Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (15 page)

Tangier is alive with skuggers, that is, with biocomputationally enhanced shapeshifters possessing mild short-range telepathic contack with each other. My merge-partner Turing have skip town as planned, and is almost to Miami now. But his less than punctilious protocols have create hundreds of fellahin skuggers in the Casbah, with the hit-count rolling up like Chicago election-night results. You ever read
The Plague
by Camus—where the jaded Algerian croaker is alla time palpating buboes?

Not that we skuggers are in any sense diseased. It’s only that I’ve welcomed a new symbiote into my system, and I’m thinking a bit faster than before. It’s like joining the Communist Party, or coming out queer, or buying dope, or writing a poem, isn’t it? We’re everywhere, baby. Skugs in the rugs.

Goaded by a limey spymaster name of Chief Soames, the Tangier cops have gone apeshit, busting every skugger they can find, and walling them up in the British Embassy basement. A skugger is subject to ooze out through any hole larger than a fingertip. But Soames have leak-proofed his gaol real good. As of today, we have sixty-four subjects in our tank.

I might add that Soames’s chief dick Jonathan Hopper is a skugger himself. But Jonathan and I don’t share our secret proclivity with the others.

Chief Soames meets me at a tea-party and then, after two days of paper-shuffle, he agree to ignore my extensive criminal record—and put me the payroll of the Queen of England’s Brain Police. It’s hard to fathom this sudden change in my circumstances.

My remit? It’s a plan that Hopper and I have cook up with our skugs. I’ll use my deep familiarity with the Reichian theory of the orgone to meld the captive skuggers into a hive-mind capable of long-range telepathy.

Soames has agreed it’s better to track Turing’s progress rather than trying to arrest and repatriate him. He rather likes my remote teep plan. As a heavy drinker, often disoriented, Soames has a natural affinity for the woo-woo. “We’ll get some use from these blighters in the basement,” he says, smacking his lips. “We’ll put the fear of God in that sod Turing.”

Every day when I report for work at the Embassy, I remove my clothing, don a regimental-stripe necktie and go downstairs. The captive skuggers are a rum lot: cute boys, a few women, kids and geezers, all of them nude. “Booo-rows,” they yell on my first day, several of them knowing me from the street. Turing’s boy Driss is among them.

“Where is al’An?” Driss asks me.

“Gone to America,” I tell him. “You can help me look for him.”

“You take me there, Boo-rows?”

“Perhaps. Have you seen my boy Kiki?”

“He go to his mother in Fez. I your boy now?” Driss wraps a rubbery arm around my waist.

I introduce myself all around. My necktie, pale skin and enormous penis set me apart. Do remember I’m a shapeshifter. With sufficiently obsessive focus, I can be the biggest dick in any room. Naturally I push this too far, and by the end of the first day I am a bobble-head atop a pair of tiny frog legs holding up a Lincoln Log. Driss collapse laughing.

The second day, Driss and the fellahs tell me they’re edgy at being in police custody. Only a few of them speak English or Spanish, but our skugger teep is working man to man. To perk the morale, I have the Embassy stooges to haul down a fifty-pound bag of refined white sugar. Everyone in the pit start feeling friendly.

The third day I double the sugar ration, and slime out some tentacles from my fingertips, plugging every navel in the room. Puppetmaster Bill. “Let’s all get soft,” I propose, teeping sexy images of mollusk reproduction. I chant whatever gone strophes come to mind, also feeding the skuggers’ real-time reactions into the mix. Feebdack feedback. The Arabs are easy-going people, if you give them a chance.

On the fourth day, even more sugar, also a carboy of olive oil. Everyone feeling festive—we shining and sticky with sweet slick. I push my face against Driss’s so our heads merge.
Plup
! Feels real wiggy. I use my squiddy arms to gather ye rosebuds. And then we’re a starfish with a shared yubbaflop head on the Embassy basement floor. Our merged heads like the center of a wagon wheel.

