“As if he had nothing to do but wait for me,” thought Carl. . .
The office was completely silent, and filled with milky light. The doctor shook Carl’s hand, keeping his eyes on the young man’s chest. . .
” I’ve seen this man before,” Carl thought. . . “But where?”
He sat down and crossed his legs. He glanced at an ashtray on the desk and lit a cigarette. . . He turned to the doctor a steady inquiring gaze in which there was more than a touch of insolence.
The doctor seemed embarrassed. . . He fidgeted and coughed. . . and fumbled with papers. . .
” Hurumph,” he said finally. . . ” Your name is Carl Peterson I believe. . .” His glasses slid down into his nose in parody of the academic manner. . .Carl nodded silently. . . The doctor did not look at him but seemed none the less to register the acknowledgement. . . He pushed his glasses back into place with one finger and opened a file on the white enamelled desk.
“Mmmmmmmmmm. Carl Peterson,” he repeated the name caressingly; pursed his lips and nodded several times. He spoke again abruptly: ” You know of course that we are don’t succeed.” His voice trailed off thin and tenuous. He put a hand to his forehead. ” To adjust the state-simply a tool-to the needs of each individual citizen.” His voice boomed out so unexpectedly deep and loud that Carl started. “That is the only function of the state as we see it. Our knowledge. . . incomplete, of course,” he made a slight gesture of deprecation. . .
” For example. . .for example . . .take the matter of uh

THE EXAMINATION

Carl Peterson found a postcard in his box requesting him to report for a ten o’clock appointment with Doctor Benway in the Ministry of Mental Hygiene and Prophylaxis. . . .
“What on earth could they want with me?” he thought irritably. . . . “A mistake most likely.” But he knew they didn’t make mistakes. . . . Certainly not mistakes of identity. . . .
It would not have occurred to Carl to disregard the appointment even though failure to appear entailed no penalty. . . . Freeland was a welfare state. If a citizen
wanted anything from a load of bone meal to a sexual partner some department was ready to offer effective aid. The threat implicit in this enveloping benevolence
stifled the concept of rebellion. . .. Carl walked through the Town Hall Square. . . .
Nickel nudes sixty feet high with brass genitals soaped
themselves under gleaming showers. . .. The Town Hall cupola, of glass brick and copper crashed into the sky.
Carl stared back at a homosexual American tourist who dropped his eyes and fumbled with the light filters of his Leica. . ..
Carl entered the steel enamel labyrinth of the Ministry, strode to the information desk . . . and presented his card.
“Fifth floor . . . Room twenty-six . . . ”
In room twenty-six a nurse looked at him with cold undersea eyes.
“Doctor Benway is expecting you,” she said smiling.
“Go right in.

“Do you suggest there is something illegitimate in this operation?”
“Not illegitimate exactly. But shoddy. Definitely shoddy.”
“Oh go back to your Island before it falls! We knew you when you were peddling your purple ass in the Plaza pissoirs for five pesetas.”
“And not many takers either,” Leif put in. He pronounced it ither. This reference to his Island origin was more than the Expeditor could stand. . . . He was drawing himself up, mobilizing his most frigid impersonation of an English aristocrat, preparing to deliver an icy, clipped “crusher,” but instead, a whining, whimpering, kicked dog snarl broke from his mouth. His presurgery face emerged in an arc-light of incandescent hate. . . .
He began to spit curses in the hideous, strangled gutturals of the Island dialect.
The Islanders all profess ignorance of the dialect or flatly deny its existence. “We are Breetish,” they say. “We don’t got no bloody dealect.”
Froth gathered at the corners of the Expeditor’s mouth. He was spitting little balls of saliva like pieces of cotton. The stench of spiritual vileness hung in the
airs about him like a green cloud. Marvie and Leif fell back twittering in alarm.
‘He’s gone m ad,” Marvie gasped. “Let’s get out of here.” Hand in hand they skip away into the mist that covers the Zone in the winter months like a cold Turkish Bath.

