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First published in the United States of America by Viking Press 2014
This edition published in Penguin Classics 2015
Copyright © William S. Burroughs, 1983
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Grateful acknowledgement is given for permission to reprint a portion of ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ by Lena Guilbert Ford and Ivor Novello.
Copyright 1915 by Chappell & Co., Ltd.; Copyright renewed, published in the USA by Chappell & Co., Inc. International copyright secured.
All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Cover photograph © Tove Breistein/Millennium Images.
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-141-97606-8
I STRANGER WHO WAS PASSING
II HIS FATHER’S PICTURE
III QUIÉN ES?
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TO DENTON WELCH,
FOR KIM CARSONS
The original title of this book was The Johnson Family. “The Johnson family” was a turn-of-the-century expression to designate good bums and thieves. It was elaborated into a code of conduct. A Johnson honors his obligations. His word is good and he is a good man to do business with. A Johnson minds his own business. He is not a snoopy, self-righteous, trouble-making person. A Johnson will give help when help is needed. He will not stand by while someone is drowning or trapped under a burning car.
The only thing that could unite the planet is a united space program … the earth becomes a space station and war is simply out, irrelevant, flatly insane in a context of research centers, spaceports, and the exhilaration of working with people you like and respect toward an agreed-upon objective, an objective from which all workers will gain. Happiness is a by-product of function. The planetary space station will give all participants an opportunity to function.
SHOOT-OUT IN BOULDER
SEPTEMBER 17, 1899. What appeared to be an Old-Western shoot-out took place yesterday afternoon at the Boulder Cemetery. The protagonists have been identified as William Seward Hall, sixty-five, a real-estate speculator with holdings in Colorado and New Mexico, and Mike Chase, in his fifties, about whom nothing was known.
Hall resided in New York City, and wrote western stories under the pen name of “Kim Carsons.” “He was apparently here on a business trip,” a police source stated.
At first glance it appeared that Chase and Hall had killed each other in a shoot-out, but neither gun had been fired, and both men were killed by single rifle shots fired from a distance. Chase was shot from in front through the chest. Hall was shot in the back. Nobody heard the shots, and police believe the rifleman may have employed a silencer.
A hotel key was found in Hall’s pocket, and police searched his room at the Overlook Hotel. They found clothing, a 38 revolver, and a book entitled Quién Es? by Kim Carsons. Certain passages had been underlined.
Police investigating this bizarre occurrence have as yet no clue to the possible motives of the men. “Looks like an old grudge of some sort,” Police Chief Martin Winters said. When asked whether there was any reason Chase and Hall should want to kill each other, he replied, “Not that I know of, but we are continuing the investigation.”
The Sunday paper played up the story, with pictures of the deceased and the cemetery, and diagrams showing the location of the bodies and the probable spot from which the shots had been fired. When asked about the make and caliber of the death weapon, the Medical Examiner stated: “Definitely a rifle. Size of the exit holes is consistent with a 45-70 dumdum bullet, but the projectiles have not been recovered.”
The article quoted the underlined passages from Hall’s book Quién Es?
Papers in an old attic … an old yellow press clipping from the Manhattan Comet, April 3, 1894:
Three members of the Carsons gang were killed today when they attempted to hold up the Manhattan City Bank. A posse, dispatched in pursuit of the survivors, ran into an ambush and suffered several casualties. … Mike Chase, a U.S. marshal, stated that the ambush was not carried out by the Carsons gang but by a band of Confederate renegades armed with mortars and grenades. …
This poem was wroted by Kim Carsons after a shoot-out on Bleecker Street, October 23, 1920. Liver Wurst Joe and Cherry Nose Gio, Mafia hit men, with Frank the Lip as driver, opened fire on Kim Carsons, Boy Jones, Mars Cleaver, known as Marbles, and Guy Graywood, described as an attorney. In the ensuing exchange of shots Liver Wurst Joe, Cherry Nose Gio, and Frank the Lip was all kilted. Only damage sustained by the Carsons group was to Boy’s vest when he took refuge behind a fire hydrant.
“My vest is ruinted,” he moaned. “And it was dog shit done it. There should be a law.”
Owing to certain “offensive passages” written in the French language the poem could not be quoted, but an enterprising assistant editor had copies made with translations of the offensive passages and sold them to collectors and curiosity seekers for five dollars a copy.
