Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (27 page)

“How about we raise Joan from the dead?” I said sourly. “Like Alan here was promising my son.”

“That goes too far,” said Susan, shaking her head. “That’s black magic.”

“Beige magic,” I said. “Eh, Alan? Your mnemnons might turn wizardry into an office job for government flunkies.”

“I’m nobody’s flunky,” said Alan, taking offense. “And, yes, I say we
can
raise Joan.”

I found myself intrigued. “It wouldn’t be any quaint, fusty table-turning scene. Not ye merrie Englande. Think of Aztec scorpion gods and man-eating centipedes. Remember this—I shot Joan in the head and she wants revenge. But if we could pull it off—it’d be a relief to reach the end.”

“Let it come down,” said Naranjo, taking an interest. “Yeah. You boys want to go to Mexico City for a day instead of rushing to Los Alamos like sheep. And I know a little plane we can borrow. This forest ranger has a snow-plowed strip out in the wild here. Ricky can drive us there.”

Across the room, Ricky guffawed. “You’re talking about Ranger Rob the Smuggy Bear. Yeah, man.”

“I’m for it,” said Alan. “It’ll tangle our trail. And we’ll circle back to Los Alamos when we’re done.”

“What’s so special about Los Alamos?” I asked Alan. “They build bombs. Why you want to make that anti-life scene?”

“Alan wants a ray-gun for skugging everyone at once!” said Susan.

“Nuclear telepathy,” I said. “Holocaust enlightenment.”

“These are inaccurate characterizations of my plans,” said Alan stiffly.

“Will the magic ray-gun make a sound?” said Susan, laughing for the first time. “
Uhn, uhn, uhn
. I’d love to tape it.”

“Or tape Alan’s last words while the feds fry him up,” said Naranjo. “
Th-th-th-that’s all folks!
Q
uaaaaaaak!
Hey, enough chatter, let’s get the plane. I’m in the mood to make a pickup down South. If it’s okay with this goddamn parasite that Alan infected me with.”

Getting the plane wasn’t hard—Ricky Red Dog drove them to the ranger’s place, and Alan skugged the fat, hairy man who lived there. Ranger Rob the Smuggy Bear. A nasty old pedophile. It made you feel dirty all over just to look at him all wrapped in oily beaver pelts.

The plane was a Cessna four-seater. Naranjo and Susan sat in front, Alan and me in back. We flew straight through, staying low as crop-dusters, unseen by the pig’s radar eyes, stopping twice at rural airports for food and gas, skugging the people we dealt with. It took a heap of eating to maintain our skugs.

The first airport sold a line of flight and work clothes, and we got ourselves outfitted with rough-trade khakis and leather jackets for when we’d go back North, Susan too. Naturally we cleaned out the cash register as well.

And at the second airport we got all feisty and robbed a nearby bank, scoring a city pay-roll in a cartoon canvas sack, enough pesos to match three thousand dollars US.

I was glad to be flying into Mexico City. I always dug the freedom of the place, the effervescent high-altitude air, and the sky’s pitiless shade of lapis lazuli blue. Goes good with circling vultures.

But by the time we’d parked the plane, it was dusk. The streets were sinister and chaotic—with the special chaos of a dream. Naranjo split off from us to score some weight with his canvas sack of pesos. Skugger or not, the man was determined to work his old routine.

“Look for me when you want to go home,” Naranjo told the others. “Burroughs will know where.”

I guided Alan and Susan to the Bounty Bar, a scurvy dive where Joan and I used to hang. Like wading into a nightmare swamp of stasis. The faces had changed, but the gestalts were the same.

Flush from our crime spree, I got the bartender to rent us an upstairs room unseen. This way we’d have a place to close the deal with Joan’s ghost—if it came to that. We had a few drinks, Scotch for me, Mexican soda-pop for Alan and Susan. The place was filling up. I was very high off the endorphins from my Man within, but it didn’t feel quite harsh enough. I started talking about scoring something real.

“Remember why we’re here,” admonished Susan. “For poor Joan’s memory. We have to help her soul find liberation.” She dragged Alan and me around the room, and we let her. The faces flowed past, and Susan’s voice gabbled at everyone. I’d dialed up my high to where I was just seeing colors and shapes.

