The Wild Boys Read Free Page B

guests catatonic. You see, he really knows Provençal and Arabic. You have to study for years on a real undercover job like this. The Chief wasn’t pulling cover tonight. He was expansive and “watch your step, Rogers” I told myself, sipping a weak Scotch.
    “‘I think you are the man for a highly important and I may add highly dangerous assignment, Rogers.’ You fell for that crap?”
    “Well sir he is impressive,” I said cautiously.
    “He’s a cheap old ham,” said the Chief. He sat down and filled his kif pipe with one hand. He smoked and blew the ash out absently caressing a gazelle that nuzzled his knee.
    “ ‘Gotta stay ahead of the Commies or everybody’s kids will be learning Chinese.’ What a windbag.”
    I endeavored to look noncommittal.
    “Have you any idea what we’re doing here, Rogers?”
    “Well, no sir.”
    “I thought not. Never tell them what you want until you’ve got them where you want them. I’m going to show you a documentary film.”
    Two Arab servants carry out a six-foot screen and set it up ten feet in front of our chairs. The Chief gets up turning switches adjusting dials.
    A jungle seen through a faceted eye that looks simultaneously in any direction up or down … close-up of a green snake with golden eyes … telescopic lens picks out a monkey caught by an eagle between two vasttrees. The monkey is borne away screaming. I can feel a probing insect intelligence behind the camera, pyramids ahead fields and huts. In the fields workers are planting maize seeds under the direction of an overseer with staff and headdress. Close-up of a worker’s face. Whatever it is that makes a man a man, all feeling and all soul has gone out in that face. Nothing is left but body needs and body pleasures. I have seen faces like that in the back wards of state hospitals for the insane. Faces that live to eat, shit and masturbate. Satisfied with the inspection the camera moves back to observe group patterns of the workers. They are moving through a three-dimensional film of the operation that covers them with a grey sheen. Occasionally the overseer adjusts a slow worker with his eyes.
    Next take shows a room in the temple suffused with underwater light. An old priest naked to his pendulous dugs and atrophied testicles sits cross-legged on a toilet seat set in the floor. The seat is cushioned with human skin on which are tattooed pictures of a man turning into a giant centipede. The centipede is eating him from inside legs and claws grow through screaming flesh. Now the centipede is eating his screaming mouth.
    “Criminals and captives sentenced to death in centipede are tattooed with those pictures on every inch of their bodies. They are left for three days to fester. Then they are brought out given a powerful aphrodisiac, skinned alive in orgasm and strapped into a segmented copper centipede. The centipede is placed with obscene endearments in a bed of white-hot coals. The priests gather in crab suits and eat the meat out of the shell with gold claws.”
    The old priest looks like a living part in an exotic computer.From festering sockets in his spine fine copper wires trail in a delicate fan. The camera follows the wires. Here in a little copper cage a scorpion is eating her mate. Here the head of a captive protrudes through the floor. Red ants have made a hill in his head. They crawl in and out of empty eye sockets. They have eaten his lips away from a gag. A muffled scream without a tongue torn through his perforated palate showers the floor with bloody ants. In jade aquariums human rectums and genitals grafted onto other flesh … a prostate gland quivers rainbow colors through a pink mollusk … two translucent white salamanders squirm in slow sodomy golden eyes glinting enigmatic lust … Lesbian electric eels squirm on a mud flat crackling their vaginas together … erect nipples sprout from a bulbous plant.
    “They know an aphrodisiac so potent that it shatters the body to quivering