The Ticket That Exploded (Burroughs, William S.) (4 page)

The Guard named Rose sitting on a bench in the back of a swaying truck with the silent demolition men. He does not know where he is going or what he will do when he gets there . . . “getting old . . watchman in a warehouse .. museum guard maybe . .”

I stopped at a newsstand on Shaftesbury Avenue and bought a copy of
Encounter
contemplating under Eros the feat of prose abstracted to a point where no image track occurs.

(The concomitance or rather juxtaposition with this relentlessly successful though diagrammatic schemata by sexualizing syntactically delinquent analogous metaphor)

It was 11:50
P.M
. when I stepped into the entrance of Boot’s and there was “Genial” standing outside blue neon on his face you thought of diseased metal when you looked at him a face burning in slow cold fires.

(desperately effete negation of societal values fecundate with orifices perspective and the ambivalent smugness of unavowed totalitarianism.)

I knew why he was standing there. He didn’t have the ready to fill his script. He was waiting for somebody he could touch.

(foundering in disproportionate exasperation he doesn’t even achieve the irrelevant honesty of hysteria but rather an uneasy somnolence counterpointed by the infantile exposure of fragmentary suburban genitalia.)

“Need bread for your script, man?”

He turned and looked at me decided I wasn’t the heat
and nodded. I passed him a quid. “That should buy six jacks. I’ll see you outside.”

He nodded again went in and sat down in the script line.

(ironically the format is banal to its heart of pulp ambivalently flailing noneffectual tentacles of verbal diarrhea)

I waited half an hour of word sludge

(confirming the existence of their creator their periodically jolted lives starved of direction or vector by the recognizable official negative analogues banal “privatisation” being the most reliable)

“You can fix at my place if you like.”

I could tell he had no place of his own. He just nodded and we got in a cab. I had to wake him up when we got there and help him up the stairs. He’d been hitting the goof balls waiting on his script. I deposited him in a chair. He slumped forward and his tongue lolled out. He opened one eye and looked at me.

“Don’t I know you from some place?”

“Right back where we started from born knowing.”

His eyes touched me inside. He smiled twisting a Sammy scarf in his dirty fingers.

“You should have let me finish the job instead of leaving it half done.”

(species spawning for such a purpose to ask reputably informed complacent “What is it for?” Accessibility is I feel to beg the question.)

“I’m immune now remember.”

“Yes thanks to me.”

“Thanks ‘Genial.’”

“So what did it get you?” He pointed to the mirror. “Look at you . . burnt out used up . . .”

(to traduce or transfigure and reduce a man’s pulsating multiplicity to untranslatable inchoate word for latent consensus of “otherness”)

“And look at you ‘Genial’ . . . sex scar tissue on anyone I ever asked alive or dead I should know.”

(Mr S. who latterly became something the point is simply the contradictions of an inherent territory prophet stridently inclined to gritty acceptances depending on banal illiterate process of perceptive engagement)

I found “Genial” in the police shed on top of the hill. He was sitting on a bench his face blank as an empty screen. A police sergeant behind a desk squinted through cigarette smoke. “Much trouble this one,” he pointed to ‘Genial,’ “papers
muy malo no en ordenes
. .”

“He has a passport?”

“Oh yes but the date here and the date here
no corresponde . . muy malo
.. perhaps the passport is false . . it will have to be sent to the Capitol of course ..”

He watched my hand and checked the denomination of the note I was slipping under the frayed green blotter.

He picked up the passport and leafed through it. “Oh yes . . here is the date of entry . . Yes everything quite in order .. your passport
señor
..”

“Genial” stood there with the passport in his hand . . “Come along ‘Genial,’” I put a hand under his arm and led him out onto the road.

“Adiós señores.”

“Adiós.”

I guided “Genial” with one hand under an elbow. He
weighed no more than his clothes. We sat down under a tree worn smooth by others who sat there before or after time switched the tracks through a field of little white flowers by the ruined signal tower. We remember the days as long procession of the secret police always everywhere in different form, outside Guayaquil sat on a river bank and saw a big lizard cross the mud flats dotted with melon rind thrown from passing canoes. It was the end of the line. My death across his face faded through the soccer scores the urinal and the bicycle races . . faded into lam’s face at the Green Inn looking across the valley.