At some point, Susan zeroed in on this gaunt, long-haired cat with an air of arrested development. Like a waxwork in a museum of mental aberration. He was sitting alone with an empty, sticky-looking glass and an ashtray full of butts.

“I hear you are muralist, Señor Cortez?” said Susan, in a corny stage accent. She leaned over him and stuck out her tits. “I am composer.”

“What kind of sound?” asked the guy. He didn’t seem Mexican at all.

“Sound like
thees
,” said Susan amping the corn. She dragged a chair back and forth so that it screeched against the floor. She made wild grunting noises at the same time. “Acousmatics,
vato
!” She flopped down in the chair she’d been flinging around and pointed her finger at her chest. “Susan
Verde
. And this skinny
maricon
is my friend Bill.”

“Far out,” said Cortez the loner. “But don’t talk that way. I’m from Texas.”

“The, uh, bartender says you’re doing a mural at the Panteón Americano,” continued Susan, not missing a beat.

Hearing that, I turned off my buzz and started paying attention. The Panteón Americano was where Joan was buried.

“Yeah, babe,” said Cortez with strange, sinister jocularity. “A mural in mosaic. I’m copying a work by Salvador Dali,
Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity
. It’s highly erotic, you dig, but as long as it’s got the word ‘Virgin’ in the title, I figure the archbishop gives me my hall-pass. Even though what the clerics really wanna see is a dying man with an hourglass and a scythe on the floor, and the man’s reaching up ecstatic towards a triangle of white light, it’s like God’s eye, or Mary’s snatch more brighter than a harp of gold. I work at night when nobody’s there to run the Inquisition on me.”

“You, ah, have the key to the main gate?” I asked, getting aboard our hell-bound ride.

“Sure,” said Cortez, looking us over and reaching a conclusion. “And you three want me to let you in, right? Helping freaks set up necro sex parties is by way of being a profitable sideline.” His face folded into an expression of contented depravity. “No problemo.”

“No party,” I said. “We’re here to visit my dead wife.”

“Sure you are, Bill,” said Cortez. “You’ve got a bone to pick.” It was as if he and I knew each other from somewhere, and his words referred to private jokes from our period of intimacy. Like in a lucid dream.

“Let’s do it,” I said, handing Cortez a sheaf of bills.

Rising to his feet, Cortez seemed to float a few inches above the ground. I saw him as an airborne jellyfish, torpid and predatory. “Get me a bottle of tequila, too,” he burbled.

It was quite dark out. Cortez, Alan, Susan, and I walked towards the Panteón Americano cemetery. It wasn’t very far. On the way, we passed some outdoor markets. I felt numb and cold, like a condemned man on his way to the gallows. For his part, Cortez made a side deal with Susan Green, selling her a nasty little pistol that he had in his coat pocket.

“Fuck the pigs,” said Susan, striking a tough pose with her dinky gun. I doubted she’d know how to reload it.

Cortez keyed us through the graveyard gate. Images of Joan’s burial and the cops and the reporters were streaming from the dusky borders of my visual field. Joan’s corpse. Her parents. My brother. The morgue. My lawyer. Joan’s face.

Cortez was was overly loud and animated, swinging his flashlight in reckless loops. Rather than helping us find Joan’s crypt as required, he dragged us to the chapel to show off his bullshit mural—some bobby-soxer girl with a rhino’s horn between the cheeks of her butt, completely vapid. Cortez was executing his work using tiny squares of tile tinted in the properly hideous hues of conventional religious art.

“The tiles are like atoms in matter,” Cortez intoned, warming up to an artist’s brag. “The tiles are like people in a crowd. We’re puzzle pieces, man. Who fits?” He laid his dark hand on Susan’s waist.

I was very edgy by now. My skug’s candy-ass endorphins weren’t softening this scene at all. I made my arm into an anaconda and gave Cortez a bone-rattling shake. “You go back to the gate and don’t let anyone in,” I told him.

“Yeah,” sneered Susan, getting very cocky with her shabby little gun. “Make it snappy or I’ll blast you.”

