Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (19 page)

“Eight’s a nice number,” said Ned.

They progressed westward along the Gulf coast, with the rain tapering off. Eventually Vassar awoke and they pulled over for a rest at the side of road. To their right was a cypress swamp. To their left a crooked moon sailed through the tattered storm clouds, casting radiance into the lagoon.

Alan savored the otherworldly scene—the tall bare trees with arched knees, the water obsidian black, the faint pale birds nested amid the veils of Spanish moss.

“Looks iffy,” said Ned, who wasn’t as reckless as he sometimes made himself out to be.

“I’ve heard people say that swamp water is good for you,” said Vassar, crouching to splash off his face.

“Gator!” said Susan softly. “Look right there.”

A bumpy dark form was lying just beneath the surface, half a body-length away from Vassar, the creature’s nostrils and eyes like gleaming knots on a silver log. He was utterly immobile, watching for his chance.

“Like a cop,” said Vassar, taking a step back. He stretched and looked around. “My turn to drive? How far do you wanna go?”

Ned and Alan shared a pulse of teep. The great fear was that the feds had loaded Landers into a truck and were driving the skugsniffer after them—assuming they’d guessed which way to go. Alan wasn’t quite sure how much information Landers had managed to glean from their final contact. In any case, it seemed wise to continue driving for many hours.

“Let’s go for New Orleans,” suggested Ned. “We’ll take turns at the wheel and roll into the Big Easy at dawn. Find a room and have some fun. I’ve been there, you know. On shore-leave from the Navy.”

“Vassar and I know some deep grooves there,” said Susan. “We used to go the Vieux Carré for the music. Keep driving, yeah. It jolts me out of depression to stay awake all night.”

“You’re depressed?” said Vassar as if surprised. “Even though we’re on an exciting adventure?”

“You nearly got arrested in Miami, Vassar. Tony El Tigre came by the apartment to shake us down. I gave up my nice job. And now we’re in a car with your latest conquest, who seems more like a tranny than like a real girl—I’m sorry, Abby, but that’s what I think. Yes, gang, Susan is depressed.”

After this outburst, Susan ended up companionably dozing in the back seat with Alan. The two others sat in front, piloting their oversized an American car through the primeval night. Alan found it strange how easily Susan had seen through his imitation game. A woman’s intuition. Not that Vassar seemed to believe her.

Ned and Vassar took turns in the driver’s seat, chatting and telling stories. They turned off Susan’s tape machine and put on the radio, pulling in pop, hillbilly music, and, as the night wore on, jazz and the accordion arabesques of Cajun bands.

The sounds threaded through Alan’s dreams. He saw chimerical ghosts like seahorses and flounders and cephalopods, with some of them bearing human faces on long necks. The ghosts peeped in from the periphery of his vision, slyly peering at him, always whisking out of sight when he gave them his full attention. Was his lamented flame Christopher Morcom among them?

But now images of the dead police captain appeared. First the captain was floating in a blackwater swamp being chewed by alligators, and then, oh horrible, the captain was rushing after Alan in vengeance, riding in a black hearse with a siren. Meanwhile the flickering ghost-things were chortling in the darkness behind Alan’s head. Alan felt a sick conviction that these visions were real. But what did they mean?

It was a relief to awaken. Susan was leaning on his shoulder.

“You two look cute,” said Vassar, smiling at them from the front seat. Ned was in the process of parking the car. They were in a city.

“Our bad boys,” muttered Susan, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “We’ll teach them respect, won’t we, Abby? Let’s make them our sex slaves.”

“Perhaps,” said Alan, embarrassed and a little aroused.

It was a wet dawn, still dark, the air filled with mist. They were in the French Quarter, among two-story buildings, very human in scale, with ironwork balconies supported by slender columns. A few of the town’s legendary bon-vivants were passing by, only now making their way home.

A lean man with a cyst the size of a golf ball on the side of his face was singing the pop song that Alan had heard in Madeira. “Earth Angel.” He moved his hands as if were swimming the breast stroke—dancing his way home. A gray-haired man in jeans and a billed cap was loading an eight-foot wooden cross into the back of his pickup truck, his night’s preaching done. The cross bore the insignia, “Repent,” along its cross-bar, the letters red and smeared. At the end of the block, a silky-voiced pitchman was cozening people into an upstairs after-hours bar.