He was standing on a Moroccan hillside with his troops and around them the Pan pipes calm and impersonal as the blue sky — From his pocket he heard Poo Poo say “Take me with you” — He felt a little plastic bag and drew it out — There was a flat grey membrane inside it — He moved away on Pan pipes to the remote mountain village of his childhood where blue mist swirled through the streets and time stopped in the slate houses — Words fell from his mind — He drifted through wind chimes of subway dawns and turnstiles — Boys on roller skates turned slow circles in a shower of ruined suburbs — grey luminous flakes falling softly on Ewyork, Aris, Ome, Oston — crumpled cloth bodies through the glass and metal streets swept by time winds — from siren towers the twanging tones of fear — positive feedback Pan God of Panic piping blue notes through empty streets as the berserk time machine twisted a tornado of centuries — wind through dusty offices and archives — board books scattered to rubbish heaps of the earth — symbol books of the all powerful board that had controlled thought
feeling and movement of a planet with iron claws of pain and pleasure from birth to death — control symbols pounded to word and image dust; crumpled cloth bodies of the vast control machine — The whole structure of reality went up in silent explosions under the whining sirens — Pipers from his remote mountain villages loosed Pan God of Panic through streets of image — dead nitrous streets of an old film set — paper moon and muslin trees and in the black silver sky great rents as the cover of the world rained down in luminous film flakes — The 1920’s careened through darkening cities in black Cadillacs spitting film bullets of accelerated time —

through the open window trailing swamp smells and old newspapers — orgasm addicts stacked in the attic like muttering burlap — the mattress molded on all sides masturbating afternoons reflected; “Difficult to get out” — word and image skin like a rubber toy dusted with grey spine powder — Blue notes of Pan trickled down silver train whistles — calling the imprisoned Jinn from copulation space suits that clung to his muscle lust and burning sex skin — The green fish boys dropped their torture of spectral presence and like fish left the garden through clear water — Tentative beings followed the music membrane of light and color — Pipes of Pan trickled down sleeping comrade of his childhood — pure blue jabs through the Garden of Delights — cutting the black insect — He slipped out of time in a — His camera gun blasted memory — The blue boy reached from the remote mountain village other apparatus — They twisted cool and impersonal as the sky against each other in pressure seats — stuck together in slow-motion faces —
crisscrossed with tentative whistles of other lips broken now from birth to death — control skin melted leaving crumpled cloth bodies of muttering burlap — Explosion swept through empty sex thoughts as the sperm tanks drained into streets of image — the cover of the world rained down — all from an old movie will give at his touch.

Lykin was the first to awake — He could not remember where he was — Slowly his blue eyes blurred with exhaustion registered glowing red rocks and metallic shrubs with silver leaves that surrounded the little pool where he lay — The ghastly night flooded back into his memory — Controls of their space craft had suddenly blanked out by the intervention of an invisible alien force like an icy draught through the cabin — Not only the mechanical controls had been put out of action but their nerve centers had been paralyzed — He and Bradly the Co-pilot had sat helpless in their pressure seats for two hours while the invading force guided their ship in a sickening spiral through the poisonous cloud belts of an unknown planet — Lykin and Bradly had blacked out when they landed — How had they gotten out of the ship? — He stood up and tripped over the sleeping form of his companion naked except for the skin-tight transparent space suit that clung to his muscular body — He decided to have a quick look at the terrain before waking
Bradly — He was at the bottom of a gully surrounded by red rocks of some translucent substance — He climbed out of the gully and found himself on a plateau — A fantastic landscape of multicolored rock carved like statues of molten blue lava interspaced with stalagmites of a pearly white intensity he had never experienced in his previous explorations — The sky was like a green ocean — There were four suns on the horizon around the plateau, each sun of a different color — Blue, green, red, and one (much larger than the others) a brilliant silver — The air was of a tingling clarity that seemed to support his body so that movements were incredibly precise and easily performed — He turned and started back down the gully toward the pool — He felt a click in his brain like a crystal flare and heard a silver voice: “Come stranger” — Bradly was accustomed to telepathic phenomena but this voice was unusually clear and immediate — He climbed over a large rock and saw the pool — His friend was still asleep—Beside him sat an amphibious green fish boy shimmering with water from the pool — The creature pulsed with translucent green light that flooded through the flesh in eddies — The head was a pointed dome that sprang from a slender neck on either side of which protruded gills like sensitive spongy wings — The creature was covered by a membranous substance with a network of transparent veins — The body surface was in constant motion like slow water dripping down a statue — The face was almost flat but with lips and nose sharply and beautifully delineated and huge liquid eyes above the high ridged cheekbones the delicate structure of which shone through transparent skin — The being was sitting
in a cross-legged position and from its thighs jutted small silver fins of fine gauze — The slender sinuous legs ended in webbed flippers — Between the legs Lykin could see the genitals half aroused in curiosity as the fish boy stroked the head of his sleeping companion and touched the space suit with tentative jabs of its long green fingers — Lykin moved cautiously so as not to frighten the creature back into the pool — The fish boy turned and looked at him with a shy dreamy smile — An electric shiver ran up his spine and burst in crystal fish syllables: “Approach stranger — Have no fear” — The creature’s mouth had not moved — Lykin moved forward with excitement tingling through his body and knelt beside the water boy who extended a dripping hand and lightly clasped his shoulder — A thrill ran through him from the contact — Underwater memory bubbles burst in his brain — He was in the alien medium, squirming in crystal rock pools and basking on edges of limestone fanned by giant ferns in the sound of dripping water — Swimming through ruined cities with the water creatures twisting in slow swirls of orgasm, shooting out explosions of colored bubbles to the surface, trailing blue streamers —

