Exquisite Corpse (10 page)

He'd stolen the textbook last time he visited the ancestral manse on St. Charles, where his cousin, Daniel Devore's son, lived now with his family. Mignon had bequeathed the house to them in return for Daniel's help in business. She'd known her son Jay would never want to live uptown.

He stared at a colorful cross section of prostate surgery, a pair of hemostats inserted through an incision in the scrotum to clamp a small vein, a gloved finger sneaking up the rectal cavity, caressing the diseased gland, then puncturing it with a scalpel and letting its sweet juices escape through the muscle wall into the intestine. The prostate looked like a dark wrinkled walnut. The walls of the rectum undulated in slick pink waves around the stainless steel blade. Jay found himself thinking of Tran, the Vietnamese boy he'd scored the sheet of acid from yesterday. Tran's young prostate would be smooth and fine, no larger than an almond.

The spine of the heavy book pressed painfully against Jay's crotch. He realized he had a boner again, as if the night had not been enough to exhaust him. There was a hollow at the top of the rectal canal, just above the prostate, where any number of objects fit so beautifully …

He pushed himself out of the chair, slid the book back into its space on the crowded shelf, and left the library. The house was silent but for the occasional drunken laughter of revelers still roaming the Quarter. On an ordinary night, Jay would have been reading, watching a video, or doing his accounts; he loved math for its exquisite symmetry. But this was no ordinary night. He had a guest.

No, he reminded himself, not a guest this time. A
pet.

The luminous dial of the grandfather clock in the hall read ten to five. Strange shadows moved like ghosts trapped behind the barbed design of the gold-flocked scarlet wallpaper. Jay entered the parlor, a baroque fantasy of draped velvet and satin tassels and dark carved teak, syrup-smooth hardwood floor covered with an enormous Chinese rug. The dominant colors of the room were purple, rose, and gold; in daylight it had the aspect of a gilded womb.

Taking up most of one wall was a fireplace of pink marble inlaid with art deco plumes of malachite, carnelian, and jet, an exquisite piece of stonework. Its beauty was obscured beneath a layer of greasy black ash that would not yield even to a wire scrub brush soaked in industrial-strength bleach.

Jay paused as if at loose ends, then lifted a delicate china teacup from a claw-footed table and drained its dregs. A slow shudder ran down his spine like notes on a xylophone. The tea was spiked with cognac and LSD. He had been sipping this potent brew all night, since he brought his new pet home.

The boy from Café du Monde had come docilely, keeping a few respectful paces behind, just close enough so all the tourists and Jackson Square hustlers could see that this beautiful creature was with him. Normally Jay was cautious about such things, but this time he felt just as if a prize greyhound or some other valuable sleek animal were voluntarily following him home.

Prize greyhound.
That was a laugh. If Fido really was a dog, he'd be a street cur with an appealing face but a dirty coat. Luckily, his coat came off. As did his boots, his grubby T-shirt, his filthy jeans, his stinking socks, and his unspeakable underwear. Underneath it all, Fido could be made clean.

Wire brush and bleach hadn't worked on the marble fireplace. But boys were made of softer stuff.

As Jay glided through the parlor, he caught sight of his reflection in the enormous mirror that stood in one corner, heavy gilt frame succulent with carved fruit and vegetation. He was a silver-white specter awash in the waterlight of dawn, his naked flesh luminously pale. His chest and abdomen were crisscrossed with dark spray patterns of blood, delicate as sea foam. His hair was stiff with it. His eyes were wide and wild, glittering.

He entered the bathroom. The dazzle of light on black and white tile was relieved by glistening scrawls and blots of red, like handfuls of rubies thrown about. The boy was curled upon himself in the bathtub, trussed at the wrists and ankles and tightly round the skinny smooth thighs, his eyes bright with acid and hideous awareness. His body was scoured, scraped away to raw nerve. Over the sharpest points of his body, cheeks and knees and hips, Jay could see the blue-white gleam of bone. The bleach had raised angry chemical burns on what little skin he had left. His cock was as wet and shapeless as a spit-out mouthful of food. At some point his stomach had been partly slit open, the layers pulled apart and a shiny bubble of intestine exposed.

