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Page 11


  Spare Ass Annie

  When I became captain of the town, I decided to extend asylum to certain citizens who were persona non grata elsewhere in the area because of their disgusting and disquieting deformities.

  One was known as Spare Ass Annie. She had an auxiliary asshole in the middle of her forehead, like a baneful bronze eye. Another was a scorpion from the neck down. He had retained the human attribute of voice and was given to revolting paroxysms of self-pity and self-disgust during which he would threaten to kill himself by a sting in the back of the neck. He never threatened anyone else, though his sting would have caused instant death.

  Another, and by far the most detrimental, was like a giant centipede, but terminated in human legs and lower abdomen. Sometimes he walked half-erect, his centipede body swaying ahead of him. At other times he crawled, dragging his human portion as an awkward burden. At first sight he looked like a giant, crippled centipede. He was known as the Centipeter, because he was continually making sexual advances to anyone he could corner, and anyone who passed out was subject to wake up with Centipete in his bed. One degenerate hermaphrodite known as Fish Cunt Sara claimed he was the best lay in town: “Besides, he’s a perfect gentleman in every sense of the word. He’s kind and good, which means nothing to the likes of you….”

  These creatures had developed in a region where the priests carried out strange rites. They built boxes from the moist, fresh bones of healthy youths, captives from neighboring tribes. The boys were killed by looping a vine noose around their necks and pushing them off the branch of a giant cypress tree. The branch had been cut off and carved in the form of an enormous phallus, being some fifteen feet long and three feet in circumference. The vine (always a yagé plant) was attached to the end of the branch, and the youth was led out and pushed off so that he fell about eight feet, breaking his neck. Then the priests pounced on him, while he was still twitching in orgasmic convulsions, and cut through the flesh with copper knives, tearing out the bones. From these bones they made boxes with great skill and speed, lining the boxes with copper. Runners were dispatched to carry the boxes to a certain high peak where peculiar lights were given off by the rocks. Pregnant women were placed in the boxes and left on the peak for a period of three hours. Often the women died, but those who survived usually produced monsters. The priests considered these monstrosities a way of humiliating the human race before the gods, in the hope of diverting their anger.

  These horrible freaks were highly prized, and they lived in the temple. The women who gave birth to the most monsters received gold stars, which they were authorized to wear on ceremonial occasions.

  Once a month they held a great festival at which everyone gathered in a round stone temple, open at the top, and prostrated themselves on the floor, assuming the most disgusting and degraded positions possible, so that the gods would see they were not attempting to elevate themselves above their station.

  The habit of living in filth and humiliation finally occasioned a plague, a form of acute leprosy, that depopulated the area. The surviving freaks (who seemed immune to the plague) I decided to receive as an object lesson in how far human kicks can go.

  The Dream Cops

  There was a sudden thunder of knocks on the door. The Agent pulled on his trousers and turned the key in the lock. Three men pushed into the room. Two were in plain clothes, one in uniform. The man in uniform immediately pulled a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket and twisted them around the Agent’s wrists. The handcuffs were made of a tough pliable wood. His uniform was torn and spotted, the tunic twisted and buttoned in the wrong holes.

  One of the plainclothesmen looked like a vaudeville-house detective, with derby and cigar. The cigar was ten inches long. The other plainclothesman was tall and thin and carried an instrument that looked like a slide rule.

  “The cigar’s too long,” said the Agent. “A dream cigar. You can’t touch me.”

  The house detective nodded to the uniformed cop. The cop showed dirty steel teeth in a snarl. He hit the Agent across the mouth. The Agent could taste the blood.

  “You have some peculiar dreams,” said the detective. “Besides, we can dream too…. Sleeping with a nigger.”

  The Agent was about to deny this, but when he turned to look there was a young Negro in his bed. Huge lice crawled in and out of the Negro’s greasy, frizzled hair.

  “All right,” said the detective. “Let’s see your arm.”

  The Agent rolled up the sleeve of his sweatshirt. Sparks exploded behind his eyes. Blood ran down his chin. He got up, looking at the house detective.

  “Wise guy, eh?” the house detective snarled, his eyes phosphorescent, his mouth slavering. “You’re the wisest prick I ever walked in on. Let’s see your arm. Your short arm.”

  He reached out a hairy hand as thick as it was wide, and grabbed the Agent’s belt. With the other hand he ripped open the Agent’s fly. The buttons rolled across the floor. He held the Agent’s penis judicially between thumb and forefinger. He turned to the other plainclothesman—glen-plaid suit, skin tight and smooth and red over his face, bad teeth. Smoking a cigar shaped like a cigarette. He had been taking down the number on the Agent’s kerosene stove.

  “Sixty percent of them are Jews,” said the house detective.

  “I’m not Jewish,” said the Agent.

  “Sure, I know. You fucked one of those characters eats glass and razor blades and circumscribed yourself. Not Jewish!”

  The other detective looked up from the kerosene stove and laughed sycophantically. A gold filling fell out on the floor.

  At a signal from the house detective, the uniformed cop took the handcuffs off.

  “Watch your step,” said the house detective. The three men went out, closing the door.

