the two eyes one blue and one brown and the look out of
them different and the sauna seemed to open up and he sawed red
lights on the skyline like a forest fire at night and he knowed it
was the North Lights from a picture in geography it's a wonder of
nature.

So when Arch and Ma
got back they was glad enough to have the house gone so long as
Granny went with it, and they built on another spot to escape the
hant of her. When the moon is full you can hear her bellowing from
the old house site and the sauna is there to this day. Nobody uses
it. Arch and Ma is like cats with the morphine, can't stand the feel
of water on their selves.

Kim remembers a
friend of his father's, an unobtrusively wealthy man who traveled all
over the world studying unusual systems of hand-to-hand fighting. And
he wrote a book about it. Kim remembers him as looking very safe and
happy. He could kill anyone in sight and he knew it. And that was a
good feeling.

The book was
fascinating. Chinese practitioners who can stun or kill by a soft
twisting blow just at the right place and the right time. They can
even calculate the "soft touch" as it is called, to kill
several hours later. You jostle the target in a crowd and
—
Kim
hummed a funeral march happily.

An Indian boxer who
could hit a steel plate with all his strength without sustaining so
much as a bruise. And challenged the writer to hit him as hard as he
could. The Indian made it clear that if he felt the writer was
withholding his full strength the interview was at an end. So the
writer, who was a Karate
5
Dan, hit him
full-blast and the Indian didn't even blink.

"You have fair
power, sir," he said.

And there was a
magnificent sulky old Indian who specialized in a lightning blow
to the testicles. The Golden Target he called it. "He was one of
the most unpleasant men I have ever met," the writer reports.
"After a scant quarter-hour spent in his company I was impotent
for a full week."

So the writer tries
to impress this old Midas by breaking a stack of bricks. The Indian
sets up a stack and adds one more brick. Then he lightly thumps the
stack. The writer points a disparaging finger at the top brick,
which is undamaged.

The old practitioner
removes the top brick. All the bricks under it have been shattered as
if hit by a sledgehammer.

And a bartender in
Paris had fashioned a weapon from his breath. By taking certain herbs
he had developed a breath so pestiferous that "Then standing
almost six feet away
he breathed on me.
Words cannot convey
the vertiginous retching horror that enveloped me as I lost
consciousness...And for days afterwards I shuddered at the
memory of that awesome breath." And his farts could take out a
barroom. So he beats the skunk at its own game but he wasn't as cute
as a skunk is. Once Kim found a baby skunk in a field and petted it
and decided it was the cutest thing he ever saw.

When it comes to
hand to claw feet fang poison, squirt, quill, shock fighting, animals
beat humans in any direction.

Kim had of course
thought of living weapons. The only animal that has been trained
to attack reliably on command is the dog, though many other animals
would be vastly more efficient as fighting machines. The bobcat, the
lynx, the incomparable wolverine that can drive a bear from its kill,
and the purple-assed mandrill with its huge razor-sharp canines and
rending claws is one of the most savage animals on earth. Kim looked
in disdain at Jerry's dog Rover, a skulking, cowardly, inefficient
beast. Kim usually spotted the squirrel before Rover could sniff it
out. When Jerry wasn't around, Kim would corner Rover and transfix
him with his witch stare as he intoned "BAAAAAD DOOOGGG"
over and over and Rover begins to cower and whimper and lift his lips
in a hideous smile and finally, desperate to ingratiate himself,
he rolls on his back and pisses all over himself. While Kim enjoyed
this spectacle, it was not enough to compensate for the continuous
proximity of this filthy, fawning, vicious shit-eating beast. But
then who am I to be critical, Kim thought philosophically.

Kim has just read a
juicy story about African medicine men, ancient evil of pestiferous
swamps in their snouty faces and undreaming reptile eyes. They
capture hyenas and blind them with red-hot needles and burn out their
vocal cords while they intone certain spells binding the tortured
animals to their will, twisting their own eyes into the quivering
pain socket, they lead blind mouths to the target, pouring the
mindless ferocity of their crocodile brains into the hyena's terrible
bone-cracking jaws to fashion a silent dedicated instrument of death.

