up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out.
Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer. Like one of those thinking machines, you feed in your question, sit back, and wait.... I was looking for a name. My mind was sorting through names, discarding at once F.L.--Fuzz Lover, B.W.--Born Wrong, N.C.B.C.--Nice Cat But Chicken; putting aside to reconsider, narrowing, sifting, feeling for the name, the answer.
'Sometimes, you know, he'll keep me waiting three hours. Sometimes I make it right away like this.' Nick had a deprecating little laugh that he used for punctuation. Sort of an apology for talking at all in the telepathizing world of the addict where only the quantity factor --How much $? How much junk? --requires verbal expression. He knew and I knew all about waiting. At all levels the drug trade operates without schedule. Nobody delivers on time except by accident. The addict runs on junk time. His body is his clock, and junk runs through it like an hourglass. Time has meaning for him only with reference to his need. Then he makes his abrupt intrusion into the time of others, and, like all Outsiders, all Petitioners, he must wait, unless he happens to mesh with non-junk time.
'What can I say to him? He knows I'll wait,' Nick laughed. I spent the night in the Ever Hard Baths --(homosexuality is the best all-around cover story an agent can use) --where a snarling Italian attendant creates such an unnerving atmosphere sweeping the dormitory with infra red see in the dark fieldglasses.
('All right in the North East corner! I see you!' switching on floodlights, sticking his head through trapdoors in the floor and wall of the private rooms, that many a queen has been carried out in a straitjacket.... )
108
I lay there in my open top cubicle room looking at the ceiling... listened to the grunts and squeals and snarls in the nightmare halflight of random, broken lust....
'Fuck off you!'
'Put on two pairs of glasses and maybe you can see something!' Walked out in the precise morning and bought a paper.... Nothing.... I called from a drugstore phone booth... and asked for Narcotics:
'Lieutenant Gonzales... who's calling?'
'I want to speak to O'Brien.' A moment of static, dangling wires, broken connections...
'Nobody of that name in this department... Who are
'Well let me speak to Hauser.'
'Look, Mister, no O'Brien no Hauser in this bureau. Now what do you want?'
'Look, this is important.... I've got info on a big shipment of H coming in.... I want to talk to Hauser or O'Brien.... I don't do business with anybody else....'
'Hold on.... I'll connect you with Alcibiades.' I began to wonder if there was an Anglo-Saxon name left in the Department....
'I want to speak to Hauser or O'Brien.'
'How many times I have to tell you no Hauser no O'Brien in this department.... Now who is this calling?'
I hung up and took a taxi out of the area.... In the cab I realized what had happened.... I had been occluded from space-time like an eel's ass occludes when he stops eating on the way to Sargasso.... Locked out.... Never again would I have a Key, a Point of Intersection.... The Heat was off me from here on out... relegated with Hauser and O'Brien to a landlocked junk past where heroin is always twenty-eight dollars an ounce and you can score for yen pox in the Chink Laundry of Sioux Falls.... Far side of the world's mirror, moving into the past with Hauser and O'Brien... clawing at a not-yet of Telepathic Bureaucracies, Time Monopolies, Control Drugs, Heavy Fluid Addicts:
'I thought of that three hundred years ago.'
'Your plan was unworkable then and useless now. ...Like Da Vinci's flying machine plans....' 109
ATROPHIED PREFACE
WOULDN'T YOU?
Why all this waste paper getting The People from one place to another? Perhaps to spare The Reader stress of sudden space shifts and keep him Gentle? And so a ticket is bought, a taxi called, a plane boarded. We are allowed a glimpse into the warm peach-lined cave as She (the airline hostess, of course) leans over us to murmur of chewing gum, dramamine, even nembutal.
'Talk paregoric, Sweet Thing, and I will hear.'
