Lee's eyes moved in the substance of his face... a little, cold, grey flick.... 'Clean it up,' he said.
'Enough dirt in here now.'
'Oh uh sure,' Miguel fumbled with a dustpan.
Lee put the packet of heroin away.
Lee lived in a permanent third-day kick, with, of course, certain uh essential intermissions to refuel the fires that burned through his yellow-pink-brown gelatinous substance and kept off the hovering flesh. In the beginning his flesh was simply soft, so soft that he was cut to the bone by dust particles, air currents and brushing overcoats while direct contact with doors and chairs seemed to occasion no discomfort. No wound healed in his soft, tentative flesh.... Long white tendrils of fungus curled round the naked bones. Mold odors of atrophied testicles quilted his body in a fuzzy grey fog....
During his first severe infection the boiling thermometer flashed a quicksilver bullet into the nurse's brain and she fell dead with a mangled scream. The doctor took one look and slammed steel 39
shutters of survival. He ordered the burning bed and its occupant immediately evicted from the hospital premises.
'Guess he can make his own penicillin!' snarled the doctor. But the infection burned the mold out... Lee lived now in varying degrees of transparency... While not exactly invisible he was at least difficult to see. His presence attracted no special notice.... People covered him with a project or dismissed him as a reflection, shadow: 'Some kinda light trick or neon advertisement.'
Now Lee felt the first seismic tremors of Old Faithful the Cold Burn. He pushed Miguel's spirit into the hall with a kind, firm tendril.
'Jesus!' said Miguel. 'I gotta go!' He rushed out. Pink fires of histamine spurted from Lee's glowing core and covered his raw periphery. (The room was fireproof, the walls of iron blistered and spotted with moon craters.) He took a large fix and falsified his schedule.
He decided to visit a colleague, NG Joe, who got hooked during a Bang-utot attack in Honolulu.
(Note: Rang-utot, literally, 'attempting to get up and groaning...' Death occurring in the course of a nightmare... The condition occurs in males of S.E. Asiatic extraction.... In Manila about twelve cases of death by Bang-utot are recorded each year.
One man who recovered said that 'a little man' was sitting on his chest and strangling him. Victims often know that they are going to die, express the fear that their penis will enter the body and kill them. Sometimes they cling to the penis in a state of shrieking hysteria calling on others for help lest the penis escape and pierce the body. Erections, such as normally occur in sleep, are considered especially dangerous and liable to bring a fatal attack.... One man devised a Rube Goldberg contraption to prevent erection during sleep. But he died of Bang-utot. Careful autopsies of Bang-utot victims have revealed no organic reason for death. There are often signs of strangulation (caused by what?); sometimes slight hemorrhages of pancreas and lungs - not sufficient to cause death and also of unknown origin. It has occurred to the author that the cause of death is a misplacement of sexual energy resulting in a lung erection with consequent strangulation.... [See article by Nils Larsen M.D.,
NG lived in constant fear of erection so his habit jumped and jumped. (Note: It is a well known tiresome fact, it is a notoriously dull and long winded fact, that anyone who gets hooked because of any disability whatever, will be presented, during the periods of shortage or deprivation [such a thing as too much fun you know] with an outrageously padded, geometrically progressing, proliferating account.)
An electrode attached to one testicle glowed briefly and NG woke up in the smell of burning flesh and reached for a loaded syringe. He rolled into a foetal position and slid the needle into his spine. He pulled the needle out with a little sigh of pleasure, and realized that Lee was in the room. A long slug undulated out of Lee's right eye and wrote on the wall in iridescent ooze: ' The Sailor is in the City buying up TIME.'
I am waiting in front of a drugstore for it to open at nine o'clock. Two Arab boys roll cans of garbage up to a high heavy wood door in a whitewashed wall. Dust in front of the door streaked with urine. One of the boys bent over, rolling the heavy cans, pants tight over his lean young ass. He looks at me with the neutral, calm glance of an animal I wake with a shock like the boy is real and I have missed a meet I had with him for this afternoon.
40
'We expect additional equalizations,' says the Inspector in an interview with Your Reporter.
'Otherwise will occur,' the Inspector lifts one leg in a typical Nordic gesture, 'the bends is it not? But perhaps we can provide the suitable chamber of decompression.' The Inspector opens his fly and begins looking for crabs, applying ointment from a little clay pot. Clearly the interview is at an end. 'You're not going?' he exclaims. 'Well, as one judge said to the other, 'Be just and if you can't be just be arbitrary.' Regret cannot observe customary obscenities.' He holds up his right hand covered with a foul-smelling yellow ointment. One's Reporter rushes forward and clasps the soiled hand in both of his. 'It's been a pleasure, Inspector, an unspeakable pleasure,' he says peeling off his gloves, rolling them into a ball and tossing them into the wastebasket. 'Expense account,' he smiles. 41
