In 1959, a member of the scientific elite of England said to Brion Gysin: "How does it feel to know that you are one of the last human beings?"
Brion was noncommittal, and the Venusian added facetiously, "Well, life won't be so bad on the reservation."
The program of the ruling elite in Orwell's 1984 was: "A foot stamping on a human face forever!" This is naïve and optimistic. No species could survive for even a generation under such a program. This is not a program of eternal, or even long-range dominance. It is clearly an extermination program.
Joe decided that people were too busy making money to foster a climate in which research could flourish. Joe didn't have ideas about rewriting history like Kim did. More of Kim's irresponsible faggotry: he's going to rewrite history while we wait. Well, let determined things to destiny hold unbewailed their way. DESTINY prances out in an atomic T-shirt—her glow in the dark.
Joe decides to go into deepfreeze for fifty years. With a million dollars judiciously distributed in bonds and savings accounts, the whole system set up with dummy companies and mail drops, Joe will be a rich man when he wakes up.
And what about Kim?
"Oh," Joe shrugs. "I guess that one can take care of himself in the Land of the Dead. At least he won't have any mail-order croaker pulling him out half-baked. Not with that 45-70 hollow point just under the left shoulder blade."
Joe puts out a hook baited with a blond Nordic Übermensch from the 1936 Olympics—Herr Hellbrandt. Yes, hell-burnt . . .
Ah, a strike! Postmark is Medellin, Colombia. Honorarium of two hundred thousand dollars a year (or other currency of his choice) to take over a center devoted to genetic research. If interested he can contact our representative in Mexico City . . . Abogado Hernandez Desamparado, 23 avenida Cinco de Mayo, Mexico, D.F.
Joe has confided in no one. But they know. They are waiting for him. He decides to leave some future shock behind him: notarized clinical notes and X rays demonstrating the results of magnetic field therapy, citing cases of total remission of cancerous tumors that would, with conventional treatment, have been fatal in a few weeks or months. The cases cover many types of cancer, with instructions for building the therapeutic device from materials easily and cheaply obtained. The device is basically Reich's Orgone Accumulator, a construction of organic material lined with iron or steel wool. Joe has added a number of alterations, notably magnetized iron, which vastly potentiate the action.
Cancer seems as immutably real and exempt from intervention as a nuclear blast. The explosive replication of cells? Once it starts, it is like an atom bomb that has already detonated. Death is an end product of purpose, of destiny. Something to be done in a certain time, and once it is done there is no point in staying around. Like a bullfight. Destiny = Ren.
A cancer cell, a virus has no destiny, no human purpose beyond endless replication. It has no work to finish and no reason to die. Give it a reason to die and it will. The ultimate purpose of cancer and all virus, is to replace the host. So instead of trying to kill the cancer cells, help them to replicate and to replace host cells.
Produce the first all-virus rat, it's more efficient—instead of all these elaborate organs we have just cells, an undifferentiated structure. Instead of endeavoring to keep the rat alive, we will endeavor to keep the cancer cells alive. Instead of trying to keep the patient alive, we will keep his Death alive. If he can become Death, he cannot die.
Death is incidental to function. When function is accomplished, death occurs. So instead of joining the retarded medical profession and desperately trying to keep Death out, why not let Death all the way in?
Joe saw cancer as just another milepost. Cancer came into its own with the Industrial Revolution, a cancer model dedicated to producing identical replicas on an assembly line. The analogy carries over to human cells and replication, as solid as auto parts, tin cans, bottles and printed words. Joe didn't give a shit about cancer. He wasn't there to save human lives. He was there to alter the human equation.
The notes are published in the Alternative Press with detailed plans. Soon testimonials are pouring in from all over the country. Life does a "debunking" story. Warnings from the FDA, the AMA and the cancer institute quickly escalate to shrill hysteria. And mutiny in the ranks: Doctor X, a respected oncologist practicing in a midwestern city, asks that his name be withheld: "I have seen it with my own eyes . . . the remission and complete cure of hitherto incurably cancerous conditions."
