Complete Stories (99 page)

In a celebratory mood, I drank half a bottle of champagne at the hotel bar and then, on a whim, I went up to the fifth floor and stood outside the corner room where Bill and I had coupled so thoroughly and so well, lo, these twenty-three years gone.

Standing there, I wondered if the Master had ever thought of me again. I’d combed though his later works, hoping to find some refracted image of myself—sometimes imagining that an echo of our pleasures could be found in Bill’s descriptions of farm boys in transports of sexual abandon. I’d even mailed him shameless letters, asking if my speculations were correct. But he never answered, and then one day he died.

“I miss you, Bill,” I said into the plush Victorian quiet of the hotel hall.

I can swear I never touched his old room’s door, but just as surely as if I’d pounded on it with my fist, a voice from within called, “We hear you. Come on in.” The words were blurred, as if the speaker had a lisp.

I pushed forward; the door swung open. The room was filled with heavy, dark furniture, and books piled in the gloom. A man with long, stringy blond hair and a fluffy blond goatee sat before a velvet-curtained window, bent over a desk with a single brass lamp. At first I had only a quarter-view of his face. He was bent very low indeed, as if kissing the papers scattered on his desk, papers covered by penciled writing in the smallest script I’d ever seen.

“Welcome back, Gregge,” came a high, twangy voice, different from the one I’d heard through the door. The blond man turned his head, clamping his mouth tight shut and staring at me with pale blue eyes that held an expression of triumphant glee. A curious high piping seemed to come from within his head. And then all at once his mouth gaped open.

You must believe me when I tell you that his tongue was a small manikin, a detailed copy of William Burroughs, fully animated and alive. I, who have so little imagination, could never invent such a thing.

I stepped back, feeling for the door, wanting to flee and forget what I was seeing. But I struck the door wrong—and it slammed shut. The blond man came closer, mouth open, eyes dancing with spiteful delight. I was shaking all over.

Like a dictator on the balcony of his palace, the meat puppet Burroughs stared out from the mouth, his tiny hands resting upon the lower teeth as if upon a railing.

“I knowed you was coming,” came Bill’s thin, rheumy voice. He was using the Pa Kettle accent he sometimes liked to put on. “Picked up your moon-calf aura from the hall.” He paused, savoring my reactions.

“I don’t understand,” I said, fighting back a spasm of nausea. “Don’t hurt me.”

“I’m working out karma,” said the little Burroughs. “I owe you for never writing back. I’m gonna let my pal Dr. Teage set you up for a Poe tasting. Later on you might do some secretarial work for us—or make yourself useful in other ways.” He allowed himself one of his appalling leers. “You’re aging well, Gregge. But that’s enough outta me already.”

In a twinkling, the Burroughs face on the blond man’s tongue smoothed over, and the tiny arms sank into the pink surface. I was faced with a somewhat seedy character licking his lips. His breath smelled of fruit and manure.

“I’m Teage,” he said, his goatee wagging. “And you’re—”

“Gregge Crane,” I said. “I knew Bill a little, a long time ago. I was with him in this room.”

“I know,” said Teage, who for some reason seemed to trust me. “I’m with him in this room every day. We’re doing a book together. I’m like you. I always wanted to be a fiction writer. Look at this.”

On the desk were the sheets filled with tiny words, and lying on one of the sheets was a sharpened bit of mechanical pencil lead with a scrap of tape around one end. Bill’s writing implement, half the size of a toothpick.

“The process is my own invention,” said Teage. “I call it twanking. Before I started channeling Bill, I was a biocyberneticist. Twanking is elementary. You assemble a data base of the writer’s works and journals, use back-propagation and simulated evolution to get a compact semantic generator that produces the same data, turn the generator into the connection weights for an artificial neural net, code the neural net into wetware for the gene expression loops of some human fecal bacteria, and then rub the smart germs onto living flesh. I think it’s deliciously fitting to use my tongue. Bill speaks through me. Every night I twank him by rubbing on a culture of his special bacilli. I lean over our desk and we write till dawn. Afternoons I read it over. I really need to start getting it keyboarded soon.”

“What’s the book going to be called?” was all I could think to say.

