Read Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel for Free Online Page B

professor. I know this character from the summer when he briefly orbited Brian Howard, but yesterday I hardly recognize him...his face all dead and gray. Talks like a full-on Brit boffin, with stutters and pauses like Morse code, and he shrieks key words for emphasis. “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, Burroughs !” Pathetically glad to talk to me, and I’m all ears, lonely Ruth amid the alien corn. He laughs inordinately at all my jokes.
    After I stand him to a cognac and kief, he rush me outside to talk. This summer he called himself Zeno Metakides, but now he’s shedding his character armor and says he’s Alan Turing. As we walk, he’s darting glances down the side streets in fear of, he says, a large man-eating slug that he’s unleashed. And I’m digging the kicks, carrying a pipe and a bottle.
    Turing say he’s learning to program the processes of biological growth. His face, just as a for instance, is a fake, a meat disk that he cultured in a pan six months ago, and it’s grown onto him like a lichen on a boulder. But it’s rotting. While he’s talking to me, he picks shreds of flesh off his cheeks,
    Picking up on my visceral repulsion, the mad prof reassures me that his face-rot is akin to cancer and is therefore not a communicable disease. Says he’s concocted a cure with the help of an angelic youth name of Driss. The cure itself have however gone metastatic on him and is the aforementioned slug that roams the Tangier alleys in search of boys.
    But Turing’s confident, and manful. He says that he’s still quite fit, he goes running on the beach three miles every morning, trailing his flag of stink. It’s a wonder the fellahs don’t tear him apart bare-handed and roast him like a goat.
    Turing has a third problem besides his rotting face and the escaped slug, viz. he is unable to return to his rooms because of some unspecified dust-up with sinister unknown agents who have penetrate the Zone. They are persecute him because he know too much. And then the evening breaks into blotches and streaks with a soundtrack of hysterical laughter. I leave Turing passed-out in an alley.
    And now...oh the horror, Allen, the horror...I hear this character’s voice in the street. Real-time message from the Burroughs memory unit: I offered to let the decaying math prof bunk in the spare room of this whorehouse suite where I hang my Writer shingle. He’s coming up the stairs, his gray pieface aimed unerringly my way like a lamprey’s toothed sucker disk.
     
    Love,
    Bill
     
    ***
     
    To Jack Kerouac
    Tangier, December 23, 1954
     
    Dear Jack,
     
    Jack, tell Maw Kerouac shut her crusty crack about me being a bad influence, of all the misguided abuse I ever stand still for. What you need is find you a decent woman, son. Marry the gash and tell your control-knob maw to wipe her own wrinkled ass alla time...
    I’m practicing my winning sales pitch in case the writing game don’t pan out and I am reduce to sell cooking gear like Neal. Ideas flap in my belfry like hairy jungle bats. Ah, don’t turn away, my lad, I need you. Voice quavering from the darkness of Father Jack’s confessional booth. I got confidential doings that I gotta spill or else I wig already. I buggered my typing machine, your grace. Commence Scrivener’s Tale...
    Against my better judgment, I am temporarily lodging a shameless mooch who used to call himself Zeno Metakides, only he a Brit math prof in disguise. He was a code breaker in the War, and he say the UK authorities are out to liquidate him on account of he’s queer. Or maybe it’s KGB, CIA, or the Knights of Templar. His legit handle is Alan Turing, but that don’t come from my primly pursed lips.
    Turing is two years older than me, slim and fit, awkward and mechanical, with a robotic grating laugh I dig to provoke. Queer as a three-dollar bill. He has an endearingly bad attitude towards the powers that be. Dizzy with Wee Willy Lee’s majoun-tea and sympathy, he’s been pouring out his