Read Online Naked Lunch by William Burroughs - Free Book Online Page B

sign dead and sinister against the sky, waiting for darkness. The sanitarium was evidently built on a great limestone promontory, over which flowering trees and vine tendrils broke in waves. The smell of flowers was heavy in theair.
    The commandante sat at a long trestle under a vine trellis. He was doing absolutely nothing. He took the letter that Carl handed him and whispered through it, reading his lips with the left hand. He stuck the letter on a spike over a toilet. He began transcribing from a ledger full of numbers. He wrote on and on.
    Broken images exploded softly in Carl’s head, and he was moving out of himselfin a silent swoop. Clear and sharp from a great distance he saw himself sitting in a lunchroom. Overdose of H. His old lady shaking him and holding hot coffee under his nose.
    Outside an old junky in Santa Claus suit selling Christmas seals. ‘Fight tuberculosis, folks,’ he whispers in his disembodied, junky voice. Salvation Army choir of sincere,homosexual football coaches sings: ‘In the SweetBye and Bye.’
    Carl drifted back into his body, an earthbound junk ghost.
    ‘I could bribe him, of course.’
    The commandante taps the table with one finger and hums ‘Coming Through the Rye.’ Far away, then urgently near like a foghorn a split second before the grinding crash.
    Carl pulled a note half out of his trouser pocket.… The commandante was standing by a vast panel of lockers and depositboxes. He looked at Carl, sick animal eyes gone out dying inside, hopeless fear reflecting the face of death. In the smell of flowers a note half out of his pocket, the weakness hit Carl, shutting off his breath, stopping his blood. He was in a great cone spinning down to a black point.
    ‘Chemical therapy?’ The scream shot out of his flesh through empty locker rooms and barracks, musty resorthotels, and spectral, coughing corridors of T.B. sanitariums, the muttering, hawking, grey dishwater smell of flophouses and Old Men’s Homes, great, dusty custom sheds and warehouses, through broken porticoes and smeared arabesques, iron urinals worn paper thin by the urine of a million fairies, deserted weed-grown privies with a musty smell of shit turning back to the soil, erect wooden phallus onthe grave of dying peoples plaintive as leaves in the wind, across the great brown river where the 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’sface 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 corner.
    ‘It is all Trak … modern, 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 littlebusiness 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 boy cries drift in on the warm night. The Trak sign stirs like a nocturnal beast, and bursts into blue flame.
    The Black Meat
    ‘We friends, yes?’
    Theshoe shine boy put on his hustling smile and looked up into the Sailor’s dead, undersea eyes, eyes without a trace of warmth or lust or hate or any feeling the boy had ever experienced in himself or seen in another, at once cold and intense, impersonal and predatory.
    The sailor leaned forward and put a finger on the boy’s inner arm at the elbow. He spoke in his dead, junky whisper.
    ‘With veinslike that, Kid, I’d have myself a time!’
    He laughed, black insect laughter that seemed to serve some obscure function