William S. Burroughs (28 page)

The Queen is the
head filter just like the Pharaohs. And any vampiric immortality is
strictly limited. Like a good club.

Oh yes, we've come a
long way from the Egyptians. They had to maintain an actual
life-sized mummy. We can reduce our wealthy clients to a virus
particle that can take root anywhere and suck and suck as good as any
mummy because it's got all the genetic information.

Mummies are the
arch-conservatives...

"What about
space?"

"We must never
allow anyone to leave this planet.
.. .
Certain things simply must not be allowed to change; otherwise,
"WE ARE COMPLETELY FUCKED...
"

From time to time
hints are dropped.
.. .
Kim could even
become one of the chosen few...

"You see, there
aren't enough Western Lands to go around...not nearly enough
...
if
you would just be
sensible
..."

An old-queen voice,
querulous, petulant, cowardly, the evil old voice of Gerald Hamilton
and Backhouse...

Kim doesn't want any
immortality that talks like that.

One morning at
breakfast Kim is halfway through his second cup of tea, smoking a
cigarette and looking out the window to his right
...
gray
morning, gray street, peeling billboards...Kim experiences an uneasy
feeling of disassociation, something stirring and twisting in
his throat.

"I'm trying to
eat my breakfast, if you don't mind."

Kim looks up. A
burly red-faced man is sitting at the next table. Strange that Kim
hadn't seen him when he came in.

"I don't know
what you mean
..."
Kim stammers. "I'm
just sitting here."

"You know what
I mean right enough. You were making a filthy noise."

The man stands up
and throws down his napkin.

"Filthy sod!"
He walks out.

Kim sits paralyzed
like a man who has received a mortal wound, every drop of life ebbing
out of him.

"Are you all
right, sir?"

"Yes, Mrs.
Hardy."

"A dreadful
man, Mr. Wentworth
...
came right into my
kitchen he did...'I'd like my breakfast, if you don't mind,' he says
and I tell him I'm fixing it and he says, 'Look sharp
...
look
sharp.

Directional mike,
Kim surmises. Two can play at that game. Kim had been into
ventriloquism at one time. He never achieved proficiency but he did
encounter some colorful characters like the old Stomach Rumbler,
who could ventriloquize stomach rumbles and farts.

Kim makes the round
of music halls, carnivals, theatrical agencies of the shabbier
variety
...
one hundred pounds reward.

"I'll by God
show them some filthy noises."

Kim's hatred for
England is becoming an obsession. If you have the right accent you
can be wearing a burlap sack and the Hunkers will stand to
attention like one of Pavlov's salivating dogs at the sound of his
master's voice. They know their place.

What hope for a
country where people will camp out for three days to glimpse the
Royal Couple? Where one store clerk refers to another as his
"colleague"?

Licensing laws left
over from World War I: "Sorry sir, the bar is closed." And
you know he is just delighted to tell you the bar is closed.

God save the Queen
and a fascist regime
...
a flabby, toothless
fascism, to be sure. Never go too far in any direction, is the basic
law on which Limey-Land is built. The Queen stabilizes the whole
sinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on
top...

The English have
gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too
stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste
products, the backlash and bad karma of empire. You see what we
owe to Washington and the Valley Forge boys for getting us out
from under this den of snobbery and accent, this ladder where
everyone stomps discreetly on the hands below him:

"Pardon me, old
chap, but aren't you getting just a bit ahead of yourself in rather
an offensive manner?"

The only thing gets
Homo sapiens
up off his dead ass is a foot up it. The English
thing worked too well and too long. They'll never get all that
ballast of unearned privilege into space. Who wants that dumped in
his vicinity? They get out of a spaceship and start looking about
desperately for inferiors.

For three months Kim
held on at Earl's Court
...
three months of
grinding, abrasive fear, defeats, and humiliations that burned like
acid.

He learned to use
the shield of constant alertness, to see everybody on the street
before they saw him. He learned to render himself invisible by
giving no one any reason to look at him, to wrap himself in a cloak
of darkness or a spinning cylinder of light. Devoid of physical
weapons, he turned to the weapons of magic and here he scored some
satisfying hits.

He produced a
blackout with a tape recorder that plunged the whole Earl's Court
area into darkness
...
SPUT.

He conjured up a
wind that tore the shutters off the market stalls along World's End
and went on to kill three hundred people in Bremen or someplace.

(Giver of Winds is
my name.)

He read about it in
the paper next day and said: "The more the merrier." At the
same time he realized that he was being fashioned into an instrument
of destruction, a bottle djin to use against
their
enemies.
Whose enemies exactly? He was past caring.

And he takes out
some local nuisances. The horrible old crone in the cigarette kiosk
across from the hotel who would shove his change back at him...Then
one day Kim's eyes blank, appraising, rested on her Primus stove
...
a
peg to hang it on. As he walks away he can feel her eyes on his back
spitting little sparks of pure hate
...
sparks?...Cooking
up water for her morning tea on her leaky old Primus...

