Cities of the Red Night

English manor house lights up. A picture on the wall shows an old gentleman wrapped in red shawls and scarves propped up in bed, with laudanum, medicine glass, tea, scones, and books on the night table beside him. Taking to his bed for the winter....

A light shines on a huge four-poster bed. A man with a nightcap sits up suddenly. A naked radiant boy is standing at the foot of his bed. The man gasps, chokes, turns bright red and dies of apoplexy, blood gushing from his mouth and nose.

Cities of the Red Night: Spotlights bathe the papier-mache walls in red light. The boys camp around putting on disease makeup. Juanito, the Master of Ceremonies, puts a red rubber flesh-cluster in his navel.

'My dear, you look like Venus de Milo with a clock in her stomach.'

The boys pose with expressions of idiot lust. The spectators roll on the floor laughing. One turns blue in the face.

'Cyanide reaction! Medics on the double!'

Boys in white coats rush in and shoot him with a blackout dart.

Piper Boy with a bamboo flute in Lima ... blue sky, color of his eyes. Smell of the sea. Dink is fucking Noah who turns into Audrey and Billy.

'It's me! It's me! I've landed! Hi, Bill! It's two hundred years, Bill! I've landed!'

The pilgrimage may take many lifetimes. In many rooms, on many levels, the ancient whispering stage ...

Moving age with his binoculars, Audrey lays back in a chair masturbating. Bright pirates. Jerry comes in red wax. We see Tibet for a few seconds, people. A sepia cutback to the hospital. Depraved smile, sperm in a beaker.

He plays 'Semper Fi' to four Marine guards. Baby pictures declared in red letters of cutthroat trout. Red anticipation of fever drifts from the bed. See what he is looking at onstage.

National Emergency, age fifteen, holds up a string of stoplights. Jerry's radiant ghost may take many lifetimes. Jerry, the cabin boy, stands over the hills and far away.

'Lima, flash, it's me. The Piper Boy in Lima. Dink, I've landed. Long way to find you.'

Noah is in the library studying diagrams of mortars and grenades. He is drawing a cannon. A Chinese child in the doorway throws a firecracker underneath his chair. As the firecracker explodes, the cannon barrel tilts up at an angle. A backdrop of burning galleons falls in front of him.

Audrey's boys are back on deck. Gas tank explodes in Tamaghis. Flintlock rifle on the library table. Hans and Noah take off their shorts.

'Wenn nicht von vorn denn von hintern herum.' If not from the front then around by the back way.

As Noah bends over, the flintlock breaks at the breech. As Noah ejaculates, breech-loading rifles pour withering fire into a column of Spanish soldiers.

A float of a Spanish galleon moves slowly and ponderously across the gymnasium floor. On the deck, we see the Inquisition with stakes and garrotes, the Conquistadores, the patrons and governors, officers and bureaucrats and their modern equivalents, machos and politicos swilling Old Parr scotch and brandishing pearl-handled 45s.

Immigration police in dark glasses ... 'Pasaporte ... Documentos ...'

Kelly as Ah Pook, spattered with black spots of decay, is fucking the young Corn God in a pirate's chest overflowing with gold ducats and pieces of eight. As they come, a yellow haze like gaseous gold streams off them and wafts across the deck of the galleon. Machos clutch their throats, spit blood, and die.

Noah hangs ejaculating in the same yellow haze of magical intention. The curtain is drawn