Cities of the Red Night

At two o'clock O'Brien called: "Well, I think we've found your head for you—or what's left of it. Can't be sure until we check the dental work...."

"Where did you find it?"

"At the airport. Crate labeled MACHINE PARTS sent by air freight and addressed to a broker in Lima, Peru, to be picked up by Juan Mateos. The crate was being loaded onto the plane when the workmen accidentally dropped it and it split open. It was airtight and strongly built ... it just happened to fall right on a seam. They tell me the stink was enough to knock a man down. One of puked all over the crate."

"When did this happen?"

"At noon. We sent along a duplicate crate and contacted the Lima police to tail anyone who calls for it."

"Was the crate lined with magnetized iron?"

"Yes. We duplicated that too. The Lima police have two men planted in the customs broker's to watch anyone who calls for other crates in case he tries to check out the head crate in any way. A compass would tell him it is magnetized. We've got a wax head inside, so even with X-ray equipment ..."

"Very good. You seem to have thought of everything. But just one more point: an object like that gives out very strong psychic vibrations that a sensitive could pick up on.... You might tell them to watch especially for an adolescent who comes for another crate and touches of brushes up against the head crate."

"That's already been done. Captain Graywood told them to watch for an errand boy who might brush against the crate, especially with his ass or crotch."

O'Brien said this in a matter-of-fact voice, as if it were routine procedure. Dimitri, Graywood, and now O'Brien. Who the hell were these so-called cops?

Firecrackers

There are about thirty boys staying in Skipper Nordenholz's "Palace," as we call it. The number fluctuates from day to day as people come in from other settlements or set out on various missions. Mr. Thomas has taken The Great White and sailed with a small crew. His assignment is, as always, to recruit people with special skills.

The boys cook in the communal kitchen or on the patio. Here the Arab boys roast meat over charcoal fires and bake bread in clay ovens. Food is plentiful. We set traps for fish in the river and in the bay. A short walk into the jungle and I can shoot wild turkey and grouse and occasionally a deer. River fish can also be kept in the fishpond until needed.

We are all up at dawn for a breakfast of eggs, fruit, and bread. Then after a short rest there is instruction in bare-hand fighting given by Japanese and Chinese youths: the use of stick, chain, and staff, different styles of swordsmanship, and knife fighting. An Indian Thuggee gives lessons in the strangling cord. He belongs to a dissident magical brotherhood known as the Secret Stranglers who have separated themselves from the worship of Kali.

I take particular interest in archery since the bow can deliver more projectiles in less time than the guns we are making. I have made a number of crossbows to sell in the store so that the Indians will be able to duplicate the design. These bows are not as heavy as the usual crossbows and it is quite easy to pull and cock the bow by hand. I am more interested in speed of fire than in armor-piercing strength.

Dink Rivers excels at the martial arts. After a few lessons he is able to equal his instructors in proficiency. He explains once general body control is mastered, any physical skill can be learned almost at once. He has promised to show me the secrets of body control but says that the time has not yet come. "I get my orders in dreams and whatever happens in my dreams then has to happen when I wake up." Often he does not sleep in the Palace and Hans tells me he has a hut about half a mile down the coast.

One night I dream I am sitting with Dink when he looks at me and says, "I think you should see this," pulling down his shorts to reveal his half-erect phallus. I wake up in a state of great excitement and Dink says that the time is approaching. In preparation I must abstain from sex for three days.

At the end of this period, during which I had not seen him, be appeared in my room during the siesta hour and led the way out through the gate and along the path by the sea. We are quite close to the hut before I can see it, built in clump of trees and shrubs, painted green and blending with the surroundings. The house is built of parts salvaged from grounded ships.

Inside it is cool and dark, smelling of pitch. The house consists of a single room furnished like a ship's cabin, containing a chest, a rolled-up pallet, and two low stools of driftwood. We take off our clothes, hanging them on wooden pegs and he indicated that I am to sit opposite him on one of the stools, our knees touching. He looks silently into my eyes and I feel a tightness and weakness in the chest.

He is getting stiff and so am I, the feeling of weakness now like death in the throat as we both are fully erect. Silver spots boil in front of my eyes and I have a feeling of squeezing into his nuts and cock as I lie on the pallet and Dink fucks me.

Afterwards we lie down side by side. He is talking in his clear grave young voice. I have rarely seen him smile and there is something very sad and remote about him like a faint sign or signal from a distant star.

"Middletown isn't like the town where you came from. There are no Mrs. Nortons sniffing around for the scent of whiskey and sin. We do not allow people like her in Middletown. To an outsider, Middletown is just a pretty little place, stone houses along a clear river. Nice friendly folk. But strangers don't stay unless we can adjust them to our ways. For those who must remain outside there is no land for sale and no work.

"Middletown is run by a magical brotherhood. You will hear about white and black lodges, the right-hand path and the left-hand path. Believe me, there is no such sharp line. However, the Middletown Brothers would not allow themselves to be placed in a position where they would need to use the usual methods of black magic. Once you achieve body control you don't need that.

"There is no formal initiation into the Brotherhood. Initiation comes through dream guides. At the age of fourteen, when I began to have dreams that culminated in ejaculation, I decided to learn control of the sexual energy. If I could achieve orgasm at will in the waking state, I could do the same in dreams and control my dreams instead of being controlled by them.

"To accomplish sexual control, I abstained from masturbation. In order to achieve orgasm, it is simply necessary to relive a previous orgasm. So while awake, I would endeavor to project myself into sexual dreams, which I was now having several times a week. It was some months before I acquired sufficient concentration to get results.

"One day I was lying naked on my bed, feeling a warm spring wind on my body and watching leaf shadows dance on the wall. I ran through a sex dream like reciting my ABCs when suddenly silver spots boiled in front of my eyes and I experienced a feeling of weakness in the chest—the dying feeling—and I am slipping into my self in the dream and go off.

"Having brought sexual energy under control I now had the key to body control. Errors, fumbles, and ineptitudes are caused by uncontrolled sexual energy which then lays one open to any sort of psychic or physical attack. I went on to bring speech under control, to be used when I want it, not yammering in my ear at all times or twisting tunes and jingles in my brain.

"I used the same method of projecting myself into a time when my mind seemed empty of words. This I would do while walking in the woods or paddling on the lake. Once again, I waited some time for results. One day as I was paddling on the lake and about to put out fishlines, I felt the weakness in my chest, silver spots appeared in front of my eyes with a vertiginous sensation of being sucked into a vast empty space where words do not exist."

*

My time is divided between the library and the gun shop. The library is well stocked with books on weapons, fortifications, shipbuilding, and navigation and has also a large number of maps indicating the number of Spanish troops stationed in different locations, the nature of fortification, and the Spanish sea routes with approximate times when they are in use.

It often happens that quite practical inventions are for some reason not developed. Here are plans for a repeating gun with a number of barrels rotating by means of a hand-turned crank. A repeating gun is one of my dreams but first there is some basic improvement required in the gun itself.

Hans and I, wearing only shorts, are reading the same book, our knees touching. Here are plans for a grenade—simply a metal sphere filled with powder ignited by a fuse, and a mortar that shoots large grenades for a considerable distance. I feel a sudden quickening of interest and a prickling sensation in the back of my neck. Hans seems equally affected. He is breathing through his teeth, eyes boring into the paper as if he were studying an erotic drawing.

We look at each other and stand up, our shorts sticking out at the crotch. We strip our shorts and Hans grins and brings his finger up in three jerks. I prop the book against the wall on the far side of the desk and bend over a chair. As Hans fucks me, the drawings seem to come alive belching red fire and just as I go off, Chinese children set off a string of firecrackers against the door and I see a huge firecracker blow the library to atoms as a gob of sperm hits the book six feet away.

We sit down naked and Hans wipes his brow with one hand and says: "Wheeeeoooo!"

I say: "Firecracker! That's the basic exploding weapon. It's all here, but they didn't see how far it can be carried. Firecrackers ... they can be of any size. Why not exploding cannonballs? One such projectile could sink a galleon."

"Waring is expecting us."

Dink leads the way up a steep path. Waring's house is on top of a hill in grove of trees, concealed by vines. He receives us most cordially in a cool room furnished in the Moroccan style with a low table and settees. A tall aloof black serves mint tea, and Waring passes around a hashish pipe. Dink declines, since he never touches alcohol or any other drug.

At a sign from Dink, Waring gets up and leads us into his studio.

"While there is still light ..."

His paintings are unlike any I have ever seen, containing not one but many scenes, figures, and landscapes that flicker in and out of the canvas. I can see The Great White, Harbor Point, fleeting faces, islands, flying fish, and Indians rowing across the bay.

Back in the sitting room candles have been lit, and there is a partridge pie with flaky pastry and wild turkey tagine on a low table. I do not remember much of what was said during dinner.

At one point, Waring looked at me quizzically and said: "What you are doing is against the rules. Be careful you don't get caught."

It was quite late when we left. Back in the hut, Dink rolled out the pallet and I fell into a deep sleep.

In a dream I see Dink standing over me with the most perfectly formed erect phallus I have ever seen. Now he is fucking me with my legs up and as I wake up ejaculating, I find that he is fucking me. I can feel his face in mine and for a split second he disappears and I hear his fourteen-year-old voice in my throat: "It's me! It's me! It's me! I made it! I landed!"

We can hardly wait to get back to the shop and set all hand to work. In a week, we have several different devices ready for testing. I have made a number of arrows, the heads of hollow iron filled with powder; grenades, with a shaft to be launched from a flintlock rifle; several mortars; and a projectile for a cannon, designed to explode on contact. The nose of this projectile, which is not round but shaped like a short cylinder, is of softer metal packed with flint chips and iron filings so that, being violently depressed on contact with ship or rigging, it explodes the powder charge. Inside, the cylinder is lined with Greek fire—that is, pitch mixed with finely powdered metal, this being separated from the powder charge by a layer of paper.

The time is now ready for testing, There is a stranded ship two hundred yards off the coast a mile down from our station. We proceed to the testing site with our bows and rifle grenades, mortars, and one cannon. Everyone is there: Strobe, the Iguana twins, Nordenholz, even Waring.

Ten arrows and ten rifle grenades are dipped into the fire. Bow is drawn, the head ignited from a torch, and the arrow launched, the same procedure being followed with the rifle grenades, which are of course much larger. The missiles streak towards the ship and in a few seconds are exploding on the decks, in the rigging, and against the sides, starting fires from one end of the boat to the other. Then mortars are launched, and though some fall short or overshoot, those that land cause great damage.

Time now for the cannon: a perfect hit with a ten-pound projectile at the waterline. The explosion tears a gaping hole in the hull and wraps the boatside in fire. There is no doubt as to the deadly effectiveness of these weapons. We are congratulated by Nordenholz and Strobe and the Iguana twins.

Waring smiles and says: "Nice toys. Nice noisy toys to scare the ghosts away."

The plans are sent along by courier to the other settlements and we busy ourselves bringing the fortifications of Port Roger up to date. The Indians are offered good pay to work in our ever-expanding shop and are learning how to make these devices.

Soon we have a fair stockpile of shells sufficient to pour a deadly fire into the bay from both sides. We have mounted gun towers around the walls of the town with cannon that can reach the bay or be lowered to fire directly down on any forces laying siege to Port Roger.

Nordenholz is supervising the construction of special boats designed to operate near the coasts. These are about fifty feet long, mounted on two pontoons. They will draw only a few feet of water and can be used in rivers and quickly launched or concealed. They will carry the maneuverable cannons and a good stock of mortars and grenades. He calls them Destroyers, since they have no other purpose. No provisions need be carried, just guns and gun crews, and the Destroyers will be so much faster than a galleon that they can easily avoid the fixed cannons.

I now turn my attention to improving the flintlock. My dissatisfaction with this weapon derives from an incident that occurred in a waterfront tavern in Boston. This place was near our old gun shop, and we were accustomed to take a beer there after work. One evening I was there with Sean Brady when a man came in who had been dismissed by my father for his drunken, lazy, quarrelsome habits and had stomped out, vowing vengeance on all of us.

There he stood at the bar, weaving and glaring at us with bloodshot eyes, and let loose a string of vile oaths and insults. Brady told him to mind his mouth or lose his teeth, whereupon the man pulled a flintlock pistol from his side pocket, leveled it at Brady's chest, and pulled the trigger. At this precise second the bartended, who was standing behind the ruffian and to one side, spat a stream of beer straight into the pan, causing the weapon to misfire. We then beat the man unconscious and threw him into the harbor and watched him sink.

Of what use are flintlock weapons with a driving rain behind you? And the length of time taken to reload far exceeds the firing time. The weapon lacks firing power—that is, the number of projectiles that can be fired in a given length of time. So back to the library.

I note that early cannonballs were breech-loading, and feel once again the admonitory prickling in the back of my neck. At that very moment a hand touches the nape of my neck. It is the Iguana who has come in silently with her twin. I look up at her.

"It's there in my head, but I can't quite get it out where I can see it."

"Well, how did you see the exploding cannonball?"

Hans and I look at each other and grin.

Waring has told me about Hassan i Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain, who terrorized the Moslem world for years with a few hundred assassins. I pointed out that holding a single fortified position—as Hassan i Sabbah did at Alamut—is no longer possible, owing to improved weapons that I have already perfected and which will inevitably, in the course of time, fall into the hands of our prospective enemies. We need now a much wider area of occupation, Waring said cryptically: "Well, that depends on what you are trying to do."

As I was returning from the library this afternoon, a red-haired child of twelve or so popped out of a doorway, aimed a small pistol at me and pulled the trigger.

"Bang! You're dead."

I had seen these toy pistols may times before and never concerned myself to find out exactly how they functioned, just as I had seen firecrackers without realizing the potentials of that toy. The child was reloading.

"Let me see that," I demanded.

The child handed me his pistol, which had a flat hammer. The report resulted from the hammer's striking a little blister of powder glued between two pieces of paper. Suddenly I had the solution: firing device, charge, and ball in one unit, to be inserted and extracted through the breech. I bent down and the boy jumped up on my back, and I carried him into the gun shop as he fired his pistol in the air.

We are working round the clock on this design. Pallets are on the floor, and we take turns sleeping. We are producing double-barreled guns in both rifle and pistol form, for increased firepower.

In a week we have two rifles and two pistols, with a number of cartridges ready for testing. The test is carried out in the gun shop, since secrecy must be observed. A man-sized target is set up at one hundred feet. "Pow Pow"—two bullets on target.

After the test I present the red-headed boy, whose name is Chan, with a rifle and give Strobe a pistol. At this Strobe is somewhat piqued. I retain the remaining two weapons for my own use. Plans are immediately dispatched by courier to all the settlements in these locations: on the Pacific side of the isthmus of Panama opposite the Pearl Islands; two settlements inland from Guayaquil in a heavily wooded and mountainous area; and settlements above Panama City on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides and in the mountainous interior.

Production of the weapons is now standardized and we have fifty Indians working under our supervision. As soon as they learn how to assemble the guns, they are sent back to their villages and jungles since decentralization is a keynote of our strategy. Instead of one central factory, there are a number of small shops that can turn out a few guns a day. We are distributing guns through the store in Port Roger. Arming the native population is another essential step. The cannon that protect Port Roger are being converted to receive breech-loading shells.

Necesita automóvil

I hadn't been in Mexico City in fifteen years. Driving in from the airport I could hardly recognize the place. As Dimitri said, a selective pestilence may be the only solution. Otherwise, they will multiply their assholes into the polluted seas.

Kiki, Jim, and I checked into a small hotel off Insurgentes, which was a few blocks from John Everson's Mexico City address. Then we split up. Jim and Kiki went to John Everson's address to see what they could pick up from the landlady and the vecinos. I went to the American Embassy, found the Protection Department, and sent in my card. I saw the girl hand it to a man at a desk. He looked at the card and looked at me. Then he did something else. I waited twenty minutes.

"Mr. Hill will see you now."

Mr. Hill didn't get up or offer to shake hands. "Yes, Mr. uh ..." He glanced down at the card. "...Snide. What can I do for you?"

There is a breed of State Department official who starts figuring out how he can get rid of you without doing whatever it is you want done as soon as you walk into his department. Clearly, Mr. Hill belonged to this breed.

"It's about John Everson. He disappeared in Mexico City about two months ago. His father has retained me to locate him."

"Well, we are not a missing-person service. So far as we are concerned, the case is now with the Mexican authorities. I suggest you contact them. A colonel, uh ..."

"Colonel Figueres."

"Yes, that is the name, I believe."

"Did John Everson pick up his mail at the embassy?"

"I uh don't think ... in any case, we don't encourage ..."

"Yes, I know. You are also not a post office. Would you mind calling the mail desk and asking if there are any letters there addresses to John Everson?"

"Really, Mr. Snide ..."

"Really, Mr. Hill. I have been retained by an American citizen—rather well connected, I may add, working on a U.S. government project—retained to find an American citizen who is missing in your district. So far, there is no evidence of foul play but it hasn't been ruled out."

He was also the type who backs down under pressure. He reached for the phone. "Could you tell me if there are any letters for John Everson at the desk.... One letter?"

I slid a power of attorney across the desk which authorized me among other things to pick up mail addressed to John Everson. He looked at it.

"A Mr. uh Snide will pick up the letter. He has authorization." He hung up.

I stood up. "Thank you, Mr. Hill." His nod was barely perceptible.

On the way out of the office I met that CIA punk from Athens. He pretended to be glad to see me, and shook hands and asked where I was staying. I told him at the Reforma. I could see he didn't believe me, which probably meant he knew where I was staying. I was beginning to get a bad feeling about the Everson case, like gathering vultures.

I waited almost an hour to see Colonel Figueres, but I knew he was really busy. He'd been a major when I last saw him. He hadn't changed much. A little heavier, but the same cold gray eyes and focused attention. When you see him he gives his whole concentration to you. He shook hands without smiling. I can't recall ever seeing him smile. He simply doesn't give himself occasion to do so. I told him I had come about the Everson boy's disappearance.

He nodded. "I thought you had, and I'm glad you are here. We haven't been able to give enough time to it."

"You think something may have happened to him?"

Figueres doesn't shrug. He doesn't gesticulate. He just sits there with his eyes focused on you and what is being discussed.

"I don't know. We have checked Progreso and all surrounding towns. We have checked airports and buses. If he had gone off on another dig, he would be that much easier to locate. A blond foreigner off the tourist routes is very conspicuous. We have also checked all the tourist places. Apparently he was a level-headed, serious young man ... no indications of drug use or excessive drinking. Is there any history of amnesia? Psychotic episodes?"

"None that I know of."

Dead end.

Back at the hotel, Jim and Kiki had turned up very little from questioning the landlady and neighbors. The landlady described Everson as a serious polite young man ... un caballero. He entertained few visitors and these were also serious students. There had been no noise, no drinking, no girls.

I sat down and opened the letter. It was from his twin sister in Minneapolis. It read:

Querido Juanito,

He has visited me again. He says that before you receive this letter He will have contacted you. He says you will then know what has to be done.

Your Ever Loving Sister,

Jane

At three o'clock, I called Inspector Graywood in New York. "Clem Snide here."

"Ah yes, Mr. Snide, there have been some developments in Lima. A boy did come to call for another crate and was seen to brush against the duplicate head crate. He was followed to a bicycle rental and repair shop in the Mercado Mayorista. Police searched the shop and found false identity papers in the name of Juan Mateos. The proprietor has been arrested and charged with possession of forged papers and with conspiracy to conceal evidence of a murder. He is being detained in isolation. He claims he did not know what was in the crate. He had been offered a fairly large sum to pick up the crate after it had cleared customs. The crate was to have been brought to his shop. Someone would arrange to pick it up there, and he would be paid an additional and larger sum. The customs agent who passed the crate has also been arrested. He has confessed to accepting a bribe."

