Word Virus by William S. Burroughs

Author:William S. Burroughs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 1998-02-16T05:00:00+00:00

WHO IS THE THIRD THAT WALKS BESIDE YOU

“Now it might surprise you to know there was another man in your position some thirty-five years ago today” his voice trails off. The ash gathers on his Havana held in a delicate grey cone the way it does on a really expensive cigar. “Yes, he wanted to give it all back, everything he’s ever taken anywhere. Oh he’d walk down the street giving a smile back here, a gracious nod over there, and a firm young ass over here (stay in line Gertie). He’d breathe life and sweetness back into bones rotten with strontium and even understandably top secret ‘Operation Pee Pee,’ the bones and blood and brains of a hundred million more or less gooks down the drain in green cancer piss, would be reversed. Tomorrow when he was properly rested he would have a talk first with his bankers and later of course with Winkhorst in the Technical department to set ‘Operation Rewrite’ going round the clock” (“/laser guns washing in present time/rockets across the valley / whole sky burning / “. His sad servant stands on the burning buckling deck of an exploding star, last glimpse through gun smoke in streets of war and death long ago and far away. You see, Mr. Bradly, that boy was your servant who did what you were afraid to do yourself and you laughed at him for doing it and joked about Operation Expendable in the urinals of present time.)

“/In fact that man had always experienced difficulty in dealing with his social inferiors. Like now standing in the shop, his casting roll and fishing plug slung over open shoulder, trying with the most lamentable results to impersonate a barefoot boy with his string of bull-heads or is it just plain old country bullshit from a Saturday Evening Post cover? He twisted rapidly, scooping up the change like a boy who has just heard ‘last one in is a sissy’ and maladroitly snagged an old peasant in the scrotum with his fishing plug. Then in a mistimed attempt at easy joviality he snapped open his Hollywood switch blade and said: ‘Well I guess we’ll just have to cut the whole thing off.’ He muttered something about calling a doctor, made a vague ineffectual gesture from a New Yorker cartoon inadvertently blinding the proprietor’s infant son. Finding that all his overtures of goodwill had fallen quite flat he ran back to the 1920s where he took refuge in Sid’s, soothing his shattered nerves with long cool draughts of needle beer. All the old tunes and sad old showmen stand there in blue twilight Silver Dollar Dan and Little Boy Blue dead stars fading sad train whistles a distant sky./”

“/Stranger, forget seventy tons to the square inch and be gone at the flutes. Death takes over in busy lands ashes gutted cities of America and Europe. Empty air marks authority over all antagonists late afternoon on white steps of the set. See, the chains are fallen.

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