Interzone Read online

  People carry huge loads of charcoal down from the mountains on their backs—that is, the women carry loads of charcoal. The men ride on donkeys. No mistaking the position of women in this society. I noticed a large percentage of these charcoal carriers had their noses eaten away by disease, but was not able to determine whether there is any occupational correlation. It seems more likely that they all come from the same heavily infected district.

  Hashish is the drug of Islam, as alcohol is ours, opium the drug of the Far East, and cocaine that of South America. No effort is made to control its sale or use in Tangier, and every native café reeks of the smoke. They chop up the leaves on a wooden block, mix it with tobacco, and smoke it in little clay pipes with a long wooden stem.

  Europeans occasion no surprise or overt resentment in Arab cafés. The usual drink is mint tea served very hot in a tall glass. If you hold the glass by top and bottom, avoiding the sides, it doesn’t burn the hand. You can buy hashish, or keif, as they call it here, in any native café. It can also be purchased in sweet, resinous cakes to eat with hot tea. This resinous substance, a gum extracted from the cannabis plant, is the real hashish, and much more powerful than the leaves and flowers of the plant. The gum is called majoun, and the leaves keif. Good majoun is hard to find in Tangier.

  Keif is identical with our marijuana, and we have here an opportunity to observe the effects of constant use on a whole population. I asked a European physician if he had noted any definite ill effects. He said: “In general, no. Occasionally there is drug psychosis, but it rarely reaches an acute stage where hospitalization is necessary.” I asked if Arabs suffering from this psychosis are dangerous. He said: “I have never heard of any violence directly and definitely traceable to keif. To answer your question, they are usually not dangerous.”

  The typical Arab café is one room, a few tables and chairs, a huge copper or brass samovar for making tea and coffee. A raised platform covered with mats extends across one end of the room. Here the patrons loll about with their shoes off, smoking keif and playing cards. The game is Redondo, played with a pack of forty-two cards—rather an elementary card game. Fights start, stop, people walk around, play cards, smoke keif, all in a vast, timeless dream.

  There is usually a radio turned on full volume. Arab music has neither beginning nor end. It is timeless. Heard for the first time, it may appear meaningless to a Westerner, because he is listening for a time structure that isn’t there.

  I talked with an American psychoanalyst who is practicing in Casablanca. He says you can never complete analysis with an Arab. Their superego structure is basically different. Perhaps you can’t complete analysis with an Arab because he has no sense of time. He never completes anything. It is interesting that the drug of Islam is hashish, which affects the sense of time so that events, instead of appearing in an orderly structure of past, present and future, take on a simultaneous quality, the past and future contained in the present moment.

  Tangier seems to exist on several dimensions. You are always finding streets, squares, parks you never saw before. Here fact merges into dream, and dreams erupt into the real world. Unfinished buildings fall into ruin and decay, Arabs move in silently like weeds and vines. A catatonic youth moves through the marketplace, bumping into people and stalls like a sleepwalker. A man, barefooted, in rags, his face eaten and tumescent with a horrible skin disease, begs with his eyes alone. He does not have the will left to hold out his hand. An old Arab passionately kisses the sidewalk. People stop to watch for a few moments with bestial curiosity, then move on.

  Nobody in Tangier is exactly what he seems to be. Along with the bogus fugitives of the Socco Chico are genuine political exiles from Europe: Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, Republican Spaniards, a selection of Vichy French and other collaborators, fugitive Nazis. The town is full of vaguely disreputable Europeans who do not have adequate documents to go anywhere else. So many people are here who cannot leave, lacking funds or papers or both. Tangier is a vast penal colony.

  The special attraction of Tangier can be put in one word: exemption. Exemption from interference, legal or otherwise. Your private life is your own, to act exactly as you please. You will be talked about, of course. Tangier is a gossipy town, and everyone in the foreign colony knows everyone else. But that is all. No legal pressure or pressure of public opinion will curtail your behavior. The cop stands here with his hands behind his back, reduced to his basic function of keeping order. That is all he does. He is the other extreme from the thought police of police states, or our own vice squad.

