Free William S. Burroughs by The Place of Dead Roads

studio.
    Now Kim turns left
down the hall to the studio. Like an empty stage set. A sofa and an
armchair covered in green satin, a workbench littered with brushes,
palettes and tubes of paint, a rack for canvases and paintings. The
easel is empty. Kim sits down on the sofa, looking down to the river.
    Kim's memory of his
past life is spotty. Sometimes he feels he is getting someone else's
memories. There is an incestuous episode with his mother in a seaside
hotel. He is standing on a balcony in his bathing trunks. His face is
clouded and sulky. His mother appears in the doorway behind him,
dressed in a blue kimono...
    "I want to
sketch you. Cuppy."
    He twitches
irritably ... "Oh not now, Mother, I
want to
    take a bath and
change for dinner... "
    "I want to
sketch you naked, Cuppy."
    "Naked,
Mother?"
    But that couldn't
have happened because Kim had never been to the seaside. Actually his
mother was a bit dotty, into Ouija boards and tarot cards and crystal
balls and she drank six bottles of paregoric every day and her room
reeked of it.
    His father seemed
remote and veiled with an enigmatic sadness. He traveled frequently
on "company business." Expense account suggested illness.
Illness was radium poisoning.
    He remembered the
occasions when he was allowed to shoot his father's 36 cap-and-ball revolver. It was kept in a mahogany case
with silver clasps and hinges, all lined with green felt and a place
for the revolver, the conical bullets covered with thick yellow
grease to prevent multiple discharge, the percussion caps, the bullet
molds. The revolver had a double trigger, the lower one cocking the
weapon and the upper one, which had a very light pull, fired the
shot.
    On his twelfth
birthday he hit the target six times, death in his hands, grinning
through the smoke. His boy grin lit up, dazzling, radiant,
portentous as a comet, smelling immortality in powder smoke.

    Kim is with a boy of
about his own age. He can't see the boy clearly but they have known
each other for a long time. They are standing on the railroad bridge
over Dead Boy Creek. The water runs still and deep here and they can
see fish stirring. The boy is teaching Kim to fly. He soars over the
water and lands on a path. Kim stands poised, thinking he can't, and
suddenly he is in the air, sweeping in to land on the path. Now they
crisscross back and forth across the stream, higher now over the
trees, they can see the field leading up to the house on the hill
where Kim lives. There is a balcony that runs across the front of the
house facing down toward the railroad and the river. The balcony is
supported by two marble columns which his father had acquired when
the old courthouse was torn down. Against the darkening sky it looks
like a painting. The House on the Hill... He is in the house
now, in the hallway that leads to the studio, telling his father how
he has learned to fly...
    "We have no
such powers, my son," his father says sadly.
    They are on the
balcony. A smoky red sunset over the river. Now an engine comes
in sight, two black men are stoking the fire and pounding each other
on the back...Kim can make out the name Mary Celeste... Slowly
like a parade of floats another ship moves by... The
Copenhagen... Kim smiles and waves...
    His father watches
with the sad eyes of a guardian whose role it is to nurture and
protect a being greater than himself. He knows that the boy must go
and that he cannot follow. The track is overgrown with weeds now.

    Kim puts out two
trays of sulfur candles ready to light, closes the french doors
leading onto the balcony, and caulks them as best he can with paper.
My father's bedroom. Enter. The room is empty except for the bed, a
chair, a dresser, a pair of workpants stained with paint hanging on a
wooden peg. Smell of nothing and nobody there. I remember, I
remember, into his own bedroom the little window where the sun
came peeping in at morn. He sets out the tray.
    He had once found a
scorpion crawling on his bed, and a boy