“Bill hasn’t decided yet.” Teage hesitated, then pressed on. “The thing is, Gregge, he’s much more than a simulation. I’ve caught his soul? Is soul a bad word anymore? Logically, you might expect that there’d be no continuity of behavior from session to session. But Bill remembers. He’s all around us—dark energy. He knows things, and even when the visible effects wear off, he’s still inside my tongue.”

Perhaps it was the effects of the champagne—or my pleasure at having Burroughs call me by name—but all this seemed reasonable. And, God help me, it was I myself who suggested the next step.

“Maybe you can help me twank Poe. The whole reason I came out here this summer was because I need to write a story in his style.”

“I know,” said Teage, “Bill and I have been getting ready for you. Bill’s known for months that you’d come tonight. The spirits are outside our spacetime, Gregge, continually prodding the world toward greater gnarliness. Inching our reality across paratime. Making your and my lives into still more perfect works of art.” He let out an abrupt guffaw, his breath like the miasma above a compost heap.

“You’ll give me a germ culture to turn my flesh into Edgar Allan Poe?” I pressed.

“It’s over here,” said Teague. “And maybe tomorrow you’ll start typing my manuscript into your computer. Unless there’s a complete rewrite.”

“Fine,” I said, sealing our deal. “Wonderful.”

The twanking culture consisted of scuzzy crud on a layer of clear jelly in a Petri dish atop a dusty green
Collected Works
of Poe. Teage fit a cover onto the dish and handed it to me.

“I’ve got no use for this batch myself,” he said. “I’ve got my mouth full enough with Burroughs.”

I peered into the dish. Fuzzy white Cheerio-sized rings.Green and orange streaks. Spots, dots, and streamers.

“You only need a little at a time,” Teage was saying. “Dig out a few grams of the culture with, like, a plastic coffee spoon, and smear it on. Careful where you put it, though. It takes hold wherever it touches. The tongue’s especially good because it’s so flexible.”

Back in my room I brewed a pot of coffee and sat down to record these events on my laptop and on the cute little minidrive that I carry with it. I once lost a year’s work on a Poe bibliography in a hard disk crash, and now I always make a point of saving off my work as I go.

-----

It’s calming to be lying here propped on the pillows of my bed, typing. It’s a warm night; I’m nude. The yellow lamplight burnishes the tones of my flesh. I’ve been avoiding the sight of the Petri dish on my bed stand. But now it’s time.

I poise the white plastic spoon over the culture. Rub that gunk on my tongue?

I think not.

For as soon as Teage told me the culture would alter whatever part of me it touched, I decided to use my penis.

So here we go. It stings more than I could have imagined. The sensation flutters into my loins and my solar plexus. My penis shifts and separates. A vertical break forms in the base, two flaps split off near the top.

What have I done, what have I done, what have I done?

I’ve twanked Eddie Poe into my penis.

He’s angry, of all things. “What is the meaning of this conjuration?” cries Poe. “I abjure you to return me to my rest.” He glances down and sees my belly, my pubic hair, my scrotum.

“Fie! Gaud, sodomite, ghoul, defiler of my grave!”

It’s I who should be upset; I’m the one with the deformed, yelling penis. But the transformation is such that my cock seems to have a stronger personality than me. Nothing new, really. I’m in shock, and for a moment this seems almost funny.

But now it gets much worse. The little Poe penis knots his brow in fury, gathers his strength and—snaps himself loose from my belly. No, no, no!

Somewhere below the horror I think of a lighthouse with a hollow base breaking loose from brittle chalk.

There’s a hole at my crotch. The hole is moving around, adjusting itself, becoming a vagina.

I catch hold of Eddie before he can run away and, screaming like a woman, I stampede bare-assed down the halls and up the stairs to Teage’s room—not forgetting to bring my laptop. I must preserve every bit of this, at all costs.

For finally I have a story to tell.

-----

Teage has drawn back his curtains and is standing by his open window, staring into the humid night. He turns to face me, Burroughs in his mouth again.

Bill calls a word to my Eddie: “
Tekelili
.” I recognize it from Poe’s only novel, his tale of a sailing trip to the farthest South. Poe used
tekelili
to represent the cries of birds at Earth’s nethermost frontier.

“
Tekelili
,” responds the figure in my hand. And now, vivified by the exchange, the little Poe grows hot to the touch, twists from my grasp, and buzzes through the room’s air. An instant later he’s flown out Teage’s open window, blinking like a firefly, like a lighthouse. He pauses out there, waiting for us to come and follow.

