Exquisite Corpse (19 page)

The interlude in the shed had calmed him, helped him regain an unstable equilibrium.

But he still couldn't stop himself from going out tonight.

IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU'D BE DEAD
.

I had just seen this phrase neatly printed in black felt-tip pen on a pastel-pink wall. I could not fathom its meaning, though I suspected it to be ominous. I was not quite reeling drunk, but I was working on it.

The French Quarter didn't feel like the wicked place I had expected. I'd envisioned certain gray alleyways in Soho, furtive porno shops and peep shows, dodgy customers ducking in and out of low dark doorways. But all the sex in the French Quarter seemed cheerful, garishly lit, and highly commercial. The shop windows of Bourbon Street displayed colourful plastic penises and flavoured lubricants, inflatable lovers and leather bondage gear. The strip clubs sent barkers into the streets to extol their seedy array of vices. Sex, or at any rate the ersatz rendering of it, seemed to be a major tourist attraction.

Farther down Bourbon Street the lights dimmed, the music grew louder and more synthesized, the crowd thinned and became mostly male. The drinks were more expensive at these bars than they had been on the tourist strip, but I was already approaching the highest plateau of inebriation I could allow myself. For the next several hours I would pace my intake, twirling in the stream of drunkenness without allowing myself to be swept away on the current. Drunkenness was not the only pleasure I sought tonight.

I moved from bar to bar, soaking up beer and ambience, measuring the tenor of the various crowds. Some places were
young, loud, and frantic. Some were full of older men hungrily eyeing anything under thirty-five. A few were mixed, and it was these I lingered in longest. No one would remember me as an odd sort; I would just be one more barfly. No one would mark me as too young, too old, too trendy, too straight. No one would play Barbra Streisand on the jukebox.

Several men chatted me up. I chatted back, accepted their offers of drinks, eventually saw them off alive and well. Some didn't appeal to me physically, and the attraction of the flesh was essential. Some seemed too clever, too sober, too much in control of their faculties.

There was a certain diffidence I always looked for in my companions, nothing so obvious as a death wish, but a sort of passivity toward life. There have been offered in recent years a plethora of “murderer profiles,” a series of lists and charts meant to delineate the character of an habitual killer. What about the profile of an ideal victim? They exist as surely as we do, and they move as inexorably toward their given destinies.

(Yes, of course there are victims who are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. And then there are waifs who wander the world without guile, seeming to offer themselves up to whatever wants them.)

I maintain that ideal victims are actually
more
similar than their murdering counterparts. An habitual killer needs a vivid personality, even if all that lies beneath the flash and scintillation is a howling emptiness. But even before his death, the victim is often more void than substance.

Without knowing what streets I had traversed to get there, I found myself in a place called the Hand of Glory. I remembered reading someplace that a hand of glory was a magical talisman made from the mummified severed hand of a murderer. In my drunken state, I saw this as a good omen.

I ordered a maintenance drink, a vodka tonic I could sip more slowly than beer, and found a table with a view of the bar. The place was crowded but not overrun. I avoided vast
crowds because someone was always likely to be nearby when you were trying to leave unnoticed.

This bar had the feel of a grotto, cozy and mysterious. The ceiling was a latticework hung with bunches of dusty plastic grapes. The main illumination was provided by a radioactive-looking chartreuse-coloured sign advertising Mickey's Big Mouth Malt Liquor. The jukebox was stocked with crooners, and no hateful television set glowed and flickered as in most American bars. A white marble nude stood sentinel in a corner, blank-eyed, pitifully endowed, rather ghostly.

I scanned the crowd. It was a mixture of young punkish kids, black-clad espresso types, elegant male couples, and single men on the prowl. I wondered if I looked like one of the latter, then decided not. I was too calm, too self-contained. I never approached anyone. It had always been the way with my companions. They saw something in me that they needed, and they came to me.