are such that few Presidents live out their full term of office, usually dying of a broken spirit after a year or two. The Expeditor had once been President and served the full five years of his term. Subsequently he changed his name and underwent plastic surgery, to blot out,
as far as possible, the memory of his disgrace.
“Yes of course . . . we’ll pay you,” Marvie was saying to the Expeditor.
“But take it easy. It may be a little while yet. . . .”
“Take it easy! A little w hile!. . . Listen.”
“Yes I know it all. The finance company is repossessing your wife’s artificial kidney. . . . They are evicting your grandmother from her iron lung.”
“That’s in rather bad taste, old boy.. . . Frankly I wish I had never involved myself in this uh matter. That bloody grease has too much carbolic in it. I was down
to customs one day last week. Stuck a broom handle into a drum of it, and the grease ate the end off straight away. Besides, the stink is enough to knock a man on
his bloody ass. You should take a walk down by the port.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” Marvie screeched. It is a mark of caste in the Zone never to touch or even go near what you are selling. To do so gives rise to suspicion of retailing, that is of being a common peddler. A good part of the merchandise in the Zone is sold through
street peddlers.
“Why do you tell me all this? It’s too sordid! Let the retailers worry about it.”
“Oh it’s all very well for you chaps, you can scud out
from under. But I have a reputation to maintain. . . . There’ll be a spot of bother about this.”

And everyone is happy about it? . . . Is there anyone who isn’t happy about it?”
Soldiers in jeeps sweep mounted machine-guns back and forth across the crowd with a slow, searching movement.
“Everybody happy. Well that’s fine.” He turns jovially to the prostrate President. “I’ll keep your papers in case I get caught short. Haw Haw Haw.” His loud,
metallic laugh rings out across the dump, and the crowd laughs with him under the searching guns.
The forms of democracy are scrupulously enforced on the Island. There is a Senate and a Congress who carry on endless sessions discussing garbage disposal
and outhouse inspection, the only two questions over which they have jurisdiction. For a brief period in the mid-nineteenth century, they had been allowed to control the dept, of Baboon Maintenance but this privilege had been withdrawn owing to absenteeism in the
Senate.
The purple-assed Tripoli baboons had been brought to the Island by pirates in the 17th century. There was a legend that when the baboons left the Island it would
fall. To whom or in what way is not specified, and it is a capital offense to kill a baboon, though the noxious behaviour of these animals harries the citizens almost
beyond endurance. Occasionally someone goes berserk, kills several baboons and himself.
The post of President is always forced on some particularly noxious and unpopular citizen. To be elected President is the greatest misfortune and disgrace that can befall an Islander. The humiliations and ignominy

removed his appendix with a rusty can opener and a
pair of tin snips (he considered the germ theory “a
nonsense.”) Flushed with success he then began snipping and cutting out everything in sight: “The human body is filled up vit unnecessitated parts. You can get
by vit one kidney. Vy have two? Yes dot is a kidney. . . .
The inside parts should not be so close in together crowded. They need lebensraum like the Vaterland.” The Expeditor had not yet been paid, and Marvie was faced by the prospect of stalling him for eleven months until the check cleared. The Expeditor was said to have been bom on the Ferry between the Zone and the Island. His profession was to expedite the delivery of merchandise. No one knew for sure whether his services were of any use or not, and to mention his name always precipitated an argument. Cases were cited to
prove his miraculous efficiency and utter worthlessness.
The Island was a British Military and Naval station directly opposite the Zone. England holds the Island on yearly rent-free lease, and every year the lease and
permit of residence is formally renewed.
The entire population turns out, attendance is compulsory, and gathers at the municipal dump. The President of the Island is required by custom to crawl across the garbage
on his stomach and deliver the Permit of Residence and Renewal of the Lease, signed by every citizen of the Island, to The Resident Governor who stands resplendent in dress uniform. The Governor takes the permit and shoves it into his coat pocket:
“Well,” he says with a tight smile, “so you’ve decided to let us stay another year have you? Very good of you.

in a crew-cut, college boy way, but his face had sagged
and formed lumps under the chin like melting paraffin.
He was getting heavy around the hips.
Leif The Unlucky was a tall, thin Norwegian, with a patch over one eye, his face congealed in a permanent, ingratiating smirk. Behind him lay an epic saga of unsuccessful enterprises. He had failed at raising frogs, chinchilla, Siamese fighting fish, rami and culture pearls.
He had attempted, variously and without success, to promote a Love Bird Two-in-a-Coffin Cemetery, to comer the condom market during the rubber shortage,
to run a mail order whore house, to issue penicillin as a patent medicine. He had followed disastrous betting systems in the casinos of Europe and the race tracks
of the U.S. His reverses in business were matched by the incredible mischances of his personal life. His front teeth had been stomped out by bestial American sailors
in Brooklyn. Vultures had eaten out an eve when he drank a pint of paregoric and passed out in a Panama City park. He had been trapped between floors in an
elevator for five days with an oil-burning junk habit and sustained an attack of D.T.s while stowing away in a foot locker. Then there was the time he collapsed with
strangulated intestines, perforated ulcers and peritonitis in Cairo and the hospital was so crowded they bedded him in the latrine, and the Greek surgeon goofed and
sewed up a five monkey in him, and he was gangfucked by the Arab attendants, and one of the orderlies stole the penicillin substituting Saniflush; and the time he got clap in his ass and a self-righteous English doctor cured him with an enema of hot, sulphuric acid, and
the German practitioner of Technological Medicine who

