DEMONOLOGY
553
In the first section, about the hideous subworld of drug addicts, it
is
the horrible encroaching presence of informers, perverts and pushers
that stands out most luridly-literal devourers of their victims. Willy
the informer, for instance, "that blind, seeking mouth" who "would
suck the juice right out of every junkie he ran down." Bradley the
Buyer who has a "contact habit," a yen to assimilate other people
into his foulness which "comes on him like a great black wind." In
his spreading presence people disappear. "Like a vampire bat he
gives off a narcotic effluvium, a dank green mist that anesthetizes
his victims and renders them helpless in his enveloping presence. And
once he has scored he holes up for several days like a gorged boa
constrictor." A world of eaters and eaten . From such monsters Wil–
liam Lee flees across mournful, rancid dying landscapes which are
sometimes parts of America, and sometimes anywhere in the world.
This is the world of
Junkie
refracted through an imagination in the
toils of nightmare.
With the appearance of Doctor Benway and his doings in An–
nexia and the Freeland Republic, a sort of black satire commences.
Benway is both a figure of comedy and a figure of horror. He
is
a
particular kind of inspired charlatan, a master of all methods of
"assault on the subject's personal identity." In Annexia he had helped
to develop the perfect police state in which all the citizens are
maintained in a permanently demoralized condition, cowering "like
neurotic cats." There is some straight satire on bureaucratic methods
of demoralization: "Documents issued in vanishing ink faded into
old pawn tickets. New documents were constantly required. The
citizens rushed from one bureau to another in a frenzied attempt to
meet impossible deadlines" ; and various other ways are described in
which citizens can be manipulated into losing all sense of their real
identities. Benway (helped by Violet his baboon assistant) is also
responsible for some of those wild parody operations which obsess
Burroughs. In Freeland he runs a Reconditioning Center and works
on Automatic Obedience Processing. It is the unintended release of
the subjects of this center which precipitates one of those apocalyptic
scenes of rampant perversion, unspeakable sadism, disease and de–
struction which recur throughout the book. Another ominous sanitari–
um episode follows giving way, as often happens, to a great landscape
of decay.