I supposed I was more a black-clad espresso type, if a bit of an unsteady one. But I felt silly in my jumper and heavy trousers, and I had shucked my good English winter coat altogether. There was a chill in the air, to be sure, a damp cool vapour drifting round corners and rising from drains. But I had just come from London, where November vapours were like ill-intentioned hands sliding beneath your collar to encircle your coat-chafed, chicken-skinned throat, where November winds cut more deeply than my stolen scalpel ever did.

For the first time since I lulled myself to death in Painswick, I felt comfortable, almost contented. Someone would come to me, some perfect boy ripe for the slaughter. I would find a place to take him, and I would take him again and again. I wanted this so badly that I could not make myself care what happened afterward. If they caught me, I would let them kill me; I would never be taken back to prison. If they would not kill me, I would will myself to die again, and this time I would stay dead.

I closed my eyes and felt the room spin pleasantly. When I opened them again, I would see him.

“Excuse me.”

The voice was soft but very sharp. It cut through my hazy maundering like a serrated knife through gauze. I opened my eyes, blinked away a brief dazzle of bar lights and unfamiliar spectacles, and beheld the love of my life for the first time.

Of course, I didn't know then that he was the love of my life. All I saw was a tall, rather wispy blond in expensive dark clothes, holding a frosted beer bottle in each hand. Dixie, the brand I'd been drinking.

“I saw you sitting alone over here. You don't look like you know anyone. I thought you might like a cold drink.”

Not just a drink, but a
cold
drink. The man had a way with words. How many hours had I lain in my cell, parched beyond any relief the tepid tap water could give, dreaming of a really
cold
drink?

“Certainly,” I said. “Thanks very much. Won't you join me?”

He smiled as he slid into the opposite chair, and I noticed two things about his face. First, it was beautiful; long thin nose elegantly squared at the tip, lean smooth jaw, sensuous lips with a twist that might be sardonic or cruel. Second, his eyes were colder than any drink could ever be: cold from the inside out, a weird mint-green colour like glacial ice. The smile did not touch them.

If I hadn't been intoxicated, I think I would have known what he was then. But I only smiled back, and regretted that sooner or later I would have to send this icy beauty on his way, because he was clearly no ideal victim.

“I like your accent. Where you from?”

“London,” I said. It seemed safest; an Englishman from London was less remarkable to Americans than any other kind.

“London.” He nodded, affirming what I'd said, as Americans do. “Are you homesick?”

“Not at all.”

“What brings you to New Orleans?”

“The climate.”

“Moral or meteorological?”

“Both.”

We paused, offering noncommittal half-smiles, sizing each other up. He wasn't my usual type, and I had a hunch that I wasn't his either. Yet I didn't want him to move on, and he seemed in no hurry to go.

At last he asked me, “What's your name?”

Before, in my previous life, I'd told all my boys my real name. There had never seemed any need to do otherwise. Tonight I had been using Arthur, since none of the men who approached me were interesting. But to this man I said, “Andrew.”

“I'm Jay.” He reached across the table to shake my hand. His grip was cool, dry, and languid. When I shook hands with a potential companion, I always slid my palm over his palm and grasped his wrist, briefly encircling it with my fingers, gauging his reaction to such an intimate, dominant touch. But now I was shocked to feel Jay doing the same to me. We both snatched our hands away and stared at one another.

Again he broke the silence. “Would you like another drink?”

I hadn't been aware of finishing my first one. I tipped the Dixie bottle to the light: empty. The vodka tonic was gone too.

“No thanks,” I said. I wanted one, but I wasn't sure what was going on here, and I knew I would be drunker in ten minutes than I was now.

“Well, I would. Excuse me a minute, will you, Andrew?” He actually waited for my nod of assent before walking away. I watched him wind through the crowd, sinuous as a Siamese cat, and I wondered what such an elegant, tightly wound, oddly
polite
man wanted with me. The bar was well jammed by this time, and I soon lost sight of him.

Ten minutes later he hadn't come back. I shifted in my
chair, wondering if he'd given me the slip, desperately needing a piss. My bladder had shrunk in prison, where aiming one's cock into the chamber pot and producing a few tainted drops of urine qualified as a way to relieve the boredom. I worried that Jay would return first and think I had gone. By that point I was already deeply intrigued with him, though I couldn't quite say why.