“Bawstard! Tou’ll never see the bill of lading until my cut is deposited in escrow.”
“Well, might as well kiss and make up. There’s nothing mean or petty about me.”
They shake hands without without enthusiasm and peack each other on the cheek. The deal drags on for months.They engage the services of an Expeditor. Finally Marvie emerges with a check for 42 Turkestan kurds drawn on an anonymous bank in South America, to clear through Amsterdam, a procedure that will take eleven months more or less.
Now he can relax in the cafès of The Plaza. He shows a photostatic copy of the check. He would never show the original of course, lest some envios citizen spit ink eradicator on the signature or otherwise mutilate the check.

Everyone asks him to buy drinks and celebrate, but
he laughs jovially and says, “Fact is I can’t afford to buy
myself a drink. I already spent every kurd of it buying
Penstrep for Ali’s clap. He’s down with it fore and aft
again. I came near kicking the little bastard right
through the wall into the next bed. But you all know
what a sentimental old thing I am.”
Marvie does buy himself a shot glass of beer, squeezing a blackened coin out of his fly onto the table. “Keep the change.” The waiter sweeps the coin into a dust pan, he spits on the table and walks away.
“Sore head! He’s envious of my check.”
Marvie had been in Interzone since “the year before one” as he put it. He had been retired from some unspecified position in the State Dept, “for the good of the service.” Obviously he had once been very good looking

“Hollywood, Siam.”
“Well American style .”
“What’s the commission? . . . The commission. . . . The Commission.”
“Yes, nugget, a shipload of K.Y. made of genuine whale dreck in the South Atlantic at present quarantined by the Board of Health in Tierra del Fuego. The commission, my dear! If we can pull this off we’ll be in clover.” (Whale dreck is reject material that accumulates in the process of cutting up a whale and cooking it down. A horrible, fishy mess you can smell for miles. No one has found any use for it.)
Interzone Imports Unlimited, which consists of Marvie and Leif The Unlucky, had latched onto the K.Y. deal. In fact they specialize in pharmaceuticals and run a 24-hour Pro station, six ways coverage fore and aft, as a side line. ( Six separate venereal diseases have
been identified to dale.) They plunge into the deal. They form unmentionable
services for a spastic Greek shipping agent, and one entire shift of Customs inspectors. The two partners fall out and finally denounce each other in the Embassy
where they are referred to the We Don’t Want To Hear About It Department, and eased out a back door into a shit-strewn vacant lot, where vultures fight over fish heads. They flail at each other hysterically.
“You’re trying to fuck me out of my commission!”
“Your commission! Who smelled out this good thing in the first place?”
“But I have the bill of lading.”
“Monster! But the check will be made out in my name.”

one can say for sure he didn’t make a pass at Aracknid’s unappetizing person.
Aracknid is a worthless chauffer, barely able to drive. On one occasion he ran down a pregnant woman in from the mountains with a load of charcoal on her back, and she miscarriaged a bloody,dead baby in the street , and Keif got out and sat on the curb stirring the blood with a stick while the police questioned Aracknid and finally arrested the woan for a violation of the Sanitary code.
Aracknid is a gimly unattractive young man with a long face of a strange, slate-blue color. He has a big nose and great yellow teeth like a horse. Anybody can find an attractive chauffeur, ut only Andrew Keif could have found Arcknid; Keif is brilliant, decadent young novelist who lives in a remodeled pissoir in the red light district of the Native Quarter.
The Zone is a single, vast building. The rooms are made of a plastic cement that bulges to accomodate people, but when too many crowd into one room there is a soft plop and someone squeezes through the wall right into the next house, the next bed that is, since the rooms are mostly bed where the business of the Zone is transacted . A hum of sex and commerce shakes the Zone like a vast hive:
“Two thirds of one percents. I won’t budge from that figure, not even for my bumpkins.”
But where are the bills of lading,lover?”
“Not where you’re looking pet.That’s too obvious.”
“A bale of levies with built-in falsie baskets.Made in Hollywood.”