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He has sacrificed all control, and is dependent as an unborn child. The Oblique Addict suffers a whole spectrum of subjective horror, silent protoplasmic frenzy, hideous agony of the bones. Tensions build up, pure energy without emo- tional content finally tears through the body throwing him about like a man in contact with high tension wires. If his charge connection is cut off cold, the Oblique Addict falls into such violent electric convul- sions that his bones shake loose, and he dies with the skeleton straining to climb out of his unendurable flesh and run in a straight line to the nearest cemetery. The relation between an O.A. (Oblique Addict) and his R.C. (Recharge Connection) is so intense that they can only endure each other's company for brief and infrequent intervals -- I mean aside from recharge meets, when all personal contact is eclipsed by the recharge process. Reading the paper.... Something about a triple mur- der in the rue de la Merde, Paris: "An adjusting of scores."...I keep slipping away.... "The police have identified the author... Pepe El Culito... The Little Ass Hole, an affectionate diminutive." Does it really say that?... I try to focus the words... they separate in meaningless mosaic.... LAZARUS GO HOME Fumbling through faded tape at the pick up frontier, a languid grey area of hiatus miasmic with yawns and gaping goof holes, Lee found out that the young junky standing there in his room at 10 A.M. Was back from two months skin diving in Corsica and off the junk.... "Here to show off his new body," Lee decided with a shudder of morning junk sickness. He knew that he was seeing -- ah yes Miguel thank you -- three months back sitting in the Metropole nodded out over a stale yellow eclair that would poison a cat two hours later, decided that the effort involved in seeing Miguel at all 10 A.M. was enough without the intolerable chore of correcting an error -- ("what is this a fucking farm?") which would also entail current picture of Miguel in much used areas like some great, inconvenient beast of an object on top in the suitcase. "You look marvelous," Lee said, wiping away the more obvious signs of distaste with a sloppy, casual napkin, seeing the grey ooze of junk in Miguel's face, studying patterns of shabbiness as if man and clothes had moved for years through back alleys of time with never a space station to tidy up. |
