Cities of the Red Night

  “Oh I want that one…” coos a courtier.

  Audrey leads an army of twelve-year-old boys carrying banners of colored silk … POLTERGEISTS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

  They stand now, still as stone, in a sickening uneasy calm. As the barometer drops and drops, slowly a black cloud gathers over their heads. A little wind stirs brown hair across the mouth, blown lilacs and brown hair, ruffling through hair yellow as corn silk, through auburn, orange, russet and flame-red hair and black Pan curls.…

  WIND WIND WIND

  A sighing sound, a whistle, a shriek, hair standing straight up now as a black funnel whirls around their slender bodies tearing cobblestones up from the street, screaming hurricanes of broken glass as the boys ride this bucking whistling wind—it’s known as a “space horse.” You let it carry you all the way out, glass blizzards stripping flesh from the bones, tossing bloody bones through the air with street signs and branches, masonry, stones, and timbers—the whole city is flapping and shredding.

  Thousand-mile-an-hour winds—the fences, barbed wire, and massive iron gates hemming in the Casbah are tearing loose … flying wire decapitates screaming crowds. Pan, God of Panic, rides the wings of Death as the torn sky bends with the wind, prop sky tearing, shredding—incandescent force—the pure young purpose blazes like a comet.…

  WIND! WIND! WIND!

  Audrey is in the eye of the hurricane, a point of lucid calm. In front of him is a dusty tube of Colgate toothpaste in the window of a Tangier shop.

  Far away he sees Middletown: red brick houses, a deep clear stream, stone bridges, naked boys, high-pitched distant voices. A boy who looks familiar … he knows the boy’s name but can’t remember from where exactly … it’s Dink … Dink Rivers, the boy from Middletown.

  Now Dink waves and beckons: “It’s me, Audrey! I’m back!”

  Audrey tries to reach him but the wind tosses Audrey about like a cork. He is fighting his way upriver through breaking ice floes … years tearing loose.

  The distant voice of the pitchman: “The age-old story of Adam and Eve…”

  Audrey finds himself in the Fun City of his dream … can’t remember exactly … pinwheels … shooting galleries a rural slum … rundown houses … rubbish … little fields of corn and cabbage … blotched diseased faces … silent and intent … all moving down a steep road of red clay … no one seems to see him.

  The road leads to a rubbly square. In the middle of the square is a platform built around a tree.

  ARGUE SECOND TIME AROUND SUCH A DEAL

  On the platform is Arn as Eve with long red hair, her body covered with fever blotches. A naked youth with long yellow hair is Adam. The fever smell steams off their bodies and the crowd draws the smell in, whimpering and rubbing themselves.

  Something familiar about Adam, Audrey thinks. Reminds him of something a long time ago. Why … it’s me!

  Now Arn proffers Adam an apple. The fruit is purple-red and shiny like the head of a penis. Here and there on the fruit are triangular bulges like Adam’s apples and at one end is a russet rectum. Why it’s made of male flesh, Audrey thinks.

  “No! No!” Audrey screams without a throat, without a tongue.

  Adam does not hear. His face wears an appalling expression of idiotic ecstasy as he bites into the apple. Audrey can feel the sugary burning-metal taste down to his quivering toes as Arn rises from his side tearing loose … the sweet diseased knowledge.

  Eve stands there with a noose … bone’s song burning marbled cream smashed roses … old story of Adam and Eve … how Eve was made. Knowledge of the blackout … Black Jack’s Apple Tree … fruit made of the boy’s death dangling there. It’s a lovely tree, isn’t it? Nets of the Green Guards fall over Audrey’s head.

  By noon of the third day, General Darg is ready to surrender. Knowing the treatment meted out to defeated generals in Yass-Waddah, he calculates how he can get a better deal from Dimitri. The insurgents are now in control of Ba’dan, or what is left of it. Considering the terrible fate awaiting prisoners taken by the Green Guards during the battle, Dimitri launches an immediate all-out assault on Yass-Waddah.