All over America, people are making rechargers in various shapes, of pyramids, space suits and suits of armor, set on high towers and deserts and mountains, in undersea bubbles, built into hollow trees in deep forests overgrown with vines and orchids, in cliff dwellings and caves, in boats and dirigibles. There is no stopping it, and the medical bureaucracy would soon regret their ill-advised and futile attempt. Nurtured on self-deceit, accustomed to obedience and respect, they attempted to "reason" with the enraged patients, or worse, to overawe the mob by sheer presence, which was quickly revealed as a hollow fraud.
Hall has been reading a lot of these doctor books. His own Doctor Benway shines forth as a model of responsibility and competence by comparison. Perhaps the most distasteful book of this genre is entitled A Pride of Healers. To be remembered that it is Pathology who decides a patient got cancer or don't got it. The doctors open it up. Anything looks suspicious, cut off a hunk and send it down to Pathology. The doctors twiddle their scalpels and wait. A green light winks on.
"It's malignant, boys. Let's go. Gotta stay ahead of the Mets."
So in this pride of prowling healers, the runty, ugly, half-impotent pathologist finds a big surgeon humping his old lady. So he frames the adulterous surgeon for prostate cancer and everybody knows there is only one cure. The surgeon is castrated and his nuts sent down to Pathology. Holding the nuts of his enemy in his hand gets him hot and he surprises his wife with a real pimp fuck. He's got another surprise for her: as she comes, he shoves the severed nuts down her throat. As the Germans say, unappetitlich.
Most of them are not quite so lurid. Just ordinary no-good, greedy, callous, bigoted humans with grossly inflated self-images. Here is Mike Seddons from "Final Diagnosis": attractive, red-haired, empty as a waiting room. How can anyone believe in ESP or anything like that in the face of vast medical complexes, monuments to progress and science and rationality and healing? This wretched specimen has fallen for a nineteen-year-old nurse. They made it in a broom closet in a reek of Mr. Clean. He has proposed. She has accepted.
Then she comes down with bone cancer. They have to take off the left leg stat, scalpels crossed it hasn't spread. Does he still want her? She tells him to take five days to think it over. He does. With bleak clarity he sees the years to come. Oh yes, he can see, where his own interests are involved.
He is striding toward Surgery, Big Man On Complex now:
"It takes guts to practice surgery," he says. It certainly does. What would he do without guts? Striding toward Surgery, the patient is clearly terminal—he would operate on a mummy— and she is shambling along on her new prosthetic leg.
"Will you shake the lead out?"
"I'm doing the best I can, darling."
Why don't she go back to her crutches, he thinks irritably. Aloud he says, "Why don't you jet-propel on your stinking farts?"
Admittedly his words are somewhat unkind. But cancer does stink. Of course it's not her fault she is in this loathsome condition, or is it? His mother always said:
"Son, in this life everyone gets exactly what he wants and exactly what he deserves." People tend to believe it, so long as they are getting what they think they deserve.
Incongruously Mike thinks of an old joke. The eternal traveling salesman, protagonist of the eternal dirty joke, spots an attractive woman in the club car. As fate would have it, she is in the lower bunk just opposite his upper bunk. And he is eyeballing her. She takes off her wig. She pops out a glass eye. She spits out her false teeth. She unhooks her wooden legs, look
s up at him pertly, and says, "Is there anything you want?"
"You know what I want. Take it off and throw it up here."
He starts laughing. She demands why. Finally he tells her, and she hits him with her prosthesis. Required five stitches.
So Joe has left a cloud of ink behind him like a retreating squid in the form of his Orgone Cancer Cure, like a cure for death itself, so closely is cancer linked with death. Exaltation sweeps through cancer wards and cancer-ridden outpatients, and with regained vitality comes anger: Why have doctors concealed this cure? Why did the FDA burn Reich's books and suppress his findings without a trial? (One judge refused to listen to any testimonials.)