"What about the boy?"

"There was no reason to hold him in connection with this case. However, since he has a record for petty theft and a history of epilepsy, he has been placed in a rehabilitation center in Lima."

"I wish I could be on the scene."

"So do I. Otherwise, I doubt if any important arrests will be made. In a country like that, people of wealth are virtually untouchable. People like the Countess de Gulpa. for example...."

"So you know about her?"

"Of course. The description of the man who contacted the customs broker tallies rather closely with your Identikit picture of Marty Blum. I have sent a copy to the Lima police and informed them that he is also wanted in connection with a murder here. Benson, it seems, was a pusher, small-time ... a number of leads but no arrests as yet. Have you found the Everson boy?"

"Not yet and I don't like the looks of it."

"You think something has happened to him?"

"Perhaps."

"I believe you have a contact from Dimitri." I had said nothing about this contact when I told my story in O'Brien's office. "Perhaps it is time to use it."

"I will."

"Your presence in South America would be most valuable. It so happens that client who wishes to remain anonymous is prepared to retain you in this connection. You will find thirty thousand dollars deposited to your bank account in Lima."

"Well, I haven't finished this case yet."

"Perhaps you can bring the Everson case to a speedy conclusion." He rang off.

It would seem that I had been called upon to act. I got out a map and couldn't find the Callejón de la Esperanza. There are small streets in Mexico City you won't find on a map. I had a general idea as to where it was and I wanted to walk around. I've cracked cases like this with nothing to go on, just by getting out and walking around at random. It works best in a strange town or in a town you haven't visited for some time.

We took a taxi to the Alameda, then started off in a north-westerly direction. Once we got off the main streets I saw that the place hadn't changed all that much: the same narrow unpaved streets and squares, with booths selling tacos, fried grasshoppers, and peppermint candy covered with flies; the smell of pulque, urine, benzoin, chile, cooking oil, and sewage; and the faces—bestial, evil, beautiful.

A boy in white cotton shirt and pants, hair straight, skin smoky black, smelling faintly of vanilla and ozone. A boy with bright copper-red skin, innocent and beautiful as some exotic animal, leans against a wall eating an orange dusted with red pepper ... a maricón slithers by with long arms and buck teeth, eyes glistening ... man with a bestial Pan face reels out of a pulquería ... a hunchback dwarf shoots us a venomous glance.

I was letting my legs guide me. Calle de los Desamparados, Street of Displaced Persons ... a farmacia where an old junky was waiting for his Rx. I got a whiff of phantom opium. Postcards in a dusty shop window. Pancho Villa posing with scowling men...gun belts and rifles. Three youths hanging from a makeshift scaffold, two with their pants down to the ankles, the other naked. The picture had been taken from behind—soldiers standing in front of them watching and grinning. Photos taken about 1914. The naked boy looked American—you can tell a blond even in black and white.

My legs pulled me in, Jim and Kiki following behind me. When I opened the door a bell echoed through the shop. Inside, the shop was cool and dim with a smell of incense. A man came through a curtain and stood behind the counter. He was short and lightly built and absolutely bald, as if he had never had hair on his head; the skin was a yellowish brown, smooth as terra-cotta, the lips rather full, eyes jetblack, forehead high and sloping back. There was a feeling of age about him, not that he looked old but as he were a survivor of an ancient race—Oriental, Mayan, Negroid—all of these, but something else I had never seen in a human face. He was strangely familiar to me and then I remembered where I had seen that face before. It was in the Mayan collection of the British Museum, a terra-cotta head about three inches in height. His lips moved into a slow smile and he spoke in perfect English without accent or inflection, eerie and remote as if coming from a great distance.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen."

"Could I see that postcard in the window?"

"Certainly. That is what you have come for."

It occurred to me that this must be Dimitri's contact, but this was not the address he had given.

"The Callejón de la Esperanze? The Alley of Hope was destroyed in the earthquake. It has not been rebuilt. This way, gentlemen."

He ushered us through a heavy door behind the curtain. When the door closed, it shut out all noise from the street. We were in a bare whitewashed room with heavy oak furniture lit by a barred window that opened onto a patio. He motioned us to chairs and got an envelope from a filing case and handed me a picture. It was an eight-by-ten replica of the postcard in the window. As I touched the picture, I got a whiff of the fever smell.

Three youths were hanging from a pole supported by tripods, arms strapped to their sides by leather belts. There were two overturned sawhorses and a plank on the ground below them. The blond boy was in the middle, two dark youths hanging on each side of him. The other two had their pants down to their ankles. The blond boy was completely naked. Five soldiers stood in front of a barn looking up at the hanged men. One of the soldiers was very young, sixteen or seventeen, with down on his chin and upper lip. He was looking up with his mouth open, his pants sticking out at the fly.

The proprietor handed me a magnifying glass. The hanged boys quivered and writhed, necks straining against the ropes, buttocks contracting. Standing to one side, face in shadow, was the officer. I studied this figure through the glass. Something familiar ... Oh yes—the Dragon Lady from "Terry and the Pirates." It was a woman. And she bore a slight resemblance to young Everson.

I pointed to the blond boy. "Do you have a picture of his face?"

He laid a picture on the table. The picture showed the boy's face and torso, his arms strapped to his sides. He was looking at something in front of him with a slack look on his face, as if he had just received an overwhelming shock and understood it completely. It was John Everson, or a close enough resemblance to be his twin brother.

I showed him a snapshot of Everson I had in my pocket. He looked at it and nodded. "Yes it seems to be the same young man."

"Do you know who these people were?"

"Yes. The three boys were revolutionaries. The blond boy was the son of an American miner and a Spanish mother. He was born and raised in Durango and spoke no English. He was hanged on his twenty-third birthday: September 24, 1914. The woman officer was his half-sister, three years older. She was finally ambushed and killed by Pancho Villa's men. I can assure you that young Everson is alive and well. He has simply forgotten his American identity. His memory can be restored. Unlike Jerry Green, he fell into comparatively good hands. You will meet them tonight ... Lola La Chata is holding her annual party."

"Lola? Is she still operating?"

"She has her little time concession. You will be back in the days of Allende. The Iguana twins will be there. They will take you to Everson. And now ..." He showed us out the back way onto an unpaved street. "I think you will get a ride to Lola's."

Lola's was quite a walk from where we were, and it was not an area for taxis. Also I was a little confused as to directions. A Cadillac careened around the corner and screamed to a stop in a cloud of dust. A man in glen plaid suit leaned out of the front seat.

"Going to the party? Get in, cabrones!"

We got into the back seat. There were two machos in the front seat and two on the jump seats. As we sped through the dirt streets they blasted at cats and chickens with their 45s, missing with every shot as the vecinos dove for cover.

Por convención Zapata

The General's car stops in front of Lupita's place, which in a slum area of unpaved streets, looks like an abandoned warehouse. The door is opened by an old skull-faced pistolero with his black jacket open, a tip-up 44 Smith & Wesson strapped to his lean flank.

The pistolero steps aside and we walk into a vast room with a high-beamed ceiling. The furniture is heavy black oak and red brocade, suggesting a Mexican country estate. In the middle of the room is a table with platters of tamales and tacos, beans, rice, and guacamole, beer in tubs of ice, bottles of tequila, bowls of marijuana and cigarette papers. The party is just starting and a few guests stand by the table puffing marijuana and drinking beer. On a smaller table syringes are laid out with glasses of water and alcohol. Along one wall are curtained booths.

Lola La Chata sits in a massive oak chair facing the door, three hundred pounds cut from the mountain rock of Mexico, her graciousness underlining her power. She extends a massive arm: "Ah, Meester Snide ... El Puerco Particular ... the Private Pig ..." She shakes with laughter. "And your handsome young assistants ..." She shakes hands with Jim and Kiki. "You do well by yourself, Meester Snide."

And you, Lola.... You are younger, if anything."

She waves a hand to the table. "Please serve yourselves.... I think an old friend of yours is already here."

I start towards the table and recognize Bernabé Abogado.

"Clem!"

"Bernabé!"

We got into an embrace and I can feel the pearl-handled 45 under his glen plaid jacket. He is drinking Old Parr scotch and there are four bottles on the table. He pours scotch into glasses as I introduce Jim and Kiki. "Practically everybody in Mexico drinks scotch." Then he laughs and pounds me on the back. "Clem, meet the Iguanas ... this very good friend."

I shake hands with two of the most beautiful young people I have ever seen. They both have smooth greenish skin, black eyes, a reptilian grace. I can feel the strength in the boy's hand. They are incredibly poised and detached, their faces stamped with the same ancient lineage as the shop proprietor. They are the Iguana twins.

Junkies arrive and pay court to Lupita. She rewards them with papers of heroin fished from between her massive dugs. They are fixing at the table of syringes.

"Tonight everything is free," says the Iguana sister. "Mañana es otra cosa."

The room is rapidly filling with whores and thieves, pimps and hustlers. Uniformed cops get in line and Lupita rewards each of them with an envelope. Plainclothesmen come in and shove to the head of the line. Their envelopes are thicker.

Bernabé beckons to a young Indian policeman who has just received a thin envelope. The policeman approaches shyly. Bernabé pounds him on the back. "This cabrón get cockeyed borracho and kill two people.... I get him out of jail."

Other guests are arriving: the glamorous upper crust and jet set from costume parties. Some are in Mayan and Aztec dress. They bring various animals: monkeys, ocelots, iguanas, and a parrot who screams insults. The machos chase a terrified squealing peccary around the room.

A rustle of excitement sweeps through the guests:

"Here's Mr. Coca-Cola."

"He's the real thing."

Mr. Coca-Cola circulates among the guests selling packets of cocaine. As the cocaine takes effect the tempo of the party accelerates. The General turns to a spider monkey perched on top of his chair.

"Here, cabrón, have a sniff." He holds up a thumbnail with a pinch of cocaine. The monkey bites his hand, drawing blood. The cocaine spills down his coat. "CHINGOA YOU SON OF A WHORE!" The General leaps up and jerks out his 45, blasting at the monkey from a distance of a few feet and missing with every shot as the guests hit the deck, dodge behind chairs, and roll under the table.

Lupita lifts a finger. Fifty feet away across the room, the old pistolero draws his long-barreled 44, aims and fires in one smooth movement, killing the monkey. The display of power intimidates even the machos and there is a moment of silence as a servant removes the dead monkey and wipes up the blood. A number of couples and some trios retire to the curtained booths.

Another contingent of guests has arrived among whom I recognize American narcotics agens. One of them is talking with a Mexican lawyer. "I feel so sorry for these American boys in jail here for the cocaina," the lawyer says. "And for the girls, even sorrier. I do what I can to get them out but it is most difficult. Our laws are very strict. Much stricter than yours."

In a search booth, which is also one of the booths at Lupita's party, a naked American girl with two uniformed police. The General and the lawyer enter from a door at the rear of the booth. One of the cops points to a packet of cocaine on a shelf. "She have it in her pussee, señores." Ata gesture from the General the cops exit, grinning like monkeys.

"We feel so sorry for your pussee—frozen in the snow," says the General taking off his pants. "I am the beeg thaw."

A giggling macho pulls aside a curtain in front of the booth. "Good pussee, cabrones?"

Two Chapultepec blondes nudge each other and chant in unison: "Isn't he marvelous? Never repeats himself."

The macho pulls aside the curtain of the next booth. "He fuck her in the dry hole."

"Never repeats himself."

In the end booth Ah Pook, the Mayan God of Death, is fucking the young Corn God. As the curtains are jerked aside they reach orgasm and the young Corn God is spattered with black spots of decay. A nitrous haze like vaporized fish steams off their bodies. The macho gasps, coughs, and drops dead of a heart attack.

"Never repeats himself."

Lupita gestures. Indian servants load the body onto a stretcher and carry it out. The party resumes at an even more hectic pace. The gas released by the copulations of life and death acts on the younger guests like catnip. They strip off their clothes, rolling around on mattresses which are spread out on the floor by wooden-faced servants. They exchange masks and do stripteases with scarves while others roll on their backs, legs in the air, applauding with their feet.

The Iguana touched my arm. "Will you and your two helpers please come with me? We have matters to discuss in private."

She led us through a side door and down a long corridor to an elevator. The elevator opened onto a short hall at the end of which was another door. She motioned us into a large loft apartment furnished in Moroccan and Mexican style with rugs, low table, a few chairs, and couches. I declined a drink but accepted a joint.

"The postcard vendor tells me you can help us locate John Everson," I began

She nodded. I remembered that I had not heard her brother say anything. He had nodded and smiled when we were introduced. He sat beside her now on a low couch looking serene rather than bored. Jim, Kiki, and I sat opposite in three cedar chairs from Santa Fe.

"We have many places here...." A wave of her hand brought the benzoin smell of New Mexico into the room. "It was a lovely place but they had to spoil it with their idiotic bombs. Oh yes, John Everson ... such a nice boy, modern and convenient. You found him so, of course?" She turned to her brother, who smiled and licked his lips. "Well, he is in Durango with relatives ... in excellent condition, considering the transfer of identities. Such operations may leave the patient a hospital case for months. This generally means that the operations has not been skillfully performed, or that discordant entities have been lodged in the same body....

"In Everson's case, there have been no complications. We had to give the Mexican identity sufficient time for a transfer to take place. Now it only remains to blend the two and he will recover his own identity, with fluent Spanish and a knowledge of rural Mexico which will be useful in his profession.

"In this case, the two identities are so similar that there will be no disharmony. And the spirit of El Gringo now has a home. He could not enter the cycle of rebirth because his karma required a duplicate death. This was done by electric brain stimulation which seems completely real to the patient. As you know, a difficulty in organ transplants is that they are rejected as a foreign body. Drugs must be administered to suspend the rejection. In this case, the shared experience of being hanged will dissolve the rejection that would otherwise occur, giving rise to the phenomenon of multiple personalities, where only one personality can occupy the body at one time. The hanging experience acts as a solvent. The two personalities will blend into one. John Everson will contact his parents, and tell them that he suffered a lapse of memory owing to a light concussion but is now completely recovered."

I leaned back. "Well, that wraps that case up."

"You have been retained to act against the Countess...thirty thousand dollars. Does that seem enough to you?"

"Well, considering what we are expected to do—no."

"And considering that you are all inexperienced and susceptible, this is virtually a suicide mission. I am prepared to retain you at a fair price and provide contacts which will give you at least some chance of success."

She led the way into a bare room with chairs, a long table, and filing cabinets along one wall. I recognized the room as a replica of the room in back of the postcard vendor's shop. She went to the filing cabinet and handed me a short pamphlet bound in heavy parchment. On the cover in red letters:

CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT

Book Two

Cities of the Red Night

The Cities of the Red Night were six in number: Tamaghis, Ba'dan, Yass-Waddah, Waghdas, Naufana, and Ghadis. These cities were located in an area roughly corresponding to the Gobi Desert, a hundred thousand years ago. At that thime the desert was dotted with large oases and traversed by a river which emptied into the Caspian Sea.

The largest of these oases contained a lake ten miles long and five miles across, on the shores of which the university town of Waghdas was founded. Pilgrims came from all over the inhabited world to study in the academies of Waghdas, where the arts and sciences reached peaks of attainment that have never been equaled. Much of this ancient knowledge is now lost.

The towns of Ba'dan and Yass-Waddah were opposite each other on the river. Tamaghis, located in a desolate area to the north on a small oasis, could properly be called a desert town. Naufana and Ghadis were situated in mountainous areas to the west and south beyond the perimeter of usual trade routes between the other cities.

In addition to the six cities, there were a number of villages and nomadic tribes. Food was plentiful and for a time the population was completely stable: no one was born unless someone died.

The inhabitants were divided into an elite minority known as the Transmigrants and a majority known as the Receptacles. Within these categories were a number of occupational and specialized strata and the two classes were not in practice separate. Transmigrants acted as Receptacles and Receptacles became Transmigrants.

To show the system in operation: Here is an old Transmigrant on his deathbed. He has selected his future Receptacle parents, who are summoned to the death chamber. The parents then copulate, achieving orgasm just as the old Transmigrant dies so that his spirit enters the womb to be reborn. Every Transmigrant carries with him at all times a list of alternative parents, and in case of accident, violence, or sudden illness, the nearest parents are rushed to the scene. However, there was at first little chance of random or unexpected deaths since the Council of Transmigrants in Waghdas had attained such skill in the art of prophecy that they were able to chart a life from birth to death and determine in most cases the exact time and manner of death.

Many Transmigrants preferred not to wait for the infirmities of age and the ravages of illness, lest their spirit be so weakened as to be overwhelmed and absorbed by the Receptacle child. These hardy Transmigrants, in the full vigor of maturity, after rigorous training in concentration and astral projection, would select two death guides to kill them in front of the copulating parents. The methods of death most commonly employed were hanging and strangulation, the Transmigrant dying in orgasm, which was considered the most reliable method of ensuring a successful transfer. Drugs were also developed, large doses of which occasioned death in erotic convulsions, smaller doses being used to enhance sexual pleasure. And these drugs were often used in conjunction with other forms of death.

In time, death by natural causes became a rare and rather discreditable occurrence as the age for transmigration dropped. The Eternal Youths, a Transmigrant sect, were hanged at the age of eighteen to spare themselves the coarsening experience of middle age and the deterioration of senescence, living their youth again and again.

Two factors undermined the stability of this system. The first was perfection of techniques for artificial insemination. Whereas the traditional practice called for one death and one rebirth, now hundreds of women could be impregnated from s ingle sperm collection, and territorially oriented Transmigrants could populate whole areas with their progeny. There were sullen mutters of revolt from the Receptacles, especially the women. At this point, another factor totally unforeseen was introduced.

In the thinly populated desert area north of Tamaghis a portentous event occurred. Some say it was a meteor that fell to earth leaving a crater twenty miles across. Others say that the crated was caused by what modern physicists call a black hole.

After this occurrence the whole northern sky lit up red at night, like the reflection from a vast furnace. Those in the immediate vicinity of the crater were the first to be affected and various mutations were observed, the commonest being altered hair and skin color. Red and yellow hair, and white, yellow, and red skin appeared for the first time. Slowly the whole area was similarly affected until the mutants outnumbered the original inhabitants, who were as all human beings were at the time: black.

The women, led by an albino mutant known as the White Tigress, seized Yass-Waddah, reducing the male inhabitants to slaves, consorts, and courtiers all under sentence of death that could be carried out at any time at the caprice of the White Tigress. The Council in Waghdas countered by developing a method of growing babies in excised wombs, the wombs being supplied by vagrant Womb Snatchers. This practice aggravated the differences between the male and female factions and was with Yass-Waddah seemed unavoidable.

In Naufana, a method was found to transfer the spirit directly into an adolescent Receptacle, thus averting the awkward and vulnerable period of infancy. This practice required a rigorous period of preparation and training to achieve a harmonious blending of the two spirits in one body. These Transmigrants, combining the freshness and vitality of youth with the wisdom of many lifetimes, were expected to form an army of liberation to free Yass-Waddah. And there were adepts who could die at will without any need of drugs or executioners and project their spirit into a chosen Receptacle.

I have mentioned hanging, strangulation, and orgasm drugs as the commonest means of effecting the transfer. However, many other forms of death were employed. The Fire Boys were burned to death in the presence of the Receptacles, only the genitals being insulated, so that the practitioner could achieve orgasm in the moment of death. There is an interesting account by a Fire Boy who recalled his experience after transmigrating in this manner:

"As the flames closed round my body, I inhaled deeply, drawing fire into my lings, and screamed out flames as the most horrible pain turned to the most exquisite pleasure and I was ejaculating in an adolescent Receptacle who was being sodomized by another."

