Complete Stories (22 page)

The buzzing peaks, but instead of vibrating away into pure dimension-Z energy, the professor and doctor are…dancing through it, lying down beside the CRASH desk-chair, spitty slippery slick peekaboo hair fanning out, and the deadly sound is just coking them up is all…my God, he’s built like a racehorse. She spreads and pushes back, their orgone energy tears at the buzzing, breaking it into Stones riffs: “Oh, Doctor please do the hip-shake, babe, I’m riding down your moonlight mile …”

But now we’re dollying out through the window, and up again. It’s almost dark outside and the buzzing is louder than ever, wilder and higher…it’s a multiplex sound with endlessly complex layers of information folded inside each other over and over. (Think of the sound an acid-tripping brain might make as chessmen slide off tilted tiles and wooden fingers fumble for the saves.)

Split-screen checker-board montage. In the black squares people flare into white energy, in the red squares they couple. We draw back and the tessellated plane warps into a sphere, Mother Earth, everyone coming or going at twilight’s touch.

Cut to a double bed with a sleeping couple. Pale, pale grey light outside. Faint buzzing. The woman sits up suddenly. Mashed frizzy hair, smallish breasts with perfect nipples. It’s Dr. Schmid! She shakes the dormant mound next to her, and Professor Akwell sits up, too, eyes gummy.

The light is growing, the buzzing too. Dr. Schmid flicks on the radio.

“It is
kuzzz
seventy to
bzzzzzznt
Earth’s adult population destroyed. Preliminary studies indicate that the deaths
wheeeeeep
dawn and dusk.”

“Do you hear that?” she cries, jumping out of bed and staring out the window. On a distant hillside a little flare of white light. “Quickly, dear!” She hops back in the bed.

Professor Akwell still rubbing his eyes. “I’m…I’m too tired.”

The radio is still crackling and talking. “Interviews with
fweeep
a striking uniformity. All those adults not destroyed by the Buzz were engaged in
dzeeeent
. Listeners are urgently advised to pair up and stick together. Orgasm
zaaaaap
only answer.”

Fingers trembling with haste, Dr. Schmid has pulled on tight stockings and a lacy black garter belt. The buzzing is so loud that the perfume bottles on her dresser are rattling. She falls back on a chair, her legs spread. “Hurry, hurry, oh please hurry!” A ray of sunlight slant into the room.

The professor shambles across the room and kneels down in front of her. Runs his hands around her stocking-tops, where the full buttocks bulge out like warm triple-scoops of vanilla ice cream. He squats lower and glues his mouth to her vagina.

Cut to prof’s-eye view of her body. Mystery-furze of black pubic hair in the foreground, thighs and black suspenders out to the sides, the taut buckler of her undulating belly, the swollen breasts sliding, nipples pointing this way and that, her pouting lips and heavy-lidded eyes.

She’s coming now; it’s fine for
her
, and part of the buzzing stutters into “Emotional Rescue,” but the professor barely has a hard-on, this early in the morning and still having to take a piss. He doesn’t come, and the buzzing takes him away, melting into hot light between those quivering thighs.

She screams and draws back. The light rolls across the floor like ball-lightning, singeing a trail into the carpet. And then something surprising happens. The light grows projections, begins to dim, and it’s…Professor Akwell saved by the love of a good woman?

No. It’s that red-haired youth from Mannheim. Naked and curled into a fetal position. He stands up and runs a hand across his forehead. Buzzing and music fading now, New York Dolls chanting: “Who are the Mystery Girls? Who are the Mystery Girls? Who are the Mystery Girls?”

“
Wo sind wir?
” youth asks in German.

The woman is embarrassed and fumbles for her robe. “Who are you?”

“
Amerika
?”

“Yes.” She stands, cheeks still pink with sex-flush. “This is America. But where did you come from?”

“I,” he fumbles for the English. “I am from Mannheim, Germany. I have make the Buzz. I am Uli.” Naked, but self-assured, Uli holds his hand out.

“Lola. Lola Schmid.” Gingerly she takes his hand. “But why have you done this? And how?”

Uli looks down at himself. “Do you have some jeans?”

“Yes …” She hands him the pair she was wearing yesterday. He wriggles into them, then slips on her discarded tube-top as well. He picks up one of her lipsticks and leans close to the mirror on her dresser.