Stranger Who Was Passing
un grand principe de violence dictait à nos moeurs
(a great principle of violence dictated our fashions)
Surely a song for men like a great wind
Shaking an iron tree
Dead leaves in the winter pissoir
J’aime ces types vicieux
Qu ’ici montrent la bite. …
(I like the vicious types
who show the cock here. …)
Simon, aimes-tu le bruit des pas
Sur les feuilles mortes?
(Simon, do you like the sound of steps
on dead leaves?)
The smell of war and death?
Powder smoke back across the mouth blown
Powder smoke and brown hair?
Death comes with the speed of a million winds
The sheltering sky is thin as paper here
That afternoon when I watched
The torn sky bend with the wind
I can see it start to tilt
And shred and tatter
Caught in New York
Beneath the animals of the Village
The Piper pulled down the sky.
LET IT COME DOWN.
Appointment at the cemetery … Boulder, Colorado …
September 17, 1899
Mike swung onto the path at the northeast corner, wary and watchful. He was carrying a Webley-Fosbery 45 semi-automatic revolver, the action adjusted with rubber grips by an expert gunsmith to absorb recoil and prevent slipping. His backup men were about ten yards away, a little behind him across the street.
Kim stepped out of the cemetery onto the path. “Hello, Mike.” His voice carried clear and cool on the wind, sugary and knowing and evil. Kim always maneuvered to approach downwind. He was wearing a russet tweed jacket with change pockets, canvas puttees, jodhpurs in deep red.
At sight of him Mike experienced an uneasy déjà vu and glanced sideways for his backup.
One glance was enough. They were all wearing jackets the color of autumn leaves, and puttees. They had opened a wicker shoulder basket. They were eating sandwiches and filling tin cups with cold beer, their rifles propped against a tree remote and timeless as a painting.
Déjeuner des chasseurs.
Mike sees he has been set up. He will have to shoot it out. He feels a flash of resentment and outrage.
God damn it! It’s not fair!
Why should his life be put in jeopardy by this horrible little nance? Mike had a well-disciplined mind. He put these protests aside and took a deep breath, drawing in power.
Kim is about fifteen yards south walking slowly toward him. Fresh southerly winds rustle the leaves ahead of him as he walks “on a whispering south wind” … leaves crackle under his boots … Michael, aimé tu le bruit des pas sur les feuilles mortes…? Twelve yards ten … Kim walks with his hands swinging loose at his sides, the fingers of his right hand brushing the gun butt obscenely, his face alert, detached, unreadable. … Eight yards. … Suddenly Kim flicks his hand up without drawing as he points at Mike with his index finger.
“BANG! YOU’RE DEAD.”
He throws the last word like a stone. He knows that Mike will see a gun in the empty hand and this will crowd his draw. …
(With a phantom gun in an empty hand he has bluffed Mike into violating a basic rule of gunfighting. TYT. Take Your Time. Every gunfighter has his time. The time it takes him to draw aim fire and hit. If he tries to beat his time the result is almost invariably a miss. …
“Snatch and grab,” Kim chants.
Yes, Mike was drawing too fast, much too fast.
Kim’s hand snaps down flexible and sinuous as a whip and up with his gun extended in both hands at eye level.
“Jerk and miss.”
He felt Mike’s bullet whistle past his left shoulder.
Trying for a heart shot. …
Both eyes open, Kim sights for a fraction of a second, just so long and long enough: the difference between a miss and a hit. Kim’s bullet hits Mike just above the heart with a liquid SPLAT as the mercury explodes inside, blowing the aorta to shreds.
Mike freezes into a still, gun extended, powder smoke blowing back across his face. He begins to weave in slow circles. He gags and spits blood. His gun arm starts to sag.
Kim slowly lowers his gun in both hands, face impassive, eyes watchful.
Mike’s eyes are glazed, unbelieving, stubborn, still trying to get the gun up for the second shot. But the gun is heavy, too heavy to lift, pulling him down.
Slowly Kim lowers his gun into the holster.
Mike crumples sideways and falls.
Kim looks up at the trees, watching a squirrel, a remote antique gaiety suffuses his face, molding his lips into the ambiguous marble smile of a Greek youth.
Definitely an chaic from Skyros with that special Skyros smile.
Who is the Greek youth smiling at? He is smiling at his own archaic smile.
