Cities of the Red Night

  But few of us had any confidence in Krup. We’d seen this character operate, how smoothly he’d hoaxed us into his hanging universe … Tamaghis … the Double G. But the shore leave was one hell of a lot better. We never had it so good. We could go to a licensed Siren cathouse where they have these deactivated Sirens just give you the sex trill.

  The boys are getting dressed to go ashore, adjusting hangman-knot ties.

  “Might pop myself a month’s pay tonight.”

  “More likely you’ll swing the other way.”

  The heavy-handed kidding—it’s all so Young Navy. The pimply virgin there trying to act wise—he’s from Virginia, so we call him the Virginian. So we all chip in to pay for a Siren and watch the Virginian through the two-way mirror.…

  “Look at the dong on that kid,” says the boy from East Texas.

  The kraut kids hardly ever go ashore, because they like to save money. Off duty they loll around in their bunks jacking off and making airplane noises.

  THE SKY IS THIN AS PAPER HERE

  Waring’s house still stands. Only the hinges have rusted away in the sea air so all the doors are open. In a corner of the studio I find a scroll about five feet wide wrapped in heavy brown paper on which is written “For Noah.” There is a wooden rod attached to one end of the scroll and on the wall two brass sockets designed to receive it. Standing on tiptoe I fit the rod into the sockets and a picture unrolls. Click. I remember what Waring told me about the Old Man of the Mountain and the magic garden that awaited his assassins after their missions of death had been carried out. As I study the picture I see an island in the sky, green as the heart of an emerald, glittering with dew as waterfalls whip tattered banners of rainbow around it. The shores are screened with thin poplars and cypress and now I can see other islands stretching away into the distance like the cloud cities of the Odor Eaters, which vanish in rain … the garden is fading … rusty barges and derricks and cement mixers … a blue river … red brick buildings … dinner by the river. On the edge of the market, tin ware clattering in a cold spring wind. When I reach the house the roof has fallen in, rubble and sand on the floor, weeds and vines growing through … it must be centuries.… Only the stairs remain going up into the blue sky. Sharp and clear as if seen through a telescope, a boy in white workpants, black jacket and black cap walking up a cracked street, ruined houses ahead. On the back of his jacket is the word DINK in white thread. He stops, sitting on a stone wall to eat a sandwich from his lunch box and drink some orange liquid from a paper container. He is dangling his legs over a dry streambed. He stands up in the weak sunlight and urinates into the streambed, shaking a few drops off his penis like raindrops on some purple plant. He buttons his pants and walks on.

  Dead leaves falling as we drive out to the farmhouse in the buckboard … loft of the old barn, jagged slashes of blue sky where the boards have curled apart … tattered banners of rain … violet twilight yellow-gray around the edges blowing away in the wind.

  He is sitting there with me, cloud shadows moving across his face, ghostly smell of flowers and damp earth … florist shop by the vacant lot … dim dead boy.… The sky is thin as paper here.

  ÉTRANGER QUI PASSAIT

  Farnsworth, Ali, and Noah Blake are moving south across the Red Desert, a vast area of plateaus, canyons, and craters where sandstone mesas rise from the red sand. The temperature is moderate even at midday and they travel naked except for desert boots, packs, and belts with eighteen-inch Bowie knives and ten-shot revolvers chambered for a high-speed 22-caliber cartridge. They have automatic carbines of the same caliber in their packs, with thirty-shot clips. These weapons may be needed if a time warp dumps an old western posse in their laps.

  The only provisions they carry are protein, minerals and vitamins in a dried powder concentrate. There are streams in the canyon bottoms where fish abound and fruit and nut trees grow in profusion.

  They carry collapsible hang-gliders in their packs.

  They have stopped at the top of a thousand-foot cliff over an area littered with red boulders. Here and there is a glint of water. The sandstone substrata form pools that hold water and even in otherwise arid patches there are usually fish and crustaceans in the pools.

  The boys unpack and assemble the gliders. As always, they will take off one at a time so that the lead glider will indicate to the others the air currents, wind velocities, and updrafts to be expected.

