Naked Lunch (23 page)

Froth gathered at the corners of the Expeditor’s mouth. He was spitting little balls of saliva like pieces of cotton. The stench of spiritual vileness hung in the airs about him like a green cloud. Marvie and Leif fell back twittering in alarm.

‘He’s gone
mad,’
Marvie gasped. ‘Let’s get
out
of here.’ Hand in hand they
skip away into the mist that covers the Zone in the winter months like a cold Turkish Bath.

The Examination

Carl Peterson found a postcard in his box requesting him to report for a ten o’clock appointment with Doctor Benway in the Ministry of Mental Hygiene and Prophylaxis.…

‘What on earth could they want with me?’ he thought irritably.…‘A mistake most likely.’ But he knew they didn’t make
mistakes.… Certainly not mistakes of identity.…

It would not have occurred to Carl to disregard the appointment even though failure to appear entailed no penalty.… Freeland was a welfare state. If a citizen wanted anything from a load of bone meal to a sexual partner some department was ready to offer effective aid.
The threat implicit in this enveloping benevolence stifled the concept of rebellion.…

Carl walked through the Town Hall Square.… Nickel nudes sixty feet high with brass genitals soaped themselves under gleaming showers.… The Town Hall cupola, of glass brick and copper crashed into the sky.

Carl stared back at a homosexual American tourist who dropped his eyes and fumbled with the light filters of his Leica.…

Carl entered the steel enamel labyrinth of the Ministry, strode to the
information desk … and presented his card.

‘Fifth floor … Room twenty-six …’

In room twenty-six a nurse looked at him with cold undersea eyes.

‘Doctor Benway is expecting you,’ she said smiling. ‘Go right in.’

‘As if he had nothing to do but wait for me,’ thought Carl.…

The office was completely silent, and filled with milky light. The doctor shook Carl’s hand, keeping his eyes on the young
man’s chest.…

‘I’ve seen this man before,’ Carl thought.…‘But where?’

He sat down and crossed his legs. He glanced at an ashtray on the desk and lit a cigarette.… He turned to the doctor a steady inquiring gaze in which there was more than a touch of insolence.

The doctor seemed embarrassed.… He fidgeted and coughed … and fumbled with papers.…

‘Hurumph,’ he said finally.…‘Your name is Carl
Peterson I believe.…’ His glasses slid down into his nose in parody of the academic manner.… Carl nodded silently.… The doctor did not look at him but seemed none the less to register the acknowledgement.… He pushed his glasses back into place with one finger and opened a file on the white enamelled desk.

‘Mmmmmmmm. Carl Peterson,’ he repeated the name
caressingly, pursed his lips and nodded
several times. He spoke again abruptly: ‘You know of course that we are trying. We are all trying. Sometimes of course we don’t succeed.’ His voice trailed off thin and tenuous. He put a hand to his forehead. ‘To adjust the state – simply a tool – to the needs of each individual citizen.’ His voice boomed out so unexpectedly deep and loud that Carl started. ‘That is the only function of the state
as we see it. Our knowledge … incomplete, of course,’ he made a slight gesture of depreciation.…‘For example …
for example
… take the matter of the uh
sexual deviation.’
The doctor rocked back and forth in his chair. His glasses slid down onto his nose. Carl felt suddenly uncomfortable.

‘We regard it as a misfortune … a sickness … certainly nothing to be censored or uh sanctioned any more than
say … tuberculosis.… Yes,’ he repeated firmly as if Carl had raised an objection.… ‘Tuberculosis. On the other hand you can readily see that
any
illness imposes certain, should we say
obligations
, certain
necessities
of a prophylactic nature on the authorities concerned with public health, such necessities to be imposed, needless to say, with a minimum of inconvenience and hardship to the unfortunate
individual who has, through no fault of his own, become uh infected.… That is to say, of course, the minimum hardship compatible with adequate protection of other individuals who are not so infected.… We do not find obligatory vaccination for smallpox an unreasonable measure.… Nor isolation for certain contagious diseases.… I am sure you will agree that individuals infected with hrumph what
the French call “les malades gallants” heh heh heh should be compelled to undergo treatment if they do not report voluntarily.’ The doctor went on chuckling and rocking in his chair like a mechanical toy.… Carl realized that he was expected to say something.

