sanitarium owing to a false front of green stucco topped by an intricate neon sign dead and sinister against the sky, waiting for darkness. The sanitarium was evidently built on a great lime- stone promontory, over which flowering trees and vine tendrils broke in waves. The smell of flowers was heavy in the air. The commandante sat at a long wooden trestle under a vine trellis. He was doing absolutely nothing. He took the letter that Carl handed him and whispered through it, reading his lips with the left hand. He stuck the letter on a spike over a toilet. He began tran- scribing from a ledger full of numbers. He wrote on and on. Broken images exploded softly in Carl's head, and he was moving out of himself in a silent swoop. Clear and sharp from a great distance he saw himself sitting in a lunchroom. Overdose of H. His old lady shaking him and holding hot coffee under his nose. Outside an old junky in Santa Claus suit selling Christmas seals. "Fight tuberculosis, folks," he whis- pers in his disembodied, junky voice. Salvation Army choir of sincere, homosexual football coaches sings: "In the Sweet Bye and Bye." Carl drifted back into his body, an earthbound junk ghost. "I could bribe him, of course." The commandante taps the table with one finger and hums "Coming Through the Rye." Far away, then urgently near like a foghorn a split second before the grinding crash. Carl pulled a note half out of his trouser pocket.... The commandante was standing by a vast panel of lockers and deposit boxes. He looked at Carl, sick animal eyes gone out, dying inside, hopeless fear re- flecting the face of death. In the smell of flowers a note half out of his pocket, the weakness hit Carl, shutting of his breath, stopping his blood. He was in a great cone spinning down to a black point. "Chemical therapy?" The scream shot out of his flesh through empty locker rooms and barracks, musty resort hotels, and spectral, coughing corridors of T,B. sani- tariums, the muttering, hawking, grey dishwater smell of flophouses and Old Men's Homes, great, dusty cus- tom sheds and warehouses, through broken porticoes and smeared arabesques, iron urinals worn paper thin by the urine of a million fairies, deserted weed-grown privies with a musty smell of shit turning back to the soil, erect wooden phallus on the grave of dying peoples plaintive as leaves in the wind, across the great brown river where whole trees float with green snakes in the branches and sad-eyed lemurs watch the shore out over a vast plain (vulture wings husk in the dry air). The way is strewn with broken condoms and empty H caps and K.Y. tubes squeezed dry as bone meal in the sum- mer sun. "My furniture." The commandante's face burned like metal in the Hash bulb of urgency. His eyes went out. A whif of ozone drifted through the room. The "novia" muttered over her candles and altars in one corner. "It is all Trak... modern, excellent..." he is nod- ding idiotically and drooling. A yellow cat pulls at Carl's pant leg and runs onto a concrete balcony. Clouds drift by. "I could get back my deposit. Start me a little busi- ness someplace." He nods and smiles like a mechanical toy. "Joselito!!!" Boys look up from street ball games, bull rings and bicycle races as the name whistles by and slowly fades away. "Joselito!... Paco!... Pepe!... Enrique!..." The plaintive boy cries drift in on the warm night. The Trak sign stirs like a nocturnal beast, and bursts into blue flame. THE BLACK MEAT "We friends, yes?" The shoe shine boy put on his hustling smile and looked up into the Sailor's dead, cold, undersea eyes, eyes without a trace of warmth or lust or hate or any feeling the boy had ever experienced in himself or seen in another, at once cold and intense, impersonal and predatory. The Sailor leaned forward and put a finger on the boy's inner arm at the elbow. He spoke in his dead, junky whisper. "With veins like that, Kid, I'd have myself a time." He laughed, black insect laughter that seemed to serve some obscure function of orientation like a bat's squeak. The Sailor laughed three times. He stopped laughing and hung there motionless listening down into himself. He had picked up the silent frequency of junk. His face smoothed out like yellow wax over the high cheek-bones. He waited half a cigarette. The Sailor knew how to wait. But his eyes burned in a hideous dry hunger. He turned his face of controlled emergency in a slow half pivot to case the man who had just come in. "Fats" Terminal sat there sweeping the cafe with blank, periscope eyes. When his eyes passed the Sailor he nodded minutely. Only the peeled