Others were stabbed, decapitated, disemboweled, shot with arrows, or killed by a blow on the head. Some threw themselves from cliffs, landing in front of the copulating Receptacles.

The scientists at Waghdas were developing a machine that could directly transfer the electromagnetic field of one body to another. In Ghadis there were adepts who were able to leave their bodies before death and occupy a series of hosts. How far this research may have gone will never be known. It was a time of great disorder and chaos.

The effects of the Red Night on Receptacles and Transmigrants proved to be incalculable and many strange mutants arose as a series of plagues devastated the cities. It is this period of war and pestilence that is covered by the books. The Council had set out to produce a race of supermen for the exploration of space. They produced instead races of ravening idiot vampires.

Finally, the cities were abandoned and the survivors fled in all directions, carrying the plagues with them. Some of these migrants crossed the Bering Strait into the New World, taking the books with them. They settled in the area later occupied by the Mayans and the books eventually fell into the hands of the Mayan priests.

The alert student of this noble experiment will perceive that death was regarded as equivalent not to birth but to conception and go on to infer that conception is the basic trauma. In the moment of death, the dying man's whole life may flash in front of his eyes back to conception. In the moment of conception, his future life flashes forward to his future death. To reexperience conception is fatal.

This was the basic error of the Transmigrants: you do not get beyond death and conception by reexperience any more than you get beyond heroin by ingesting larger and larger doses. The Transmigrants were quite literally addicted to death and they needed more and more death to kill the pain of conception. They were buying parasitic life with a promissory death note to be paid at a prearranged time. The Transmigrants then imposed there terms on the host child to ensure his future transmigration. There was a basic conflict of interest between the host child and Transmigrant. So the Transmigrants reduced the Receptacle class to a condition of virtual idiocy. Otherwise they would have reneged on a bargain from which they stood to gain nothing but death. The books are flagrant falsifications. And some of these basic lies are still current.

"Nothing is true. Everything is permitted." The last words of Hassan i Sabbah, Old Man of the Mountain.

"Tamaghis ... Ba'dan ... Yass-Wadah ... Waghdas ... Naufana ... Ghadis."

It is said that an initiate who wishes to know the answer to any question need only repeat these words as he falls asleep and the answer will come in a dream.

Tamaghis: This is the open city of contending partisans where advantage shifts from moment to moment in a desperate biological war. Here everything is as true as you think it is and everything you can get away with is permitted.

Ba'dan: This city is given over to competitive games and commerce. Ba'dan closely resembles present-day America with a precarious moneyed elite, a large disaffected middle class and an equally large segment of criminals and outlaws. Unstable, explosive, and swept by whirlwind riots. Everything is true and everything is permitted.

Yass-Waddah: This city is the femaile stronghold where the Countess de Gulpa, the Countess de Vile, and the Council of the Selected plot a final subjugation of the other cities. Every shade of sexual transition is represented: boys with girls' heads, girls with boys' heads. Here everything is true and nothing is permitted except to the permitters.

Waghdas: This is the university city, the center of learning where all questions are answered in terms of what can be expressed and understood. Complete permission derives from complete understanding.

Naufana and Ghadis are the cities of illusion where nothing is true and therefore everything is permitted.

The traveler must start in Tamaghis and make his way through the other cities in the order named. This pilgrimage may take many lifetimes.

Get out of the

defensive position

We now have a sufficient stockpile of the new weapons to initiate our campaign, and it seems unwise to delay longer. Sooner or later the enemy will learn something of our plans and the means we possess to implement them. We will apply the classic rules of hit-and-run warfare against a larger force, drawing them deeper into our territory while raiding and cutting supply lines. This is the tactic that beat Crassus's Roman Legions in the disastrous Parthian campaign. The Parthians would suddenly appear over a rise mounted on horses, loose a shower of arrows and ride away, luring the Romans deeper and deeper into the desert as thirst, hunger, and disease took their toll. Only a handful of the Legionnaires made their way back to the sea.

Once this tactic has sufficiently weakened the enemy, we will shift to an all-out attack on a series of enemy positions. Failure to follow through on a successful attack is as disastrous as attempting an attack against unfavorable odds. It was this error that lost Hannibal the war against Rome. He did not realize that he had beaten the whole Roman army, so instead of marching on the unprotected city without delay, he retrenched to consolidate his position until he had no position left.

We can expect a landslide of defections to our cause, and we must follow through to deliver a series of knockout blows. Nor will we allow time for the French and English to recognize the danger and join Spain against a common enemy. As soon as we see victory on the way in the southern hemisphere of the American continent, we will strike in the northern hemisphere. Then we will open a diplomatic offensive concentrating on England to negotiate treaties, trade agreements, and recognition of our independent and sovereign status.

Of course the new weapons will be common knowledge in a short time, but by then we will have a lead that will be difficult to overtake. We will be able to produce the weapons in any quantity, and by attracting inventors, skilled workers and technicians with higher wages and better living conditions, we can continue to turn out better weapons than our adversaries. We have also the incalculable advantage of a huge territory virtually impossible to invade successfully, whereas European countries, with the exception of Russia, are vulnerable to invasion, since they have no place to retreat to. We expect the Articles to spread through Africa, the Near and Far East, and we could invade Spain from North Africa.

Our immediate plan is to provoke the Spanish into a massive attack by taking Panama City and Guayaquil. This should divert much of the Pacific fleet to those two locations and dispatch land forces from Lima to Guayaquil and from Cartagena to Panama. If necessary, we shall retreat into the swamps of southern Panama and to the mountainous and heavily wooded areas northwest of the city. In the event of decisive land victories, we will immediately launch attacks on the depleted garrisons at Lima and Cartagena, inflict what damage we can on the fleet, and at the same time, strike in Mexico.

The Iguana twins have returned to Mexico to organize our movement there, and Bert Hansen has gone with them. Captain Strobe has gone to Panama to assess the strength of the Spanish garrison and to organize partisan resistance to the north and east of the city. The area to the south is already in our hands. Juanito and Brady, with a force of fifty men, have gone south to set up fortified positions west of Guayaquil from which the attack on the city can be launched and to which our forces can withdraw, luring the Spanish ground forces into a deadly trap.

The sea battles will be directed by Opium Jones, Skipper Nordenholz, and Captain Strobe. A number of Destroyers are under construction.

Then one morning we received word on the signal drums that Captain Strobe had been taken in Panama City and sentenced to hang.

On receipt of this news, we set out for Panama City with a force of fifty men armed with the double-barreled rifles and a good stock of mortars, both of the type that explode on contact and those that explode from timed fuses. We had little hope of arriving in time, so we sent back word to the local partisans to take what measures they could to effect a rescue, that an expeditionary force was on the way.

Marching day and night without sleep, on opium and yoka, we were five miles south of the city at dawn on the third day. A warm mist enveloped us and I was reminded of the steam bath in my little Michigan lake town and found myself walking with an erection. Suddenly we heard a terrific explosion from the direction of Panama City and stopped, our faces lifted to the rising sun.

Shortly thereafter, a runner informed us that Captain Strobe had been rescued and was heading south in a fishing boat towards one of Pacific bases opposite the Pearl Islands. We instructed the runner to inform the Spanish garrison that the pirates who had engineered the destruction of the armory and the escape of Captain Strobe were just south of the city, that they were few in number and almost out of powder. As we had hoped, the Spanish fell into our trap and immediately dispatched a column of soldiers in pursuit, leaving only a hundred to guard the city.

The country here is low hills with outcroppings of limestone, ideally suited for ambush. We select a narrow valley between slopes strewn with limestone boulders. Rocky terrain is the best for mortar attacks. We dispose twenty men on each slope, about fifty yards from the path the Spanish column will take. The remaining ten will serve as decoys, fleeing as the soldiers approach. Once the concealed riflemen open up on the enemy flanks, they will seek cover and fire directly into the Spanish column, who will then be caught in a three-way fire. Concealed behind boulders, we settle down to wait.

It is not long before the Spanish appear. There are about two hundred men in the column, with four officers on horseback. As they catch sight of the decoys, the officers urge their horses on, shouting to the men to follow. The lead officer, a major, is leaning forward in the saddle, his sword raised, his teeth bared under a bristling black mustache. Using a rifle with contact mortar, I take careful aim, leading the horse by four feet to allow for forward speed. Even so, I miscalculate slightly, and the mortar hits the horse in the withers instead of in the shoulder as I had intended. The explosion blows the major out of the saddle and over the horse's head. His sword flies out of his severed right hand in a glittering arc. The horse rears, screaming and kicking, entrails spilling from a gaping hole.

My shot is the signal for the others to open up, bouncing mortars off boulders by the foot soldiers and under the horses. One officer whirls and gallops back towards the city. After two rounds of mortar fire, we shift to the double-barreled rifles. In a few minutes, all but a handful are dead or dying and the survivors are fleeing back to the city in a blind panic. I give the signal to hold fire, since the accounts carried by the fugitives will place our number at five to eight hundred. The rumor of a large force of well-armed privateers, probably English, will spread panic in the city, whose defenders are now reduced to a scant hundred men.

We advance to the outskirts of the city, where a party of officers display a flag of truce to indicate that they wish to parley. We state our terms as immediate and unconditional surrender of the garrison and the city, telling the officers that we have better than eight hundred men behind us. If they surrender the city, we promise to spare the lives of the Governor, the officers and soldiers, and all the inhabitants. If not, we will kill any who offer the slightest resistance, and will sack and burn the city. They have no option except to agree.

Meanwhile, about three hundred local partisans have gathered, armed with weapons taken from the dead, since we do not want the officers to see the new weapons until we are able to effectively seal the city. We then stipulate that all soldiers, officers and armed civilians must come to this spot and lay down their arms. Anyone subsequently found in possession of arms will be summarily executed.

The soldiers, having laid down their arms, are ordered to remove their uniforms, boots and socks. Clad only in undergarments, they are marched to the garrison and locked in. The officers, the Governor, the wealthy inhabitants, and the clergy, protesting the indignity, are locked in the prison after all the prisoners have been released.

We post notices to the inhabitants to go about their daily business and to fear no harm. We set up the Articles in public places, impound all ships in the harbor, and post guards at all exits. No boat may leave the harbor and no person may leave the city.

For the next two days, while we are catching up on our sleep, the soldiers, officers and hostages are to be given adequate food, but the partisans who guard them and bring the food have orders not to talk or to answer any questions.

On the third day, fully rested, we gather around a conference table in the governmental dining room. News of our success has spread throughout the area, and there are now more than five hundred partisans gathered in the city, more than enough for routine guard duty. We consult maps and formulate plans for a series of attacks on the Spanish-held garrisons on the east side of the isthmus. These garrisons are for the most part small, and will be no match for our mortars. Within a month, we will control a string of garrisons from Port Roger to northern Panama. It is decided that the post of Commandante shall rotate each day. Since the ambush was largely according to my plan, I will assume the first shift.

We are the language

As I was reading the Cities of the Red Night text, the Iguana sister brought some books and put them down on the table. I laid aside the folder.

"Who wrote this?"

"A scholar who prefers to remain anonymous. Research into this area is not reinforced. If, as he suggests, conception is the basic trauma, then it is also the basic instrument of control." She gestured to the books stacked on the table. I saw at a glance that they were elaborately bound in a variety of colors. They looked very expensive.

"These are copies. Please study them carefully. I will pay one million dollars for recovery of the originals."

"How good are the copies?"

"Almost perfect."

"Then why do you want the originals? Collector's vanity?"

"Changes, Mr. Snide, can only be effected by alterations in the original. The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe are the prerecordings themselves. The copies can only repeat themselves word for word. A virus is a copy. You can pretty it up, cut it up, scramble it—it will reassemble in the same form. Without being an idealist, I am reluctant to see the originals in the hands of the Countess de Gulpa, the Countess de Vile and the pickle factory...."

"I don't need a pep talk—but I do need a retainer."

She laid out a check for two hundred thousand cools on the table. I began examining the books, skipping through to get a general impression. They are composed in a variety of styles and periods. Some of them seem to stem from the 1920s of The Great Gatsby, old sport, and others to derive from the Edwardian era of Saki, reflecting an unbearably flawed boyishness. There is an underlying current of profound frivolity, with languid young aristocrats drawling epigrams in streets of disease, war, and death. There is a Rover Boys-Tom Swift story line where boy heroes battle against desperate odds.

The books are color comics. "Jokes," Jim calls them. Some lost color process has been used to transfer three-dimensional holograms onto the curious tough translucent parchment-like material of the pages. You ache to look at these colors. Impossible reds, blues, sepias. Colors you can smell and taste and feel with your whole body. Children's books against a Bosch background; legends, fairy stories, stereotyped characters, surface motivations with a child's casual cruelty. What facts could have given rise to such legends?

A form of radiation unknown at the present time activated a virus. This virus illness occasioned biologic mutations, especially alterations in hair and skin color, which were then genetically conveyed. The virus must have affected the sexual and fear centers in the brain and nervous system so that fear was converted into sexual frenzies which were reconverted into fear, the feedback leading in many cases to a fatal conclusion. The virus information was genetically conveyed, in orgasms that were often fatal. It seems likely that the burnings, stabbings, poisonings, stranglings, and hangings were largely terminal hallucinations produced by the virus, at a point where the line between illusion and reality breaks down. Over a period of generations the virus established a benign symbiosis with the host. It was a mutating virus, a color virus, as if the colors themselves were possessed of a purposeful and sinister life. The books are probably no more representative of life at the time than a Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell represents the complex reality of American life.

"Are these complete copies of the originals I am retained to find, or should I say uncover?"

"No, these are fragments."

"You have some idea as to what the other books contain?" I asked.

She glanced at the check. "Do you?"

I nodded. "They may contain the truth, which these books cover with a surface so horrible and so nauseously prettified that it remains impervious as a mirror." I put the check in my wallet. "And as misleading," I added. I returned to the books.

As I read on, I became increasingly aware of a feeling of faintness and malaise. The colors were giving me a headache—the deep electric blue of the southern sky, the explosions of green by the pools and waterways, the clothes of tight-fitting red velvet, the purples, red, and pinks of diseased skin—rising from the books palpable as a haze, a poisonous miasma of color.

I loosened my collar, my thoughts hazy and somehow not my own, as if someone were delivering a lecture on the books, of which I caught an occasional phrase ... captions in English? "At one time a language existed that was immediately comprehensible to anyone with the concept of language." A World War I ambulance?

As I tried to examine it more closely, I could not be sure, but I had seen it with photographic clarity ... an old sepia photo circa 1917. "They have removed the temporal limits."

I looked up with a start, as if I had been dozing. The Iguana and her brother were not in the room. I had not seen them go. Jim was sitting on one side of me and Kiki on the other. They seemed to be equally affected.

"Whewwww ..." said Jim. "I need a good hooker of brandy."

"Muy mereado," said Kiki. "No quiero ver más...."

Jim and Kiki walk over to a cabinet bar in the corner of the room. I pick up a book bound in red skin. In a deeper shade of red: The First Redhead.

A blond boy with a noose around his neck blushes deeper and deeper, red washing through his body, his lips swelling as the red tide sweeps into his hair and ripples down his chest to the crotch, down his legs, dusting his skin with red hairs that glisten in a soft fire, heart pounding against his ribs like a caged bird....

I pick up a book with a heavy blue cover like flexible metal. In gold letters: The Blue Mutant. As I open the book I get a whiff of ozone.

A boy with a blue rash around his crotch, neck, and nipples, burning his asshole and crotch, a slow cold burn behind his ear, the blue color in his eyes, pale blue of northern skies washed across the whites, the pupils deep purple, blue shit burning in his ass like melting solder ... the smell of the Blue Mutant Fever fills the room, a rotten metal meat smell that steams off him as he shits a smoldering blue phosphorescent excrement. His pubic and rectal hairs turn bright blue and crackle with sparks....

I was looking at the books from above in a spacecraft coming in for a landing.

A purple twilight lay over the sad languorous city. We were driven to a villa on the outskirts of Lima. The house was surrounded by the usual high wall, topped with broken glass like sugar crystals on a cake. Two floors, balcony on the second floor, bougainvillea climbing over the front of the house.

The driver carried the luggage in and gave us the keys. He also gave me a guidebook in which certain shops and business addresses were checked.

We had a look around. The furniture looked like a window display: solid, expensive, undistinguished. Glassed bookcases were filled with leather-bound encyclopedias, Dickens, Thackeray, Kipling, books on the flora and fauna of South America, bird books and books on navigation. Nowhere did I see any indication that anyone had ever lived there.

Consulting a map of Lima, on a glass-covered coffee table spread with some issues of the National Geographic, I looked up the addresses. All in or near the Mercado Mayorista. One was an art-supply store....Hmmmm....I had already decided to fabricate the complete books if I could find the right paper. In fact, I felt sure that this was exactly what I was being paid to do. An address in the Mercado was Blum & Krup Import-Export. This was my contact.

The Mercado Mayorista of Lima occupies about four square blocks. Here vegetables, fruits, pigs, chickens and other produce are brought in by truck from all over Peru to be unloaded and sold. The shops, booths, bars, and restaurants are open twenty-four hours a day. The only thing comparable to the Mercado Mayorista is the Djemalfnaa of Marrakesh. The Djemalfnaa, however, has been a tourist attraction for so long that millions of cameras have sucked its vitality and dimmed its colors.

The Mercado is seldom visited by tourists and is no conceived as a folkloric spectacle. It has a definite function and the folklore is incidental. Street performers gather here because there are always spectators with money.

We walked on, passing little restaurants serving hot fish soup, meat on spits, brown bread ... bars with jukeboxes and boys dancing, Chinese restaurants, snake charmers, a trick bicycle rider, trained monkeys. Very faintly I could hear the pipes of Pan.

Some distance away there was a small circle of onlookers. A boy was playing a bamboo flute. He was about fifteen years old, with yellow hair, blue eyes, and a dusting of freckles on a broad face. Looking into the boy's eyes, I experienced a shock of recognition. His eyes were blank and empty as the blue sky over the market, devoid of any human expression: Pan, the Goat God. The music went on playing in my head, trickled down mountainsides in a blue twilight, rustling through glades and grass, twinkling on starlit streams, drifting down windy streets with autumn leaves.

I decided to visit the art-supply store alone. What I wanted would be under the counter. Anyone handling that kind of paper and ink would be into art forgery, probably passports and documents as well. Two visitors would queer the deal. Kiki wanted to look around the town anyway, and Jim needed some photographic equipment.

The store was on a dingy narrow street near the market. There were some dusty canvasses, easels, and tubes of paint in the window, reminiscent of the rubber sandwiches served in Swedish bars to legitimize the sale of liquor. When I tried the door I found that it was locked. I knocked, and the door was finally opened by a middle-aged man with heavy rimless glasses who looked at me suspiciously.

"Vous voulez?"

"Du papier, monsieur!"

"Entrez." He stood aside and locked the door behind me. A fattish woman with frizzy blonde hair and large diamonds on her liver-spotted fingers sat at an ancient cash register. She had been reading Le Figaro, which lay on the counter. She looked frightened. So did he. War criminals, I decided matter-of-factly. French collaborators.

"J'ai besoin de papier pour une tâche spéciale.... Des livres qui devraient paraître anciens."

He nodded and something like a smile touched his thin lips. "Par ici, monsieur."

He led the way to a back room containing a long oak table and several chairs. Iron cabinets with cylinder locks occupied one wall. He looked at me sharply.

"Ah oui." He gestured to the cabinets. "L'histoire, monsieur, à votre disposition ... quelle époque? Vous cherchez peut-être un codex mayan? Un papyrus d'Égypte? Quelque chose du Moyen Age?"

"Plus récent ... Dix-huitième ... environ 1702."

