The Soft Machine

'You crazy or something walk around alone?'

The guide pointed to the head: 'Guard—You walk through his eyes and you N.G.' The guide sliced a hand across his genitals: 'This bad place, Meester—You ven conmigo—'

He led the way through dusty streets—Metal excrement glowed in corners—Darkness fell in heavy chunks blocking out sections of the city.

'Here,' said the guide—'A restaurant cut from limestone, green light seeping through bottles and tanks where crustaceans moved in slow gyrations—The waiter took their order hissing cold dank breath through a disk mouth.

'Good place—cave crabs— Muy bueno for fuck, Johnny—'

The waiter set down a flat limestone shell of squid bodies with crab claws.

'Krishnus,' said the guide.

Still alive, moving faintly in phosphorescent slime— The guide speared one on a bamboo spike and dipped it into yellow sauce—A sweet metal taste burned through stomach intestines and genitals—

Bradly ate the krish-nus in ravenous gulps—

The guide raised his arm from the elbow, ' Muy bueno, Johnny—You see.' The waiter was singing through his disk mouth a bubbling cave song— ' Vamanos, Johnny—I show you good place—We smoke fuck sleep O.K. Muy got good one, Johnny—'

Word 'Hotel' exploded in genitals—An old junky took Bradly's money and led them to a blue cubicle— Bradly leaned out a square hole in one wall and saw that the cubicle projected over a void on rusty iron props—The floor moved slightly and creaked under their feet—

'Some time this trap fall—Last fuck for Johnny.'

There was a pallet on the iron floor, a brass tray with hashish pipes, and a stone jar.

'Johnny shirt off'—said the guide unbuttoning Bradly's shirt with gentle lush rolling fingers

—'Johnny pants down'—He dipped a green phosphorescent Pretend an Interest

Benway 'camped' in the Board of Health. He rushed in anywhere brazenly impounding all junk. He was of course well-known but by adroit face rotation managed to piece out the odds, juggling five or six bureaus in the air thin and tenuous drifting-away cobwebs in a cold Spring wind under dead crab eyes of a doorman in green uniform carrying an ambiguous object composite of club, broom and toilet plunger, trailing a smell of ammonia and scrubwoman flesh. An undersea animal surfaced in his face, round disk mouth of cold grey gristle, purple rasp tongue moving in green saliva: 'Soul Cracker,' Benway decided. Species of carnivorous mol-lusk. Exists on Venus. It might not have bones. Time-switched the tracks through a field of little white flowers by the ruined signal tower.

Sat down under a tree worn smooth by others sat there before. We remember the days as long procession of the Secret Police always everywhere in different form. In Guayaquil sat on the river bank and saw a big lizard cross the mud flats dotted with melon rind from passing canoes.

Carl's dugout turned slowly in the brown iridescent lagoon infested with sting ray, fresh water shark, arequipa, candirus, water boa, crocodile, electric eel, aquatic panther and other noxious creatures dreamed up by the lying explorers who infest bars marginal to the area.

'This inaccessible tribe, you dig, lives on phosphorescent metal paste they mine from the area.

Transmute to gold straightaway and shit it out in nuggets. It's the great work.'

Liver-sick gold eyes gold maps gold teeth over the aguardiente cooked on the Primus stove with canella and tea to cut the oil taste leaves silver sores in the mouth and throat.

'That was the year of the Rindpest when all the tourists died even the Scandinavians and we boys reduced to hawk the farter LWR—Local Wage Rate.'

'No calcium in the area you understand. One blighter lost his entire skeleton and we had to carry him about in a canvas bathtub. A jaguar lapped him up in the end, largely for the salt I think.'

Tin boys reduced to hawk the farter the substance and the strata—You know what that means?

Carried the youth to dead water infested with consent—That was the year of The Clear—Local Wage Rate of Program Empty Body—

'Head Waters of the Baboon-asshole. . . That's hanging vine country—' (The hanging vine flicked around the youth's neck molding to his skull bones in a spiraling tendril motion snapped his neck, he hangs now ejaculating as disk mouths lined with green hairs fasten to his rectum growing tendrils through his body dissolving his bones in liquid gurgles and plops into the green eating jelly.)

'This bad place you write, Meester. You win something like jellyfish.'

They live in translucent jelly and converse in light flashes liquefying bones of the world and eating the jelly—boy chrysalis rotting in the sun—lazy undersea eyes on the nod over the rotting meat vegetable sleep— limestone dope out of shale and water. . .

The youth is hanged fresh and bloody—Tall ceremony involves a scorpion head—lethal mating operation from the Purified Ones—No calcium in the area— Exists on Venus—It might not have bones—Ray moss of orgasm and death—Limestone God a mile away— Better than shouts: 'Empty body!' Dead land here you understand waiting for some one marginal to the area.

'Deep in fucking drum country' (The naked Initiate is strapped with his back and buttocks fitted to a wooden drum. The drummer beats out orgasm message until the Initiate's flesh lights up with blue flame inside and the drum takes life and fucks the boy (( puffs of smoke across a clear blue sky...)) The initiate awoke in other flesh the lookout different... And he plopped into squares and patios on

'Write me Meester.')

Puerto Joselito is located at the confluence of two strong brown rivers. The town is built over a vast mud flat crisscrossed by stagnant canals, the buildings on stilts joined by a maze of bridges and catwalks extend up from the mud flats into higher ground surrounded by tree columns and trailing lianas, the whole area presenting the sordid