nerves of junk sickness would have registered a move- ment. The Sailor handed the boy a coin. He drifted over to Fat's table with his floating walk and sat down. They sat a long time in silence. The cafe was built into one side of a stone ramp at the bottom of a high white canyon of masonry. Faces of The City poured through silent as fish, stained with vile addictions and insect lusts. The lighted cafe was a diving bell, cable broken, settling into black depths. The Sailor was polishing his nails on the lapels of his glen plaid suit. He whistled a little tune through his shiny, yellow teeth. When he moved an effluvia of mold drifted out of his clothes, a musty smell of deserted locker rooms. He studied his nails with phosphorescent intensity. "Good thing here, Fats. I can deliver twenty. Need an advance of course." "On spec?" "So I don't have the twenty eggs in my pocket. I tell you it's jellied consomme, One little whoops and a push." The Sailor looked at his nails as if he were studying a chart. "You know I always deliver." "Make it thirty. And a ten tube advance. This time tomorrow. "Need a tube now, Fats." "Take a walk, you'll get one." The Sailor drifted down into the Plaza. A street boy was shoving a newspaper in the Sailor's face to cover his hand on the Sailor's pen. The Sailor walked on. He pulled the pen out and broke it like a nut in his thick, fibrous, pink fingers. He pulled out a lead tube. He cut one end of the tube with a little curved knife. A black mist poured out and hung in the air like boiling fur. The Sailor's face dissolved. His mouth undulated forward on a long tube and sucked in the black fuzz, vibrating in supersonic peristalsis disap- peared in a silent, pink explosion. His face came back into focus unbearably sharp and clear, burning yellow brand of junk searing the grey haunch of a million screaming junkies. "This will last a month," he decided, consulting an invisible mirror. All streets of the City slope down between deepen- ing canyons to a vast, kidney-shaped plaza full of darkness. Walls of street and plaza are perforated by dwelling cubicles and cafes, some a few feet deep, others extending out of sight in a network of rooms and corridors. At all levels criss-cross of bridges, cat walks, cable cars. Catatonic youths dressed as women in gowns of burlap and rotten rags, faces heavily and crudely painted in bright colors over a strata of beatings, arabesques of broken, suppurating scars to the pearly bone, push against the passer-by in silent clinging insistence. Traffickers in the Black Meat, flesh of the giant aquatic black centipede -- sometimes attaining a length of six feet -- found in a lane of black rocks and iridescent, brown lagoons, exhibit paralyzed crustaceans in cam- ouflage pockets of the Plaza visible only to the Meat Eaters. Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades, doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebe- phrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, officials of unconstituted police states, brokers of exquisite dreams and nostalgias tested on the sensi- tized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw mate- rials of the will, drinkers of the Heavy Fluid sealed in translucent amber of dreams. The Meet Cafe occupies one side of the Plaza, a maze of kitchens, restaurants, sleeping cubicles, peril- ous iron balconies and basements opening into the underground baths. On stools covered in white satin sit naked Mug- wumps sucking translucent, colored syrups through alabaster straws. Mugwumps have no liver and nourish themselves exclusively on sweets. Thin, purple-blue lips cover a razor-sharp beak of black bone with which they frequently tear each other to shreds in fights over clients. These creatures secrete an addicting fluid from their erect penises which prolongs life by slow- ing metabolism. (In fact all longevity agents have proved addicting in exact ratio to their effectiveness in prolonging life. ) Addicts of Mugwump fluid are known as Reptiles. A number of these How over chairs with their flexible bones and black-pink flesh. A fan of green cartilage covered with hollow, erectile hairs through which the Reptiles absorb the fluid sprouts from behind each ear. The fans, which move from time to time touched by invisible currents, serve also same form of communication known only to Reptiles. During the biennial Panics when the raw, pealed Dream Police storm the City, the Mugwumps take refuge in the deepest crevices of the wall sealing them- selves in clay cubicles and remain for weeks in bio- stasis. In those days of grey terror the Reptiles