Brion Gysin - The Process

At that point, the Medusa head in the cabin snapped at me: “As far as Mother is concerned, every trek is a trick!”

I refused to let myself be turned into stone. When you are as high as that in the stratosphere, it is always a beautiful day — until something pops. In the back of the cabin, Hamid was giving Thay Himmer an expensive lesson in how to play Ronda; slapping his cards down on the table like firecrackers and probably taking Thay’s peach-colored Sulka underdrawers as well as his Sulka shirt. Thay grinned away goofily as he lost trick after trick. Hamid kept snapping: “Mine … mine … mine …” as he took them all and I was boozily amused to catch Mya with my other ear, singing exactly the same song to me as she swept us over this particular stretch of planet Earth: “Mine … mine … mine …! I own two million, nine hundred and fifty-six thousand, two hundred and forty-seven hectares of this … not God’s little acres, Hassan … hectares!”

The landscape I looked down on was so lunar and I was feeling so completely lunatic, myself, that all I had to do was to let the words “Lady Moon,” form in my head and there she was in the plane, beside me under the plastic sky-dome: Princess Mya at her Lear jet cabin controls. That must have been about the time the Borbor hit its peak: just at thirty thousand feet, I happened to notice. At that point, she throttled her engines and we would have glided peacefully, uneventfully into “Malamut”—if Ghoul had not intervened.

“You won’t believe it,” she smiled, as “Malamut” swam up out of the great circle of sand and sea but, when I saw what she was pointing out, my heart sank. All her bloody Borbor drained right out of my tank. I could believe it only too well. After all: I, too, have been to Southern California to see a six-story-high hot-dog-stand in the form of a giant Saint Bernard dog, makes you sick just to have to look at it on the skyline. Well, “Malamut” is Mya sitting in the lotus position with an Olympic-sized swimming pool on her knees. There she floats on the fringes of the Sahara and the Atlantic, like a giant broody Buddha with a two-thousand-mile strip of bare beach under her broad beam. It was crossing my mind that she hadn’t been wise to turn her back on the Sahara and Ghoul, when she screamed in my ear:

“That’s Heaven Rock, Hassan: that’s Me! ”

Pop! Pop! went my ears like a double thunderclap inside of my head! I looked up past Mya and saw the plastic sky-dome had gone; grabbed off by Ghoul. Mya sucked at her oxygen in time to pull the plane out of its spin. We were all shaken up but Thay was worst hurt. They’ve got him in some other part of this palace I haven’t seen yet. I guess Hamid’s there, too. I really don’t know about this Thay Himmer cat; looks like he’s conjuring himself out of the picture real quick. I’m told that, as soon as he shut off his word-line, his old asthma has hit him so bad we got to get him into an iron lung. I would have thought Dakar would be nearest but:

“Not at all!” snaps Madame Mya. “We must all take off for Tam … and tonight!”

Well, this is the way I came — with nothing but my black suit of skin and my recording system. I’ll go anywhere, I guess; any time the lady says. Moreover, may I add, there is nothing to eat in this goddamn place. I have found nothing but a storeroom full of cases of chunky peanut butter, and that’s all! There are no servants on tap in this tomb because all of those faggotty Foulba have flitted off to the mainland to sew bead-fringe and ostrich feathers on their shepherdess hats for the beauty contest. They give me the creeps. Trust a woman to imagine I might be interested in the likes of them! Mya brought them down a present of five hundred gross of cheap blue cotton shirts from Hong Kong but, because they never wore shirts before in their lives, they hoisted them on little crossed sticks, over their heads, and tore off to their camp; looking like an army of “ men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders .”

The Himmer’s Swiss lawyer came in and I recorded him. Funny, I had to turn the tape over to record him on top of Thay, wiping Thay’s words as I went. I wonder if that sort of cannibalism is what Himmer meant by: “Rub out the word”?

“ IT! ” poor Amos always cries when I bring him in this portfolio of headaches; Princess Mya’s affairs. “Please don’t tag me with all that again, Rolf!” he begs me. “I’m It, already,” he says. And, now, that’s quite literally true since he has been taken prisoner and tortured, we have word tonight, by the captains in Tam. An emergency, a most unfortunate emergency arose abruptly during those hours we were out of communication with the Himmers; most disturbing, the first time it’s happened, ever. As Amos saw it, there was nothing for him to do but risk a night flight to Tam to try and save his twin sister, Freeky Fard, who is one of our Players, of course. As I now understand it from the Princess herself, this unique break in the very communication on which all our success depends was entirely due to the events surrounding your, ah, contact by means of the Saharan Seal. While the Seal is suspended there are no available words; or so I am led to believe. Well. It is interesting, I suppose, to see the way in which Mr. Himmer’s unorthodox, ah, methods work out. However, Amos and I have prognosticated your arrival or the arrival of someone just, ah, like you at any rate, long before we became cognizant of Mr. Himmer’s, ah, game. Nevertheless, let us, for a moment, call it just that: a game.

Well, what has happened in game-terms: what have we here? Here we have the newly-made king in “Malamut,” beyond a doubt, but one of his Towers of, ah, Strength has been taken by Tam. That is Amos Africanus. This other, ah, Tower of Strength, here; i.e., myself, must move off to Basel immediately because Basel is Banking, you know. A great deal is involved. There is a plane waiting for me out on the field, ready to take off as soon as we have lights, so I must be very brief. To go on with the game: the consort, while making a king, has been overtaken; first, by a voluntary abstinence from words and, then, an acute shortage of breath. That is Thay. Thay Himmer needs immediate medical attention, we agree on that, but: is Francis-X. Fard a competent medical practitioner? That I cannot answer. Nonetheless, it has been decided that the next move will be to transport Thay to Tam tonight in the other Lear jet: that’s what the princess flies best. You will be seven aboard: the plane’s maximum load. There will be several Players on hand to help. Olav Pesonius, a Finnish friend, whom Mr. Himmer calls his Little White Reindeer, was brought into “Malamut” today by the Foulba, along with the younger Africanus sister, Ana Lyse, and a rather unfortunate American newspaperwoman called Mag Media, I am afraid. Here, by the way, is Olav’s journal of his trip down here overland; it might amuse you to run through it before you take your plane, tonight or early tomorrow morning before dawn. The Princess Mya has done really very little night flying: you might insist on a dawn flight, if you can. I say advisedly, if you can, because the king merely modifies moves: he cannot initiate any move until he has been crowned. The king is simply a Champion, you see, until he has been shown to his people — in this case, the Foulba, first. There will be no tiresome parades or risky public appearances. Don’t worry — none of that! We will project you on television when it is feasible — the Sahara has been widely transistorized, you realize — but we expect to do an inaugural flyover while the Foulba bards and court poets are acclaiming you on international shortwave bands. However, before this can take place, you must first reclaim and rescue your other Tower of Strength from, ah, Tam. That is Amos, naturally, on whom a great deal depends.