Jay smiled. The boy smiled back. He had to; most of the flesh around his mouth had been scraped or burned away, and his smile was a rictus of bleach-white teeth set in bleeding gums. Jay supposed he hadn't taken care of his pet very well. No doubt the ASPCA would be pounding on his door any minute now.

The revelers could howl in the streets all they liked, but the French Quarter did not belong to them. Tomorrow, next week, next year they would be gone, their passage as ephemeral as the wake that swirled behind a ship on the river. Jay would be here still. The Quarter was his, its gaslit nighttime streets, its sordid alleys and neon-starred byways, the secret courtyards swathed in leaflight and shadow, the huge purple moon that hung above it all like a bleary eye. It delivered offerings up to him, and he accepted them gratefully, voraciously. Jay did not mind the noise of the revelers. But in here, it was a night of revelry for him too.

The sun would be risen before the boy died.

A
t about the same time Tran was staring helplessly at a Baggie full of LSD and hundred-dollar bills, Lucas Ransom awoke to a blaring clock radio in a dirt-cheap motel room on the other side of New Orleans. He slapped at the snooze button, pulled night-stale covers up around his collarbone, felt nausea rising in his gut but quenched it, refused it, willed it away. He couldn't afford nausea this morning.

He slipped briefly back into dream. Something about Tran, as they always seemed to be these days. When the alarm went off again ten minutes later, he awoke with tears on his face. WBYU was playing “A Taste of Honey.”

“A taste—more bitter—than wine,” Luke sang along to wake himself up. His voice sounded as brittle as a saltine cracker. His lungs felt like sponges dipped in formaldehyde and left to dry in the sun. All this would have to change before showtime.

He stumbled into the shower. A cockroach squeezed its greasy-looking brown body down the drain hole as the rusty water drummed into the tub. Luke soaped himself apathetically, his hands sliding over ribs and hipbones sharper than they had been a month ago, two weeks ago even. Other than an attack of thrush, a vile white fungus that had invaded his mouth and throat for a fortnight, Luke hadn't had any opportunistic infections yet. But his lymph nodes had been swollen for over a year, the number of T-cells in his blood was a little lower at his free clinic checkup each month, he got the shits on a regular basis, and he was dropping weight fast.

Even when he was using heroin, he had worked out at the Lee Circle YMCA a couple of times a week. He had never been pumped up, but he liked the way his muscles felt when they were sleek and taut. He was living then in the Faubourg Marigny, a neighborhood of shabby little Creole cottages a stone's throw from the French Quarter, and because he loved lying in a bath of subtropical sunlight on the roof of his apartment, his skin stayed darker than Tran's and the dusting of hair on his chest, belly, and legs bleached to pale gold, lighter than the hair on his head. Even his pubic hair had lightened a shade; even his cock had acquired a healthy glow.

He'd kept all that up as long as he could. But it had been a long time since he could. The muscle had melted off his sturdy frame until he was all painful edges and awkward bone-ends. One of the medicines he was taking made him horribly sensitive to sunlight, and his tan had been replaced by a pale gray like the color of an uncooked shrimp. His entire body felt jagged and pallid and pasty.

These days it took all of his strength to walk to his car in the motel parking lot, get the engine started after two or three tries, and drive the thirty miles to the bayou. That meant the radio shows were coming from something that ran deeper in him than strength, and the only thing Luke knew of that ran deeper than strength was insanity.

He figured Lush Rimbaud was insane, probably had been for some time. But he was starting to wonder about Luke Ransom, too. He believed bad influences were inevitably stronger than good ones: just as he knew Tran had to have some sweet memories of him, he also knew those memories were likely
soured in Tran's heart by the sheer awfulness of what had come later.

So Luke had always assumed the insane part of his mind would eventually overtake the sane part. It was the part that had wanted Tran to inject diseased blood, Luke's own blood, into his vein. It was the part that had wanted Tran to die, not even
with
him, but
instead of
him.

And what was there to stay sane for now? A trip to the clinic once a month, his pentamidine inhaler and his egg lipids, a long night spent tapping out useless words that paled next to his memories, a filthy cubicle on the Airline Highway among hookers and junkies?