  * * *

  Audrey has been captured by the Green Guards and brought to the Countess de Gulpa’s palace. She isn’t going to share this with the courtiers.

  “Hello, Audrey, I am very glad to see you here.” She smiles and licks her lips, her eyes glowing with green fire. “Let me show you around.”

  Two massive guards flank him on either side and two walk behind. Through electrodes implanted in their brains they are telepathically controlled by the Countess.

  “I’ll show you my conservatory, Audrey. I’m sure you will find it interesting.”

  She leads the way into a red-carpeted room. There is a plastic sheet across one end where plants are growing. A horrible black smell of filth and evil fills the room, a smell of insects and rotten flowers, of unknown secretions and excrements.

  “Come along, I’ll show you my little plants.” She stands at one end of the plastic screen, which is open and leads to a narrow path that encircles the garden. “Look there, Audrey.”

  Audrey sees a pink shaft growing from the ground, a penis-shaped shaft, red and purple, and as he watches, the shaft moves and pulses. The Countess leans forward with a hoe and turns the plant out of the ground. The shaft is attached to a pink sac with insect legs like a scorpion or a centipede. It scrabbles to cover itself up with dirt.

  “That was once a silly boy like you, Audrey, and that’s where I’m going to plant you.” The Countess stands with her hand on the door. “You’ll find out how it’s done, Audrey. You’ll have six hours to learn.”

  The courtiers, lounging on a colonnade high above the river, see a flotilla of boats, rafts, and landing barges approaching. This must be General Darg returning in triumph with hundreds of captives. They squirm and moan in vile anticipation, stretching forth languid fingers to a basket of golden figs warmed by the noon sun.

  “My God, something’s up me!”

  The principal defense of Yass-Waddah are the towers, manned by a few skilled technicians, capable of throwing electric blasts like lightning bolts. Now the towers open fire, blowing boats out of the water.

  The insurgents take heavy losses but they spread out and keep coming. Landings have been made all up and down the river and Yass-Waddah is surrounded by confused troops without a plan of attack.

  The Cyclops Boys go into action. These beings have one eye in the center of the forehead. They can activate the death chakra in the back of the neck until a laser beam shoots out the third eye, cutting through stone and metal, seeking the electronic control centers of the city.

  Instrument panels are blowing out, magazines exploding. The screaming crowd pours through the walls, now broken in many places.

  “Death to the Council of the Selected!”

  “Death to the Green Guards!”

  “Death to the Foreign Sows!”

  “Death to the Courtiers!”

  But the courtiers are deaf to everything but their own screams as the kundu do their work.

  Audrey felt the floor shift under his feet and he was standing at the epicenter of a vast web. In that moment, he knew its purpose, knew the reason for suffering, fear, sex, and death. It was all intended to keep human slaves imprisoned in physical bodies while a monstrous matador waved his cloth in the sky, sword ready for the kill.

  From the depth of his horror and despair, something was breaking through like molten lava, a shock wave of uncontrollable energy. Audrey felt the chakra at the back of his neck light up and glow like a tiny crystal skull brighter and brighter. A hum filled the room and a smell of ozone.

  The Countess turned from the door, eyes blazing with alertness, and Audrey saw what had happened. Her orders to the guards had not been obeyed. An interfering frequency had blanked out her control of them.

  Audrey smiled and licked his lips. He started forward, hands outstretched to block a groin kick. The Countess screamed like
an animal, dodged past him and out the door.

  He was a step behind her as she sprinted down the corridor. He ran with inhuman speed, taking twenty feet at a stride and caught her at the end of the hall. He held her elbows pinioned, his hip against her, and grinned into her screaming face, which was losing all human semblance as he smashed her against the wall and threw his hammer-fist into her face, crushing the perfectly chiseled nose and lips that crumpled like rubber.

  Now he was clawing out her eyes, which were blank and white and rubbery. Someone was shaking his shoulder.

  “Mr. Carsons, what are you doing? Why, you’re waking up the whole ward.”

  Audrey found himself looking at a ruptured pillow. A nurse stood over him.

