Naked Lunch (6 page)

‘So the
wind-up is we are drummed out of the industry. Not that Violet was a
bona fide
croaker, neither was Browbeck for that matter, and even my own certificate was called in question. But Violet knew more medicine than
the Mayo Clinic. She had an extraordinary intuition and a high sense of duty.

‘So there I was flat on my ass with no certificate. Should I turn to another trade? No. Doctoring was in
my blood. I managed to keep up my habits performing cut-rate abortions in subway toilets. I even descended to hustling pregnant women in the public streets. It was positively unethical. Then I met a great guy. Placenta Juan the Afterbirth Tycoon. Made his in slunks during the war. (Slunks are underage calves trailing afterbirths and bacteria, generally in an unsanitary and unfit condition. A calf
may not be sold as food until it reaches a minimum age of six weeks. Prior to that time it is classified as a slunk. Slunk trafficking is subject to a heavy penalty.) Well, Juanito controlled a fleet of cargo boats he register under the Abyssinian flag to avoid bothersome restrictions. He gives me a job as ship’s doctor on the
S.S. Filariasis
, as filthy a craft as ever sailed the seas. Operating
with one hand, beating the rats offa my patient with the other and bedbugs and scorpions rain down from the ceiling.

‘So somebody wants homogeneity at this juncture. Can do but it costs. Bored with the whole project, me.… Here we are.… Drag Alley.’

Benway traces a pattern in the air with his hand and a door swings open. We step through and the door closes. A long ward gleaming with stainless
steel, white tile floors, glass brick walls. Beds along one wall. No one smokes, no one reads, no one talks.

‘Come and take a close look,’ says Benway. ‘You won’t embarrass anybody.’

I walk over and stand in front of a man who is sitting on his bed. I look at the man’s eyes. Nobody, nothing looks back.

‘IND’s,’ says Benway, ‘Irreversible Neural Damage. Overliberated, you might say … a drag
on the industry.’

I pass a hand in front of the man’s eyes.

‘Yes,’ says Benway, ‘they still have reflexes. Watch this.’ Benway takes a chocolate bar from his pocket, removes the wrapper and holds it in front of the man’s nose. The man sniffs. His jaws begin to work. He makes snatching motions with his hands. Saliva drips from his mouth and hangs off his chin in long streamers. His stomach rumbles.
His whole body writhes in peristalsis. Benway steps back and holds up the chocolate. The man drops to his knees, throws back his head and barks. Benway tosses the chocolate. The man snaps at it, misses, scrambles around on the floor making slobbering noises. He crawls under the bed, finds the chocolate and crams it into his mouth with both hands.

‘Jesus! These ID’s got no class to them.’

Benway
calls over the attendant who is sitting at one end of the ward reading a book of J. M. Barrie’s plays.

‘Get these fucking ID’s outa here. It’s a bring down already. Bad for the tourist business.’

‘What should I do with them?’

‘How in the fuck should I know? I’m a scientist.
A pure
scientist. Just get them outa here. I don’t hafta look at them is all. They constitute an albatross.’

‘But what?
Where?’

‘Proper channels. Buzz the District Coordinator or whatever he calls himself … new title every week. Doubt if he exists.’

Doctor Benway pauses at the door and looks back at the IND’s. ‘Our failure,’ he says. ‘Well, it’s all in the day’s work.’

‘Do they ever come back?’

‘They don’t come back, won’t come back, once they’re gone,’ Benway sings softly. ‘Now this ward has some innarest.’

The patients stand in groups talking and spitting on the floor. Junk hangs in the air like a grey haze.

‘A heart-warming sight,’ says Benway, ‘those junkies standing around waiting for the Man. Six months ago they
were all schizophrenic. Some of them hadn’t been out of bed for years. Now look at them. In all the course of my practices, I have never seen a schizophrenic junky, and junkies are
mostly of the schizo physical type. Want to cure anybody of anything, find out who doesn’t have it. So who don’t got it? Junkies don’t got it. Oh, incidentally, there’s an area in Bolivia with no psychosis. Right sane folk in them hills. Like to get in there, me, before it is loused up by literacy, advertising, TV and drive-ins. Make a study strictly from metabolism: diet, use of drugs and alcohol,
sex, etc. Who cares what they think? Same nonsense everybody thinks, I daresay.

