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... Far side of the world's mirror, moving into the past with Hauser and O'Brien... clawing at a not-yet of Telepathic Bureaucracies, Time Monopolies, Control Drugs, Heavy Fluid Addicts: "I thought of that three hundred years ago." "Your plan was unworkable then and useless now. ...Like Da Vinci's Hying machine plans...." ATROPHIED PREFACE WOULDN'T YOU? Why all this waste paper getting The People from one place to another? Perhaps to spare The Reader stress of sudden space shifts and keep him Gentle? And so a ticket is bought, a taxi called, a plane boarded. We are allowed a glimpse into the warm peach-lined cave as She (the airline hostess, of course) leans over us to murmur of chewing gum, dramamine, even nembutal. "Talk paregoric, Sweet Thing, and I will hear." I am not American Express.... If one of my people is seen in New York walking around in citizen clothes and next sentence Timbuktu putting down lad talk on a gazelle-eyed youth, we may assume that he ( the party non-resident of Timbuktu) transported himself there by the usual methods of communication.. Lee The Agent (a double-four-eight-sixteen) is taking the junk cure... space time trip portentously familiar as junk meet corners to the addict... cures past and future shuttle pictures through 'his spectral substance vibrating in silent winds of accelerated Time.... Pick a shot.... Any Shot.... Formal knuckle biting, floor rolling shots in a precinct cell.... "Feel like a shot of Heroin, Bill? Haw Haw Haw." Tentative half impressions that dissolve in light . pockets of rotten ectoplasm swept out by an old junky coughing and spitting in the sick morning.. Old violet brown photos that curl and crack like mud in the sun: Panama City... Bill Gains putting down the paregoric con on a Chinese druggist. "I've got these racing dogs... pedigree greyhounds. . All sick with the dysentery... tropical climate . the shits... you sabe shit?... My Whippets Are Dying...." He screamed.... His eyes lit up with blue fire.... The flame went out... smell of burning metal.... "Administer with an eye dropper. Wouldn't you?... Menstrual cramps... my wife... Kotex... Aged mother... Piles .. raw... bleeding..." He nodded out against the counter.... The druggist took a tooth-pick out of his mouth and looked at the end of it and shook his head.... Gains and Lee burned down the Republic of Panama from David to Darien on paregoric.... They Hew apart with a shlupping sound.... Junkies tend to run together into one body.... You have to be careful especially in hot places.... Gains back to Mexico City.... Desperate skeleton grin of chronic junk lack glazed over with codeine and goof balls... cigarette holes in his bathrobe... coffee stains on the floor... smoky kerosene stove... rusty orange flame... The Embassy would give no details other than place of burial in the American Cemetery.... And Lee back to sex and pain and time and Yage, bitter Soul Vine of the Amazon.... I recall once after an overdose of Majoun (this is Cannabis dried and finely powdered to consistency of green powdered sugar and mixed with some confection or other usually tasting like gritty plum pudding, but the choice of confection is arbitrary. |