dart about faster and faster, scream past each other at supersonic speed, their flexible skulls flapping in black winds of insect agony. The Dream Police disintegrate in globs of rotten ectoplasm swept away by an old junky, coughing and spitting in the sick morning. The Mugwump Man comes with alabaster jars of fluid and the Reptiles get smoothed out. The air is once again still and clear as glycerine. The Sailor spotted his Reptile. He drifted over and ordered a green syrup. The Reptile had a little, round disk mouth of brown gristle, expressionless green eyes almost covered by a thin membrane of eyelid. The Sailor waited an hour before the creature picked up his presence. "Any eggs for Fats?" he asked, his words stirring through the Reptile's fan hairs. It took two hours for the Reptile to raise three pink transparent fingers covered with black fuzz. Several Meat Eaters lay in vomit, too weak to move. (The Black Meat is like a tainted cheese, overpower- ingly delicious and nauseating so that the eaters eat and vomit and eat again until they fall exhausted.) A painted youth slithered in and seized one of the great black claws sending the sweet, sick smell curling through the cafe. HOSPITAL Disintoxication Notes. Paranoia of early withdrawal. . Everything looks blue.... Flesh dead, doughy, toneless. Withdrawal Nightmares. A mirror-lined cafe. Empty. ...Waiting for something.... A man appears in a side door.... A slight, short Arab dressed in a brown jellaba with grey beard and grey face... There is a pitcher of boiling acid in my hand.... Seized by a convulsion of urgency, I throw it in his face.... Everyone looks like a drug addict.... Take a little walk in the hospital patio.... In my absence someone has used my scissors, they are stained with some sticky, red brown gick.... No doubt that little bitch of a criada trimming her rag. Horrible-looking Europeans clutter up the stairs, in- tercept the nurse when I need my medicine, empty piss into the basin when I am washing, occupy the toilet for hours on end -- probably fishing for a finger stall of diamonds they have stashed up their asshole.... In fact the whole clan of Europeans has moved in next to me....The old mother is having an operation, and her daughter move right in to see the old gash receive proper service. Strange visitors, presumably relatives... One of them wears as glasses those gad- gets jewelers screw into their eyes to examine stones. ...Probably a diamond-cutter on the skids... The man who loused up the Throckmorton Diamond and was drummed out of the industry.... All these jewelers standing around the Diamond in their frock coats, wait- ing on The Man. An error of one thousandth of an inch ruins the rock complete and they have to import this character special from Amsterdam to do the job. ...So he reels in dead drunk with a huge air hammer and pounds the diamond to dust.... I don't check these citizens.... Dope peddlers from Aleppo?... Slunk traffickers from Buenos Aires? Il- legal diamond buyers from Johannesburg?... Slave traders from Somaliland? Collaborators at the very least... Continual dreams of junk: I am looking for a poppy field.... Moonshiners in black Stetsons direct me to a Near East cafe.... One of the waiters is a connection for Yugoslav opium.... Buy a packet of heroin from a Malay Lesbian in white belted trenchcoat.... I cop the paper in Tibetan section of a museum. She keeps trying to steal it back. ...I am looking for a place to fix.... The critical point of withdrawal is not the early phase of acute sickness, but the final step free from the medium of junk....There is a nightmare interlude of cellular panic, life suspended between two ways of being.... At this point the longing for junk concen- trates in a last, all-out yen, and seems to gain a dream power: circumstances put junk in your way.... You meet an old-time Schmecker, a larcenous hospital at- tendant, a writing croaker.... A guard in a uniform of human skin, black buck jacket with carious yellow teeth buttons, an elastic pullover shirt in burnished Indian copper, adolescent- nordic-sun-tan slacks, sandals from calloused foot soles of young Malayan farmer, an ash-brown scarf knotted and tucked in the shirt. (Ash-brown is a color like grey under brown skin. You sometimes find it in mixed Negro and white stock, the mixture did not come of and the colors separated out like oil on water.... ) The Guard is a sharp dresser, since he has nothing to do and saves all his pay to buy fine clothes and changes three times a day in front of an enormous mag- nifying mirror. He has a Latin handsome-smooth face