The medical profession has suffered a horrific loss of prestige and credibility, compounded by frantic efforts to discredit the cure in the face of mounting evidence of its effectiveness. Time was when MD plates on a car afforded a measure of protection against vandalism. Now doctors are subject to find their tires slashed, MURDERING BASTARD written in soap on the windshield.
It stacked up and up. Unnecessary operations, patients dying in the emergency room. "We cannot accept medical admissions from emergency."
Woman with a heart attack. Her husband calls for an ambulance.
"I can't send an ambulance until I know what's wrong with her."
"I tell you she's having a HEART ATTACK!"
"I can't send an ambulance until I know what's wrong with her."
"SHE'S HAVING A CORONARY! A HEART ATTACK!"
"I can't send an ambulance until I know what's wrong with her."
Potentially beneficial and harmless products and treatments kept off the market . . . lethal products kept on the market. Recent example: the so-called nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs for arthritis. In England eight people died of liver failure caused by the drug Oraflex, and still they won't withdraw it— just change the trade name.
I saw a TV show where the company representative, the lies oozing and slithering out of him, tries to tell a woman her hepatitis could have been caused by something else.
"I know it was that medicine."
A vast bureaucratic conspiracy of mismanagement . . .
The Medical Riots of 1999: it all started in the Burn Unit of a midwestern hospital. It is policy in burn units to restrict the use of painkillers to the vanishing point, since burn cases may require weeks of healing and treatment. It was argued that to administer painkillers would frequently result in addiction. So the patient must endure baths in which the dead skin and flesh are scrubbed from the raw lesions with a stiff brush. You can hear them screaming all over the hospital and out into the parking lots.
A team of amateur astronauts who call themselves the Spacers landed in the Burn Unit when their homemade space rocket exploded, spattering them with burning rocket fuel and shards of white-hot metal.
Ten were admitted to the Burn Unit. They received 25 mg of Demerol on admission. After that, nothing but aspirin and Darvon. The Spacers didn't scream in the baths but they radiated such pain and rage that three nurses quit in one day. The only nurse left on duty was a tall, strikingly beautiful woman who was part black and part Chinese. "If I had my way, you boys would get all the junk you need. So what if you get a little habit? Boy your age can kick in five days."
After the first scrub they issued an ultimatum: "Morphine every four hours as long as we need it or we walk out."
"What is this nonsense? There will be no morphine and you are not going anywhere."
"Meet my brother, the lawyer-doctor."
"You propose to hold these people against their will?"
"It's for their own good. If they leave the hospital they will be dead in a few days from infections."
They set up a private clinic in a loft. When police raided the clinic to search for unauthorized drugs, two patients died from police bullets and one police officer died from injuries. It was all on TV. Soon a nationwide walkout was underway. With the threat of cancer removed, the medical centers appear as a vast waste.
"Fifty years the fucking croakers kept the cure from the people."
Joe had a kidney stone but they wouldn't believe him at the hospital. Got his X ray mixed up with someone else's. They say a kidney stone is the worst pain a man can experience. Not surprising that Joe was a ringleader in the Medical Riots of 1999.
The walkout spreads to other hospitals:
"MORPHINE OR WALK!"
"MOW! MOW! MOW!"
The doctors paw the ground uneasily, like cattle scenting danger.
"What are we waiting for, a hospital bed?"
"Kill all the fucking croakers!"
Security steps nimbly aside and the crowds rush in.
"Got a hotshot cutting doc here."
"I think he needs an operation."
"Hell yes, a Gutectomy . . . fetch my scalpel."
"Paging Doctor Friedenhof and Doctor von Streusschnitt."
Enter Professor von Streusschnitt, flanked by his scalpel bearers carrying saws and knives two feet long.
"We must perform—how you say—the Gutectomy. Two kidneys? Sure, von is a Jew. Rauschmit!"
