Interzone Read online

  Lee closed the shutter slowly.

  In the Rio Grande valley of South Texas, he had killed a rattlesnake with a golf club. The impact of metal on the live flesh of the snake sent an electric shiver through him.

  In New York, when he was rolling lushes on the subway with Roy, at the end of the line in Brooklyn a drunk grabbed Roy and started yelling for the law. Lee hit the drunk in the face and knocked him to his knees, then kicked him in the side. A rib snapped. Lee felt a shudder of nausea.

  Next day he told Roy he was through as a lush worker. Roy looked at him with his impersonal brown eyes that caught points of light, like an opal. There was a masculine gentleness in Roy’s voice, a gentleness that only the strong have: “You feel bad about kicking that mooch, don’t you? You’re not cut out for this sort of thing, Bill. I’ll find someone else to work with.” Roy put on his hat and started to leave. He stopped with the doorknob in his hand and turned around.

  “It’s none of my business, Bill. But you have enough money to get by. Why don’t you just quit?” He walked out without waiting for Lee to answer.

  Lee did not feel like finishing the letter. He put on his coat and stepped out into the narrow, sunless street.

  The druggist saw Lee standing in the doorway of the store. The store was about eight feet wide, with bottles and packages packed around three walls. The druggist smiled and held up a finger.

  “One?” he said in English.

  Lee nodded, looking around at the bottles and packages. The clerk handed the box of ampules to Lee without wrapping it. Lee said, “Thank you.”

  He walked away through a street lined on both sides with bazaars. Merchandise overflowed into the street, and he dodged crockery and washtubs and trays of combs and pencils and soap dishes. A train of burros loaded with charcoal blocked his way. He passed a woman with no nose, a black slit in her face, her body wrapped in grimy, padded pink cotton. Lee walked fast, twisting his body sideways, squeezing past people. He reached the sunny alleys of the outer Medina.

  Walking in Tangier was like falling, plunging down dark shafts of streets, catching at corners, doorways. He passed a blind man sitting in the sun in a doorway. The man was young, with a fringe of blond beard. He sat there with one hand out, his shirt open, showing the smooth, patient flesh, the slight, immobile folds in the stomach. He sat there all day, every day.

  Lee turned into his street, and a cool wind from the sea chilled the sweat on his thin body. He hooked the key into the lock and pushed the door open with his shoulder.

  He tied up for the shot, and slid the needle in through a festered scab. Blood swirled up into the hypo—he was using a regular hypo these days. He pressed the plunger down with his forefinger. A passing caress of pleasure flushed through his veins. He glanced at the cheap alarm clock on the table by the bed: four o’clock. He was meeting his boy at eight. Time enough for the Eukodal to get out of his system.

  Lee walked about the room. “I have to quit,” he said over and over, feeling the gravity pull of junk in his cells. He experienced a moment of panic. A cry of despair wrenched his body: “I have to get out of here. I have to make a break.”

  As he said the words, he remembered whose words they were: the Mad Dog Esposito Brothers, arrested at the scene of a multiple-slaying holdup, separated from the electric chair by a little time and a few formalities, whispered these words into a police microphone planted by their beds in the detention ward.

  He sat down at the typewriter, yawned, and made some notes on a separate piece of paper. Lee often spent hours on a letter. He dropped the pencil and stared at the wall, his face blank and dreamy, reflecting on the heartwarming picture of William Lee—

  He was sure the reviewers in those queer magazines like One would greet Willy Lee as heartwarming, except when he gets—squirming uneasily—well, you know, a bit out of line, somehow.

  “Oh, that’s just boyishness—after all, you know a boy’s will is the wind’s will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”

  “Yes I know, but … the purple-assed baboons …”

  “That’s gangrened innocence.”

  “Why didn’t I think of that myself. And the piles?”

  “All kids are like hung up on something.”

  “So they are … and the prolapsed assholes feeling around, looking for a peter, like blind worms?”

  “Schoolboy smut.”