For this is the smile that happens when the smiler becomes the smile.
The wind is rising. Kim watches a dead leaf spiral up into the sky.
The Egyptian glyph that signifies: To stand up in evidence. An ejaculating phallus, a mouth, a man with his fingers in his mouth.
Kim waves to his three witnesses. One waves back with a drum stick in his hand.
Hiatus of painted calm …
Pâté, bread, wine, fruit spread out on the grass, gun propped against a tombstone, a full moon in the China-blue evening sky. One of the hunters strums a mandolin inlaid with mother-of-pearl as they sing:
“It’s only a paper moon …”
Kim lifts his gun and shoots a hole in the moon, a black hole with fuzz around it like powder burns.
A wind ripples the grass, stirs uneasily through branches.
“Flying over a muslin tree.”
Kim’s second shot takes out a grove of trees at the end of the cemetery.
The wind is rising, ripping blurs and flashes of russet orange red from the trees, whistling through tombstones.
All the spurious old father figures rush on stage.
“STOP, MY SON!”
“No son of yours, you worthless old farts.”
Kim lifts his gun.
“YOU’RE DESTROYING THE UNIVERSE!”
“What universe?”
Kim shoots a hole in the sky. Blackness pours out and darkens the earth. In the last rays of a painted sun, a Johnson holds up a barbed-wire fence for others to slip through. The fence has snagged the skyline … a great black rent. Screaming crowds point to the torn sky.
“OFF THE TRACK! OFF THE TRACK!”
“FIX IT!” the Director bellows. …
“What with, a Band-Aid and chewing gum? Rip in the Master Film. … Fix it yourself, Boss Man.”
“ABANDON SHIP, GOD DAMN IT. … EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF!”
For three days Kim had camped on the mesa top, sweeping the valley with his binoculars. A cloud of dust headed south told him they figured him to ride in that direction for Mexico. He had headed north instead, into a land of sandstone formations, carved by wind and sand—a camel, a tortoise, Cambodian temples—and everywhere caves pocked into the red rock like bubbles in boiling oatmeal. Some of the caves had been lived in at one time or another: rusty tin cans, pottery shards, cartridge cases. Kim found an arrowhead six inches long, chipped from obsidian, and a smaller arrowhead of rose-colored flint.
On top of the mesa were crumbled mounds of earth that had once been houses. Slabs of stone had been crisscrossed to form an altar. Homo sapiens was here.
Dusk was falling and blue shadows gathered in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east. Sangre de Cristo! Blood of Christ! Rivers of blood! Mountains of blood! Does Christ never get tired of bleeding? To the west the sun sets behind thunderclouds over the Jemez Mountains, and Jiménez straddles the mountains with his boots of rock and trees, a vast charro rising into the sky, his head a crystal skull of clouds as his guns spit from darkening battlements and thunder rattles over the valley. The evening star shines clear and green … “Fair as a star, when only one/Is shining in the sky.” That’s Wordsworth, Kim remembers. It is raining in the Jemez Mountains.
“It is raining, Anita Huffington.” Last words of General Grant, spoken to his nurse, circuits in his brain flickering out like lightning in gray clouds.
Kim leaned back against stone still warm from the sun. A cool wind touched his face with the smell of rain.
Pottery shards … arrowheads … a crib … a rattle … a blue spoon … a slingshot, the rubber rotted through … rusting fishhooks … tools … you can see there was a cabin here once … a hypodermic syringe glints in the sun … the needle has rusted into the glass, forming little sparks of brown mica … abandoned artifacts …
He holds the rose flint arrowhead in his hand. Here is the arrowhead, lovingly fashioned for a purpose. Campfires flicker on Indian faces eating the luscious dark meat of the passenger pigeon. He fondles the obsidian arrowhead, so fragile … did they break every time they were used, like bee stings, he wonders?
(Bison steaks roasting on a spit.)
Somebody made this arrowhead. It had a creator long ago. This arrowhead is the only proof of his existence. Living things can also be seen as artifacts, designed for a purpose. So perhaps the human artifact had a creator. Perhaps a stranded space traveler needed the human vessel to continue his journey, and he made it for that purpose? He died before he could use it? He found another escape route? This artifact, shaped to fill a forgotten need, now has no more meaning or purpose than this arrowhead without the arrow and the bow, the arm and the eye. Or perhaps the human artifact was the creator’s last card, played in an old game many light-years ago. Chill of empty space.