  Tangier is one of the few places left in the world where, so long as you don’t proceed to robbery, violence, or some form of crude, antisocial behavior, you can do exactly what you want. It is a sanctuary of noninterference.

  II. LEE’S JOURNALS

  Lee’s Journals

  Lee’s face, his whole person, seemed at first glance completely anonymous. He looked like an FBI man, like anybody. But the absence of trappings, of anything remotely picturesque or baroque, distinguished and delineated Lee, so that seen twice you would not forget him. Sometimes his face looked blurred, then it would come suddenly into focus, etched sharp and naked by the flashbulb of urgency. An electric distinction poured out of him, impregnated his shabby clothes, his steel-rimmed glasses, his dirty gray felt hat. These objects could be recognized anywhere as belonging to Lee.

  His face had the look of a superimposed photo, reflecting a fractured spirit that could never love man or woman with complete wholeness. Yet he was driven by an intense need to make his love real, to change fact. Usually he selected someone who could not reciprocate, so that he was able—cautiously, like one who tests uncertain ice, though in this case the danger was not that the ice give way but that it might hold his weight—to shift the burden of not loving, of being unable to love, onto the partner.

  The objects of his high-tension love felt compelled to declare neutrality, feeling themselves surrounded by a struggle of dark purposes, not in direct danger, only liable to be caught in the line of fire. Lee never came on with a kill-lover-and-self routine. Basically the loved one was always and forever an Outsider, a Bystander, an Audience.

  Went to Brion Gysin’s place in the Medina for lunch: Brion, Dave Morton, Leif and Marv, and a handsome New Zealander who is passing through the Zone. A ghastly, meaningless aggregate.

  Morton said to me: “How long were you in medical school before they found out you weren’t a corpse?”

  The standard double entendres and coy references to test the stranger. Brion says: “I’m queer for shoes,” and begins polishing his shoes during lunch.

  Marv says: “I’m very sensitive to that word. I wish you wouldn’t use it,” rolling his round gray eyes, speckled with flaws and opaque spots like damaged marbles, at the young stranger…. Oh God!

  But none of this is the real horror. Looking around the room, I suddenly saw that the other people were figures in a waking nightmare where no contact with anyone else is possible.

  Somehow it was worse than a gathering of out-and-out squares, say the St. Louis country club set I was brought up with. There, a dreary formalism reigns. It is just dull. But this was horrible, pointing to some final impasse of communication. There was nothing said that needed to be said. The dry hum of negation and decay filled the room with its blighting frequency, a sound like insect wings rubbing together.

  Dream: I am in Interzone some years ago. I meet a silly fairy who twists every remark into obscene, queer double entendre. Under this vacuous camping I see pure evil. We meet two lesbians, and they say, “Hello, boys,” a dead, ritual greeting from which I turn away in disgust. The fairy follows me, moves into a house with me. I feel nauseated, as if a loathsome insect had attached itself to my body.

  I am walking out along a dry, white road on the outskirts of town. There is danger here. A dry, brown, vibrating hum or frequency in the air, like insect wings rubbing together. I pass a village: mounds about two feet high, of black c
loth over wire frames like a vast hive.

  Back in the city. Everywhere is the dry hum. Not a sound, exactly, but a frequency, a wavelength. A Holy Man with a black face is causing the waves. He operates from a tower-like structure covered with cloth.

  I contract to assassinate the Holy Man. An Arab gives me a pink slip to present at a gun store, where a rifle with a telescopic sight will be issued to me. A Friend walks with me. He says: “There is no use to oppose the Holy Man. The Holy Man is reality. The Holy Man is Right.”

  “You’re wrong,” I say. “Wrong! I don’t want to see you again for all eternity.”