Kim looked
speculatively at Rover and licked his lips and Rover crept whimpering
behind Jerry's legs.

The Colonel filled
his pipe
...
"They attacked at dawn.
Like gray shadows. I saw a boy go down hamstrung, next thing his
throat is ripped out...I couldn't see what was doing it
...
like
a ghost attack...But the boys knew and the cry went up: "SMUNS!"

That's the native
word for hyenas blinded by the beastly medicine men...We intended to
capture a male gorilla of the mountain species
...
somewhat
smaller than the lowland breeds...we had a cage just so big and big
enough and I managed to nip into it and lock the door...I'll never
forget my boys pleading to be let in as the hyenas tore them
apart
...
couldn't chance it, you know...One
boy wedged in the door and that would have been it
...
but
in their blind animal panic they simply could not appreciate my
position
...
would you believe that some of
them cursed me with their last breath?"

"Lesser breed
without the law," Kim put in.

"Ah yes Kipling
the writer chap
...
awfully depressing all
that
..."

There
lay the rider distorted and pale

With
the dew on his brow and the rust on his mail

Yes Kim had
considered smaller living weapons
...
so much
more reliable but still in need of precise guidance. He assumes
a professorial manner, his eyes twinkling out through his bifocals.

"Gentlemen,
most illnesses kill indirectly and as it were accidentally by
the uh cumulative damage of their occupation. So host death is a
by-product of the invading organism's life cycle."

But wouldn't it be
possible, Kim thought wistfully, to find an agent that will act
directly
on the Death Center, which some occultists locate in
the back of the neck?

A Death Organism
—
in
short, a D.O.

"That would be
keen!
" Kim's face blazes in a glowing boyish
smile. His grin splits the sky and fades into a vast crystal skull of
stars, lighting the ruined cities and bleak landscapes of a dead
world
...
the light always fainter as the
stars go out one after the other.

D.O. acts as a
binary. It doesn't do anything until it receives cellular
instructions from the Other Half. Like an L.A., that is Latent Agent,
stationed near the target and alerted by a central signal to act. The
L.A. may wait for years...(An old gardener who had worked in the
General's garden for ten years killed him with a scythe. The General
was planning a campaign against the Old Man's fortress at Alamut.) Or
he can be used the next day.

A selective
pestilence puts the selector in a position of unique safety...The
selector will be well advised to bear in mind at all times that the
road to Heaven is paved with solid bricks of safety. He must think
ahead. Not just who is a threat to my safety right now but who will
be a threat in ten, twenty or a hundred years since ultimate safety
must be computed in immortal terms.

So beware of fools'
safety.

Consider the menace
potential posed to you and your compadres by decent churchgoing
folk...You want to take care of these vermin without endangering your
fellow Johnsons. Now, what characterizes these shits? They
have
to
be right. They
need
the approval of others. Both needs are so
constant and so compulsive as to assume the proportion of
biological needs like the need of an addict for morphine...A page
from the
Denver Post
passed through his mind...Pet owners
panicked by mysterious dog deaths...A new disease it seems.
Confined to dogs...Man made dogs in his own lousiest image
...
dogs
exhibit all the worst characteristics of human animals. They are
fawning, filthy, vicious, servile, literally convulsed by their need
for approval just like a religious lawman fawning on the Lord and
fingering his nigger notches. A dog has to be RIGHT. He is RIGHT to
bite someone who has no right to be in that yard, that house...Well
if it attacks
dogs,
chances are good it will attack
human
dogs, right in their ugly, snarling, ingratiating, cop-loving,
priest-loving, boss-loving, God-loving, epicenter, the vile groveling
worshipers of the Slave Gods. When a disease agent moves from one
host species to another, with no natural immunity to that
strain, the agent can become incomparably more efficient. And
this can be accomplished with rather rudimentary tinkering
...
Most
attempts at germ warfare, in fact, start with animal diseases like
glanders, parrot fever, anthrax. Kim paused to reflect that a
plant
virus,
once it got root in human soil, might produce a Garden of
Eden while you wait
...
a paradise
consisting of plants and fertilizer.