Lola goes to her closet, turns her back to Uli and puts on a dress. Shot of inviting ass framed by black garter-straps. Then
swish
the dress is on, a light summer dress with little stars and nebulae printed yellow on white.

Cut to Uli and Lola having breakfast in Lola’s kitchen. In her clothes, and with his face made up, he looks…unsettling. A punky bachelor girl. He is talking, haltingly, and with many fluid hand-gestures.

“I have all the time been looking for the
absolute rock
. I snipped from here and there the all-best pieces and folded up mixed.” He meshes his fingers to illustrate. “So it was all right. It went. But always I was still feeling something missing.”

“Where did you find it, then?” Lola’s manner is bright, yet distant. You sense that she no longer quite believes in the reality unfolding around her.

“I was reading in a magazine that someone had the idea of treating turned antiquities as noise-plates.” His measured eyes stare at her, looking to see if she understands. One eye is blue, one green.

Lola shakes her head and Uli tries again. “I robbed an Egyptian vase from the museum.” He picks up an empty juice-glass and turns it on its side. As he continues talking, he rolls the glass with one hand and touches it delicately with a pencil. “There was a little groove ringed around and around. The Egyptian worker a long time ago made noise and his knife trembled. My phonographic stylus turned the trembling back into voice. A song not his. A very strange song.”

Uli falls silent. Lola finds and lights a cigarette. Finally Uli continues.

“I whited-out…and yet here I am back. I think everyone will melt into light and everyone will come back. We all must tour the Hall of the Martian Kings.”

“I don’t want to. Sex is better. And why do you speak of Martians?”

“It was like this. I mixed the sounds together. It stacked up and became too big. From the window out I must go. And this is the surprising point, that I never hit the street. Instead …

Wah-wah-wah
and melt to flashback.

Uli-eye view of falling towards street. Neatly arranged German cobblestones rushing up at you. A dog gazing up too surprised to run. Wild, high buzzing.

Suddenly a section of the cobblestones swings open like two double doors. Blinding light streams out and you fall through the street and into the light. Everything is glowing from ultraviolet on up to X-ray-colored. Also an on/off strobing in the film here, giving things red jumpy edges.

The music-loops are subtracted from the buzzing and now you hear only the pure, solemn twitter of the Martian death-song. Camera dollies along the endless bright corridor. Huge translucent statues of scarab-beetles line the sides like suits of armor. The floor is tessellated in snaky curves, there are doors doors doors.

You see Uli’s hand reach out and turn a doorknob, then whiiisssk! Back in Lola’s kitchen.

“The song from the vase,” Uli is saying, “It is perhaps the soul of the Martian civilization. We are free now to go in and out from door to door.”

Lola shakes her head. “Not me.”

Cut. Lola’s bed, sunset. The buzzing is building. Lola is on all fours, wearing only the garter belt. Uli is crouched behind her, his hand spreading her cheeks, his face pressed into her crack. She moans and pushes back.

Wild, high buzzing closer now. Uli kneels and we see Lola’s sweet, inviting asshole puckered out like Clara Bow’s mouth. Uli rubs spit on his long white cock and drives it in, holding her hips and pulling her against him. They come, screaming. The buzzing fades.

Cut. Dawn. Uli sleeping in Lola’s bed. A shaft of sunlight flicks onto the wall. Faint buzzing. Lola sits up with a grunt of fear. Moving quickly, she turns and squats over Uli’s face, rubbing her cunt against his slack features. He half wakes.

“Go gone, Lola. Back to the Hall is best.”

“
No!
” She is kneeling over his mouth, naked, facing the camera. “Do it, Uli! Do it to me!” He is passive, uninterested.

Lola mashes her breasts with her left hand, rubs her clitoris with two fingers of her right. The buzzing is louder and louder.

“More,” Lola moans, “It’s not enough. You’ve got to …”

She begins to piss. This is enough. Her face puffs and glazes and she comes, taking some of the buzzing into Linton Kwesi Johnson: “Smash their brains in, smash their brains in, smash their brains in.”

But Uli…Uli lets the sound take him away again; he’s a hissing white mound at the foot of the bed. Once again, as with Professor Akwell, the light dims and re-forms into a new shape …”Baby it’s you, baby it’s you, baby it’s you.”

Enjoy yourself.

============

Written in Spring, 1981.

New Blood
, December, 1981.

