During the biennial Panics when the raw, pealed Dream Police storm the City, the Mugwumps take refuge in the deepest crevices of the wall sealing themselves in clay cubicles and remain for weeks in biostasis. In those days of grey terror the Reptiles dart about faster and faster, scream past each other at supersonic speed, their flexible skulls flapping in black winds of insect agony. The Dream Police disintegrate in globs of rotten ectoplasm swept away by an old junky, coughing and spitting in the sick morning. The Mugwump Man comes with alabaster jars of fluid and the Reptiles get smoothed out.
The air is once again still and clear as glycerine.
The Sailor spotted his Reptile. He drifted over and ordered a green syrup. The Reptile had a little, round disk mouth of brown gristle, expressionless green eyes almost covered by a thin membrane of eyelid. The Sailor waited an hour before the creature picked up his presence.
'Any eggs for Fats?' he asked, his words stirring through the Reptile's fan hairs. It took two hours for the Reptile to raise three pink transparent fingers covered with black fuzz. Several Meat Eaters lay in vomit, too weak to move. (The Black Meat is like a tainted cheese, overpoweringly delicious and nauseating so that the eaters eat and vomit and eat again until they fall exhausted.)
A painted youth slithered in and seized one of the great black claws sending the sweet, sick smell curling through the cafe.
32
HOSPITAL
Everyone looks like a drug addict....
Take a little walk in the hospital patio.... In my absence someone has used my scissors, they are stained with some sticky, red brown gick.... No doubt that little bitch of a criada trimming her rag. Horrible-looking Europeans clutter up the stairs, intercept the nurse when I need my medicine, empty piss into the basin when I am washing, occupy the toilet for hours on end --probably fishing for a finger stall of diamonds they have stashed up their asshole.... In fact the whole clan of Europeans has moved in next to me....The old mother is having an operation, and her daughter move right in to see the old gash receive proper service. Strange visitors, presumably relatives... One of them wears as glasses those gadgets jewelers screw into their eyes to examine stones. ...Probably a diamond- cutter on the skids... The man who loused up the Throckmorton Diamond and was drummed out of the industry.... All these jewelers standing around the Diamond in their frock coats, waiting on The Man. An error of one thousandth of an inch ruins the rock complete and they have to import this character special from Amsterdam to do the job.
...So he reels in dead drunk with a huge air hammer and pounds the diamond to dust.... I don't check these citizens.... Dope peddlers from Aleppo?... Slunk traffickers from Buenos Aires? Illegal diamond buyers from Johannesburg?... Slave traders from Somaliland? Collaborators at the very least...
Continual dreams of junk: I am looking for a poppy field.... Moonshiners in black Stetsons direct me to a Near East cafe.... One of the waiters is a connection for Yugoslav opium.... Buy a packet of heroin from a Malay Lesbian in white belted trenchcoat.... I cop the paper in Tibetan section of a museum. She keeps trying to steal it back. ...I am looking for a place to fix.... The critical point of withdrawal is not the early phase of acute sickness, but the final step free from the medium of junk....There is a nightmare interlude of cellular panic, life suspended between two ways of being.... At this point the longing for junk concentrates in a last, all-out yen, and seems to gain a dream power: circumstances put junk in your way.... You meet an old-time Schmecker, a larcenous hospital attendant, a writing croaker....
A guard in a uniform of human skin, black buck jacket with carious yellow teeth buttons, an elastic pullover shirt in burnished Indian copper, adolescent-nordic-sun-tan slacks, sandals from calloused foot soles of young Malayan farmer, an ash-brown scarf knotted and tucked in the shirt. (Ash-brown is a color like grey under brown skin. You sometimes find it in mixed Negro and white stock, the mixture did not come of and the colors separated out like oil on water....) The Guard is a sharp dresser, since he has nothing to do and saves all his pay to buy fine clothes and changes three times a day in front of an enormous magnifying mirror. He has a Latin handsomesmooth face with a pencil line mustache, small black eyes, blank and greedy, undreaming insect eyes. When I get to the frontier the Guard rushes out of his casita, a mirror in a wooden frame slung round his neck. He is trying to get the mirror off his neck.... This has never happened before, that anyone reached the frontier. The Guard has injured his larynx taking off the mirror frame.... He has 33
lost his voice.... He opens his mouth, you can see the tongue jumping around inside. The smooth blank young face and the open mouth with the tongue moving inside are incredibly hideous. The Guard holds up his hand. His whole body jerks in convulsive negation. I go over and unhook the chain across the road. It falls with a clank of metal on stone. I walk through. The Guard stands there in the mist looking after me. Then he hooks the chain up again, goes back into the casita and starts plucking at his mustache.
They just bring so-called lunch.... A hard-boiled egg with the shell of revealing an object like I never seen it before.... A very small egg of a yellow-brown color... Perhaps laid by the duck-billed platypus. The orange contained a huge worm and very little else.... He really got there firstest with the mostest.... In Egypt is a worm gets into your kidneys and grows to an enormous size. Ultimately the kidney is just a thin shell around the worm. Intrepid gourmets esteem the flesh of The Worm above all other delicacies. It is said to be unspeakably toothsome... An Interzone coroner known as Autopsy Ahmed made a fortune trafficking The Worm.
