{"id":3213,"date":"2011-05-29T09:56:32","date_gmt":"2011-05-29T17:56:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=3213"},"modified":"2012-08-21T09:31:45","modified_gmt":"2012-08-21T17:31:45","slug":"turing-chronicles-excerpt-billjoan-showdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/29\/turing-chronicles-excerpt-billjoan-showdown\/","title":{"rendered":"TURING & BURROUGHS excerpt: Bill\/Joan showdown."},"content":{"rendered":"

I haven\u2019t been in a condition to write any fresh blog posts this month, but I should be better soon. In the meantime, just to keep the blog alive, I\u2019m posting an excerpt from my novel-in-progress, Turing & Burroughs<\/em>, which features William Burroughs and Alan Turing in a relationship.<\/p>\n

In the following passage, Burroughs describes a 1955 scene where he returns with Alan and their friend Judy Green to the room in the Bounty Bar in Mexico City where Bill shot his wife Joan Vollmer in 1951. He hopes to come to terms with Joan\u2019s ghost. Bill, Alan, and Judy are all \u201cskuggers,\u201d\u009d that is telepthic, shape-shifting mutants hosting a parasitic slug-like being called a skug. Judy is an early electronic musician, who creates a kind of artificial sound she calls acousmatics.<\/p>\n

The illos for this post are random images that have accumulated in my to-blog folder.
\n[Begin excerpt of draft for Turing & Burroughs<\/em>.]<\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We were nearing the all-night market that we\u2019d passed on the way to the graveyard. Alan trotted over to one of the butchers there and\u2014how horrible\u2014purchased a hundred-pound skinned calf, draping the creature across his shoulders. Uncut protein for Joan.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d asked the Bounty bartender for any old room. But\u2014I could hear the unerring ping of synchronicity\u2014he\u2019d given us the very room in which I\u2019d shot Joan in 1951.<\/p>\n

The room had become a short-term spot for whores and johns. Where once the lodging had held books, rugs, and a circle of friends, it was now reduced to a bed, a chair, a light bulb, a glass by the sink. Alan threw the slaughtered veal calf onto the dirty floor. A church bell tolled midnight. I closed the door. The intense silence peculiar to Mexico engulfed us\u2014a vibrating, soundless hum.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I spawned a skug off my stomach and laid it upon the veal calf. The bony flesh shuddered and took on life, forming itself into a featureless loaf. I laid Joan\u2019s finger atop the swollen, pulsing pillow\u2014I was like a bishop installing a saint\u2019s bone.<\/p>\n

Judy Green sang to the skug, running her odd voice up and down some archaic scale, and vibrating her skin to add dark, low overtones. Guided by the finger\u2019s DNA, and by my teeped hints, the skug morphed into a crude human form, tightened into something like a window-dresser\u2019s mannequin, then locked into a replica of Joan\u2019s final, spindly form. A golem.<\/p>\n

I set to work on programming the thing\u2019s mind via teep, reconstructing Joan\u2019s personality from my memories. I remembered the early days\u2014camping on Joan\u2019s vaguely oriental bed with coffee and benzedrine, chattering about decadence and nothingness, Joan alluring in her silks and bandannas. I thought of Joan catching a June bug outside our shack in Louisiana, and tying a thread to the bumbling bug\u2019s foot\u2014Joan called it the beetle\u2019s hoof. She flew it in a circle around our heads. Even in Mexico City, Joan kept her slant humor, seeing the adventure in the squalor, making herself at ease on a pile of six mattresses, calling herself the princess and the pea. A phrase from Allen\u2019s memoriam poem popped into my mind. \u201cShe studied me with \/ clear eyes and downcast smile, her \/ face restored to a fine beauty.\u201d\u009d And now it was so.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Joan\u2019s body sat up and blinked, very jerky, very robotic. This wasn\u2019t going to work. But now I saw the glinting ultraviolet cuttlefish of Joan\u2019s ghost. She was dawdling at the fringes of visibility, twiddling her tentacles and flipping her hula-skirt fin, making up her mind. And now she dove into the skug.<\/p>\n

Still sitting on the floor, the Joan-thing shuddered like a wind-riffled pond. She fixed me with her eyes and began talking, her voice languid and intermittent, like music down a windy street.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to leave. I want to go to paradise. But I\u2019m not done with you, Bill.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m agonized by regret,\u201d\u009d I said. \u201cI writhe abjectly. Go up to heaven, Joan. You deserve it. Forgive me and go.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat about little Billy?\u201d\u009d asked Joan, rising lithe to her feet. She seemed taller than I remembered. Reaching out, she laid a cool hand on my face.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Immediately I had a physical sense that I was carrying a large covered basket. I\u2019d been carrying it in my arms for a long time. Our son Billy was in the basket. He was going to die.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll help him!\u201d\u009d I cried. \u201cIt won\u2019t happen that way.\u201d\u009d I stepped back, breaking Joan\u2019s hallucinatory contact.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou won\u2019t save him,\u201d\u009d said Joan, bleakly mournful. \u201cI know you.\u201d\u009d She looked around as if only now recognizing this as the spot where I\u2019d shot her.<\/p>\n