  “Understand, I’m not trying to belittle Lee—”

  “You’d better not. He’s a one-hundred-percent wistful boy, listening to train whistles across the winter stubble and frozen red clay of Georgia.”

  —yes, there was something a trifle disquieting in the fact that the heartwarming picture of William Lee should be drawn by William Lee himself. He thought of the ultimate development in stooges, a telepathic stooge who tunes in on your psyche and says just what you want to hear: “Boss, you is heartwarming. You is a latter-assed purple-day saint.”

  Lee put down the pencil and yawned. He looked at the bed.

  I’m sleepy, he decided. He took off his pants and shoes and lay down on the bed, covering himself with a cotton blanket. They don’t scratch. He closed his eyes. Pictures streamed by, the magic lantern of junk. There is a feeling of too much junk that corresponds to the bed spinning around when you are very drunk, a feeling of gray, dead horror. The pictures in the brain are out of control, black and white, without emotion, the deadness of junk lying in the body like a viscous, thick medium.

  A child came up to Lee and held up to him a bleeding hand.

  “Who did this?” Lee asked. “I’ll kill him. Who did it?”

  The child beckoned Lee into a dark room. He pointed at Lee with the bleeding stub of a finger. Lee woke up crying “No! No!”

  Lee looked at the clock. It was almost eight. His boy was due anytime. Lee rummaged in a drawer of the bed table and found a stick of tea. He lit it and lay back to wait for KiKi. There was a bitter, green taste in his mouth from the weed. He could feel a warm tingle spread over his body. He put his hands behind his head, stretching his ribs and arching his stomach.

  Lee was forty, but he had the lean body of an adolescent. He looked down at the stomach, which curved in flat from the chest. Junk had sculpted his body down to bone and muscle. He could feel the wall of his stomach right under the skin. His skin smooth and white, he looked almost transparent, like a tropical fish, with blue veins where the hipbones protruded.

  KiKi stepped in. He switched on the light.

  “Sleeping?” he asked.

  “No, just resting.” Lee got up and put his arms around KiKi, holding him in a long, tight embrace.

  “What’s the matter, Meester William?” KiKi said, laughing.

  “Nothing.”

  They sat down on the edge of the bed. KiKi ran his hands absently over Lee’s back. He turned and looked at Lee.

  “Very thin,” he said. “You should eat more.”

  Lee pulled in his stomach so it almost touched the backbone. KiKi laughed and ran his hands down Lee’s ribs to the stomach. He put his thumbs on Lee’s backbone and tried to encircle Lee’s stomach with his hands. He got up and took off his clothes and sat down beside Lee, caressing him with casual affection.

  Like many Spanish boys, KiKi did not feel love for women. To him a woman was only for sex. He had known Lee for some months, and felt a genuine fondness for him, in an offhand way. Lee was considerate and generous and did not ask KiKi to do things he didn’t want to do, leaving the lovemaking on an adolescent basis. KiKi was well pleased with the arrangement.

  And Lee was well pleased with KiKi. He did not like the process of looking for boys. He did not lose interest in a boy after a few contacts, not being subject to compulsive promiscuity. In Mexico he had slept with the same boy twice a week for over a year. The boy had looked enough like KiKi to be his brother. Both had very straight black hair, an Oriental look, and lean, slight bodies. Both exuded the same quality of sweet masculine innocence. Lee met the same p
eople wherever he went.

  In the Café Central

  Johnny the Guide was sitting in front of the Café Central with Mrs. Merrims and her sixteen-year-old son. Mrs. Merrims was traveling on her husband’s insurance. She was well-groomed and competent. She was making out a list of purchases and places to go. Johnny leaned forward, solicitous and deferential.

  The other guides cruised by like frustrated sharks. Johnny savored their envy. His eyes slid sideways over the lean adolescent body of the boy, poised in gray flannels and a sport shirt open at the neck. Johnny licked his lips.

