Exquisite Corpse

by Poppy Z. Brite

  “Dr. David Acer, leering fag demon menacing home, family, and America with a dripping syringeful of his own foul juices. Nobody would say he did the right thing, not when they first thought about it. But think about it, huh? Imagine him standing there staring down some breeder bimbo’s sticky little throat, replaying in his head her idiotic chitchat with the hygienist, realizing that in a year or two he’ll be dead and this cunt will be squatting out her third kid, and society will adore her as fertility goddess, pillar of blandness, ROLE MODEL, even as he rots in a pariah’s grave. And just try to imagine … how the hypo of novocaine and the hypo that just happens to be full of his blood … might … get … mixed … up.

  “Call it AIDS dementia if it makes you feel better.

  “I’m Lush Rimbaud and that’s it for tonight. I’ll be taking calls on next week’s show, same time, whatever frequency we can get, so listen up … unless, of course, one of us is dead by next week, or you are. And we all could be. And they don’t give a fuck.

  “Thank you and good night.”

  7

  Tran shifted from foot to foot in front of the wrought-iron gate on Royal Street, then rang the buzzer again. The pavement felt terribly hard beneath the thin soles of his sneakers. He’d been pounding it for a while, and if he struck out now, he’d be pounding it some more.

  He’d left his car and all his belongings in the pay lot over by Jax Brewery, forced down coffee and a single beignet, then skulked around the Quarter for hours until he worked up the nerve to come here. The sugar and caffeine made last night’s drugs go swarming through his system anew, and he had to sit and stare at the river for a while just to calm down.

  He’d walked past the gate once, around noon, but that was ridiculously early to drop in on a Quarter resident he barely knew. He had no idea what sort of hours Jay Byrne kept, but somehow he doubted Jay was a morning person.

  Now the afternoon shadows were beginning to lengthen. Through the gate he could see into Jay’s courtyard, a dark jungle of tranquility. Half-swathed in foliage, the little white house revealed nothing.

  He wrapped his fingers around the black swirls of iron. “Please be there,” he murmured. “Please let me in.”

  He wasn’t even sure what he wanted here. He’d been attracted to Jay for a long time, though before yesterday they had scarcely exchanged ten sentences that weren’t about buying drugs. Something about Jay’s face had initially fascinated him, a pallid and dissolute gauntness he admired, though most of the other kids found it creepy. He longed to touch Jay’s lank blond hair, which looked infinitely soft to him. He liked the gray shadows in Jay’s eye sockets and beneath his cheekbones, his sensual lips, his pale eyes of indeterminate color. He fantasized about Jay’s willowy body, so different from Luke’s sturdy muscular build. The only other person he had been with was the lad at the Christmas party, Zach, whose body was like a mirror image of his own, slight and bony (and who had given Tran a cold-blooded brush-off the next time they met). He dreamed of a tall, slender man with smooth pale skin. He dreamed of Jay, masturbated to memories of Jay’s face and projections of his body, found himself hoping Jay would show up to place an order at his weekly acid bazaar in a rotating series of coffeeshops. This week, Jay had.

  When he asked Tran to pose for him, Tran nearly got a boner on the spot. But it wasn’t as if Jay had specifically invited him here; it wasn’t as if he could call Jay a friend. Tran had plenty of friends in the Quarter, but he didn’t want to see any of them today.

  The scene this morning had gotten to him in ways not apparent at first. Bits of it kept coming back to him all day: a florid phrase from one of Luke’s letters, read aloud in his father’s precise, heavily accented voice; a memory of standing in the living room, taking a last look at the empty house, wondering when he would see his mother or his little brothers again. Tran couldn’t remember ever feeling so lonely, not even in the terrible twilight weeks after the breakup with Luke. He just wanted someone to wrap strong arms around him, to whisper meaningless words of comfort, to ease some of the pain.

  All his French Quarter friends were young, bizarre, alienated from their families. They’d be instantly sympathetic to his problem; they would tell him his father was an asshole, and that would be that. Trouble was, Tran could see his father’s point of view all too clearly. There just wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. He got so sick of people his own age sometimes.

