Meet Señor Kaposi

MEET SEÑOR KAPOSI / William S. Burroughs THE VENUSIAN INVASION is a takeover of the Egyptian seven souls: Ren is degraded by Hollywood down to John Wayne levels. Sekem works for the Company. The Khu's are all transparent fakes. The Ba's is rotten with AIDS. The Ka is paralysed. Khaibit sits on you like a nagging wife. Seku is poisoned with radiation and contaminants and cancer. Melanoma, known as Melly, she goes round and round and she comes out here and she comes out there . . . Introducing Señor Kaposi, a dignified, middle-aged man with a gray mustache and the sweet sickening smell of rotten blood. "Live and let live" is his motto. "I like old people of Mediterranean descent. We can live together for years and I'm not, as a rule, even the cause of death." Then Doc Kniehaus gives him a rejuvenation shot. His hair and his mustache turn jet black, and he glares about and the rotten blood stink just reeks off him. "Get out of my way, Melly. I kill in months." Melly was attending her own business. She started as a little black mole that bled. Not a girl to settle down with a mole and "no known spread of the disease." Three weeks later a swelling in the groin revealed a metastasis . . . the Mets always win, and the patient suddenly lost her taste for cigarettes, a sure sign of liver involvement. Melly goes round and round and she pops up here and she pops up there. "She's arresting. Stand back for the paddles. No use . . . she's gone." All in a day's work. One less chart tomorrow. The voice is that of the high school commencement speaker in the gymnasium: "The only viable solution seems to be a series of devastating plagues. Can we develop and distribute the indicated plagues in time? The project calls for carriers who disseminate the plagues by their portentous presence." It's a high-school play. Such colorful characters as Yellow Jack wait in the wings, the suit loose on his thin frame, like a yellow mummy. He 256 · The Missouri Review exudes a reek of raw meat going rotten. And the Kaposi Kid, a ravishing youth covered with exquisite lesions, like bruises on a peach, and a heavy fragrance of rotten blood sweetened by adolescent flesh. And the Black Death cornballs in their stinking cloaks, camping around and jetting pus from the glands under their arms and in the groin, fit to kill with clear ringing peals of boyish laughter and shaking out clouds of fleas and coughing up bloody pneumonic spit . . . they can throw it 20 feet. And there is Airborne Rabies in a raccoon coat, howling it out at football games. Enter AIDS, the femme fatale, her suck all the resistance out of a man. She is surrounded by courtiers and camp followers and the rare opportunistics. The White Plague coughs again, a pale youth in 18thcentury garb with blood on his lace, looking for a young poet. This is not Gothic romanticizing, but a viable biologic weapon . . . human carriers who are themselves immune but able to infect anyone in their airspace. Easily within reach of modern technology. Not a new concept. Remember Typhoid Mary? Human carriers of a deadly plague who are themselves immune or slightly affected, just a hectic flush and a feverish energy as they move from line to line at an airport, mix with festive crowds on a warm human level, ride the subways, commuter trains, buses, breathe on receptionists and guards at nuclear installations . "I want to protest what you are doing in the name of . . . ACHOO!" "All right, mister. Get moving." "I will." Our Black Death boys run to medieval cloaks, they billow so divinely, yellow fever carriers, evil grinning coolies, leaving a reek of raw meat behind them. I quote from an article in The Lancet on odor diagnosis: "Yellow fever smells like a butcher shop and typhoid like freshly baked brown bread." Baked, we assume, by the legendary Typhoid Mary. She was an incorrigible cook. Thirty cases of typhoid traced to the Happy Hour Bar and Grill. "Oh, Gawd!" the Inspector groans. "Mary...