Kim gathers wood for a fire. The stars are coming out. There’s the Big Dipper. His father points to Betelgeuse in the night sky over Saint Louis … smell of flowers in the garden. His father’s gray face on a pillow.
Helpless pieces in the game he plays
On this checkerboard of nights and days.
He picks up the obsidian arrowhead, arrow and bow of empty space. You can’t see them anymore without the arm and the eye … the chill … so fragile … shivers and gathers wood. Can’t see them anymore. Slave Gods in the firmament. He remembers his father’s last words:
“Stay out of churches, son. All they got a key to is the shit house. And swear to me you will never wear a lawman’s badge.”
Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
Playthings in an old game, the little toy soldiers are covered with rust, shaped to fill a forgotten empty space.
Rusty tin cans … pottery shards … cartridge cases … arrowheads … a hypodermic syringe glints in the sun.
The horse is as much a part of the West as the landscape, but Kim never really made it with the horse. He tried at first to establish a telepathic bond with his horse, but the horse hated the relationship and tried to kill him at every opportunity. It would swell itself up when he put on the saddle, or it would suddenly scrape against a tree or run under a low branch. All the old horse tricks.
He did eventually break one beast, a strawberry roan, down into telepathy with a loaded quirt and some rather ingenious electronic devices but his “Strawberry,” as he called it, finally turned on him and Kim swore that he would never again become involved with a horse. He hated their hysteria, their stubborn malice, and their awful yellow teeth.
“Shoot-out in front of the Dead Ass Saloon, still noon heat, dusty street from nowhere to nowhere, lead flying all over the set, my faithful cayuse at my side, then he hits me from behind with a front hoof. I roll, twist, and put a quick shot into his ribs from below. He screams like a woman spitting blood, bullets clipping all around couldn’t hit me because of the prancing screaming horse, then he bolts right for them and they are all shooting at the horse and I take them out slow and easy and greasy. Percussion lock days, had to grease your bullets. Otherwise sparks fly out between the cylinder and the barrel, and all six cylinders is subject to go up in your face.”
It was his practice to move on foot and he could cover up to fifty miles a day with his sorcerer’s gait and his specially designed spring-walking boots, then pick up a horse, keep it for a week or so, and release it. Kim intended to head into the Jemez Mountains and hide out for a month. … He would need camping equipment, too heavy to carry. …
The area was mostly Mexican, and Kim had family letters. …
There are signs that indicate the presence of a stranger in rural areas. Some are positive, like the barking of dogs. Other indications are negative, like the sudden cessation of frogs croaking.
Joe the Dead had taught Kim how to circumvent this obstacle course. “If you want to hide something, create disinterest in the area where it is hidden. Try this on a city street. Don’t give anyone any reason to look at you and no one will see you. You have become invisible. This is easy in a city, where most people are concerned with their own business. But in the country you have to get around critters whose business it is to smell and see and hear you and give notice of your approach. So you have to give the watchers good reasons not to smell and see and hear you and give notice of your approach. This amulet is from the Cat Goddess Bast. All dogs hate and fear it. But you have to animate its power and make it work for you.”
Kim took three dogs to a remote mountain cabin and got down to the root of their dogness. The dogs did not survive this psychic dissection. Kim wondered if any creature can survive the exposure of its basic mechanisms. After that, Kim had the power to cloud dogs’ minds, to blunt their sense of smell, their hearing, and their sight. And he could make himself part of his surroundings so that he did not disturb the frogs and birds and crickets.
He reached a road of yellow gravel unobserved. He followed the road to a store by a bridge … sound of running water …
“Buenos días, señor.” Kim stood in front of the counter, an envelope in his right hand. A thin old man in a gray flannel shirt looked up. It was not often that anyone reached his store unannounced. Two young men watched from the back of the store.
“I bring greetings from Don Bernabe Jurado.” Kim passed the envelope over the counter. The old man read the letter.
“You are welcome, Mr. Hall. My name is Don Linares.” He led the way through the store to a back room, where a screen door opened onto a patio … fruit trees, a pump, chickens scratching.
The old man motioned Kim to a chair and gave him an appraising glance.
“You are hungry.”