"Et l'auteur, monsieur? Gentilhomme, courtisane, voleur?" And the author? Gentleman, courtesan, thief?

"Pirate américain."

"Parfaitment." He opened a little casket with a key from his vest pocket and selected from it another key. With this he opened a cabinet in which I could see packages in cubbyholes, and brought out several packets tied and sealed with red wax.

"De Boston."

"Parfaitment." I examined the parchment carefully, holding it up to the light and looking at it under a magnifying glass. I nodded and smiled. "Très bien."

"De l'encre?"

"Oui."

He opened another cabinet full of bottles and jars and tubes.... "Ça."

I brought out my portable kit and ran some tests. "Ça marche ... ça marche....j'ai besoin aussi de couleurs.... C'est un livre illustré."

"De couleurs parfumées, monsieur?"

"Mais bien entendu ... d'hachissh, d'opium, du sang, du rhum, encens d'église, de latrines, du pourriture ..."

The package came to $10,000 plus $300 of regular art supplies.

"Alors, monsieur, vous avez le temps pour un cognac?"

"J'ai toujours le temps pour ça."

We start making books. I write the continuity. Jim does the drawings. We have the address of a modeling agency which puts us in touch with the film underground. We are in the right place.

Lima is the film studio of the world for far-out porn and snuff films, mostly on contract to collectors and governmental agencies. Only the third-rate material finds its way into the open market. The best camera work, processing, special effects, and actors of all nationalities can be had here for a price.

Jim sketches a scene in the rough. We stage it with live actors and then photograph it. Then Jim projects the color shots onto our paper for the finished product, which is something between photography and drawing and looks quite a lot like the Iguanas' "joke books."

Monsieur La Tour sells quality merchandise. The books seem to age two hundred years overnight. I am working mostly on my pirate story line. but since I am sure of the quality of the goods, I will invest some more money in Mayan and Egyptian papers and colors, and do two snuff films—a Mayan number called The Child of Ix Tab, and an Egyptian number called The Curse of the Pharaohs.

Ix Tab was the patron saint of those who hang themselves, whom she would transport straight to Paradise. In this number a young aristocrat is hanged by Ix Tab, who then gives birth to a superpotent Death Baby. The boy who plays the young aristocrat has a classic Mayan profile, and Ix Tab, spotted with decay, is a versatile pro who also plays in my Egyptian number as the evil sister of Tutankhamen—she has him strangled and gives birth to a Scorpion Goddess.

A million dollars is shrinking to expense-account money at this point. I am already a hundred thousand clams into the $200,000. I figure it is about time to look up Blum and Krup before they come looking for me. It's a small town and word gets around.

A cowboy in the

seven-days-a-week fight

Tamaghis is a walled city built of red adobe. The city stirs at sunset, for the days are unbearably hot at this season and the inhabitants nocturnal. As the sun sets the northern sky lights up with a baleful red glow, bathing the city in light that shades from seashell pink to deep-purple shadow pools.

It is a summer night and the air is warm and electric with a smell of incense, ozone, and the musky sweet rotten red smell of the fever. Jerry, Audrey, Dahlfar, Jon, Joe, and John Kelley are walking through a quarter of massage parlors, Turkish baths, sex rooms, hanging studios, cubicle restaurants, booths selling incense, aphrodisiacs and aromatic herbs. Music drifts from nightclubs, sometimes a whiff of opium smoke—the Painless Ones who run many of the concessions smoke it.

The boys pause at a booth and Audrey buys some Red Hots from a Painless One. This aphrodisiac causes an erogenous rash in the crotch, anus, and on the nipples. It acts within seconds, taken orally, or it can be injected—but this is dangerous since the pleasure is often so intense that it stops the heart. Adolescents of the city play red-hot dare games known as Hots and Pops.

The boys are dressed in red silk tunics open on their lean bodies, red silk pants, and magnetic sandals. At their belts they carry spark guns and long knives, sharp on both edges, that curl slightly at the end. Knife fights are frequent here since Red Hots can set off the raw red Killing Fever.

The virus is like a vast octopus through bodies of the city, mutating in protean forms: the Killing Fever, the Flying Fever, the Black hate Fever. In all cases the total energies of the subject are focused on one activity or objective. There is a Gambling Fever and a Money Fever which sometimes infect the Painless One—eyes glittering, they draw in the money with a terrible eagerness, trembling like hungry shrews. There is also an Activity Fever: the victims rushing about in a frenzy organizing anything, acting as agents for anything or anybody, prowling the streets desperately looking for contacts.

Red Night in Tamaghis: Dog Catchers, Spermers, Sirens, and the Special Police from the Council of the Selected who are infiltrating Tamaghis from Yass-Waddah. The Dog Catchers will seize any youths they encounter in the Fair Game areas and sell them off to hanging studios and sperm brokers. The Spermers are pirates operating from strongholds outside the city walls, attacking caravans and supply trains, tunneling under the walls to prowl in the rubbly outskirts of the city. They are outlaws who may be killed by any citizen, like cattle rustlers.

Two boys, faces blazing with alertness, slide from one red shadow pool to another. A patrol of Dog Catchers passes. The boys crouch in the darkness by a ruined wall, teeth bare, hands on their knives. The Dog Catchers are muscular youths with heavy thighs and the deep chests of runners. Naked to the waist, they carry a variety of nets and handcuffs around their shoulders, and bolos that can tangle legs at twenty yards. On leads are the hairless red sniffhounds, quivering, whimpering, sniffing, trying to fuck the Dog Catchers' legs. Audrey's lips part in a slow smile. This is one of his infiltration tactics: the dogs are trained to wrap themselves around a Dog Catcher's legs and trip him up.

Audrey and Cupid Mount Etna are in a populous area with wide stone streets, A flower float of Sirens passes. In conch shells of roses they trill: "I'm going to pop you naked darling and milk you while you're being hanged...."

Idiot males are rushing up, jumping on the hanging float to be hanged by the Sirens, many of whom are transvestites from Yass-Waddah. The floats wind on towards the hanging Gardens where the golden youths gather with their Hanging Exempt badges. Like characters in a charade they pose and pirouette in the red glow that lights trees, pools, and diseased faces burning with the terrible lusts of the fever.

Audrey decided on a detour. Four Special Police from the Council of the Selected stand in their way. They are crew-cut men in blue suits, looking like religious FBI men with muscular Christian smiles.

"What can we do for you?"

"Drop dead." Audrey snaps. He draws his spark gun and gives them a full blast. They fall twitching and smoking. Officially the SPs have no standing in Tamaghis, but they are bribing the local police and kidnapping boys for the transplant operation rooms of Yass-Waddah.

The boys sprint around the bodies and turn into an alley, police whistles behind them. Possession of a spark gun is a capital offense. Dodging and twisting through the maze of narrow streets, tunnels, and gangways, they lose the patrol.

They are on the outskirts now, near the walls, walking down a steep stone road. There is a road above them and a steep grassy slope leading up to it. Suddenly, a World War I ambulance truck stops on the high road and six men jump out got up as pirates with beards and earrings. They rush down the slope, eyes flashing with greed.

"Spermers!"

Audrey drops on one knee, raking the slope with his spark gun. the Spermers scream, rolling down the slope, clothes burning, setting the grass on fire. The truck is burning. Audrey and Cupid sprint on as the gas tank explodes behind them.

The unconscious imitated

by a cheesecake

The Double Gallows is the late place in Tamaghis. At 11:30 it is still nearly empty. The bartended is checking bottles and polishing glasses. SOme character is freaking out at the bar.

"We're all a bunch of dirty rotten vampires!" he screams. The bouncer throws him out.

"We don't like that in here. I mean it."

A Siren undulates in and trills for service.

"You see that sign, lady?" The bartender points to a picture of a Siren with a noose: "... will not be served here." The bouncer hustles her out.

It's an exclusive-type place where everybody goes. What do people do in Tamaghis? They see the Show. They all come here and see the big Show. There's a hanging show every night. The bar is filling up now, because this is Flasher Night. The chic clients make their entrances through trapdoors in the floor and ceiling, or through disused side entrances, and even now they are popping up through the floor in green drag screaming like mandrakes, dropping down through the ceiling in gauzy parachutes or with ropes around their necks, slithering in through mirrors and screens. Some are completely naked but most wear at least cowboy chaps, or scarves, or capes, or masks, or body paint, or sarongs, or snakeskin jockstraps, or Mercury sandals, or Scythian boots, or Etruscan helmets, or space suits with transparent ass and crotch.

Noose peddlers circulate among the clients, stopping here and there as a table of young aristocrats feel the nooses, which are of various grades and materials—silk in all colors, hemp cured and softened in rare unguents, tingle nooses burning with a soft blue flame, leather nooses made from sniffhound hide.

Audrey drops a noose languidly and waves to Jim across the room. Jim comes over and sits at his table. Audrey introduces him to Rubble Blood Pu, a slim elegant youth dressed in expensive nineteenth-century clothes with a red rope mark around his neck, and to Captain Strobe, the Gentleman Spermer, in eighteenth-century clothes, his yellow hair in a pigtail. Strobe too has the hemp marks around his neck. Cupid Mount Etna with a cupid-bow mouth, yellow goat eyes, and curly hair, is naked except for goat-hood sandals. Blindish Wasp, black sideburns, eyebrows that completely cover the eye sockets, thin purple lips, is shaped like a wasp—thin rounded chest, a waist so narrow Jim could have put his hands around it, long thin legs. His skin is dead white and shiny, his cock pointed. He is naked except for a black skullcap and black pointed shoes of soft leather. He gives of a sharp aromatic odor.

The guests are becoming impatient. "Pop Pop Pop," they scream.

Lights go on in a little alcove and there is the double gallows. It's a hologram and it makes you queasy to look at it floating there in stagnant rotten air like a solid mirage you can almost drink out of and almost smell. The star is a dummy called Whitey because he cost as much as the white shark in Jaws. A door opens on the gallows and Whitey is led in by a red demon as the clients caper around the gallows, standing on tiptoe and twisting their heads to one side and making clicking sounds with their tongues.

Now Whitey stands with the noose around his neck, pelvis tilted forward, cock almost hard, pupils pinpointed. The platform falls and he hangs there ejaculating and a blaze of light flashes out his eyes.

"A Flasher! A Flasher!" The clients throw up their arms and wriggle their hips forward ecstatically, bathing in the flash, pushing each other aside, wallowing about in heaps.

The gallows disappears. In an old silent film 1920s guests are jumping into a swimming pool.

"Come along to our digs, old sport," says Rubble Blood Pu. "This place is getting vulgar."

Pu leads the way through an area of vacant lots, rubble, and half-demolished buildings overgrown with weeds, scrub, and vines.

"Here we are."

He stops in front of a three-story building. The two lower floors are torn down to the girders and concrete stairs lead to the third floor. Pu unlocks a heavy door.

The third floor is furnished in Moroccan style with rugs and cushions and low tables. Five of the kraut kids, all naked, are smoking hash. One gets up and does a belly dance while the others, at the four points of the compass, roll on their backs, legs in the air, clapping with their feet as they sing.

They wear no clothes

And they dance up on their toes

And the dance they do

Is enough to kill a Jew

Rubble Blood Pu and Captain Strobe are both very slender, with small aristocratic genitals, and they manage to look elegantly attired and perfectly poised when naked. A boy with long flaxen hair and flaring ears, naked except for a helmet, brings a tray of mint tea.

Pu shows Jim how to hold the glass by top and bottom so as not to burn his hand.... "Come along and I'll show you around the house."

The kraut kids trail along, laughing and goosing each other.

"And here is the gallows room ... all modern and convenient, as you can see ... our subjects wear hanging helmets ... show him, Igor."

Igor walks up grinning. The helmet extends around the neck and down to the collarbone, glares around the ears, and covers the shaven scalp.

"You see there are wires for brain waves to be recorded over here; throat mikes in the helmet ... and this." He holds up a little ring of transparent elastic. "Always tailormade, of course ... and these magnetic tingle disks for the nipples. And the noose, scented with the subject's special smells—you know, his dirty underwear and jacked-off-in handkerchiefs. We've always been vampires, old sport.... It's in the family." He takes a last look around. "The best that money can buy ... still it's a bit confining, old sport—if you know what I mean. All in the mind, you know...."

The room behind him turns into Gatsby's booklined study.

*

"One of your dizzy spells?"

Hans takes my arm. The boys have sated themselves for the moment. They are sitting around, shoulder to shoulder, passing cannabis cigarettes.

"Cuidado, hombre."

A boy brushes a spark from his naked thigh ...soft distant voices in the warm dusk. We are walking back through the stale air of Panama that eddies around our bodies and settles behind us. No fresh breezes stir here. The city is like a closed room, full of stale flowers and stagnant water.

"And no, old sport, there is someone I want you to meet ... better nip in here first." He opens the door into a luxurious bathroom. "See you in the drawing room."

When Jim gets up to the drawing room, he sees a red-haired girl looking like Jerry's twin sister, dressed in red silk pajamas. The kraut kids sprawl in front of her, jacking off like she is a pinup.

Audrey looks at his wristwatch. He is on patrol with Cupid Mount Etna. Time to hit the street.

We are coordinated

the guard is manifold

Kelly, Clinch Todd, Hans, and myself proceed now to the garrison to review the captured soldiers. Massive walls with four gun towers surround a courtyard along which living quarters are ranged. Hans and I, flanked by ten partisans carrying razor-sharp machetes, step into the courtyard while Kelley, Todd, and Jon remain in the wardroom behind the bars.

"Tenshun!" They understand that in any language.

The soldiers shamble into a ragged line. Dirty, unshaven, frightened, they would seem to pose no threat. I walk slowly up and down, looking at each face in turn. A sorry lot for the most part, stupid and brutal, many of them showing the ravages of drink and disease. But two faces do stand out: a think hawk-faced youth with piercing gray eyes who meets my regard steadily, and a pimply boy with red hair who gives me an ingratiating smile.

"How many of you can read?"

The hawk-faced youth and two others raise their hands. A fourth raises his hand halfway.

"Well, can you read or can't you?"

"Well, yes sir, but it takes me some time."

"You'll have plenty of that." I point to the Articles. "I want those of you who can read to read what is written there. I want you to read it carefully. Then I want you to explain what is written there to those who can't read. Is that clear?"

The hawk-faced youth nods with a slight smile.

"I'll be back later to see if what is written there has been read and understood."

We then proceed to the house where the women are held, to be greeted by a chorus of shrewish complaints. No one will talk to them or tell them what had happened to their sons, husbands, and brothers. They have been denied medical attention and prevented from going to Mass.

I apologize smoothly for the temporary inconvenience and assure them that their husbands, son, and brothers are safe and being well cared for. I tell them that I am a qualified physician, and that if any of them are suffering from any pains or illnesses I will be glad to receive them one by one in a room I have set up as my office. I have also brought a priest who will hear confession, grant absolutions, or perform any other priestly offices of which they are in need. The "priest" is none other than Half-Hanged Kelley, his hemp marks covered by a clerical collar.

One by one, they troop into my office complaining of headaches, backaches, toothaches, chills and fever, shingles, flatulence, cramps, palpitations, catarrhs, varicose veins, fainting spells, neuralgia, and other ailments difficult to classify. To each I give a draft containing four grams of opium, with instructions to repeat the dose if their trouble returns, which of course it will at the end of eight hours when the opium wears off. Needless to say, Kelley is also kept busy by the pious señoras.

Returning to the garrison, I call the soldiers to attention. I walk down the line directing the three readers and the half-reader to stand forward. I then pick out six more, looking for faces and bodies that are reasonably well favored or show some signs of adaptability, intelligence, and good character. These ten being brought to the wardroom, I ask if they have read the Articles or had the Articles explained to them.

"'Article One: No man may be imprisoned for debt.' What does this Article mean to you?"

A fresh-faced boy with an impudent smile and reddish hair speaks up: "Suppose I run up a bill in the cantina and can't pay?"

I explain that debts to an innkeeper fall into a special category. If no one paid, there would be no cantinas and no wine.

The hawk-faced boy asks: "Does this mean that you intend to release all peons even though they stand in debt to the patrón?"

"It means exactly that. We intend to abolish the peonage system."

A mulatto boy looks at me suspiciously. Blank faces of the others show me they know nothing of the peonage system or how it operates.

"'Article Two: No man may enslave another.' What does this mean to you?"

"Does this mean we get out of the army?" the pimply boy asks.

I explain that the Spanish army does not exist in areas we control. Our army consists entirely of volunteers.

"What do you pay?"

"We pay in freedom and equal shares of any booty we take. The gold we have taken here in Panama will be shared equally among the soldiers who took part in the operation."

"I want to volunteer." He smiled and rubbed his crotch. Not intelligent exactly, but quick, intuitive, and brazen. A shameless one.

"What's your name?"

"Paco."

"Yes, Paco, you can volunteer."

"You mean you're going to abolish slavery?" the mulatto youth asked suspiciously.

"I mean exactly that."

"I'll believe it when I see it."

"'No man may interfere in any way with the religious beliefs or practices of another.' What does this mean to you?"

"We don't have to go to Mass?"

"That's right. Nor may you prevent anyone else from doing so."

"That would apply to other religions? To Moors and Jews?" the hawk-faced boy asked.

"Of course ... 'Article Four: No man may be subjected to torture for any reason.'"

"How will you get information from prisoners?"

"There are easier ways of doing that, as you will see. 'Article Five: No man may interfere with the sexual practices of another or force any sexual act on another against his or her will.' What does this mean to you?"

"You mean if I fuck another boy in the ass no one can say anything?"

"They can say what they like but they cannot interfere. If they do you would be justified in taking whatever measures were necessary to protect your freedom and your person, and anyone under the Articles would be bound to assist you."

The half-reader spoke up for the first time. "Sergeant Gonzalez and Corporal Hassanavitch kicked two soldiers to death for sodomy."

"Did they indeed?"

"If the sergeant finds out I told you that he'll have a knife in me."

"A knife?"

"Yes sir. He has a knife strapped to his leg."

"Interesting ... 'Article Six: No man may be put to death except for violation of the Articles. All officers of the Inquisition stand condemned under this Article and subject to immediate execution.' Do any of you know of any such officers present in Panama City?"

"Father Domingo and Father Gomez are officers of the Inquisition," said the hawk-faced youth. "Sent here to deal with pirates. They wanted to burn the English pirate as a heretic."

"Thank you. You will be rewarded for the information." The hawk-faced boy looked at me haughtily.

"I want no reward."

"Good." I turned to the half-reader. "And don't worry about the sergeant. I am having him removed from the garrison." The others were similarly processed in groups of ten. Only fifteen were suitable to be trained as partisans. Ten were obviously incorrigible rogues and troublemakers, chief among them being Sergeant Gonzalez, a snarling buck-toothed two-hundred-pound hulk, and Corporal Hassanavitch, a rat-faced gypsy. These ten bastards were marched to the guardhouse adjacent to the garrison and locked in. In taking leave of them I gave Sergeant Gonzales a bottle of anise-flavored aguardiente containing enough opium to kill five men, enjoining him to share it equally with his companions. He leered at me showing his yellow teeth.

"Síííí, Señor Capitán."

At the prison I summoned the resident clergymen to a small interrogation room. I was seated behind a desk examining papers, armed partisans ranged behind me. Kelley, in accordance with his clerical costume, had left his gun in a corner.

"Gentlemen, this is father Kelley from Ireland." Kelley smiled and nodded unctuously.

I studied a file in front of me, drumming my fingers on the desk. I looked up.

"Father Gomez?"

"I am Father Gomez." A plump face, near-sighted yellowish eyes behind spectacles, a cruel absentminded expression.

"Father Domingo?"

"I am Father Domingo." A thin sour face, autos-da-fé smoldering in sulfurous gray eyes.

