Naked Lunch (5 page)

Documents issued in vanishing ink faded into old pawn tickets. New documents were constantly required. The citizens rushed from one bureau to another in a frenzied attempt to meet impossible deadlines.

All benches were removed from the city, all fountains turned off, all flowers and trees destroyed. Huge electric buzzers on the top of every apartment house (everyone lived in apartments) rang the quarter hour. Often the vibrations would throw people out of bed. Searchlights played over the town all night (no one was permitted to use shades, curtains, shutters or blinds).

No one ever looked at
anyone else because of the strict law against importuning, with or without verbal approach, anyone for any purpose, sexual or otherwise. All cafés and bars were closed. Liquor could only be obtained with a special permit, and the liquor so obtained could not be sold or given or in any way transferred to anyone else,
and the presence of anyone else in the room was considered
prima facie
evidence
of conspiracy to transfer liquor.

No one was permitted to bolt his door, and the police had pass keys to every room in the city. Accompanied by a mentalist they rush into someone’s quarters and start ‘looking for it.’

The mentalist guides them to whatever the man wishes to hide: a tube of vaseline, an enema, a handkerchief with come on it, a weapon, unlicensed alcohol. And they always submitted
the suspect to the most humiliating search of his naked person on which they make sneering and derogatory comments. Many a latent homosexual was carried out in a straitjacket when they planted vaseline in his ass. Or they pounce on any object. A pen wiper or a shoe tree.

‘And what is this supposed to be for?’

‘It’s a pen wiper.’

‘A pen wiper, he says.’

‘I’ve heard everything now.’

‘I guess
this is all we need. Come on, you.’

After a few months of this the citizens cowered in corners like neurotic cats.

Of course the Annexia police processed suspected agents, saboteurs and political deviants on an assembly line basis. As regards the interrogation of suspects, Benway has this to say:

‘While in general I avoid the use of torture – torture locates the opponent and mobilizes resistance
– the threat of torture is useful to induce in the subject the appropriate feeling of helplessness and gratitude to the interrogator for withholding it. And torture can be employed to advantage as a penalty when the subject is far enough along with the treatment to accept punishment as deserved. To this end I devised several forms of disciplinary procedure. One was known as The Switchboard.
Electric drills that can be turned on at any time are clamped against the subject’s teeth; and he is instructed to operate an arbitrary switchboard,
to put certain connections in certain sockets in response to bells and lights. Every time he makes a mistake the drills are turned on for twenty seconds. The signals are gradually speeded up beyond his reaction time. Half an hour on the switchboard
and the subject breaks down like an overloaded thinking machine.

‘The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets. Ever pop coke in the mainline? It hits you right in the brain, activating connections of pure pleasure. The pleasure of morphine is in the viscera. You listen down
into yourself after a shot. But C is electricity through the brain, and the C yen is of the brain alone, a need without body and without feeling. The C-charged brain is a berserk pinball machine, flashing blue and pink lights in electric orgasm. C pleasure could be felt by a thinking machine, the first stirrings of hideous insect life. The craving for C lasts only a few hours, as long as the C
channels are stimulated. Of course the effect of C could be produced by an electric current activating the C channels.…

‘So after a bit the channels wear out like veins, and the addict has to find new ones. A vein will come back in time, and by adroit vein rotation a junky can piece out the odds if he don’t become an oil burner. But brain cells don’t come back once they’re gone, and when the
addict runs out of brain cells he is in a terrible fucking position.

‘Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence – their speech centers are destroyed – except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh
hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the
flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.