‘And why don’t junkies got schizophrenia? Don’t know yet. A schizophrenic can ignore hunger and starve to death if he isn’t fed. No one can ignore heroin withdrawal. The fact of addiction imposes contact.

‘But that’s only one angle. Mescaline, LSD6, deteriorated adrenalin, harmaline can produce an approximate schizophrenia.
The best stuff is extracted from the blood of schizos; so schizophrenia is likely a drug psychosis. They got a metabolic connection, a Man Within you might say. (Interested readers are referred to Appendix.)

‘In the terminal stage of schizophrenia the backbrain is permanently depressed, and the front brain is almost without content since the front brain is only active in response to backbrain
stimulation.

‘Morphine calls forth the antidote of backbrain stimulation similar to schizo substance. (Note similarity between withdrawal syndrome and intoxication with Yage or LSD6.) Eventual result of junk use – especially true of heroin addiction where large doses are available to the addict – is permanent backbrain depression and a state much like terminal schizophrenia: complete lack of
affect, autism, virtual absence of cerebral event. The addict can spend eight hours looking at a wall. He is conscious of his surroundings, but they have no emotional connotation and
in consequence no interest. Remembering a period of heavy addiction is like playing back a tape recording of events experienced by the front brain alone. Flat statements of external events. “I went to the store and
bought some brown sugar. I came home and ate half the box. I took a three grain shot etc.” Complete absence of nostalgia in these memories. However, as soon as junk intake falls below par, the withdrawal substance floods the body.

‘If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and
libido.

‘Some of my learned colleagues (nameless assholes) have suggested that junk derives its euphoric effect from direct stimulation of the orgasm center. It seems more probable that junk suspends the whole cycle of tension, discharge and rest. The orgasm has no function in the junky. Boredom, which always indicates an undischarged tension, never troubles the addict. He can look at his shoe
for eight hours. He is only roused to action when the hourglass of junk runs out.’

At the far end of the ward an attendant throws up an iron shutter and lets out a hog call. The junkies rush up grunting and squealing.

‘Wise guy,’ says Benway. ‘No respect for human dignity. Now I’ll show you the mild deviant and criminal ward. Yes, a criminal is a mild deviant here. He doesn’t deny the Freeland
contract. He merely seeks to circumvent some of the clauses. Reprehensible but not too serious. Down this hall … We’ll skip wards 23, 86, 57 and 97 … and the laboratory.’

‘Are homosexuals classed as deviants?’

‘No. Remember the Bismarck Archipelago. No overt homosexuality. A
functioning
police state needs no police. Homosexuality does not occur to anyone as conceivable behaviour…. Homosexuality
is a
political
crime in a matriarchy. No society tolerates overt rejection of its basic
tenets. We aren’t a matriarchy here,
Insh’allah.
You know the experiment with rats where they are subject to this electric shock and dropped in cold water if they so much as move at a female. So they all become fruit rats and that’s the way it is with the etiology. And shall such a rat squeak out, “I’m queah
and I luuuuuuuuve it” or “Who cut yours off, you two-holed freak?” ’twere a square rat so to squeak. During my rather brief experience as a psychoanalyst – spot of bother with the Society – one patient ran amok in Grand Central with a flame thrower, two committed suicide and one died on the couch like a jungle rat (jungle rats are subject to die if confronted suddenly with a hopeless situation).
So his relations beef and I tell them, “It’s all in the day’s work. Get this stiff outa here. It’s a bring down for my live patients” – I noticed that all my homosexual patients manifested strong unconscious heterosex trends and all my hetero patients unconscious homosexual trends. Makes the brain reel, don’t it?’

‘And what do you conclude from that?’

‘Conclude? Nothing whatever. Just a passing
observation.’

We are eating lunch in Benway’s office when he gets a call.

‘What’s that? … Monstrous! Fantastic! … Carry on and stand by.’

He puts down the phone. ‘I am prepared to accept immediate assignment with Islam Incorporated. It seems the electronic brain went berserk playing six-dimensional chess with the Technician and released every subject in the R.C. Leave us adjourn to the roof.
Operation Helicopter is indicated.’

