Exquisite Corpse (6 page)

He recalled an interesting bit of trivia he'd picked up somewhere: an old film star named Jayne Mansfield had died out here on Chef Menteur Highway. Her car had slammed into the back of one of the mosquito trucks that went steaming through the byways of the city, spraying enough poison to kill tens of thousands of insects. Tran imagined the famous decapitated head sailing through the cloud of insecticide and gasoline fumes, comet tail of blood describing a graceful arc.

The image of the movie star's death had haunted him since he'd first heard of it. He'd described it in one of his notebooks, in the purplest and most gleeful prose he could conjure. But if he tried to tell it to any of his friends—Vietnamese or Anglo—he knew exactly what they'd say.
You're sick, Tran, you know that? You're really fucked up.

Now he was almost home. A tangle of factory smokestacks and towers loomed ahead on one side of the highway. A dimly lit cluster of buildings on the other side was the heart of the community where Tran had lived most of his life. The swampy green land surrounding these buildings, the ragged blue-gray shroud of mist, the slightly ramshackle aspect, and the Vietnamese characters on the signs suggested a tiny foreign village, but the whole thing was only about twenty minutes away from downtown New Orleans. Known as Versailles or Little Vietnam, the neighborhood had been established by North Vietnamese refugees, perpetuated by the family they brought over and the children they raised.

He turned off Chef Menteur, navigated streets of little brick houses with poultry coops, fishing docks, vegetable gardens, and rice paddies in back. Eventually he pulled up in front of a house that had none of these exciting features. As a kid, Tran had envied his friends whose families fished and farmed. He
used to beg to help feed the ducks or go netting for shrimp. Only later did he realize his manicured yard seemed so boring because his family was a bit richer than most of the others in the community. Not wealthy by any means, but they didn't have to raise their own food. A lot of people out here did.

He wondered what the slackers, technoheads, and baby peaceniks at the rave tonight would think of that. Probably they would think it was cool, that such people were in touch with the earth, which they all wanted to save as long as they didn't have to stop dancing to do it. But Tran was willing to bet none of those ravers had ever wrung a duck's neck and plunged the carcass into boiling water to remove the feathers. Nor, he wagered, had any of them picked leeches off their ankles after wading in a stagnant pool of canal water to catch crawfish.

Like most Asian-American kids he'd met, Tran lived in two worlds. Since his twin brothers were still too young, he often helped in his parents' café. His table service was barely adequate, but he ran the cash register like nobody's business and knew how to make perhaps a third of the eighty-seven traditional dishes on the menu.

That was one world, the existence spanning the restaurant, his home, his family. The other world was the French Quarter, his tidy little acid business, clubs and raves, people like Jay Byrne. Glamorous, dangerous men … like the one who had introduced him to this other world. But that was over, and something he didn't want to think about after such a fine night.

He got out of the car, crossed the damp lawn, and let himself into the house. The living room was a mass of overlapping blue and gray shadows, swathed in dawn. He made his way down the hall, past the closed door of the twins' room, and let himself into his own room.

His father was sitting on the bed.

This in itself was a shock. Tran wasn't sure his father had ever been in his room before. He and his father were seldom even home and awake at the same time. But the real shock
was the look on his father's face. Truong Van Tran had a couple of expressions that seemed to serve him well in almost every situation: an acquiescing but faintly impatient smile, a tight-lipped glare, a steady gaze that was almost neutral if you failed to notice the slight disdainful crook of an eyebrow. T.V. did not approve of wasted time, and he did not suffer fools gladly. He did not suffer them at all when he had a choice.

So the look on his face was new to his oldest son. It had elements of sorrow, anger, fatigue, and, most frightening of all, bewilderment. Bewilderment in a man who had always seemed sure of everything, who ran his small café like a barracks. His father's gaze made Tran feel like a stranger, like an intruder in his own home, in his own room. There was a dark smudge on T. V.'s forehead, as if he had handled something grimy and then wiped his hand across his brow. Tran could not remember ever having seen his father anything but immaculate.

