smooth green brown wen. On the table in front of her is a samovar of tea and a twenty-pound hamper of brown sugar. No one has ever seen her eat anything else. It is only just before a shot that she hears 61
what anyone says or talks herself. Then she makes some flat, factual statement relative to her own person.
'My asshole is occluding.'
'My cunt got terrible green juices.'
Iris is one of Benway's projects. 'The human body can run on sugar alone, God damn it.... I am aware that certain of my learned colleagues, who are attempting to belittle my genius work, claim that I put vitamins and proteins into Iris's sugar clandestinely.... I challenge these nameless assholes to crawl up out of their latrines and run a spot analysis on Iris's sugar and her tea. Iris is a wholesome American cunt. I deny categorically that she nourishes herself on semen. And let me take this opportunity to state that I am a reputable scientist, not a charlatan, a lunatic, or a pretended worker of miracles.... I never claimed that Iris could subsist exclusive on photosynthesis.... I did not say she could breathe in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen --I confess I have been tempted to experiment being of course restrained by my medical ethics.... In short, the vile slanders of my creeping opponents will inevitably fall back onto them and come to roost like a homing stool pigeon.' 62
ORDINARY MEN AND WOMEN
Luncheon of Nationalist Party on balcony overlooking the Market. Cigars, scotch, polite belches.... The Party Leader strides about in a jellaba smoking a cigar and drinking scotch. He wears expensive English shoes, loud socks, garters, muscular, hairy legs --overall effect of successful gangster in drag.
P.L. (pointing dramatically): 'Look out there. What do you see?' LIEUTENANT: 'Huh? Why, I see the Market.'
P.L.: 'No you don't. You see men and women.
Lieutenant: 'No, we do not want to buy any used condoms! Cut!' P.L.: 'Wait!... Come in, my boy. Sit down.... Have a cigar.... Have a drink.' He paces around the boy like an aroused tom cat.
'What do you think about the French?'
'Huh?'
'The French. The Colonial bastards who is sucking your live corpuscles.'
'Look mister. It cost two hundred francs to suck my corpuscle. Haven't lowered my rates since the year of the rindpest when all the tourists died, even the Scandinavians.' P.L.: 'You see? This is pure uncut boy in the street.'
'You sure can pick'em, boss.'
'M.I. never misses.'
P.L.: 'Now look, kid, let's put it this way. The French have dispossessed you of your birthright.'
'You mean like Friendly Finance?... They got this toothless Egyptian eunuch does the job. They figure he arouse less antagonism, you dig, he always take down his pants to show you his condition.
'Now I'm just a poor old eunuch trying to keep up my habit. Lady, I'd like to give you an extension on that artificial kidney, I got a job to do is all.... Disconnect her, boys.' He shows his gums in a feeble snarl.... 'Not for nothing am I known as Nellie the Repossessor.'
'So they disconnect my own mother, the sainted old gash, and she swell up and turn black and the whole souk stink of piss and the neighbors beef to the Board of Health and my father say: 'It's the will of Allah. She won't piss any more of my loot down the drain.'
'Sick people disgust me already. When some citizen start telling me about his cancer of the prostate or his rotting septum make with that purulent discharge I tell him: 'You think I am innarested to hear about your horrible old condition? I am not innarested at all.' ' P.L.: 'All
'Mister, I hate everybody. Doctor Benway says it's metabolic, I got this condition of the blood.... Arabs and Americans got it special.... Doctor Benway is concocting this serum.' P.L.: 'Benway is an infiltrating Western Agent.'
L.l: 'A rampant French Jew...'
L.2: 'A hog-balled, black-assed Communist Jew Nigger.
P.L.: 'Shut up, you fool!'
