The Western Lands (18 page)

"You see, it's all replaced by special scar tissue."

Hollywood moguls are pelted with blue-ringed octopuses as they disport themselves by the swimming pool. A drunken script writer suddenly stands there weaving back and forth.

"What's your problem, Joe?" The words slither out. Joe is, pulling what look like tiny blue Frisbees out of a handbag, his hands in rubber gloves.

"You think you can buy talent and throw it out when you've wrung it dry? I'm going to show you some
natural
talent."

He sails a blue-ring out.  . . . Slop, on a sagging bosom . . . Plop, on a fat cold face.

They float like great dead carp, white hairy stomachs sticking up to the sky in the still gray smog.

Sound can act as a painkiller. To date we do not have music sufficiently powerful to act as a practical weapon.

Remember an English-gentleman-in-India story: an encounter with a rude native youth who didn't know enough to move out of his path. When his servant moved forward to administer the indicated correction, the boy's hand flew to the flute at his belt as if reaching for a weapon. Then he darted away.

In the government rest house, despite six stiff whiskies, the narrator still had difficulty getting to sleep and was disturbed by foul dreams. "At three in the morning I was awakened by what I can only describe as a corpse blowing into my ears, the most loathsome, filthy sound I have ever heard. I am not ashamed to admit that I grabbed my pants and fled in blind terror.

"Next day, I found that my dog and my faithful native boy had not escaped in time . . . eyes starting out from the sockets, faces frozen in a terror so hideous that I could not look on those faces. I ordered them immediately sealed into coffins. That cursed music communicated some secret so loathsome that no decent man may hear it and live."

Must have been a decent dog.

Everybody wants a sure-thing weapon ... a ray, an artifact. There is nothing more terrifying than to stand in front of a deadly, snarling enemy with nothing but a psychic weapon that may or may not work. That is when you reach all the way down and come up with a
Stopper.

The Hindus teach that the Heaven World is more dangerous for the soul than the Hell World, since it is more deceptive and conduces to the fatal error of overconfidence and assumption of immunity. Like a fighter the soul must be constantly in training lest it grow soft on an ephemeral throne. So the splendor of the palace, the constant parades, the state barges, the gold and lapis lazuli, the chariots and bowmen, eat away one's awareness of the ultimate reality of conflict. . . .

"Security, the friendly mask of change / At which we smile, not seeing what smiles behind." Like the Family Album of the Romanovs. From morning till night, ceremonies. Every meal a state occasion. How could anyone preserve a modicum of intelligence and character under such a barrage of meaningless and banal masquerades? The answer is they did not. They became as empty and banal as the parts they played in the crumbling dream of Imperial Russia . . . the summer palaces, the yachts, the sailors and troops in review, state banquets and shoots, distraction for the soul and very little sustenance. No wonder they cannot see the gathering shadows, obvious to the impartial eye of the camera.

Of course ancient Egypt is incomparably more splendid. Gold everywhere and jewels, slaves and soldiers, all the heady trappings of absolute power. Severed hand bleeds on a post in the garden. He was Master of the Hounds and robbers poisoned five choice mastiffs brought down from the North. Few things are more dangerous to the soul than absolute power. Remember, it's granted for a purpose, to achieve certain definite objectives. The objective is SPACE.

In Waghdas the objective is agreed upon or they wouldn't be there at all. As to the means of realizing the objective, there is much divergence of thought and method, so much disagreement that another area of concurrence is imposed. All agree that a single authoritarian system would be fatal to the objective, and could only lead to the old frauds, the old lies, the old hierarchical structures.

Taking advantage of the freedom so gained and held, there are parties who work indefatigably to overthrow freedom and impose a One-God, One-Party order. They are dying out. Occasionally we put out a PNO on some group—Public Nuisance Order—and they are disposed of in one way or another, like cows with the aftosa.

F
ilm sequentially presented ... now, imagine that you are dead and see your whole life spread out in a spatial panorama, a vast maze of rooms, streets, landscapes, not sequential but arranged in shifting associational patterns. Your attic room in St. Louis opens into a New York loft, from which you step into a Tangier street. Everyone you have ever known is there. This happens in dreams of course. Now when dealing with an adversary the strategy is to inveigle him or her into your territory. Instead of crossing the river, bring the people on the other side to your side, where you know the country and can marshal your allies.

City like Tangier on a tidal river which runs along the front of the town where the Avenida de Espafia used to be. I am staying with Waring and his manservant, TargUisti, at the Riverfront Pension. There's a balcony over the river, with cane chairs, and we sit there in the evening watching shark fins in the iridescent green water as the boats go by. A smell of mudflats and stagnant seawater. It's a nice lazy scene, sitting there sipping a planter's punch or a gin sling or sometimes rum and coconut milk, but there is a wrong note.