Awful scenarios ran through his head. Something had happened to his mother, or the twins. But if so, why was T.V. waiting for him in here, alone? Vietnamese families congregated in times of catastrophe. If anything bad had happened to a family member, the living room and kitchen would be full of milling relatives, and the house would reek of strong coffee sweetened with condensed milk.

This was something for him, then; for him alone. Tran began ticking off the possibilities in his mind. All of them were very bad.

“Dad?” he said uncertainly. “What's wrong?”

His father stood up and reached into the pocket of his trousers. At that moment Tran realized he was still wearing the sweat-soaked, gaudy rave dress; he hadn't even bothered to tuck it into his shorts. It seemed the least of his worries. T.V. was going to pull one of two things out of his pocket: Tran's stash of acid or the letters. The letters would be infinitely worse.

TV's hand emerged clutching a sheaf of half-crumpled paper, a few ripped-open envelopes.

Tran felt his stomach trying to cave in. All at once the acid and ecstasy he'd taken came rushing back tenfold. He did not even feel angry about the invasion of his privacy: there would be no point to such anger. His father wouldn't understand it. He owned the house; therefore all its rooms and all its contents were his to peruse as he saw fit. Tran thought he might vomit as T.V. glanced at the first sheet of paper and began to read.

“I want you underneath me
right now,
dear boy, my heart, my intestinal maze. I want to slide two fingers into the crook of your arm, there where the skin is as smooth as the crushed-velvet head of your cock. I have a fresh needle just for you, just for the arterial hard-on that throbs there. I slide stainless steel into your flesh, and the bead of blood that wells when I take the needle out is as tender as your …”

T.V. stopped reading. Tran knew the next three words, could even visualize them scrawled in psychotic purple on the sheet of notebook paper his father held crumpled in his hand. They were “sugar candy asshole.”

Tran attempted a smile. It came out nearly stillborn, a sickly mewling thing. “Yeah, um, Luke has quite a crazy style. He wants to be the next William S. Burroughs. He … uh … sends me all his fiction.”

“Vinh, please don't insult me.” His father was speaking Vietnamese, which was a bad sign at such a time: it signified a complexity or depth of emotion he did not trust himself to express in English. The tonal qualities of the language alone comprised thousands of nuances and shadings. “This is not fiction. These are letters written to you about things you've done. Are these things the truth?”

Not
Are these things true?
but
Are these things
THE TRUTH
?,
the one truth, as if there might be no other.

Tran shrugged. His father's gaze drove through him like long nails. “Yeah, at one time or another I did all that stuff. It wasn't like I injected drugs every day or anything.”

“Who is this man? This Luke?”

“He's a writer. Seriously, Dad. He's had four books published and he's a brilliant writer. But he's …”
Sick, vicious, as crazy with pain as a run-over dying dog
. “Kind of unstable. I quit seeing him months ago.”

“He lives in New Orleans?” There was no return address on the letters—Luke was no fool—but all the envelopes bore local postmarks.

“Not anymore,” Tran lied. Well, it could be true. He didn't know if Luke was still terrorizing the airwaves, hadn't tried to tune in the show in months. Only shreds and tag ends of gossip told him that Luke was even still alive.

The best defense was a good offense. “Look, Dad, I don't know what you want from me. You came in my room, you went through my stuff—you must not have trusted me in the first place. Are you really surprised?”

“No, Vinh … no.” His father stood before him with bowed shoulders. He couldn't recall ever having seen his father's shoulders bowed before. T.V.'s usual posture was straight, almost stiff. But not now. “I wish I could be surprised, but I'm not. That is precisely why I looked. And I'm sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” Tran heard his voice crack, cursed it. But he sensed that the end of the talk was drawing near, and he knew nothing good could lie at the end of this talk.

“For my own part in this. Your mother and I must have done something terribly wrong. And what if the twins turn out like you?” A new shadow crossed his father's face, a depth of darkness previously unplumbed. “You would never … you have never
done
anything to them?”

