|
Expeditions leave for unknown places with unknown purposes. Strangers arrive on rafts of old packing crates tied together with rotten rope, they stagger in out of the jungle their eyes swollen shut from insect bites, they come down the mountain trails on cracked bleed- ing feet through the dusty windy outskirts of the city, where people defecate in rows along adobe walls and vultures fight over fish heads. They drop down into parks in patched parachutes,... They are escorted by a drunken cop to register in a vast public lavatory. The data taken down is put on pegs to be used as toilet paper. Cooking smells of all countries hang over the City, a haze of opium, hashish, the resinous red smoke of Yage, smell of the jungle and salt water and the rotting river and dried excrement and sweat and genitals. High mountain flutes, jazz and bebop, one-stringed Mongol instruments, gypsy xylophones, African drums, Arab bagpipes... The City is visited by epidemics of violence, and the untended dead are eaten by vultures in the streets. Albinos blink in the sun. Boys sit in trees, languidly masturbate. People eaten by unknown diseases watch the passerby with evil, knowing eyes. In the City Market is the Meet Cafe. Followers of ob- solete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up Har- maline, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland para- noid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging un- speakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spec- tral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang- utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensi- tized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw mate- rials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, mala- dies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war. |
