Free Naked Lunch by William Burroughs Page A

and bartered for raw materials of the will, drinkers of the Heavy Fluid sealed in translucent amber of dreams.
    The Meet Café occupies one side of the Plaza, a maze ofkitchens, restaurants, sleeping cubicles, perilous iron balconies and basements opening into the underground baths.
    On stools covered in white satin sit nakedMugwumps sucking translucent, colored syrups through alabaster straws. Mugwumps have no liver and nourish themselves exclusively on sweets. Thin, purple-blue lips cover a razorsharp beak of black bone with which they frequently tear each other to shreds in fights over clients. These creatures secrete an addicting fluid from their erect penises which prolongs life by slowing metabolism. (In factall longevity agents have proved addicting in exact ratio to their effectiveness in prolonging life.) Addicts of Mugwump fluid are known as Reptiles. A number of these flow over chairs with their flexible bones and black-pink flesh. A fan of green cartilage covered with hollow, erectile hairs through which the Reptiles absorb the fluid sprouts from behind each ear. The fans, which move from time totime touched by invisible currents, serve also some form of communication known only to Reptiles.
    During the biennial Panics when the raw, pealed Dream Police storm the City, the Mugwumps take refuge in the deepest crevices of the wall sealing themselves in day cubicles and remain for weeks in biostasis. In those days of grey terror the Reptiles dart about faster and faster, scream past eachother at supersonic speed, their flexible skulls flapping in black winds of insect agony.
    The Dream Police disintegrate in globs of rotten ectoplasm swept away by an old junky, coughing and spitting in the sick morning. The Mugwump Man comes with alabaster jars of fluid and the Reptiles get smoothed out.
    The air is once again still and clear as glycerine.
    The Sailor spotted his Reptile. Hedrifted over and ordered a green syrup. The Reptile had a little, round disk mouth of brown gristle, expressionless green eyes almost covered by a thin membrane of eyelid. The Sailor waited an hour before the creature picked up his presence.
    ‘Any eggs for Fats?’ he asked, his words stirring through the Reptile’s fan hairs.
    It took two hours for the Reptile to raise three pink transparent fingerscovered with black fuzz.
    Several Meat Eaters lay in vomit, too weak to move. (The Black meat is like a tainted cheese, overpoweringly delicious and nauseating so that the eaters eat and vomit and eat again until they fall exhausted.)
    A painted youth slithered in and seized one of the great black claws sending the sweet, sick smell curling through the café.
    Hospital
    Disintoxication Notes.
Paranoiaof early withdrawal.… Everything looks blue.… Flesh dead, doughy, toneless.
    Withdrawal Nightmares.
A mirror-lined café. Empty.… Waiting for something.… A man appears in a side door.… A slight, short Arab dressed in a brown jellaba with grey beard and grey face.… There is a pitcher of boiling acid in my hand.… Seized by a convulsion of urgency, I throw it in his face.…
    Everyone looks like a drugaddict.…
    Take a little walk in the hospital patio.… In my absence someone has used my scissors, they are stained with some sticky, red brown gick.… No doubt that little bitch of a criada trimming her rag.
    Horrible-looking Europeans clutter up the stairs, intercept the nurse when I need my medicine, empty piss into the basin when I am washing, occupy the toilet for hours on end – probably fishingfor a finger stall of diamonds they have stashed up their asshole.…
    In fact the whole clan of Europeans has moved in nextto me.… The old mother is having an operation and her daughter move right in to see the old gash receive proper service. Strange visitors, presumably relatives … One of them wears as glasses those gadgets jewelers screw into their eye to examine stones.… Probably a diamond-cutteron the skids … The man who loused up