  Jay wasn’t home, wasn’t answering. With a sudden sense of desperation, Tran leaned on the buzzer. He didn’t even know why it felt so necessary to see Jay, except that he had no other plan. He was carrying enough money to check into a hotel, but he couldn’t stand the thought of sleeping by himself in an anonymous room. Answer, he thought, trying to send his message through the buzzer. Please answer, please let me in, I promise you won’t be sorry.

  He was about to give up and slump against the gate in despair when the intercom crackled. “Yes?” asked Jay’s voice, sounding tired and dry and distant.

  “It’s Tran.”

  “I know. I can see you.”

  Tran glanced up at the high brick wall that fronted Jay’s property. Its top was inlaid with iron spikes and decorated with coils of razor wire. At one corner of the gate was a small video camera unobtrusively pointed at the sidewalk.

  “Well …” What to say now? Why had he even come? “I saw you yesterday. You asked me to pose for you.”

  A long pause, then: “Oh … yeah.” Tran felt a lump rising in his throat. Jay could not have sounded less enthusiastic if he’d tried.

  “Could you …” Jay’s soft voice trailed off. Now he sounded disoriented, and Tran wondered if he might still be tripping. “Uh, could you come back in an hour? I’m kind of busy.”

  He was with another person. Tran knew it as surely as a divine revelation. He was with another person and Tran had interrupted their lovemaking. His eyes blurred with tears. He’d thought he was lonely before; now he knew what lonely was. “Sorry to bother you.” He spun away from the intercom.

  Jay’s voice followed him. “No, wait! Don’t go. I want to see you.” Its new urgency made Tran stop and turn back toward the gate. “I’d like to take your picture tonight. I’m just sort of… in the middle of something. Won’t you come back in an hour?”

  Now Jay’s voice was coaxing, almost caressing. The change was so abrupt it sent a little chill down Tran’s spine. How could the man shift gears so quickly, so effortlessly? But the voice itself lured him, reminded him why he had come here. “If you’re sure it will be OK,” he said.

  “It will be better than OK,” Jay told him, and the intercom went dead. Tran was left standing on the sidewalk, his eyes still stinging with tears of embarrassment, his body suddenly, ridiculously horny.

  He headed back toward Café du Monde. He hadn’t slept in thirty hours; there were least five different drugs in his system; he had no current address. It was time for another cup of coffee. Tran needed to get wired.

  Inside the house on Royal Street, Jay was as wired as he had ever been. Possibly he was as wired as anyone had ever been.

  Over the course of the night, in teacup-sized increments, he’d polished off a large flask of cognac mixed with Earl Grey. He’d swallowed three hits of the acid Tran had sold him, then dissolved two more in the flask to keep the edge on his buzz. Despite the stimulants, he had managed a nap just after dawn.

  But his skull still felt stuffed full of cotton, his penis was as limp and sore as a worm on a fishhook, and his jaw ached from biting again and again into unresisting flesh. The bathroom was a charnelhouse. Most of his guest’s body was strewn across his bed, reeking and oozing. And Tran was coming back in an hour.

  He collected the materials he would need from the kitchen and went into the bedroom. The boy—Jay could no longer think of him by any name, even the pitiful joke of Fido—lay sideways across the mattress, arms flung above his head, feet trailing on the hardwood floor. The comforter and sheets were splashed with blood from the
gaping wound in his belly. Polaroid photographs littered the bed and the nightstand, depicting various stages of the guest’s devolution from human to property: unconsciousness, reawakening, pain-madness, pain-daze, tranquility. Jay gathered them up, stuffed them into a drawer with hundreds of others.

  He spread garbage bags and sections of an old Times-Picayune on the floor and lifted the boy onto them. Next to his work area he arranged a bowl of water, a roll of paper towels, several bags, and a large plastic bucket. The knife he preferred was an ordinary kitchen tool, honed very sharp but otherwise unremarkable.

  He began by severing the head. The meat of the neck was tender, separating into fleshy layers beneath his blade. When he reached the spine, he inserted the tip of the knife between two vertebrae and levered them apart; at the same time he grabbed a fistful of hair and twisted the head away from the body. The spine parted with a wet click. Jay sliced neatly through the remaining flap of skin, and the head was free.