Kim nodded. …
Huevos rancheros with fried beans and blue tortillas and a pot of coffee. Kim ate with delicate animal voracity, like a hungry raccoon. A cat rubbed against his leg. It was a handsome brute, a purple-gray tomcat with green eyes.
Kim enjoyed the Spanish ritual of talking about everything but the business in hand. They talked about the weather, the railroad’s decision to set up the terminal in Lamy rather than in Santa Fe itself. Mostly they talked about mutual friends and acquaintances, Don Linares throwing in a bit of false data here and there; the letter could be a forgery, and Kim an impostor.
“Ah? But they are already married since June.”
“Yes, to be sure. I am forgetful at times.”
There was a moment of silence. Kim knew he was being tested. Well, he wouldn’t mind being reborn as a Mexican.
“How can I be of service?” the old man finally asked.
“I need a horse and some supplies and much silence. Sugar, salt, lard, tea, chile, salt pork, flour, a bag of lemons …” Kim looked over the stock of guns. … Ah there is something he’d been looking for: a smooth-bore 44, chambered for shot shells. You have a room full of turkeys to take care of, this gun could throw a hail of lead three feet wide. Ideal gun for survival hunting. And the only thing for snakes. Kim paid in gold.
The Jemez Basin, crater of an extinct volcano, looks as though it were scooped out by a giant hand. A river winds down the middle of the basin and a number of spring-fed tributaries feed into the river, so that the whole basin is crisscrossed by water. Some streams are only two feet wide at the top but eight feet deep, with an overhanging bank. The valley is full of frogs, and you can see great yellow tadpoles deep down in the dark slow-moving water of these swampy streams.
Kim camped on the south slope, his tent hidden by trees. He baited his hook with a big purple worm and dropped it into one of the still, narrow streams, yellow flash of fish side in the dark water.
He held the crisp fried fish by the head and the tail, eating the meat off the backbone, washed down with lemonade.
Twilight, fish jumping, a symphony of frogs. Kim saw a vast frog conducting the orchestra, and he thought of Rimbaud’s “Historic Evening.”—“A master’s hand awakes the meadow’s harpsichord … they are playing cards at the bottom of the pond. …”
The golden grass, the sinister black water were like the landscape of some forgotten planet. He could see himself eating trout there forever, heaps of bones with grass growing through.
Kim is a slimy, morbid youth of unwholesome proclivities with an insatiable appetite for the extreme and the sensational. His mother had been into table-tapping and Kim adores ectoplasms, crystal balls, spirit guides and auras. He wallows in abominations, unspeakable rites, diseased demon lovers, loathsome secrets imparted in a thick slimy whisper, ancient ruined cities under a purple sky, the smell of unknown excrements, the musky sweet rotten reek of the terrible Red Fever, erogenous sores suppurating in the idiot giggling flesh. In short, Kim is everything a normal American boy is taught to detest. He is evil and slimy and insidious. Perhaps his vices could be forgiven him, but he was also given to the subversive practice of thinking. He was in fact incurably intelligent.
Later, when he becomes an important player, he will learn that people are not bribed to shut up about what they know. They are bribed not to find it out. And if you are as intelligent as Kim, it’s hard not to find things out. Now, American boys are told they should think. But just wait until your thinking is basically different from the thinking of a boss or a teacher. … You will find out that you aren’t supposed to think.
Life is an entanglement of lies to hide its basic mechanisms.
Kim remembers a teacher who quoted to the class: “If a thing is worth doing at all it is worth doing well. …”
“Well sir, I mean the contrary is certainly true. If a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing, even badly,” said Kim pertly, hoping to impress the teacher with his agile intelligence. “I mean, we can’t all become Annie Oakleys doesn’t mean we can’t get some fun and benefit from shooting. …”
The teacher didn’t like that at all, and for the rest of the school year singled Kim out for heavy-handed sarcasm, addressing him as “our esteemed woodsman and scout.” When Kim couldn’t answer a history question, the teacher asked, “Are you one of these strong, silent men?” And he wrote snippy little comments in the margins of Kim’s compositions: “Not quite as badly as that,” viciously underlining the offending passage. At the end of the term the teacher gave him a B — for the course, though Kim knew fucking well he deserved an A.
