Exquisite Corpse (7 page)

He wondered if Luke had ever thought the same thing. Then he reminded himself that he did not care, could not care what Luke thought.

“I'm negative,” he said again. “I don't have AIDS, and I haven't been screwing the twins. Now get out.”

“Vinh, if you—”

“Dad.” Tran went to his father, took the letters from his hand. “You don't know me. This is who I am. Here. In these letters.” He waved the ragged sheaf of paper in T.V.'s face. “Now leave me alone.”

His father looked at him a moment longer. His dark eyes had a regretful but faintly impassive cast, as if he were looking at his son's corpse already in its coffin. Tran could almost see a miniature of himself reflected there, a wan and wasted image in a mahogany box, propped on a trestle in the Catholic church, surrounded by white flowers and grieving relatives. If he died in five years, if he died tomorrow, that was how it would be.

For several seconds Tran felt himself falling into his father's eyes, into that future. Then TV. turned and left the room, and Tran was free.

Luke's letters were still crumpled in his hand. He stared at them for a moment, then put them on the nightstand atop a pile
of books. For a long time the very sight of Luke's handwriting had made his flesh crawl with loathing. That purple scrawl looked exactly like Luke's voice sounded, thick with whiskey and self-pity, on the phone at three in the morning. Ziggy Stardust after the band broke up, rubbing his face in broken shards of gutter glass, swearing he could see the stars. Cockteasing death, courting and seducing it at every turn, but never going all the way as long as he had a choice in the matter.

Tran looked around his bedroom, wondering what to take first, and felt a fresh wave of helplessness sweep over him. There were clothes everywhere, clean and dirty; there were notebooks, sketches, random books and papers.

Prioritize,
he told himself.
Start with the important stuff
. He went to his bookshelf, took down a large glossy volume on death and dying. He knew his parents had seen plenty of mangled corpses up close in Vietnam—neighbors, teachers, family. They'd never take such a book off the shelf. Tran flipped through full-page color shots of humans in various stages of mutilation, decay, and general disrepair until he found the Baggie he'd stashed there, which contained fifty hits of LSD and five crisp green portraits of Ben Franklin.

He sat on the edge of his bed holding his ready assets, silently cursing the name of Lucas Ransom and every word the man had ever committed to paper. When he was done with that, he cursed himself for a while, until he was sick of it. Then he got up and started packing.

Remember, remember, the fifth of November, Gunpowder, treason, and plot!

I
n 1605, the celebrated traitor Guy Fawkes and assorted ruffians in his sway conspired to blow up London's Houses of Parliament. Fawkes himself was only a scruffy soldier of fortune, a well-paid dupe of some rich Catholics with a grudge against the king, but history has remembered his name and preserved his effigy. After planting explosives beneath the House of Commons, the conspirators fled to a hill at the southeastern tip of Hampstead Heath, hoping for a good view of the fireworks. This hill, incidentally, owes its magnificence to plague victims buried in mass graves on the heath.

From terrain shaped by millions of pestilent bones, the ruffians watched their dream expire. Fawkes himself was caught in the basement with a blazing torch and a great lot of gunpowder. He was tortured in the Tower of London, tried in Westminster Hall, then drawn, quartered, and hanged in the Old Palace Yard outside the Houses. The foundations he had hoped to see crumble and burn were soaked with the blood from his living intestines, and generations of yet-unborn English children were given an excuse for extortion and pyromania.

Pity. All those needly spires and pinnacles, all those soaring walls with their windows like little rotten pits in a great gray cheese, and the damned clock, all sliding majestically into the Thames! Of course the Houses looked quite different in 1605. But they are stamped in the memory of any lifelong Londoner just as they are now, eight acres of powdered wigs, musty scrolls, stone spindles shrouded in gray and purple fog. One cannot help but picture a brilliant flower of fire rupturing from the dark innards of the complex, and wonder whether Westminster Bridge would have gone too.

Without so much as a nod to the actual instigators of the plot, English sentiment required that a holiday be set up in honour of Guy Fawkes, and his effigy tortured and burned each year. And the C of E claims to have stamped out paganism!

Guy Fawkes' Day plagues certain sensitive souls, haunts their eyes, keeps them looking uneasily over their shoulders and staying in well-lighted streets. The staccato of fireworks sets their nerves on edge, and the rich smoky smell of a bonfire is as charnel to them. They deplore the clamour of ragged schoolboy mobs; they say they cannot abide the taunts of “Penny for the guy, mister? Penny for the guy?”