‘I digress as usual. Pending more precise knowledge of brain electronics, drugs remain an essential tool of the interrogator in his assault on the
subject’s personal identity. The barbiturates are, of course, virtually useless. That is, anyone who can be broken down by such means would succumb to the puerile methods used in an American precinct. Scopolamine is often effective in dissolving resistance, but it impairs the memory: an agent might be prepared to reveal his secrets but quite unable to remember them, or cover story and secret life
info might be inextricably garbled. Mescaline, harmaline, LSD6, bufotenine, muscarine successful in many cases. Bulbocapnine induces a state approximating schizophrenic catatonia … instances of automatic obedience have been observed. Bulbocapnine is a backbrain depressant probably putting out of action the centers of motion in the hypothalamus. Other drugs that have produced experimental schizophrenia
– mescaline, harmaline, LSD6 – are backbrain stimulants. In schizophrenia the backbrain is alternately stimulated and depressed. Catatonia is often followed by a period of excitement and motor activity during which the nut rushes through the wards giving everyone a bad time. Deteriorated schizos sometimes refuse to move at all and spend their lives in bed. A disturbance of the regulatory function
of the hypothalamus is indicated as the “cause” (causal thinking never yields accurate description of metabolic process – limitations of existing language) of schizophrenia. Alternate doses of LSD6 and bulbocapnine – the bulbocapnine potientiated with curare – give the highest yield of automatic obedience.

‘There are other procedures. The subject can be reduced to deep depression by administering
large doses of benzedrine for several days. Psychosis can be induced by continual large doses of cocaine or demerol or by the abrupt
withdrawal of barbiturates after prolonged administration. He can be addicted by dihydro-oxy-heroin and subjected to withdrawal (this compound should be five times as addicting as heroin, and the withdrawal proportionately severe).

‘There are various “psychological
methods,” compulsory psychoanalysis, for example. The subject is requested to free-associate for one hour every day (in cases where time is not of the essence). “Now, now. Let’s not be negative, boy. Poppa call nasty man. Take baby walkabout switchboard.”

‘The case of a female agent who forgot her real identity and merged with her cover story – she is still a fricteuse in Annexia – put me onto
another gimmick. An agent is trained to deny his agent identity by asserting his cover story. So why not use psychic jiu-jitsu and go along with him? Suggest that his cover story is his identity and that he has no other. His agent identity becomes unconscious, that is, out of his control; and you can dig it with drugs and hypnosis. You can make a square heterosex citizen queer with this angle …
that is, reinforce and second his rejection of normally latent homosexual trends – at the same time depriving him of cunt and subjecting him to homosex stimulation. Then drugs, hypnosis, and –’ Benway flipped a limp wrist.

‘Many subjects are vulnerable to sexual humiliation. Nakedness, stimulation with aphrodisiacs, constant supervision to embarrass subject and prevent relief of masturbation
(erections during sleep automatically turn on an enormous vibrating electric buzzer that throws the subject out of bed into cold water, thus reducing the incidence of wet dreams to a minimum). Kicks to hypnotize a priest and tell him he is about to consummate a hypostatic union with the Lamb – then steer a randy old sheep up his ass. After that the Interrogator can gain complete hypnotic control –
the subject will come at his whistle, shit on the floor if
he but say Open Sesame. Needless to say, the sex humiliation angle is contraindicated for overt homosexuals. (I mean let’s keep our eye on the ball here and remember the old party line … never know who’s listening in.) I recall this one kid, I condition to shit at sight of me. Then I wash his ass and screw him. It was real tasty. And he
was a lovely fellah too. And some times a subject will burst into boyish tears because he can’t keep from ejaculate when you screw him. Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big beautiful garden. I was just scratching that lovely surface when I am urged by Party Poops … Well, “son cosas de la vida.”’

I reach Freeland, which is clean and dull
my God. Benway is directing the R.C., Reconditioning Center. I drop around, and, ‘What happened to so and so?’ sets in like: ‘Sidi Idriss “The Nark” Smithers crooned to the Senders for a longevity serum. No fool like an old queen.’ ‘Lester Stroganoff Smuunn – “El Hassein” – turned himself into a Latah trying to perfect A.O.P., Automatic Obedience Processing. A martyr to the industry …’ (Latah
is a condition occurring in Southeast Asia. Otherwise sane, Latahs compulsively imitate every motion once their attention is attracted by snapping the fingers or calling sharply. A form of compulsive involuntary hypnosis. They sometimes injure themselves trying to imitate the motions of several people at once.)