Ali woke in a strange bed to find the proprietor standing over him, “Who the fuck are you and what are you doing in my apartment?” Ali flashed back to the suburban cocktail party — music from the ‘20s — old women doing the Charleston — and the Irishman with iron-grey hair who looked like a con cop from vaudeville —

“Easy way and a tough way to do things, kid — i can put you up for the night in this apartment — The owner is
out of town and i dont
think
he’ll be back before tomorrow night —”

“But Mr O’Brien said —”

“Tell O’Brien he can stay in his own precinct — This happens to be my apartment — Put on your dry goods and cut —”

Ali dressed hastily — Tucking his shirt he slipped out into the American suburb — The streets were empty and clean like after a heavy rain — At an intersection of cracked concrete boys turned slow circles on roller skates under a half-moon in the morning sky, swept by storms of color as the sun rose — Ali felt his steps lighter and lighter — He floated away on eddies of blue and green — He alighted in the clear atmosphere of a green land where every blade of grass shone as if framed in crystal — The gravity pull was light so his feet barely touched the ground as he ran along clear streams of water under dripping trees — came to a city of worn marble streets and copper domes — In the lobby of a luxury hotel page boys in elaborate uniforms assessed his financial status with experienced eyes — On the wall was a little sign:

The Nature of Begging

Need ? —— Lack -

Want? —— Need-

Life? —— Death-

Ali walked out into the main square — fish smells and dead eyes in doorways — obscene gestures of proposition — In a dark side street off the square Ali found what looked like an old chemist’s shop with jars of colored liquid in the window — A little black man, body bent by a fibrous tumor came forward to meet him with a chirp of
interrogation — He was wearing double lens glasses that slid down on his nose — Ah drew out the plastic bag he carried with the flattened grey membrane inside — The shopkeeper took it in smooth black fingers and held it up to the light — He gave a little chirping call and his assistant came in from shadow recesses of the shop — It was some creature like a large grasshopper with a body that changed color as he walked past the jars — The eyes were crystal lens — His penis, which was held in upright position by a long silver cord extending into the abdomen, moved in flash erections to currents of color— He held the membrane in adzes and grafting tools that fitted into his fibrous finger stumps — As he looked his body pulsed a brilliant green — The shopkeeper nodded and brought out a jar about two feet high full of a heavy white fluid — The assistant opened the envelope with a little curved knife and dropped the membrane into the jar — As Ali watched the membrane stirred like a Japanese flower and blossomed into a tiny green newt with human head — The creature opened black liquid eyes for a few seconds then curled into foetal sleep and sank to the bottom of the jar — The shopkeeper covered the jar with a cloth and put it on a dark shelf — He smiled and drew a map on the counter — Starting from the shop a dotted line led to a system of canals, a pump, two penises in orgasm, closed eyes of sleep five times — Then the dotted line led back to the shop — He looked at Ali to be sure he understood — Ali nodded and walked on the dotted line — The marble streets ended in mud — He could see a system of canals with thatched huts and gardens and tanks tended by little black men with fibrous tumors and moles from
which sprouted green hairs — They looked up from their work and flashed quick smiles —A heavy smell of compost heaps and rotten ponds filled the air — As he passed over a bridge a green newt boy surfaced in a canal smiled and masturbated quickly ejaculating an iridescent fluid that glinted in the clear light — He twisted with a mocking laugh and dove out of sight in the black water — Ali walked along the canal and found himself in a maze of pumps and locks and could not find how he got there or the way out — At the bottom of this maze a man in green tattered uniform motioned him to come down pointing to an iron stairway that led out on a wooden ramp — The man stood waiting at the end of the ramp — Ali walked toward him smiling like a dog — “i am a stranger here — i am sorry if — i do not know your laws” — The guard was smiling too — a slow familiar smile like: “Perhaps you don’t go into the prison if” — flashed back to customs shed in South America — Ali bent over a chair feeling quick pants of the young policeman on his naked back — The carbine leaning against one wall sharp and clear in the flash bulb of orgasm — “So” — he thought “things are not different here” —