  I hide from the Friend in a florist’s shop, under a case of flowers. He stands by the case as though at my coffin, crying and wringing his hands and begging me to give up the assassination of the Holy Man. I am crying too, my tears falling in yellow dust, but I won’t give up.

  It is frequently said that the Great Powers will never give up the Interzone because of its value as a listening post. It is in fact the listening post of the world, the slowing pulse of a decayed civilization, that only war can quicken. Here East meets West in a final debacle of misunderstanding, each seeking the Answer, the Secret, from the other and not finding it, because neither has the Answer to give.

  I catch sluggish flies in the air with the curious pleasure one derives from taking an eyelash from an eye, or extracting a hair from a nostril, the moment when the hair gives way with a little snap and you turn the greasy black hair between finger and thumb, looking at the white root, reluctant to let it go. So I felt the cold fly moving between my fingers, and the soft crunch as I delicately crushed the head to avoid a hemorrhage of sticky juice or blood—Where does the blood come from? Do they bite and suck blood?—finally letting the dead fly drop to the floor, spinning like a dry leaf.

  Failure is mystery. A man does not mesh somehow with time-place. He has savvy, the ability to interpret the data collected by technicians, but he moves through the world like a ghost, never able to find the time-place and person to put anything into effect, to give it flesh in a three-dimensional world.

  I could have been a successful bank robber, gangster, business executive, psychoanalyst, drug trafficker, explorer, bullfighter, but the conjuncture of circumstances was never there. Over the years I begin to doubt if my time will ever come. It will come, or it will not come. There is no use trying to force it. Attempts to break through have led to curbs, near disasters, warnings. I cultivate an alert passivity, as though watching an opponent for the slightest sign of weakness.

  Of course there is always the possibility of reckless breakthrough, carrying a pistol around and shooting anybody who annoys me, taking narcotic supplies at gunpoint, amok a form of active suicide. Even that would require some signal from outside, or from so deep inside that it comes to the same thing. I have always seen inside versus outside as a false dichotomy. There is no sharp line of separation. Perhaps:

  “Give it to me straight, Doc.”

  “Very well … A year perhaps, following a regime …” He is reaching for a pad.

  “Never mind the regime. That’s all I wanted to know.”

  Or simply the explosion of knowing, finally: “This is your last chance to step free of the cautious, aging, frightened flesh. What are you waiting for? To die in an old men’s home, draping your fragile buttocks on a bench in the dayroom?”

  Just thought of the story about how cats sit on your chest and breathe your breath out of you so you suffocate. Just sit there, you dig, their nose one-quarter inch from yours, and whenever you take a breath you get the cat’s exhaust carbon dioxide. This story is like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Invented by cat-haters. So I start an anti-cat movement, pointing out their sneaky, sensual, unmoral traits, and begin wholesale extermination, genocide of the feline concept. There is always money in hate.

  Perhaps Hitler was right in a way. That is, perhaps certain subspecies of genus Homo sapiens are incompatible. Live and let live is impossible. If you let live, they will kill you by creating an environment in which you have no place and will die out. The present psychic environment is increasingly difficult for me to endure, but there is still leeway, slack that could be taken up at any time. Safety lies in exterminating the type that produces the environment in which you cannot live. So I will die soon—why bother? Some form of transmigration seems to me probable. I am now, therefore I always was and always will be.

  Looking down at my shiny, dirty trousers that haven’t been changed in months, the days gliding by, strung on a syringe with a long thread of blood … it is easy to forget sex and drink and all the sharp pleasures of the body in this Limbo of negative pleasure, this thick cocoon of comfort.

  More and more trouble at the farmacía. Spent all day until 5 P.M. to score two boxes of Eukodal. I’m running out of everything now. Out of veins, out of money. I can sense the static at the drugstore, the mutterings of control like a telephone off the hook.

  “Muy difícil ahora,” the druggist tells me.