A sharp pain knifes across my belly.

-----

I brought the laptop in the car with me; Teage is driving, led by the darting light. I’m still naked. My pains come in rhythmic waves. I fear what comes next. But I keep writing, saving the file after every sentence.

We drive down Broadway and turn right on Baseline. The great triangular rocks of the Flatirons are gold in the waning moon.

Thick clear fluid seeps from my vagina. I’m giving birth.

-----

In the middle of the field hovers glowing Eddie Poe. Between my wet thighs twitches a newborn sea-cucumber—a warty, foot-long creature with a fan of tendrils at one end—the very species found in Poe’s novel of the great hole beyond the Antarctic walls of ice. The contractions continue. More life stirs in my womb.

The Burroughs thing watches quietly from within Teage’s mouth. I force a mugwump out through my birth canal, then a centipede and a cuttlefish.

-----

As they leave my body, the creatures crawl to Eddie’s beacon, no two of them the same. Unknown energies pour from their tendrils, hands, mandibles, tentacles. The beams drill through Earth’s thin crust, friable as a chalk tablet.

A glow is visible from the tunnel my children have made.

Teage has gone and I must follow. My body is changing, my mind can barely form the words to type. I’ll end my manuscript and cast the minidrive clear.

And then, ah, then—raving, inchoate, my womb expelling an endless stream of life, I’ll leap into the Hollow Earth.

Shambhala
.

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

Written in June, 2004.

Poe’s Lighthouse
, Chris Conlon, ed. (Cemetery Dance, 2006).

Since this story already has a hoax introduction, it’s perhaps overkill to write another layer of annotation. But, hey, Edgar Allan Poe would.

In the summer of 2004, I went to Boulder, Colorado, to teach a one-week “Transreal Writing” course at the Naropa Institute. Transrealism is my term for the practice of basing fantastic tales on your real life—something I often do. I have more discussions of transrealism in my essay collection,
Seek!
(Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999) and on my writing page www.rudyrucker.com/writing.

I’d last been at Naropa in 1982, when I got to meet Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs (but, no, I didn’t spend the night with Burroughs). By way of illustrating my transreal writing technique to my students in 2004, I wrote “MS Found in a Minidrive” during the week I was teaching them. And, as so often seems to happen, my main character is a mad professor.

The theme of the story had already been defined by Chris Conlon, who was editing an anthology
Poe’s Lighthouse
(Cemetery Dance, 2006) of stories all taking off on the same unfinished story fragment by Master Poe. You can find the complete text of the original “Lighthouse” fragment in Poe’s Online Collected Works at http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/lightha.htm. I might mention, by the way, that my friend John Shirley has a really terrific story, “Blind Eye,” in that same
Poe’s Lighthouse
anthology. John sticks to the straight Poe style and delivers a tale that’s eerily like one of the master’s.

The high point of my week at Naropa was a large group reading they had. I was on a bill with my favorite poet and dear friend Anselm Hollo, reading to a crowd of three hundred people. As my story was tailor-made for the Naropa audience, it fully blew their minds and they loved it. I was thrilled to be performing at this level in the home of the Beats; it was truly “a gala night within the lonesome latter years,” as Poe touchingly puts it in his poem “The Conqueror Worm.”

As an unemployed, overweight, unmarried, overeducated woman with a big mouth, I don’t have a lot of credibility. But even if I was some perfect California Barbie it wouldn’t be enough. People never want to listen to women.

I, Glenda Gomez, bring glad tidings. She that hath ears, let her hear.

An alien being has visited our world. Harna is, was, her name. I saw her as a glowing paramecium, a jellyfish, a glass police car, and a demonic art patron. This morning, when she was shaped like a car, I rode inside her to the fifteenth century. And this evening I walked past the vanishing point and saved our universe from Harna’s collecting bag. I’m the queen of space and time. I’m trying to write up my story to pitch as a reality TV show.

Let’s start with paramecia. Unicellular organisms became a hobby of mine a few months ago when I stole a microscope from my job. I was sorting egg and sperm cells for an infertility clinic called Smart Stork. Even though I don’t have any kind of biology background they trained me.