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Фантастика. Фэнтези
   Зарубежная фантастика
      Вильям Берроуз. Голый завтрак (engl) -
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into the casita and starts plucking at his mustache. They just bring so-called lunch.... A hard-boiled egg with the shell of revealing an object like I never seen it before.... A very small egg of a yellow-brown color... Perhaps laid by the duck-billed platypus. The orange contained a huge worm and very little else.... He really got there firstest with the mostest.... In Egypt is a worm gets into your kidneys and grows to an enormous size. Ultimately the kidney is just a thin shell around the worm. Intrepid gourmets esteem the flesh of The Worm above all other delicacies. It is said to be unspeakably toothsome..., An Interzone coroner known as Autopsy Ahmed made a fortune traf- ficking The Worm. The French school is opposite my window and I dig the boys with my eight-power field glasses.... So close I could reach out and touch them.... They wear shorts.... I can see the goose-pimples on their legs in the cold Spring morning.... I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust. Did I ever tell you about the time Marv and me pay two Arab kids sixty cents to watch them screw each other? So I ask Marv, "Do you think they will do it?" And he says, "I think so. They are hungry." And I say, "That's the way I like to see them." Makes me feel sorta like a dirty old man but, "Son cosas de la vida," as Soberba de la Flor said when the fuzz upbraids him for blasting this cunt and taking the dead body to the Bar 0 Motel and fucking it.... "She play hard to get already," he say... "I don't hafta take that sound." (Soberba de la Flor was a Mexican criminal convict of several rather pointless murders. ) The lavatory has been locked for three hours solid. ...I think they are using it for an operating room.... NUъSE: "I can't find her pulse, doctor." Dъ. BENWAY: "Maybe she got it up her snatch in a finger stall." NUъSE: "Adrenalin, doctor?" Dъ.. BENWAY: "The night porter shot it all up for kicks." He looks around and picks up one of those rubber vacuum cups at the end of a stick they use to unstop toilets.... He advances on the patient.... "Make an incision, Doctor Limpf," he says to his ap- palled assistant.... "I'm going to massage the heart." Dr. Limpf shrugs and begins the incision. Dr. Ben- way washes the suction cup by swishing it around in the toilet-bowl.... NUъSE: "Shouldn't it be sterilized, doctor?" Dъ. BENWAY: "Very likely but there's no time." He sits on the suction cup like a cane seat watching his assistant make the incision.... "You young squirts couldn't lance a pimple without an electric vibrating scalpel with automatic drain and suture.... Soon we'll be operating by remote control on patients we never see.... We'll be nothing but button pushers. All the skill is going out of surgery.... All the know-how and make-do... Did I ever tell you about the time I per- formed an appendectomy with a rusty sardine can? And once I was caught short without instrument one and removed a uterine tumor with my teeth. That was in the Upper Effendi, and besides..." Dъ. LYMPH F: "The incision is ready, doctor." Dr. Benway forces the cup into the incision and works it up and down. Blood spurts all over the doctors, the nurse and the wall.... The cup makes a horrible sucking sound. NUъSE: "I think she's gone, doctor." Dъ. BENWAY: "Well, it's all in the day's work." He walks across the room to a medicine cabinet.... "Some fucking drug addict has cut my cocaine with Saniflush! Nurse! Send the boy out to fill this ъX on the double!" Dr. Benway is operating in an auditorium filled with students: "Now, boys, you won't see this operation performed very often and there's a reason for that.... You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning. "Just as a bull fighter with his skill and knowledge extricates himself from danger he has himself invoked, so in this operation the surgeon deliberately endangers his patient, and then, with incredible speed and celer- ity, rescues him from death at the last possible split second.... Did any of you ever see Dr. Tetrazzini per- form? I say perform advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by throwing a scal- pel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance like a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: 'I don't give them time to die,' he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. 'Fucking undisciplined cells!' he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter." A young man leaps down into the operating theatre and, whipping out a scalpel, advances on the patient. Dъ. BENWAY: "An espontaneo Stop him before he guts my patient!" (Espontaneo is a bull-fighting term for a member of the audience who leaps down into the ring, pulls out a concealed cape and attempts a few passes with the bull before he is dragged out of the ring. ) The orderlies scuffle with the espontaneo, who is finally ejected from the hall. The anesthetist takes ad- vantage of the confusion to pry a large gold filling from the patient's mouth.... I am passing room 10 they moved me out of yester- day.... Maternity case I assume... Bedpans full of blood and Kotex and nameless female substances, enough to pollute a continent... If someone comes to visit me in my old room he will think I gave birth to a monster and the State Department is trying to hush it up.... Music from I Am an American... An elderly man in the striped pants and cutaway of a diplomat stands on a platform draped with the American flag. A de- cayed, corseted tenor -- bursting out of a Daniel Boone costume -- is singing the Star S pangled Banner, accom- panied by a full orchestra. He sings with a slight lisp.... THE DIPLOMAT (reading from a great scroll of ticker tape that keeps growing and tangling around his feet): "And we categorically deny that any male citizen of