I stood frozen in place, awaiting her next move, more than ever wishing I hadn\u2019t set this in motion.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cOoooo<\/em>,\u201d\u009d said Joan, her voice purring up through an octave. \u201cI know. <\/em>It\u2019s time for our William Tell routine.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

Without moving her arms or her shoulders, she poked her head out on a snaky tendril, scanning the room. Of course she spotted Judy Green\u2019s gun.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d\u009d said Judy, guessing what lay ahead. It was like we were playing out a script. Joan held out her hand. In thrall, Judy passed her the pistol. Turing sat goggling like a mute imbecile.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe glass, Bill,\u201d\u009d said Joan, her voice low and firm.<\/p>\n

I moved across the room like a fish in heavy water. I set the glass on my head.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A few paces away from me, Joan raised the pistol.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t,\u201d\u009d I said, faint and husky. \u201cDon\u2019t shoot me, Joan.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

She fired. I flinched to the side. The bullet struck my temple. I slumped to the floor: deaf, blind, undead. I could still sense things via teep.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s over!\u201d\u009d breathing Joan, with a fading lilt of summer in her voice.<\/p>\n

Her ghost wriggled from her skugly flesh and fluttered in the air. Like a dragonfly now, not a cuttlefish. Flying around the borders of my teep, she shrank as if moving far away. Joan\u2019s spurned new body reverted to being a skug. It raised one end, as if sniffing the air, then humped along the floor and out the window.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Brain-scrambled as I was, I hallucinated that I humped my own body after Joan\u2019s skug. Fully into the invisible zone of the astral plane, I slithered out the window and\u2014just for jolly\u2014levitated myself fifty feet high in the air. See me fly?<\/p>\n

La policia <\/em>kicked in our rented room\u2019s door, inevitable as stink on shit. It was like a straight-on replay of 1951, but with me in a new role. As the victim, I lay naked on a marble slab with a spongy erection. Cops all around.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need acousmatics,\u201d\u009d said Judy. \u201cI memorized the sounds of a race riot in Miami. I\u2019ll pump the replay from my skin, mixing in the shrieks of swine at the slaughterhouse. We\u2019ll raise Bill and rectify those policia <\/em>pronto.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

My head was splitting in unbearable pain. I retracted my limbs, blanking things out.<\/p>\n

\u201cBill?\u201d\u009d said Alan, leaning over me and shaking me. \u201cBill?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

We were still in the room where I\u2019d been shot. I sat up and spit the bullet from my mouth. The sun was high.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat a burn,\u201d\u009d I said. \u201cLet\u2019s split this scene.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cAgents everywhere,\u201d\u009d said Judy, leaning out the open window. \u201cLike flies on meat. We need more acousmatics.\u201d\u009d She emitted a fresh torrent of noise. It was a collage of every sound I\u2019d ever heard in my life\u2014thrown into a rock-tumbler.<\/p>\n

The sky went pale green. Hailstones fell past, big as hens\u2019 eggs, shattering on the street. Elephants trumpeted frantic at the drone of an approaching twister. The street-side wall rocked twice and exploded out. Turing and I slid helpless across the floor, pissing our pants. Cars flew through the air with clown-cops behind the wheels. A striped circus tent swept upwards, drawing me into a whirling shattered midway of bleachers and shooting galleries, of sugar skulls and Socco Chico queens…<\/p>\n

Poised at the virtual tent-peak of the vortex was Joan, far and wee, the bride on the funeral cake, luminous white, bidding farewell, giving me the finger. Behind her glowed the divine light of a heavenly Missouri sunset.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Cut. I was still in that room we\u2019d rented, lying on the floor in a clotted crust of blood. I\u2019d been here all night, reflexively regrowing my brain. The sunlight lay like pig iron on the ground. The police had dispersed\u2014if they\u2019d ever been there at all.<\/p>\n

[End excerpt of draft forTuring & Burroughs<\/em>]<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I haven\u2019t been in a condition to write any fresh blog posts this month, but I should be better soon. In the meantime, just to keep the blog alive, I\u2019m posting an excerpt from my novel-in-progress, Turing & Burroughs, which features William Burroughs and Alan Turing in a relationship. In the following passage, Burroughs describes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3213"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4221,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3213\/revisions\/4221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}