'You will, baby... in time.'
'OK. So what do I do?'
'You accept?'
'Yeah, like...' He glanced at the package. 'Whatever... I accept.' The boy felt a silent black clunk fall through his flesh. The Sailor put a hand to the boy's eyes and pulled out a pink scrotal egg with one closed, pulsing eye. Black fur boiled inside translucent flesh of the egg.
102
The Sailor caressed the egg with nakedly inhuman hands --black-pink, thick, fibrous, long white tendrils sprouting from abbreviated finger tips. Death fear and Death weakness hit the boy, shutting off his breath, stopping his blood. He leaned against a wall that seemed to give slightly. He clicked back into junk focus.
The Sailor was cooking a shot. 'When the roll is called up yonder we'll be there, right?' he said, feeling along the boy's vein, erasing goose-pimples with a gentle old woman finger. He slid the needle in. A red orchid bloomed at the bottom of the dropper. The Sailor pressed the bulb, watching the solution rush into the boy-vein, sucked by silent thirst of blood.
'Jesus!' said the boy. 'I never been hit like that before!' He lit a cigarette and looked around the kitchen, twitching in sugar need. 'Aren't you taking off?' he asked.
'With that milk sugar shit? Junk is a one-way street. No U-turn. You can't go back no more.' They call me the Exterminator. At one brief point of intersection I did exercise that function and witnessed the belly dance of roaches suffocating in yellow pyretheum powder ('Hard to get now, lady... war on. Let you have a little.... Two dollars.') Sluiced fat bedbugs from rose wall paper in shabby theatrical hotels on North Clark and poisoned the purposeful Rat, occasional eater of human babies. Wouldn't you?
My present assignment: Find the live ones and exterminate. Not the bodies but the 'molds,' you understand --but I forget that you cannot understand. We have all but a very few. But even one could upset our food tray. The danger, as always, comes from defecting agents: A.J., the Vigilante, the Black Armadillo (carrier of Chagas vectors, hasn't taken a bath since the Argentine epidemic of
'35, remember? ), and Lee and the Sailor and Benway. And I know some agent is out there in the darkness looking for me. Because all Agents defect and all Resisters sell out.... 103
THE ALGEBRA OF NEED
Few reach the Plaza, a point where The Tanks empty a tidal river, carrying forms of survival armed with defences of poison slime, black, flesh rotting, fungus, and green odors that sear the lungs and grab the stomach in twisted knots....
Because 'Fats'' nerves were raw and peeled to feel the death spasms of a million cold kicks....
'Fats' learned The Algebra of Need and survived....
One Friday 'Fats' siphoned himself into The Plaza, a translucent-grey, foetal monkey, suckers on his little soft, purple-grey hands, and a lamphrey disk mouth of cold, grey gristle lined with hollow, black, erectile teeth, feeling for the scar patterns of junk.... And a rich man passed and stared at the monster and 'Fats' rolled pissing and shitting in terror and ate his shit and the man was moved by this tribute to his potent gaze and clicked a coin out of his Friday cane (Friday is Moslem Sunday when the rich are supposed to distribute alms ). So 'Fats' learned to serve The Black Meat and grew a fat aquarium of body.... And his blank, periscope eyes swept the world's surface.... In his wake of addicts, translucentgrey monkeys flashed like fish spears to the junk Mark, and hung there sucking and it all drained back into 'Fats' so his substance grew and grew filling plazas, restaurants and waiting rooms of the world with grey junk ooze.
Bulletins from Party Headquarters are spelled out in obscene charades by hebephrenics and Latahs and apes, Sollubis fart code, Negroes open and shut mouth to flash messages on gold teeth, Arab rioters send smoke signals by throwing great buttery eunuchs --they make the best smoke, hangs black and shit-solid in the air --onto gasoline fires in a rubbish heap, mosaic of melodies, sad Panpipes of humpbacked beggar, cold wind sweeps down from post card of Chimborazzi, flutes of Ramadan, piano music down a windy street, mutilated police calls, advertising leaflet synchronize with street fight spell SOS.
Two agents have identified themselves each to each by choice of sex practices foiling alien microphones, fuck atomic secrets back and forth in code so complex only two physicists in the world pretend to understand it and each categorically denies the other. Later the receiving agent will be hanged, convict of the guilty possession of a nervous system, and play back the message in orgasmal spasms transmitted from electrodes attached to the penis. Breathing rhythm of old cardiac, bumps of a belly dancer, put put put of a motorboat across oily water. The waiter lets fall a drop of martini of the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, who lams for the 6:12 knowing that he has been
