554
TONY TANNER
The next episode is a composite vision of the modem city, which
is also a city of the damned. "Faces of The City poured through
silent as fish, stained with vile addictions and broken lusts. . .. All
streets of The City slope down between deepening canyons to a
vast kidney-shaped plaza full of darkness." This generalized city is
the cesspool of the modem world (almost the last words of the book
are: "They are rebuilding the City. Lee nodded absently ... 'Yes ...
Always . . .' ") ; and here again we find hideous images of devouring
creatures. "Traffickers in the Black Meat, flesh of the giant aquatic
black centipede," and more specifically, the Mugwumps and Reptiles
whose human originals can
be
detected lurking in
Junkie.
"Mug–
wumps have no liver and nourish themselves exclusively on sweets.
Their purple-blue lips cover a razor-sharp beak of black bone
with
which they frequently tear each other to shreds in fights over
clients. These creatures secrete an addicting fluid from their erect
penises which prolongs life by slowing metabolism. . . . Addicts of
the Mugwump fluid are known as Reptiles. . . . A fan of green
cartilage covered with hollow, erectile hairs through which the Rep–
tiles absorb the fluid sprouts from behind each ear." Against these
creatures the "Dream Police" are helpless and "disintegrate in globs
of rotten ectoplasm."
It
is a hideous vision of the triumphant reign
of life lived on the lowest, vilest, animal level. It is the Mugwumps,
for instance, who organize one of those homosexual executions which
proliferate throughout the book. A young boy is hanged, he has
an orgasm, and is then buggered while dangling on the rope. After,
"the Mugwump falls with a fluid, sated plop." The horror of
all
these scenes and beasts is real enough. Burroughs did not invent the
Mugwumps-he must have seen them.
For most of the rest of the book we are in Interzone. The City of
Interzone is "the Composite City where
all
human potentials are
spread out in a vast silent market." It is full of violence, disease,
perverted sex. Here is "the Meet Cafe" where every kind of distor–
tion and degradation of the human potential congregate, where
all
diseases wait: "maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere,
maladies of the laboratory and atomic war. . . . A place where the
unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless
hum.... Larval entities waiting for a Live One...." Burroughs'
evil is a "waiting" evil. Though the book is full of the most vivid