To be sure, Kim was rotten clear through and he looked like a sheep-killing dog and smelled like a polecat, but he was also the most ingenious, curious, resourceful, inventive little snot that ever rose from the pages of Boy’s Life, thinking up ways of doing things better than other folks. Kim would get to the basic root of what a device is designed to do and ask himself, Is it doing it in the simplest and most efficient way possible? He knew that once an article goes into mass production, the last thing a manufacturer wants to hear about is a better and simpler article that is basically different. And they are not interested in a more efficient, simpler or better product. They are interested in making money.
When Kim was fifteen his father allowed him to withdraw from the school because he was so unhappy there and so much disliked by the other boys and their parents.
“I don’t want that boy in the house again,” said Colonel Greenfield. “He looks like a sheep-killing dog.”
“It is a walking corpse,” said a Saint Louis matron poisonously.
“The boy is rotten clear through and he stinks like a polecat,” Judge Farris pontificated.
This was true. When angered or aroused or excited Kim flushed bright red and steamed off a rank ruttish animal smell. And sometimes he lost control over his natural functions. He took comfort from learning that partially domesticated wolves suffer from the same difficulty.
“The child in not wholesome,” said Mr. Kindhart, with his usual restraint. Kim was the most unpopular boy in the school, if not in the town of Saint Louis.
“They have nothing to teach you anyway,” his father said. “Why, the headmaster is a fucking priest.”
The summers they spent at the farm, and during the day Kim spent much of his time outdoors, hiking, hunting, and fishing. He loved squirrel hunting in the early morning, and usually went hunting with Jerry Ellisor, a buck-toothed, slightly retarded boy who lived next door. Jerry was subject to fits, so Kim carried a leather-covered stick he would shove in Jerry’s mouth to keep him from biting his tongue off. Kim enjoyed watching these fits because sometimes Jerry would get a hard-on and shoot off in his pants, and that was a powerful sight. And Jerry had a slinky black hound dog. Everybody knows you can’t find squirrels without a dog to bark up the tree where a squirrel is.
His father had an extensive and eclectic library, and Kim spent much of his time reading during the winter months. Kim read everything in his father’s library, Shakespeare and all the classics. Dickens was not for him, and he couldn’t abide Sir Walter Scott. Knights and ladies repelled him. Armor was a cumbersome and impractical device, jousting was stupid and bestial, and romantic love was disgusting, rather like the cult of Southern womanhood. He noticed that he was particularly detested by self-styled Southern gentlemen, a truly pestiferous breed. The animal doctor should put all Southern gentlemen to sleep, along with the knights and the ladies, he decided.
There were a number of medical books, which Kim read avidly. He loved to read about diseases, rolling and savoring the names on his tongue: tabes dorsalis, Friedreich’s ataxia, climactic buboes … and the pictures! the poisonous pinks and greens and yellows and purples of skin diseases, rather like the objects in those Catholic stores that sell shrines and madonnas and crucifixes and religious pictures. There was one skin disease where the skin swells into a red wheal and you can write on it. It would be fun to find a boy with this disease and draw pricks all over him. Kim thought maybe he would study medicine and become a doctor, but while he liked diseases he didn’t like sick people. They complained all the time. They were petulant and self-centered and boring. And the thought of delivering babies was enough to turn a man to stone.
His father had a large collection of books on magic and the occult, and Kim drew magic circles in the basement and tried to conjure up demons. His favorites were the Abominations like Humwawa, whose face is a mass of entrails and who rides on a whispering south wind. Pazuzu, Lord of Fevers and Plagues, and especially Gelal and Lilit, who invade the beds of men, because he did sometimes experience a vivid sexual visitation he hoped was an incubus. He knew that the horror of these demon lovers was a gloomy Christian thing. In Japan there are phantom whores known as “fox maidens,” who are highly prized, and the man who can get his hands on a fox maiden is considered lucky. He felt sure there were fox boys as well. Such creatures could assume the form of either sex.
Once he made sex magic against Judge Farris, who said Kim was rotten clear through and smelled like a polecat. He nailed a full-length picture of the Judge to the wall, taken from the society page, and masturbated in front of it while he intoned a jingle he had learned from a Welsh nanny:
Slip and stumble (lips peel back from his teeth)
Trip and fall (his eyes light up inside)
Down the stairs
And hit the wallllllllllllllll!