  What is this creeping cancer of control? The suicided German is a plant, a pretext— Some days ago I was standing in a bar when a man touched my arm. I immediately made him for fuzz. In my pocket I had a box of methadone ampules I had just bought in the Plaza Farmacía. Could he be concerned about that? No, not in the Zone. He asked me if I was Max Gustav. I said, “No,” naturally. The cop had a passport and showed me Gustav’s picture, which he thought resembled me.

  Next day I read in the paper that Max Gustav had been found dead in a ditch outside the town, apparently a suicide from overdose of Nembutal. It seems at the time the cop asked if I was Max they did not know he was dead. He had checked out of his hotel, leaving a suitcase. After two days the hotel called the law. They opened the suitcase, found the passport, and started looking for Max Gustav…. Well, the next time I went to the Plaza Farmacía they would not sell me methadone ampules without a script. A new regulation had gone into effect as a result of Max Gustav’s suicide. And that shows how things are related, or something. Bill Gains here would be the last straw. But everything has two faces. You need a paper now for everything. Why not apply for a permit to buy junk?

  Such a sharp depression. I haven’t felt like this since the day Joan died.

  Spent the morning sick, waiting for Eukodal. Kept seeing familiar faces, people I had seen as store clerks, waiters, et cetera. In a small town these familiar faces accumulate and back up on you, so you are choked with familiarity on every side.

  Sitting in front of the Interzone Café, sick, waiting for Eukodal. A boy walked by and I turned my head, following his loins the way a lizard turns its head, following the course of a fly.

  Running short of money. Must kick habit.

  What am I trying to do in writing? This novel is about transitions, larval forms, emergent telepathic faculty, attempts to control and stifle new forms.

  I feel there is some hideous new force loose in the world like a creeping sickness, spreading, blighting. Remoter parts of the world seem better now, because they are less touched by it. Control, bureaucracy, regimentation, these are merely symptoms of a deeper sickness that no political or economic program can touch. What is the sickness itself?

  Dream: Found a man with both hands cut off. I was pouring water on the stubs to stop the bleeding— Years ago in New York a young hoodlum borrowed a gun from me and never returned it. In a spasm of hate, I put a curse on him. A few days later both his hands were blown off when a gasoline drum exploded while he was working on it. He died. Are curses effective? Of course they are, to some extent.

  More and more physical symptoms of depression. The latest is a burning sensation in the chest.

  Until the age of thirty-five, when I wrote Junky, I had a special abhorrence for writing, for my thoughts and feelings put down on a piece of paper. Occasionally I would write a few sentences and then stop, overwhelmed with disgust and a sort of horror. At the present time, writing appears to me as an absolute necessity, and at the same time I
have a feeling that my talent is lost and I can accomplish nothing, a feeling like the body’s knowledge of disease, which the mind tries to evade and deny.

  This feeling of horror is always with me now. I had the same feeling the day Joan died; and once when I was a child, I looked out into the hall, and such a feeling of fear and despair came over me, for no outward reason, that I burst into tears. I was looking into the future then. I recognize the feeling, and what I saw has not yet been realized. I can only wait for it to happen. Is it some ghastly occurrence like Joan’s death, or simply deterioration and failure and final loneliness, a dead-end setup where there is no one I can contact? I am just a crazy old bore in a bar somewhere with my routines? I don’t know, but I feel trapped and doomed.

  Waiting for Eukodal, I was subject to a series of beggars. Two girls paralyzed from the waist down, swinging around on blocks. They bar the way, clutching at my pants legs. An English seaman on the beach. He gets his face very close to mine, and says, “You may be in the same position someday.” I go into a café and sit at the counter drinking a cup of coffee. A child about seven years old, barefooted and dirty, touches my arm. These people are raised in beggary and buggery.

  The nightmare feeling of my childhood is more and more my habitual condition. Is this a prevision of atomic debacle? Dream of a sixteenth-century Norwegian: He saw a black, mushroom-shaped cloud darkening the earth.

  We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures, and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision. They are representatives of abstract forces who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past. There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers. The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident, inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.