Cities of the Red Night by William S. Burroughs

Author:William S. Burroughs
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Picador

WE ARE THE LANGUAGE

As I was reading the Cities of the Red Night text, the Iguana sister brought some books and put them down on the table. I laid aside the folder.

“Who wrote this?”

“A scholar who prefers to remain anonymous. Research into this area is not reinforced. If, as he suggests, conception is the basic trauma, then it is also the basic instrument of control.” She gestured to the books stacked on the table. I saw at a glance that they were elaborately bound in a variety of colors. They looked very expensive.

“These are copies. Please study them carefully. I will pay one million dollars for recovery of the originals.”

“How good are the copies?”

“Almost perfect.”

“Then why do you want the originals? Collector’s vanity?”

“Changes, Mr. Snide, can only be effected by alterations in the original. The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe are the prerecordings themselves. The copies can only repeat themselves word for word. A virus is a copy. You can pretty it up, cut it up, scramble it—it will reassemble in the same form. Without being an idealist, I am reluctant to see the originals in the hands of the Countess de Gulpa, the Countess de Vile and the pickle factory.…”

“I don’t need a pep talk—but I do need a retainer.”

She laid out a check for two hundred thousand cools on the table. I began examining the books, skipping through to get a general impression. They are composed in a variety of styles and periods. Some of them seem to stem from the 1920s of The Great Gatsby, old sport, and others to derive from the Edwardian era of Saki, reflecting an unbearably flawed boyishness. There is an underlying current of profound frivolity, with languid young aristocrats drawling epigrams in streets of disease, war, and death. There is a Rover Boys–Tom Swift story line where boy heroes battle against desperate odds.

The books are color comics. “Jokes,” Jim calls them. Some lost color process has been used to transfer three-dimensional holograms onto the curious tough translucent parchment-like material of the pages. You ache to look at these colors. Impossible reds, blues, sepias. Colors you can smell and taste and feel with your whole body. Children’s books against a Bosch background; legends, fairy stories, stereotyped characters, surface motivations with a child’s casual cruelty. What facts could have given rise to such legends?

A form of radiation unknown at the present time activated a virus. This virus illness occasioned biologic mutations, especially alterations in hair and skin color, which were then genetically conveyed. The virus must have affected the sexual and fear centers in the brain and nervous system so that fear was converted into sexual frenzies which were reconverted into fear, the feedback leading in many cases to a fatal conclusion. The virus information was genetically conveyed, in orgasms that were often fatal. It seems likely that the burnings, stabbings, poisonings, stranglings, and hangings were largely terminal hallucinations produced by the virus, at a point where the line between illusion and reality breaks down.

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