His hair stands up on end. He whines and whimpers and howls the word out and shoots all over the Judge’s leg. And Judge Farris actually did fall downstairs a few days later, and fractured his shoulder bone. The Judge swore to anyone who would listen that a scrawny, stinking red dog that must have gotten in through the basement window suddenly jumped out at him on the stairs, with a most peculiar smile on its face, showing all its teeth, wrapped its paws around his legs, tripping him so that he fell and hit his shoulder against the wall at the landing.
Nobody believed him except Kim, and Kim knew that he had succeeded in projecting a thought form. But he was not overly impressed. The Judge was dead drunk every night and he was always falling down. Magic seemed to Kim a hit-and-miss operation, and to tell the truth, a bit silly. Guns and knives were more reliable.
He read about Hassan i Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain, Master of the Assassins, and he was fascinated. How he longed to be a dedicated assassin in an all-male society. He dreamt of the Old Man, who came to him with a white beard and pale blue eyes and told him to go kill Colonel Greenfield, who said he looked like a sheep-killing dog.
“GRRRRRRRRRRRR … I’ll leap at his throat, as seals are said to do if mistreated by their trainers.”
There is a smell in the air after a thunderbolt hits, it’s one of those archetypal smells like the smell of the sea and the smell of opium: one whiff and you never forget it.
Once Kim Carsons and Jerry Ellisor saw lightning strike the cornice of the old school building outside Saint Albans, the smell so heavy you could see it drifting from the shattered bricks in a violet haze and the boys go crazy with the smell like a cat with catnip. They strip off their clothes and caper around masturbating and turning cartwheels and grinning out between their legs and screaming to the sky:
“SMELL ME!”
And Jerry’s slinky black hound dog throws back its head and howls, lightning popping all around them as the sky gets blacker and blacker with just a line of bright green around the rim and the next thing we are snatching up our clothes and running for the cyclone cellar, bricks from the school bouncing all around us. We both shit ourselves when the twister ripped the cellar door off and the house went up like matchsticks. And the dog kept on howling. When we come up out of the cellar the house is clean gone, with Jerry’s bedfast grandmother. She’d been alone in the house, since Arch and Ma were in town for their monthly shopping, and Jerry was supposed to look after “the old stink-bag,” as he called her.
“Maybe it dropted her in the river,” Jerry said as they poured hot water over each other in the sauna and washed the shit off. Everybody was glad to see the last of her, she’d been clean out of her mind the past five years, her breasts all eated away with the cancer and Arch kept buying more morphine to finish her off but she had such a strength for it no amount would kill her and Arch said it was like buying feed for a hawg.
“She’s a marl-hole in the worst form there is, no bottom to her.”
“Well, leastwise she don’t eat much,” Ma said. “Half a cup of soup a day. She can’t last much longer on that.”
And Jerry pipes up: “I heard about an old Saint Woman lived twenty years and all she ever eated was a holy wafer on Sundays.”
And Arch just looks at him and says, “You know any more stories like that?”
“Sure, plenty. Why, this one old biddy lived forty years after the doctor said—”
And Arch whops him alongside the head with a ruck-hoe handle.
Jerry took Kim in to see Grandma once. She reminded Kim of an old rock covered with lichen, and he thought she could live forever like that.
Now, the sauna was erected by a Finnish boy who witched wells and did tinkering jobs, and he had put some Finn magic on it because he had the power. No one could say his real name, so they all called him Sinki for Helsinki, where all the Finns is borned at. This Sinki had bright red hair, and one eye was blue and the other brown. He could whip a knife out of his sleeve and cut the head clean off a chicken and have the knife put back away before the blood squirted out … WHOOOOSH. Kim recollects when the sauna is finished Sinki, Jerry and Kim is the first to get the cleaning in it. They didn’t have to worry about Arch and Ma butting in by this time they is both taking the morphine and taking it heavy only way they can stand up for the aggravations of Grandma when the morphine runned out of her any hour of the day or night she lets out such a bellowing Arch can hear it clear to the end of his cornfield.
Well, Sinki rubs his long red pointed dick and Jerry grins his buck teeth bare so we all get hard and jerk off with a smell like fucking ferrets. Then Sinki draws a circle on the floor with the jism and says something in Finn talk and tells us he has put a magic on the sauna it will last the house out.
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 purpleassed 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.
haveneedDenver Postdogshumanto reflect that a , 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.