  They draw lots. Noah will go first. He stands on the edge of the cliff studying the terrain, the movements of dust clouds and tumbleweeds. He looks up at the clouds and the wheeling vultures. He runs towards the edge of the cliff and soars out over the desert. The glider is out of control for a few seconds in an updraft. He goes into a steep dive and pulls out, coming in smoothly now he lands by a pool. He waves and signals to the others; a tiny figure by a speck of water. They move a hundred feet down the cliff and take off.

  By the pool they eat dried fruit washed down with water. Ali stands up and points.

  “Look there.”

  The others can’t see anything.

  “There … right there.…”

  They pick out a lizard about four feet high standing on two legs fifty feet away. The lizard is speckled with orange-red and yellow blotches, so perfectly camouflaged it is like picking a face out in a picture puzzle to see him. The lizard knows he has been seen and lets out a high-pitched whistle. He runs towards them on two legs with incredible speed, kicking up a trail of red dust. He stops in front of them, immobile as a stone, while the dust slowly settles behind him. Seen at close range he is clearly humanoid with a smooth yellow face and a wide red mouth, black eyes with red pupils, a patch of red pubic hair at the crotch. A dry spoor smell drifts from his body.

  The lizard boy now leads the way setting the fastest pace the others can maintain. As he moves his body changes color to blend into the landscape. In the late afternoon they are making their way down a steep path into a canyon. Leaves spatter the lizard’s body with green. They come to a wide valley and a river with deep pools. The boys take off their packs and swim in the cool water. The lizard dives down to the bottom and comes up with a fourteen-inch cutthroat trout in his jaws and flips it onto the grass by the pool. Ali and Farnsworth are picking strawberries.

  Next day they set out to explore the canyon. The river winds between red cliffs. Here and there are cubicles cut in the rock by ancient cliff-dwellers.

  * * *

  We are heading for the river towns of the fruit-fish people. The staple of their diet is a fruit-eating fish which attains a weight of thirty pounds. To cultivate this fish they plant the riverbanks with a variety of fruit trees and vines so that the smell of fruit and fruit blossoms perfumes the air, which is a balmy eighty degrees.

  Our boat rides high in the water on two pontoons of paper-thin dugout canoes sealed over to form a sort of sled on which we glide, propelled by a gentle current, past youths in the boughs of trees, masturbating and shaking the ripe fruit into the water with the spasms of their bodies as their sperm falls also to be devoured by the great green-blue fish. It is this diet of fruit and sperm which gives the fruit fish its incomparable flavor.

  Little naked boys walk along the banks throwing fruit into the water and masturbating while they emit birdcalls and animal noises, giggling, singing, whining, and growling out spurts of sperm that glitter in the dappled sunlight. As we pass, the boys bend over, waving and grinning between their legs like sheaves of wheat parted by a gentle breeze that wafts us to the jetty.

  Who are we? We are migrants who move from settlement to settlement in the vast area now held by the Articulated. These voyages often last for years, and migrants may drop out along the way or adventurous settlers join the migrants. We carry with us seeds and plants, plans, books, pictures, and artifacts from the communes we have visited.

  On the jetty we are welcomed by a tall statuesque youth with negroid features and kinky yellow hair. It is late afternoon and the boys are trooping back from
the riverbanks and orchards and fish hatcheries. Many of them are completely naked. I am struck by the mixtures here displayed: Negro, Chinese, Portuguese, Irish, Malay, Japanese, Nordic boys with kinky red and blond and auburn hair and jet-black eyes, blacks with straight hair, gray and blue and green eyes, Chinese with bright red hair and green eyes, mixtures of Chinese and Indian of a delicate pink color, Indians of a deep copper red with one blue eye and one brown eye, purple-black skin and red pubic hairs.

  * * *

  Arriving at the port city after a long uncomfortable train journey from the capital, Farnsworth checked into the Survival Hotel. The hotel was a ramshackle wooden building of four stories overlooking the bay, with wide balconies and porches overgrown with bougainvillea where the guests sat in high-back cane chairs sipping gin slings. A promontory of red and yellow sandstone a thousand feet high cut the town off from the sea, which entered by a narrow channel between the rock and the mainland. Looking down from the balcony of his room on the fourth floor, Farnsworth could see the beaches around the lagoon, where languid youths stretched naked in the sun. Fatigued from his journey, he decided to take a nap before dinner.