It is estimated that ten thousand doctors, medical bureaucrats and directors of pharmaceutical companies were massacred in the week of the Long Scalpels. The killings were not by any means random. The rioters had lists: "There's the bastard let me pass a kidney stone in the emergency room."
And billions of dollars' worth of useless equipment was destroyed in great ether burnouts.
PANIC . . . MAYDAY . . . AMOK!
The day when the top came off. A time of incredible danger and ecstasy. Every wish, every dream, every nightmare is suddenly real as the grimy streets, the subways. A cop on the corner who clubs everyone in sight—smooth commuters with their briefcases, smart women from the pages of Vogue, dogs on leads—screaming, "I don't like you and I don't know you / And now by God I'm going to show you!"
Famished leopards and tigers, released from the Central Park Zoo, invade Lutèce. An alert survivor throws his venison steak to a leopard, who gulps it down. He leaps over the disemboweled gourmands and streaks to safety.
A pilot bails out of a burning plane and gives his passengers the finger: "See you in Church!"
Doctor Benway rides again. He surveys a ward full of intensive-care patients killed by a Swedish nurse who bathes twice a day. Her put household ammonia and Mr. Clean into the IVs.
"I thought it would clean them out, doctor."
"Hmmm, yes, straight thinking, nurse. It's all in the day's work. Get these stiffs out of here and let them bury each other. This world's for the living and we need the beds. Bring on the next shift!"
He turns into the Herr Professor. His eyes glint with crazed dedication and purpose.
"An die Arbeit!"
Avenida Cinco de Mayo in Mexico City has the enigmatic surface of an area where obsolete trades survive, like stagnant pools at the margins of a river. At No. 23, Joe finds the plaque, in tarnished gold letters: HERNANDEZ DESAMPARADO, ABOGADO. ASUNTOS DE DOCUMENTOS Y EMIGRACIÓN.
Three stories up in a creaky, open elevator, at the end of a long corridor. Joe knocks, one long, two short. The door immediately opens as if the man were waiting just behind it, like a jack-in-the-box. He is elegantly dressed in a dark suit, with polished ankle-high black boots and a pearl-gray tie with pearl stick pin.
"Señor Hellbrandt?"
Desamparado holds out a thin brown hand, smooth and cool to the touch, like the underside of a lizard that has emerged from beneath a stone. He motions Joe into a small room with an old roll-top desk and a swivel chair in front of it. By the desk is an oak chair with leather cushion and back. Joe sits down.
The abogado sits in the swivel chair, then neatly crosses his thin legs and pivots to face Joe. He is an old man in his seventies, with a disdainful expression that is obviously chronic. He picks up four pages of legal-sized paper held together with a copper paper clip. Joe notices that the clip has stained the paper with verdigris. The paper is old and t
hick, like parchment. Looking down at the pages through his gold-rimmed bifocals, as if what he reads is both wearisome and distasteful, finally Desamparado speaks, in a silky, sibilant whisper.
"Genetic research. When you have understood Race, you have understood everything."
He looked at Joe as if evaluating his ability to understand everything. Joe recognized a fellow corpse, a compendium of gestures, intonations and expressions painfully rehearsed and reenacted.
"You will have a free hand within the parameters of the project."
For a moment he seemed too weary to go on. His words hung like cold ashes in the air of the office, lit only by a grimy, barred window of wired glass that let in a dim gray-white light.
With an obvious effort, Hernandez Desamparado uncrossed his legs.
"There are papers to sign."
It took all of Joe's strength to get his pen out and glance through the various releases and agreement forms which the abogado placed in front of him. Then, taking a deep breath, he concentrated on the One Point, signed each document carefully and placed it face down on a blotting pad with leather corners. Desamparado retrieved the signed forms and filed them on a dark shelf deep in the old desk.
During this charade, which seemed to go on forever, Joe felt his carefully hoarded stash of vitality drain out of him into a cold gray fog. He shivered, recognizing a practitioner higher in the vampire hierarchy than himself. But Joe didn't have time to play politics.