“That’s Zachary, isn’t it?” said Susan. “This is the building where we stayed, remember Vassar? We had this wonderful room on the ground floor facing the garden in back. A little paradise. Hey, Zachary! Brother Squonk!”

“Square and root,” said Zachary, a dark-skinned, well-knit man with tight curls. “It’s Susan Green and Vassar Lafia. What you got for me, Vassar?”

“Smoke off the boat,” said Vassar. “Straight from Sultan. Can we get the room by the garden?”

“The
looove
suite,” said Zachary. “Vacant as of an hour ago. The night’s dark suck and push is done. It’s a spang new day. Feed my head and go to bed.”

“Enjoy,” said Vassar, passing Zachary a lump of hash. “Can we, uh, score some sandwiches from upstairs, too? Muffalettas? Is the kitchen open?”

“I’ll order two for you,” said Zachary, examining Vassar’s offering.

“And a six-pack of Regal Lager?” continued Vassar.

“Ned and I don’t drink alcohol,” put in Alan.

“Me either,” added Susan. “Most of the time.”

“Ginger ale for the others, and Regal Lager for me,” amended Vassar. “I’m on a spree.”

“We’ll see,” said Zachary, pocketing his hash. “Still playing with the acousmatics, Susan? Feed my ears. What’s the latest?”

“
Bulldozer At The Dump
,” said Susan in her flat, title-reciting tone. “
Wrong Supermarket.
What It’s Like To Be Dead
.
Orgasm Anyway
.
Godwaters.
I brought them all.”

“This afternoon we’ll jam. Your tape, my sax, and Nebuchadnezzar with his monstrous bass. Maybe Long John on the drums. Welcome to the Chateau La Pompe, y’all.”

Their room was sizable and well-used, with overflowing ashtrays, empty bottles, and an enormous unmade bed. A door opened onto dim garden, faintly green in the burgeoning dawn. Feeling awkward, Alan found a trash can and tidied up. Ned got clean sheets from the cupboard and remade the bed. The food and drinks arrived. The little company recharged their energy.

“Let’s bounce!” said Vassar now, bundling Susan and Alan onto the sheets.

“You too, Ned,” said Susan, wriggling out of her shirt and pants. “Kiss me down low, sailor-boy. I know you want to. Be my slave.”

“Susan, I don’t know if—” began Vassar, his voice suddenly thin and righteous, even though he himself was jiggling Alan’s large, bare breasts.

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” said Susan. “Like Abby says.”

So now they got into it, side by side. Vassar began hungrily pushing into Alan with short, quick thrusts, just like they’d done aboard the
Phos
. Alan reveled in the sense of being so easily penetrated. And Vassar had good staying power. Meanwhile Susan straddled Ned, rocked her crotch against his face for awhile, had an orgasm and switched to riding his cock.

Vassar kept looking over at Susan. He was aroused and somehow wistful. Alan rocked his womanly hips, wanting Vassar’s full attention. Ned began to moan, a series of rising notes. Falling into rough synch, the four of them rushed the summit in unison.
Ka-boom
.

In the charged silence that followed, Susan slid off Ned and began kissing Alan on the mouth, thrusting in her tongue. He rather enjoyed this. Susan’s antic creativity almost made up for her being a woman.

Meanwhile the overheated Ned, empowered by his skug, grew stiff again. He mounted Susan and plunged into her again.

“That’s my wife,” protested Vassar at this point. “Not some hired party girl.”

“Oh hush, Vassar,” said Susan, her voice tight and fast. “I’m into this now. Ned’s the man.” She let out a ragged laugh. “Let’s yodel like we’re in the Alps!”

“I said it’s enough!” snarled Vassar. He sat up and shoved Ned so hard that the taller man rolled off the bed and onto the floor.

“Time to zap you,” said Ned, weary and annoyed. He swarmed across the bed, with his limbs like the bluntly flexing arms of a starfish. He elongated a finger and drilled it into Vassar’s forehead—skugging the man on the spot.