New Blood
was a magazine run by Michael Wojczuk and Niko Murray out of Boulder, Colorado. I met them in the summer of 1981 when I had a two-week gig giving a short course at the Naropa Institute of Boulder.
New Blood
always had a vigorous punky feel to it, and I was happy to have two of my stories in their pages. It was great in Boulder—I got to take a hot tub with Allen Ginsberg, smoke pot with Gregory Corso, and give a copy of
White Light
to William Burroughs.

“Buzz” is the most cyberpunk of my early stories. Sylvia and I really did see Elvis Costello play in Mannheim, by the way, it wasn’t far from Heidelberg.

I took the scientific idea for “Buzz” from Peter K. Lewin, “Preliminary Studies in the Extraction of Human Sounds Engraved Accidentally into Ancient Vessels,” Speculations in Science And Technology, #3, August, 1980.

“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” —
Hamlet
, Act II, Scene ii.

Joe threw the empty soda bottle high over the black dirt, and Udo fired a rock at it. Miss. Joe’s turn.

He looked for a good rock while Udo retrieved the bottle from the mounded rows of the asparagus field. In Heidelberg, the farmers keep their asparagus white by making it grow up through half a meter of sunless mulch.

“Okay Joe,” Udo called. “
Raketen los
!” The big liter bottle arced up, twirling end over end and whistling. Completely in synch for that one second, Joe flung his clot of asphalt. He nicked the bottle, but it didn’t break. Solid German construction.

Just then Udo’s mother started yelling from the house. Joe couldn’t understand her dialect, but he liked her voice. She had strong legs and big breasts and red hair. Too bad he didn’t have a mother like that. Too bad he didn’t have a mother.

“I must eat dinner,” Udo explained in the clean high-German they taught at school. “You can have the bottle since you hit it first.”

“Thanks. Why don’t you come over to the base tonight? They’re showing
Grease
.” It was Joe’s favorite movie. Dark and wiry, he looked like one of Travolta’s friends.

“
Schmiere
? In English?”

“Naturally. In
Amerikanisch
, man. It’s at the Patrick Henry Village NCO Club. I’ll get you in.”

After Udo left, Joe walked into the asparagus field to get the bottle. It would be good for a twenty pfennig refund, enough for a sweet-bun at the market he passed on the way to the U.S. Army base where he lived with his father.

The mounds of mulch over the asparagus were patted smooth. Here and there you could see a little bump where a ripe stalk was about to break through. The watery, insistent May sunlight brought a rich earth-smell up from the field. An occasional car whizzed past, emphasizing the silence.

As Joe picked up the bottle he noticed something shiny lying on the next mound over. A bright little sphere, like a big ball bearing or a silvered glass Christmas-tree ball. An odd thing to find in an asparagus field.

He hopped over the intervening mound and leaned over the little mirror-ball. The sky was in there, and his face and the horizon and the field. Neat. But …

Wait. It wasn’t the same. The field in the little reflected image was pink and crowded with towering…machinery, tapering in towards the image’s center. Worse, the funhouse face looking back at Joe was not his after all…was not any living human’s.

He jumped back with a sort of cry. The face in the ball didn’t move. Maybe it was just painted on? That had to be it. He leaned over the ball again, scrutinizing the weird visage.

What had initially seemed a butchered mess now took on order. It was basically humanoid: ears, pinky-tan skin, long hair on top, nose-slits, eyes and mouth. The big difference was that the mouth was on top and the eyes on bottom…like a person upside down, with red mouth detached and writhing in the big black forehead. What a crazy thing to paint on a ball and leave …

The mouth was moving. Calling others. More faces crowded up. Two, three, five…small and distorted in the mirror’s curve.

Joe gasped and stepped back, then stepped forward and gave the ball a poke with his bottle. It rolled off the mound. Nothing in the image changed. The central figure was holding up a three-fingered hand and making signs. The vaguely female mouth-slash moved soundlessly. Over the figure’s head Joe could make out a tiny rocket-plane moving across the curved sky, moving away and away, dwindling towards the infinitely distant central point. It was a whole universe in there. The…woman beckoned him closer.

“Wait,” Joe muttered. “I’ll take you home. I can’t stay here.”

But he didn’t want to touch the sphere. Maybe if you touched it they could pull you inside. He took out his handkerchief and laid it on the ground next to the shiny ball. Then he used the bottle to nudge the ball onto the hankie, which he picked up by its four corners. The ball was very light…hardly there at all. Back at the road he stowed it and the bottle in the knapsack he used for a school satchel, then swung onto his bike.