Exquisite Corpse (11 page)

Tran twisted his face out of Luke's grasp, which had tightened involuntarily at the word
only.
Luke saw five white finger-shaped marks on Tran's golden skin. As he watched, the marks deepened to rose, the color of Tran's blood just below the surface.

“Last week when you went to Baton Rouge … I was in the French Quarter one night and … there happened to be this party.”

Luke shut his eyes tightly and willed his hands away from Tran's smooth throat. He knew what was coming. Couldn't
Tran be merciful and tell him straight out? Of course not.

“Everybody was really hammered,” Tran said pleadingly.

Luke ground his teeth, counted to five, and opened his eyes. Tran was watching but something in Luke's eyes made him look away. “So everybody was hammered,” said Luke. “Imagine that, at a party in the French Quarter. SO FUCKING WHAT?”

“They played some kind of kissing game with this clove and this orange—”

“Tran. Just say it, goddamn you, please just say it.”
Don 't say it,
Luke's heart begged in agonizing counterpoint,
as long as you haven't said it out loud then it didn't happen, so just shut up, just don't say—

“Well-I-ended-up-fooling-around-with-this-guy,” Tran said all in a rush, then hitched in a deep shuddery breath as if the unspoken revelation had deprived him of air.

A strange burning sensation had begun to spread through the muscles of Luke's shoulders, as if corrosive acid were eating into the tissue. Luke wondered what the physiology of that particular phenomenon might be; why should the news of his lover's betrayal make his muscles corrode? But he only said, “I thought we weren't going to do shit like that.”

“I did too! I didn't want to! It was just …”

“It was just that you were drunk and your dick was hard, right?”

“Well, yeah.”

“At least you admit it.”

“But he wouldn't; leave me alone! He's already fucked most of my friends …”

“Great. I'm glad you're so selective about your sordid affairs.”

Tran's eyes closed in defeat, and the dark smudge of his lashes on the butter-smooth skin beneath his eyes was enough to twist a barb through Luke's heart, even now. “I didn't mean to, Luke. I was basically seduced into it.”

Luke's vision went red. He could see directly into the core
of his own rage, and that core was on the point of meltdown. He grabbed a pillow off the bed and punched it, then throttled it. He didn't know what else he was going to do until he saw a cascade of tiny feathers swirling around the bed, drifting to the floor. He had ripped the pillow open with his fingernails. One of his expensive goose-down pillows, no less.

“GO AHEAD!!!”
he heard himself screaming.
“Why don't you just take this amazing thing we have and throw it away? Why don't you just toss it in the gutter and piss on it because you happened to GET DRUNK AT A PARTY??? What a FUCKING BRILLIANT IDEA!!!”

He forced himself to breathe several times, then resumed speaking in a soft, precise voice. “I mean—could you be any lamer if you
tried?
You did this—you ran home to
tell
me about it, God knows why—and now you're saying you weren't even
responsible?”

Tran was staring wide eyed at the feathers on the floor. His gaze flicked back up to Luke's, then away. “No. I'm not saying that.”

“Sounds like it to me.”

“Well… hmmm …”

“Don't
hmmm
me, you damned devil! I know how that devious Oriental mind works. You can't save face on this one. Just tell me …” Luke's steam ran out and he lay staring at Tran. His face felt terribly naked. He was sure he looked ghastly. “What happened.”

“Okay. There's this guy I sometimes see out at the clubs.”

“What do you mean,
see?”

“I'd noticed him in the Quarter. I talk to people, and this guy gets around. I'd talked to him a couple of times.”

“Does this
guy”—
it was a word Luke never used, a word that made no distinction between the myriad subspecies of the male gender—“does this
person
have a name?”

“Zach.”

“You mean that pallid little fuck who looks like Edward Scissorhands, only more pleased with himself?”

Tran nearly laughed. He bit at the inside of his lip to stop himself, and seeing his white teeth against the dark pink wet flesh made Luke wish they were soul-kissing, ass-fucking, anything except having this wretched conversation.

“Yeah,” said Tran, “that guy.”

“What did you do?”

“He kept … um,
embracing
me. He said I was his long-lost twin brother.”