  * * *

  Someone touches his shoulder. Ali is looking into the dim light of early dawn.

  “What is it?”

  “Patrol, I think.”

  We are out of the reservation area and the penalty for being caught here without authorization is the white-hot jockstrap. We will not be taken alive. We have cyanide shoes, a cushion of compressed gas in a double sole under our feet. A certain sequence of toe movements and we settle down in a whoosh of cyanide as the Green Guards clutch their blue throats and we streak out of our bodies across the sky. We also have rocket-fuel flamethrowers, very effective at close range.

  This is not a patrol. It is a gang of naked boys covered with erogenous sores. As they walk they giggle and stroke and scratch each other. From time to time they fuck each other in Hula-Hoops to idiot mambo.

  “Just leper kids,” Ali grunts. “Let’s make some java.”

  We drink it black in tin cups and wash down K rations.

  DRAFT RIOTS

  And here I was with a pop-happy skipper in an old leaky jinxed gallows-propelled space tramp with all the heaviest guns of the planet trained on us: the Countess de Gulpa (not nearly so unimportant as Pierson would have liked me to believe), the CIA and the Board, Blum and the Movie Studio. I figured we’d be lucky to reach Hoboken. As a matter of fact, we got a few miles farther to what is now lower Manhattan.

  Four kids insisted on guiding us to the Double G in New York and when we walked in, I saw that the whole place had changed. The gallows were gone but there were two nooses on the wall above the bar with brass plaques: “Rope used to hang Baboon O’Toole—June 3, 1852.” “Rope used to hang Lousy Louie—June 3, 1852.” And a photo of Baboon and Lousy standing side by side on a double gallows.

  The decor is now the New York of 1860: vintage crystal chandeliers and a huge female nude in a gilded frame over the bar. I spot Marty sitting with four thuggish-looking wooden-faced characters drinking champagne, and he waves to me.

  “You boys join us and have some bubbly.”

  We sit down and the thugs give us a cold fishy who-are-these-nances look. The fever does convey certain advantages. We all have a virus feel for weak points in any opponent and Krup has given us some basic courses in unarmed psychic combat. The techniques mostly run on a signal switch—I love you/I hate you—at rapid intervals, but this is only effective once a weak spot has been found.

  We soon have these four hoods in line with just the right shade of show-you. Hoodlums are ducky soup. Anyone who has to be tough on the surface is riddled with weak spots. But don’t try the switcheroo on the wrong people. Try it on a tiddleywink and it can bounce back with a meat cleaver. And don’t tangle with some Mafia don sitting in front of his grocery store.

  * * *

  When we walk into the Double G in Tamaghis, we see a heavy padlock on the gallows mechanism with a lead seal and a notice on a brass plaque: “All public hangings forbidden by order of the DNA Police.”

  “Yep,” the bartender tells us. “That’s right. No more publics. It’s the law.”

  Death requires a random witness to be real and a public hanging is real because of random witnesses. In the Garden of Eden, God left Adam and Eve alone to eat the fruit of the Hanging Tree and then popped back in like a random house dick who just happened to be passing in the hall when he heard amorous noises.

  “What’s going on here?”

  “See any dogcatchers or Sirens in the street?”

  “Well no, come to think of it.”

  “You won’t.”

  The bartender is a little, thin, middle-aged Irishman with glowing gray eyes. He is dressed in a tight-fitting green suit. He picks up ten glasses in each hand, spreads them out on the bar, and starts polishing. “We had a riot here. The boyos killed every dogcatcher in Tamaghis and most of the Sirens.…” He holds up a glass to the light. “The kids all want to get out to Waghdas now and find the answers. I tell them every time you find an answer you find six questions under it, like leprechauns under a toadstool.”

  * * *

  New York—the Double G—1860 …

  A little, skinny, middle-aged Irishman dressed in a filthy green suit bangs on the bar with his beer mug and a respectful silence falls. He jumps up onto the bar, his face contorted like an evil leprechaun as he spits the words out: “The bankers on Wall Street and the sheenies is buying their sons out for three hundred dollars.” His eyes glow and the hair stands up on his head. “And what about you and me who don’t see three hundred dollars a year in one piece? We get drafted into the frigging army to fight for the frigging niggers.”