with a pencil line mustache, small black eyes, blank and greedy, undreaming insect eyes. When I get to the frontier the Guard rushes out of his casita, a mirror in a wooden frame slung round his neck. He is trying to get the mirror off his neck.... This has never happened before, that anyone reached the frontier. The Guard has injured his larynx taking of the mirror frame.... He has lost his voice.... He opens his mouth, you can see the tongue jumping around inside. The smooth blank young face and the open mouth with the tongue moving inside are in- credibly hideous. The Guard holds up his hand. His whole body jerks in convulsive negation. I go over and unhook the chain across the road. It falls with a clank of metal on stone. I walk through. The Guard stands there in the mist looking after me. Then he hooks the chain up again, goes back into the casita and starts plucking at his mustache. They just bring so-called lunch.... A hard-boiled egg with the shell of revealing an object like I never seen it before.... A very small egg of a yellow-brown color... Perhaps laid by the duck-billed platypus. The orange contained a huge worm and very little else.... He really got there firstest with the mostest.... In Egypt is a worm gets into your kidneys and grows to an enormous size. Ultimately the kidney is just a thin shell around the worm. Intrepid gourmets esteem the flesh of The Worm above all other delicacies. It is said to be unspeakably toothsome..., An Interzone coroner known as Autopsy Ahmed made a fortune traf- ficking The Worm. The French school is opposite my window and I dig the boys with my eight-power field glasses.... So close I could reach out and touch them.... They wear shorts.... I can see the goose-pimples on their legs in the cold Spring morning.... I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust. Did I ever tell you about the time Marv and me pay two Arab kids sixty cents to watch them screw each other? So I ask Marv, "Do you think they will do it?" And he says, "I think so. They are hungry." And I say, "That's the way I like to see them." Makes me feel sorta like a dirty old man but, "Son cosas de la vida," as Soberba de la Flor said when the fuzz upbraids him for blasting this cunt and taking the dead body to the Bar 0 Motel and fucking it.... "She play hard to get already," he say... "I don't hafta take that sound." (Soberba de la Flor was a Mexican criminal convict of several rather pointless murders. ) The lavatory has been locked for three hours solid. ...I think they are using it for an operating room.... NURSE: "I can't find her pulse, doctor." DR. BENWAY: "Maybe she got it up her snatch in a finger stall." NURSE: "Adrenalin, doctor?" DR.. BENWAY: "The night porter shot it all up for kicks." He looks around and picks up one of those rubber vacuum cups at the end of a stick they use to unstop toilets.... He advances on the patient.... "Make an incision, Doctor Limpf," he says to his ap- palled assistant.... "I'm going to massage the heart." Dr. Limpf shrugs and begins the incision. Dr. Ben- way washes the suction cup by swishing it around in the toilet-bowl.... NURSE: "Shouldn't it be sterilized, doctor?" DR. BENWAY: "Very likely but there's no time." He sits on the suction cup like a cane seat watching his assistant make the incision.... "You young squirts couldn't lance a pimple without an electric vibrating scalpel with automatic drain and suture.... Soon we'll be operating by remote control on patients we never see.... We'll be nothing but button pushers. All the skill is going out of surgery.... All the know-how and make-do... Did I ever tell you about the time I per- formed an appendectomy with a rusty sardine can? And once I was caught short without instrument one and removed a uterine tumor with my teeth. That was in the Upper Effendi, and besides..." DR. LYMPH F: "The incision is ready, doctor." Dr. Benway forces the cup into the incision and works it up and down. Blood spurts all over the doctors, the nurse and the wall.... The cup makes a horrible sucking sound. NURSE: "I think she's gone, doctor." DR. BENWAY: "Well, it's all in the day's work." He walks across the room to a medicine cabinet.... "Some fucking drug addict has cut my cocaine with Saniflush! Nurse! Send the boy out to fill this RX on the double!" Dr. Benway is operating in an auditorium filled with students: "Now, boys, you won't see this operation performed very often and there's a reason for that.... You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning. "Just as a bull fighter with his skill and knowledge extricates himself from danger he has himself invoked, so in this operation the surgeon deliberately endangers his patient, and then, with incredible speed and celer- ity, rescues him from death at the last possible split second.... Did any of you ever see Dr. Tetrazzini per- form? I say perform advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by throwing a scal- pel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance like a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: 'I don't give them time to die,' he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. 