Naked Lunch

In the coastal city of Interzone, a boy is shining a sailor’s shoes. The sailor then meets a man named “Fats” Terminal, for whom he is to acquire “eggs” in exchange for drugs. The eggs are from the Reptiles, the reptilian-looking and acting humanoid users of a substance produced by another type of humanoid known as Mugwumps. Mugwumps lack livers, survive solely by sucking on sweets, and “secrete an addicting fluid from their erect penises which prolongs life by slowing metabolism” (46). This fluid is what the Reptiles are addicted to. While getting the eggs from the Reptiles, the sailor comes across a group of exhausted Meat Eaters. Such people are addicted to “black meat,” a meat derived from the flesh of gigantic black centipedes. This meat is both “overpoweringly delicious and nauseating” (47), so Meat Eaters tire themselves out, continually eating and then vomiting the food.

Lee is waiting in “Hassan’s Hospital” in Interzone. He describes receiving for lunch there an egg laid by a duck-billed platypus and an orange containing “a huge worm and very little else” (50). Lee also describes an operation that Benway performed in the hospital lavatory. Benway uses a toilet plunger to try and resuscitate a patient and then washing the plunger in the toilet bowl and inserting it into an incision made by another doctor.