Cities of the Red Night

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 mas....'

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.