'Fucking undisciplined cells!' he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter." A young man leaps down into the operating theatre and, whipping out a scalpel, advances on the patient. DR. BENWAY: "An espontaneo Stop him before he guts my patient!" (Espontaneo is a bull-fighting term for a member of the audience who leaps down into the ring, pulls out a concealed cape and attempts a few passes with the bull before he is dragged out of the ring. ) The orderlies scuffle with the espontaneo, who is finally ejected from the hall. The anesthetist takes ad- vantage of the confusion to pry a large gold filling from the patient's mouth.... I am passing room 10 they moved me out of yester- day.... Maternity case I assume... Bedpans full of blood and Kotex and nameless female substances, enough to pollute a continent... If someone comes to visit me in my old room he will think I gave birth to a monster and the State Department is trying to hush it up.... Music from I Am an American... An elderly man in the striped pants and cutaway of a diplomat stands on a platform draped with the American flag. A de- cayed, corseted tenor -- bursting out of a Daniel Boone costume -- is singing the Star S pangled Banner, accom- panied by a full orchestra. He sings with a slight lisp.... THE DIPLOMAT (reading from a great scroll of ticker tape that keeps growing and tangling around his feet): "And we categorically deny that any male citizen of the United States of America..." TENOR: "Oh thay can you thee..." His voice breaks and shoots up to a high falsetto. In the control room the Technician mixes a bicar- bonate of soda and belches into his hand: "God damned tenor's a brown artist1" he mutters sourly. "Mikel rumph," the shout ends in a belch. "Cut that swish fart off the air and give him his purple slip. He's through as of right now.... Put in that sex-changed Liz athlete.... She's a fulltime tenor at least.... Costume? How in the fuck should I know? I'm no dress designer swish from the costume department! What's that? The entire costume department occluded as a security risk? What am I, an octopus? Let's see... How about an Indian routine? Pocahontas or Hia- watha?... No, that's not right. Some citizen cracks wise about giving it back to the Indians.... A Civil War uniform, the coat North and the pants South like it show they got together again? She can come on like Buffalo Bill or Paul Revere or that citizen wouldn't give up the shit, I mean the ship, or a G.I. or a Dough- boy or the Unknown Soldier.... That's the best deal. ...Cover her with a monument, that way nobody has to look at her...." The Lesbian, concealed in a paper mache Arc de Triomphe fills her great lungs and looses a tremendous bellow. "Oh say do that Star Spangled Banner yet wave..." A great rent rips the Arc de Triomphe from top to bottom. The Diplomat puts a hand to his fore- head.... The Diplomat: "That any male citizen of the United States has given birth in Interzone or at any other place...." "O'er the land of the FREEEEEEEEEEE..." The Diplomat's mouth is moving but no one can hear him. The Technician clasps his hands over his ears: "Mother of God!" he screams. His plate begins to vibrate like a Jew's harp, suddenly flies out of his mouth.... He snaps at it irritably, misses and covers his mouth with one hand. The Arc de Triomphe falls with a ripping, splinter- ing crash, reveals the Lesbian standing on a pedestal clad only in a leopard-skin jockstrap with enormous falsie basket.... She stands there smiling stupidly and flexing her huge muscles.... The Technician is craw- pleasure to the head.... Ten minutes later you want another shot.... The pleasure of morphine is in the viscera.... You listen down into yourself after a shot. ...But intravenous C is electricity through the brain, activating cocaine pleasure connections.... There is no withdrawal syndrome with C. It is a need of the brain alone -- a need without body and without feeling. Earth- bound ghost need. The craving for C lasts only a few hours as long as the C