From the roof of the R.C. we survey a scene of unparalleled horror. IND’s stand around in front of the café tables, long streamers of saliva hanging off their chins, stomachs noisily churning, others ejaculate at the sight of women. Latahs
imitate the passers-by with monkey-like obscenity. Junkies have looted the drugstores and fix on every street corner.…
Catatonics decorate the parks.… Agitated schizophrenics rush through the streets with mangled, inhuman cries. A group of P.R.’s – Partially Reconditioned – have surrounded some homosexual tourists with horrible knowing smiles showing the Nordic skull beneath in double exposure.

‘What do you want?’ snaps one of the queens.

‘We want to
understand
you.’

A contingent of howling simopaths swing
from chandeliers, balconies and trees, shitting and pissing on passersby. (A simopath – the technical name for this disorder escapes me – is a citizen convinced he is an ape or other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the army, and discharge cures it.) Amoks trot along cutting off heads, faces sweet and remote with a dreamy half smile.… Citizens with incipient Bang-utot clutch their penises and
call on the tourists for help.… Arab rioters yipe and howl, castrating, disembowelling, throw burning gasoline.… Dancing boys striptease with intestines, women stick severed genitals in their cunts, grind, bump and flick it at the man of their choice.… Religious fanatics harangue the crowd from helicopters and rain stone tablets on their heads, inscribed with meaningless messages.… Leopard Men tear
people to pieces with iron claws, coughing and grunting.… Kwakiutl Cannibal Society initiates bite off noses and ears.…

A coprophage calls for a plate, shits on it and eats the shit, exclaiming, ‘Mmmm, that’s my rich substance.’

A battalion of rampant bores prowls the streets and hotel lobbies in search of victims. An intellectual avantgardist – ‘Of course the only writing worth considering
now is to be found in scientific reports and periodicals’ – has given someone a bulbocapnine injection and is preparing to read him a bulletin on ‘the use of neohemoglobin in the control
of multiple degenerative granuloma.’ (Of course, the reports are all gibberish he has concocted and printed up.)

His opening words: ‘You look to me like a man of intelligence.’ (Always ominous words, my boy …
When you hear them stay not on the order of your going but go at once.)

An English colonial, assisted by five police boys, has detained a subject in the club bar: ‘I say, do you know Mozambique?’ and he launches into the endless saga of his malaria. ‘So the doctor said to me, “I can only advise you to leave the area. Otherwise I shall bury you.” This croaker does a little undertaking on the side.
Piecing out the odds you might say, and throwing himself a spot of business now and then.’ So after the third pink gin when he gets to know you, he shifts to dysentery. ‘Most extraordinary discharge. More or less of a white yellow color like rancid jism and stringy you know.’

An explorer in sun helmet has brought down a citizen with blow gun and curare dart. He administers artificial respiration
with one foot. (Curare kills by paralyzing the lungs. It has no other toxic effect, is not, strictly speaking, a poison. If artificial respiration is administered the subject will not die. Curare is eliminated with great rapidity by the kidneys.) ‘That was the year of the rindpest when everything died, even the hyenas.… So there I was completely out of K.Y. in the headwaters of the Baboonsasshole.
When it came through by air drop my gratitude was indescribable.… As a matter of fact, and I have never told this before to a living soul – elusive blighters’ – his voice echoes through a vast empty hotel lobby in 1890 style, red plush, rubber plants, gilt and statues – ‘I was the only white man ever initiated into the infamous Agouti Society, witnessed and participated in their unspeakable rites.’

The Agouti Society has turned out for a Chimu Fiesta. (The Chimu of ancient Peru were much given to sodomy
and occasionally staged bloody battles with clubs, running up several hundred casualties in the course of an afternoon.) The youths, sneering and goosing each other with clubs, troop out to the field. Now the battle begins.

Gentle reader, the ugliness of that spectacle buggers description.
Who can be a cringing pissing coward, yet vicious as a purple-assed mandril, alternating these deplorable conditions like vaudeville skits? Who can shit on a fallen adversary who, dying, eats the shit and screams with joy? Who can hang a weak passive and catch his sperm in mouth like a vicious dog? Gentle reader, I fain would spare you this, but my pen hath its will like the Ancient Mariner. Oh
Christ what a scene is this! Can tongue or pen accommodate these scandals? A beastly young hooligan has gouged out the eye of his confrere and fuck him in the brain. ‘This brain atrophy already, and dry as grandmother’s cunt.’