I grow out a feeler with a lobster-eye to admire what we done. Our group face look like a gangland hit on President Eisenhower, a bald baby with slit-mouth scars and eye-puckers like 128 bullet holes. Hopper and his boss upstairs are abreast of our session, they very pleased.

On day five, I engage three footmen to haul in hods of wobbly British pastries, barrows of dates, heaped trays of kumquats. The skugger fellahs are increasingly admire me. “Booo-rows! Booo-rows! Booo-rows!”

Driss and I
plup
our heads together, the rest of the gang piles on. We make a parabolic monster face, a dish-shaped teep antenna pointing towards the floor. We vibe our mind-rays through the watery gut of Ma Earth. You wave, we wave. Hopper runs a droopy tentacle down the basement stairs into my spine.

And then—lo! We pick up on Turing in Florida.

For a minute there, I can see through T’s eyes, he saying good-bye to this beefcake Vassar he’s been romancing. He dither around and then he catch a cab. The scene is rainy, seedy, overripe. The cab ram into some mooch—and just then one of the fellahin boys pull out his head and start ululating the Call to Prayer. That time of day. Our trans-Atlantic confab break up.

“It’s the
process
, not the
result
,” feller says, fingerpainting the wall with his own shit.

I’ve been up all night, al’En, writing you. The sun rises, the stucco city glows with inner light.

It’s a gas to shake my arms like wriggly dough, a rush to merge tissues with my new pals, wunnerful to host psychic vibrations in my head. I can even pick up a couple or three broadcasts. Radio Tanger with the Maghreb News. We’re riding history’s dragon.

Now I’ll report to the Embassy and coax my skuggers into a teep star again. I’m on tenterhooks to see Turing at my parents’ home. My son Billy living there too, you may recall. I wish I could be a better father.

Love,

Bill

***

To Jack Kerouac

Tangiers, January 3, 1954

So fuck this sound. I’m coming home. Scribbling on the Tanger ferry dock right now. I’m booked onto a chain of flights from Gibraltar to London to New York to Miami. Seven league boots.

I’ve been tied in with some Embassy officials here, and it turned sour. The upside is the Top Pig have write me a British passport and spring for my plane ticket as a parting gift. I’m quite mobile, being off junk.

My stoolie job was to telepathically spy on Professor Alan Turing, who’s made it back to Palm Beach. Yesterday he go to my parents house and show his ass to the extent that Mother have terminate my monthly stipend forever. And he raising a ghoulish notion of resurrecting Joan. My wrath knows no bounds.

I run upstairs and drop a dime on Turing, that is, I tell Chief Soames, the head spy, that Turing is turn psycho killer and Soames need to sic the Palm Beach cops on the man right away. While Soames is slowly process my request, I go back down to my team of teepers.

It’s time for their daily feast, and I hang there with them, mainlining the sweetmeats. We have a party, we singing songs and making our floppy, baggy bodyparts into skirly flutes and flubby drums. I’m getting into a North African sense of time. Around sunset, Chief Soames chief come down and tell us that by the time the Palm Beach cops got to my parents’ house, Turing was gone.

I want to go right back to more spying then, but my skuggers are balky, also very jittery and disorganized from the sugar rush, also some of the boys are metabolizing themselves some endocannabinoids.

And then this boy Driss start petitioning me. He want to come to America. He say if the skuggers help me one more time, I should at least open a path so they can ooze out and slime free on the streets once more. I agree. The skuggers and I celebrate our new accord for some hours, wriggling like a basket of eels.

Finally around 3 am we restart the teep—which involves physically merging all of our heads. Right away we hitting it good. It’s mid-evening in Florida. I home in on Turing, happy in a jazz club with some nobody name of Ned. Ned a skugger too. I’m oddly envious of him.

Turing feels my gaze, and suddenly he learns to put up a telepathy block. A formidable quarry. I rush upstairs and ask the security guard to let me use the Embassy phone and ring Chief Soames at home in his house. I want him notify the Florida cops again.

The guard balk at first, so, not standing on ceremony, I jab his gut and make him a skugger too. He turn very cooperative. I sit in his lap while I use his phone to give Soames his orders.

