Naked Lunch

28

Carl saw Joselito in a big clean room full of light, with private bath and concrete balcony. And nothing to talk about there in the cold empty room, water hyacinths growing in a yellow bowl and the China blue sky and drifting clouds, fear flickering in and out of his eyes. When he smiled the fear flew away in little pieces of light, lurked enigmatically in the high cool corners of the room. And what could I say feeling death around me, and the little broken images that come before sleep, there in the mind?

'They will send me to the new sanitarium tomorrow. Come and visit me. I will be there alone.' He coughed and took a codeineeta.

'Doctor I understand, that is I have been given to understand, I have read and heard --not a medical man myself -- don't pretend to be-that the concept of sanitarium treatment has been more or less supplanted, or at least very definitely supplemented, by chemical therapy. Is this accurate in your opinion? What I mean to say is, Doctor, please tell me in all sincerity, as one human being to another, what is your opinion of chemical versus sanitarium therapy? Are you a partisan?' The doctor's liver sick Indian face was blank as a dealer's.

'Completely modern, as you can see,' he gestures toward the room with the purple fingers of bad circulation. 'Bath... water... flowers. The lot.' He finished in Cockney English with a triumphant smirk. 'I will write for you a letter.'

'This letter? For the sanitarium?'

The doctor was speaking from a land of black rocks and great, iridescent brown lagoons. 'The furniture... modern and comfortable. You find it so of course?' Carl could not see the sanitarium owing to a false front of green stucco topped by an intricate neon sign dead and sinister against the sky, waiting for darkness. The sanitarium was evidently built on a great limestone promontory, over which flowering trees and vine tendrils broke in waves. The smell of flowers was heavy in the air.

The commandante sat at a long wooden trestle under a vine trellis. He was doing absolutely nothing. He took the letter that Carl handed him and whispered through it, reading his lips with the left hand. He stuck the letter on a spike over a toilet. He began transcribing from a ledger full of numbers. He wrote on and on.

Broken images exploded softly in Carl's head, and he was moving out of himself in a silent swoop. Clear and sharp from a great distance he saw himself sitting in a lunchroom. Overdose of H. His old lady shaking him and holding hot coffee under his nose.

Outside an old junky in Santa Claus suit selling Christmas seals. 'Fight tuberculosis, folks,' he whispers in his disembodied, junky voice. Salvation Army choir of sincere, homosexual football coaches sings: 'In the Sweet Bye and Bye.'

Carl drifted back into his body, an earthbound junk ghost.

'I could bribe him, of course.'

The commandante taps the table with one finger and hums 'Coming Through the Rye.' Far away, then urgently near like a foghorn a split second before the grinding crash. Carl pulled a note half out of his trouser pocket.... The commandante was standing by a vast panel of lockers and deposit boxes. He looked at Carl, sick animal eyes gone out, dying inside, hopeless fear reflecting the face of death. In the smell of flowers a note half out of his pocket, the weakness hit Carl, shutting of his breath, stopping his blood. He was in a great cone spinning down to a black point.

'Chemical therapy?' The scream shot out of his flesh through empty locker rooms and barracks, musty resort hotels, and spectral, coughing corridors of T,B. sanitariums, the muttering, hawking, 29

grey dishwater smell of flophouses and Old Men's Homes, great, dusty custom sheds and warehouses, through broken porticoes and smeared arabesques, iron urinals worn paper thin by the urine of a million fairies, deserted weed-grown privies with a musty smell of shit turning back to the soil, erect wooden phallus on the grave of dying peoples plaintive as leaves in the wind, across the great brown river where whole trees float with green snakes in the branches and sad-eyed lemurs watch the shore out over a vast plain (vulture wings husk in the dry air). The way is strewn with broken condoms and empty H caps and K.Y. tubes squeezed dry as bone meal in the summer sun.

' My furniture.' The commandante's face burned like metal in the flash bulb of urgency. His eyes went out. A whif of ozone drifted through the room. The 'novia' muttered over her candles and altars in one corner.

'It is all Trak... modern, excellent...' he is nodding idiotically and drooling. A yellow cat pulls at Carl's pant leg and runs onto a concrete balcony. Clouds drift by.

'I could get back my deposit. Start me a little business someplace.' He nods and smiles like a mechanical toy.

'Joselito!!!' Boys look up from street ball games, bull rings and bicycle races as the name whistles by and slowly fades away.

'Joselito!... Paco!... Pepe!... Enrique!...' The plaintive boy cries drift in on the warm night. The Trak sign stirs like a nocturnal beast, and bursts into blue flame. 30