But watch any of these sensitive souls when they are accosted, and you'll notice it is the guy they cannot look at—or cannot stop looking at. The straw guy in old coat and trousers and shapeless hat, sprawled on his bed of copper pennies in his rough wagon … the helpless, harmless effigy seems to frighten them. He was born from the rag pile yesterday; he will die on the bonfire tonight. But they do not like looking into his ashen smudge of a face.

I think they can feel the anger given shape and form in these creatures, the incredulity of a soul made to burn perhaps a billion times for a crime that never happened. I hope for
what the nervous souls fear: that one year the guys will rise up and finish off those Houses.

It was Guy Fawkes' Day when I returned to life. Like a guy, I had been on the wagon too long; but I suspected I would be blazing merrily before the night was done, and by morning I would be but a memory to those who had once jeered at me, a bit of ash spirited away into the sky.

I came into London on the M1 and left the Jaguar in a quiet residential street near the Queensbury tube station. Then I descended into the creaky, dusty bowels of the Underground. This was an old station with no automatic ticket vendors. Using the window meant speaking to a person who might remember me. I was still dressed in Waring's blood-spotted hospital greens and white lab coat, though I'd put away my mask. In the end I pulled the coat up under my chin, went to the window, and bought a ticket for Piccadilly. Anyone could be going to Piccadilly, absolutely anyone. The ticket seller never even looked at me.

The empty echo of the platform, the bland colourful exhortations of the posters and automatic sweet vendors, the lulling motion of the train, the murmur of the sparse midday crowds, the tunnels and stations flashing by nearly put me to sleep. But I resisted Morpheus, who had been such a faithful lover these past five years.

The next time I emerged from the tube, I was in Piccadilly Circus and all the world seemed to explode around me, written in neon swirls and punctuated with shiny red double-decker buses. Piccadilly is a giddy hub of London, a cross between a traffic hazard and a funfair ride. Faded wax rock stars leer down from the wedding-cake balconies of Victorian music halls; behind the ornate facades, glittering modern shopping centres are cleverly concealed.

The traffic was deafening, the smells stunning: petrol, exhaust, a spicy blend of restaurants. I bought a souvlaki from a takeaway and ate it in three bites. It was the most delicious
thing I had ever tasted, the soft fragrant bread, the tender meat sauced and seasoned as if someone cared whether it was good, the subtle salty oils, the juices trickling over my tongue, staining the corners of my mouth. And the smells of the
people:
their clean skins, their perfumes, their scented soaps and shampoos, their sweat that did not stink of desperation!

On impulse I stopped at a news vendor's to scan the advertisements in the
London Gay Times
. I remembered when this paper had been tucked away at the backs of shops, half-hidden behind magazines featuring glossy colour photos of greased arses and tumescent circumcised cocks. And that was when the shops carried it at all. Now it was up front with all the other city papers.

In addition to the AIDS information lines and HIV counselling centres that had sprung up like mushrooms on a wet lawn, a great many new pubs and dance clubs seemed to have opened, each promising more decadence than the last. None of these chatty pubs or glittering flesh palaces seemed quite what I wanted. Too many people noticing you, talking to you, their brains as likely to be hypertuned on stimulants as dulled with drink. I put the paper back on the shelf and headed up Coventry Street toward Leicester Square, Chinatown, the shimmer of Soho. My old hunting grounds.

I knew a secondhand clothing store where one could buy a coat, a jumper, and an old pair of trousers for three quid in 1988. Now these same musty-smelling items cost the better part of a tenner. “Count yourself lucky to find trousers that fit,” the proprietor said when I raised an eyebrow at the price. “We've nearly sold out. Guy Fawkes, you know; the kids want them.”

I traded Waring's ugly rubber-soled loafers for shiny wingtips that fit me perfectly, and the old man threw in a fresh pair of socks. (Waring's socks, I am sorry to say, were so ripe they had to be disposed of.) The scalpel was still taped securely to the side of my leg, and I left it there for now.

I outfitted myself in basic black, good for hiding bloodstains and blending into crowds. Not flash enough to be noticed in the trendy bars of Soho, but nothing to sneer at, either. With the little gold-rimmed spectacles and new haircut, I thought I looked rather smart.