When I hit the Embassy again next day, my handler Jonathan Hopper want to talk with me.

“Bill, you’ve gone off the rails. The Chief’s beside himself. You woke him for a wild goose chase. I fear you’ll be dismissed.”

I explain that Turing have terminate my family meal-ticket, and I don’t like how he talk about dig up my dead wife. “Shooting her once was enough, already,” I add.

“You’re not yourself, Bill,” says Hopper. “You’re only saying these cruel things for effect.”

I bull my way down to the basement and plug in with my skuggers again. We wobble our orgone antenna towards the Sunshine State for one last time, and I find Turing and Ned have dig themselves into the sand of West Palm Beach like quahog clams. Turing is asleep, with his teep-block around his ankles like wet underwear.

In his dream, he notice me and start teeping, sleepy and warm.

“Hello Bill. I rather miss you. Why are you persecuting me, brother?”

“Leave my family alone.”

“You’ve caused them enough pain, eh? No matter. I’m leaving town.”

“But, wait. I’ll need to find you.” And in that moment I realize that I’m in love.

“You don’t really want me,” Turing say shyly. “I’m odd.” And then he fade into blobby visions of higher-dimensional skugs.

I sprint to the top floor and hammer like a maniac on Chief Soames’s door.

“What is it, Burroughs? You’ve become excessively tedious.”

“Call the Palm Beach police! We’ve got another chance to nab Turing! But I insist they capture him alive. The man’s a find, a sport, a valuable mutation! We’ll pin him down so I can debrief him!”

“Very well,” says Soames. “One more call.” He pause to study me. “And—Burroughs? Collect your pay and leave. You’re sacked.”

“Can you give me a British passport before I go?” I whine. “Turing stole mine, you see. And I need a plane ticket to the States. To wrap things up.”

Soames make with a smelly yawn. “Snag a passport at Records downstairs. We stockpile the papers of our Brits who come a cropper here. And we’ll issue you a two-day pass for the planes. And now I’ll phone your beastly Florida bobbies, worse luck. It’s like talking to jungle sloths.”

I got half a mind to recruit Soames as a skugger too, but he careful to keep me on the other side of his desk.

Downstairs I ask the brittle woman in Records to give me
two
passports, wanting to do Driss a favor. She slap two on the counter, ready made. “The Jackson twins,” she say. “Stanley and Daniel. Died here last year. A reckless pair—tried to hoodwink a sharif.”

“They don’t resemble me at all,” I remark, studying the identical faces, coarse and dull.

“You’re the India rubber man, innit?”

On the street, I engage the services of a farmer leading his donkey to market. We tie a rope from the donkey to the Embassy’s barred and boarded basement window. The donkey pulls, and the window pop out like a tooth. The captive skuggers come oozing out, loose and wriggly. I rather doubt anyone will ever get a skugger antenna working again.

Meanwhile Driss rush to my side. “Ouakha,” he say, batting his eyes. “Now we go to America, Boo-rows?”

“London for you,” I say. “No further. America for me. Can you look like this?” I show him the mug-shot of Daniel Jackson. Driss wriggle right into form. I do the same dance. We’re mirror-twins, me in my suit and he in his djellaba. We stroll off down the street arm in arm, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Driss is quite a catch. But my plane ticket pass is only for one. His trip to London will come out of my personal funds, fond mentor that I am.

Hopper, my friend at the Embassy, come legging after us. “Burning our bridges, eh, Burroughs? I just now skugged Soames as well. Stick around, things are getting interesting.”

“I have to see Turing face to face,” I tell him. “And mend my fences with the parents. And check in on my son.”

“I wonder if you’ll have any trouble finding Turing.”

“I’ll find Turing in the West Palm Beach jail. That’s why I turned him in. Once I’ve talked sense to him, he and I can take up where we left off.”

“The police won’t be able to hold him, Bill. Have some pride in the skugger team, old top. Tangier is collapsing around us now. And Palm Beach will fall as well.”

I remain fixated on my pursuit. “If Turing breaks out, where does he go?”