Several old biddies
gathered in front of the blackened shattered kiosk. One turns to
Kim.

"Terrible,
isn't it?"

"I can't
believe it," Kim says. "Why I was just waiting for her to
open...
"

"You heard it?"
they ask eagerly.

"Indeed
yes
...
Just coming out the door I was and I
think, Gor blimey it's the Blitz again
...
Had
her wrapped in a plastic sheet like
..."

And he closed down a
Greek coffee shop that gave him some sass
...
camera
and tape-recorder magic...So many good ones and so many bad
ones...That's what you get for trying.

"Gentleman to
see you, Mr. Wentworth."

It's Tony, sitting
in the dreary little drawing room with lumpy armchairs. Kim takes a
deep breath, about to launch into a tirade.

"Read this."
Tony hands him a newspaper clipping.

PROFESSOR DIES IN
BIZARRE MISHAP

A man, later
identified as Professor Stonecliff, a curator at the British Museum
and a world-famous Egyptologist, was apparently seized by a fit of
madness in Victoria Station. He entered into an altercation with
other passengers which developed into a fistfight. Then he broke
free and threw himself under the wheels of a train.

"What really
happened?" Kim asks.

"Professor
Stonecliff suddenly lost control of his bowels in a crowded
compartment. He was attacked by the other passengers and blinded
in one eye by an umbrella."

Nightmare scene
under a green haze
...
faces contorted out of
all human semblance, burning with sulfurous hate and hideous
complicity
...
the man running, stumbling,
blood streaming from his ruptured eye
...
the
crowd behind him, one brandishing a bloody umbrella...

"Get him!"

"Kill the
filthy sod!"

"So you got off
easy," Tony says.

"And you got
off a lot easier."

"This is no
time for recriminations, Kim. The situation is desperate. We could
all be charged under the Defence of the Realm Act."

"Telephone, Mr.
Wentworth."

"Have you got a
hundred pounds? I've found the old Stomach Rumbler."

The Rumbler is a
potbellied Indian with the nastiest eyes Kim ever saw. You can't like
him. He just isn't a likable man. But he can deliver the goods. We
give the old Stomach Rumbler a trial run at ERP Headquarters in
Bedford Square. Tony stands at one end of the room, thirty feet away
from the Rumbler, and a horrible churning noise rumbles out of Tony's
stomach like a vast kraken digesting a whale.

"What's his
range?" Tony asks.

"Fifty yards,
sahib," the Rumbler sneers.

It's a solemn
occasion. The Queen is regretting a tip slide that killed three
hundred children. For years the villagers have been saying:

"We gotta do
something about that tip."

An ominous gray
black slagheap that towered over the village and nobody did
anything about that tip. Then one fine morning the tip slid down and
covered the school.

Her address was
designed to be simple and moving:

"To those of
you who have lost your children in this disaster, I can only
say
..."

It rumbles out over
the mikes on TV
...
my God, what a sound. The
Queen turns pale but continues:

"...
that
your grief is my grief and the grief of all
..."

Her words are
drowned out by loathsome, squishy, farting noises, gurgles and
chuckles:

"ENNGLAAND
..."
the Queen gasps and flees from the podium, leaving in her wake a
monumental belch

ERP

She never made
another public appearance. Her Majesty is indisposed
...
permanently
indisposed...The monarchy is tottering.

Kim feels that he
has acquitted his English karma. He shelves a project to blow up all
the mummies in the British Museum.

Kim loved Paris at
first sight
...
the outdoor urinals, the
flower stalls and markets and cobblestone streets, the lovely gun
stores full of sword canes and sword pistols and fountain-pen guns,
the well-stocked pharmacies, French boys with gamin grins, a
three-foot baguette under one arm...An old man peddles by on a
bicycle, a lobster gesticulating frantically from his handle
basket...It's like a painting that moves.

It is a fall day,
crisp and clear. The Paris light lingers on the buildings, touches
cornices, a white cat, a geranium in a window box...Dead
leaves...Kim steps into a
pissoir
and there on the wall these
lines worthy of Verlaine or Rimbaud:

Jaime
ces types vicieux

Qu
'ici montrent la bite...

I
like the vicious types

Who
show the cock here...

"Moi
aussi
...
"
Kim lisped ineptly, "and this is the pencil of my
brother-in-law." I must do something about my French. He gets a
book in French and the same book in English and very quickly learns
to read French.

Kim makes an
appointment with Maitre Bumsell...The Maitre, a thin
aristocratic-looking old man, extends a long cool hand.

Kim suspects that
Bumsell is not the old French aristocrat he is impersonating. His
native language, Kim decides, is German...A Swiss Jew, most
likely from Zurich or Basel...

Bumsell leads him
into a room with an alcove and draws a curtain...Kim looks out of the
picture, smiling:

HIS
FATHER'S PICTURE

Kim
Carsons age
16 1876