“How original.”

“Then we started kissing in the doorway.”

“Oh, under the disgusting vegetable parasite?”

“The what?”

“The mistletoe.”

“Yeah.”

Luke pictured the two of them pressed against the jamb, leaning into each other, their hands raking and groping, their mouths messily joined. Probably twenty or thirty other French Quarter scene-kiddles were in the room, some more concerned with their own sordid pawings, some looking on, blearily marking the fact that Luke Ransom's boyfriend was swapping spit with one of the biggest sluts in town, and many of them probably finding that fact maliciously funny. Luke had a talent for making himself unpopular among posers.

Part of him wanted to throw himself sobbing on Tran's mercy, beg Tran to say it wasn't true, could never be true. Part of him wanted to murder the stupid brat, tear his cheating bones apart, then breathe life back into him for the sheer joy of killing him again. The image of the two boys kissing in the doorway was indelibly branded on Luke's mind, a fresh hot wound searing its way deep into the steaming meat of his brain, making a scar that would last forever.

“So then what happened?”

“Well, he dragged me off into a … bedroom, I think, and … Luke, do you really want to hear this?”

“No,” Luke told him truthfully. “But you made me go this far. Now I have to hear it all.”

“Why? I just needed to be honest with you. We never have to talk about this again if you don't want to.”

“And I'm just supposed to stop thinking about it, huh? Maybe you can gloss things over so easily. In fact, I'm sure you can. But my mind doesn't work like that.
Even if I could wipe this shit out of my head right now, I wouldn't dare … because I might need it someday.
You want to be a writer, Tran? Then you better start saving up too …”

He had ranted in this vein for a while. There had been more, much more, but Luke decided to end the flashback there. He didn't want to relive Tran's hesitant description of a blowjob received and reciprocated in a stranger's dark bedroom while the party roared on beyond a half-closed door, or his own wretchedly furious reaction. He opened his eyes and shook his head a couple of times, and it was the present again. Sort of.

That had happened six months after they met, nearly a year before Luke's test came up positive. Luke's own sexual conduct had been blameless during those six months, a first for him. Still, he had to admit that a good part of his anger came from a petty sense of missed opportunity. He'd only been in Baton Rouge to sign at the Hibiscus Bookstore, which he had done several times without event when he was single. But this time, for some reason, the signing was attended by any number of slender, dark-haired, dark-eyed boys so pretty they made Luke's hand shake a bit as he inscribed their books.

One in particular, a self-described poet named Michel, stayed around to talk to him throughout the signing. They had a drink afterward, then two, and when Michel asked him to stay overnight, Luke badly wanted to. Instead he thought of the difficult conversation he and Tran had had the week before. They had talked out their various fears and jealousies, and Luke thought they had decided on some sort of faith to each other. He wanted to spend the night devouring the self-described poet like a sweet bonbon offered up on the altar of his twin gods, talent and lust. That was what such boys were
for.
Instead he found himself horny and half-drunk on I-10, searching the dial for shitty talk radio, the hour way past midnight, the industrial panorama of Baton Rouge dazzling his eyes in the rearview mirror.

When he found out Tran had cheated on him anyway, Luke wished he'd gone ahead and fucked Michel. Never mind that Michel had been a pretentious airhead not half as beautiful as Tran. Luke had an ugly sense of having missed out on an easy, sweet piece of ass while Tran got one, of having failed to put a notch in his barrel to match Tran's new notch. He also had an idea that Tran had tricked him into feeling this way.

Ah, relationships If he was lucky, Luke thought, he would never have another one. And he was feeling awfully lucky lately. Just waking up alive every day, that made him feel his luck like a ten-ton weight sitting on his chest.

He pulled on a T-shirt and jeans, shoved his feet into a pair of pointy-toed black cowboy boots, slung his ancient motorcycle jacket around his shoulders. This had been Luke's unvarying cold-weather uniform for the past ten years. Now the jeans felt too loose and his biceps no longer filled out the sleeves of the jacket, but the boots were still fine. A good pair of boots was a friend forever, till death do us part. Idly he wondered whether this pair would outlast him. One of the soles was beginning to crack and peel, but then so was his.