Where Vassar had been all knotted aggression a moment before, now he was languidly draped in a posture of noble ease. Ned withdrew his finger; the hole in Vassar’s brow healed over, and the drops of spilled blood sank into his skin.

Susan, shocked silent by Ned’s assault, now found the breath for a scream. Ned abruptly skugged her as well, hooking his thumb into her temple.

Perhaps Alan could have intervened and stopped Ned. But he didn’t care to. He was too fascinated by watching the situation unfold. And by now he was fully behind the skugs’ cause.

A moment later, Susan had healed over, too. The four of them were in teep contact—that is, their skug-sensitized brains were exchanging subtle phase-modulated electromagnetic waves. Alan focused on Vassar, his rough-cut dreamboat.

Vassar was in his own world, staring at his hands, bending his fingers in odd ways, unsystematically exploring the qualities of his altered form. His inner mind was more oddly organized than Alan had realized before. The man’s flashes of wit emanated not from chains of reason, but from surreal juxtapositions. A pair of images would collide and stick—and that would be the next thing that Vassar said, heedless of any precise meaning. And then somehow a meaning would emerge. He had a great ability to turn off his inner filters. What Vassar thought, Vassar said. And, Alan could now perceive even more clearly than before, Vassar was somewhat unsure of himself. He knew full well that, on the world’s terms, he was an ineffectual wastrel. Far from glorying in this, he nursed an abiding sense of regret.

“Astral radio rates you!” Vassar suddenly exclaimed, as if reacting to Alan’s not entirely laudatory thoughts. Instinctively Vassar now veiled the deeper parts of his mind. “This is wild,” he added, playing the rogue once more. “I like how you’re staring at my dick, Abby.”

“We’ll grow comfortable with each other’s inner ways,” said Alan. It would only be a matter of minutes till Vassar saw down into the sexual secrets in Alan’s mind. For now, Alan turned his attention to Susan, who was gazing at Ned, with a sea of stories in her eyes.

Susan’s mind reminded Alan of when, as a boy, he’d creep into his mother’s closet with its clutter of veils and feminine armatures, a place of mysteries. In Susan’s head, sinuous melodies and sprung rhythms mingled with remembered voices and ambient noises—the slam of a door, a cough, the burbling of a percolator. Everything was in flux and under revision, as in some tootling cartoon landscape where every object joins in a communal jig. Susan was nothing like so blithe as he’d thought. Her psyche housed countless icons of how she had at various times imagined herself to appear from the outside. Her every utterance was a bravura performance to be pondered and stored. Her seeming opinions were to some extent in quote-marks, embroidered on samplers in mock-serious knotty-pine frames. Her actual opinions were harder to discern.

“It’s okay, isn’t it?” Ned was saying to Alan aloud. “That I skugged them?”

“We’re four strange bedfellows,” said Alan. “But, yes, we need a team if we’re to spread the skugs worldwide.”

“Complete global mastery, huh?” said Vassar. “Am I on board? Oh sure. Can I be, uh, the Duke of Jersey City?”

“And I’m the Duchess of Queens,” added Susan. “Royal mutants on the prowl.” Saying this, she twisted the last word into a musical tone, and warbled the sound up and down, her voice velvety. She stretched her arms like boneless tentacles, wrapping the four of them in a group hug. “All friends now? Even though you guys have destroyed our lives?”

“I hope this doesn’t wear off,” said Vassar. “I can stop even pretending to look for a job.”

“We’ll change the world forever,” said Alan.

“Whoah,” said Vassar, still sorting out the fresh scraps of data he was finding in Ned’s and Alan’s brains. “You’re that same loser Ned who was on the ship? And, hold it—the Abby thing was a drag act? I’ve been boning a man?”

“And I’m not even William Burroughs,” said Alan. “I’m Professor Alan Turing from Manchester.”

“You might as well wear your real faces, boys,” said Susan. “Let us see how you look.”

Yes. Alan was dead sick of his imitation games. With a sudden flicker of his will, he was once again wearing his original Alan Turing form—for the first time since Christmas morning in Tangier. And Ned was back to looking like he had on the ship.

“Alan, not Abby,” said Susan, softly “Quite handsome. The timid Prince Charming awakes from his spell. And, Ned, you look even better this way.”