No one would guess I had already killed two men today, and meant to do a third. But that was the whole point, wasn't it?

Outside the shop, a pack of boys accosted me, wagon trundling along behind, misshapen form sprawled on a heap of lucre. “Penny for the guy? Penny for the guy?” I surrendered all my coins to their grubby fragile-boned hands. I couldn't help it. There was a crisp November bite to the air, seasoned with the smoke of firecrackers and bonfires, and the boys' eyes were bright and wild, and their cheeks were ruddy as autumn apples, dusted with fine golden hairs, smudged with ash.

In Leicester Square, children of a different sort sat smoking in the park, painted children who of a Saturday might parade up and down the King's Road staring in the shop windows at zebra-striped vinyl raincoats, at Dr. Marten boots done up in purple glitter, at lace body stockings for all sexes—and at the gaudiest, prettiest things of all, their own reflections in the glass.

Below the neck these children wore black, gray, and white garments of various materials and textures, held together with bits of metal. Above the neck they were like abstract paintings done in furious rainbow hues. A technicolour scribble of tortured hair, great panda-smudges of azure or chartreuse round the eyes, a slash of vermilion across the soft young mouth, and off they went.

I used to envy these kids their freedom, even if all it meant was living off Mum and Dad or on the dole. They could look like strange crosses between birds of paradise and walking corpses if they so desired. They could spit on the sidewalk, lounge insolently where they were not wanted, make rude remarks
to the tourists who gawped at them. They could be as conspicuous as they liked. They never had to blend in anywhere, and never cared to try.

It was these children, indirectly, who caused me to quit my last civil service job three months before I was arrested. I had a position behind a desk at the Metropolitan Water Board. The English civil service; allows a man to rise to his highest level of incompetence; I had already been dismissed from three or four such positions, but they were perfectly willing to hire me on again and see how long I might last at this one. They knew vaguely that I was intelligent and could type, and my work history showed that I would perform the job flawlessly right up until the moment I told some petty supervisor or other to stuff it as far as it would go.

But one day very much like this, when autumn nipped the city and the sky was a rare, clear blue, I looked at the stack of meaningless papers on my desk and the balled-up wrapper of the greasy takeaway chicken I'd eaten an hour ago, when they said I could, even though I was always hungry well before that. I listened to the conversations unspooling around me, and I heard dialogue straight out of a Joe Orton play (“How dare you involve me in a situation for which no memo has been issued”). I thought of a boy I'd seen in the King's Road the night before, his black hair teased wild, his smile open and easy and free. Quite possibly he didn't have the price of a meal in his pocket, but nobody could tell him when he might or mightn't eat one. Very quietly but very firmly, something in me rebelled.

I stood. I dropped the greasy wrapper in the rubbish can; I never thought anyone else should have to clean up after me. And I left that office forever. No one spoke to me, no one saw me go. I spent the rest of the day in Chelsea, drinking in the pubs. I watched the kids prance up and down eyeing one another (and, most often, finding one another sadly deficient). I spoke to no one. I brought no one with me when I staggered home. There were already two I had to get rid of, one crumpled
in the wardrobe beginning to bloat, the other still fresh enough to share my bed.

I had no prospects at the time, only a small savings account and an insatiable appetite for killing boys. As it turned out, this was all I would require to get me through those last few months. But the wild children of Leicester Square would not serve my purposes today. I needed someone less conspicuous, more anonymous; in short, someone more closely resembling myself.

Most of all, though, I needed a drink.

I slipped into the stream of humanity on Charing Cross Road, succumbed to an irresistible impulse and ducked into a bookshop to scan the true crime section. I was the subject of three garish paperbacks: jackets the colour of fresh blood and fleeting love, well-thumbed central photo inserts documenting my bath, my bedroom closet, my kitchen knives, the stairs leading up to my flat, all with breathless captions (“Twenty-three men climbed these stairs, never expecting it would be their last trip!”). I left the store feeling obscurely pleased, turned at Lisle Street, and walked through Chinatown, marvelling at the strange stew of smells, the exotic spell of the fairy lights draping the storefronts, the vivid Asian faces of the boys. Then I crossed wide, chaotic Shaftesbury Avenue and was in the part of Soho I remembered best.