At this same pension this old religious nut comes to eat every night since his wife is too religious to cook, reads the Bible all her waking hours, and there are about thirty of these pestilent characters, who call themselves the Selected of Jehovah.

Waring and I are laying our plans to be rid of them once and for all by registering a complaint with Targuisti's brother-in-law, who is a captain of police. When dealing with creeps like that, anything goes.

As often happens, fate jogs my arm. One late afternoon I am standing in back of the pension when this Selected bastard sidles up to me like a vicious old crab and says, "You think Missouri is a
lump?
Well, I'm from Missouri," and he goes into the lounge of the pension to read the Bible. I can see his wife in front of their 1910-type frame house about seventy feet away, talking to another evil old Venusian piece of shit named Sister Willoughby. So I levitate fifty feet in the air just for jolly, wouldn't you? She sees me and starts screaming,
"Satan! Satan! Satan!"
and scampers inside and comes out with a shotgun.

My universe is less stable than Don Juan's, sometimes I am an impeccable warrior and at other times I act like a timid suburbanite in a
New Yorker
cartoon. The present emergency finds me in warrior valence, so I swoop down on an invisible slide, get the gun away from her and carry her off kicking and screaming to a nearby hillside where I turn her into a rabbit and blast her with the shotgun and take the remains back and give it to the pension cook to fix for dinner.

At dinner there is this mealy-assed Bible fart with his hunched-over fat lump of a son, looks like he is sculpted out of rancid lard, and he is moaning, "Lord, Lord, where is my helpmeet?" And he glares at me, not suspicious, just the way he would look at anybody drinking a glass of beer all nasty and intemperate. I'd forgotten he is a vegetarian and I won't have the pleasure of watching him eat his other half. Any case, there is no time to lose. We must get to the
Comisaría
before he reports his wife missing and before Sister Willoughby starts talking in tongues.

"Sorry to bother you with neighborhood business, but that old Willoughby woman is going crazy and screaming at American schoolteachers with good American Express credit cards that they are Whores of Babylon, and the Riverfront Pension is losing its trade because the Reverend Norton preaches temperance sermons in the bar . . . they are
bothering tourists.
"

The Captain looks up gravely, his face clouding over.

"But what brings us here is the fact that his wife has been missing for some time now. We strongly suspect. . . everything points to . . . witnesses heard a shot . . ."

"His gun is registered, of course." (Your Moroccan police do think of everything.)

"Captain, he has probably
eaten
the remains. It is only one of their vile customs. And the Willoughby woman . . . highly dangerous. Why, she might well physically attack a tourist on his way to the bank. Moroccans are enlightened and civilized people. Benemakada is famous even in America for
promptness
in dealing with the mentally ill before they commit some atrocious act."

(The sooner they get some heavy sedation into Sister Willoughby the better, I figure.)

So we all pile into a police car and whisk the Willoughby woman to Benemakada . . . right this way for the pearly gates. A young English intern comes out, peeling off his white coat.

"Just pumped enough Thorazine into her to sedate a rabid horse. Before she went under, she was screaming some rot about you swooped out of the sky like a Satanous vulture, carried off her sister and turned her into a rabbit." He cocked a quizzical eyebrow at me. "Did you actually, old boy? Good job and all. Aha, I think she needs another jolt. She just took the Lord's name in vain."

Now for the Reverend Norton.

"But my wife is only missing since this afternoon. I went back and she wasn't in the house, nor could I find Sister Willoughby, who was to have shared our evening prayers."

"Your neighbors tell a different story. They say Mrs. Norton has been missing for almost a fortnight." The Captain pulls out a paper. "Mr. Norton, I have here the certificate of registration for a shotgun. Where is this weapon?"

"Well, now, I don't rightly know. Usually I keep it over in that corner by the door. Maybe it was stolen by the Arabics."

A policeman stands there with the gun. "I found this buried under the house, Captain."

"Mr. Norton, it is my duty to arrest you on suspicion of murder. We are a civilized people. There is no capital punishment here. You may even get off with twenty years, pleading a crime of passion." He nudges the Reverend with a horrible leer. "She was fucking some Arab. You go crazy. Before you know what's happened, you've killed her. Must have been Satan took over your hands when you did it. Confess, man, and ease your soul."

"Killed my sainted Mary? You must be mad, or in the pay of the Communists!"

"Such talk will do you no good." He gestures to another policeman, who stands there with a skeleton in his arms. "How will you explain
that?"