  “Just look what you’ve done. You’ve torn your pillow to pieces.” She snatched the pillow from his hands and bustled out.

  The nurse returned with a new pillow. She straightened the bed and put the pillow under his head in a way that said, See that it stays there. She looked at her wristwatch. “I’ll get you an injection.”

  Audrey lay back looking at the ceiling. He felt calm and relaxed. He must have had a nightmare. He couldn’t remember what it was and it all seemed very remote and unimportant. Just a pillow. Well, he had a new pillow now. The nurse was back with a hypo on a little silver tray. He rolled back his sleeve, felt the alcohol on his arm—and the prick of the needle. GOM one quarter grain.

  He woke in gray dawnlight and lay there trying to remember. When had it all started? In London with Jerry Green and John Everson. His first real habit.

  He had chippied around in New York with cut shit but this was pure H dispensed by a woman doctor with a title. The Countess, they called her. If she liked you she would write for any amount of heroin and coke or both. She liked the “boys,” as she called them.

  Then suddenly, the terrible news. The Countess was dead of a heart attack. The Home Office was clamping down. Time to move.

  So Audrey, Jerry, and John set out for Katmandu in a second-hand car that got them as far as Trieste, where they took a boat arriving in Athens in the middle of the summer.

  The heat was like an oven. They finally found quarters in a hostel: a bare room with three cots. The proprietor had inquisitive unpleasant eyes. Everything about him said “police informer.” But they were thin and the room was cooler than the street. The boys stripped to their underwear and sat down on the cots.

  “I feel terrible,” said Audrey.

  “I got some kinda awful hives,” said Jerry scratching at a red welt on his ribs.

  “Probably just the heat and being sick,” said John. “Let’s see what we’ve got left.” He stood up and swayed and put a hand to his forehead.

  Audrey stood up to steady him and silver spots boiled in front of his eyes. They both sat down again, then got up very slowly and took a little Chinese H and some cotton from the knapsacks. They cooked it all together and split it.

  Ten minutes later, Audrey was down with Cotton Fever. Teeth chattering, his whole body shaking, he lay on the bed, knees up to his chin, hands clenched in front of his face.

  Finally, he got two Nembutals down and the shivering stopped. He went to sleep.

  He dreamed he was back in Saint Louis as a child. He was eating orange ice very fast for the sharp headache and the relief that comes from sipping a little water. Just as he reached for the water, he woke up with a pounding searing headache, his body burning with fever. He knew that he was very sick, perhaps dying.

  He tried to get up and fell on his knees by Jerry’s bed. He shook Jerry’s shoulder. The flesh was burning-hot. Jerry muttered something.

  “Wake up, Jerry. We have to get help.”

  The door opened. The light was turned on. Three Greek cops and the proprietor were watching from the doorway. The cops pointed to the boys and said something in excited Greek. They backed out of the room stuffing handkerchiefs in front of their faces. Leaving one cop at the door, they called an ambulance.

  Audrey vaguely remembered being lifted onto a stretcher by masked figures. As he was carried down the stairs, he saw words in front of his eyes: a lattice of black words on white paper shifting and rotating. He could make out the first sentence:

  “The name is Clem Snide. I am a private asshole.”

  The nurse stood by his bed with a thermometer. She put it in his mouth and left the room. She came back with a breakfast tray. She drew out the thermometer and looked at it. “Well, almost down to normal now.”

  Audrey sat up in bed, drank the orange juice greedily, ate a boiled egg and a piece of toast and was drinking his coffee when Doctor Dimitri came in. The face looked familiar and seemed to stir and concentrate the vague shapes of the dream. Of course, Audrey thought. I’ve been delirious and he was the doctor.

  “Well, I see you’re a lot better. You should be out of here in a few days now.”

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Ten days. You’ve been very sick.”

  “What was it?”

  “Don’t know exactly … a virus … new ones keep turning up. We thought at first it was scarlet fever but when there was no reaction to antibiotics, we shifted to purely symptomatic treatment. I don’t mind telling you it was a close thing … temperatures up to a hundred and six … your two friends are here … exactly the same syndrome.”

