Free The Western Lands by William S. Burroughs Page B

cells and replication, as solid as auto parts, tin cans, bottles and printed words. Joe didn't give a shit about cancer. He wasn't there to save human lives. He was there to alter the human equation.
    The notes are published in the Alternative Press with detailed plans. Soon testimonials are pouring in from all over the country. Life does a "debunking" story. Warnings from the FDA, the AMA and the cancer institute quickly escalate to shrill hysteria. And mutiny in the ranks: Doctor X, a respected oncologist practicing in a midwestern city, asks that his name be withheld: "I have seen it with my own eyes . . . the remission and complete cure of hitherto incurably cancerous conditions."
    All over America, people are making rechargers in various shapes, of pyramids, space suits and suits of armor, set on high towers and deserts and mountains, in undersea bubbles, built into hollow trees in deep forests overgrown with vines and orchids, in cliff dwellings and caves, in boats and dirigibles. There is no stopping it, and the medical bureaucracy would soon regret their ill-advised and futile attempt. Nurtured on self-deceit, accustomed to obedience and respect, they attempted to "reason" with the enraged patients, or worse, to overawe the mob by sheer presence, which was quickly revealed as a hollow fraud.

    Hall has been reading a lot of these doctor books. His own Doctor Benway shines forth as a model of responsibility and competence by comparison. Perhaps the most distasteful book of this genre is entitled A Pride of Healers . To be remembered that it is Pathology who decides a patient got cancer or don't got it. The doctors open it up. Anything looks suspicious, cut off a hunk and send it down to Pathology. The doctors twiddle their scalpels and wait. A green light winks on.
    "It's malignant, boys. Let's go. Gotta stay ahead of the Mets."
    So in this pride of prowling healers, the runty, ugly, half-impotent pathologist finds a big surgeon humping his old lady. So he frames the adulterous surgeon for prostate cancer and everybody knows there is only one cure. The surgeon is castrated and his nuts sent down to Pathology. Holding the nuts of his enemy in his hand gets him hot and he surprises his wife with a real pimp fuck. He's got another surprise for her: as she comes, he shoves the severed nuts down her throat. As the Germans say, unappetitlich.
    Most of them are not quite so lurid. Just ordinary no-good, greedy, callous, bigoted humans with grossly inflated self-images. Here is Mike Seddons from "Final Diagnosis": attractive, red-haired, empty as a waiting room. How can anyone believe in ESP or anything like that in the face of vast medical complexes, monuments to progress and science and rationality and healing? This wretched specimen has fallen for a nineteen-year-old nurse. They made it in a broom closet in a reek of Mr. Clean. He has proposed. She has accepted.
    Then she comes down with bone cancer. They have to take off the left leg stat, scalpels crossed it hasn't spread. Does he still want her? She tells him to take five days to think it over. He does. With bleak clarity he sees the years to come. Oh yes, he can  see, where his own interests are involved.
    He is striding toward Surgery, Big Man On Complex now:
    "It takes guts to practice surgery," he says. It certainly does. What would he do without guts? Striding toward Surgery, the patient is clearly terminal—he would operate on a mummy— and she is shambling along on her new prosthetic leg.
    "Will you shake the lead out?"
    "I'm doing the best I can, darling."
    Why don't she go back to her crutches, he thinks irritably. Aloud he says, "Why don't you jet-propel on your stinking farts?"
    Admittedly his words are somewhat unkind. But cancer does stink. Of course it's not her fault she is in this loathsome condition, or is it? His mother always said:
    "Son, in this life everyone gets exactly what he wants and exactly what he deserves." People tend to believe it, so