The junkies didn't make it easy, either. Always knowing someone was snorting or shooting up somewhere in the motel court, maybe right next door; always knowing he could lay his hands on some junk if he only wanted to. And he wanted to almost all the time. He never stopped imagining how it would relieve the nausea, render the bone-grinding fatigue irrelevant, wipe away the imprint of Tran's body on his own.

But he knew it would also eventually stop him from giving a shit about anything, including staying alive. And he wasn't ready to give the world the satisfaction of watching him die just yet.

He'd started using heroin ten years ago, back in San Francisco, when he was Tran's age: snorted some at a party, loved the rush and the ensuing lull, the longest period of utter calm his mind had ever known. He went back for more, eventually started putting it in his arm instead of up his nose. The rush was purer that way, the lull longer and far sweeter. It turned out he had a heroin metabolism. A habit tended to sap a normal person's vitality, as if a tiny droplet of the life force were siphoned off by the needle each time. Steady use of heroin would kill most people eventually. But certain systems drew strength from it.

He had kicked for a while around the time he met Tran, three years ago. No methadone self-deception for Luke; just
the frigid sweats, the crawling itch, the nausea that boiled like red worms in his gut. You can use one substance to cure your addiction to another, he told himself as he clutched his bottle of Jack Daniel's in the aftermath of junk sickness, but the new substance should be something different entirely. Something to take your mind off the desire that still pours through your veins. Methadone was a rubber sex doll; whiskey was a brand-new lover.

So what should he use now, Luke wondered, to cure his addiction? Tran was in his veins sure as the memory of the needle, in his tissues sure as the ghost of junk sickness. Nothing touched the deep, slow ache that came to him whenever he remembered being in bed with Tran, fucking or talking or just memorizing each other's face as obsessively as two lovers ever had. Tran's eyes were difficult to think about, too. Luke remembered how they would take on the golden cast of the afternoon light, and the liquid blackness of the pupils, and the feel of delicate skin against his lips when he kissed the subtle, perfect curve at their inner corners. Oh yes, he knew how to torture himself with memories.

He turned off the water, dried his scrawny body with a threadbare towel, dragged himself out of the bathroom and sank into the ugly vinyl armchair. An ancient burn hole from someone's cigarette nipped at the back of his leg. There were days when he had to rest after doing anything: showering, walking half a mile down the highway to the McDonald's or Popeye's, even reading the paper. Apparently this was going to be one of those days.

Since he'd gotten on the subject of memories, Luke decided to treat himself to a flashback. He was doing this more and more these days, reliving vivid moments from his past. Often they had to do with Tran, and since the good moments were exquisitely painful to recall, he usually chose the bad ones.

Luke leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, and it was December of two years ago. A few days before Christmas, a holiday he'd always found wretchedly depressing anyway.
Tran had escaped his family festivities, and they were curled like spoons on the mattress of Luke's loft. Luke lay with his face pressed into the hollow of Iran's shoulder, dreamily nuzzling the fine black hair at the his nape, which smelled of sweet gel and sex sweat. Tran was nineteen then, and his hair was much shorter, nearly buzz-cut. The style made his face look fiercely exotic, feral. It also showed off the three tiny silver hoops in his earlobes—two in the left, one in the right—each of which had reportedly driven his parents into new paroxysms of horror.

Suddenly Tran said without warning, “I'm sorry.”

Luke knew by now that Tran was prone to disjointed interjections, often in belated response to a conversation he'd been having hours or days ago. But for some reason, this meek
I'm sorry
set off a warning bell in his head. “For what?” he asked.

Tran didn't answer, and a shrieking klaxon joined the bell. Luke propped himself on one elbow and used Tran's sharp hipbone as a handle to roll him over none too gently. “What?” he said again, more urgently. Tran looked away. Luke grabbed Tran's face, forced it toward him. A small tortured sound escaped Tran's throat, not quite a word, not yet a sob.

“What have you
done?”

Answer me,
Luke thought,
answer me right now and save me the suspense.
Instead came Tran's usual long silence preceding the answer to a tough question. Then, “Nothing. Only …”