Cortez picked up a heavy hammer from his bench, glaring at us with bloodshot eyes, fully set for a showdown. Susan really was ready to shoot him. It was like, with her husband murdered, she didn’t care what she did. I liked that.

“Here, here,” interposed Alan. “Let’s be civilized, Mr. Cortez! We did pay you, but—” Alan passed him another bill. “Do take your tequila and sit by the front gate. That’ll suit us very nicely.”

So Cortez reeled back towards the cemetery entrance. I bagged his hammer and a screwdriver as well.

Now that I didn’t have the besotted artist yammering at us, my head cleared and I was able to find Joan’s crypt. I’d walked here in my dreams often enough. It was January, but the Mexican graveyard was lush with poinsettia shrubs and the stylized cypress trees. The moon was peeping out. I could hear the yowling of cats.

With Alan’s help, I pried the plate off Joan’s unlabeled spot in the wall. A wild smell. She’d been dead over three years. I’d feared her ghost would dart from the tomb, more vengeful than ever before. But nothing happened.

“Any bit of tissue will do,” said Alan, bustling at my side. He reached bare-handed into the funerary niche, his arm deep in the dark. A madman. “I’m touching her,” he reported, and made an abrupt, twisting motion, as if snapping desiccated sinews.

Alan displayed his prize to me, cradling it in the palm of his hand, dramatically lit by a moonbeam. A withered finger, with dried skin and strands of dark flesh. It bore a fingernail. Alan remanded it to my custody.

“Joan,” I said, my voice weak and strange. I clutched the finger tight in my hand.

We blew through the gate without talking to Cortez at all. Endless traffic clogged the night street.

“Are you all right?” Susan Green asked me.

“I’m imagining Joan trailing back from her finger,” I said. “Bobbing in the air like a lifesize balloon.”

“We’ll go to that room you rented?” coaxed Susan.

“Right-o,” put in Alan. “Above the Bounty Bar. But we need some
material
.”

We were nearing the all-night market that we’d passed on the way to the graveyard. Alan trotted over to one of the butchers there and—how horrible—purchased a hundred-pound skinned calf, draping the creature across his shoulders. Uncut protein for Joan.

I’d asked the Bounty bartender for any old room. But—I could hear the unerring ping of synchronicity—he’d given us the very room in which I’d shot Joan in 1951.

It seemed the room was currently in use as a short-term flop for whores and johns. Where once the lodging had held books, rugs, and a circle of friends, it was now reduced to a bed, a chair, a light bulb, a glass by the sink. Alan threw the slaughtered veal calf onto the dirty floor. A church bell tolled midnight. I closed the door to the hall. The intense silence peculiar to Mexico engulfed us—a vibrating, soundless hum.

Moving in a trance, I spawned a skug off my stomach and laid it upon the veal calf. The bony flesh shuddered and took on life, forming itself into a featureless loaf. By way of orienting itself, the skug carpeted itself with tiny snail antennae, each stalk with a black bead eye at its time. The thousand eyes watched me and made way as I laid Joan’s finger down in their midst. I was like a bishop installing a reliquary bone.

To promote the transformation, Susan Green sang to the skug, running her odd voice up and down an archaic scale. Susan was weirdly vibrating her throat to add dark, low overtones. And now, guided by the genetic codes in the dead finger, the skug morphed into a crude human form, then tightened into a replica of the final, spindly Joan.

Not daring to think too deeply about what I was doing, I set to work on programming the simulacrum’s mind via teep. I was in effect reconstructing Joan’s personality from my memories. I remembered the early days—Joan and I camping on her vaguely oriental bed with coffee and benzedrine, two youths chattering about decadence and nothingness, Joan quite alluring in her silks and bandannas. I thought of Joan catching a June bug outside our shack in Louisiana, and tying a thread to the bumbling bug’s foot—Joan called it the beetle’s hoof, and she flew the beetle in a circle around our heads. I thought of more and more.

Even in the last days in Mexico City, Joan had kept her slant humor, seeing adventure in our squalor. The week before she died, she’d perched herself atop a pile of six mattresses we’d found in the street—and she’d called herself the princess and the pea. A phrase from Allen Ginsberg’s
in memoriam
poem popped into my mind.