  Hans sat several tables away. He was a German who procured boys for English and American visitors. He had a house in the native quarter—bed and boy, two dollars per night. But most of his clients went in for “quickies.” Hans had typical Nordic features, with heavy bone structure. There was something skull-like in his face.

  Morton Christie was sitting with Hans. Morton was a pathetic name-dropper and table-hopper. Hans was the only one in Tangier who could stand his silly chatter, his interminable dull lies about wealth and social prominence. One story involved two aunts, living in a house together, who hadn’t spoken to each other in twenty years.

  “But you see, the house is so huge that it doesn’t matter, really. They each have their own set of servants and maintain completely separate households.”

  Hans just sat there and smiled through all of these stories. “It is a little girl,” he would say in defense of Morton. “You must not be hard with him.”

  Actually Morton had, through years of insecurity—sitting at tables where he wasn’t wanted, desperately attempting to gain a moment’s reprieve from dismissal—gained an acute sense for gossip and scandal. If someone was down with the clap, Morton always found out somehow. He had a sense for anything anyone was trying to conceal. The most perfect poker face was no protection against this telepathic penetration.

  Besides, without being a good listener, sympathetic, or in any way someone you would want to confide in, he had a way of surprising confidences out of you. Sometimes you forgot he was there and said something to someone else at the table. Sometimes he would slip in a question, personal, impertinent, but you answered him before you knew it. His personality was so negative there was nothing to put you on guard. Hans found Morton’s talent for collecting information useful. He could find out what was happening in town by spending half an hour listening to Morton in the Café Central.

  Morton had literally no self-respect, so that his self-esteem went up or down in accordance with how others felt about him. At first he often made a good impression. He appeared naïve, boyish, friendly. Imperceptibly the naïveté degenerated into silly, mechanical chatter, his friendliness into compulsive, clinging hunger, and his boyishness faded before your eyes across a café table. You looked up and saw the deep lines about the mouth, a hard, stupid mouth like an old whore’s, you saw the deep creases in the back of the neck when he craned around to look at somebody—he was always looking around restlessly, as if he were waiting for someone more important than whomever he was sitting with.

  There were, to be sure, people who engaged his whole attention. He twisted in hideous convulsions of ingratiation, desperate as he saw every pitiful attempt fail flatly, often shitting in his pants with fear and excitement. Lee wondered if he went home and sobbed with despair.

  Morton’s attempts to please socially prominent residents and visiting celebrities, ending usually in flat failure, or a snub in the Café Central, attracted a special sort of scavenger who feeds on the humiliation and disintegration of others. These decayed queens never tired of retailing the endless saga of Morton’s social failures.

  “So he sat right down with Tennessee Williams on the beach, and Tennessee said to him: ‘I’m not feeling well this morning, Michael. I’d rather not talk to anybody.’ ‘Michael!’ Doesn’t even know his name! And he says, ‘Oh yes, Tennessee is a good friend of mine!’ ” And they would laugh, and throw themselves around and flip their wrists, their eyes glowing with loathsome lust.

  I imagine that’s the way people look when they watch someone burned at the stake, Lee thought.

  At another table was a beautiful woman, of mixed Negro and Malay stock. She was delicately proportioned, with a dark, copper-colored complexion and small teeth set far apart, her nipples pointed a little upward. She was dressed in a yellow silk gown and carried herself with superb grace. At the same table sat a German woman with perfect features: golden hair curled in braids forming a tiara, a magnificent bust, and heroic proportions.

  She was talking to the half-caste. When she opened her mouth to speak, she revealed horrible teeth, gray, carious, repaired rather than filled with pieces of steel—some actually rusty, others of copper covered with green verdigris. The teeth were abnormally large and crowded over each other. Broken, corroded braces stuck to them, like an old barbed-wire fence.

  Ordinarily she attempted to keep her teeth covered as far as possible. However, her beautiful mouth was hardly adequate to perform this function, and the teeth peeked out here and there as she talked or ate. She never laughed if she could help it, but was subject to occasional laughing jags brought on by apparently random circumstances. The laughing jags were always followed by fits of crying, during which she would repeat over and over, “Everybody saw my teeth! My horrible teeth!”