"You are officers of the Inquisition?" I inquired midly.

"We are clergymen. Priests of God," said Domingo, glaring at me. He was not used to being on the receiving end.

"You are dogs of the Inquisition. Sent here from Lima. You urged that our companion Captain Strobe be burned as a heretic instead of hanged as a pirate. You were overruled by Bishop Gardenas and Father Herera. No doubt you are biding your time to revenge yourself on these honest men for their humanity."

Without more ado I drew my double-barreled pistol and shot them both in the stomach. Placing the smoking pistol on the desk, I snapped my fingers.

"Father Kelley! Extreme unction!"

The other clergymen gasped and turned pale. However, they could not conceal their relief when I told then that as decent clergymen they had nothing to fear. I reloaded my pistol as Kelley delivered his bogus unction.

"Well, I think you gentlemen could do with a drink." I poured for each a small glass of anise spirits containing four grains of opium.

Sitting on a balcony overlooking the bay, sipping a rum punch as the sun went down, I reflected that the exercise of power conveys a weird sensation of ease and tranquility. (I wonder how many of the ten men in the guardhouse will be alive tomorrow. It amuses me to think of them cutting each other's throats over a bottle of poisoned spirits.)

The summary dispatching of the two Inquisitors was based on a precept long used by the Inquisition itself, which is in fact the way they were able to maintain their power despite widespread opposition and hatred. Brutal sanctions against a minority from which one is generically exempt cannot but produce a measure of satisfaction in those who are spared such treatment. "As decent clergymen you have nothing to fear." Thus the burning of Jews, Moors, and sodomites produces a certain sense of comfort in those who are not Jews, Moors, or sodomites: "This won't happen to me." To turn this mechanism back on the Inquisitors themselves gives me a feeling of taking over the office of fate. I am become the bad karma of the Inquisition. I am allowing myself also the satisfaction that derives from a measure of hypocrisy, rather like the slow digestion of a good meal.

Troublemakers:

Any body of men will be found to contain ten to fifteen percent of incorrigible troublemakers. In fact, most of the misery on this planet derives from this ten percent. It is useless to try and reeducate them, since their only function is to harm and harass others. To maintain them in prisons is a waste of personnel and provisions. To addict them to opium takes too long, and in any case they are not amenable to useful work. There is but one sure remedy. In future operations, as soon as these individuals are discovered, either by advance intelligence or by on-the-spot observation, they will be killed on any pretext. In the words of the Bard, "Only fools do those villians pity who are punished ere they have done their mischief."

Today Hans is the City Commandante: all spit and polish, bathed and shaved, green-jacketed with silver skull-and-crossbones on his shoulders, khaki pants, his soft brown boots carefully shined.

At the guardhouse, five of the prisoners are dead. It is easy to reconstruct what happened. Sergeant Gonzalez, attempting to keep all the liquor for himself, was attacked by Corporal Hassanavitch and an accomplice. The sergeant killed them both with his knife and then drained about half the spirits, holding the rest at bay. The sergeant soon being overcome, the others took the knife and cut his throat. The victors then drank the remains of the bottle, which killed three of them.

"Well, get them out of here." Hans gestures to the corpses.

The partisans lead the way, planting shovels in the ground. We leave the prisoners digging graves like sullen Calibans and proceed to the barracks, where we are greeted by the smell of cannabis. The soldiers are laughing and talking, more relaxed now that ten wrong men have been removed.

"Achtung!"

The way Hans can say it anyone would believe it.

The men are now brought to the wardroom one at a time. The hawk-faced youth, whose name is Rodriguez, acts as clerk, writing down answers as Hans fires the questions.

"Name? Age? Place of birth? Length of service? Locations and times of previous service? What training have you received as a soldier?"

"Training?" The man looks blank.

"What did you do all day?"

"Well, we had to drill and clean the barracks, cook and wash dishes, work in the Captain's gardens...."

"What about your guns? You received instruction in their use? There was daily target practice?"

"We fired them only at fiestas and parades."

"Was there instruction in knife and sword fighting? In unarmed combat?"

"No, nothing like that. We could get a citation for fighting."

"Field exercises?"

"Qué es eso?"

"That means you go into jungles or mountains to learn the terrain and pretend to fight a war."

"We never left the city."

"So you have no idea of conditions and terrain ten miles outside Panama City?"

"No, sir."

"During the time of your service here, have you been sick?"

"Various times, señor."

"And what sicknesses have you had?"

"Well, sir, chills and fever, cramps and loose bowels...."

"Pox?"

"Yes, sir. The whores are rotten with it."

"And what treatment did you receive?"

"Not much. The doctor gave me some pills for the pox that made me feel worse. There was a sort of tea for the fever that helped a little...."

"You were formerly stations at Cartagena. What was the situation there as regards sickness?"

"Much worse, sir. A thousand soldiers died of the yellow sickness. That was when I was transferred."

"Was the work there the same?"

"More or less, except we had to guard the mule train."

"So you did leave the city at times?"

"Yes, sir. Sometimes for a week."

"And what was the mule train carrying? You don't need to tell me. Gold. What else interests the Spanish? Well now, all that gold to protect ... the garrison must have been larger than here ... perhaps a thousand?"

"Ten thousand, sir," says the soldier proudly.

Hans pretends to be impressed and whistles softly.

"And galleons no doubt to take away the gold? When all those sailors came ashore there must have been some right brawls in Cartagena, verdad?"

"Verdad, señor."

Big Picture calling Shifty

We return to staff headquarters, which we have set up in the Governor's spacious bedroom on the ground floor. This is the coolest room in the house but even so the heat is oppressive and we must keep the windows covered with mosquito netting which cuts off the occasional eddy of air that is the closest approximation to a breeze. There is a huge ornate curtained bed where exhausted partisans who arrive with dispatches can rest, where the staff officers can catch an hour's sleep or satisfy the sudden sex hungers that occur during the long hours of intense mental concentration without sleep.

We often work naked in the Governor's bedroom, seeing the maps with our whole bodies, performing ritual copulations in front of the maps, animating the maps with our sperm. The key map is Big Picture, showing the present area of occupation from Cartagena on the Atlantic seaboard to the Pearl Islands in the Pacific and northwards to a point a hundred miles north of Panama City. Green pins on the map show cities occupied by the partisans. Black pins designate areas occupied by the Spanish.

The key to Big Picture are ledger books.... We are now transcribing into the ledger books information obtained from the prisoners.

Cartagena. Location on map. Black pin. Estimated strength of garrison: ten thousand soldiers. Strongly fortified. Has resisted a number of pirate attacks. Gold terminal. Heavily armed convoys pick up gold here. Hygienic conditions worse than Panama. Recent epidemic of yellow fever.

These ledgers indicate no only the strength of garrisons and the movement of ships, but also the whole way of life of the enemy, what the soldiers do, what the officers do, what food they eat, what illnesses they suffer from, how they think, and what they can be expected to do. Rather like studying past performance to pick the winner of a horse race. But the Spanish, since they consist entirely of past performance, are much more predictable than horses. Massively encased in their colonial architecture, their forts and galleons, their uniforms, gold, portraits and religious processions, they move like ponderous armored knights to ends the was can predetermine.

In addition to Big Picture, there are also much more detailed maps of smaller areas showing locations of arms caches, farmhouses belonging to partisans, streams, wells, and sketches of animals native to the region. As messages come in, the green pins are spreading north and east and south along the Pacific coast. The whole southern isthmus of Panama is now in our hands.

We study the maps, concentrating on Big Picture. What exactly will the Spanish do? No doubt respond after their kind—heavy, massive, and slow as their galleons. They will dispatch galleons from Cartagena to land troops on the east coast, who will then move west towards Panama City. They will dispatch galleons from Lima to the Bay of Panama to land troops above and below Panama City, in what they fondly think is a crushing pincer movement.

On the eastern seaboard, we have every chance of a decisive sea victory. Here we have The Siren and The Great White, both now equipped with maneuverable cannons and exploding projectiles. No doubt all the British and French pirates and privateers in the West Indian area will gather like sharks at the smell of Cartagena gold. Our Destroyers will be operating long the coasts and land partisans will make the landing of troops extremely costly. On the Pacific side, our sea forces are negligible, consisting of only a few Destroyers in the Pearl Islands vicinity. We have, therefore, decided to evacuate Panama City at the approach of the Spanish galleons and let them land as many troops as they wish. In fact, the more they land, the better we like it. The Spanish, confident of victory, will then move north and south relying on heavy reinforcements from the east.

Back in the barracks, the fifteen who are to receive partisan training are lined up. I study each fact in turn: Rodriguez, the haw-faced boy with intense gray eyes, very intelligent, highly literate staff-officer material ... Juanito, a little Filipino, always smiling, eager to please ... the mulatto reader José, a solid reliable face, steady nerves in combat ... Kiki, the half-reader with a Mongoloid face and straight black hair, nicknamed El Chino ... Paco with his impudent ingratiating smile ... Nemo, a slender yellow-skinned buck-toothed youth with a dancer's grace ... Nimun, a curiously archaic youth part Negro with red hair, brown freckles, and a blank expression—he looks like one of the first mutant redheads from prehistoric times ... Pedro, a handsome broad-faced boy with high cheekbones and a smooth reddish face. The others are less distinguished, country faces from farm families who have enlisted to escape grinding poverty.

"You have been selected for partisan training. Your instruction begins tomorrow. During ten days of training, you will be paid five times your present pay. As soon as you join partisans in the field, the rate will be ten times present pay and an equal share of any booty taken. You will be wearing cadet uniforms from now on. You can come and go as you like after training hours."

Hans walks up and down measuring the boys with his eyes and writing measurements down on a clipboard. He hands the list to partisans, who return with a stack of uniforms and boots which they dump on a table.

We direct the boys to strip and bathe.

The boys are drawing water from the cistern and pouring it over each other with the usual horseplay and merriment. Paco sidles in behind Nemo and pretends to fuck him, rolling his eyes and showing his teeth and snorting like a horse. "Cabrón!" Nemo screams, dodging away as he empties a bucket of water over Paco's head.

I am the eternal spectator, separated by unbridgeable gaps of knowledge, feeling the sperm gathering in tight nuts, the quivering rectums, smelling the iron reek of sex, sweat, and rectal mucus, watching the writhing brown bodies in the setting sun, torn with an ache of disembodied lust and the searing pain of disintegration.

Silver spots boil in front of my eyes. I am standing in the empty ruined courtyard hundreds of years from now, a sad ghostly visitant in a dead city, smell of nothing and nobody there.

The boys are flickering shadows of memory, evoking bodies that have long since turned to dust. I am calling, calling with a throat, without a tongue, calling across the centuries: "Paco ... Joselito ... Enrique."

Screen play/part one

It is on the second floor. A brass plaque: "Blum & Krup." A metal door. A bell. I ring. A cold-eyed young Jew opens the door a crack.

"Yes? You are client of salesman?"

"Neither." I hand him my card. He closes the door and goes away. He comes back.

"Mr. Blum and Mr. Krup will see you now."

He ushers me into an office decorated in the worst German taste with pictures of youths and maidens swimming with swans in northern lakes, the carpets up to my ankles. There, behind a huge desk, are Blum and Krup. A vaudeville team. Blum is Austrian and Jewish, Krup is Prussian and German.

Krup bows stiffly without getting up. "Krup von Nordenholz."

Blum bustles out from behind the desk. "Sit down, Mr. Snide. I am the master here. Have a cigar."

"No, thanks."

"Well, we will have some fun at least. We will have an orgy." He goes back to his chair on the other side of the desk and sits there watching me through cigar smoke.

"And why have you not come here sooner, Mr. Snide?" asks Krup in a cold dry voice.

"Oh well, there's a lot of legalwork in this business ..." I say vaguely.

"Ja und Assenwerke." (Yes and asswork.)

"We want that you stop with the monkey business and do some real business, Mr. Snide."

"We are not a charitable institution."

"We do not finance ass fuckings."

"Now just a minute, Blum and Krup. I wasn't aware you were my clients."

Krup emits a short cold bray of laughter.

Blum takes the cigar out of his mouth and points the butt across the table at my chest. "And who did you think was your million-dollar client?"

"A green bitch synthesized from cabbage?"

"Well, if you are my client, what am I expected to do exactly?"

Krup whinnies like a cynical horse.

"You are to recover certain rare books now in the possession of a certain Countess," Blum says.

"I am not even sure I would know these books if I saw them."

"You have seen samples."

"I am not sure the samples correspond in any way to the alleged books I am retained to recover."

"You think you have been deceived?"

"Not 'think.' Know."

The room is so quiet you can hear the long gray cone of Blum's cigar fall into an ashtray. Finally he speaks. "And suppose we could tell you exactly where the books are?"

"So they are in someone's private bank vault surrounded by guards and computerized alarm systems? I am supposed to sneak in there and carry out a carton of books slung over my shoulder in a rare tapestry, stamps and first editions in all my pockets, industrial diamonds up my ass in a finger stall, a sapphire big as a hen's egg in my mouth? Is that what I am expected to do?"

Blum laughs loud and long while Krup looks sourly at his nails. "No, Mr. Snide. This is not what you are expected to do. There is a group of well-armed partisans operating in an adjacent area, who will occupy the Countess's stronghold. You will have only to go in after them and secure the books. There will be an outcry against the partisans who have so savagely butchered a rich foreign sow... Then stories will filter out about the Countess and her laboratories, and there'll be something in it for everybody. The CIA, the partisans, the Russians, the Chinese ... we will have some fun at least. Might start a little Vietnam down here."

"Well," I say. "You have to take a broad general view of things."

"We prefer a very specific view, Mr. Snide," says Krup looking at a heavy gold pocket watch. "Be here at this time Thursday and we will talk further. Meanwhile, I would strongly advise you to avoid further commitments."

"And bring your assistants and the books what you got," adds Blum.

When Jim and I go to see Blum and Krup on Thursday, we take along the books the Iguanas have given me. Krup looks the books over, snorting from time to time, and as he finishes leafing through each one, he slides it down the table to Blum.

"Mr. Snide, where are the books you are now making?" asks Krup.

"Books? Me? I'm just a private eye, not a writer."

"You come to make with us the crookery," snaps Blum, "we break you in your neck. Hans! Willi! Rudi! Heinrich! Herein!"

Four characters come in with silenced P-38s, like in an old Gestapo movie.

"And now, your assistant will get the books while you and your Lustknabe remain here. Hans and Heinrich will go with him to make sure he does not so lose himself."

Hans and Heinrich step behind Jim. "Keep six feet in front us at all times." They file out.

In half an hour Jim is back with the books. B & K spread them out on the table and both of them stand up and look at them like generals studying a battle plan.

Finally Krup nods. "Ach ja. With these I think it is enough."

Blum turns to me, almost jovial now, rubbing his hands. "Well, you and your assistant and the boy, you are ready to leave, hein?"

"Leave? Where to?"

"That you will see."

Hans, Rudi, Willi and Heinrich march us up some stairs onto a roof and into a waiting helicopter. The pilot has a blank cold thuggish face and he is wearing a 45 in a shoulder holster. He looks American. The guards strap us into our seats and blindfold us and we take off. The flight lasts for about an hour.

Then we are herded out and into another place, a prop job. Dakota, probably. About three hours this time, and we set down on water. They take off our blindfolds and we now have a different pilot. He looks English and has a beard.

The pilot turns around and smiles. "Well, chaps, here we are."

They untie us and we get out on a jetty. It is on a small lake, just big enough to set the plane down. Around the lake I see Quonset huts and in an open space something that looks like an oil rig. A barbed-wire fence surrounds the area with gun towers. There are enough armed guards around for a small army.

In front of a Quonset hut several men are talking. One comes forward to greet us: it is that CIA punk Pierson.

"Well, Snide," he says. "Welcome aboard."

"Well, Pierson," I say. "If you can't lick them join them."

"That's right. How about some chow?"

"That would be just fine."

He leads the way into a Quonset that serves as a dining room. There are some long tables and tin plates and a number of men eating. Some of them look like construction workers, others like technicians.

My attention is drawn to a table of about thirty youths. They are the best-looking boys I have ever seen at one time, and all of them are ideal specimens of white Anglo-Saxon youth.

"Our genetic pool," Pierson explains.

A fat mess sergeant slops some fish and rice and stewed apricots on our plates and fills tin cups with cold tea.

"Army-style here," says Pierson.

After we finish eating, he lights a cigarette and grins at me through the smoke.

"Well, I guess you are wondering what this is all about."

"Yeah."

"Come along to my digs and I'll explain. Some of it, at least."

I know quite a bit already. Much more than I want him to think I know. And I know that the less he tells me the better chance I have of getting out of here alive. I've already seen that the oil rig is a rocket-launching pad. Things are falling into place.

He leads the way to a small prefab. He turns to Jim and Kiki: "Why don't you two look around? Do some fishing. You can get tackle at the PX. The lake is stocked with largemouth bass ... You'll do well here...."

I nod to Jim and he walks away with Kiki. Pierson unlocks the door and we go in. A cot, a card table, some chairs, a few books. He motions me to a chair, sits down and looks at me. "You saw the launching pad?"

"Yes."

"And what do you think it will be used for?"

"To launch something, obviously."

"Obviously. A space capsule that will also be a communications satellite."

I am beginning to understand what they are planning to communicate.

"Now, just suppose an atom bomb should fall on New York City. Who would get the blame for that?"

"The Commies."

"Right. And suppose a mysterious plague broke out attacking the white race, while the yellow, black, and brown seemed to be mysteriously immune? Who would be blamed for that?"

"Yellow black brown. Yellow especially."

"Right. So we would then be justified in using any biologic and/or chemical weapon in retaliations, would we not?"

"You would do it justified or not. But the plague might well decimate the white race ... destroy them as a genetic entity."

"We would have the fever sperm stocks. We could rebuild the white race to our specifications, after we ..."

The table of thirty boys flashed in front of my eyes. "Pretty neat. And you want me to write the scenario."

"That's it. You've written enough already to get the ball rolling."

"What about the Countess de Gulpa? How does she figure in this?"

"Ah, the Countess. She doesn't figure. She is not nearly as important as you may have thought. She would hardly go along with destroying the blacks and browns, because she makes her money out of them. She still thinks in terms of money."

"Her laboratories?"

"Not much we could use. Certain lines of specialized experimentation ... interesting, perhaps. She has, for example, succeeded in reanimating headless men. These she gives to her friends as love slaves. They are fed through the rectum. I don't see any practical applications. We had thought of using her in scandals to discredit the rank-and-file CIA ... but that won't be necessary now.

"I daresay you could wipe her out with rockets from here."

"Easily. Or we could use biologic weapons."

"The Black Fever?"

"Yes." He pointed to the radio. "In fact, I could give the order right now."

"So what do you want from me?"

"You will finish the scenario. Your assistant will do the illustrations."

"And then?"

"You have been promised a million dollars to find the books. You have found them. Of course, money will mean nothing once this thing breaks, but we will see to it that you live comfortably. After all, we have no motive to eliminate you ... we may need your services in the future. We're not bad guys really...."

How nice will these guys be once they get what they want from me? If I am allowed to live at all it will certainly be as a prisoner.

I am trying to stall Blum with a slick number called Naked Newgate about a handsome young highwayman and the sheriff's daughter. Blum isn't buying it.

"Any thousand-dollar-a-week Hollywood hack could write such a piece of shit."

Then Pierson asks me over for a drink and a "little chat." It sound ominous.

"Oh uh by the way ... Blum isn't exactly happy about the screenplay."

"Nize baby, et up all the screenplay."

He looks at me sharply.

"What's that, Snide?"

"It's a joke. Fitzgerald in Hollywood."

