Brion Gysin - The Process

“Most gracious of you but, no; never!” Himmer protests. I am shocked to see just how flustered he is. “No stimulants ever,” he grins. “I just don’t need them, I guess.”

“Oh, thass all right,” I mumble, realizing with relief that his grin is a purely mechanical reflex of extreme oriental politeness. For a split second there, he looked almost Chinese: quite distinctly, I saw formalized orange and black flames of anguish licking his rictus.

“Welcome aboard,” he is saying: “like a full-gown Dalai Lama found in the beauty of his age. In Present Time, it’s your move, Hassan. You now hold the master-pawn which may well include some sort of claim on Mya herself, for all I know: but always remember that I am Mya’s seventh husband and her last. I have no more to say — ever! — and, now, I must go.”

“Am I supposed to give this jewel to your wife?” I asked, lamely.

“At your risk and peril!” he snapped. “She may try to cozen it out of you: in fact, she most certainly will, but if you give it to her — if you play it over to her, into her full power and possession, that’s the end of that! The Emerald Seal, lawfully, is the Beginning and Ending of words. Having played the Green Beetle on you leaves me speechless. I mean that quite literally: I have only these few last words. Such has been the immutable rule since time immemorial when the Seal was first put on the Word. You can, I imagine, guess why. In Present Time, however, we must avail ourselves of the new knowledge, must we not? I have thought it wise, therefore — although it may not have been wise of me at all: it may have been downright criminally insane of me, who knows? to make you a tape! However, I have. Previously, the whole silly old Master-Adept game-situation had to be played out telepathically but Mya and I think that’s so out of date, don’t you? There’s so much static about these days since electronics that most messages get hopelessly garbled. For Mya and me, the message is OUT! This, therefore, my dear Professor Ulys O. Hanson the Third, is our first conversation and our last. What you know, you know, and the rest of the garbage you’ll get from my recorded Last Words when you play back this fiveinch spool of magnetic tape on your UHER.”

With that, he handed me over a red, white and yellow box of “SOUND MAGIC” tape.

Then, he took a little white plastic bronchial inhalator out of his pocket and he opened his mouth round-open, so: like, O. My own so-called mind was working so slowly that, while I registered that Himmer had heavenly good breath, like flowering alpine pastures still half under snow — how rare! probably because his teeth were so wide apart he had no decay and he probably never smoked — no stimulants ever! — all this time, I was politely withdrawing my gaze from this wet open red mouth in order to drop my gaze and, yes, I remembered where I meant to look — at my UHER, still tightly gripped between my two feet.

“Damn!” I sighed. “I wasn’t turned-on.”

When I raised my eyes from the ground, Himmer had inhaled his little puff of vapor and, without a further word, vanished; I suppose, into the noonday crowd on the Boulevard but who knows? I could hardly wait to play back his tape:

He who tastes knows; so Mya and I have decided to give you a taste. Just to prove how serious we are, here is the text of the telex we sent to our operational headquarters in Africa; to “Malamut,” the house Mya built way down south on Cape Noon: WITH HASSAN IN PRESENT TIME STOP CHANGE START OPERATION SCARAB PHASE FOUR SIGNED MYA AND THAY. You met Amos Africanus and Rolf Ritterolf in the Hotel Saint Georges in Algut. They manage our whole Stop Change Start device; of which Operation Scarab is, of course, only a part. Since your famous first interview with them, we have detailed them off to you as your personal staff. In Present Time, you are the Operator of Operation Scarab yourself. We hope you will be pleased with their work. They are two of our very best men in Africa or anywhere else, so, you see, we mean business. This is pretty big business even for Mya, who has irons in the fire all over Creation. What we mean to do is to snatch the Sahara right out from under that handful of prune-faced white bastards and their evil monopolistic double-criss-crossed corporations, who are already crunching into the desert like crocodiles cutting up a live camel! We intend to save the Sahara and give it back to itself. Now, you have to admit, a woman can’t be expected to swing a deal like this all alone, Hanson: Mya needs help.

One look in the mirror will tell you why Mya needs someone like you in Africa. The whole trouble with me is that I look just too damned white for Phase Four. I could make it in Mongolia, maybe, but we haven’t got there yet. I dream of the Gobi desert, don’t you? I can make the yellow scene somewhat, having been born out that way and, besides, I’ve been a Brahman as well as a Buddhist in my day but, hard as I’ve tried, I just can’t make Black. Go Black, Jack! Well, short of massive melanin injections, I tried up in Harlem like everybody else in my day but I can’t say it worked. I remember once being at somebody’s piss-elegant Easter cocktail with canapés on Morningside where, from across the crowded room, I caught sight of one nasty pasty-white face. “How did that whitey get in here?” I asked indignantly. It was my own reflection in a mirror over the mantelpiece. Imagine campaigning to be “accepted” by the human race after that!

Well, I did try again, later, to get into some skin other than my own; right here in North Africa where the problem is not, essentially, color. Back in those days when Tanja was really Tanja, long before you ever came here, I was, in a way, “initiated” as you have been but much less successfully than you, of course. Perhaps because of my whiteness, I always stuck out like a cop. However, do let me tell you briefly who we really are and how we got onto your trail and saw your light rising like that of a Mahdi long before you ever turned up: the man whose name is not Hassan, yourself. When I tell you the story, you’ll see why I feel it was “written,” of course.

* * *

At the time I am speaking of, Mya and I were just jetting around Africa getting to know people. This African trip grew out of my therapy for Mya’s very first husband; Peter Paul Strangeblood, the Richest Kid on Earth. Poor PP, he was only twenty-one but he’d had it: there wasn’t really much anyone could really do for him except take all that money away from him and he knew this. It made him as nasty as hell. Mya had done all she could since she first picked him up but by the time she called me in professionally — I’m a Doctor of Grammatology as well as Hereditary Bishop in the First Farout Church — poor PP was already pretty well beyond help. We did our best to get him to respond to Africa but he merely shambled along after Mya and me until that day in the hotel in Bukavu when the big cardboard box caught up with us, dropped in by parachute: we were under siege in a terrible poured-concrete hotel at the time. Mya and I started ripping the box open like two kids at Christmas, hoping it was food. I’d been giving Strangleblood various occult exercises for his “havingness” and one exercise we’d almost forgotten about had been making him send to his bank for one million dollars U.S. in cash. When PP saw all that money spread out on the bed, he turned as green as the bills: he was all choked up. I felt very sorry for him because I suffer from asthma myself. He had to be flown out by the Swiss Red Cross, eventually; they called it an “ évacuation sanitaire .” Somehow, Mya and I lost sight of him until the divorce.

Eventually, Mya and I landed here in Tanja together but not as lovers; not yet. Mya wasn’t ready for me: a great many things had to happen to both of us, first. I merrily went my own mad mystical way, which has led us at long last to you, as you see. For a time, Mya went quite another way. Mya is no Lady Bluebeard, no matter what the papers may say. When she first flew in to consult me in New York, Mya still had a lot of the original starry-eyed cowgirl from Medicine Hat or some such awful place which I have never had to visit, being a native South Sea Islander myself, but I know all about it from Mya. Mya is part Indian on both sides of her family and she comes of an awe-inspiring matriarchy of potent old squaws who, for seven generations in one single century, have taken mates upon themselves as they pleased. These mates were French-Canuck trappers and rugged Scots Hudson Bay Company factors or, like Mya’s own father, fifteen-year-old Tom Bear Foot, simply the hottest moccasin cousin at the time and the place. Mya was born with the aurora borealis dancing around her birch-bark crib and she is the Great Queen of the Crees in her own right. Mya can take on the whole white and the whole yellow race.