  “And I’ve been delirious all this time?”

  “Completely. Do you remember any of it?”

  “Last thing I remember is being carried out of the hostel.”

  “The remarkable thing is that you, Jerry, and John all seemed to be in the same delirium. I’ve made a few notes.…” He flipped open a small loose-leaf notebook. “Does this mean anything to you? Tamaghis … Ba’dan … Yass-Waddah … Waghdas … Naufana … or Ghadis?”

  “No.”

  “Cities of the Red Night?”

  Audrey glimpsed a red sky and mud walls.… “Just a flash.”

  “And now, there is the matter of my fee.”

  “My father will pay you.”

  “He has already agreed to do so but he has refused to pay the hospital costs—pleading his income tax. This is awkward. However, if you will sign an agreement to pay … your father suggests that you apply to the American Embassy for repatriation.…”

  * * *

  The boys are at the reception desk of the hospital, signing papers. Doctor Dimitri stands there in a dark suit.

  Audrey looks around: something very strange about this hospital … for one thing, no one seems to be wearing white uniforms. Perhaps, he thinks egocentrically, they are all waiting for us to go home so they can leave—but then another shift would be coming on. In fact, he decides, this doesn’t look like a hospital at all … more like the American Embassy.

  A cab pulls up under the portico. Doctor Dimitri shakes hands with a rapidly disappearing smile.

  As soon as the boys are gone, he walks through a series of doors, each guarded by an armed security man who nods him through.

  He is in a room with a computer panel attached to a battery of tape recorders. He flicks a switch.

  “The Consul will see you now.”

  A black wooden slate on the desk said “Mr. Pierson.” The Consul was a thin young man in a gray seersucker suit with an ascetic disdainful Wasp face and very cold gray eyes.

  He stood up, shook hands without smiling, and motioned the three boys to chairs. He spoke in a cultivated academic voice from which all traces of warmth had been carefully excised. “You realize that there is a considerable hospital bill outstanding?”

  “We have signed an agreement to pay.”

  “The Greek authorities could prevent you from leaving the country.”

  The three boys spoke at once:

  Audrey: “It wasn’t our fault.…”

  Jerry: “We got sick.…”

  John: “It was…”

  Audrey: “A virus…”

  Jerry: “A new virus.” He smiled seductively at the Consul, who did not sm
ile back.

  All together: “We almost died!” They rolled their eyes back and made a death-rattle sound.

  “The police found evidence of drug-taking in your room. You are lucky not to be in jail.”

  “We’re certainly grateful to you, Mr. Pierson. And lucky to be here—like you say,” said Audrey. He tried to sound impulsive and boyish but it came out all slimy and insinuating.

  The others nodded in agreement.

  “Don’t thank me,” said the Consul dryly. “It was Doctor Dimitri who put in a word with the police. He is interested in your case. A new virus, it seems.…” He looked at the boys severely, as if they had committed some gross breach of decorum.

  “Doctor Dimitri is quite an influential man.”

  All together, plaintively: “We want to go home.”

  “I daresay. And who will pay for that?”

  “We will—when we can,” said Audrey.

  The others nodded in agreement.

  “And when will that be? Have you ever thought about working?” asked Mr. Pierson.

  “Thought about it,” said Audrey.

  “In an abstract sort of way…” said Jerry.

  “Like death and old age…” said John.

  “Doesn’t happen to people one knows…” said Audrey feeling like a Fitzgerald character. The sun came out from behind a cloud and filled the room with light.

  The Consul leaned forward and spoke in confidential tones. “For example … for example … you could work your way home. There’s a ship in Piraeus now that can use three deckhands. Any sailing experience?”

  “Reef the mizzenmast!” said Audrey.

  “Scuttle the bilge!” said John.

  “And pour hot tar on the companionway!” said Jerry.

  “Good.” The Consul wrote something down on a slip of paper and passed it to Audrey. “When you get to The Billy Celeste, ask for Captain Nordenholz.”