"Oh," he says, a bit intimidated by the reference to Fitzgerald ... perhaps something he should know about ... He clears his throat.

"Blum says he wants something he calls art. He knows it when he sees it and he isn't seeing it now."

"What I like is culture! What I like is art!" I screech in the tones of a crazed Jewish matron.

He gives me a long blank sour look.

"More jokes, Snide?"

"I'll give him what he wants. I'm staging a little theater production tomorrow ... very artistic."

"This had better be good, Snide."

A slim blond youth in elegant nineteenth-century clothes stands on a scaffold. A black hood, laced with gold threads, is drawn over his head.

RUBBLE BLOOD PU

(END OF PART I)

Stuck in dead smallpox nights of last century. This satined ass in yellow light.

(Yellow-flecked storm waves ... palm trees ... wide strip of sand ... a corduroy road ... I don't remember hitting ... I really don't think so ... the truck shadow ... trees tasting cement ... green dark water.)

"Good English soldier of fortune, sir. Work for you, yes no?"

Spelling years whisper the lake heavy red sweater, trash cans in yellow light. The sigh of harmonica flags in the sad golden wash of the sunset singing fish luminous sky fresh smell of damp violets. Man smell of dirty clothes red faces breath thick on tarnished mirrors.

Sunset, train whistles. I am on the train with Waring. Red clay roads and flint chips glitter in the setting sun.

Pilots the plane across time into a waiting taxi, steep stone street, boy with erection yellow pimples turn-of-the-century lips parted ... red hair freckles a ladder.

A young face floats in front of his eyes. The lips, twisted in a smile of ambiguous sexual invitation, move in silent words that stir and ache in his throat with a taste of blood and metallic sweetness. He feels the dizzy death weakness breathing through his teeth, his breath ice cold.

The boy in front of him lights up inside, a blaze of light out at his eyes in a flash as Audrey feels the floor drop out from under him. He is falling, the face floating down with him, then a blinding flash blots out the room and the waiting faces.

Cheers here are the nondead

A tenor voice was singing in my head:

"A touch of sun, a touch of sun

The color sergeant said ..."

I woke up with something cold on my chest. A doctor was sitting by my bed with a stethoscope.

"Hello there, young guy," he said when I opened my eyes.

A naval officer stood beside the doctor, looking down at me. I could feel a cast around my neck. The doctor turned to the other officer:

"Heart's sound as a gold dollar. Should be out of the cast in a week."

The officer looked down at me from some stinker of a battleship film: "If you feel like that again, son, so see the shrink or the chaplain."

"Would someone show me my face in the mirror?"

The doctor held a hand mirror in front of me. A shock of recognition. Familiar young face. Red hair.

"Just wanted to be sure I was still there."

The doctor and the officer laughed, and I heard the door close. The face looked at me from the foot of the bed.

"Hello. I'm Jimmy Lee. You're Jerry. We're identical twins. I'm in the medics, you're in communications. U.S. Navy, six years' service. Depressed over the death of your pet monkey, you tried to hang yourself. I cut you down in time. That's our story. You want to remember...."

They had to be careful about sex in the navy, so Jimmy and Jerry got a book on astral projection and decided to learn to do it in the "second state," as the book called it, and they finally succeeded though they never knew exactly when it would happen or who was going to visit whom until it happened and this was sometimes under embarrassing circumstances, like in the shower room or during a physical examination. One twin lets out an eerie high-pitched wolf howl and turns bright red all over as the hairs on his head and body stand up and crackle. Then, as if struck by lightning, he falls to the floor in an erotic seizure ejaculating repeatedly in front of the appalled and salacious tars. A slack-jawed pimply boy from east Texas watches with a bestial leer.

"Look at his peter!"

"Medics!"

Jimmy describes a typical attack to a flustered navy psychiatrist:

"First there's this smell, Doctor. Like skunks in heat, if you'll pardon the expression, sir. It chokes you and gets you hot. Like a popper, sir." He makes a motion of breaking a popper under his nose, moans and shows his teeth. The doctor coughs, opens a window and pulls up a venetian blind. Sunlight streams into the room.

"And then Jerry's face comes into focus like. He he he," he titters. "That reminds me of a joke, sir. This old Jew, sir, got his wife and Mrs. Lieberman from next door in his car, he is driving out into the country to focus his headlights, sir, and he's got a sheet to do it with and Mrs. Lieberman sees him getting the sheet out, sir, and she says:

" 'Vot's he gonna do?'

" 'He's going to focus.'

" 'Vot? Both of us?'

"Rather good, don't you think, sir? Looking at me with this smile, sir." He leers at the doctor and squirms in his chair. "And his body, sir, is a translucent red haze. I got that word out of a navy bulletin on poison fish. Some of them is translucents. You can see all their guts, sir." He looked pointedly at the doctor's stomach. "It's like Jerry vaporize hisself. He just steams right into me feeling and wriggling down into each glittering leg hair, sir." Jimmy hitches up his pants to show white ankles with red hairs that stir and glitter in the sunlight.

"With little electric prickles, sir, into you know and you know and you knows. Then I am going down very fast in an elevator, you knows the feeling, sir, right here." He cups his crotch. "And Jerry is floating down with me. Then silver light pops in my eyes, sir." He makes a loud popping sound with his mouth. The doctor starts. "And I shoot off and everything turns red. We call it a red-out, sir."

The doctor made a personal diagnosis of acute homosexual panic. A colleague said it was psychomotor epilepsy. The Old Man said he didn't care what it was, he didn't want it in the navy. So the Juicy-Fruit twins, as he called them, were up for discharge. Since they had no medical record of epileptic seizures or psychosis prior to enlisting in the navy there was the question of a complete disability pension, and this slowed things down. Then project Simulated Space Conditions got under way and the discharge was shelved.

"What's going on here?" I asked Jimmy Lee.

"Well, we're on Krup's spaceship or so he claims. Anyhoo, he's up there with charts and maps and the crew seems to obey him, most of them at least."

"What do they look like?"

"Germans mostly. Young punks."

"Who else is here?"

"All the boys from your scripts: Audrey, Jerry, all the Jims and Johns and Alis and Kikis and Strobe, Kelley, and Dahlfar. One foot in a navy mess and the other on some kooky spaceship. You see, there is a pretense this is just a naval station and you never know which is the pretense: spaceship or navy. One minute you are getting popped in Tamaghis, the next you're on KP or swabbing the deck. They got shore patrols out in Tamaghis. Whole area is off limits. And pro stations. And I've got a rundown on Krup. He's an intergalactically known spaceship swindler. You set out for the Big Dipper and wind up stranded in Vladivosotok. And he's a heavy metal junk runner, known as Opium Jones in the trade."

I'd seen metal junk addicts. Withdrawal is like acute radiation sickness. We sure are in good hands.

"Who's that joker with the doctor?"

"Oh he's one of the old navy set.... The doctor will be back any minute. I have to take a sperm specimen. They run tests on it...."

I start to get a hard-on at the prospect of coming in another body. The doctor is looking down at me.

"How do you feel, young guy?"

"Horny, Doc."

"That always happens with a vertebral fracture like yours."

He folds the sheet down to my knees. I can it float up and throb. A throbbing in my neck sends electric tingles down to my crotch. Jimmy sits down with a beaker and runs his fingers lightly up and down my new cock and I go off in a blaze of silver light. Jimmy's face gets black around the edges and I go out for a few seconds. When I come around, the doctor is gone.

"He's a creep and I hate him," Jimmy says. "He used to be the doctor in a Siren cathouse."

I know what that means. Money from the Madam to pass her girls, in advanced stages of one of the fifty-seven venereal diseases endemic in the Cities of the Red Night,

"Sometimes I wish it was one thing or the other. Tamaghis or the navy," I complain. "Six years in the navy and what did it get us? Give me Tamaghis. It beats swabbing decks and fucking clapper dry-cunt whores."

"It does at that," agrees Jimmy.

"What about Blum?"

"It's open war now between Krup and Hollywood."

"Sounds like a scriptwriter's paradise."

"It is and that's why they drafted you into the navy where they don't have to pay you anything but navy pay. Got you for a pop. Same way they got all of us."

"So this ship is manned by the hanged."

"Sure. That's how we all got shanghaied."

"The Germans too?"

"Second generation. They are all artificial-insemination kids from one hanged father."

I closed my eyes, feeling very relaxed and comfortable in Jimmy's body, and I could remember the little Michigan lake town. Fishing was the big thing then, carp and lake trout. At fourteen I ran away to join the navy with a forged birth certificate. Two years later they found it out and the President himself pardoned me—it was in all the papers. And I could remember this dream I kept having about a strange city with red light in the streets and then I was in a room naked and could see other people there naked too and suddenly they are all looking at me, I get a hard-on and go off and sometimes one of the faces lights up just as I start to shoot. And that was the first time I saw Jimmy Lee, long before I met him in the navy after my pardon. I was learning to be a radio operator and I'd gone to the radio room when this new kid with tech stripes looks up and smiles at me just like he did in the dream.

"We met—in a way, that is ... weren't you in the Double G the other night?"

I remembered a place I'd wandered into where everybody was looking at something I couldn't see. The way they were looking and a smell in the place got me hot and Jimmy looking at me like that, I was getting a hard-on now so I sat down to hide it and lit a cigarette.

Jimmy starts filling me in on the officers. He always knew who was what aboard ship. "The Old Man's a real asshole and you can't smear it on too thick—tell him you want to be buried right in the same coffin with him when you die. Anyhoo, I think we're getting a new C.O. You see, this is a kook project with simulated space conditions and the old C.O. can't adjust. So they have called in someone called Krup von Nordenholz, a Nazi war criminal, I hear, but a space expert. So forget about the old C.O. Never butter a man on the way out or you can slip right out with him. Like to bunk with me? Just one other kid in the room, Jim Lewis. You'll like him and he'll like you, too...."

The investiture of the new C.O. was not unopposed and a period of chaos followed.

Stepping into the hall, I saw three naked boys swabbing the corridor, wriggling their asses and goosing each other. The old C.O., with the master-at-arms, bustles round a corner.

"This is disgraceful! Arrest these men!"

"Are we going to be popped, Commander?"

"Bare-ass in front of all our mates?"

"These men are obviously deranged. Call the medics. Reefer madness most likely. If it's dope they are to be transferred to the prison ward."

The doctor minces in. "Hello there, young guys. Come along for an examination."

"Who's that?"

"That's the new doctor."

"Well, I don't like the look of him."

"He's supposed to be an expert on space medicine."

"So what?"

"So long as I'm C.O. this is Naval Station 123 Communications."

Back in his cabin, the C.O. found a full-length naked effigy of himself dangling with a hard-on from a lantern hook in the ceiling. Then a powder charge went off in its nuts and a roll of paper popped out the cock in a puff of smoke. The paper landed on his desk and unrolled: his resignation just waiting for his signature.

The resignation of the old C.O. after a nervous breakdown did not end the conflict. The old navy was still in occupation. But Krup was winning. Smoothly Krup moved in his Hitler Jungen boys, one looking just like another, all with rosy cheeks and yellow hair. These boys were clean, efficient, exemplary sailors and the old navy could find no fault with them. And Krup removed the off limits on Tamaghis. This made him popular with the men. All the swishes in camouflage openly wore Krup buttons: Billy Budd with a rope around his neck saying, "God Bless Captain Krup."

And the croaker was a Krup man. He served on a Krup metal junk runner when the crew broke into the cargo and got hooked on M.J. Krup found it out and cut them off cold. "This is not a charitable institution," he told the ward full of M.J. addicts shitting, screaming, puking, ejaculating phosphorescent sperm. "I leave you in good hands."

Anyone reporting sick to that croaker walked out a Krup man or he went out feet-first. And the fence sitters, seeing the way the navies were crumbling, began coming over to Krup, and since many of these were the technical sergeants, that just about sewed it up as a Krup shop.

Then one night, the Krup men in every dorm got up before dawn and took down all the pinup girls. Oh say can you see by the dawn's early light forty-eight naked boys fucking, sucking, rimming on a red, white, and blue gallows and some awful Nordic shit Krup laps up like a cat, the boy singing his swan song in a mountain lake full of swans who convoy him reverently to the gallows. You don't have to be a space expert, just a tech sergeant, to see the old navy game in operation—how one faction gets another out to slide in their own boys.

Morning sun on morning hard-ons as the tars climb out of their bunks and stare at the walls.

"Where's my sexpot?" a boy moans stolidly.

"I can't stand these kids on my walls."

"They're not your walls any longer."

"Hans, Rudi, Heinrich, Willi—herein!"

Come in with Krup or else. A Krup takeover of the crew and the ship, or so it seemed. He changed his the name of the ship from The Enterprise to The Billy Celeste, after a nineteenth-century English man-of-war. Now all Krup had to worry about were his own men, who had used him to get rid of the old C.O., and the old navy with its loathsome pinups and pro stations.

But few of us had any confidence in Krup. We'd seen this character operate, how smoothly he'd hoaxed us into his hanging universe... Tamaghis ... the Double G. But the shore leave was one hell of a lot better. We never had it so good. We could go to a licensed Siren cathouse where they have these deactivated Sirens just give you the sex trill.

The boys are getting dressed to go ashore, adjusting hangman-know ties.

"Might pop myself a month's pay tonight."

"More likely you'll swing the other way."

The heavy-handed kidding—it's all so Young Navy. The pimply virgin there trying to act wise—he's from Virginia, so we call him the Virginian. So we all chip in to pay for a Siren and watch the Virginian through the two-way mirror....

"Look at the dong on that kid," says the boy from East Texas.

The kraut kids hardly ever go ashore, because they like to save money. Off duty they loll around in their bunks jacking off and making airplane noises.

The sky is thin as

paper here

Waring's house still stands. Only the hinges have rusted away in the sea air so all the doors are open. In a corner of the studio I find a scroll about five feet wide wrapped in heavy brown paper on which is written "For Noah." There is a wooden rod attached to one end of the scroll and on the wall two brass sockets designed to receive it. Standing on tiptoe I fit the rod into the sockets and a picture unrolls. Click. I remember what Waring told me about the Old Man of the Mountain and the magic garden that awaited his assassins after their missions of death had been carried out. As I study the picture I see an island in the sky, green as the heart of an emerald, glittering with dew as waterfalls whip tattered banners of rainbow around it. The shores are screened with thin poplars and cypress and now I can see other islands stretching away into the distance like the cloud cities of the Odor Eaters, which vanish in rain ... the garden is fading ... rusty barges and derricks and cement mixers ... a blue river ... red brick buildings ... dinner by the river. On the edge of the market, tin ware clattering in a cold spring wind. When I reach the house the roof has fallen in, rubble and sand on the floor, weeds and vines growing through ... it must be centuries.... Only the stairs remain going up into the blue sky. Sharp and clear as if seen through a telescope, a boy in white workpants, black jacket and black cap walking up a cracked street, ruined houses ahead. On the back of his jacket is the word DINK in white thread. He stops, sitting on a stone wall to eat a sandwich from his lunch box and drink some orange liquid from a paper container. He is dangling his legs over a dry streambed. He stands up in the weak sunlight and urinates into the streambed, shaking a few drops off his penis like raindrops on some purple plant. He buttons his pants and walks on.

Dead leaves falling as we drive out to the farmhouse in the buckboard ... loft of the old barn, jagged slashes of blue sky where the boards have curled apart ... tattered banners of rain ... violet twilight yellow-gray around the edges blowing away in the wind.

He is sitting there with me, cloud shadows moving across his face, ghostly smell of flowers and damp earth ... florist shop by the vacant lot ... dim dead boy.... The sky is thin as paper here.

Étranger qui passait

Farnsworth, Ali, and Noah Blake are moving south across the Red Desert, a vast area of plateaus, canyons, and craters where sandstone mesas rise from the red sand. The temperature is moderate even at midday and they travel naked except for desert boots, packs, and belts with eighteen-inch Bowie knives and ten-shot revolvers chambered for a high-speed 22-caliber cartridge. They have automatic carbines of the same caliber in their packs, with thirty-shot clips. These weapons may be needed if a time warp dumps an old western posse in their laps.

The only provisions they carry are protein, minerals and vitamins in a dry powder concentrate. There are streams in the canyon bottoms where fish abound and fruit and nut trees grow in profusion.

They carry collapsible hang-gliders in their packs.

They have stopped at the top of a thousand-foot cliff over an area littered with red boulders. Here and there is a glint of water. The sandstone substrata form pools that hold water and even in otherwise arid patches there are usually fish and crustaceans in the pools.

The boys unpack and assemble the gliders. As always, they will take off one at a time so that the lead glider will indicate to the others the air currents, wind velocities, and updrafts to be expected.

They draw lots. Noah will go first. He stands on the edge of the cliff studying the terrain, the movements of dust clouds and tumbleweeds. He looks up at the clouds and the wheeling vultures. He runs towards the edge of the cliff and soars out over the desert. The glider is out of control for a few seconds in an updraft. He goes into a steep dive and pulls out, coming in smoothly now he lands by a pool. He waves and signals to the others; a tiny figure by a speck of water. They move a hundred feet down the cliff and take off.

By the pool they eat dried fruit washed down with water. Ali stands up and points.

"Look there."

The others can't see anything.

"There ... right there...."

They pick out a lizard about four feet high standing on two legs fifty feet way. The lizard is speckled with orange-red and yellow blotches, so perfectly camouflaged it is like picking a face out in a picture puzzle to see him. The lizard knows he has been seen and lets out a high-pitched whistle. He runs towards them on two legs with incredible speed, kicking up a trail of red dust. He stops in front of them, immobile as a stone, while the dust slowly settles behind him. Seen at close range he is clearly humanoid with a smooth yellow face and a wide red mouth, black eyes with red pupils, a patch of red pubic hair at the crotch. A dry spoor smell drifts from his body.

The lizard boy now leads the way setting the fastest pace the others can maintain. As he moves his body changes color to blend into the landscape. In the late afternoon they are making their way down a steep path into a canyon. Leaves spatter the lizard's body with green. They come to a wide valley and a river with deep pools. The boys take off their packs and swim in the cool water. The lizard dives down to the bottom and comes up with fourteen-inch cutthroat trout in his jaws and flips it onto the grass by the pool. Ali and Farnsworth are picking strawberries.

Next day they set out to explore the canyon. The river winds between red cliffs. Here and there are cubicles cut in the rock by ancient cliff-dwellers.

We are heading for the river towns of the fruit-fish people. The staple of their diet is a fruit-eating fish which attains a weight of thirty pounds. To cultivate this fish they plant the riverbanks with a variety of frit trees and vines so that the smell of fruit and fruit blossoms perfumes the air, which is a balmy eighty degrees.

Our boat rides high in the water on two pontoons of paper-thin dugout canoes sealed over to form a sort of sled on which we glide, propelled by a gentle current, past youths in the boughs of trees, masturbating and shaking the ripe fruit into the water with the spasms of their bodies as their sperm falls also to be devoured by the great green-blue fish. It is this diet of fruit and sperm which gives the fruit fish its incomparable flavor.

Little naked boys walk along the banks throwing fruit into the water and masturbating while they emit birdcalls and animal noises, giggling, singing, whining, and growling out spurts of sperm that glitter in the dappled sunlight. As we pass, the boys bend over, waving and grinning between their legs like sheaves of wheat parted by a gentle breeze that wafts us to the jetty.

Who are we? We are migrants who move from settlement to settlement in the vast area now held by the Articulated. These voyages often last for years, and migrants may drop out along the way or adventurous settles join the migrants. We carry with us seeds and plants, plans, books, pictures, and artifacts from the communes we have visited.