channels are stimulated. Then you forget it. Eukodol is like a combination of junk and C. Trust the Germans to concoct some really evil shit. Eukodol like morphine is six times stronger than codeine. Heroin six times stronger than morphine. Di- hydro-oxy-heroin should be six times stronger than heroin. Quite possible to develop a drug so habit-form- ing that one shot would cause lifelong addiction. Habit Note continued: Picking up needle I reach spontaneously for the tie-up cord with my left hand.' This I take as a sign I can hit the one useable vein in my left arm, (The movements of tying up are such that you normally tie up the arm with which you reach for the cord. ) The needle slides in easily on the edge of a callous. I feel around. Suddenly a thin column of blood shoots up into the syringe, for a moment sharp and solid as a red cord. The body knows what veins you can hit and conveys this knowledge in the spontaneous movements you make preparing to take a shot.... Sometimes the needle points like a dowser's wand. Sometime I must wait for the message, But when it comes I always hit blood. A red orchid bloomed at the bottom of the dropper. He hesitated for a full second, then pressed the bulb, watching the liquid rush into the vein as if sucked by the silent thirst of his blood. There was an iridescent, thin coat of blood left in the dropper, and the white paper collar was soaked through with blood like a bandage. He reached over and filled the dropper with water. As he squirted the water out, the shot hit him in the stomach, a soft sweet blow. Look down at my filthy trousers, haven't been changed in months.... The days glide by strung on a syringe with a long thread of blood.... I am forget- ting sex and all sharp pleasures of the body -- a grey, junk-bound ghost. The Spanish boys call me El Hom- bre Invisible -- the Invisible Man.... Twenty push ups every morning. Use of junk re- moves fat, leaves muscle more or less intact. The addict seems to need less tissue....Would it be possible to isolate the fat-removing molecule of junk? More and more static at the Drug Store, mutterings of control like a telephone off the hook... Spent all day until 8 P.M. to score for two boxes of Eukodol.... Running out of veins and out of money. Keep going on the nod. Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.... Fall asleep reading and the words take on code signifi- cance.... Obsessed with codes.... Man contracts a series of diseases which spell out a code message.... Take a shot in front of D.L. Probing for a vein in my dirty bare foot.... Junkies have no shame.... They are impervious to the repugnance of others. It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido.... The junky's shame disappears with his non- sexual sociability which is also dependent on libido.... The addict regards his body impersonally as an instru- ment to absorb the medium in which he lives, evaluates his tissue with the cold hands of a horse trader. "No use trying to hit there." Dead fish eyes Hick over a ravaged vein. Using a new type sleeping pill called Soneryl.... You don't feel sleepy.... You shift to sleep without transition, fall abruptly into the middle of a dream.... I have been years in a prison camp suffering from mal- nutrition.... The President is a junky but can't take it direct because of his position. So he gets fixed through me.... From time to time we make contact, and I recharge him. These contacts look, to the casual ob- server, like homosexual practices, but the actual ex- citement is not primarily sexual, and the climax is the separation when the recharge is completed. The erect penises are brought into contact -- at least we used that method in the beginning, but contact points wear out like veins. Now I sometimes have to slip my penis under his left eyelid. Of course I can always fix him with an Osmosis Recharge, which corresponds to a skin shot, but that is admitting defeat. An O.R. will put the President in a bad mood for weeks, and might well precipitate an atomic shambles. And the President pays a high price for the Oblique Habit. He has sacrificed all control, and is dependent as an unborn child. The Oblique Addict suffers a whole spectrum of subjective horror, silent protoplasmic frenzy, hideous agony of the bones. Tensions build up, pure energy without emo- tional content finally tears through the body throwing him about like a man in contact with high tension wires. If his charge connection is cut off cold, the Oblique Addict falls into such violent electric convul- sions that his bones shake loose, and he dies with the skeleton straining to climb out of his unendurable flesh and run in a straight line to the nearest cemetery. The relation between an O.A. (Oblique Addict) and his R.C. (Recharge Connection) is so intense that they can only endure each other's company for brief and infrequent intervals -- I mean aside from recharge meets, when all personal contact is eclipsed by the recharge process. Reading the paper.... Something about a triple mur- der in the rue de la Merde, Paris: "An adjusting of scores."