the United States of America..." TENOъ: "Oh thay can you thee..." His voice breaks and shoots up to a high falsetto. In the control room the Technician mixes a bicar- bonate of soda and belches into his hand: "God damned tenor's a brown artist1" he mutters sourly. "Mikel rumph," the shout ends in a belch. "Cut that swish fart off the air and give him his purple slip. He's through as of right now.... Put in that sex-changed Liz athlete.... She's a fulltime tenor at least.... Costume? How in the fuck should I know? I'm no dress designer swish from the costume department! What's that? The entire costume department occluded as a security risk? What am I, an octopus? Let's see... How about an Indian routine? Pocahontas or Hia- watha?... No, that's not right. Some citizen cracks wise about giving it back to the Indians.... A Civil War uniform, the coat North and the pants South like it show they got together again? She can come on like Buffalo Bill or Paul ъevere or that citizen wouldn't give up the shit, I mean the ship, or a G.I. or a Dough- boy or the Unknown Soldier.... That's the best deal. ...Cover her with a monument, that way nobody has to look at her...." The Lesbian, concealed in a paper mache Arc de Triomphe fills her great lungs and looses a tremendous bellow. "Oh say do that Star Spangled Banner yet wave..." A great rent rips the Arc de Triomphe from top to bottom. The Diplomat puts a hand to his fore- head.... The Diplomat: "That any male citizen of the United States has given birth in Interzone or at any other place...." "O'er the land of the FъEEEEEEEEEEE..." The Diplomat's mouth is moving but no one can hear him. The Technician clasps his hands over his ears: "Mother of God!" he screams. His plate begins to vibrate like a Jew's harp, suddenly flies out of his mouth.... He snaps at it irritably, misses and covers his mouth with one hand. The Arc de Triomphe falls with a ripping, splinter- ing crash, reveals the Lesbian standing on a pedestal clad only in a leopard-skin jockstrap with enormous falsie basket.... She stands there smiling stupidly and flexing her huge muscles.... The Technician is craw- pleasure to the head.... Ten minutes later you want another shot.... The pleasure of morphine is in the viscera.... You listen down into yourself after a shot. ...But intravenous C is electricity through the brain, activating cocaine pleasure connections.... There is no withdrawal syndrome with C. It is a need of the brain alone -- a need without body and without feeling. Earth- bound ghost need. The craving for C lasts only a few hours as long as the C channels are stimulated. Then you forget it. Eukodol is like a combination of junk and C. Trust the Germans to concoct some really evil shit. Eukodol like morphine is six times stronger than codeine. Heroin six times stronger than morphine. Di- hydro-oxy-heroin should be six times stronger than heroin. Quite possible to develop a drug so habit-form- ing that one shot would cause lifelong addiction. Habit Note continued: Picking up needle I reach spontaneously for the tie-up cord with my left hand.' This I take as a sign I can hit the one useable vein in my left arm, (The movements of tying up are such that you normally tie up the arm with which you reach for the cord. ) The needle slides in easily on the edge of a callous. I feel around. Suddenly a thin column of blood shoots up into the syringe, for a moment sharp and solid as a red cord. The body knows what veins you can hit and conveys this knowledge in the spontaneous movements you make preparing to take a shot.... Sometimes the needle points like a dowser's wand. Sometime I must wait for the message, But when it comes I always hit blood. A red orchid bloomed at the bottom of the dropper. He hesitated for a full second, then pressed the bulb, watching the liquid rush into the vein as if sucked by the silent thirst of his blood. There was an iridescent, thin coat of blood left in the dropper, and the white paper collar was soaked through with blood like a bandage. He reached over and filled the dropper with water. As he squirted the water out, the shot hit him in the stomach, a soft sweet blow. Look down at my filthy trousers, haven't been changed in months.... The days glide by strung on a syringe with a long thread of blood.... I am forget- ting sex and all sharp pleasures of the body -- a grey, junk-bound ghost. The Spanish boys call me El Hom- bre Invisible -- the Invisible Man.... Twenty push ups every morning. Use of junk re- moves fat, leaves muscle more or less intact. The addict seems to need less tissue....Would it be possible to isolate the fat-removing molecule of junk? More and more static at the Drug Store, mutterings of control like a telephone off the hook... Spent all day until 8 P.M. to score for two boxes of Eukodol.... ъunning out of veins and out of money. Keep going on the nod. Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand. It was my other hand.... Fall asleep reading and the words take on code signifi- cance.... Obsessed with codes.... Man contracts a series of diseases which spell out a code message.... Take a shot in front of D.L. Probing for a vein in my dirty bare foot.... Junkies have no shame.... They are impervious to the repugnance of others. It is doubtful if shame can exist in the absence of sexual libido.... The junky's shame disappears with his non- sexual sociability which is also dependent on libido.... The addict regards his body impersonally as an instru- ment to absorb the medium in which he lives, evaluates his tissue with the cold hands of a horse trader. "No use trying to hit there." Dead fish eyes Hick over a ravaged vein. Using a new type sleeping pill called Soneryl.... You don't feel sleepy.... You shift to sleep without transition, fall abruptly into the middle of a dream.... I have been years in a prison camp suffering from mal- nutrition.... The President is a junky but can't take it direct because of his position. So he gets fixed through me.... From time to time we make contact, and I recharge him. These contacts look, to the casual ob- server, like homosexual practices, but the actual ex- citement is not primarily sexual, and the climax is the separation when the recharge is completed. The erect penises are brought into contact -- at least we used that method in the beginning, but contact points wear out like veins. Now I sometimes have to slip my penis under his left eyelid. Of course I can always fix him with an Osmosis ъecharge, which corresponds to a skin shot, but that is admitting defeat. An O.