  She was constantly saving up money to have the teeth out, but somehow she always spent the money on something else. Either she got drunk on it, or she gave it to someone in an irrational fit of generosity. She was a mark for every con artist in Tangier, because she was known to have the money she was always saving up to have her teeth out. But putting the touch on her was not without danger. She would suddenly turn vicious and maul some mooch with all the strength of her Junoesque limbs, shouting, “You lousy bastard! Trying to con me out of my teeth money!”

  Both the half-caste and the Nordic, who had taken on herself the name of Helga, were free-lance whores.

  Dream of the Penal Colony

  That night Lee dreamed he was in a penal colony. All around were high, bare mountains. He lived in a boardinghouse that was never warm. He went out for a walk. As he stepped off the street corner onto a dirty cobblestone street, the cold mountain wind hit him. He tightened the belt of a leather jacket and felt the chill of final despair.

  Nobody talks much after the first few years in the colony, because they know the others are in identical conditions of misery. They sit at table, eating the cold, greasy food, separate and silent as stones. Only the whiny, penetrating voice of the landlady goes on and on.

  The colonists mix with the townspeople, and it is difficult to pick them out. But sooner or later they betray themselves by a misplaced intensity, which derives from the exclusive preoccupation with escape. There is also the penal-colony look: control, without inner calm or balance; bitter knowledge, without maturity; intensity, without warmth or love.

  The colonists know that any spontaneous expression of feeling brings the harshest punishment. Provocative agents continually mix with the prisoners, saying, “Relax. Be yourself. Express your real feelings.” Lee was convinced that the means to escape lay through a relationship with one of the townspeople, and to that end he frequented the cafés.

  One day he was sitting in the Metropole opposite a young man. The young man was talking about his childhood in a coastal town. Lee sat staring through the boy’s head, seeing the salt marshes, the red-brick houses, the old rusty barge by the inlet where the boys took off their clothes to swim.

  This may be it, Lee thought. Easy now. Cool, cool. Don’t scare him off. Lee’s stomach knotted with excitement.

  During the following week, Lee tried every approach he knew, shamelessly throwing aside unsuccessful routines with a shrug: “I was only kidding,” or, “Son cosas de la vida.” He descended to the most abject emotional blackmail and panhandling. When this failed, he scaled a dangerous cliff (not quite so dangerous either, since he knew every inch of the ascent)
to capture a species of beautiful green lizard found only on these ledges. He gave the boy the lizard, attached to a chain of jade.

  “It took me seven years to carve that chain,” Lee said. Actually he had won the chain from a traveling salesman in a game of Latah. The boy was touched, and consented to go to bed with Lee, but soon afterward broke off intimate relationships. Lee was in despair.

  I love him and besides, I haven’t discovered the Secret. Perhaps he is an Agent. Lee looked at the boy with hatred. His face was breaking up, as if melted from inside by a blowtorch.

  “Why won’t you help me?” he demanded. “Do you want another lizard? I will get you a black lizard with beautiful violet eyes, that lives on the west slope where the winds pick climbers from the cliff and suck them out of crevices. There is only one other purple-eyed lizard in town and that one—well, never mind. The purple-eyed lizard is more venomous than a cobra, but he never bites his master. He is the sweetest and gentlest animal on earth. Just let me show you how sweet and gentle a purple-eyed lizard can be.”

  “Never mind,” said the boy, laughing. “Anyhoo, one lizard is enough.”

  “Don’t say anyhoo. Well, I will cut off my foot and shrink it down by a process I learned from the Auca, and make you a watch fob.”

  “What I want with your ugly old foot?”

  “I will get you money for a guide and a pack train. You can return to the coast.”

  “I’ll go back there anytime I feel like it. My brother-in-law knows the route.”

  The thought of someone being able to leave at will so enraged Lee that he was in danger of losing control. His sweaty hand gripped the snap-knife in his pocket.