...I keep slipping away.... "The police have identified the author... Pepe El Culito... The Little Ass Hole, an affectionate diminutive." Does it really say that?... I try to focus the words... they separate in meaningless mosaic.... LAZARUS GO HOME Fumbling through faded tape at the pick up frontier, a languid grey area of hiatus miasmic with yawns and gaping goof holes, Lee found out that the young junky standing there in his room at 10 A.M. Was back from two months skin diving in Corsica and off the junk.... "Here to show off his new body," Lee decided with a shudder of morning junk sickness. He knew that he was seeing -- ah yes Miguel thank you -- three months back sitting in the Metropole nodded out over a stale yellow eclair that would poison a cat two hours later, decided that the effort involved in seeing Miguel at all 10 A.M. was enough without the intolerable chore of correcting an error -- ("what is this a fucking farm?") which would also entail current picture of Miguel in much used areas like some great, inconvenient beast of an object on top in the suitcase. "You look marvelous," Lee said, wiping away the more obvious signs of distaste with a sloppy, casual napkin, seeing the grey ooze of junk in Miguel's face, studying patterns of shabbiness as if man and clothes had moved for years through back alleys of time with never a space station to tidy up.... "Besides by the time I could correct the error... Lazarus go home.... Pay The Man and go home.... What I want to see your old borrowed meat for?' "Well it's great to see you off....Do yourself a favor." Miguel was swimming around the room spear- ing fish with his hand.... "When you're down there you never think about horse." "You're better off like this," said Lee, dreamily caress- ing a needle scar on the back of Miguel's hand, follow- ing the whorls and patterns of smooth purple flesh in a slow twisting movement.... Miguel scratched the back of his hand.... He looked out the window.... His body moved in little, gal- vanized jerks as junk channels lit up.... Lee sat there waiting. "One snort never put anybody back on, kid." "I know what I'm doing." "They always know." Miguel took the nail file. Lee closed his eyes: "It's too tiresome." "Uh thanks that was great." Miguel's pants fell to his ankles. He stood there in a misshapen overcoat of Hesh that turned from brown to green and then color- less in the morning light, fell off in globs onto the floor. Lee's eyes moved in the substance of his face... a little, cold, grey Hick.... "Clean it up," he said. "Enough dirt in here now." "Oh uh sure," Miguel fumbled with a dustpan. Lee put the packet of heroin away. Lee lived in a permanent third-day kick, with, of course, certain uh essential intermissions to refuel the fires that burned through his yellow-pink-brown ge- latinous substance and kept off the hovering flesh. In the beginning his flesh was simply soft, so soft that he was cut to the bone by dust particles, air currents and brushing overcoats while direct contact with doors and chairs seemed to occasion no discomfort. No wound healed in his soft, tentative flesh.... Long white ten- drils of fungus curled round the naked bones. Mold odors of atrophied testicles quilted his body in a fuzzy grey fog.... During his first severe infection the boiling thermom- eter Hashed a quicksilver bullet into the nurse's brain and she fell dead with a mangled scream. The doctor took one look and slammed steel shutters of survival. He ordered the burning bed and its occupant immedi- ately evicted from the hospital premises. "Guess he can make his own penicillin!" snarled the doctor. But the infection burned the mold out... Lee lived now in varying degrees of transparency... While not exactly invisible he was at least difficult to see. His presence attracted no special notice.... People covered him with a project or dismissed him as a reflection, shadow: "Some kinda light trick or neon advertise- ment." Now Lee felt the first seismic tremors of Old Faith- ful the Cold Burn. He pushed Miguel's spirit into the hall with a kind, firm tendril. "Jesus!" said Miguel. "I gotta