We have a virus
which we may term the RIGHT VIRUS already occupying the target. We
have a disease agent K9 programmed to attack selectively any
host occupied by R.V. Our agent K9 is further linked with D.O. the
Death Organism. Just formulate the thought "I AM RIGHT" and
YOU ARE DEAD.

Kim made a code note
at the bottom of the page
...
meaning
follow up on this when conditions for doing so become available,
in this case a laboratory and technicians.

P.S.: We could give
it to them at their
deadly
church suppers.

Kim remembers the
Odor Eaters of Tibetan mythology who build fantastic cities in the
clouds, which are washed away in rain. Kim would take a big dose of
cannabis tincture and sit for hours watching the clouds, occasionally
reading from Rimbaud and writing a phrase down in his notebook
...
One
of Kim's Cloud Stations is the Place of the Half Humans. This is an
area of big trees and vacant lots. Some of the houses are boarded up,
others have an air of being semioccupied. On a porch a rusting
bicycle is overgrown with morning-glory vines and weeds grow up
between cracked blackened boards. Silence takes on the quality
of a dimension here, fragile words break on the dead leaves that
rustle across the worn cobblestones and cracked concrete, a derelict
railroad car with a tin cabin on top sits there on a rusty weed-grown
switchback. On the other side of the tracks a slope leads down to the
river and looking upriver you can see a ten-story building that never
got finished, a maze of twisted girders growing from stained concrete
on many levels, ladders, catwalks, and precarious lookout cabins.
From this launching site the Halfs make their solo flight soaring
from an upper level down to a sandbar by the river. They can do all
the things you do in dreams like start at the top of a stairway and
soar down to the bottom step...And they keep switching identities.
Who was I in the last century? Steep slope down to the tracks. Here
and there are stone steps overgrown with weeds and vines. A cable
threaded through iron loops serves as a handrail down to a cold black
pond where, toward perfumed evening, a sad child releases a boat
frail as a May butterfly. The morning glory has made another loop
around the rusting bicycle. Another green shoot has sprung up through
black rotting boards on the porch. A vague area/
'terrain vague
of
vacant lots and rusty machinery, quarries and ponds. They are half
visible their steps so light they don't crush the dead leaves
drifting over paths in the sky endless beaches covered with white
nations full of joy new flowers new stars new flesh ladder of
Tibetan mythology, launching clouds
...
morning
...
black
pond
...
boat frail as a dead
leaf...precarious cities. A call. Three dead on porch
...
the
cold evening
...
a sad child.
Silence
...
boards on the porch
...
rusty
machinery the other side of the tracks their steps half visible
looking upriver
...
new flesh. No dogs will
enter this area but there are cats and raccoons and skunks and
squirrels. From one house drifts a heavy odor of flowers and unknown
excrement and the musky smell of impossible animals, long
sinuous ferretlike creatures that peer out through bushes and vines
with enormous eyes. This is a gathering place for the Odor Eaters who
build the cloud cities. Now, sated with odors, some are visible,
silent and immobile in a clearing of rusted garden furniture dusted
with leaves by a cracked concrete pool green with algae. A frog plops
into the water, making a black hole in the green surface. A taste of
ashes in the air an odor of sweating wood on the hearth stale
flowers, mist over the canals...There is a swamp with a nest of white
beasts in the melancholy golden wash of the setting sun the arched
wooden bridge down by the river luminous skulls among the peas, roads
bordered by walls and iron fences that barely hold back the
undergrowth, wind from the south excited the evil odors of desolate
gardens, in a puddle some very little fishes. Ectoplasm addicts
measure doses from a lead bottle.