If the possibility of violence had been anywhere in him, Tran would have hit his father then. He was taller than T.V., and broader in the shoulders. He would have grabbed his father by the front of his expensive, tacky polyester shirt and smacked him twice across the face, hard.

But Vietnamese children did not strike their parents. The tradition of ancestor worship had died only two generations
back, and it lay uneasy in its grave. The parents of Versailles complained about the terrible rudeness their children learned at school, the lack of respect they seemed to revel in. But the thought of physically harming a parent was as foreign to these children as the idea of burning incense before a photo of a dead great-grandfather.

And Tran had no violence in him; he was only drawn to it in others. That was one of the first reasons why he had loved Luke.

But the notion that he would hurt his brothers … the idea that an integral facet of his character was the fault of some dreadful mistake his parents had made … it was all too much to bear. The talk was over, Tran realized, and he was the one ending it. “Fine,” he said. “Get out of my room. Go to work. Tell Mom to give me two hours after she takes the twins to school—go shopping or something. I'll be gone by the time she gets back.”

“Vinh—”

“I want my car. It's in my name. I won't take anything else from the rest of the house, just the stuff in here.”

“Where will you go?” T.V. asked. He didn't really sound as if he expected an answer.

“Where else? The French Quarter.”

Tran might as well have said
Angola
or
the lower pits of Hell
. T.V. shook his head hopelessly. “To spend so much time there is bad enough. How can you live in the Quarter? We'll never hear from you again.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's dangerous.”

“East New Orleans is dangerous. People get shot out here all the time. The Quarter's a safe place.” Relatively speaking, this was true. The Quarter had its share of robberies and occasional killings, but most of them happened to tourists who didn't know any better than to stray into pockets of desertion late at night: Rampart, upper Barracks, the ghostly area near
Canal where the burned-out facade of the old D. H. Holmes building loomed over the narrow street. If you knew where you were and who was around, you were usually fine.

“We thought we could take you to a doctor.”

Tran closed his eyes. A slow burn was spreading behind his lids. “I'm not going to any goddamn doctor,” he said. “There's nothing wrong with me.”

“You don't realize how sick you are. Sick in the brain. So intelligent, such potential—and yet you are doing everything wrong.”

Tran turned away from his father, started pulling books off the shelves and piling them on the floor.

“We only want to help you.”
That's what Luke said to me once,
Tran thought,
and he meant he wanted me to die with him
. But he stayed silent.

“Have you been tested for AIDS?”

Ask me anything. Ask me how I felt puking my guts out the first time I let him shoot me up. Ask me about the time he accidentally came in my mouth, and all I could taste was death spilling over my tongue, down my throat, seeping through my tissues. Ask me about the phone calls that lasted till dawn, the receiver slick with sweat and tears, sealed to my ear like a barnacle. Ask me any of those things. Please, Dad, ask me anything but that.

“Yes,” Tran said as calmly as he could. “I got a test. It was negative.”

It was true; he had gotten one negative result. But that was only three weeks after the last time he'd slept with Luke. And they had told him to come back in six months, and six months after that, and six months after
that
…

Tran saw his life stretching away before him, measured out in half-year increments, discrete pockets of time. Each pocket became a glass vial capped with a circle of red plastic. On each cap was a tiny label, and Tran's initials neatly lettered there. Each vial was three-quarters full of dark blood. He
could shatter them one by one, waste them all in a blind search for the poisoned vial. But when he found it, it would contain nothing but his death.

So what do I do with the rest of my time?
he thought.
Live rent-free with my parents, write in my notebooks, go outdancing, catch a buzz, get laid? It doesn't sound so bad. But what if I only have, say, five more years to live?

The life he had known up to now would not be enough. This unfortunate scene with his father had only hastened a decision Tran knew he had to make. It was the next step of his adventure, the step that would keep him alive. How could he die in the middle of his great adventure?