s said to be unspeakably toothsome. . . . An Interzone coroner known as Autopsy Ahmed made a fortune traf­ficking The Worm.The French school is opposite my window and I dig the boys with my eight-power field glasses. . . . So close I could reach out and touch them. . . . They wear shorts. . . . I can see the goose-pimples on their legs in the cold Spring morning. . . . I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, tom with disembodied lust.Did I ever tell you about the time Marv and me pay two Arab kids sixty cents to watch them screw each other? So I ask Marv, “Do you think they will do it?”And he says, “I think so. They are hungry.”And I say, “That’s the way I like to see them.”Makes me feel sorta like a dirty old man but, “Son cosas de la vida,” as Soberba de la Flor said when the fuzz upbraids him for blasting this cunt and taking the dead body to the Bar O Motel and fucking it. . . .“She play hard to get already,” he say . . . “I don’t hafta take that sound.” (Soberba de la Flor was a Mexican criminal convict of several rather pointless murders.)The lavatory has been locked for three hours solid. . . . I think they are using it for an operating room. . . .Nurse: “I can’t find her pulse, doctor.”Dr. Benway: “Maybe she got it up her snatch ina finger stall.”Nurse: “Adrenalin, doctor?”Dr. Benway: “The night porter shot it all up for kicks.” He looks around and picks up one of those

to do and saves all his pay to buy fine clothes and changed three times a day in front of an enourmous magnyfining mirror. He has a Latin handsome-smooth face with a pencil line  moustache, small balck eyes, blank and greedy, undreaming insect eyes. When I get to the frontier Guard rushes out of his casita, a mirror in a wooden frame slung around his neck. He is trying to get the mirror off his neck. . . . This has never happened before, that anyone reached the frontier. The Guard has injuried his larynx taking off the mirror frame. . . He has lost his voice. . . He opens his mouth, you can see the tongue jumping around inside. The smooth blank young face and the open mouth with the tongue moving inside are incredibly hideous. The Guard holds up his hand. His whole body jerks in a convulsive negation. I go over and unhook the chain across the road. It falls with a clank of metal stone. I walk throug. The Guard stands there  in the mist looking after me. Then he hooks the chain uo again, goes back into the casita and starts plucking at his moustache.

They just bring so-called lunch. . . A hard-boiled egg with the shell off revealing an object like I never seen  it before. . . A very small egg of a yellow-brown color. . . Perhaps laid by a duck-billed platypus. The orange contained a huge worm and very lillte else. . . He  really got there firstest with the mostest. . . In Egypt is a worm gets into your kidneys and grows to an enormous size. Ultimately the kidney is just a thin shell around the worm. Intrepid gourmets esteem the flesh of The worm above all other delicacies. It

Aleppo? . . . Slunk traffickers from Buenos Aires? Il­legal diamond buyers from Johannesburg? . . . Slave traders from Somaliland? Collaborators at the very least…Continual dreams of junk: I am looking for a poppy field. . . . Moonshiners in black Stetsons direct me to a Near East cafe. . . . One of the waiters is a connection for Yugoslav opium….Buy a packet of heroin from a Malay Lesbian in white belted trenchcoat. . . . I cop the paper in Tibetan section of a museum. She keeps trying to steal it back. … I am looking for a place to fix. …The critical point of withdrawal is not the early phase of acute sickness, but the final step free from the medium of junk. . . .There is a nightmare interlude of cellular panic, life suspended between two wavs of being. . . . At this point the longing for junk concen­trates in a last, all-out yen, and seems to gain a dream power: circumstances put junk in your way. . . . You meet an old-time Schmecker, a larcenous hospital at­tendant, a writing croaker. …l:| A guard in a uniform of human skin, black buck I jacket with carious yellow teeth buttons, an elastic pullover shirt in burnished Indian copper, adolescent- ; nordic-sun-tan slacks, sandals from calloused foot soles of young Malayan farmer, an ash-brown scarf knotted ‘ and tucked in the shirt. (Ash-brown is a color like 5 grey under brown skin. You sometimes find it in mixed I Negro and white stock, the mixture did not come off I and the colors separated out like oil on water. . . .) ft The Guard is a sharp dresser, since he has nothing

Withdrawal nightmares. A mirror-lined cafè.Empty. . . Waiting for something . . . A man appears in a side door . . . A slight,short arab dressed in a brown jellaba with grey beard and grey face. . .There is a pithcer in my hand. . .Seized by a convulsion of urgency,I throw it in his face. . . Every one looks like a drug addict. . . Take a little walk in the hospital patio. . . In my absence someone has used my scissors, they are stained with some sticky, red brown gick. . . No doubt that little bitch of a criada trimming her rag. Horrible looking Europeans clutter up the stairs, in­tercept the nurse when I need my medicine, empty piss into the basin when I am washing, occupy the toilet for hours on end—probably fishing for a finger stall of diamonds they have stached up their asshole. . . .In fact the whole clan of Europeans has moved in next to me. . . .The old mother is having an operation, and her daughter move right in to see the old gash receive proper service. Strange visitors, presumably relatives . . . One of them wears as glasses those gad­gets jewellers screw into their eyes to examine stones. . . . Probably a diamond-cutter on the skids .. . The man who loused up the Throckmorton Diamond and was drummed out of the industry. . . . All these jewelers standing around the Diamond in their frock coats, wait­ing on The Man. An error of one thousandth of an inch ruins the rock complete and they have to import this character special from Amsterdam to do the job. . . . So he reels in dead drunk with a huge air hammer and pounds the diamond to dust….I don’t check these citizens. . . . Dope peddlers from