  The hair was a gory scruff, the face swollen, unrecognizable. The tip of the tongue protruded between blood-smeared front teeth, nearly bitten off in some ecstasy of pain. He’d seen that before. Jay put the head in a purple plastic shopping bag from the K&B drugstore and moved on to the extremities. The hands and feet went in drugstore bags as well, rinsed in the bowl to remove the first wash of blood, then tied up neat as Christmas gifts.

  Now came what ought to be the best part, the part he hated to rush through. Jay pressed his thumbs into the soft V of skin at the base of the breastbone, ran them down the line bisecting the torso until they slipped into the gaping abdominal wound. He spread the wound tenderly, pulling its edges up and apart until the skin began to tear. It was very slippery going, and he had to use the knife in places, but soon he had the body split wide open from crotch to thorax, a wet festival of scarlet.

  The heat of freshly exposed organs wafted up at him. Jay lowered his face into the visceral stink, the stew of blood and shit and secret gases, the innards’ rare perfume. His eyelids fluttered and his nostrils flared with pleasure. But there was no time to enjoy himself. He’d had his fun while this one was still alive. The dissection was going to be a total loss.

  He pulled out yards of intestines that felt like soft boudin sausages in his hands, the shrunken pouch of the stomach, the hard little kidneys, the sluttish liver, big and gaudy as some flamboyant subtropical blossom. All went into the plastic bucket. He reached up under the ribs and slit the diaphragm, stuck his hands in the chest cavity and raked out both spongy lungs, then the rubber-textured, veined knot of muscle that was the heart.

  Jay would have cracked the chest open if he’d had time; it was hard work requiring sweat and a hacksaw, but he liked the symmetrical arrangement of its various muscles and sacs, so different from the slick jumble of the belly. And the ribs, their connective cartilage severed, spread open like wings of scarlet streaked with snow.

  But he was in a hurry here, and working blind. Though he could easily cut himself with the knife and risk mingling the guest’s blood with his own, the worry that always plagued Jay at these moments was more arcane.

  As a child, somewhere on his family’s swampland, he’d stuck his hand down an enticing hollow in the roots of a live oak and something had sunk small needle-sharp teeth into his hand. Jay had seized the creature (some sort of mouse or vole) and crushed the life out of it. Then, fascinated by the way the bones felt grinding together, he had torn the soft little body to bits. But he had never forgotten the lancing pain, the panic shot through with loathing, the surety that something poisonous had hold of him. It came unbidden to his mind every time he reached inside a chest cavity.

  He wore condoms during the sex he had with his guests, but that was almost incidental. He had tried wearing rubber gloves while cutting them open, unraveling them, and taking them apart, but found that he couldn’t bear to. He could sheath his cock, but his hands needed to feel the silken textures of their wounds, their slick interiors. And considering the other ways in which he used their meat, he supposed it was silly to bother taking any precautions at all.

  Now the body was a scooped-out shell. Shining nubs of vertebrae were visible beneath a thin layer of pearly pink tissue. Stray rags of flesh hung off the hipbones and dangled in the hollow of the abdomen, reminding Jay of the shreds of pulp left inside a jack-o’-lantern. Only the arc of the ribs seemed to retain any strength, and Jay was glad he’d left the chest intact.

  He began at what had been the waist and drew his knife through flesh again and again until only the spine joined the two halves of the body. Again he inserted his knife between vertebrae, twisted, and yanked. The boy parted from himself easily, still leaking various ichors, but not in great quantity. Jay had done his work well.

  He wrapped the halves in separate bags, the organs in a third—big black plastic bags designed to hold heavy, wet, stinking garbage. One by one he lugged these bags through the house, through the rear courtyard, and into the former slave quarters that ran along the back wall of his property. This building was a long, low shed with a forward-slanting roof, cramped and hot inside. Thanks to a dalliance with cocaine in his early twenties, Jay’s sense of smell was not what it had once been, but even he could detect an odor in here. He propped the bags in a corner with several others in various stages of marination, Left for days or weeks, they produced amazing juices.