  Next morning the Agent’s mouth was still sore. Lighting the kerosene stove, he found a gold filling.

  The Conspiracy

  Yes, they know we’ll wait. How many hours, days, years, street corners, cafeterias, furnished rooms, park benches, sitting, standing, walking? … All those who wait know that time and space are one. How long-far to the end of the block and back? How many games of solitaire make an hour? … Then time will suddenly jump, slip ahead. This happens usually in the late afternoon, after four o’clock. From one to four you hit on the slowest time.

  I was reexamining candidates, proceeding by elimination, to isolate the name. Yes, I thought, that is correct procedure. At the same time, I knew the name would probably be a dark horse, someone I hadn’t thought of, like the man who says, “Why didn’t you come to me? I’d have lent you the money,” and you know he would have lent it. It was someone like that I was looking for, while the logical elimination of prospects went on:

  Gardiner? I wonder how he would manage to turn me in without picking up a phone and calling the law? By getting arrested himself? By telling someone who was sure to talk?

  Marvin? At least he would say: “Bill, I can’t do it. I won’t take the risk. You’ll have to get out.”

  Anyone who would do it for money was out. There would be more money on the other side. Two cops. That can scare up $5,000 overnight. (Why is killing a cop such a heinous crime in America? It isn’t so in Mexico or South America. Because Americans accept cops at their own valuation, as they accept anyone who has the means of force.)

  “Not a man of my acquaintance, that I’m sure of….”

  (“Is this your final report?”)

  Not a man … not a man…. Well, how about a woman? … A woman? Well … Mary! That was the name, the answer.

  I told the driver to stop. We were passing 72nd Street. I got out, paid the cab back to Washington Square, and waved goodbye to Nick, still in the cab.

  I took the subway up to 116th Street and walked across the Columbia campus to Mary’s flat. Why didn’t I think of her first? A university campus—the perfect hideout. And I could count on Mary, count on her 100 percent. The building was a four-story brownstone. The windows shone clean and black
in the morning sunlight. I walked up three flights and knocked on the door. Mary opened it and stood there looking at me.

  “Come in,” she said, her face lighting up. “Want a cup of coffee?” I sat down with her at the kitchen table and drank coffee and ate a piece of coffee cake.

  “Mary, I want to hide out here for a while. I don’t know how long exactly. You can say someone rented the extra room to write his thesis. He doesn’t want to go out of the room or see anyone till it’s finished. You have to buy his food and bring it to him. He’s paying you one hundred dollars to stay there three weeks, or however long it takes. I just killed two detectives.”

  Mary lit a cigarette. “Holdup?”

  “No. It’s much more complicated than that. Let’s move to the living room, in case somebody comes. I’ll tell you about it….

  “Light junk sickness, when I wake up needing a shot, always gives me a sharp feeling of nostalgia, like train whistles, piano music down a city street, burning leaves…. I mentioned this to you, didn’t I?”

  Mary nodded. “Several times.”

  “An experience we think of as fleeting, incalculable, coming and going in response to unknown factors. But the feeling appears without fail, in response to a definite metabolic setup. It’s possible to find out exactly what that setup is and reproduce it at will, given sufficient knowledge of the factors involved. Conversely it is possible to eliminate nostalgia, to occlude the whole dreaming, symbolizing faculty.”

  “And you mean it’s been done?”

  “Exactly. Scientists have perfected the anti-dream drug, which is, logically, a synthetic variation on the junk theme…. And the drug is habit forming to a point where one injection can cause lifelong addiction. If the addict doesn’t get his shot every eight hours he dies in convulsions of oversensitivity.”

  “Like nerve gas.”

  “Similar. In short, once you are hooked on the anti-dream drug, you can’t get back. Withdrawal symptoms are fatal. Users are dependent for their lives on the supply, and at the same time, the source of resistance, contact with the myth that gives each man the ability to live alone and unites him with all other life, is cut off. He becomes an automaton, an interchangeable quantity in the political and economic equation.”

  “Is there an antidote?”

  “Yes. More than that, there is a drug that increases the symbolizing faculty. It’s a synthetic variation of telepathine or yageine, the active principle of Bannisteria caapi.”

  “And where do you come in?” Mary asked.

  “Five years ago I made a study of Bannisteria caapi—the Indians called it Yagé, Ayauhuasca, Pilde—in South America, and found out something about the possible synthetic variations. The symbolizing or artistic faculty that some people are born with—though almost everyone has it to some degree as a child—can be increased a hundred times. We can all be artists infinitely greater than Shakespeare or Beethoven or Michelangelo. Because this is possible, the opposite is also possible. We can be deprived of symbol-making power, a whole dimension excised, reduced to completely rational nonsymbolizing creatures. Perhaps …”

  “Yes?”

  “I was wondering whether … Well, let it go. We have enough to think about.”

  That afternoon Mary went out and bought the papers. There was no mention of Hauser and O’Brien.

  “When they can keep that quiet they must have a fix in near the top. With the ordinary apparatus of law looking for me, I might have one chance in a hundred; this way …”

  I told Mary to go to a pay phone in Times Square, call police headquarters and ask for Hauser. Then go across the street and see what happens. She was back in half an hour.