But nature won out. When I finally got up from the table, able to hang on no longer, I had to clutch at the back of my chair to keep from stumbling sideways. The bar tilted at a vicious angle.
Get ahold of yourself,
I thought.
You're an alcoholic and an Englishman. You can sail through this.

It was more like lurching into a tempest, but I managed to negotiate my way across the bar and into the men's loo. Mercifully, it was a single tiny room whose door locked from the inside. After Sam, I wasn't quite ready for another dingy row of sinks, another dim line of cubicles. I pissed what felt like several litres, then glanced at myself in the mirror as I was leaving. Hair spiky and tousled, spectacles askew, eyes faintly mad: just a nice English tourist out on a bender.

Jay was leaning against the wall outside the door. He looked as cockeyed as I felt. “I needed to pee,” he told me, “but I had three shots of tequila on the way to the bathroom.”

“Why three?”

“Once for every time you've unnerved me.” He gave me a sly sidelong look. “First—when I laid eyes on you. Second—when you shook my hand. And third—when I looked back at our table and saw you were gone.”

I tried to grasp his shoulder. My hand seemed to float between us for a moment, then wound up on his chest, in the V of his shirt where cloth gave way to flesh. Jay reached out long arms and pulled me in. I stumbled, fell against him. He was a bit taller, and I felt my face crush into his neck, my lips splay open against his throat. Then somehow we were kissing as ravenously as I had ever kissed anyone, alive or dead.

My fingers were tangled in his hair, tugging so hard it had to hurt. His tongue was in my mouth, raking against the sharp edges of my teeth, feeling as if it would plunge straight down my throat and choke me. He tasted of blood and rage. His kiss was laced with the slow savour of pain. I knew these tastes; they were the tastes in my own mouth, the flavour of my life.

I did not know what Jay was, not yet; but on some instinctual, almost biological level I
recognized
him. I knew then that this man was infinitely dangerous to me. I also knew that I had to go as deep inside him as he would let me.

When I was able to stop grinding my body against his as if I meant to drive him through the wall, I pulled back and looked him in the face. Trying to read his eyes was like searching for sentience in a pool of murky water: I thought I saw things moving deep down in there, but all I could be sure of was my own faint reflection. “What are we letting ourselves in for?” I whispered.

“An adventure,” Jay said, and offered up another of those lovely cold smiles. He told me later that, at that moment, he still believed he would kill me.

There was no question but that we were leaving together. When we quit the Hand of Glory, I didn't know whether to bless the place or curse it. We walked up a side street, stealing glances at each other, occasionally bumping shoulders or brushing hands. The streets were narrow and quiet, the cobbled pavements overhung with lacy iron balconies and Victorian cottages and a curious flat-fronted, shuttered type of house. There were mysterious gates and dark alleyways, through which one occasionally glimpsed a sylvan courtyard with a fountain sparkling at its centre.

Jay pointed at a tall gray building on a corner. “That house is haunted.”

“By what?”

“The ghosts of tortured slaves.”

An expectant silence lay heavily between us, not as if he
wanted me to inquire further about the ghost story, but more as if he thought I might have some opinion on tortured slaves.

“Fascinating,” I said, leaving it ambiguous for now.

Again I wondered what this man wanted from me, and what I expected to get from him. Were we going to fuck? It had been so long since I'd had sex with a breathing body, I wasn't sure I would remember how. Did I think I was going to kill him, on his own territory, with no weapon or means of disposal? The idea appealed to me, but the reality seemed implausible, and more so when I studied Jay's profile. This was no acquiescent brat to the slaughter. This was some other kind of animal.

Jay stopped and unlocked an iron gate with finals wrought in the shape of pineapples. We passed through an overgrown courtyard to a small white house. A series of keys, a sequence of numbers pressed on an electronic keypad, and we were inside. My memory telescoped briefly back to my Brixton flat, the last place I'd lived before being arrested, and the complicated series of locks and bolts I'd had on the door.