supersonic speed, their flexible skulls flapping in black j winds of insect agony.The Dream Police disintegrate in globs of rotten ectoplasm swept away by an old junky, coughing and spitting in the sick morning. The Mugwump Man comes with alabaster jars of fluid and the Reptiles get smoothed out.The air is once again still and clear as glycerine.The Sailor spotted his Reptile. He drifted over and ordered a green syrup. The Reptile had a little, round disk mouth of brown gristle, expressionless green eves almost covered by a thin membrane of eyelid. The Sailor waited an hour before the creature picked up his presence.“Any eggs for Fats?” he asked, his words stirring through the Reptile’s fan hairs.It took two hours for the Reptile to raise three pink ; transparent fingers covered with black fuzz.» Several Meat Eaters lay in vomit, too weak to move, i (The Black Meat is like a tainted cheese, overpower- i ingly delicious and nauseating so that the eaters eat s and vomit and eat again until they fall exhausted.)5 A painted youth slithered in and seized one of the e great black claws sending the sweet, sick smell curling e through the cafe.

HOSPITAL

Disintoxication Notes. Paranoia of early withdrawal. . . . Everything looks blue. . . . Flesh dead, doughy, toneless.

of exquisite dreams and nostalgias tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, drinkers of the Heavy Fluid sealed in translucent amber of dreams. The Meet Cafè occupies one side of the Plaza, a maze of kitchens, restaurants, sleeping cubicles, perilous iron balconies and basements opening into the underground baths. On stools covered in a white satin sit naked Mugwumps sucking translucent, colored syrups through alabaster straw. Mugwumps have no liver and nourish themselves exclusively on sweets. Thin, purple-blue lips cover a razor-sharp beack of black bone with witch they frequently tear each other to shreds in fights over clients. These creatures secrete an addicting fluid from theri erect penises which prolongs life by slowing metabolism.(In fact all longevity agents have proved addicting in exact ratio to their effectiveness in prolonging life ). Addicts of Mugwump fluid are known as reptiles. A number of these flow over chairs with their flexible bones and black-pink flesh. A fan of green cartilage covered with hollow, erectile hairs through wich the Reptiles absorb the fluid sprouts from behind each ear. The fans, which move from time to time touched by invisible currents, serve also some form of communication known only to Reptiles.During the biennial Panics when the raw, pealed Dream Police storm the City, the Mugwumps take refuge in the deepest crevices of the wall sealing them­selves in clay cubicles and remain for weeks in bio­stasis. In those days of grey terror the Reptiles dart about faster and faster, scream past each other at

into focus unbearabaly sharp and clear,burning yellow brand of junk searing the grey haunch of a milion screaming junkies. ” This will  last a month,” he decided, consulting an invisible mirror. All streets of the City slope down between deepending canyons to a vast, kidney-shaped plaza full of darkness.Walls of street and plaza are perforated by dwelling cubicles and cafès, some a few feet deep, others extending out of  sight in network of rooms and corridors. At all levels criss-cross of bridges, cat walks, cable cars. Catatonic youths dressed as a women in growns of burlap and rotten rags, faces heavily and crudely painted in bright colors over a strata of beatings, arabesques of broken,suppurating scars to the pearly bone, push against the passer-by in silent clinging insistence. Traffickers in the Black Meat, flesh of the giant acquatic black centipede-sometimes attaining a lenght of six feet- found in a lane of black rocks and iridescent,brown lagoons,exhibit paralyzed crustaceans in camouflage pockets of the Plaza visible only to the Meat Eaters.Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades, doodling  in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, black  marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic  sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of  infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players,  servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of  the spirit, officials of unconstituted police states, brokers

by the urine of milion fairies, deserted weed-grown privies with a musty smell of shit turning back to the soil, erect wooden phallus on the grave of dying peoples plaintive as leaves in the wind, across the great brown river where whole trees float with green snakes in the branches and sad-eyed lemurs watch the shore out over a vast plain (vulture wings husk in the dry air). The way is strewn with broken condoms and empty H caps and K.Y. tubes squeezed dry as bone meal in the sum­mer sun.“My furniture.” The commandante’s face burned like metal in the flash bulb of urgency. His eyes went out. A whiff of ozone drifted through the room. The “novia” muttered over her candles and altars in one comer.“It is all Trak . . . modem, excellent . . .” he is nod­ding idiotically and drooling. A yellow cat pulls at Carl’s pant leg and runs onto a concrete balcony. Clouds drift by.“I could get back my deposit. Start me a little busi­ness someplace.” He nods and smiles like a mechanical toy.“Joselito!!!” Boys look up from street ball games, bull rings and bicycle races as the name whistles by and slowly fades away.“Joselito! . . . Paco! . . . Pepe! . . . Enrique! . . .” The plaintive bov cries drift in on the warm night. The Trak sign stirs like a nocturnal beast, and bursts into blue flame