On the jetty we are welcomed by a tall statuesque youth with negroid features and kinky yellow hair. It is late afternoon and the boys are trooping back from the riverbanks and orchards and fish hatcheries. Many of them are completely naked. I am struck by the mixtures here displayed: Negro, Chinese, Portuguese, Irish, Malay, Japanese, Nordic boys with kinky red and blond and auburn hair and jet-black eyes, blacks with straight hair gray and blue and green eyes, mixtures of Chinese and Indian of a delicate pink color, Indians of a deep copper red with one blue eye and one brown eye, purple-black skin and red pubic hairs.

Arriving at the port city after a long uncomfortable train journey from the capital, Farnsworth checked into the Survival Hotel. The hotel was a ramshackle wooden building of four stories overlooking the bay, with wide balconies and porches overgrown with bougainvillea where the guests sat in high-backed cane chairs sipping gin slings. A promontory of red and yellow sandstone a thousand feet high cut the town off from the sea, which entered by a narrow channel between the rock and the mainland. Looking down from the balcony of his room on the fourth floor, Farnsworth could see the beaches around the lagoon, where the languid youths stretched naked in the sun. Fatigued from his journey, he decided to take a nap before dinner.

Someone touches his shoulder. Ali is looking into the dim light of early dawn.

"What is it?"

"Patrol, I think."

We are out of the reservation area and the penalty for being caught here without authorization is the white-hot jockstrap. We will not be taken alive. We have cyanide shoes, a cushion of compressed gas in a double sole under our feet. A certain sequence of toe movements and we settle down in a whoosh of cyanide as the Green Guards clutch their blue throats and we streak out of our bodies across the sky. We also have rocket-fuel flamethrowers, very effective at close range.

This is not a patrol. It is a gang of naked boys covered with erogenous sores. As they walk they giggle and stroke and scratch each other. From time to time they fuck each other in Hula-Hoops to idiot mambo.

"Just leper kids," Ali grunts. "Let's make some java."

We drink it black in tin cups and wash down K rations.

Draft riots

And here I was with a pop-happy skipper in an old leaky jinxed gallows-propelled space tramp with all the heaviest guns of the planet trained on us: the Countess de Gulpa (not nearly so unimportant as Pierson would have liked me to believe), the CIA and the Board, Blum and the Movie Studio. I figured we'd be lucky to reach Hoboken. As a matter of fact, we got a few miles farther to what is now lower Manhattan.

Four kids insisted on guiding us to the Double G in New York and when we walked in, I saw that the whole place changed. The gallows were gone but there were two nooses on the wall above the bar with brass plaques: "Rope used to hang Baboon O'Toole—June 3, 1852." "Rope used to hang Lousy Louie—June 3, 1852." And a photo of Baboon and Lousy Louie standing side by side on a double gallows.

The decor is now the New York of 1860: vintage crystal chandeliers and huge female nude in a gilded frame over the bar. I spot Marty sitting with four thuggish-looking wooden-faced characters drinking champagne, and he waves to me.

"You boys join us and have some bubbly."

We sit down and the thugs give us a cold fishy who-are-these-nances look. The fever does convey certain advantages. We all have a virus feel for weak points in any opponent and Krup has given us some basic courses in unarmed psychic combat. The techniques mostly run on a signal switch—I love you/I hate you—at rapid intervals, but this is only effective once a weak spot has been found.

We soon have these four hoods in line with just the right shade of show-you. Hoodlums are ducky soup. Anyone who has to be tough on the surface is riddled with weak spots. But don't try the switcheroo on the wrong people. Try it on a tiddleywink and it can bounce back with a meat cleaver. And don't tangle with some Mafia don sitting in front of his grocery store.

When we walk into the Double G in Tamaghis, we sea a heavy padlock on the gallows mechanism with a lead seal and a notice on a brass plaque: "All public hangings forbidden by order of the DNA Police."

"Yep," the bartender tells us. "That's right. No more publics. It's the law."

Death requires a random witness to be real and a public hanging is real because of random witnesses. In the Garden of Eden, God left Adam and Eve alone to eat the fruit of the Hanging Tree and then popped back in like a random house dick who just happened to be passing in the hall when he heard amorous noises.

"What's going on here?"

"See any dogcatchers of Sirens in the street?"

"Well, no, come to think of it."

"You won't."

The bartended is a little, thin, middle-aged Irishman with glowing gray eyes. He is dressed in a tight-fitting green suit. He picks up ten glasses in each hand, spreads them out on the bar, and starts polishing. "We had a riot here. The boyos killed every dogcatcher in Tamaghis and most of the Sirens...." He holds up a glass to the light. "The kids all want to get out to Waghdas now and find the answers. I tell them every time you find an answer you find six questions under it, like leprechauns under a toadstool."

New York—the Double G—1860 ...

A little, skinny, middle-aged Irishman dressed in a filthy green suit bangs on the bar with his beer mug and a respectful silence falls. He jumps up onto the bar, his face contorted like an evil leprechaun as he spits the words out: "The bankers on Wall Street and the sheenies is buying their sons out for three hundred dollars." His eyes glow and the hair stands up on his head. "And what about you and me who don't see three hundred dollars a year in one piece? We get drafted into the frigging army to fight for the frigging niggers."

A bestial roar goes up. The patrons are four-deep around the bar, brandishing clubs and crowbars. The little green man leaps down from the bar.

"What are we waiting for? An invite from City Hall? Let's go!"

About fifty blood-mad men and boys and a few screaming harpies troop out after him screaming: "Kill! Kill! Kill!"

"How did the riot start?"

"Well, you know how it is with riots. Things build up and up—then something sets it off." He tosses a chipped glass twenty feet into a trash can. "The dogcatchers start raiding out of fair-game areas and there is a move by the Hanging Fathers in the City Council to extend fair-game areas. Then two foreign Countesses they call themselves—yeah, Countess de Slutville—buy villas on the mountain and set up something they call the Genetic Institute and there are rumors about transplant operations carried out by this sawbones they have brought in from Yass-Waddah."

"That would be Van ..." I put in.

"It would. Next thing these two boy-eating sows move in their own Special Police with firearms and pressure the Council into passing an I.D.-card law so anyone who doesn't have an I.D. card stamped and updated can be arrested and hanged in the Institute. So all the boys have to apply for these cards or risk getting picked up anywhere.

"One night five SPs come in here checking I.D.s and they start to drag some kid out. They have guns of course. Doesn't do them much good. The kids is on them with broken bottles, knives, chairs, feet, knees and elbows. Four kids is killed but they take the SPs apart. You can see the bloodstains right over there. Then some little Irish kid I'd never seen before jumps up on the bar screaming: 'What are you waiting for? Waiting to get milked by these foreign bitches like randy cows? Kill! Kill! Kill!'

"The SPs and dogcatchers are barricaded in the Garden of Delight, ready to defend the richies with their last drop of blood, and it comes to that quick enough. They open up with machine guns but the boys just spread out and keep coming, throwing cobblestones and Molotov cocktails.

"Better than a hundred are killed in the few seconds it takes for the rest to swarm over the barricades and cut the guards to hamburger. Then they charge up the mountain screaming.

"'Death to the Foreign Sows!'

"Well, the Countesses and their sawbones got their asses out to Yass-Waddah in an autogyro. Their villas were looted and burned to the ground along with most of the other villas. The Hanging Fathers were thrown into the fires along with all the Sirens that could be found. Some of the rich kids was with the mob, so a few big villas are still left. But the richies sure got a new look since then."

I soon see that there is more here than just a spontaneous explosion of overcrowded poverty-ridden slums. The whole scene has been staged from above to point up the need for a strong police force, and some of the mob ringleaders turn out to be agents of big money.

"A young man in dirty overalls who fought valiantly with the mob was killed by the police and was found to possess aristocratic features, well-cared-for hands and a fair white skin. Though dressed as a laborer in dirty overalls and a filthy shirt, underneath there were fine cashmere pants, a handsome rich vest and a fine linen shirt. His identity was never learned."

—Herbert Asbury,

Gangs of New York, p. 154

Through the havoc and wreckage of the burning and looted city, through streets littered with the dead and dying, street boys dance and caper like gay insouciant sprites, many of them wearing Halloween masks. A boy in a skeleton suit flops beside a stiff corpse in grotesque imitation.

"You're dead and you stink." He jumps and capers away.

They prance around a dying policeman and mimic his death throes. "Whydon'tcha get up and stop the fight?" They snatch his hat and badge, chasing each other.

"Stop in the name of the law," they mock.

A boy snatches a coat and vest from a looted store. Another boy in fake beard and skullcap pops out.

"Shoot him in the pants! Shoot him in the pants! The coat and vest is mine!"

"They called in a new Commandante who accepted the conditions of the rioters. The Sirens who survived by concealing their assets someplace were confined to licensed cathouses or deported to Yass-Waddah. They had to walk it stark naked. Two hundred miles of desert, wild dogs, hyenas, and leopards out there waiting. The kids lined up and whipped them out the gates with hangman's nooses."

The bartender goes into a song and dance as he taps glasses with a spoon, singing:

"She's too fat for me

She's too fat for me

I don't want her

You can have her

She's too fat for me."

He wipes the bar from one end to the other. "And the sperm dealers has left too, most of them. Can't operate under the new conditions. And good riddance to the Gombeen men."

Marty has a good thing going. Operating with a friend in the Records Department at City Hall he is forging quitclaim deeds to properties in the burnt-out areas. When the smoke clears away he will owning a big chunk of lower Manhattan. "The compensation and then the building contracts. The whole thing drips with goodness."

He has troops of boys in the street to keep the home fires burning. And these riot boys will later be used to harass any wise citizens who try to reclaim their property and rebuild. The boys screaming insults at visitors. "I catching one clap from fucky your asshole." Swarming over the house like monkeys, leering in at windows, throwing stones at passerby from the roof, urinating and masturbating from balconies.

There are a number of these boys sleeping in the Turkish bath where we have billeted ourselves. They parade around naked doing imitations. Death throes they dig special, flopping around, screaming and groaning and jacking off while the others piss themselves with laughter.

Krup gets it together finally. Two kraut SPs at the door. "All leaves cancelled. Report back to ship immediately." Next stop: the future.

Tamaghis revisited

When we were first stationed in Tamaghis, it was such a frantic and dangerous place that we never got a chance to relax and look around. At that time, Tamaghis was in the hands of the women with their dogcatchers and Sirens, supported by a weak and acquiescent City Council.

Since the I.D.-card riots, the massacre of Sirens and dogcatchers, the flight of the Countesses and their retinue, and the appointment of the new Commandante from Waghdas, power had definitely shifted to the men. The new Commandante dissolved the City Council and ruled by decree.

The rioters are now the elite of the city, setting style and tone. The fashionable thing is to look for the answers or the questions behind sex and death. So the youth of Tamaghis look to the academies of Waghdas. I am speaking about ten percent of the total population. As always, the permanent parties remain: the shopkeepers, restaurant and bar owners, merchants, craftsmen and farmers.

Tamaghis is a walled city, circular in shape, with gates at the four cardinal points. The population is about twenty thousand, but the area of the city would accommodate a much larger population.

Since considerations of privacy do not apply for the emancipated youth, they live by preference in dormitories and cubicle rooms, sharing bathing and sanitary facilities. This concentration of personnel leaves room for the fishponds, farms, aviaries, and orchards within the walled area, so that the city is almost self-sufficient.

And the rich, eager to disassociate themselves from the lingering taint of the dogcatchers, Sirens, predatory Countesses, and the infamous Hanging Fathers of the erstwhile City Council, have made their estates productive. Some have thrown their houses open to youth communes. Cows' milk is brought in from a farm outside the city walls, since the new Commandante banished all cows from the city.

The mains square is a composite of the Djemalfnaa or Marrakesh and the Mercado Mayorista of Lima, surrounded by parks and trees. I am sitting in the Red Night Café with Dahlfar, Bluie, and Jimmy Lee drinking tea one afternoon. There is no alcohol and no tobacco in Tamaghis by order of the new Commandante.

A kid I recognize as a former outcast, barred from the Double G, is moving from table to table. Now he is a hero of the I.D. riots.

The kids have a basket full of xiucutls. This small orange-and-red speckled snake has a venom that causes erotic convulsions and acute diarrhea and is frequently used as a practical joke in commune initiations. Of course you can get the same thing in ampules or poppers but the old folkloric ways still have charms for the rich. The boy is making a sale at a table of rich kids.

Looking out across the square, I see a man pushing a cart with crates roped onto it and one of the kraut kids is walking alongside it.

"Looks like Krup is taking on some cargo."

"He sure is," Jimmy tells me. "Right after the riots he bought up all the nooses on the open market and all the noose material. The nooses he plans to sell to tourists in Ba'dan. He's got all the old noose merchants making rugs ... and he's shipping Red Hots and White Angels and Blue Burns and Black Lights and Greenies—the lot. So he cuts them with Spanish fly and sells them in the Ba'dan cathouses."

"He sure is an operator."

"He's putting up the prices, the miserable bastard."

"We'd better lay in stock."

We walk around through the bazaars pricing color poppers and aphros. The price has about doubled but we know it's twenty times higher in Ba'dan for cut stuff.

The Red Hots bring you out in red blotches and dots, squirming around on your red-hot ass, itching to pop, and you can top it with a Red Pop. This can be dangerous, bringing on internal hemorrhaging or in some cases spontaneous fracture of the vertebrae.

The White Angels turn your jism to light. A Snow Pop is a blaze of cold white light with hot sex sparks. The Blue Burn, which is usually mixed with Yagé, is cold and hot at the same time. You come out in a blue rash with a cold menthol burn, and a Blue Pop is like cyanide and ozone.

The Black Light turns you black as obsidian and knocks all the white words out of your brain so you are right there with whatever the sex scene is, and a Black Pop brings you off in synch. The Greenie is something between animal and vegetable. You come out in a green rash, your nuts a tight seedpod popped off by the Green Pop.

You can mix colors—say Red Hots with a Snow Pop for bells of rosy fire ringing in the sky while you squirt a choir of angels. Now, your partner may be doing the same thing or he may be squirting blue twilight in attic rooms and distant train whistles. Or you take Red Hots and smooth it with a Black Pop and spurt deep purple. An Old Glory threesome: red fucking blue, who is fucking white, and red pops blue, blue pops white, and white pops red.

Try the Rainbow Special—all colors in one—and squirt Niagara Falls, Pikes Peak, souvenir postcards, rainbows, and Northern Lights. Step right up, good for young and old. Young boys need it special. Sometimes they forget the heroes of the fever who made all this available to young boys.

Yeah, I'm a hero of the fever ... Audrey thought as they made selections. But it won't get me a discount. Yeah, I'm a hero of the fever, and knowing what went into those products I don't like to see them cut and sold to drunken American legion slobs. That's right—the City Fathers are setting up an American Legion Convention. The Ba'dan Hilton and American Express arrive in a cloud of pop stars.

The proprietor, a thin gray old man in a gray djellaba, follows us around pointing out rare items, apologizing for the higher prices.

"Oh there are some Itchy Tingles!" Audrey explains. "Just the thing for my high-school Christmas play. Give me a case."

"Oh and there are some Firsties. I'll take all you've got."

A Firsty Pop is the hyacinth smell of young hard-ons, a whiff of school toilets, locker rooms, and jockstraps, rectal mucus and summer feet, chigger lotion, and carbolic soap—whiffs you back to your first jackoff and leaves you sitting there on the toilet—if you don't keep flying speed. Never linger over a Firsty.

The proprietor has it all crated up. We pay him and tell him to send it to the mail room on The Billy Celeste.

I stop at a bookstall by a canal to pick up some light reading for the trip to Ba'dan. From an old Frenchman smoking a Gitane I buy An Outcast of the Islands by Conrad, Maiden Voyage by Denton Welch and Brac the Barbarian by John Jakes.

We walk through the flower markets, florist shops and greenhouses. Sex nettles for fraternity initiations. It's more fun than paddles. Orchids that grow into your flesh, tendrils stirring vegetable lusts. And here is a humanoid mandrake six feet in height.

"Is it a screamer?" Audrey asks.

"It sure is, son. And when he screams it will bring off every living creature for a twenty-yard radius. And the beauty of it is, he lives on your shit ... saves you installing a toilet."

"What makes him scream?"

"You fuck him, son. Or jack him off or suck him off and he screams like a major."

"What happens if we hang its green ass, roots and all?" Jimmy asked.

"Son, you'd be doing what mankind has always trembled to do. You'd be upsetting the balance between the animal and the vegetable kingdom. He'd scream the planet apart. It would be the last scream."

"He certainly has potential as a weapon," Audrey mused. "That is, if he weren't so bulky."

There are bits and pieces of many cities in Tamaghis. We are walking down a street of worn blue cobblestones rather like the outskirts of Edinburgh when a little boy falls in beside us. About four years old, I think at first. He has a rolling walk like a sailor. He is dressed in shorts with a white sailor shirt and white tennis shoes. I put my hand on his shoulder and he snaps at it with sharp little teeth.

"Keep your hands off me, you bastard."

And I see that he is a miniature youth of eighteen.

When we make it back to the ship with the kid, who has pulled a sailor cap out of his pocket, and get to our cabin there are two more krauts in it. Krup is making room for the cargo. I hope he can get it off the ground. He does. Next stop: Ba'dan.

Where naked troubadours

shoot snotty baboons

Boys in codpieces and leather jerkins carrying musical instruments from the Middle Ages invade American Express. The clerk glares and beckons to a security man. A boy with long blond hair steps to a window.

"Can I help you with something?"

"We wish to travel."

"Travel? Where exactly?"

The boys strip off their clothes: "Where naked troubadours shoot snotty baboons."

They open up with Venus 22 machine guns, a sound like farting metal. Staff and customers like dead.

Travelogue voices through the loudspeakers: They are a happy simple people / She wears the traditional Athrump / Many moons ago they say / He offered me a cup of Smuun, a mixture of black rum and the blood of menstruating seal / Now they would show me the Sacred Uncle ceremony / Mixta demonstrates how the poi mansu us prepared / We stop to observe the traditional Ullshit that must be observed before this young peasant can Bulunkmash his fiancée / The old Ungling is sick / Can nothing be done? / Sanfraz the sorcerer has been consulted / Every foot of arable land is treasured / All refuse must go into the Ungern or fertilizer ditch / The Phren crop is good and there is much rejoicing / Youths scream muku muku fucky fucky over their thumous / How long can the old ways withstand the onslaught of modern technology? / He say long long ago many thousand moons a red light appeared in the northern sky / This light inflamed men to madness and many fell sick with a terrible plague / All that remains of the ancient city of Ba'dan: mud walls in a waste of sand / If these walls could speak what tales they could tell /

What tall tales indeed. Tacitus tells us that the Scythians, a warlike and horsey people, hanged their captives from trees like an old western posse. And Herodotus gives a lurid account of their practices.

When a Scythian king died, fifty pure-blooded Arabic horses and fifty handsome youths were strangled, disemboweled and stuffed. The horses were then placed in a semicircle around the tomb and the youths mounted the horses, being held in place by a stake which passed through the body of the horse and into the ground and through the anus of the youth up to the top of his skull for good posture....

A baneful red glow flares across the northern sky, bathing the city of Tamaghis in a flickering red light shading from light pink to dark purple, flowing like water through the ancient twisting streets cut from desert rock which has now powdered to sand under generations of shuffling feet.

The first thing you notice here is the dead muffled silence of the sand-covered streets. Now we hear music and singing as a strange procession winds into sight. Naked boys with boots of rotten animal hides crawling with mnaggots lead a column of horses on which boys are riding naked and bound. The Carrion Boys caper and whinny and rear and fart, showing their teeth like horses.