ъ. will put the President in a bad mood for weeks, and might well precipitate an atomic shambles. And the President pays a high price for the Oblique Habit. He has sacrificed all control, and is dependent as an unborn child. The Oblique Addict suffers a whole spectrum of subjective horror, silent protoplasmic frenzy, hideous agony of the bones. Tensions build up, pure energy without emo- tional content finally tears through the body throwing him about like a man in contact with high tension wires. If his charge connection is cut off cold, the Oblique Addict falls into such violent electric convul- sions that his bones shake loose, and he dies with the skeleton straining to climb out of his unendurable flesh and run in a straight line to the nearest cemetery. The relation between an O.A. (Oblique Addict) and his ъ.C. (ъecharge Connection) is so intense that they can only endure each other's company for brief and infrequent intervals -- I mean aside from recharge meets, when all personal contact is eclipsed by the recharge process. ъeading the paper.... Something about a triple mur- der in the rue de la Merde, Paris: "An adjusting of scores."...I keep slipping away.... "The police have identified the author... Pepe El Culito... The Little Ass Hole, an affectionate diminutive." Does it really say that?... I try to focus the words... they separate in meaningless mosaic.... LAZAъUS GO HOME Fumbling through faded tape at the pick up frontier, a languid grey area of hiatus miasmic with yawns and gaping goof holes, Lee found out that the young junky standing there in his room at 10 A.M. Was back from two months skin diving in Corsica and off the junk.... "Here to show off his new body," Lee decided with a shudder of morning junk sickness. He knew that he was seeing -- ah yes Miguel thank you -- three months back sitting in the Metropole nodded out over a stale yellow eclair that would poison a cat two hours later, decided that the effort involved in seeing Miguel at all 10 A.M. was enough without the intolerable chore of correcting an error -- ("what is this a fucking farm?") which would also entail current picture of Miguel in much used areas like some great, inconvenient beast of an object on top in the suitcase. "You look marvelous," Lee said, wiping away the more obvious signs of distaste with a sloppy, casual napkin, seeing the grey ooze of junk in Miguel's face, studying patterns of shabbiness as if man and clothes had moved for years through back alleys of time with never a space station to tidy up.... "Besides by the time I could correct the error... Lazarus go home.... Pay The Man and go home.... What I want to see your old borrowed meat for?' "Well it's great to see you off....Do yourself a favor." Miguel was swimming around the room spear- ing fish with his hand.... "When you're down there you never think about horse." "You're better off like this," said Lee, dreamily caress- ing a needle scar on the back of Miguel's hand, follow- ing the whorls and patterns of smooth purple flesh in a slow twisting movement.... Miguel scratched the back of his hand.... He looked out the window.... His body moved in little, gal- vanized jerks as junk channels lit up.... Lee sat there waiting. "One snort never put anybody back on, kid." "I know what I'm doing." "They always know." Miguel took the nail file. Lee closed his eyes: "It's too tiresome." "Uh thanks that was great." Miguel's pants fell to his ankles. He stood there in a misshapen overcoat of Hesh that turned from brown to green and then color- less in the morning light, fell off in globs onto the floor. Lee's eyes moved in the substance of his face... a little, cold, grey Hick.... "Clean it up," he said. "Enough dirt in here now." "Oh uh sure," Miguel fumbled with a dustpan. Lee put the packet of heroin away. Lee lived in a permanent third-day kick, with, of course, certain uh essential intermissions to refuel the fires that burned through his yellow-pink-brown ge- latinous substance and kept off the hovering flesh. In the beginning his flesh was simply soft, so soft that he was cut to the bone by dust particles, air currents and brushing overcoats while direct contact with doors and chairs seemed to occasion no discomfort. No wound healed in his soft, tentative flesh.... Long white ten- drils of fungus curled round the naked bones. Mold odors of atrophied testicles quilted his body in a fuzzy grey fog.... During his first severe infection the boiling thermom- eter Hashed a quicksilver bullet into the nurse's brain and she fell dead with a mangled scream. The doctor took one look and slammed steel shutters of survival. He ordered the burning bed and its occupant immedi- ately evicted from the hospital premises. "Guess he can make his own penicillin!" snarled the doctor. But the infection burned the mold out... Lee lived now in varying degrees of transparency... While not exactly invisible he was at least difficult to see. His presence attracted no special notice.... People covered him with a project or dismissed him as a reflection, shadow: "Some kinda light trick or neon advertise- ment." Now Lee felt the first seismic tremors of Old Faith- ful the Cold Burn. He pushed Miguel's spirit into the hall with a kind, firm tendril. "Jesus!" said Miguel. "I gotta go!" He rushed out. Pink

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