  A bestial roar goes up. The patrons are four-deep around the bar, brandishing clubs and crowbars. The little green man leaps down from the bar.

  “What are we waiting for? An invite from City Hall? Let’s go!”

  About fifty blood-mad men and boys and a few screaming harpies troop out after him screaming: “Kill! Kill! Kill!”

  * * *

  “How did the riot start?”

  “Well, you know how it is with riots. Things build up and up—then something sets it off.” He tosses a chipped glass twenty feet into a trash can. “The dogcatchers start raiding out of fair-game areas and there is a move by the Hanging Fathers in the City Council to extend fair-game areas. Then two foreign Countesses they call themselves—yeah, Countesses de Slutville—buy villas on the mountain and set up something they call the Genetic Institute and there are rumors about transplant operations carried out by this sawbones they have brought in from Yass-Waddah.”

  “That would be Van…” I put in.

  “It would. Next thing these two boy-eating sows move in their own Special Police with firearms and pressure the Council into passing an I.D.-card law so anyone who doesn’t have an I.D. card stamped and updated can be arrested and hanged in the Institute. So all the boys have to apply for these cards or risk getting picked up anywhere.

  “One night five SPs come in here checking I.D.s and they start to drag some kid out. They have guns of course. Doesn’t do them much good. The kids is on them with broken bottles, knives, chairs, feet, knees and elbows. Four kids is killed but they take the SPs apart. You can see the bloodstains right over there. Then some little Irish kid I’d never seen before jumps up on the bar screaming: ‘What are you waiting for? Waiting to get milked by these foreign bitches like randy cows? Kill! Kill! Kill!’

  “The SPs and dogcatchers are barricaded in the Garden of Delight, ready to defend the richies with their last drop of blood, and it comes to that quick enough. They open up with machine guns but the boys just spread out and keep coming, throwing cobblestones and Molotov cocktails.

  “Better than a hundred are killed in the few seconds it takes for the rest to swarm over the barricades and cut the guards to hamburger. Then they charge up the mountain screaming.


  “‘Death to the Foreign Sows!’

  “Well, the Countesses and their sawbones got their asses out to Yass-Waddah in an autogyro. Their villas were looted and burned to the ground along with most of the other villas. The Hanging Fathers were thrown into the fires along with all the Sirens that could be found. Some of the rich kids was with the mob, so a few big villas are still left. But the richies sure got a new look since then.”

  I soon see that there is more here than just a spontaneous explosion of overcrowded poverty-ridden slums. The whole scene has been staged from above to point up the need for a strong police force, and some of the mob ringleaders turn out to be agents of big money.

  “A young man in dirty overalls who fought valiantly with the mob was killed by the police and was found to possess aristocratic features, well-cared-for hands and a fair white skin. Though dressed as a laborer in dirty overalls and a filthy shirt, underneath there were fine cashmere pants, a handsome rich vest and a fine linen shirt. His identity was never learned.”

  —Herbert Asbury,

  Gangs of New York, p. 154

  Through the havoc and wreckage of the burning and looted city, through streets littered with the dead and dying, street boys dance and caper like gay insouciant sprites, many of them wearing Halloween masks. A boy in a skeleton suit flops beside a stiff corpse in grotesque imitation.

  “You’re dead and you stink.” He jumps and capers away.

  They prance around a dying policeman and mimic his death throes. “Whydon’tcha get up and stop the fight?” They snatch his hat and badge, chasing each other.

  “Stop in the name of the law,” they mock.

  A boy snatches a coat and vest from a looted store. Another boy in fake beard and skullcap pops out.

  “Shoot him in the pants! Shoot him in the pants! The coat and vest is mine!”

  * * *

  “They called in a new Commandante who accepted the conditions of the rioters. The Sirens who survived by concealing their assets someplace were confined to licensed cathouses or deported to Yass-Waddah. They had to walk it stark naked. Two hundred miles of desert, wild dogs, hyenas, and leopards out there waiting. The kids lined up and whipped them out the gates with hangman’s nooses.”