  That had taken a little more than thirty minutes. Though he preferred to make it an art, he could get it down to a science when he had to. Back in the house, he scoured all the surfaces of the bathroom, then went through the other rooms lighting sticks of incense and every sort of candle: elegant golden tapers, fruit-scented votives, trendy voodoo fetishes of skulls and penises in black wax, Fast Luck Money Candles from the corner grocery that also sold Lotto tickets and John the Conqueror roots, religious candles with pretty young saints and lurid bleeding hearts painted on the glass holders.

  Finally he wiped the floors down, changed the sheets, took a fast shower, put on some soft music, and sat down to wait for Tran. When the doorbell rang twenty minutes later, Glenn Miller was swinging on the radio and Jay was drifting in and out of uneasy consciousness. He sometimes went three or four days without real sleep, but just now he was starting to feel a bit punchy.

  He buzzed Tran into the courtyard and met him at the front door, vaguely surprised to see dusk outside: where had the day gone? The kid was dressed entirely in black, tight leggings, hightop sneakers, a low-cut silk shirt that left most of his smooth chest exposed. His shiny mop of hair was pulled back in a ponytail, but long strands of it hung around his face. And the smile on that face was pure relief, as if there were no one in the world he’d rather see than creepy old French Quarter pervert Jay Byrne. Definitely this had been worth the whirlwind cleanup.

  Tran stood at the door making no effort to enter. Jay watched him, curious to see what he would do. But he didn’t do anything, just kept grinning like a fool, staring straight into Jay’s eyes as if hypnotized. Normally, no one could stare Jay down; it was a game he played in the bars sometimes. But Tran held the gaze for so long that Jay finally glanced back over his shoulder, into the house. “Would you like to come in?”

  “Oh! Yeah, sorry,” said Tran, brushing past him into the foyer. “I did acid and X last night and I just drank three cups of coffee. I’m a little out of it.”

  You always seem a little out of it, Jay thought of saying. But that was no way to speak to a guest. Anyway, he had to admit that the kid’s brand of spaciness was attractive. Along with the Asian androgyny of his face, it gave him an air of innocence, made him seem younger than he probably was.

  They went into the parlor. The room was full of incense smoke and candleglow, dizzyingly fragrant. Jay glanced about for evidence of last night’s revelry. There was Fido’s coffee cup on a little side table, probably with the residue of four Halcions and three acid tabs still silting the bottom. But in the midst of all the lurid rose-gold opulence, Tran wouldn’t notice a stray cup.r />
  “Wow! What a great room!”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Yeah. It’s so romantic.” Tran turned to him. Those Oriental eyes transfixed Jay with their coffee-brightness. This kid was so beautiful… but local, Jay reminded himself; take pictures, but don’t touch him, because if you do, you might not be able to stop.

  “But you know what? This music sucks.”

  Jay had forgotten all about the radio. Now it was blaring an instrumental version of “Seasons in the Sun” arranged for marimba and vibraphone. How embarrassing.

  He waved a dismissive hand. “I don’t know what that is. Change it if you like.”

  Tran went to the standing cabinet and twirled the dial. He found something he liked right away, a lone male voice over slow, grinding synthesizer. “Cool. This must be the LSU station from Baton Rouge. You like Nine Inch Nails?”

  “Oh yes.” Jay hadn’t a clue who Nine Inch Nails were. He listened to music a lot, but had no discernment, no individual taste. He supposed he had been born without it. He could enjoy “Seasons in the Sun” or some other tinkling abomination; he could enjoy the bone-stirring vibrations of a Bach fugue; he could enjoy the song that was on the radio now. But he made no real distinction between these musics. He liked them all in the same uncomplaining way, and none made him feel much of anything. When he socialized with kids Tran’s age, it was a constant chore figuring out which music was supposed to be cool and which was hopelessly lame.

  Tran sat on one end of a purple love seat, obviously leaving enough room for Jay to join him. Jay considered it for a moment, then sat opposite instead. If this was going to lead anywhere, it would be photographs only.

  “So,” he said, casting about. “How was the rave?”

  “The … ?” Tran’s voice trailed off. He looked stunned, as if he had no idea how he had spent the last twenty-four hours. Then he began to laugh. “The rave. Right. If you knew how bad I wish I’d never heard about that stupid rave … but it would have happened some other time, sooner or later. It had to happen.”