‘That seems reasonable,’ he said.

The doctor stopped chuckling. He was suddenly motionless. ‘Now to get back to this uh matter of sexual
deviation. Frankly we don’t pretend to understand – at least not completely – why some men and women prefer the uh sexual company of their own sex. We do know that the uh phenomena is common enough, and, under certain circumstances a matter of uh concern to this department.’

For the first time the doctor’s eyes flickered across Carl’s face. Eyes without a trace of warmth or hate or any emotion
that Carl had ever experienced in himself or seen in another, at once cold and intense, predatory and impersonal. Carl suddenly felt trapped in this silent underwater cave of a room, cut off from all sources of warmth and certainty. His picture of himself sitting there calm, alert with a trace of well mannered contempt went dim, as if vitality were draining out of him to mix with the milky grey
medium of the room.

‘Treatment of these disorders is, at the present time, hrumph symptomatic.’ The doctor suddenly threw himself back in his chair and burst into peals of metallic laughter. Carl watched him appalled.…‘The man is insane,’ he thought. The doctor’s face went blank as a gambler’s. Carl felt an odd sensation in his stomach like the sudden stopping of an elevator.

The doctor was
studying the file in front of him. He spoke in a tone of slightly condescending amusement:

‘Don’t look so frightened, young man. Just a professional joke. To say treatment is symptomatic means there is none, except to make the patient feel as comfortable as possible. And that is precisely what we attempt to do in these cases.’ Once again Carl felt the impact of that cold interest on his face.
‘That is to say reassurance when reassurance is necessary … and, of course, suitable outlets with other individuals of similar tendencies. No isolation is indicated … the condition is no more directly contagious than cancer. Cancer, my first love,’ the doctor’s voice receded.
He seemed actually to have gone away through an invisible door leaving his empty body sitting there at the desk.

Suddenly
he spoke again in a crisp voice. ‘And so you may well wonder why we concern ourselves with the matter at all?’ He flashed a smile bright and cold as snow in sunlight.

Carl shrugged: ‘That is not my business … what I am wondering is why you have asked me to come here and why you tell me all this … this …’

‘Nonsense?’

Carl was annoyed to find himself blushing.

The doctor leaned back and placed
the ends of his fingers together:

‘The young,’ he said indulgently. ‘Always they are in a hurry. One day perhaps you will learn the meaning of patience. No, Carl.… I may call you Carl? I am not evading your question. In cases of suspected tuberculosis we – that is the appropriate department – may ask, even
request
, someone to appear for a fluoroscopic examination. This is routine, you understand.
Most such examinations turn up negative. So you have been asked to report here for, should I say a psychic fluoroscope???? I may add that after talking with you I feel
relatively
sure that the result will be, for practical purposes, negative.…’

‘But the whole thing is ridiculous. I have always interested myself only in girls. I have a steady girl now and we plan to marry.’

‘Yes Carl, I know.
And that is why you are here. A blood test prior to marriage, this is reasonable, no?’

‘Please doctor, speak directly.’

The doctor did not seem to hear. He drifted out of his chair and began walking around behind Carl, his voice languid and intermittent like music down a windy street.

‘I may tell you in strictest confidence that there is definite evidence of a hereditary factor. Social pressure.
Many homosexuals latent and overt do, unfortunately, marry.
Such marriages often result in … Factor of infantile environment.’ The doctor’s voice went on and on. He was talking about schizophrenia, cancer, hereditary dysfunction of the hypothalamus.

Carl dozed off. He was opening a green door. A horrible smell grabbed his lungs and he woke up with a shock. The doctor’s voice was strangely flat
and lifeless, a whispering junky voice:

‘The Kleiberg-Stanislouski semen floculation test … a diagnostic tool … indicative at least in a negative sense. In certain cases useful – taken as part of the whole picture.… Perhaps under the uh
circumstances.’
The doctor’s voice shot up to a pathic scream. ‘The nurse will take your uh
specimen.’