Now the procession halts in front of the King's tomb and the horses are being strangled with ratchet cords that tighten and cannot be unloosed. A horse rears, baring his teeth and rolling his eyes as blood drips from his nose ... the horses are turning intolerably into youths ... shrinking faces spit out horse teeth like bullets. A horse rolls on its side kicking spasmodically, sloughing off hooves and sinews and hide, patches of human skin breaking through. Another rolls on its back kicking its legs in the air as the tail whisks in between human legs, kicking human genitals, shooting horse pricks, as intestine spurt from shrinking bellies and brains jet out from eye sockets.

As they emerge from the ruptured horse bodies, the youths are seized by the carrion-booted boys with long red hair and gloating idiot smiles. The youths and horses have all been strangled.

It is time now for the butchery, which they attack with good cheer as one boy heartens his companions with a comic bump-and-grind striptease with intestine that drop off as his erect member snaps out. He sticks his tongue out and ejaculates as his friends roar with laughter. They are a simply happy people.

Now there is work to be done. The horses must be stuffed with aromatic herbs and the youths impaled on stakes that will hold each boy astride a dead horse until horse and rider crumble into the red dust. The Carrion Boys caper away and disappear in little eddies of sand under the red sky shot with meteors and Northern Lights.

"Yipeayee Yipeaayoo Ghost riders in the sky"

In desert lands cool stone latrines / Outhouses covered with roses in drowsy summer afternoons / Dead leaves in the pissoir / J'aime ces types vicieux qui se montrent la bite / Find yourself in the navy / All right you jokers hit the deck / Naked boys rolls around squirming legs kicking in the air as the colors ripple through them / One bumps out a rich sepia with a smell of military laundry and black vomit in faded violet photo wards and it hits a delicate rose pink of seashells with the hyacinth smell of young hard-ons 1910 the young sailor in Panama yellow-fever epidemic assigned to work in the wards he knew he'd catch it sooner or later then the itching started and the red rash in his crotch and ass pearling in his pants he sniffs the smell of vomit and fever shivering in yellow olive green deep mahogany and black death spasms. Rainbows in faded calendars light up and blaze across the sky.... Coming in for a neon landing at the Rainbow Club in Portland.

When Wilson, Chief of Security at Portland, arrived at his office, his assistant handed him a message:

"The Billy Celeste, U.S. Navy from 1980 has landed and requests permission to disembark."

Wilson looked at his assistant and raised an eyebrow. "Fever?"

"And how. Even the cockroaches."

Wilson reached for a standard "Quarantine and Repatriations" form. "That's Nordenholz's ship, isn't it?"

"Right."

"Miserable old bastard. One of these days he's going to find my foot up his skinny ass." He signed the form and tossed it into the Out basket.

Book Three

Locker room

It is Christmas Eve and Toby is alone in the locker room. The old YMCA building has been sold and only a few boys still stay on. They have moved into the locker room because it is warmer and the showers are there.

Now all the other boys have gone away somewhere for Christmas and Toby knows that most of them will not be coming back, since the building has to be vacated by January 18, 1924. Toby is reading The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.

I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then ...

I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling ...

I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing ...

The twinkling succession of darkness and light was exceedingly painful to the eye.... The sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous color like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band.... Minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring ...

There is a stew simmering on a gas ring and occasionally Toby stirs it, listening to the chimes from the Salvation Army mission across the street playing "Silent Night." He remembers other Christmases, the smell of pine and plum pudding and the old smell of his steam engine.

He had been brought up in a three-story red brick house in a middle-western town. When he was six years old his parents died, in the flu epidemic of 1918. After that, a series of uncles and foster parents took care of him.

Nobody wanted Toby for long, though he was a beautiful boy with yellow hair and huge blue eyes like deep lakes. He made people uneasy. There was a sleepy animal quiescence about him. He never talked except in answer to a question or to express a need. His silence seemed to hold a threat or a criticism, and people didn't like it.

And there was something else: Toby smelled. It was a sulfurous rank animal smell that permeated his room and drifted from his clothes. His father and mother had had the same smell about them, and they kept a number of pets: cats, raccoons, ferrets and skunks. "The little people," his mother called them. Toby took the little people with him wherever he went, and his uncle John, an executive on the way up, liked big people.

"John, we have to get rid of that boy. He smells like a polecat," Toby's aunt would say.

"Well, Martha, perhaps there's something wrong with his glands." The uncle blushed, feeling that glands was a dirty word. Metabolism would have been much better ...

"That's not all. There's something in his room. Something he carries about with him. Some sort of animal."

"Now Martha...."

"I tell you, John, he's evil.... Did you notice the way he was looking at Mr. Norton? Like some horrible little gnome...."

Mr. Norton was John's boss. He had indeed been visibly discomfited by Toby's silent appraising stare.

Looking back, Toby could see the twinkle of Christmas-eve ornaments. Far away his father points to Betelgeuse in the night sky. The locker room holds the silence of absent male voices like a deserted gymnasium or barracks.

The boys have built a partition of beaverboard and set up their cots in this improvised room. There is a long table with initials carved in the top, folding chairs, and a few old magazines in the main room where the gas ring is located. In one corner is a withered Christmas tree that Toby pulled out of a trash can. This is part of his stage set. He is waiting for someone.

He tastes the stew. It is flat and the meat is tough and stringy. He adds two bouillon cubes. Another fifteen or twenty minutes. Meanwhile, he will take a shower. Naked, waiting for the water to heat up, he is examining the graffiti in the toilet cubicle, running his hands over phallic drawings with the impersonal interest of an antiquarian. He is a plant, an intrusion. He has never seen the other boys, a whiff of steaming pink flesh, snapping towels, purple bruises. He leans against the wall of the toilet as silver spots boil slowly in front of his eyes.

Christmas Eve, 1923: You see the old YMCA building. Someone he carried with: Hi/ ...

"Hi. It's me, Toby."

His father points to a few boys still staying there ... the shower's silence. Other boys have gone away. Part time in this improvised room. Building has to be vacated by the folding time machine where the gas ring is hot occasionally. Toby pulled out of the mission, stage set, other Christmases. His part is six years old in the epidemic. Toilet cubicle, his old face, remote parents. Sleepy animal whiff of naked flesh Christmas geese in the sky. Silent night for someone died waiting for the graffiti in 1918. If you ask for something solid as shirt and pants walks ... long sight you read The Monkey's Paw? Years over phallic drawings snapping towels and purple bruises....

Toby dresses and walks back into the "living room," as they call it. A man sitting at the table. He is thin and white-haired with blue eyes. His pants and shirt are red-and-white-striped like peppermint. A long patched coat is folded on the chair beside him. Wisps of fog drift from the lapels.

"Well, Toby, and what would like for Christmas?"

"Well, sir, I guess people ask for a lot of silly things, so I'd like to ask your advice before making up my mind."

"Yes, Toby, people do ask for silly things. They want to live forever, forgetting or not knowing that forever is a time word and time is that which ends. They want power and money without submitting to the conditions under which power and money are granted. Now I'm not allowed to give advice but sometimes I think out loud. If you ask for something solid like power or money or a long life, you are taking a sight-unseen proposition.... Now, if you ask for an ability ..."

"I want to learn how to travel in time."

"Well, you could do a lot worse. Makes you rich just incidentally. But it can be dangerous...."

"It is necessary to travel. It is not necessary to live."

Toby experienced a feeling of ether vertigo as he was pulled into a whirling black funnel. Far away, as if through a telescope, he could see someone sitting at a table, a slim youth of about twenty with yellow hair and brown eyes.

A fluid plop and he was inside the youth, looking out. He was sitting in a restaurant somewhere, taste of paper-thin cutlet, cold spaghetti, and sour red wine in his mouth. The waiters looked ill-tempered and tired. Now he became aware of someone sitting at an adjacent table, so obviously looking at him that they seem for a moment to be alone in the restaurant. It was a woman of about twenty-six, neither well nor poorly dressed, with an older man and woman, probably her parents. She had, Toby thought, one of the most unpleasantly intrusive faces he had ever seen, set in an oily smile or rather a knowing smirking cringe with a suffocating familiarity that pressed on his being like a predatory enveloping mollusk.

Toby began to feel quite faint. Suddenly he spoke without moving his lips: "You'll never get into a nice gentile country club with a look like that hanging out of your Jew face.... We like nice Jews with atom bombs and Jew jokes...."

Dead silence, wild-eyed faces looking for the source of this outrage.

"Ach Gott!" A Jewish waiter slumped to the floor in a faint.

Toby shifted his attention to a table of blacks. Yes and the right kind of darky too, singing sweet and low out under the mimosa, not feeding his black face in teh same restaurant with a white man and getting his strength up to rape our grandmothers."

Next a table of Latin American diplomats.

"You greasy-assed Mexican pimps. Why don't you go back to your syphy cathouses where you belong?"

"That's telling them!" said a southern American voice.

"Go screw a mud puppy.... And if there's anything worse it's a murdering mick with a bomb in his suitcase."

A suitcase by a table of Irishmen began to tick. Toby put money on his check. He lifted his wineglass to the table of Jews: "You Jews is so warm and human. I offer to you that most beautiful of all toasts: L'chaim! To life!..."

He was moving towards the door. "You blacks got soul." As he passed the Latin Americans, he twitched his hips. "Qué rica mamba.... When Irish eyes are smiling ..." In the doorway, Toby whipped his scarf around his neck and shouted back into the room with moving his lips, so it seemed to echo from every corner ...

"Bugger the Queen!"

He opened the door and heavy palpable darkness blew in with a reek of brimstone. He sprinted for the corner in a black cloud, his red scarf trailing out behind him like a burning fuse. Shouts behind him. Breaking glass.

Here was 44 Egerton Gardens. He opened the door with his key, slid in and shut the door, leaning against it. A blast outside, sirens, words in his head: "Air raid ... the blitz."

He felt his way to his room at the head of the stairs. As soon as he opened the door, the sound of breathing and the smell of sleep told him that someone else was there. He touched a shoulder.

"Hello, I'm Jim Everson. Hope you don't mind doubling up like this."

"It's all right." Toby stripped to his underwear and slid in beside him.

They lay there, listening to the explosions. The bombs seemed to walk in a leisurely way up and down Brompton Road. A smell in the room, not just of warm young flesh. It was a rank musky ozone smell, the smell of time travel.

Toby woke up in a dark cottage. Mother was not back yet. He was alone and very frightened. The cottage was in Gibraltar and he knew the floor plan in the dark.

He went from his room into the sitting room and looked into his mother's room. The bed was empty, as he knew it would be. The lights would not turn on. He lay down on her bed but the fear was there as well.

He went back to his room and tried to turn on the lights. None of them would turn on. Now even the light in his own room would not work.

He opened the cottage door and went out. Dawn light outside, but a heavy darkness lingered inside the cottage like a black fog. He resolved not to spend another night there.

Who would not spend another night there? He was two people—the boy who lived in the cottage and someone else.

He saw a boat. Durban to Gibraltar. A slim youth with yellow hair and brown eyes in a blue uniform and nautical hat was the first mate. Two officers and a crew of eight on the brigantine.

The boy's mother is back from the pub where she works as a barmaid. She is sprawled fully dressed on the bed in a drunken sleep. He looks around at the potted plants, a tapestry on the wall with a minaret, an ivory elephant, a glass mouse on a shelf. In the front room, a hot plate, a square yellow tea can with Chinese characters, a faucet dripping into a rusty sink. Two men are in the room: one a thin man in his thirties with a receding chin and a pasty face, and the other a priest with reddish hair and bloodshot eyes.

Slowly the boy takes inventory of the sleazy decorations, a brass bowl with cattails in it on the mantel of the non-functioning fireplace, a wobbly table with a tasseled lamp, three chairs, a couch, and an army blanket.

He is the boy, but also a concerned visitor, an uncle or godfather. He is preparing to leave. Outside the cottage is a steep weed-grown slope covered with Christmas rubbish and artificial snow. He hates to leave the boy there.

On the slope, a paper paddle wheel turns slowly in the wind. Written on the wheel: THE MISSING AND THE DEAD.

The priest is talking to the mother and the other man.

"Do be careful, and if anything goes wrong don't hesitate to contact me."

Dead fingers in smoke pointing to Gibraltar. "Captain Clark welcomes you aboard. Set your watches forward an hour." British we are, British we stay. Marmalade and tea in the shops, ivory elephants, carved ivory balls one inside the other, jade trees, Indian tapestries of tigers and minarets, watches, cameras, postcards, music boxes, rusty barbed wire, signal towers.

Coming in for a landing, he hears a tired gray priest voice:

"And how long will you be staying, Mr. Tyler?"

It is difficult in train "A"

On the train with Waring. Smell of steam, soot, and iron. The WCs are clogged with shit. Landscape of red soil, streams, ponds, and farmhouses.

I have a little round box which contains a number of scenes on parchment-like paper that come alive as I turn the pages. Some oxen by a river mired in concrete up to the forelocks. Now four figures, two boys and two girls in eighteenth-century garb, get out of a gilded carriage. They take off their clothes, pirouetting to tinkling music-box notes.

In the train corridor, I encounter a French customs agent—a short heavyset man with a red face and bloodshot green eyes—accompanied by a tall gaunt gray-faced assistant. It seems that we are passing through a tip of French Canada and he is here to examine passports.

The door the agent is standing before opens towards him but he is pushing the other way with his shoulder, his weight preventing two conductors from opening the door from the other side. At this point, he tells his assistant to break the door down with a fire ax. I intervene to point out that the door opens towards him. He has but to pull it open. This he finally does, then upbraids me and the two conductors for blocking his way.

"Mais je suis passenger," I protest.

"Quand même!" he snaps.

Now the passengers all disembark from the train and line up with passports in an open-air booth. The customs agent sits behind a table against a wooden partition. Every time anyone lights a cigarette, a DÉFENSE DE FUMAR sign appears and he looks up from the table shouting, "Défense de fumer."

I am first in line. The agent looks at my passport and sneers.

"Is this something of your own invention?"

I tell him it is something issued by the United States Government.

He looks at me suspiciously and says: "It says here that you live in London."

"And so?"

There is a girl behind me in line holding an American passport. I point out that my passport is the same. He snatches her passport and looks at it. Then he slaps both passports down on the table and turns to his assistant.

"Destroy these documents."

"But you can't go around destroying people's passports. Are you deranged?" I ask.

"Dérangé?" he sneers, turning now to the girl. "Is this man your accomplice?"

"Nothing of the sort. I never saw him before."

"But you travel on the same train?"

"Well, yes ... but ..."

"And sit at the same table?"

"Well, yes, it so happened ..."

"So you admit to sitting at the same table with this man you have never seen before? And perhaps you share also the same compartment? The same bed, no doubt?"

"It's not true!" she screams.

Soldiers light a wood stove. The assistant speaks: "Pardon me, sir, but my son is a collector. Could I keep one of these forgeries?"

"You may keep one. Which do you prefer?"

"Well, the girl, sir. She is prettier. My son will whack himself off looking at it, I don't mind telling you."

Very well. Destroy the other passport."

My passport is dropped into the wood stove. He turns to the other American passengers.

"All of you now come forward and surrender your lies. Documents purportedly issued by a government which ceased to exist two hundred years ago...."

A chorus of outraged protests goes up from the passengers but soldiers snatch their passports and dump them into the stove.

"Well, Mother and I want you to know we will report you to the American Consul," a tourist moans.

The officer stands up. "The currency you are carrying is of value only to a collector. I doubt if you will find one in a town of this size." He gets into the train, which starts to move.

"But what about our luggage?"

"It has been impounded. You may recover it in the capital on presentation of valid passports."

The train gathers speed. We are standing in a turn-of-the-century western town: water tower, a red dirt street, Station Hotel & Restaurant. I leave my countrymen waving credit cards and traveler's checks in front of a bland Chinese behind a counter who takes a toothpick out of his mouth, looks at the end of it, and shakes his head.

I walk along the street past a saloon and barbershop and turn into a rundown weed-grown street: Street of Missing Men. The houses on both sides look deserted. As I walk, the buildings change and the street slopes steeply down.

BATHS OPEN DAY AND NIGHT. I go into a steam room with marble benches. A boy smooth and white as alabaster beckons me and I follow him through a maze of showers and steam rooms into a waiting room and out into the street looking for a taxi on a steep stone platform over a green slope with stone steps going down.

We are looking for a Twin Taxi. He has a twin with him who is crippled, one leg in a cast. The alabaster youth sits next to me on a stone bench. He has no white to his eyes, which are a delicate egg-blue and shiny as glass. He sits there with his arm around my shoulder, talking a strange language that sets off little cartoons and film sequences ... languid white legs flicker ... silver buttocks in a dark room....

I can take the hut set

anywhere

I have rented a riverfront shack from someone named Camel. The river is slow and deep, half a mile wide at this point. Rotting piers along an unpaved street. Loading sheds in ruins, roofs fallen in. Standing in the middle of the street I turn now towards a row of houses. The houses are narrow and small clapboards, peeling paint, galvanized iron roofs separated by drainage ditches choked with weeds and brambles, rusty tin cans, broken stoves, pools of stagnant water running to culverts broken and blocked with refuse. I go up steep wooden steps to what had been a screened front porch. The screening is rusted through and the screen door off its hinges. I open a padlock and push the front door open. A musty smell of disuse and a sudden chill. Warm air seeps into the room behind me and where the outside air and inside air come in contact I see a palpable haze like heat waves. The house is about twenty feet by eight feet.

On my left is a blackened kerosene stove on a shelf attached to the wall, supported in front by two two-by-fours. On the rusty burner a blue coffeepot with a hole in the bottom. Above the stove are shelves, some dented cans of beans and tomatoes, two jars of preserved fruit covered with mold. Two chairs and a wooden bedstead at the end of the room, a stepladder by the bed . To the right of the bedstead is a door which opens onto a bathroom with two oak toilet seats side by side, a bucket black with rust, a brass faucet covered with verdigris.

I go back to the street and look around. At one end the street ends in a tributary. I walk the other way and the road turns inland. There is a shack with the sign SALOON at the turning. I go in and a man with eyes the color of a gray flannel shirt looks at me and says, "What can I do for you?"

"Where can I buy tools and supplies? I just rented the Camel shack."

"Yes I know. Do with a bit of fixing up, I guess.... Far Junction ... One mile up the road."

I thank him and start walking. Dirt road, flint chips here and there, ponds on both sides. Far Junction is a few buildings and houses, a water tower and a railroad station. The tracks are weed-grown and rusty. Chickens and geese peck in the street. I go into the general store. A man with pale gray eyes and a black alpaca jacket looks up from a seat behind the counter.

"What can I do for you, young man?"

"Quite a few things. I've rented the Camel shack."

He nodded. "Do with some fixing up, I guess."

"It sure can. More than I can carry."

"You're in luck. Deliveries twice a week. Tomorrow."

I walked around pointing: copper screening, tools, tacks, hinges, two-burner kerosene stove, five gallons of kerosene, ten-gallon water container with spigot and stand, water barrel, cooking utensils, flour, bacon, lard, molasses, salt, pepper, sugar, coffee, tea, case each canned beans and canned tomatoes, broom, mop, bucket, wooden washtub, mattress, blankets, pillows, knapsack, bedroll, slicker, machete, hunting knife, six jackknives. The proprietor walks behind me writing the purchases down on a clipboard. Alligator Gladstone bag? Fifteen dollars. Why not? Jeans, shirts, socks, bandanas, underwear, shorts, pair extra walking boots, shaving kit, toothbrush.

I pack the clothes and toilet articles into the bag....fishhooks, leaders, sinkers, lines, floats, minnow seine.

Now for the guns. Colt Frontier six-inch barrel 32-20 caliber, a snub-nosed 38 inside belt holster (this I pack in the bag), double-barrel twelve-gauge shotgun. I look at the lever-action rifles.