‘Stop me if you’ve heard this atomic secret.…’

Benway’s face retains its form in
the flash bulb of urgency, subject at any moment to unspeakable cleavage or metamorphoses. It flickers like a picture moving in and out of focus.

‘Come on,’ says Benway, ‘and I’ll show you around the R.C.’

We are walking down a long white hall. Benway’s voice
drifts into my consciousness from no particular place … a disembodied voice that is sometimes loud and clear, sometimes barely audible
like music down a windy street.

‘Isolated groups like natives of the Bismarck Archipelago. No overt homosexuality among them. God damned matriarchy. All matriarchies anti-homosexual, conformist and prosaic. Find yourself in a matriarchy walk don’t run to the nearest frontier. If you run, some frustrate latent queer cop will likely shoot you. So somebody wants to establish a beach head of homogeneity
in a shambles of potentials like West Europe and U.S.A.? Another fucking matriarchy, Margaret Mead notwithstanding … Spot of bother there. Scalpel fight with a colleague in the operating room. And my baboon assistant leaped on the patient and tore him to pieces. Baboons always attack the weakest party in an altercation. Quite right too. We must never forget our glorious simian heritage. Doc
Browbeck was party inna second part. A retired abortionist and junk pusher (he was a veterinarian actually) recalled to service during the manpower shortage. Well, Doc had been in the hospital kitchen all morning goosing the nurses and tanking up on coal gas and Klim – and just before the operation he sneaked a double shot of nutmeg to nerve himself up.’

(In England and especially in Edinburgh
the citizens bubble coal gas through Klim – a horrible form of powdered milk tasting like rancid chalk – and pick up on the results. They hock everything to pay the gas bill, and when the man comes around to shut it off for the non-payment, you can hear their screams for miles. When a citizen is sick from needing it he says, ‘I got the klinks’ or ‘That old stove climbing up my back.’

Nutmeg.
I quote from the author’s article on narcotic drugs in the
British Journal of Addiction
(see Appendix): ‘Convicts and sailors sometimes have recourse to nutmeg. About a tablespoon is swallowed in water. Result vaguely similar to marijuana with side effects of headache and
nausea. There are a number of narcotics of the nutmeg family in use among the Indians of South America. They are usually administered
by sniffing a dried powder of the plant. The medicine men take these noxious substances and go into convulsive states. Their twitchings and mutterings are thought to have prophetic significance.’)

‘I had a Yage hangover, me, and in no condition to take any of Browbeck’s shit. First thing he comes on with I should start the incision from the back instead of the front, muttering some garbled nonsense
about being sure to cut out the gall bladder it would fuck up the meat. Thought he was on the farm cleaning a chicken. I told him to go put his head back in the oven, whereupon he had the effrontery to push my hand severing the patient’s femoral artery. Blood spurted up and blinded the anesthetist, who ran out through the halls screaming. Browbeck tried to knee me in the groin, and I managed
to hamstring him with my scalpel. He crawled about the floor stabbing at my feet and legs. Violet, that’s my baboon assistant – only woman I ever cared a damn about – really wigged. I climbed up on the table and poise myself to jump on Browbeck with both feet and stomp him when the cops rushed in.

‘Well, this rumble in the operating room, “this unspeakable occurrence” as the Super called it,
you might say was the blow off. The wolf pack was closing for the kill. A crucifixion, that’s the only word for it. Of course I’d made a few “dummheits” here and there. Who hasn’t? There was the time me and the anesthetist drank up all the ether and the patient came up on us, and I was accused of cutting the cocaine with Saniflush. Violet did it actually. Had to protect her of course.…