Free Naked Lunch by William Burroughs

of orientation like a bat’s squeak. The Sailor laughed three times. He stopped laughing and hung there motionless listening down into himself. He had picked up the silent frequency of junk. His face smoothed out like yellow wax over the high cheek-bones. He waited half a cigarette.The Sailor knew how to wait. But his eyes burned in a hideous dry hunger. He turned his face of controlled emergency in a slow half pivot to case the manwho had just come in. ‘Fats’ Terminal sat there sweeping the café with blank, periscope eyes. When his eyes passed the Sailor he nodded minutely. Only the peeled nerves of junk sickness would have registered a movement.
    The Sailor handed theboy a coin. He drifted over to Fats’ table with his floating walk and sat down. They sat a long time in silence. The café was built into one side of a stone ramp at the bottom of a high white canyon of masonry. Faces of The City poured through silent as fish, stained with vile addictions and insect lusts. The lighted café was a diving bell, cable broken, settling into black depths.
    The Sailorwas polishing his nails on the lapels of his glen plaid suit. He whistled a little tune through his shiny, yellow teeth.
    When he moved an effluvia of mold drifted out of his clothes, a musty smell of deserted locker rooms. He studied his nails with phosphorescent intensity.
    ‘Good thing here, Fats. I can deliver twenty. Need an advance of course.’
    ‘On spec?’
    ‘So I don’t have the twenty eggsin my pocket. I tell you it’s jellied consommé. One little whoops and a push.’ The Sailor looked at his nails as if he were studying a chart. ‘You know I always deliver.’
    ‘Make it thirty. And a ten tube advance. This time tomorrow.’
    ‘Need a tube now, Fats.’
    ‘Take a walk, you’ll get one.’
    The Sailor drifted down into the Plaza. A street boy was shoving a newspaper in the Sailor’s face to coverhis hand on the Sailor’s pen. The Sailor walked on. He pulled the pen out and broke it like a nut in his thick, fibrous, pink fingers. He pulled out a lead tube. He cut one end of the tube with a little curved knife. A black mist poured out and hung in the air like boiling fur. The Sailor’s face dissolved.His mouth undulated forward on a long tube and sucked in the black fuzz, vibrating in supersonicperistalsis disappeared in a silent, pink explosion. His face came back into focus unbearably sharp and clear, burning yellow brand of junk searing the grey haunch of a million screaming junkies.
    ‘This will last a month,’ he decided, consulting an invisible mirror.
    All streets of the City slope down between deepening canyons to a vast, kidney-shaped plaza full of darkness. Walls of street andplaza are perforated by dwelling cubicles and cafés, some a few feet deep, others extending out of sight in a network of rooms and corridors.
    At all levels criss-cross of bridges, cat walks, cable cars. Catatonic youths dressed as women in gowns of burlap and rotten rags, faces heavily and crudely painted in bright colors over a strata of beatings, arabesques of broken, suppurating scars to thepearly bone, push against the passers-by in silent clinging insistence.
    Traffickers in the Black Meat, flesh of the giant aquatic black centipede – sometimes attaining a length of six feet – found in a lane of black rocks and iridescent, brown lagoons, exhibit paralyzed crustaceans in camouflage pockets of the Plaza visible only to the Meat Eaters.
    Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades, doodlingin Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, black marketeers of World War III, excisors of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, officials of unconstituted police states, brokers of exquisitedreams and nostalgias tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness