Exquisite Corpse

by Poppy Z. Brite

  By the time the plane touched down in Atlanta, I knew where I was headed. Going through U.S. Customs on an American passport, I worried about my accent. I needn’t have; no one required me to look them in the eye, much less to speak. Once I received the government’s stamp of approval, I stopped at a currency exchange booth and converted all Sam’s pounds back into Uncle Sam’s dollars. It seemed the pound was strong; I received a fat handful of unpleasantly furry-feeling green bills.

  An underground train carried me from the airport to the bus station, where I discovered I had several times the price of a one-way ticket to New Orleans. I left Atlanta at dawn and spent the next fifteen hours dozing and waking through green countryside, down into the swamps, along a corridor of foetid factories and oil refineries that seemed to go on forever, a nightmare of blackened smokestacks topped with greasy orange flames against weird purple skies.

  At last the coach pulled into New Orleans, and I told a cabdriver to take me to the cheapest digs nearby, which turned out to be the Hummingbird Bar, Grill, and Hotel on St. Charles Avenue. I consumed a cheeseburger and two frigid, heavenly American draft beers (can the chill of death itself be more delectable than that of a truly cold beer?), then climbed a narrow flight of stairs to a small square room and slept for twenty-four hours.

  Earlier tonight I’d checked out of the Hummingbird and walked bravely to the French Quarter, as a million low-budget tourists before me must have done. (“St. Charles turns into Royal at Canal,” the desk clerk told me, and her words seemed an exotic invocation, rich with mystery and promise.)

  I conquered the Mississippi in my heart as I stood there on the pier. I had no fear of it, or of this city it churned through. I had seen intestines and sphincters before; I was capable of handling them. Then I went off to have a drink.

  Jay sat in his parlor shaking like a spider on a web in a high wind. It was late afternoon, and Tran had left an hour ago. They hadn’t had much to say to each other upon awakening: both were embarrassed, and both felt ill from the ingestion of various substances. There had been no further physical contact.

  But as soon as he had seen Tran out of the courtyard and locked the gate behind him, all Jay’s compulsions and desires of the past twenty-four hours came rushing back a hundredfold. He returned to the house in a daze, took the medical textbook down from the shelf and leafed through it, then put it away again. For a few minutes he simply sat, feeling his skeleton rattle and his eyeballs pulse and his heart hammer. He wanted another boy right now. The urge had never come this strongly so close on the heels of a kill. The encounter with Tran had short-circuited him somehow, knocked him into a repeating loop.

  He got up, went into the bedroom, and opened the bottom drawer of his dresser. Inside were the images he kept of all the boys, his Polaroid collection. They were good shots: Jay had an eye for composition, a keen sense of pose and angle. Here was a boy with his chest and stomach barely slit open, a shallow Y-cut showing the pale layer of fat inside, but no organs. Here was a close-up of the same boy’s face, divinely peaceful. Here were two together in the tub, half on top of each other as if embracing, black skin contrasting with white, alike only in their headlessness. It still wasn’t enough. Pictures would do him no good just now.

  He unbuttoned his shirt and shrugged out of it, let it fall to the floor, undid his trousers and stepped out of them. Turning in a slow circle in the center of the bedroom, he caught sight of his reflection in the large cheval mirror. His face was impassive, his penis swelling to erection.

  He let himself out the kitchen door, walked quickly along the side of the house and into the rear courtyard. The dead overgrowth and damp statuary seemed to nod into his path. He could not get to the slave quarters fast enough. Naked and trembling, he wrenched the door open and flung himself inside.

  The smell was sweetly rotten, richly vile, stronger than yesterday due to the addition of fresh meat. It was an invisible finger, soft and fat, pushing against the back of Jay’s throat. Instead of gagging, he took a deep breath and let it invade him. He felt the odor of rotting flesh enter his lungs and seep into his bloodstream. He opened his mouth and let it rest upon his tongue like a sacrament.

  All the windows were painted black, outside and in. When Jay flicked a switch by the door, a long row of ceiling-mounted 120-watt lamps flooded the scene with merciless white light. He liked it bright in here. He liked to see things glisten.

  The inside of the shed was a single room, long and narrow. To the right was a stack of black plastic garbage bags bulging with oddly shaped lumps, distended here and there with gases, reaching halfway up the wall. To the left, just inside the door, was a deep freezer large enough to hold a man.

  A row of long shelves ran along the back wall, bearing objects carefully arranged and frequently dusted. A number of polished skulls, their hollow eye sockets packed with dried roses. A mummified ribcage fragile as an old box kite. A pair of slender-fingered hands resting at the bottom of a gallon pickle jar, preserved in grain alcohol. (Jay planned to use this alcohol to make a cherry liqueur whose recipe had been passed down through his mother’s family, but not until the hands had steeped for a while.)

  To the left of the shelves was a metal hospital table fitted with leather restraints, and in the left rear corner of the room was a fifty-gallon drum of hydrochloric acid. When young Lysander Byrne called the orders division of Byrne Metals and Chemicals and said he wanted such a drum delivered to his house in the French Quarter, no one asked questions. The rest of the left wall was taken up by a huge standing refrigerator he’d bought cheap from a restaurant about to go under. This had been somewhat more difficult to have delivered. Jay had allowed them to bring it as far as the rear courtyard, then made them leave it on the dolly, claiming he hadn’t cleared a space for it yet. Later he wrestled it into the shed by himself, wrenching his back in the process.

  The double doors of the refrigerator were opaque with condensation. Jay wiped a hand across the glass, revealing a pallid swath of what was inside. He touched his fingers to his lips, anointing himself with wetness. Then he grasped both handles and pulled the doors wide.

  The young man had been perhaps twenty-five, tall and slender, with long graceful legs and the kind of smooth hairless skin Jay craved. In life his body had been the color of dark chocolate washed with a honey-gold patina, the spoils of a summer spent sleeping naked on Caribbean beaches. He had told Jay of bumming around the islands, hitching rides on whatever crafts were going his way, living on fish, fruit, and sticky ganja. His tissues had soaked up enough warmth to keep that vibrant color for a long time.

  But he had been dead and decapitated for more than a week, hanging upside down from a steel meat hook thrust through the tendons of both ankles. As the blood drained from his neck stump into a pan Jay had set to catch it, his skin took on an ashy pallor and a slightly crinkled appearance. He looked as if he had lain too long in a very cold bath. His penis and testicles were purple-black scraps of flesh nearly lost in a thicket of blood-stiffened hair. His arms were trussed at the wrists and pulled up to his sides, the ropes tethered to the meat hook, helping support the weight of the body.

  Jay had slit the belly open and removed the entrails as soon as he killed the young man. You had to remove the entrails; otherwise the body would bloat and sometimes rupture in a matter of hours. He’d taken the heart and lungs from this one, too. The empty body cavities were smooth and free of blood, since Jay had hosed the body down before hanging it. Blood rotted fast and had a rich, savory stink. He had known this since the age of sixteen, when he had sliced his thumb open and saved the blood in a bottle so he could smell his own flesh decaying.

  He pressed his fingers to the corpse’s chest, leaving five indentations in the cold flesh. He stroked the edges of the enormous wound, appreciating the layered textures of skin and flesh and bone, then touched his lips again, licked the frigid moisture off his fingertips. His penis throbbed. His skull felt full of bluebottle flies, razor wire, boiling sl
ag.

  Jay threw back his head and shrieked at the ceiling. The echo caromed off the walls and the concrete floor. Whether he shrieked from joy or anguish he could not have said, but the sound poured back into him through every orifice, filling him with his own power.

  Then he fell to his knees and buried his face in the hanging man’s belly. He sank his teeth into flesh that had gone the consistency of firm pudding. He ripped at the edges of the wound, pulling off strips of skin and meat, swallowing them whole, smearing his face with his own saliva and what little juice remained in this chill tissue. He ran his hands up the spine, between the buttocks, slipped a finger into the asshole and saw it wriggling deep in the hollow inner cavity. At some point he ejaculated, and the semen ran down his thigh almost unnoticed, a small sacrifice to this splendid shrine.

  For several minutes Jay kneeled on the hard floor, catching his breath, his cheek resting against the corpse’s left pectoral muscle, his hand loosely cupping the smooth curve of its shoulder. Deliciously cold air poured out of the fridge, drawing him into this dream of death. When at last he was able to rise, he felt reborn.

  He left the slave quarters and went back to the house to bathe and dress. Soaping himself, he felt various residues draining away: lingering traces of Tran, cold corpse ichor, the dried drug-laced sweat of his own pores. When he stepped out of the shower, Jay was at once calm and terribly excited. Both of these emotions were overlaid with the thin veneer of dread that always accompanied them, like an acid trip with a jittery strychnine edge.

  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 mig
ht 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?”