"It is a custom of our sect."

I look significantly at the Captain, who nods grimly.

"Like some folks just keep the ash ... we have the whole skeleton preserved, since it sayeth in the Good Book: 'Cleave ye to the bones.' Cost me a lump of money too, all dried out and sanitary. Now that there is Aunt Clara."

"That is the skeleton of your wife, Mr. Norton. You not only killed her, you
ate
her."

Well, the others was rounded up and summarily deported in the hold of a cattle boat, and that took care of that nest of vipers.

Few pilgrims reach the town of Last Chance. Sloth, self-indulgence, alcohol, addictions, old age, stupidity, all are obstacles. But lack of a special courage is the only insuperable barrier—the courage to confront
your
opponent,
your
final enemy. If you lack this courage, you will never reach Last Chance. Any pilgrim who has in life solved problems with violence must go through Last Chance or back to square one. 
No one leaves Last Chance without mortal combat. To be tested in this combat is to risk the second and final death. In Last Chance you play for keeps.

Some heavies ride in with atomic bullets, will take out the target and immediate environs like a saloon or half a hotel. These "A-boys" get a wide berth. This is an Old West section, false fronts, smell of tumbleweed in the wind, saloons, hotels, Chinese laundries and opium drops, cathouses and gambling joints. For pilgrims who prefer to shoot it out, the shooting kind . . .

"Come out from behind that A-shit and shoot it out like a man. What kind of a Honey Badger are you, endangering whores and schoolteachers and cute freckle-faced kids?"

"I'ma sorry. You're simply not ME."

And there is the Rule of the Duel can be adapted to eliminate knowed varmints no good from the day they was borned till the day they die and let it be today.

During the five Duel Days, corresponding to the Mayan week of Ouayeb, any challenge must be accepted. Sensible citizens cower in gun towers or cyclone cellars armed to the tits, but lunatics walk around screaming, "I know you're in there, you candy-assed richies.  . . .
Come out and fight!"

A distant crack from a gun tower. A 45-70 catches him square in his big mouth and takes out the back of his neck in a spray of blood and vertebrae.

And there are Open Seasons that spring up like tornados, and they are out in the street slapping every passerby. Duelists with their seconds and their surgeons strut through the streets, elbow into bars.

"Did you say something?"

"No, not me."

"Oh, I thought you said something. . . ."

"Warning to all residents of Douglas County . . . Open Season approaching. Residents are urged to take cover immediately.

The Rule of the Duel is considered to be an indispensable safety valve to abort mass riots and political revolutions. The intention is to keep the wars
small
,
and
individual
.
  
. . . Man to man; creature to creature. So anyone who feels disgusted can head for the nearest Duelin' Honky-Tonk and work it off one way or another. So folks stop bottling it up inside and the heart attack rate drops and drops, and by Pasteur and Lister and Doc Halsted! the cancer rate is dropping too.

You can take your pick here. Deadly correct duels with seconds and surgeons standing by . . .

"'Zounds, sire, what a gash is here. Why, a man could drive a coach and four into your guts."

Eighteenth-century dandies: "Ah yes." He looks at the challenger as if trying to focus his image through a telescope. "As challenged, I have the right." He strokes the other's cheek and clicks his tongue.

"Such a pretty face, and I don't find saber scars at all fetching. Your rapier, now, makes only a small hole but . . . it suffices." He sniffs some snuff.

"And shall we say a civilized hour . . . around noon? It will give me an appetite for
déjeuner.
"

As swordsmen they are equally matched. A second consults the sundial. "I'll miss lunch with the Duchess," he wails.

The surgeon is drunk already. A hurried conference. The contestants retire into changing booths and emerge with push daggers in both hands, half-moons of scalpel-sharp steel projecting from the toes of their flexible boots and a little ridge of steel up the instep for crotch kicks. They explode in a blur of fists and feet and spurting blood. One, disemboweled by a crotch kick up to the navel, spitting hate like a dying weasel, throws his push dagger. Right through ribs into the heart. 

It's a draw. There will be a return engagement.

A handsome Mexican boy faces an older opponent. Blade-to-blade machetes, eighteen-inch blades sharp enough to shave the hair off your arms or chest. The
chico
is quick. He catches the other across the back of the hand, severing tendons and veins. The other drops his machete without any change of expression, catches it with his bare foot, kicks it up into his left hand and splits the kid's head like a coconut.

A Junker student duel has gone wrong somehow. Starts off with the tall Saxon sweeping a cut into the face of the Student Prince. The seconds nod and smile . . .

"Ach ja, ach ja . . .
"