  “Well?”

  She nodded. “They stalled me, said to hang on a minute, he was on the way. So I cut across the street. Not more than three minutes later a car was there. Not a police car. They blocked both entrances to the drugstore—I called from the drugstore—two went in and checked the phone booths. I could see them questioning the clerk, and he was saying in pantomime: ‘How should I know? A thousand people in and out of here every day.’ ”

  “And now you’re convinced I’m not having a pipe dream? I wish I could have one. Haven’t seen any gum in a dog’s age….”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “I don’t know. I’d better start at the beginning and bring you up to date.”

  What was the beginning? Since early youth I had been searching for some secret, some key by which I could gain access to basic knowledge and answer some of the fundamental questions. Just what I was looking for, what I meant by basic knowledge or fundamental questions, I found it difficult to define. I would follow a trail of clues. For example, the pleasure of drugs to the addict is relief from the state of drug need. Perhaps all pleasure is relief and could be expressed by a basic formula. Pleasure must be proportional to the discomfort or tension from which it is the relief. This holds for the pleasure of junk. You never know what pleasure is until you are really junk-sick.

  Drug addiction is perhaps a basic formula for pleasure and for life itself. That is why the habit, once contracted, is so difficult to break, and why it leaves, when broken, such a vacuum behind. The addict has glimpsed the formula, the bare bones of life, and this knowledge has destroyed for him the ordinary sources of satisfaction that make life endurable. To go a step further, to find out exactly what tension is, and what relief, to discover the means of manipulating these factors … The final key always eluded me, and I decided that my search was as sterile and misdirected as the alchemists’ search for the philosopher’s stone. I decided it was an error to think in terms of some secret or key or formula: the secret is that there is no secret.

  But I was wrong. There is a secret, now in the hands of ignorant and evil men, a secret beside which the atomic bomb is a noisy toy. And like it or not, I was involved. I had already ante’d my life. I had no choice but to sit the hand out.

  Iron Wrack Dream

  This is one of the worst habits I ever kicked. I sit for an hour in a chair, unable to get up and fix myself a cup of tea.

  Early this morning, half awake, shivering in a light junk-sick fever, I had a vivid dream-fantasy. The hypersensitivity of junk sickness is reflected in dreams during withdrawal—that is, if you can sleep.

  In the dream, I go to an elaborate house on a high cliff over the sea. An iron door opens in a limestone cliff, and you get to the house in a swift, silent elevator.

  I have come to see a sexless character who wears men’s clothes but may be man or woman. Nobody knows for sure. A gangster of the future, with official recognition and arbitrary powers.

  He walks toward me as if about to shake hands. He does not offer his hand. “Hello,” he says. “Hello … there.”

  The room is surrounded on three sides by a transparent plastic shell.

  “You will want to see the view,” he says. A plastic panel slides back. I step out onto a limestone terrace cut from the solid rock of the cliff. No rail or wall. A heavy mist, but from time to time I can see the waves breaking on the rocks a thousand feet below. See the waves, but I don’t hear them, like a silent film. Two bodyguards are standing a few feet behind me.

  “It gives the sensation of flying,” I say.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Well, feller say only angels have wings,” I say recklessly. I turn around. I say, “Excuse me.” The bodyguards don’t move. They are standing with their backs to him. He is arranging flowers in an obscene alabaster bowl. The guards cannot see him and he says nothing, makes no sound, but a signal has been given. The guards step aside to let me pass, back into the room.

  I walk up to the table where he is arranging flowers. “I want to know where Jim is,” I say.

  “Mmm. Yes. I suppose you do.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  “Maybe Jim doesn’t want to see you.”

  “If he doesn’t, I want to hear it from him.”

  “I never give anything for nothing. I want yo
ur room in the Chimu. I want you out of there by nine tomorrow morning.”

  “All right.”

  “Go to 60 at Fourth Street, coordinate 20, level 16, YH room 72.”

  The City is a vast network of levels, like the Racks, connected by gangways and cars that run on wires and single tracks. You put a coin in a vacant car and it will take you anywhere on its track or wire. Everyone carries an instrument called a coordinator, to orient himself.

  The City is in the U. S. The forces of evil and repression have run their course here. They are suffocating in their armor or exploding from inner pressure. New forms of life are germinating in the vast, rusty metal racks of the ruined City.

  It takes me twelve hours to find the address. A padded hammer hangs from a copper chain on the door. I knock.

  A man comes to the door: bald, looks like an old actor on the skids. Effeminate, but not queer. A dumpy, middle-aged woman is sitting in a purple velvet brocaded chair left over from 1910. She looks good-natured. I say I want to see Jim.

  “And who might you be?” the man asks.

  “I’m Bill.”

  He laughs. “He’s Bill, Gertie.” He turns to me. “Someone was just here asking for Bill.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Just five minutes,” the woman says.

  “Can I stay five minutes?” I ask. “I mean, if someone was here five minutes ago asking for Bill, and now I am here asking for Jim … well … ”