‘This way please.…’ The nurse opened the door into a bare
white walled cubicle. She handed him a jar.

‘Use this please. Just yell when you’re ready.’

There was a jar of K.Y. on a glass shelf. Carl felt ashamed as if his mother had laid out a handkerchief for him. Some coy little message stitched on like: ‘If I was a cunt we could open a dry goods store.’

Ignoring the K.Y., he ejaculated into the jar, a cold brutal fuck of the nurse standing her up
against a glass brick wall. ‘Old Glass Cunt,’ he sneered, and saw a cunt full of colored glass splinters under the Northern Lights.

He washed his penis and buttoned up his pants.

Something was watching his every thought and movement with cold, sneering hate, the shifting of his testes, the contractions of his rectum. He was in a room filled with green light. There was a stained wood double bed,
a black wardrobe with full length mirror. Carl could not see his face. Someone was sitting in a black hotel chair. He was wearing a stiff bosomed white shirt and a dirty paper tie. The face swollen, skull-less, eyes like burning pus.

‘Something wrong?’ said the nurse indifferently. She
was holding a glass of water out to him. She watched him drink with aloof contempt. She turned and picked up
the jar with obvious distaste.

The nurse turned to him: ‘Are you waiting for something special?’ she snapped. Carl had never been spoken to like that in his adult life. ‘Why no.…’ ‘You can go then,’ she turned back to the jar. With a little exclamation of disgust she wiped a gob of semen off her hand. Carl crossed the room and stood at the door.

‘Do I have another appointment?’

She looked at
him in disapproving surprise: ‘You’ll be notified
of course.’
She stood in the doorway of the cubicle and watched him walk through the outer office and open the door. He turned and attempted a jaunty wave. The nurse did not move or change her expression. As he walked down the stairs the broken, false grin burned his face with shame. A homosexual tourist looked at him and raised a knowing eyebrow.
‘Something
wrong?’

Carl ran into a park and found an empty bench beside a bronze faun with cymbals.

‘Let your hair down, chicken. You’ll feel better.’ The tourist was leaning over him, his camera swinging in Carl’s face like a great dangling tit.

‘Fuck off you!’

Carl saw something ignoble and hideous reflected back in the queen’s spayed animal brown eyes.

‘Oh! I wouldn’t be calling any names
if I were you, chicken. You’re hooked too. I saw you coming out of The Institute.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ Carl demanded.

‘Oh nothing. Nothing at all.’

‘Well, Carl,’ the doctor began smiling and keeping his eyes on a level with Carl’s mouth. ‘I have some good news for you.’ He picked up a slip of blue paper off the desk and went through an elaboratore pantomime of focusing his
eyes on it.
‘Your uh test … the Robinson-Kleiberg floculation test …’

‘I thought it was a Blomberg-Stanlouski test.’

The doctor tittered. ‘Oh dear no.… You are getting ahead of me young man. You might have misunderstood. The Blomberg-Stanlouski, weeell that’s a different sort of test altogether. I
do hope
… not necessary.…’ He tittered again: ‘But as I was saying before I was so charmingly interrupted …
by my hurumph learned young colleague. Your KS seems to be …’ He held the slip at arm’s length. ‘.…completely uh negative. So perhaps we won’t be troubling you any further. And so …’ He folded the slip carefully into a file. He leafed through the file. Finally he stopped and frowned and pursed his lips. He closed the file and put his hand flat on it and leaned forward.

‘Carl, when you were doing
your military service … There must have been … in fact there
were
long periods when you found yourself deprived of the uh consolations and uh
facilities
of the fair sex. During these no doubt trying and difficult periods you had perhaps a pin up girl?? Or more likely a pin up harem?? Heh heh heh …’

Carl looked at the doctor with overt distaste. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘We all did.’

‘And now,
Carl, I would like to show you some pin up girls.’ He pulled an envelope out of a drawer. ‘And ask you to please pick out the one you would most like to uh make heh heh heh.…’ He suddenly leaned forward fanning the photographs in front of Carl’s face. ‘Pick a girl, any girl, any girl!’