Naked Lunch

'Oh yes, many of them at first. But not for long. Some maudlin citizens will think they can send something edifying, not realizing that sending is evil. Scientists will say: 'Sending is like atomic power.... If properly harnessed.' At this point an anal technician mixes a bicarbonate of soda and pulls the switch that reduces the earth to cosmic dust. ('Belch... They'll hear this fart on Jupiter.')... Artists will confuse sending with creation. They will camp around screeching 'A new medium'

until their rating drops off.... Philosophers will bat around the ends and means hassle not knowing that sending can never be a means to anything but more sending, like Junk. Try using junk as a means to something else.... Some citizens with 'Coca Cola and aspirin' control habits will be talking about the evil glamor of sending. But no one will talk about anything very long. The Sender, he don't like talking.'

The Sender is not a human individual.... It is The Human Virus. (All virus are deteriorated cells leading a parasitic existence.... They have specific affinity for the Mother Cell; thus deteriorated liver cells seek the home place of hepatitis, etc. So every species has a Master Virus: Deteriorated Image of that species. )

The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell.... Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus. The Human Virus can now be isolated and treated.

84

THE COUNTY CLERK

The County Clerk has his office in a huge red brick building known as the Old Court House. Civil cases are, in fact, tried there, the proceeding inexorably dragging out until the contestants die or abandon litigation. This is due to the vast number of records pertaining to absolutely everything, all filed in the wrong place so that no one but the County Clerk and his staff of assistants can find them, and he often spends years in the search. In fact, he is still looking for material relative to a damage suit that was settled out of court in 1910. Large sections of the Old Court House have fallen in ruins, and others are highly dangerous owing to frequent cave-ins. The County Clerk assigns the more dangerous missions to his assistants, many of whom have lost their lives in the service. In 1912 two hundred and seven assistants were trapped in a collapse of the North-by-North-East wing. When suit is brought against anyone in the Zone, his lawyers connive to have the case transferred to the Old Court House. Once this is done, the plaintiff has lost the case, so the only cases that actually go to trial in the Old Court House are those instigated by eccentrics and paranoids who want 'a public hearing,' which they rarely get since only the most desperate famine of news will bring a reporter to the Old Court House.

The Old Court House is located in the town of Pigeon Hole outside the urban zone. The inhabitants of this town and the surrounding area of swamps and heavy timber are people of such great stupidity and such barbarous practices that the Administration has seen fit to quarantine them in a reservation surrounded by a radioactive wall of iron bricks. In retaliation the citizens of Pigeon Hole plaster their town with signs: ' Urbanite Don't Let The Sun Set On You Here,' an unnecessary injunction, since nothing but urgent business would take any urbanite to Pigeon Hole. Lee's case is urgent. He has to file an immediate affidavit that he is suffering from bubonic plague to avoid eviction from the house he has occupied ten years without paying the rent. He exists in perpetual quarantine. So he packs his suitcase of affidavits and petitions and injunctions and certificates and takes a bus to the Frontier. The Urbanite customs inspector waves him through: 'I hope you've got an atom bomb in that suitcase.'

Lee swallows a handful of tranquilizing pills and steps into the Pigeon Hole customs shed. The inspectors spend three hours pawing through his papers, consulting dusty books of regulations and duties from which they read incomprehensible and ominous excerpts ending with: 'And as such is subject to fine and penalty under act 666.' They look at him significantly. They go through his papers with a magnifying glass. 'Sometimes they slip dirty limericks between the lines.'

'Maybe he figures to sell them for toilet paper. Is this crap for your own personal use?'

'Yes.'

'He says yes.'

'And how do we know that?'

'I gotta affidavit.'

'Wise guy. Take off your clothes.'

'Yeah. Maybe he got dirty tattoos.'

They paw over his body probing his ass for contraband and examine it for evidence of sodomy. They dunk his hair and send the water out to be analyzed. 'Maybe he's got dope in his hair.' Finally, they impound his suitcase; and he staggers out of the shed with a fifty pound bale of documents. A dozen or so Recordites sit on the Old Court House steps of rotten wood. They watch his approach with pale blue eyes, turning their heads slow on wrinkled necks (the wrinkles full of dust) to follow his body up the steps and through the door. Inside, dust hangs in the air like fog, 85

sifting down from the ceiling, rising in clouds from the floor as he walks. He mounts a perilous staircase -- condemned in 1929. Once his foot goes through, and the dry splinters tear into the flesh of his leg. The staircase ends in a painter's scaffold, attached with frayed rope and pullies to a beam almost invisible in dusty distance. He pulls himself up cautiously to a ferris wheel cabin. His weight sets in motion hydraulic machinery (sound of running water). The wheel moves smooth and silent to stop by a rusty iron balcony, worn through here and there like an old shoe sole. He walks down a long corridor lined with doors, most of them nailed or boarded shut. In one office, Near East Exquisitries on a green brass plaque, the Mugwump