Outside, the early morning air caressed his skin like a cool, damp hand. The sky was full of pale blue-gray light, the color of Louisiana dawn. No one had broken into his car during the night, and the engine cranked on the first try. Maybe this was going to be a good day. The flashback had leached some of the self-pity out of him. and he was no longer in the masochistic mood necessary to enjoy the maudlin love songs of WBYU. Instead he slapped on a Coil tape, cranked it up to full volume—which wasn't much, coming from his cheap-ass speakers—and pulled out onto the highway.

Coil's version of “Tainted Love” was just the thing to fuel righteous anger in him, and righteous anger was what he
needed to pump himself up for the show. “GAVE YOU—ALL—A BOY COULD—GIVE YOU,” he sang, pounding the dashboard. Tran's face floated up in front of him, and Luke hated its effortless beauty, hated the callow, manipulative mind that lay behind those smooth-lidded eyes. He thought of the truth he had poured into his books, all the truth he knew, and he hated every critic who had ever savaged him, every reader who had missed the point.

When he ran out of specific targets for his animosity, Luke hated the world because it would go on after he was dead. The raw emotion coursed through him, as icy-pure as the finest junk, giving him the strength to be insane.

By the time he reached the turnoff to the bayou, stashed his car in a ramshackle wooden building that served as a covert garage, and walked out to the dock where the pirogue would pick him up to take him to the showboat, he could feel Lush Rimbaud stirring inside him, ready to rage.

“The rest of the world could get a fucking clue from China. One kid per family, severe penalties for extras, and mandatory sterilization. Zero population growth is their goal, and they've damn near reached it. A mess of abortion goes on in the People's Republic. A
whole
damn mess of abortion. Scraping fetus has become a way of life to the Chinese. Not to let 'em off the hook, so to speak. Extreme measures are called for because they've been world-champion breeders since the fucking Han dynasty. One out of every five people in the
world
is Chinese. But what percentage of resources do you think all those Chinese people are using? No percentage at all, compared to
your
greedy little American ass.

“Americans comprise less than five percent of the world's population, yet we suck up thirty-three percent of the world's resources. And we can breed as many rug rats as we want. Hey, it's a free country! We don't even have to be able to feed 'em. If you can't keep the little fuckers alive, the government
will do it for you! MY tax dollars—YOUR tax dollars—pay breeders to stay home and make MORE breeders! AND RESEARCH TOWARD THE CURE OF AN EPIDEMIC GOES UNFUNDED BECAUSE THE PEOPLE DYING FROM IT SUCKED TOO MUCH
COCK!!!”

He'd been on the air for several hours now, and he was rolling. Luke leaned away from the microphone and slurped at a vile-tasting protein drink that Soren, the founder, financer, and engineer of WHIV, had stashed in the cooler for him. It was as thick as a McDonald's milk shake, and slightly viscous. The flavor was part strawberry, part Pepto-Bismol, part liver: chalky-bland, sickly sweet, yet somehow meaty. It was among the more disgusting things he'd ever put in his mouth. But Soren swore it would put two pounds on him. He could use two pounds.

He returned to the mike. “They may hate us for sucking cock, but at least they can't accuse us of making more little cocksuckers. At least the biological reproduction of our own DNA in the form of a slimy, squalling lump of meat isn't the greatest satisfaction most of us will ever know in life. Now is it? I'm Lush Rimbaud coming to you on WHIV, your source of aural infection … and this one goes out to the one I love.”

He cued up Nine Inch Nails' “Something I Can Never Have.” Trent Reznor's voice burned like a hot wire into his skull, stealthy and sharp, laced with deadly pain. It might as well be the theme song of this show, this radio station, everything he had ever written, his desperate love for Tran, his whole miserable life.

And yet there was something that kept him kicking despite all the good reasons he had to go ahead and die. He could bow out any time now: it would be easy to score enough junk, and an opiate OD was title ideal way to go as far as Luke was concerned. If the straights found you with a needle hanging out of your arm and wished you good riddance, so what? You'd cashed it in easy and sweet.