go!" He rushed out. Pink fires of histamine spurted from Lee's glowing core and covered his raw periphery. (The room was fireproof, the walls of iron blistered and spotted with moon craters.) He took a large fix and falsified his schedule. He decided to visit a colleague, NG Joe, who got hooked during a Bang-utot attack in Honolulu. (Note: Rang-utot, literally, "attempting to get up and groaning..." Death occurring in the course of a nightmare... The condition occurs in males of S.E. Asiatic extraction.... In Manila about twelve cases of death by Bang-utot are recorded each year. One man who recovered said that "a little man" was sitting on his chest and strangling him. Victims often know that they are going to die, ex- press the fear that their penis will enter the body and kill them. Sometimes they cling to the penis in a state of shrieking hysteria calling on others for help lest the penis escape and pierce the body. Erections, such as normally occur in sleep, are considered especially dan- gerous and liable to bring a fatal attack.... One man devised a Rube Goldberg contraption to prevent erec- tion during sleep. But he died of Bang-utot. Careful autopsies of Bang-utot victims have revealed no organic reason for death. There are often signs of strangulation (caused by what?); sometimes slight hemorrhages of pancreas and lungs -- not sufficient to cause death and also of unknown origin. It has oc- curred to the author that the cause of death is a mis- placement of sexual energy resulting in a lung erection with consequent strangulation.... [See article by Nils Larsen M.D., The Men with the Deadly Dream in the Saturday Evening Post, December 3, 1955. Also ar- ticle by Erle Stanley Gardner for Time Magazine.] ) NG lived in constant fear of erection so his habit jumped and jumped. (Note: It is a well known tire- some fact, it is a notoriously dull and long winded fact, that anyone who gets hooked because of any disabil- ity whatever, will be presented, during the periods of shortage or deprivation [such a thing as too much fun you know] with an outrageously padded, geometrically progressing, proliferating account. ) An electrode attached to one testicle glowed briefly and NG woke up in the smell of burning flesh and reached for a loaded syringe. He rolled into a foetal position and slid the needle into his spine. He pulled the needle out with a little sigh of pleasure, and re- alized that Lee was in the room. A long slug undulated out of Lee's right eye and wrote on the wall in iri- descent ooze: " The Sailor is in the City buying up TIME." I am waiting in front of a drugstore for it to open at nine o'clock. Two Arab boys roll cans of garbage up to a high heavy wood door in a whitewashed wall. Dust in front of the door streaked with urine. One of the boys bent over, rolling the heavy cans, pants tight over his lean young ass. He looks at me with the neu- tral, calm glance of an animal I wake with a shock like the boy is real and I have missed a meet I had with him for this afternoon. "We expect additional equalizations," says the In- spector in an interview with Your Reporter. "Otherwise will occur," the Inspector lifts one leg in a typical Nordic gesture, "the bends is it not? But perhaps we can provide the suitable chamber of decompression." The Inspector opens his fly and begins looking for crabs, applying ointment from a little clay pot. Clearly the interview is at an end. "You're not going?" he ex- claims. "Well, as one judge said to the other, 'Be just and if you can't be just be arbitrary.' Regret cannot observe customary obscenities." He holds up his right hand covered with a foul-smelling yellow ointment. One's Reporter rushes forward and clasps the soiled hand in both of his. "It's been a pleasure, Inspector, an unspeakable pleasure," he says peeling off his gloves, rolling them into a ball and tossing them into the wastebasket. "Expense account," he smiles. HASSAN'S RUMPUS ROOM Gilt and red plush. Rococo bar backed by pink shell. The air is cloyed with a sweet evil substance like decayed honey. Men and women in evening dress sip pousse-cafes through alabaster tubes. A Near East Mug- wump sits naked on a bar stool covered in pink silk. He licks warm honey from a crystal goblet with a long black tongue. His genitals are perfectly formed -- cir- cumcised cock, black shiny pubic hairs. His lips are thin and purple-blue like the lips of a penis, his eyes blank with insect calm. The Mugwump has no liver, maintaining himself exclusive on sweets. Mugwump push a slender blond youth to a couch and strip him expertly. "Stand up and turn aro